the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station.
TFA seems to imply that they considered the issue of using lasers and shot it down with the words:
High frequency blasts can damage retinas, destroy electronics, and potentially ignite fires or explosions. “Think about the Death Star,” he warned. The risk factor outweighs the seductive, compact grace offered by lasers.
As you note, however, microwaves are not entirely safe either. On the other hand, if the intensity is low enough it should be safe, which is what is being discussed:
Since Mankins is dead-set on low-intensity microwave transmitters, the receiver on Earth will be large—about 6 to 8 km in diameter, positioned 5 to 10 meters above the ground.
The obvious question is if the beams can be focused, and used as a weapon, it could provide a no-warning and very destructive attack anywhere in the world. It seems to be what Mankins is trying to avoid, and I tend to agree that (aside from cost) we really, really need to make sure that the power sources of the future are not just being used to cloak the real objective: Making powerful weapons. Example: Nuclear power.
Many device manufacturers use Linux or Windows as an underlying OS as both have a lot of support form development tools and are widely used. This means that a lot of work has been poured into the OS to make it a lot more secure than some home brew system. On the other hand it also means that all vulnerability in the OS also apply to the device. As long as the device was sealed, this was no problem, but once users want to get data from the device, or even get it to interact with various internet-based services (e.g. journaling systems), the cat is out of the bag. As many OS vulnerabilities are reported after the initial release of the device, manufacturers will have to either patch the OS on the device or ignore the issue. And then there are all the other 3rd party components on a medical device.
As I understand the current FDA guidelines (I haven't read TFA yet, so it may have changed), patching the device is rather expensive as the manufacturer have to be able to document that each patch will not adversely affect the functioning of the device (to avoid the issue with the pacemaker that manu0601 considered). This means that patching is often tied with general patching of the device which will only be done as long as the manufacturer produces updates to the device. Patches may also cost money (or at the very least downtime), so users may chose to skip patches.
European Union politicians simply cannot be trusted as none have been elected by the people, so one can only wonder whose interests they serve.
That is quite a blanket statement. Members of the EU Parliament are politicians and directly elected by the people, so it is also wrong. Note that I am not saying that the European Union does not have serious democratic problems. The EU Parliament holds few of the powers usually attributed to parliaments and the EU Commission is appointed by the EU governments, so it is "buffered" against the people.
My main gripe with pdf ebooks is that they do not adapt to my screen. It also means that if I want to change the size of the fonts, I will have to manually zoom in and move the visible area around. And given that eInk updates quite slow, it is not a nice and natural process. In my humble opinion, epub is the better format for ebooks.
Precisely. I only buy DRM free eBooks. If I want a book that is not available in a DRM free version, I either pass entirely or buy a dead tree version. For the record, I have spent some 300 Euro on eBooks in the last year, and maybe half that on dead tree versions. It really irks me that many vendors do not display clearly if their books are DRM encumbered or not. Kobo is one of the few where it is easy to see in the results list. Are there others?
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
So, you don't think a decade of war with US backed Iraq had anything to do with the current state of affairs in Iran?
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
As I remember it, Bush was actually warming up to a war on Iran after winning in Iraq. One of the main reasons that it did not happen was that Iraq turned out to be a lot more unruly than the US government had expected. If Iran was going for nuclear weapons, one of the best times to do so would be when their adversaries had their militaries tied up in expensive conflicts that they did not dare to lose. And after a decade of war and occupation and facing serious economic problems, it is quite difficult for the current US government to get funding for an expensive war, even if they wanted to. It could also prove to be quite a challenge for them as it could cause the civil war to flare up in Iraq and, possibly, light the powder keg that is brewing in that area.
You may also need software to go with those computers;-) A MSDN subscription with Visual Studio can cost a pretty penny, especially if you go for the premium or ultimate packages. If you build hardware, some of the software tools are pretty expensive as well.
That is true, however, that does not really change my point. The yearly agricultural production of Denmark is large enough to feed 15 million people. Yes, that is three times the population of Denmark.
Me too. I live in Denmark, and we export foodstuffs for some 12 billion Euro. Yes, this is a very small and densely populated country. The Netherlands export foodstuffs for $55 billion, also a small and densely populated country.
You cannot prove a negative. What you can prove (and what already has been proven) is that all of the GMO crops are safer than peanuts, penicillin, and organic bean sprouts and spinach, and cell phones (GMOs 0 deaths with 100s of millions of exposures over nearly 20 years, the others many thousands of deaths between them due to anaphylactic shock, e. coli, driving-while-texting, etc).
By that rationale, cigarettes are also not dangerous.
Overall, cigarettes do not kill directly, except in very unlikely cases, e.g. people falling asleep in their beds with a lit cigarette. They do, however, poison your body, and large scale studies have shown that heavy smoking will reduce your lifespan by 9 years on average. Same thing could be true for GMO that are engineered to be poisonous to insects, but we have scarce evidence either way. What you are arguing is that we should not require that evidence prior to large scale adaption of GMO crops.
"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove the Earth is round." ~15th Century AD
Contrary to popular belief, 15th Century humans did know that the Earth is round. They even had a pretty good estimate for its circumference. Which was the reason that Columbus had such a hard time raising funds to go to India: The sailing distance was simply too far. And had the Americas not been in the way, this voyage would either have returned empty handed or maybe not at all.
But with DVD releases GP still does not get a simple file that can be played. Also, most DVDs come with (easily broken) DRM and FBI "you are a bloody thief" messages.
Good point. People living in close proximity to you may manage to figure out your pin code, but they would need to do some extra work to fool the biometrics, which would discourage a lot of nosy people from reading or modifying your personal data.
In order to do that, they would have to order gun shops to get finger prints from buyers. And if they already are, getting finger prints from phones do not make any difference. You are right in considering that there are serious privacy implications if a government can and do use this to build a national finger print register, i.e. if the fingerprints are collected in central registers, that can be accessed by police or private investigators.
How can anyone consider fingerprint identification on a touch screen as anything but toy security? You handle your phone pretty much each day, so it is highly unlikely that your fingerprints will not be all over it, in particular on the screen. With just a little bit of technique, every criminal will be able to get a usable finger print and unlock your phone. Mythbusters pretty much proved how easy these things are to bypass.
What if someone - say one of the millions of compromised computers out there - were to send a shutdown request against a large player - say spamhaus. By your example, spamhaus would be taken offline until someone at spamhaus' IT department called their ISP to get the block cleared. At which point another compromised computer sends a new shutdown request. Sure, you loose a few bots, but at the cost of one bot per 5 minutes downtime for a large vendor, you can get a pretty big bang out of a small bot network.
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the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station.
TFA seems to imply that they considered the issue of using lasers and shot it down with the words:
High frequency blasts can damage retinas, destroy electronics, and potentially ignite fires or explosions. “Think about the Death Star,” he warned. The risk factor outweighs the seductive, compact grace offered by lasers.
As you note, however, microwaves are not entirely safe either. On the other hand, if the intensity is low enough it should be safe, which is what is being discussed:
Since Mankins is dead-set on low-intensity microwave transmitters, the receiver on Earth will be large—about 6 to 8 km in diameter, positioned 5 to 10 meters above the ground.
The obvious question is if the beams can be focused, and used as a weapon, it could provide a no-warning and very destructive attack anywhere in the world. It seems to be what Mankins is trying to avoid, and I tend to agree that (aside from cost) we really, really need to make sure that the power sources of the future are not just being used to cloak the real objective: Making powerful weapons. Example: Nuclear power.
And in Danish it can mean both "poison" and "married" ...
I was under the impression that youtube had a nice app for all Android platforms? Or does PBS do something more than tv?
Gawd, NO! Leave them here & let's the rest of us go!
Don't worry, you can have Venus for the geeks, Jupiter for the nerds and Pluto all for yourself.
I'm more of a cat person myself ...
Many device manufacturers use Linux or Windows as an underlying OS as both have a lot of support form development tools and are widely used. This means that a lot of work has been poured into the OS to make it a lot more secure than some home brew system. On the other hand it also means that all vulnerability in the OS also apply to the device. As long as the device was sealed, this was no problem, but once users want to get data from the device, or even get it to interact with various internet-based services (e.g. journaling systems), the cat is out of the bag. As many OS vulnerabilities are reported after the initial release of the device, manufacturers will have to either patch the OS on the device or ignore the issue. And then there are all the other 3rd party components on a medical device.
As I understand the current FDA guidelines (I haven't read TFA yet, so it may have changed), patching the device is rather expensive as the manufacturer have to be able to document that each patch will not adversely affect the functioning of the device (to avoid the issue with the pacemaker that manu0601 considered). This means that patching is often tied with general patching of the device which will only be done as long as the manufacturer produces updates to the device. Patches may also cost money (or at the very least downtime), so users may chose to skip patches.
Depends on the angle.
European Union politicians simply cannot be trusted as none have been elected by the people, so one can only wonder whose interests they serve.
That is quite a blanket statement. Members of the EU Parliament are politicians and directly elected by the people, so it is also wrong. Note that I am not saying that the European Union does not have serious democratic problems. The EU Parliament holds few of the powers usually attributed to parliaments and the EU Commission is appointed by the EU governments, so it is "buffered" against the people.
My main gripe with pdf ebooks is that they do not adapt to my screen. It also means that if I want to change the size of the fonts, I will have to manually zoom in and move the visible area around. And given that eInk updates quite slow, it is not a nice and natural process. In my humble opinion, epub is the better format for ebooks.
Precisely. I only buy DRM free eBooks. If I want a book that is not available in a DRM free version, I either pass entirely or buy a dead tree version. For the record, I have spent some 300 Euro on eBooks in the last year, and maybe half that on dead tree versions. It really irks me that many vendors do not display clearly if their books are DRM encumbered or not. Kobo is one of the few where it is easy to see in the results list. Are there others?
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
So, you don't think a decade of war with US backed Iraq had anything to do with the current state of affairs in Iran?
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
As I remember it, Bush was actually warming up to a war on Iran after winning in Iraq. One of the main reasons that it did not happen was that Iraq turned out to be a lot more unruly than the US government had expected. If Iran was going for nuclear weapons, one of the best times to do so would be when their adversaries had their militaries tied up in expensive conflicts that they did not dare to lose. And after a decade of war and occupation and facing serious economic problems, it is quite difficult for the current US government to get funding for an expensive war, even if they wanted to. It could also prove to be quite a challenge for them as it could cause the civil war to flare up in Iraq and, possibly, light the powder keg that is brewing in that area.
You may also need software to go with those computers ;-) A MSDN subscription with Visual Studio can cost a pretty penny, especially if you go for the premium or ultimate packages. If you build hardware, some of the software tools are pretty expensive as well.
That is true, however, that does not really change my point. The yearly agricultural production of Denmark is large enough to feed 15 million people. Yes, that is three times the population of Denmark.
From what I have heard, usage of GMO crops have not increased agricultural production on farms using them.
I'm interested in the funding of these reports.
Me too. I live in Denmark, and we export foodstuffs for some 12 billion Euro. Yes, this is a very small and densely populated country. The Netherlands export foodstuffs for $55 billion, also a small and densely populated country.
You cannot prove a negative. What you can prove (and what already has been proven) is that all of the GMO crops are safer than peanuts, penicillin, and organic bean sprouts and spinach, and cell phones (GMOs 0 deaths with 100s of millions of exposures over nearly 20 years, the others many thousands of deaths between them due to anaphylactic shock, e. coli, driving-while-texting, etc) .
By that rationale, cigarettes are also not dangerous.
Overall, cigarettes do not kill directly, except in very unlikely cases, e.g. people falling asleep in their beds with a lit cigarette. They do, however, poison your body, and large scale studies have shown that heavy smoking will reduce your lifespan by 9 years on average. Same thing could be true for GMO that are engineered to be poisonous to insects, but we have scarce evidence either way. What you are arguing is that we should not require that evidence prior to large scale adaption of GMO crops.
So, the solution is to use a credit card to create the account and then block the card? Sigh.
"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove the Earth is round." ~15th Century AD
Contrary to popular belief, 15th Century humans did know that the Earth is round. They even had a pretty good estimate for its circumference. Which was the reason that Columbus had such a hard time raising funds to go to India: The sailing distance was simply too far. And had the Americas not been in the way, this voyage would either have returned empty handed or maybe not at all.
But with DVD releases GP still does not get a simple file that can be played. Also, most DVDs come with (easily broken) DRM and FBI "you are a bloody thief" messages.
Just like you can change a pin code, can't you just change the unlocking fingerprint as well? If not, reselling would be pretty difficult ...
Good point. People living in close proximity to you may manage to figure out your pin code, but they would need to do some extra work to fool the biometrics, which would discourage a lot of nosy people from reading or modifying your personal data.
In order to do that, they would have to order gun shops to get finger prints from buyers. And if they already are, getting finger prints from phones do not make any difference. You are right in considering that there are serious privacy implications if a government can and do use this to build a national finger print register, i.e. if the fingerprints are collected in central registers, that can be accessed by police or private investigators.
How can anyone consider fingerprint identification on a touch screen as anything but toy security? You handle your phone pretty much each day, so it is highly unlikely that your fingerprints will not be all over it, in particular on the screen. With just a little bit of technique, every criminal will be able to get a usable finger print and unlock your phone. Mythbusters pretty much proved how easy these things are to bypass.
What if someone - say one of the millions of compromised computers out there - were to send a shutdown request against a large player - say spamhaus. By your example, spamhaus would be taken offline until someone at spamhaus' IT department called their ISP to get the block cleared. At which point another compromised computer sends a new shutdown request. Sure, you loose a few bots, but at the cost of one bot per 5 minutes downtime for a large vendor, you can get a pretty big bang out of a small bot network.
Follow the shoe!
According to TFA, the only difference was the packing tape. It was either white with no info or with Atheist - Atheist - Atheist written all over.