Yes and no. A compass just gives you your heading, relative to magnetic north. This will presumably be able to do that; but(depending on how much variation is available in the local magnetic field) it may also be able to give you an approximate location by detecting local magnetic anomalies.
The ground-level strength and orientation of the earth's magnetic field varies a bit naturally, for geological reasons, and our dense masses of ferrous structures and AC wiring probably provide a considerable amount of texture on top of that, in densely built areas.
For magnets of reasonable size, even the most powerful ones that you can reasonably buy have a surprisingly small area of noticeable field strength. A rare-earth puck will be good for a bit over a Tesla at the surface, and two of them can make friends with one another hard enough to take your finger off; but would drop into the background surprisingly quickly as you moved further away...
I can only assume that half the fun of having enough nukes that you can use them for digging holes is not having to listen to NIMBY sentiment...
Given that Panama was, in no small part, created as a country in order to facilitate US interests in building the canal the first time around, I suspect that we would have been more than happy to ensure that the CIA provided whatever assistance was required for the free people of panama to make the right choice.
You are thinking of "Operation Plowshare"... A not-wildly-successful-but-truly-a-classic-of-the-nuclear-optimism-period project. Essentially, team nuclear realized that mankind now had the power to dig very large holes very quickly and proceeded to see what sorts of civil engineering could be shoehorned into being based on very large holes.
The godless communists, (as is often the case with these cold-war-era things) had an even larger, also not terribly well conceived; but much less euphemistically named project: "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy".
For the fanatic completionist, it may actually be a good deal. For anybody else, not so much. 60-80% of the games can probably had for peanuts, if they are even worth enough to not have been tossed by now; but there are always some that are damn rare. The difficulty increases, naturally, if you are one of those poor souls haunted by the fact that a mass-produced consumer product's ineffable, virginal, essences escape once the shrinkwrap is removed...
If we ignore, for a moment, the probably-imperfect state of emulation of some of the odder consoles on that list, does anybody have a good ballpark figure for the total size required to contain this collection?
It's nice to see that the matter was cleared up relatively quickly(the media circus wasn't pretty; but it could have been worse).
On the minus side, arsenic-crazed bacteria are a rather cool theory to have dashed against the rocks of callous empiricism. Hopefully some sort of selective breeding experiment can succeed where nature has failed, and give us an organism that substitutes some or all of its phosphorus for arsenic...
It's a surprisingly common problem, unfortunately. People with the nucleus of an actual point 'Yo, the onrushing surveillance state is bad, m'kay', then encounter some sort of strange cognitive hiccup that causes them to latch onto the nearest potentially-hostile object like a belligerent drunk at closing time, rather than something much more plausible that doesn't make them sound like a drooling nutcase.
Had the grandparent poster simply ranted about the CALEA(which did include some direct state funding of infrastructure 'upgrades' to support wiretapping, and obviously serves to bundle buying telecommunications services with paying for wiretapping infrastructure) and has been in play since 1994 he would have been on totally solid ground.
If he wanted something a little more sweeping, he could have discussed the 1970's and earlier situation(which, while technologically crude, was so bad that FISA, in 1978, counted as 'reform'...), then gone on to FISA, ECHELON should probably show up somewhere, possibly given the whole 'Clipper' situation a nod, then done CALEA, and then finished with an overview of how post-2001 has been an energetic sprint downhill, with substantial(but largely classified) evidence of extralegal surveillance, despite generous boundaries for what constitutes 'legal', the 2008 retroactive immunity bill, and so forth.
It Isn't. That. Bloody. Difficult. While parts are formally classified, or just-not-talked-about in public, large swaths of the US surveillance apparatus were simply built right in the open, with publicly available laws, phone-tapping technology advertised on the vendors' web sites, and NSA datacenters too large to hide from orbital observation. And yet, no matter how easy we make it, people just will not be satisfied without some sort of shadowy conspiracy that makes them sound totally nuts...
Well, on occasion you see people who at least have the decency to endure some sort of serious hardship and/or risk before the fulsome whining about martyrdom begins...
That beats the hell out of the usual 'stand in your cushy position of power, influence, and not a little wealth, and whine about how persecuted you are' technique.
In the hypothetical magic world of rainbows and unicorns, The Walking Dead could make a good FPS... Thief was an FPS with virtually no shooting(and when the shooting did break out, that was usually because you had fucked up) and that didn't stop it from kicking ass. And System Shock 2 demonstrated that first-person-desperate-creeping-around-the-ruins-of-a-once-familiar-world-where-things-have-gone-all-to-hell can be suitably harrowing and emotionally engaging.
That said, it seems more reasonable to assume that the 'characters' aspect will be handled as elegantly as it was in Daikatana, and the game will be a painfully generic shooter with at least one frustratingly broken 'stealth' sequence that makes no sense whatsoever; but was necessary to establish the fact that this is the painfully generic shooter where you aren't a superhuman ass-kicking machine...
It, unfortunately, isn't a huge surprise that some fairly epic paper-shuffling(and converting to TIFF, apparently) took place.
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
While crass, the grandparent post is arguably a worthwhile question when you compare the Model A to the Model B.
$10 for ethernet and a second USB port is a smaller premium(and, of course, better integrated) than pretty much any peripheral option, and some sort of networking is an extremely convenient feature. The 'A' seems like a very niche sort of device.
It's receive only, and the quality isn't magic by any means; but you can get an RTL2832-based DVB-T dongle for ~$20 and be on your merry way.
(And, indeed, this does seem to have spurred greater interest among people who weren't in for a USRP; but were interested. The fact that SDR involves substantially more nontrivial math than many arduino projects probably limits the mass appeal some, though.)
gnuradio just wasn't sexy enough, I guess. Not enough like arduino on the tip of everyone's tongue.
The device in TFA is a piece of hardware designed to support gnuradio(it might support other things as well; but a gnuradio interface is explicitly mentioned in the device specs).
Gnuradio is just the software side. Traditionally, the USRP has been the peripheral of choice. Not cheap; but configurable for a wide range of frequencies and probably the most mature. A sound card(with appropriate external circuitry bringing things down to audio frequencies, of course) is also an option, and certain flavors of DVB TV receiver dongles are the new hotness in the cheap seats.
This "Phi" device lacks some of the versatility of the classier USRP gear; but it is cheaper and offers a very fast interface to the host computer...
Unlike 'Arduino', where the term refers more or less interchangeably to both the software development environment and to a variety of atmega-based microcontroller boards, Gnuradio is just the software side. There is no 'gnuradio' hardware per se, as there is with Arduino. The USRP is probably the closest to being that; but it is pricey enough to be out of the hands of a great many hobbyists.
I'm missing out on my apparent hatred and ignorance, please enlighten me.
I made a light-hearted joke on the premise that common Chinese small arms are relatively inexpensive and generally closely based(to what degree knocked-off and to what degree licensed based on the degree of Sino-Russian chumminess or lack thereof at the time of production) Russian AK designs, and that having China sending them to the KKK would hurt demand for the product of domestic arms manufacturers.
You might need to re-calibrate your sensitivity a bit...
So, since there are dictators who attack their own citizens with military weapons, we can just ignore free speech rights? Internet freedom is a subset of freedom of speech.
I suspect that(aside from the UN's relative fecklessness), the bigger issue will be that the UN's position on "Human Rights" has a loophole in the free speech department that you could drive one of those comically oversized trucks used in open pit mining through...
From UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 29:
"(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society."
So, can anybody think of any popular restrictions on rights and freedoms that aren't fairly trivial to rationalize under 'morality', 'public order' or 'the general welfare'? Even with the 'in a democratic society' stipulation, that still leaves you a considerable degree of flexibility.
While I can imagine it offending the purists, there wouldn't be anything fundamentally broken about a school choosing to price their services by credit-hour, or by degree, as opposed to per semester. However, if they don't do that ahead of time, that would seem to leave them with very little legal recourse if somebody manages to complete their studies faster than expected.
If, on the other hand, the school did price that way, and the student isn't paying up as agreed because he thinks that he shouldn't have to, it would seem like he has no leg to stand on.
Either way, it seems like a weird thing to progress to the lawsuit stage. If the school's case is actually "But, you violated our assumptions!!!", their lawyers must be insane(or really cheap, 3k isn't going to buy too much legal time...) If the student isn't paying up 'because performance is supposed to be worth something', this seems like a relatively small collections matter, which would likely be handled by masses of demand letters for a period of time before an actual suit...
Also, Waltz seems to be making the assumption that nuke prices and availability are going to magically remain stuck at 'moderately competent nation state run by pragmatic and slightly pessimistic people' indefinitely...
That(along with the desire to have feeble little countries that can't say no to their betters' proxy wars, and a mutual desire to spend less on maintaining ICBMs) is really what bolsters the enthusiasm for arms control even among countries that already have lots and lots of nukes. Up to a point, the availability of nuclear arms can reduce conflict, or at least relocate it to countries nobody loves very much; but their broad availability could get unpleasant.
The report's punchline is that, because of human/cultural problems, the technology actually deployed will never be as safe and reliable as the technology theoretically available with today's body of engineering and technology knowledge.
So, whatever the state of the art is, unless the broken human factor is fixed, the actual nuclear facilities actually fully of zesty isotopes will always be less safe than the state of the art would suggest, even in a fairly high-budget situation like Japan.
That's the real kicker. Even if technology could save you(I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable of the state of the art to say whether it actually could or not), you won't take it up on that offer, so having broken humans ensures that you will end up dealing with incompetent responses to the breakage of sub-optimal technology...
That's one of the things I'm wary of in this context: You might piss someone off with more money and firepower than $deity when you pluck apart his precious and expensive weapon to fight terrorism (or is that boggeyman outdated by now and we have another strawman to justify spying on otherwise innocent citizens? I didn't keep up to date).
I imagine that there isn't an entirely zero chance of earning yourself a dose of succulent Polonium for your tea; but I wouldn't be too concerned. If $SINISTER_INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY has cooked up some malware, and that malware has been tactless enough to get to the point of being reverse engineered in public(as opposed to being unnoticed, or covertly picked apart by the enemy $SINISTER_INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY), that malware is already too high profile for their liking. At that point, the options are (1): Start developing something else, do your best to suggest that your previous work was probably just Ukranian bot-herders or (2): Risk drawing even more attention to yourself by seeing to it that some security researchers mysteriously cut several vital arteries while shaving.
It's a some-hundreds-of-pages report, so I wouldn't have expected you to have read it; but is it too much to skim the summary that TFA kindly provides?
The report's punchline is that TEPCO fucked up, and nuclear oversight and response are deeply rotten on both the operator and the regulator sides due to chronic regulatory capture and fecklessness. Honestly, that's a conclusion even more difficult to fix than some sort of design problem. Machines can be repaired. Deep cultural rot is much harder to root out, and makes it very likely that, even where solutions do exist, they will not be reliably enacted.
It's really about the most damning conclusion that the report could have arrived at...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. A compass just gives you your heading, relative to magnetic north. This will presumably be able to do that; but(depending on how much variation is available in the local magnetic field) it may also be able to give you an approximate location by detecting local magnetic anomalies.
The ground-level strength and orientation of the earth's magnetic field varies a bit naturally, for geological reasons, and our dense masses of ferrous structures and AC wiring probably provide a considerable amount of texture on top of that, in densely built areas.
For magnets of reasonable size, even the most powerful ones that you can reasonably buy have a surprisingly small area of noticeable field strength. A rare-earth puck will be good for a bit over a Tesla at the surface, and two of them can make friends with one another hard enough to take your finger off; but would drop into the background surprisingly quickly as you moved further away...
I can only assume that half the fun of having enough nukes that you can use them for digging holes is not having to listen to NIMBY sentiment...
Given that Panama was, in no small part, created as a country in order to facilitate US interests in building the canal the first time around, I suspect that we would have been more than happy to ensure that the CIA provided whatever assistance was required for the free people of panama to make the right choice.
The 'irrigating siberia'(and accidentally killing the Aral sea...) thing was actually another wacky soviet project: The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature....
You are thinking of "Operation Plowshare"... A not-wildly-successful-but-truly-a-classic-of-the-nuclear-optimism-period project. Essentially, team nuclear realized that mankind now had the power to dig very large holes very quickly and proceeded to see what sorts of civil engineering could be shoehorned into being based on very large holes.
The godless communists, (as is often the case with these cold-war-era things) had an even larger, also not terribly well conceived; but much less euphemistically named project: "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy".
For the fanatic completionist, it may actually be a good deal. For anybody else, not so much. 60-80% of the games can probably had for peanuts, if they are even worth enough to not have been tossed by now; but there are always some that are damn rare. The difficulty increases, naturally, if you are one of those poor souls haunted by the fact that a mass-produced consumer product's ineffable, virginal, essences escape once the shrinkwrap is removed...
.torrent?
If we ignore, for a moment, the probably-imperfect state of emulation of some of the odder consoles on that list, does anybody have a good ballpark figure for the total size required to contain this collection?
It's nice to see that the matter was cleared up relatively quickly(the media circus wasn't pretty; but it could have been worse).
On the minus side, arsenic-crazed bacteria are a rather cool theory to have dashed against the rocks of callous empiricism. Hopefully some sort of selective breeding experiment can succeed where nature has failed, and give us an organism that substitutes some or all of its phosphorus for arsenic...
Clearly you aren't doing it correctly...
If the frog jumps out of the pot, you taze its amphibian ass, charge it with resisting arrest, zip-tie its limbs and dump it back in the pot.
And if the frog turns out to have a decent lawyer, you lose the tape and plant a dimebag from the evidence locker on it.
It's a surprisingly common problem, unfortunately. People with the nucleus of an actual point 'Yo, the onrushing surveillance state is bad, m'kay', then encounter some sort of strange cognitive hiccup that causes them to latch onto the nearest potentially-hostile object like a belligerent drunk at closing time, rather than something much more plausible that doesn't make them sound like a drooling nutcase.
Had the grandparent poster simply ranted about the CALEA(which did include some direct state funding of infrastructure 'upgrades' to support wiretapping, and obviously serves to bundle buying telecommunications services with paying for wiretapping infrastructure) and has been in play since 1994 he would have been on totally solid ground.
If he wanted something a little more sweeping, he could have discussed the 1970's and earlier situation(which, while technologically crude, was so bad that FISA, in 1978, counted as 'reform'...), then gone on to FISA, ECHELON should probably show up somewhere, possibly given the whole 'Clipper' situation a nod, then done CALEA, and then finished with an overview of how post-2001 has been an energetic sprint downhill, with substantial(but largely classified) evidence of extralegal surveillance, despite generous boundaries for what constitutes 'legal', the 2008 retroactive immunity bill, and so forth.
It Isn't. That. Bloody. Difficult. While parts are formally classified, or just-not-talked-about in public, large swaths of the US surveillance apparatus were simply built right in the open, with publicly available laws, phone-tapping technology advertised on the vendors' web sites, and NSA datacenters too large to hide from orbital observation. And yet, no matter how easy we make it, people just will not be satisfied without some sort of shadowy conspiracy that makes them sound totally nuts...
Well, on occasion you see people who at least have the decency to endure some sort of serious hardship and/or risk before the fulsome whining about martyrdom begins...
That beats the hell out of the usual 'stand in your cushy position of power, influence, and not a little wealth, and whine about how persecuted you are' technique.
In the hypothetical magic world of rainbows and unicorns, The Walking Dead could make a good FPS... Thief was an FPS with virtually no shooting(and when the shooting did break out, that was usually because you had fucked up) and that didn't stop it from kicking ass. And System Shock 2 demonstrated that first-person-desperate-creeping-around-the-ruins-of-a-once-familiar-world-where-things-have-gone-all-to-hell can be suitably harrowing and emotionally engaging.
That said, it seems more reasonable to assume that the 'characters' aspect will be handled as elegantly as it was in Daikatana, and the game will be a painfully generic shooter with at least one frustratingly broken 'stealth' sequence that makes no sense whatsoever; but was necessary to establish the fact that this is the painfully generic shooter where you aren't a superhuman ass-kicking machine...
It, unfortunately, isn't a huge surprise that some fairly epic paper-shuffling(and converting to TIFF, apparently) took place.
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
The 'white blob' looks rather shiny to me, with some slight 'striping', I'd guess a fuzzy picture of some unpopulated solder pads...
While crass, the grandparent post is arguably a worthwhile question when you compare the Model A to the Model B.
$10 for ethernet and a second USB port is a smaller premium(and, of course, better integrated) than pretty much any peripheral option, and some sort of networking is an extremely convenient feature. The 'A' seems like a very niche sort of device.
It's receive only, and the quality isn't magic by any means; but you can get an RTL2832-based DVB-T dongle for ~$20 and be on your merry way.
(And, indeed, this does seem to have spurred greater interest among people who weren't in for a USRP; but were interested. The fact that SDR involves substantially more nontrivial math than many arduino projects probably limits the mass appeal some, though.)
gnuradio just wasn't sexy enough, I guess. Not enough like arduino on the tip of everyone's tongue.
The device in TFA is a piece of hardware designed to support gnuradio(it might support other things as well; but a gnuradio interface is explicitly mentioned in the device specs).
Gnuradio is just the software side. Traditionally, the USRP has been the peripheral of choice. Not cheap; but configurable for a wide range of frequencies and probably the most mature. A sound card(with appropriate external circuitry bringing things down to audio frequencies, of course) is also an option, and certain flavors of DVB TV receiver dongles are the new hotness in the cheap seats.
This "Phi" device lacks some of the versatility of the classier USRP gear; but it is cheaper and offers a very fast interface to the host computer...
Unlike 'Arduino', where the term refers more or less interchangeably to both the software development environment and to a variety of atmega-based microcontroller boards, Gnuradio is just the software side. There is no 'gnuradio' hardware per se, as there is with Arduino. The USRP is probably the closest to being that; but it is pricey enough to be out of the hands of a great many hobbyists.
I'm missing out on my apparent hatred and ignorance, please enlighten me.
I made a light-hearted joke on the premise that common Chinese small arms are relatively inexpensive and generally closely based(to what degree knocked-off and to what degree licensed based on the degree of Sino-Russian chumminess or lack thereof at the time of production) Russian AK designs, and that having China sending them to the KKK would hurt demand for the product of domestic arms manufacturers.
You might need to re-calibrate your sensitivity a bit...
So, since there are dictators who attack their own citizens with military weapons, we can just ignore free speech rights? Internet freedom is a subset of freedom of speech.
I suspect that(aside from the UN's relative fecklessness), the bigger issue will be that the UN's position on "Human Rights" has a loophole in the free speech department that you could drive one of those comically oversized trucks used in open pit mining through...
From UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 29:
"(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society."
So, can anybody think of any popular restrictions on rights and freedoms that aren't fairly trivial to rationalize under 'morality', 'public order' or 'the general welfare'? Even with the 'in a democratic society' stipulation, that still leaves you a considerable degree of flexibility.
Of course not! Think of what cheap Chinese AK knockoffs would do to the good, god-fearing American weapons industry!
While I can imagine it offending the purists, there wouldn't be anything fundamentally broken about a school choosing to price their services by credit-hour, or by degree, as opposed to per semester. However, if they don't do that ahead of time, that would seem to leave them with very little legal recourse if somebody manages to complete their studies faster than expected.
If, on the other hand, the school did price that way, and the student isn't paying up as agreed because he thinks that he shouldn't have to, it would seem like he has no leg to stand on.
Either way, it seems like a weird thing to progress to the lawsuit stage. If the school's case is actually "But, you violated our assumptions!!!", their lawyers must be insane(or really cheap, 3k isn't going to buy too much legal time...) If the student isn't paying up 'because performance is supposed to be worth something', this seems like a relatively small collections matter, which would likely be handled by masses of demand letters for a period of time before an actual suit...
Also, Waltz seems to be making the assumption that nuke prices and availability are going to magically remain stuck at 'moderately competent nation state run by pragmatic and slightly pessimistic people' indefinitely...
That(along with the desire to have feeble little countries that can't say no to their betters' proxy wars, and a mutual desire to spend less on maintaining ICBMs) is really what bolsters the enthusiasm for arms control even among countries that already have lots and lots of nukes. Up to a point, the availability of nuclear arms can reduce conflict, or at least relocate it to countries nobody loves very much; but their broad availability could get unpleasant.
The kicker is that those two are not independent:
The report's punchline is that, because of human/cultural problems, the technology actually deployed will never be as safe and reliable as the technology theoretically available with today's body of engineering and technology knowledge.
So, whatever the state of the art is, unless the broken human factor is fixed, the actual nuclear facilities actually fully of zesty isotopes will always be less safe than the state of the art would suggest, even in a fairly high-budget situation like Japan.
That's the real kicker. Even if technology could save you(I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable of the state of the art to say whether it actually could or not), you won't take it up on that offer, so having broken humans ensures that you will end up dealing with incompetent responses to the breakage of sub-optimal technology...
That's one of the things I'm wary of in this context: You might piss someone off with more money and firepower than $deity when you pluck apart his precious and expensive weapon to fight terrorism (or is that boggeyman outdated by now and we have another strawman to justify spying on otherwise innocent citizens? I didn't keep up to date).
I imagine that there isn't an entirely zero chance of earning yourself a dose of succulent Polonium for your tea; but I wouldn't be too concerned. If $SINISTER_INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY has cooked up some malware, and that malware has been tactless enough to get to the point of being reverse engineered in public(as opposed to being unnoticed, or covertly picked apart by the enemy $SINISTER_INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY), that malware is already too high profile for their liking. At that point, the options are (1): Start developing something else, do your best to suggest that your previous work was probably just Ukranian bot-herders or (2): Risk drawing even more attention to yourself by seeing to it that some security researchers mysteriously cut several vital arteries while shaving.
It's a some-hundreds-of-pages report, so I wouldn't have expected you to have read it; but is it too much to skim the summary that TFA kindly provides?
The report's punchline is that TEPCO fucked up, and nuclear oversight and response are deeply rotten on both the operator and the regulator sides due to chronic regulatory capture and fecklessness. Honestly, that's a conclusion even more difficult to fix than some sort of design problem. Machines can be repaired. Deep cultural rot is much harder to root out, and makes it very likely that, even where solutions do exist, they will not be reliably enacted.
It's really about the most damning conclusion that the report could have arrived at...