Changing the volume of a pocket of air, swim bladder style, is certainly a good option for controlling buoyancy if you don't want to go too deep; but using low density liquids to reach neutral buoyancy, and then relying on control surfaces to 'fly' up or down is also an option.
Fish have actually evolved in both directions; some have swim bladders and manipulate gas pockets for buoyancy control, some lack them; and have a largely constant density(depending on how much fatty tissue vs. bone and stuff they have) and control their depth by swimming.
It really depends on what your objectives are: if you aren't planning on going terribly deep, a small pressure vessel for buoyancy control doesn't require really heroic structural support and only requires energy when you want to change your buoyancy.
If you are planning on really deep dives, the challenges of keeping a gas bubble intact get pretty nasty(even the fancy high-precision alumina ceramic spheres that deep water ROVs use have 'sympathetic implosion' problems that have sent several craft to the bottom); so the possibility of substituting a low density liquid that doesn't need to be protected from compression is pretty attractive.
Both options can be made to work, which one is more suitable depends on what you want to do with the craft.
This sort of 'reporting' is a farce, of which they really ought to be ashamed. Aside from the dubious wisdom of parroting 'unnamed intelligence sources who definitely wouldn't have any reason to be spinning the media after a dramatic and gruesome attack on their watch'; there's a pretty aching gap in even basic critical thinking if you treat 'the working assumption is that the guys were pretty security aware' as some sort of insight.
FFS, any pot dealer who has stayed out of prison for a couple of years would count as 'pretty security aware' in the vacuous "well, we didn't realize that they were up to something until they had already executed it" sense of the term. Of course some degree of care was used in orchestrating a coordinated attack involving a number of people, some of who had had run-ins with the law before. Why would you expect otherwise?
Plus, historical examples suggest that terrorists aren't complete morons about security: Al Qaeda and the Taliban both had a healthy distrust of cellphones, even before we learned what 'dirtboxing' was; and the guys who pulled the Mumbai attacks in 2008 used Blackberries specifically because BBM is way more resistant than SMS. I realize that somebody had a burning need to fill column inches; but what pitiful dreck.
You would need to be approximately neutrally buoyant, especially if low-energy loitering is the plan; but liquids lighter than water can also serve that purpose(and, since they are denser than air you'll need a larger volume of them; but since they are nearly in-compressible you just need an impermiable membrane rather than a pressure vessel).
Off the cuff, I'd imagine that the easiest thing to do would be to use your fuel bladder for buoyancy, with ballast you discard as you consume the fuel. For the weight of the essential systems, at zero ballast, you could either get fancy and have a dedicated bladder of the lowest-density fluid that is acceptably cheap(this would be good if you wanted the thing to be recoverable, or to end-of-life as a floating contact mine); or you could just oversize the diesel bladder slightly and accept that the unit will sink after it burns through a sufficient amount of fuel(simpler, and good if you'd prefer that EOL units sink to the bottom rather than washing up where people might find them and try to trace them back to you).
So long as you don't need to surface or dive terribly quickly, you can get away with very small changes in buoyancy as long as you are neutrally buoyant by default. The 'underwater glider' designs used for long-endurance marine sampling and such use that principle pretty effectively.
On the bright side, the tech would also be amenable to the production of improved narco-subs; so even if our container ships and oil tankers aren't making it through, we'll have something to take our minds off our problems!
It's my understanding that more-or-less that idea is what we've tended to interpret the establishment clause to mean; but that implementation sometimes drifts(often pretty markedly if something whips congress into a frenzy, usually somewhat moderated by the courts, though even there we have fictions like 'ceremonial deism' that allow people to claim that overtly religious rituals are actually not religious, because reasons, with a straight face.) It's unfortunate; but a manifestation of the fact that there are so many ways to throw a coat of nominal nonsectarianism over a sectarian policy, especially one popular enough that most people just think of it as 'true' rather than as being a position particular to their sect. It's a good ideal, in any case.
In this case, it seems like the state could have saved itself a lot of trouble by adhering more closely to this principle: by allowing exceptions for 'religious' headwear, rather than saying 'eh, hair is noncritial for ID purposes, you can dye, cut, style, wear a Yarmulke, wear a colander, wear a fedora, wear a headscarf, whatever' or 'nope, everyone gets their picture taken with their hair uncovered and neutrally styled, no exceptions'. Once you give 'religious' objections more weight than other objections, you inevitably fall into the 'well, what's a "real" religion?' problem; at which point the state ends up in the goofy-at-best-and-dangerous-at-worst business of deciding whose religion is 'real', who is a freaky cultist, and who is just a snarky punk with a bad attitude. It's not as serious as just going all in and establishing an officially blessed religion; but it still unnecessarily mires you in the pointless and endless task of compiling The List of Real Religions.
That aside, though, submarines might well benefit even more than aircraft if you can get them working reasonably autonomously: adding enough room for a human and life support is hardly free in an aircraft; but at least the pressure difference between the cockpit and the outside is always going to be fairly modest. A submarine has no such luxury; with all but the ones purpose-built for deep sea research being restricted to fairly shallow dives by the fact that 'crush depth' is exactly what it sounds like.
If you can get rid of the requirement for a pocket of air, you make surviving the pressures of deep water vastly easier and cheaper. Plus, removing the crew cuts down on limits to endurance: the electronics will require some power, and you still require power if you want to change depth or move; but you could drift with the current, waiting for an activation signal or a suitably interesting passive sonar signature for months on a mere trickle of power.
On the minus side, can you imagine how much fun somebody with an interest in disrupting shipping could have with cheap, long-endurance, largely autonomous submarines? A lousy little fiberglass hull, since it's just to reduce drag, not to resist pressure; a big bladder of diesel, flooded batteries, an epoxy puck of electronics, and a little generator to top up the batteries when they get low. Dive depth would be limited primarily by the desire to keep water out of the generator, which would introduce a few gas pockets that could crush(if this really bothered you, you could flood the generator with a noncorrosive fluid for greatly increased crush resistance; at the cost of having to purge that before you can start running it); and set it loose to drift around the vicinity of the shipping lane of your choice until it hears a ship large enough to be worth blowing itself up against...
Such a thing wouldn't be cheap by consumer standards; even small fishing/pleasure craft can run you 5 to mid 6 figures; and everything costs more underwater; but when a classy nuclear submarine can run you well north of 2 billion; and a 'cheap' diesel-electric ~500million; this sort of IED-of-the-sea would be virtually disposable by comparison.
What is annoying is the tendency toward clearly voluntary and self-inflicted regressions.
The rocket surgeon who decided to remove the perfectly functional GUI for configuring 802.11x/WPA Enterprise connections; and instead made that possible only by applying a device configuration, for instance, has no excuse for such failure.
As with most things not amenable to being hammered out in syllogism, it's a trifle fuzzy around the edges; but the basic outline(which I think we owe to Locke and derivatives heavily influenced by him) that 'if there is a suitably compelling interest behind some requirement, like making 'IDs' that actually identify, the fact that your objections are religious is irrelevant; but if the requirement is imposed to inconvenience some unpopular sect, without compelling interest, or with compelling interest that could be achieved by some less inconvenient means, then it's effectively just harassment with a greater or lesser degree of dishonesty.' has always seemed pretty compelling to me.
The 'not easy' part isn't so much in the theory, as in the myriad ways people can come up with to develop 'suitably compelling interests' that just so happen to rub sects they dislike the wrong way.
Where available, chronology clues are always useful: if the policy was in place before the people who feel excessively burdened by it were even a matter of much thought among the policymakers; it is substantially less likely that the policy was devised primarily to harass them. It might still be possible to amend it to suit people better without harming the interest it was put in place to achieve; but that's a good sign that it was imposed with some non-sectarian objective in mind.
If, by contrast, the arrival of some new and controversial sect prompts an...unrelated...interest in achieving some purportedly non-sectarian goal that just happens to ruin the new guy's day springs up; you should probably look more carefully at the idea.
(By way of example, 'making photo-IDs that are actually useful' is a fairly obvious matter of state interest, and dates back about as far as the techological viability of taking and reproducing photographs at acceptable cost; which makes the idea that it was concocted as a scheme to outrage modesty and crack down on assorted religions' preferred funny hats difficult to take seriously. There is a strong argument to be made that, given the easy and pervasive use of haircuts and dye jobs to change the appearance of hair, there isn't any good reason to crack down on headscarves, colanders, etc. while allowing people with dyed and styled hair to go about their business; either hair isn't a core ID feature, or you should be putting greater effort into worrying about any way of concealing or modifying it. By contrast, when people with no prior interest in slaughterhouse standards start freaking out about the chilling barbarism of kosher or halal butchery, it's worth a raised eyebrow. Such practices may well be incompatible with acceptable standards of animal welfare; but if you didn't care about any of the delightful things done in meatpacking plants because they are the cheapest, fastest, methods; some skepticism is in order when you develop a sudden interest in the subject.)
Monitor brightness controls should be used immediately, they always come out of the box far too high; but for most other adjustments, you are probably better off in software: whether you want to geek out about color rendering(in which case the OS knows more about ICC profiles than the monitor does, and can work with a colorimeter to produce a device-specific one, rather than just the manufacturer's model-average one); or do some sort of assistive false color(in which case GPU driver color curve adjustments are probably for you).
I'd be leery of banning sugar water, that's too nanny-state for my blood; but if I were helping fund the NHS, I'd be damn sure that I wouldn't want some idiot's witch-doctor to be able to submit claims for having administered succussed eye of newt or whatnot.
If they want to do it in private practice; their efficacy claims had better be prepared to meet truth-in-advertising standards; but if they can find true believers, have at it.
If it is going on the tab of the real healthcare system; evidence or GTFO. 'The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients support the therapy' is not, exactly, 'evidence'. I bet that patients would also support an open bar in the waiting room; but that doesn't make it medically sound.
It doesn't make Windows Magnifier any less lightweight; MS clearly included it as a checkbox feature, not to compete with the specialists; but one thing worth trying is magnifier in a dual(or more)-monitor configuration.
You can move the 'magnified' window so that it fills the entire second screen; while using the primary screen as you normally would. Whatever your cursor is hovering over at a given time will be enlarged, by the amount specified in the magnifier configuration, and splashed across the second screen.
This saves you space on your primary screen; and is also a good compromise option if you find that magnification really mangles things like page layout, making navigation confusing; but you need a magnified view to read text or do other detailed work: your primary screen provides a birds-eye view of the overall layout; your magnifier screen provides a suitably enlarged view of the area around your cursor, for when you want to read a block of text. You then just look back and forth as needed.
Again, this doesn't solve the fundamental mediocrity of the magnifier tool; but given that you basically can't buy a computer without at least two video outs, and a second screen will run you 1/2 the cost of any of those programs, possibly less, it's worth at least experimenting with(at least if your vision is such that you can handle at least 'layout-level' detail; but need assistance for text, specific fiddly buttons, or other detailed elements.
It's a matter of taste; but I personally find that a slight 'backlight' behind my monitor(it's a white wall, I light it so that it is somewhere in the 50-75% as bright as on-scree-white range) can decrease eyestrain, especially at night. If the room is too dark, the brightness level that was good during the day becomes a bit too much as my eyes adjust, and I never remember to turn it down before I've noticed that my eyes are displeased. Definitely keep it subtle, though, full sunlight is not subtle, and is basically the devil for on-screen work.
Many web pages are maldesigned shit that make doing this(without a masochistic enthusiasm for reverse-engineering) difficult; but less-broken pages can actually allow the browser to be a pretty good environment from an accessibility perspective:
For the basics, Firefox has (in Options-> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced) a fairly simple configuration menu that allows you to specify preferred fonts, font sizes, and choose whether or not your preferences are applied only to sites that don't specify anything, or whether your preferences are imposed regardless of the site's style. the 'Colors' menu allows you to do the same for text colors, background colors, and visited and unvisited link color; and also specify if they are to be used only when nothing else is specified, or forcibly applied.
If you need more granularity, I've heard good things about the 'Stylish' plugin(for FF or Chrome) that allows you to impose custom CSS on a per-site basis). Doing serious CSS demands some knowledge of what you are doing; but if you are mostly interested in 'Keep it simple and legible, dumbass', and focus on the sites you actually use most, not on trying to fix the world, any sites that aren't brutally adversarial or painfully-90s in their failure to separate content and presentation can be bludgeoned into readability.
The web situation is, arguably, worse than that of native applications that do properly respect OS scale, DPI, and theme adjustments(since each web page is effectively its own 'app', and may need to be fixed slightly differently); but markedly better than applications that fail to respect OS-provided theme and scale settings(since imposing custom CSS is child's play compared to slicing into some horrible legacy binary and trying to fix its hideous custom widget set more or less blind).
Tinkering with these settings will probably push you deep into false-color territory(unless you are comparing to a genuinely nice and regularly calibrated setup, reasonably recent stuff does a fairly good job out of the box); but all the GPU vendors offer the ability to to set a custom color correction curve for R, G, and B; as well as brightness, contrast, and gamma.
Helpfully, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all arrange these controls somewhat differently(and sometimes rearrange them between driver versions); but if you have an even remotely recent GPU, you can substantially transform output colors to suit your taste. Unless you have some sort of specialist advice suited to your particular situation you'll just have to experiment, I have no idea what might be more or less comfortable for you; but this gives you control without whatever programs you are using ever having to know, support themes, or otherwise cooperate.
The GPU driver tools apply their transformations system-wide(unless the driver supports applying application-specific profiles for recognized games or video playback applications, again, driver specific); so they will really hammer the accuracy of image reproduction and the like; but they do offer the greatest control over applications that don't support themes, refuse to honor OS themes, or are otherwise touchy.
In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.
Also, if you can, turn the brightness down. Monitor manufacturers love setting the backlight to 'suntan'; because it makes the colors look more vibrant, the ghastly reflective screen look actually usable, and allows them to print a more impressive contrast ratio on the box without technically lying. If you have enough control over your computing environment, you ideally want a matte display, with the backlight low enough that the apparent brightness of white areas on the screen is about the same as the whitespace in a book under comfortable reading conditions. You will need a decent screen to actually do this(the cheap seats turn the brightness up because it's the only way to keep darker colors from just becoming indistinguishable; but better panels are up to it). You also want to avoid having to deal with glare from other light sources on the screen, since that will force you to punch the brightness back up.
Even better given the likely association with CERT. Unless you still live in the fantasy world where your tech-heavy society is safer when it is full of holes because at least you get to catch a few of the bad guys; pissing the reputation of a major security-research institution down the drain in order to catch a few drug dealers seems like a really terrible plan. There will be more drug dealers tomorrow; but repairing an environment for people to get vulnerabilities fixed without the fear that they'll be stuck in limbo until the feds have finished weaponizing them, then released for fix, will take a lot longer; and leave a lot of important things vulnerable so that the feds can go hunt a few minor threats.
Indeed, my understanding is that attorney-client communications are pretty much privileged no matter what. I was just trying to head off the 'eh, it only affects guilty people, so fuck 'em' train.
The level of surveillance-for-surveillance's sake on display here is pretty egregious even for people actually convicted of crimes(and, even if you don't care about them; consider them a likely beta test for wider implementations); but the degree to which it targets non-convicts and not even incarcerated people who merely have some sort of social connection to an incarcerated person is a heaping extra helping of dystopian.
It's another poxed tactic from the unpleasant world of 'distinction without difference to get around pesky regulations' wing of government. There isn't any meaningful difference; but if you have a contractor do it you can just refer to them as a 'Source of Information', without further elaboration; much the same way that local PDs will conjure up a 'confidential informant' whenever they'd prefer not to admit to using a Stingray; or the DEA employs 'parallel construction' to provide a legal backstory for legally inadmissible evidence.
It is very popular, and has all kinds of uses. For pretty much any restriction that either forbids a specific practice, or requires obtaining a specific sort of permission; you can probably find either a euphemism that is equivalent to that practice; but different for regulatory purposes; or something that sounds like that specific sort of permission; but is way easier to get(eg. an 'administrative subpoena' vs. a 'subpoena').
I think that XNA specifically got the axe at some point; but I'd assume that MS would already have a CLR implementation for the Xbox one ready to go. Between eating their own dog food for things like painting UI elements; and supporting their 'universal app' ambitions, it'd be a bit weird to omit one; and a CLR has been ported to things rather less familiar to Microsoft than an x86 running some sort of NT-like OS.
The XNA-based games might not be a priority, since they skewed heavily indie-and-relatively-cheap; but they do seem like the low-hanging fruit technologically. Customer demand is likely concentrated on the much more demanding native-and-optimized-within-an-inch-of-its-life titles; but getting those working is probably an interesting and somewhat harrowing process by comparison.
Yes, thank you. My vague recollection wasn't enough to google with; but it looks like XNA was what I had in mind; and what I presume would be massively easier to support on a substantially different piece of hardware than native applications.
they are inmates so considering that being locked up has already been deemed acceptable based on what they've done, don't be thinking they deserve the same rights as an inmate as you and i do on the outside
Important distinction to keep in mind here: "Securus Technologies" provides phone service/wiretapping to both jails and prisons. People in prison have been convicted of something. You can(and people frequently do), end up in jail if you cannot afford to post bail, or if the court refuses to allow release on bail, pending your trial.
Aside from more general concerns, that is perhaps the most worrisome population: can't make bail, or don't have the option, so they are presumably mostly poor and/or suspected of something gruesome; and are stuck in jail so have few options for coordinating their upcoming trial with their lawyers aside from using the phone or hoping that their(probably less than stellar and somewhat overworked) legal representation can squeeze all the necessary prep into the jail's visiting hours and policies.
If they are laboring under all those advantages and prosecutors get to listen to their calls to their attorney, apparently without bothering to disclose this fact, it's hard to even pretend that something remotely close to justice is being done.
There are some legitimate purposes for keeping an eye on prison phone calls(coordinating witness tampering, relaying instructions to confederates who remain outside, organizing smuggling operations into the prison, etc. are hardly unknown uses of the phone); but do not forget that the incarcerated population includes pre-trial detainees, who have not been found guilty of anything in a court of law yet; and the call metadata and recordings(which apparently have no particular retention limit) are not restricted to use in combating illegal conduct, prison contraband, witness intimidation, etc; but for any purposes that people with access to them see fit. Perhaps most...delightful...is Securus' own "Threads" technology: an intelligence product specifically designed to use call data to associate inmates with the non-incarcerated, so that police can more effectively focus on them. If the poor bastards in jail pre-trial aren't enough, the "More than 600,000 people with billing name and address (not incarcerated)" might object to the fact that they are part of Securus' product.
'Consultants' perform wide-scale, warrantless, attack against large number of individuals not even suspected of wrongdoing on behalf of FBI under the guise of 'research'(probably not IRB approved); FBI thanks them for their assistance and introduces the fruits of an operation that would have been dubiously legal in scope even with a warrant; much less without one.
I have the recollection that at least some; but probably not all, of the downloadable Xbox360 games, especially the indie ones, were built in something that was confusingly a bit different from.NET in the PC sense(as is customary for Microsoft's deeply confusing platform strategies); but, like.NET, was markedly more limited in terms of native code and deep hardware twiddling than the big commercial disk releases where(where developers could work more or less as close to the metal as their budget, talent, and middleware would allow). This would presumably make the indie downloadables much easier to get running on a more powerful; but architecturally alien, system.
Is my memory going on this one; or am I recalling correctly that there was one class of games that had a relatively neat abstraction layer; and one class that was accorded extremely broad power with little or no abstraction(save anything specifically related to platform integrity and DRM)?
Yeah; but if you want to restore from backup, you have to infiltrate Theresa May's lair and defeat her in hand-to-hand combat(and don't let her media-relations-form fool you; her combat form is considerably more terrifying). The savings just aren't worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Changing the volume of a pocket of air, swim bladder style, is certainly a good option for controlling buoyancy if you don't want to go too deep; but using low density liquids to reach neutral buoyancy, and then relying on control surfaces to 'fly' up or down is also an option.
Fish have actually evolved in both directions; some have swim bladders and manipulate gas pockets for buoyancy control, some lack them; and have a largely constant density(depending on how much fatty tissue vs. bone and stuff they have) and control their depth by swimming.
It really depends on what your objectives are: if you aren't planning on going terribly deep, a small pressure vessel for buoyancy control doesn't require really heroic structural support and only requires energy when you want to change your buoyancy.
If you are planning on really deep dives, the challenges of keeping a gas bubble intact get pretty nasty(even the fancy high-precision alumina ceramic spheres that deep water ROVs use have 'sympathetic implosion' problems that have sent several craft to the bottom); so the possibility of substituting a low density liquid that doesn't need to be protected from compression is pretty attractive.
Both options can be made to work, which one is more suitable depends on what you want to do with the craft.
This sort of 'reporting' is a farce, of which they really ought to be ashamed. Aside from the dubious wisdom of parroting 'unnamed intelligence sources who definitely wouldn't have any reason to be spinning the media after a dramatic and gruesome attack on their watch'; there's a pretty aching gap in even basic critical thinking if you treat 'the working assumption is that the guys were pretty security aware' as some sort of insight.
FFS, any pot dealer who has stayed out of prison for a couple of years would count as 'pretty security aware' in the vacuous "well, we didn't realize that they were up to something until they had already executed it" sense of the term. Of course some degree of care was used in orchestrating a coordinated attack involving a number of people, some of who had had run-ins with the law before. Why would you expect otherwise?
Plus, historical examples suggest that terrorists aren't complete morons about security: Al Qaeda and the Taliban both had a healthy distrust of cellphones, even before we learned what 'dirtboxing' was; and the guys who pulled the Mumbai attacks in 2008 used Blackberries specifically because BBM is way more resistant than SMS. I realize that somebody had a burning need to fill column inches; but what pitiful dreck.
You would need to be approximately neutrally buoyant, especially if low-energy loitering is the plan; but liquids lighter than water can also serve that purpose(and, since they are denser than air you'll need a larger volume of them; but since they are nearly in-compressible you just need an impermiable membrane rather than a pressure vessel).
Off the cuff, I'd imagine that the easiest thing to do would be to use your fuel bladder for buoyancy, with ballast you discard as you consume the fuel. For the weight of the essential systems, at zero ballast, you could either get fancy and have a dedicated bladder of the lowest-density fluid that is acceptably cheap(this would be good if you wanted the thing to be recoverable, or to end-of-life as a floating contact mine); or you could just oversize the diesel bladder slightly and accept that the unit will sink after it burns through a sufficient amount of fuel(simpler, and good if you'd prefer that EOL units sink to the bottom rather than washing up where people might find them and try to trace them back to you).
So long as you don't need to surface or dive terribly quickly, you can get away with very small changes in buoyancy as long as you are neutrally buoyant by default. The 'underwater glider' designs used for long-endurance marine sampling and such use that principle pretty effectively.
On the bright side, the tech would also be amenable to the production of improved narco-subs; so even if our container ships and oil tankers aren't making it through, we'll have something to take our minds off our problems!
It's my understanding that more-or-less that idea is what we've tended to interpret the establishment clause to mean; but that implementation sometimes drifts(often pretty markedly if something whips congress into a frenzy, usually somewhat moderated by the courts, though even there we have fictions like 'ceremonial deism' that allow people to claim that overtly religious rituals are actually not religious, because reasons, with a straight face.) It's unfortunate; but a manifestation of the fact that there are so many ways to throw a coat of nominal nonsectarianism over a sectarian policy, especially one popular enough that most people just think of it as 'true' rather than as being a position particular to their sect. It's a good ideal, in any case.
In this case, it seems like the state could have saved itself a lot of trouble by adhering more closely to this principle: by allowing exceptions for 'religious' headwear, rather than saying 'eh, hair is noncritial for ID purposes, you can dye, cut, style, wear a Yarmulke, wear a colander, wear a fedora, wear a headscarf, whatever' or 'nope, everyone gets their picture taken with their hair uncovered and neutrally styled, no exceptions'. Once you give 'religious' objections more weight than other objections, you inevitably fall into the 'well, what's a "real" religion?' problem; at which point the state ends up in the goofy-at-best-and-dangerous-at-worst business of deciding whose religion is 'real', who is a freaky cultist, and who is just a snarky punk with a bad attitude. It's not as serious as just going all in and establishing an officially blessed religion; but it still unnecessarily mires you in the pointless and endless task of compiling The List of Real Religions.
In a limited sense, the navy has been using autonomous underwater drones for ages now.
That aside, though, submarines might well benefit even more than aircraft if you can get them working reasonably autonomously: adding enough room for a human and life support is hardly free in an aircraft; but at least the pressure difference between the cockpit and the outside is always going to be fairly modest. A submarine has no such luxury; with all but the ones purpose-built for deep sea research being restricted to fairly shallow dives by the fact that 'crush depth' is exactly what it sounds like.
If you can get rid of the requirement for a pocket of air, you make surviving the pressures of deep water vastly easier and cheaper. Plus, removing the crew cuts down on limits to endurance: the electronics will require some power, and you still require power if you want to change depth or move; but you could drift with the current, waiting for an activation signal or a suitably interesting passive sonar signature for months on a mere trickle of power.
On the minus side, can you imagine how much fun somebody with an interest in disrupting shipping could have with cheap, long-endurance, largely autonomous submarines? A lousy little fiberglass hull, since it's just to reduce drag, not to resist pressure; a big bladder of diesel, flooded batteries, an epoxy puck of electronics, and a little generator to top up the batteries when they get low. Dive depth would be limited primarily by the desire to keep water out of the generator, which would introduce a few gas pockets that could crush(if this really bothered you, you could flood the generator with a noncorrosive fluid for greatly increased crush resistance; at the cost of having to purge that before you can start running it); and set it loose to drift around the vicinity of the shipping lane of your choice until it hears a ship large enough to be worth blowing itself up against...
Such a thing wouldn't be cheap by consumer standards; even small fishing/pleasure craft can run you 5 to mid 6 figures; and everything costs more underwater; but when a classy nuclear submarine can run you well north of 2 billion; and a 'cheap' diesel-electric ~500million; this sort of IED-of-the-sea would be virtually disposable by comparison.
What is annoying is the tendency toward clearly voluntary and self-inflicted regressions.
The rocket surgeon who decided to remove the perfectly functional GUI for configuring 802.11x/WPA Enterprise connections; and instead made that possible only by applying a device configuration, for instance, has no excuse for such failure.
As with most things not amenable to being hammered out in syllogism, it's a trifle fuzzy around the edges; but the basic outline(which I think we owe to Locke and derivatives heavily influenced by him) that 'if there is a suitably compelling interest behind some requirement, like making 'IDs' that actually identify, the fact that your objections are religious is irrelevant; but if the requirement is imposed to inconvenience some unpopular sect, without compelling interest, or with compelling interest that could be achieved by some less inconvenient means, then it's effectively just harassment with a greater or lesser degree of dishonesty.' has always seemed pretty compelling to me.
The 'not easy' part isn't so much in the theory, as in the myriad ways people can come up with to develop 'suitably compelling interests' that just so happen to rub sects they dislike the wrong way.
Where available, chronology clues are always useful: if the policy was in place before the people who feel excessively burdened by it were even a matter of much thought among the policymakers; it is substantially less likely that the policy was devised primarily to harass them. It might still be possible to amend it to suit people better without harming the interest it was put in place to achieve; but that's a good sign that it was imposed with some non-sectarian objective in mind.
If, by contrast, the arrival of some new and controversial sect prompts an...unrelated...interest in achieving some purportedly non-sectarian goal that just happens to ruin the new guy's day springs up; you should probably look more carefully at the idea.
(By way of example, 'making photo-IDs that are actually useful' is a fairly obvious matter of state interest, and dates back about as far as the techological viability of taking and reproducing photographs at acceptable cost; which makes the idea that it was concocted as a scheme to outrage modesty and crack down on assorted religions' preferred funny hats difficult to take seriously. There is a strong argument to be made that, given the easy and pervasive use of haircuts and dye jobs to change the appearance of hair, there isn't any good reason to crack down on headscarves, colanders, etc. while allowing people with dyed and styled hair to go about their business; either hair isn't a core ID feature, or you should be putting greater effort into worrying about any way of concealing or modifying it. By contrast, when people with no prior interest in slaughterhouse standards start freaking out about the chilling barbarism of kosher or halal butchery, it's worth a raised eyebrow. Such practices may well be incompatible with acceptable standards of animal welfare; but if you didn't care about any of the delightful things done in meatpacking plants because they are the cheapest, fastest, methods; some skepticism is in order when you develop a sudden interest in the subject.)
Monitor brightness controls should be used immediately, they always come out of the box far too high; but for most other adjustments, you are probably better off in software: whether you want to geek out about color rendering(in which case the OS knows more about ICC profiles than the monitor does, and can work with a colorimeter to produce a device-specific one, rather than just the manufacturer's model-average one); or do some sort of assistive false color(in which case GPU driver color curve adjustments are probably for you).
I'd be leery of banning sugar water, that's too nanny-state for my blood; but if I were helping fund the NHS, I'd be damn sure that I wouldn't want some idiot's witch-doctor to be able to submit claims for having administered succussed eye of newt or whatnot.
If they want to do it in private practice; their efficacy claims had better be prepared to meet truth-in-advertising standards; but if they can find true believers, have at it.
If it is going on the tab of the real healthcare system; evidence or GTFO. 'The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients support the therapy' is not, exactly, 'evidence'. I bet that patients would also support an open bar in the waiting room; but that doesn't make it medically sound.
It doesn't make Windows Magnifier any less lightweight; MS clearly included it as a checkbox feature, not to compete with the specialists; but one thing worth trying is magnifier in a dual(or more)-monitor configuration. You can move the 'magnified' window so that it fills the entire second screen; while using the primary screen as you normally would. Whatever your cursor is hovering over at a given time will be enlarged, by the amount specified in the magnifier configuration, and splashed across the second screen.
This saves you space on your primary screen; and is also a good compromise option if you find that magnification really mangles things like page layout, making navigation confusing; but you need a magnified view to read text or do other detailed work: your primary screen provides a birds-eye view of the overall layout; your magnifier screen provides a suitably enlarged view of the area around your cursor, for when you want to read a block of text. You then just look back and forth as needed.
Again, this doesn't solve the fundamental mediocrity of the magnifier tool; but given that you basically can't buy a computer without at least two video outs, and a second screen will run you 1/2 the cost of any of those programs, possibly less, it's worth at least experimenting with(at least if your vision is such that you can handle at least 'layout-level' detail; but need assistance for text, specific fiddly buttons, or other detailed elements.
It's a matter of taste; but I personally find that a slight 'backlight' behind my monitor(it's a white wall, I light it so that it is somewhere in the 50-75% as bright as on-scree-white range) can decrease eyestrain, especially at night. If the room is too dark, the brightness level that was good during the day becomes a bit too much as my eyes adjust, and I never remember to turn it down before I've noticed that my eyes are displeased. Definitely keep it subtle, though, full sunlight is not subtle, and is basically the devil for on-screen work.
Many web pages are maldesigned shit that make doing this(without a masochistic enthusiasm for reverse-engineering) difficult; but less-broken pages can actually allow the browser to be a pretty good environment from an accessibility perspective:
For the basics, Firefox has (in Options-> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced) a fairly simple configuration menu that allows you to specify preferred fonts, font sizes, and choose whether or not your preferences are applied only to sites that don't specify anything, or whether your preferences are imposed regardless of the site's style. the 'Colors' menu allows you to do the same for text colors, background colors, and visited and unvisited link color; and also specify if they are to be used only when nothing else is specified, or forcibly applied.
If you need more granularity, I've heard good things about the 'Stylish' plugin(for FF or Chrome) that allows you to impose custom CSS on a per-site basis). Doing serious CSS demands some knowledge of what you are doing; but if you are mostly interested in 'Keep it simple and legible, dumbass', and focus on the sites you actually use most, not on trying to fix the world, any sites that aren't brutally adversarial or painfully-90s in their failure to separate content and presentation can be bludgeoned into readability.
The web situation is, arguably, worse than that of native applications that do properly respect OS scale, DPI, and theme adjustments(since each web page is effectively its own 'app', and may need to be fixed slightly differently); but markedly better than applications that fail to respect OS-provided theme and scale settings(since imposing custom CSS is child's play compared to slicing into some horrible legacy binary and trying to fix its hideous custom widget set more or less blind).
Tinkering with these settings will probably push you deep into false-color territory(unless you are comparing to a genuinely nice and regularly calibrated setup, reasonably recent stuff does a fairly good job out of the box); but all the GPU vendors offer the ability to to set a custom color correction curve for R, G, and B; as well as brightness, contrast, and gamma.
Helpfully, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all arrange these controls somewhat differently(and sometimes rearrange them between driver versions); but if you have an even remotely recent GPU, you can substantially transform output colors to suit your taste. Unless you have some sort of specialist advice suited to your particular situation you'll just have to experiment, I have no idea what might be more or less comfortable for you; but this gives you control without whatever programs you are using ever having to know, support themes, or otherwise cooperate.
The GPU driver tools apply their transformations system-wide(unless the driver supports applying application-specific profiles for recognized games or video playback applications, again, driver specific); so they will really hammer the accuracy of image reproduction and the like; but they do offer the greatest control over applications that don't support themes, refuse to honor OS themes, or are otherwise touchy.
In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.
Also, if you can, turn the brightness down. Monitor manufacturers love setting the backlight to 'suntan'; because it makes the colors look more vibrant, the ghastly reflective screen look actually usable, and allows them to print a more impressive contrast ratio on the box without technically lying. If you have enough control over your computing environment, you ideally want a matte display, with the backlight low enough that the apparent brightness of white areas on the screen is about the same as the whitespace in a book under comfortable reading conditions. You will need a decent screen to actually do this(the cheap seats turn the brightness up because it's the only way to keep darker colors from just becoming indistinguishable; but better panels are up to it). You also want to avoid having to deal with glare from other light sources on the screen, since that will force you to punch the brightness back up.
Back in the day, I could blame crippling hardware costs for my ignorance of signal processing. Now what am I going to do?
Even better given the likely association with CERT. Unless you still live in the fantasy world where your tech-heavy society is safer when it is full of holes because at least you get to catch a few of the bad guys; pissing the reputation of a major security-research institution down the drain in order to catch a few drug dealers seems like a really terrible plan. There will be more drug dealers tomorrow; but repairing an environment for people to get vulnerabilities fixed without the fear that they'll be stuck in limbo until the feds have finished weaponizing them, then released for fix, will take a lot longer; and leave a lot of important things vulnerable so that the feds can go hunt a few minor threats.
Indeed, my understanding is that attorney-client communications are pretty much privileged no matter what. I was just trying to head off the 'eh, it only affects guilty people, so fuck 'em' train.
The level of surveillance-for-surveillance's sake on display here is pretty egregious even for people actually convicted of crimes(and, even if you don't care about them; consider them a likely beta test for wider implementations); but the degree to which it targets non-convicts and not even incarcerated people who merely have some sort of social connection to an incarcerated person is a heaping extra helping of dystopian.
It's another poxed tactic from the unpleasant world of 'distinction without difference to get around pesky regulations' wing of government. There isn't any meaningful difference; but if you have a contractor do it you can just refer to them as a 'Source of Information', without further elaboration; much the same way that local PDs will conjure up a 'confidential informant' whenever they'd prefer not to admit to using a Stingray; or the DEA employs 'parallel construction' to provide a legal backstory for legally inadmissible evidence.
It is very popular, and has all kinds of uses. For pretty much any restriction that either forbids a specific practice, or requires obtaining a specific sort of permission; you can probably find either a euphemism that is equivalent to that practice; but different for regulatory purposes; or something that sounds like that specific sort of permission; but is way easier to get(eg. an 'administrative subpoena' vs. a 'subpoena').
I think that XNA specifically got the axe at some point; but I'd assume that MS would already have a CLR implementation for the Xbox one ready to go. Between eating their own dog food for things like painting UI elements; and supporting their 'universal app' ambitions, it'd be a bit weird to omit one; and a CLR has been ported to things rather less familiar to Microsoft than an x86 running some sort of NT-like OS.
The XNA-based games might not be a priority, since they skewed heavily indie-and-relatively-cheap; but they do seem like the low-hanging fruit technologically. Customer demand is likely concentrated on the much more demanding native-and-optimized-within-an-inch-of-its-life titles; but getting those working is probably an interesting and somewhat harrowing process by comparison.
Yes, thank you. My vague recollection wasn't enough to google with; but it looks like XNA was what I had in mind; and what I presume would be massively easier to support on a substantially different piece of hardware than native applications.
they are inmates so considering that being locked up has already been deemed acceptable based on what they've done, don't be thinking they deserve the same rights as an inmate as you and i do on the outside
Important distinction to keep in mind here: "Securus Technologies" provides phone service/wiretapping to both jails and prisons. People in prison have been convicted of something. You can(and people frequently do), end up in jail if you cannot afford to post bail, or if the court refuses to allow release on bail, pending your trial.
Aside from more general concerns, that is perhaps the most worrisome population: can't make bail, or don't have the option, so they are presumably mostly poor and/or suspected of something gruesome; and are stuck in jail so have few options for coordinating their upcoming trial with their lawyers aside from using the phone or hoping that their(probably less than stellar and somewhat overworked) legal representation can squeeze all the necessary prep into the jail's visiting hours and policies.
If they are laboring under all those advantages and prosecutors get to listen to their calls to their attorney, apparently without bothering to disclose this fact, it's hard to even pretend that something remotely close to justice is being done.
There are some legitimate purposes for keeping an eye on prison phone calls(coordinating witness tampering, relaying instructions to confederates who remain outside, organizing smuggling operations into the prison, etc. are hardly unknown uses of the phone); but do not forget that the incarcerated population includes pre-trial detainees, who have not been found guilty of anything in a court of law yet; and the call metadata and recordings(which apparently have no particular retention limit) are not restricted to use in combating illegal conduct, prison contraband, witness intimidation, etc; but for any purposes that people with access to them see fit. Perhaps most...delightful...is Securus' own "Threads" technology: an intelligence product specifically designed to use call data to associate inmates with the non-incarcerated, so that police can more effectively focus on them. If the poor bastards in jail pre-trial aren't enough, the "More than 600,000 people with billing name and address (not incarcerated)" might object to the fact that they are part of Securus' product.
'Consultants' perform wide-scale, warrantless, attack against large number of individuals not even suspected of wrongdoing on behalf of FBI under the guise of 'research'(probably not IRB approved); FBI thanks them for their assistance and introduces the fruits of an operation that would have been dubiously legal in scope even with a warrant; much less without one.
News at 11:30.
I have the recollection that at least some; but probably not all, of the downloadable Xbox360 games, especially the indie ones, were built in something that was confusingly a bit different from .NET in the PC sense(as is customary for Microsoft's deeply confusing platform strategies); but, like .NET, was markedly more limited in terms of native code and deep hardware twiddling than the big commercial disk releases where(where developers could work more or less as close to the metal as their budget, talent, and middleware would allow). This would presumably make the indie downloadables much easier to get running on a more powerful; but architecturally alien, system.
Is my memory going on this one; or am I recalling correctly that there was one class of games that had a relatively neat abstraction layer; and one class that was accorded extremely broad power with little or no abstraction(save anything specifically related to platform integrity and DRM)?
Yeah; but if you want to restore from backup, you have to infiltrate Theresa May's lair and defeat her in hand-to-hand combat(and don't let her media-relations-form fool you; her combat form is considerably more terrifying). The savings just aren't worth it.