Fanboy site takes one person's opinion and stretches it across entire group of people, fills rest of article with cherry-picked fluff from other sites.
While I applaud efforts to modernize aircraft guides, etc., I have to wonder if these will perform as well as regular print would in certain emergencies. Violent vibration is often a precursor to engine failure, for example, and anyone can tell you that trying to view an LCD that is on a vibrating surface is nearly impossible; Have they tested how well pilots can use this device in such an emergency?
I'd like to know more about the testing that has gone into how well these devices integrate into crew functions during an emergency -- is it as fast? Faster? Will it function well during, say, an explosive decompression (or will the display shatter)? Can it be read in direct sunlight, or when heavy smoke is in the cabin? What procedures are in place to deal with sudden device failure -- do they have backups, one per pilot, one per crew?
So far all I've heard is the benefits to Delta, the corporation: Reduced fuel costs. What I haven't heard of is how this affects flight safety. And to be clear, Delta doesn't have a great record when it comes to this -- AirTran and Southwest Airlines routinely beat them out, and these are budget airlines. Delta aspires to be the go-to for frequent business fliers, and those tickets are at a premium. Delta has routinely shown it is more profit than safety oriented, to the point that airlines with much smaller budgets routinely beat them on maintenance, training, and flight safety.
Well, Delta... did you already prepare a press release for when it's discovered that an inability to access critical checklists during an emergency because of device failure or lack of training wasn't your fault? Or have you done the responsible thing and made sure there's redundancy and adequate training? I know which one costs more... the question is, which one did you pick.
That's where your analogy breaks, you're not only floating away, when you say "If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed" you are actually contributing to sink the ship... not the one you left, but the one you're about to board.
You know, you're probably the only one who thinks that getting a well-paying job in exchange for having to donate a few hours of your time to some government agency doing mundane support work would be "sinking a ship". To most people, that's the working definition of "meaningful contribution".
If your world-view is "it's a lost cause, let me make it worse", than no, no pardon given. And please reflect more about it, because you are part of the problem.
Nice strawman. Took you longer than average though -- nearly a full paragraph, to build one. Work on that. Now, your poor use of cognitive errors aside, I'm fixing to leave. If I manage to, then I'm not part of the problem, you are. Because you're what's left. I'm out of the equation. So turn that finger right back around.
In other news, it may be shocking for you, but not everyone wants to turn everything into a political cause. Some of us pick and choose our battles -- we learn to tolerate what's left. It's not that we don't sympathize, just that if we don't focus our energy we accomplish nothing. A flashlight pointed at a piece of steel does nothing to the steel, but take the same light energy and focus and modulate it into a laser, and it'll slice through it like butter. This is the underlying truth of political activism: You can't be a part of every cause, you have to pick a few and focus on those, otherwise you won't accomplish much of anything, anywhere.
Now, if you want to go down with the ship, you go man. I'll be on the life boat floating off thattaway, noting that your noble sacrifice gave me a place to put my feet up.
Early testers have noted they "feel quite anonymous and undetectable" wearing the tinfoil hat, with no less than three extra layers of tinfoil to keep the NSA out.
Not nearly as amusing as the truth though; He became a successful CEO by starting a business whose product slogan is basically "Hey, that's a nice computer you got there; shame if something were to happen to it." After retiring, he was accused of murder, and then dressed up as a drunk tourist to elude and mock them, while insisting on his innocence. Recently, he has claimed that his brush with the keystone cops has granted him insight into the ubiquous surveillance present in our society, and for a small fee, can make you invisible to it.
There's very little left to this man except an ego, a thick wad of cash, and a seemingly limitless potential to exploit human stupidity as a fuel source for the aforementioned ego.
I'm sorry, you must be mistaken, the jobs are in Britain.
Unemployment rate, March 2013 Britain: 7.7% United States: 7.6%
National health care Britain: Available to all citizens. Emergency care for all, regardless of legal status. No personal cost, paid for by taxes. United States: Some people meeting income or age requirements may qualify, for a fee. In an overhaul of the system soon to be deployed, there will be fewer requirements, but there will still be a fee.
Intentional homicide rate, 2012 Britain: 1.2 per capita United States: 4.7 per capita... Yeah. I'm definately mistaken here.
That's exactly how the system works, make people dependent of "a job that pays the bills", even if that job is against what we agree are human rights. And while you are just a small gear in this machine, happily turning while the machine hums idly, don't complain when someone takes control of it and uses it as what it was really designed for. 1984 ftw.
Pardon me for taking the practical approach of, upon seeing the incredible wealth inequity of this country, far worse than countries in Africa dominated by warlords, even, deciding that it's a lost cause and opting to leave and suggest others do the same. I mean, dying or starving to death for the noble cause of staying where I was born is nice and all, but my activism has some practical limits; I don't wanna die to be part of somebody else's political statement.
Well, I'm in, as long as you have a job waiting for me in the private sector too. This country is a sinking ship. We aren't willing to pay top dollar for talent, instead going for saturating the market with immigrant visas to drive labor prices down. We've got a crazy patent and copyright system that all but eliminates opportunity for startups. If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed to have a job that pays the bills, good health care, and a home in a low-crime area, I'm not gonna waste any time... I'll pack my bags and be there inside a month.
Right now, our own 'cyber army' seems more intent on considering its own citizens the enemy; At least from what I've seen in the UK they have similar levels of surveillance but are far more subdued in their... zeal... for punishing people caught in their dragnets. It's not much, but it's something. Taken as a whole, I think it would be a better quality of life to be a British citizen than a US one. Plus, they still have a middle class.
Obviously that was long ago before the internet, but I have never trusted any system since then unless it was open source and open hardware, and even then I am not sure because I have seen spooks at the chip fab and I am sure they weren't there to get coffee.
Having the source, or the blueprints, does you little good if you do not know how to read and use them, and if you stopped to go through these things for every item you own, you would turn grey and cold long before completing this epic assignment. Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace and it simply isn't possible for any one person, or even a small group of people, to retain adequate working knowledge of all the technologies we come in contact with on a daily basis enough to provide viable protection from the multitude of potential attack vectors. This is something only large governments or organizations employing tens to hundreds of thousands of people can manage, and at that, still only manage to vet a fraction of the potential workload.
The simple truth here is that our technology has become an extension of a long-existant problem in human cultures; How can you trust someone you haven't met? There are billions of humans now on this planet, and yet we have meaningful relationships with perhaps 150-200 at any point in time -- this being the maximal amount, with the median being far, far lower. Think of the many tens of thousands of people that were responsible for the design of your car, your house, the power grid, the computer you're reading this on, your toaster... when you consider all the people that are abstractly involved in your life, it quickly becomes clear that trust is explicitly needed for society to work.
For the most part, it does. People are inherently social creatures. We don't harm one another, even abstractly, as a general rule. And this alone is what has allowed society to develop, indeed, allowed humans to become the dominant species on the planet. But our technology is continuously integrating itself, merging, reforming, reconnecting, in new and unexpected ways, and with ever-increasing complexity mirroring that of life itself, it is inevitable that vulnerabilities will become so prolific that anyone who chooses to will be able to find at least a few that haven't been discovered by others and use them to his/her advantage.
This is the essence of the hacker mindset. Stripped of everything else, it is "Knowledge is power", and hackers intuitively understand that the system being hacked is not the computer, but the people using it. It is the trust placed in the system that it will do as they expect it to, but without a deeper understanding of why it works as expected. Hackers know that sufficient time and effort put into understanding something will eventually take them to a place beyond the currently-accepted boundaries of human possibility. That is to say, they will have reached the edge of what is known, and may now contribute to pushing that barrier outwards... which they then do, because this end, in and of itself, is viewed as beneficial to society. And indeed it is, but it is not without its cost.
The time is rapidly approaching when we will be forced to confront the long-unaddressed social problems of our society. All security problems in IT eventually reduce to the trust relationship between two people.
Not the same, Stuxnet and even.bat files are run by default on a MicroSoft OS.
Okay, this is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. I'm discussing how improvements in this technology will one day make it possible to achieve what it does now with fewer requirements. You're off babbling about autorun on windows and how people don't care much for security. These are very different problems.
Proof of concept of something I've known since the early 90's that a computer system gives off electromagnetic energy and you can read that energy through a wall (apartment). They just made it smaller and moved it closer.
First, it's been known that electronic devices give off EM since the 19th century, not the early 90s. The first radio was created in 1906, by which time it was well-established that any alternating current source will give off EMR. But decades before that, Nikola Tesla was busy showing off technology to wirelessly transmit electricity in New York.
Secondly, none of that has exactly dick to do with what's being discussed -- which is the use of motion sensors to capture vibration, which is then via a complex software application, recreates the keystrokes entered from a nearby keyboard.
So you not only went on babbling off topic, but your off topic wasn't even remotely accurate. Your entire post was a waste of time, and I now feel slightly stupider for having taken the time to point this out, and my only consolation is that at least there's the chance that someone who reads it will click on my reply and come away with a better appreciation of both the subject material, and just how wrong someone can be while sounding perfectly reasonable if you don't know the subject material.
This is a child who is going to come of age not understanding how some people are unavailable sometimes because this is the only world she knows. She is precocious, but this is becoming the norm.
I'm not sure accepting that creating needy children who have no ability to be patient is a good thing; It will, and is, creating a slave generation. It has been proven time and time again that the ability to delay gratification is directly, and strongly, linked to long-term success as an adult. But if short-term thinking and immediate gratification got us into this mess, surely it can get us out as well.
I encourage this because when I was three years old access to daddy was something I would never again enjoy in this life to the present day, for even one minute. I feel the lack did not improve my level of joy throughout my life, though I could be wrong. Sometimes daddy is an ass. As my mother is dead I have to accept her judgement on the issue. I can aspire however to be better: to be the available, accessible and good daddy I wished for when I was my youngest daughter's age.
This explanation, while heartfelt and readily related to, is not a good reason to be doing what you are doing. A child who always has a parent to do things for him/her is a child who will not grow up. Part of growing up is taking personal responsibility, learning to be patient, and independent problem-solving ability. With an expectation that, with the push of a button, a parent will always be available to solve any problem that might arise, you are sowing weakness into the character of this malleable young person. You are, in a very real way, stunting emotional development.
I know this is an incredibly unpopular thing to say right now, but consider that the first thing we do to a new child born into this world is to slap them in the face. Why would we do that? Willingly induce pain to a brand new life that literally hasn't even been in the world a minute? It's to induce breathing. To get that child sucking down yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures. The pain is for the benefit of the child. All too often, letting a child learn something "the hard way" is seen as child abuse, but the reality is that human beings don't learn things by being told, they learn things by doing. And a lot of doing involves screwing up and getting hurt. You can't accomplish or amount to much of anything in life if you aren't willing to endure pain, and struggle, and loss. This is a lesson that has gone missing in the latest generation, and as they start to move into the workforce, we're seeing clear signs that it has created a pathological problem that may take them decades to sort out, and in the interim leave them emotionally, financially, and even physically vulnerable in ways previous generations were not.
The future is here and it is scary and amazingly awesome.
If I hopped in a time machine and went back 40 years and told everyone there that in the future, we will have instant real-time access to all of the knowledge of humanity, and global communication capability with billions of other humans, they would probably be shocked. And when I told them that in spite of these achievements, we mostly use these capabilities to entertain instead of educate, and have so ingrained them into daily life that we have created children incapable of functioning without continuous access to these devices, they would likely be equally shocked. I very much doubt they'd believe that this is how the technology would influence our society, believing it to be some kind of dystopian science fiction written by a hippie who smoked too much pot and got paranoid of the government.
You're right. It's scary and awesome. But on the level, I'm going to go with it being more scary than awesome; Our technology has created an unparalleled degree of dysfunction in the everyday person. But I hope, very much, that I will be wrong in this conclusion and that my inability to see a future in
A Nokia phone is the only thing that will survive a 4 year old. Now teaching someone how to use a phone before they've even learned to read is another matter entirely, as is the issue of what kind of a parent would want a 4 year old to have a phone, since at that age the kid shouldn't be away from the parent for any length of time. It begs the question of how involved the person asking the question really is with this child, and their motivations for giving them a device whose express purpose is remote communication at a time where being remote, either physically or emotionally, is considered by most to be child abuse.
There's no mention of damaged hearing organs in the article.
If I expose you to infrasonic tones, something proven to cause anxiety and stress in people, over a period of time, and then you later commit suicide, an autopsy will not find anything wrong with your ears. Nonetheless, that's what killed you. Now it doesn't work on everyone, and it works to varying degrees on the people it does effect, but searching for physical signs of trauma isn't always the best way of determining a cause of death; An autopsy is only one component in a murder investigation. You still have to investigate their environment, question eyewitnesses, and gather additional information.
It's not that much different, from a methodology standpoint, investigating the death of whales. A lack of damaged hearing organs doesn't mean it wasn't the proximate cause of death.
Your problem is that you're looking to television to inform you. The purpose of tv is to entertain and sell. That's it.
A television is just a device. It's a tool, like a hammer, a screwdriver, or a car. It has no innate purpose; it is up to the user to create purpose in it. While a TV, and televised material as a whole, is often used for entertainment and marketing, it is neither exclusively used as such, nor should we encourage it to only be used in that capacity.
"They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk." -- Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek
Typically most aerospace engineers try to do incremental changes rather than having so many like is being done here today.
Perhaps as an integrated system. But each component here has been previously tested in other designs. The big problems so far seem to have been software and integration issues. There was a non-fatal flaw in excessive vibration which caused a premature engine shut down, but these are all pretty normal from a systems integration perspective. The project has seen far fewer setbacks overall than what historically should be happening if it was a true clean sheet design.
(it was rumored they were going to try to fly the raw 2nd stage past the Moon with the remaining propellant). Instead, this stage is going to crash into the Earth eventually as just another piece of random space junk.
One hopes that a company would be responsible enough to dispose of its trash instead of shooting it at, or past, the moon, where it would likely be recaptured by the gravity well of another celestial...
The only other rocket that I'm aware of that did this many firsts all at once was the Saturn V, and that was done simply because the NASA officials involved didn't want to waste several launches proving new technologies and decided to do everything at once. The "space race" was also a major factor with the Saturn V as NASA was under some extreme time pressure to perform and get people to the Moon.
Are you saying that this private company isn't under "extreme time pressure to perform"?
First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your.mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."
You know, the same smartass attitude was held by our government officials regarding the "hollywood" possibility of hackers gaining control over power grids, missile launch systems, water distribution systems, etc. And then Stuxnet showed up, and took out a key element of a country's nuclear weapons program. It is exceptionally arrogant to say because you can't see a problem, one doesn't exist.
This is a proof of concept; It demonstrates that such an attack is now possible. Everything Stuxnet achieved, it did based on proof of concept code, which was then studied, refined, and weaponized. It's just a matter of time now. As mobile devices are loaded with more sensors, and yet retain their closed-source, integrated black box SoCs, etc., attacks of this sort will not only be practical, but one day trivial.
The ltibeam you link and the exxon one are considerably different. A 12kHz transducer is on the order of inches in size.
Er, go look at that picture again. The lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength. Which means, it'll be bigger, not smaller. Unless of course you build a transducer that, er, doesn't work. In which case sure, "inches in size" works great.
A bicycle is nice, but it won't help you evacuate your family and pets. It won't help you haul a generator, fuel, and two weeks worth of food home. It won't help you haul all of the debris out of your house and yard, sandbags to prevent flooding, or the tools you need to start fixing stuff.
No, it won't. You're expected to already have a generator, fuel, and two weeks worth of food home. And if there's substantial debris in your house, then you should probably relocate, as anyone would during a natural disaster. If there's debris in your yard, that's not a life-threatening emergency... just an eyesore. As for your pets... they're nice to have but let's be honest here: If it comes down to staying with your pets and perishing, or getting out alive... if you aren't willing to deal with the emotional loss of Fluffy you should just wander out into the road and yell "Zombie dinner! Come get some!"
So from your long list of complaints, we find that someone like you who bought a truck and called it "Mission: Accomplished" is in far worse shape than the person who bought a bike, and then stockpiled what was needed ahead of time. In fact, the only valid point you brought up was that not all of your family may be physically able to see to their own needs. If that's the case, you may want to invest in a shortwave radio or similar communications gear because if we're talking about preparedness... your family's survival shouldn't be dependent on whether or not your truck survives.
When MT says they plan an 'improved device', they mean it's ready now - just waiting for certification . ..
Alternatively, they've already identified potential design limitations but as the certification process takes longer than the development of a new model, they have opted to complete the certification process and begin getting a return on investment, while pursuing parallel development of a replacement model.
Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure.
Historically, new rockets have been of an untested design, without much in the way of previously-tested designs to use as a reference. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is built largely around previously-tested designs, on top of solid engineering. One would suppose this would give it a better than 50/50 chance of success. In fact, the space shuttle program, viewed over its total life, had something like 93% success rate for its engines. Much of the SpaceX projects' development is based on the results of those tests, designs, and engineering expertise.
It would be highly suspect of their rockets had a failure rate much higher than that -- one would expect a higher success rate due to incremental improvement, not worse.
Except for all the existing insulin pumps and existing continuous glucose monitors. Remember that time when a whole town of diabetics died because their insulin pumps... oh wait. That didn't happen. Or that time when a whole town of diabetics died because their CGMs.. oh wait. That didn't happen either. Hmm.
And yet, the FDA has been investigating an unusually high number of insulin pump failures, to the point that 13 recalls have been issued as of 2010. These failure rates were not anticipated during testing, and thus the likely explanation is environmental factors. And then there's people like this woman who has had multiple pump failures... a statistically unlikely event that happened to her twice in short order. And she's not the only one... the internet is filled with stories of people who have had "bad luck" with pumps. This is a strong indicator that environmental factors are in play in pump failures -- and the first one that comes to mind for me is EMI; that's why hospitals ask you to turn off cell phones. They can screwup devices a lot less sensitive than an insulin pump, and they're only pumping out a few hundred mW of RF when active. Airport scanners are several orders of magnitude more than that -- to the point Medtronic tells people not to take them through airport scanners because of the high probability of failure. And those gigawatt radar systems on aircraft carriers? Well... is it really that much of a stretch that if they can cause cable TV blackouts, lock owners out of cars, cause garage doors to randomly open and close... at a distance of over 40 miles... that this is an unlikely scenario? Especially when you consider something like 80% of the US population lives within 50 miles of one of the country's borders -- the majority of which is butted against two oceans?
... Apparently, suggesting the CDC might know something about disaster preparedness is "overrated". I should have used the word 'fuck' more often... then people might have accidentally read something logical that might save their life instead of promotional marketing material.
Exxon-Mobil's argument that saw no whales only fortifies the suspicion that they were driving the whales away.
Dude, stop using basic deductive reasoning. It'll get you into trouble on this website. Judging by the moderation on this thread, you need to swear more, use exclaimation points, and call everyone a moron -- this is apparently how you win arguments now.
Funny, you don't see many dead diabetics in the waiting area, do you?
You don't see many terrorists either, but few people would suggest they aren't out there simply because they aren't wearing their "I'm With the Taliban" t-shirts while going through customs.
You'd think with all of the media coverage given to people who just get stared at wrong by the TSA we would see a couple more of these sorts of disasters on CNN.
You'd think, from watching CNN, that only pretty, underage, white girls get kidnapped too. Unfortunately for minorities, boys, and ugly people, they get kidnapped too.
But give the engineers a bit of credit - they don't just stick these things on a bunch of rabbits and then go out to the bar (the engineers, not the rabbits).
Well, actually that's exactly what they do... prior to human testing, they test on animals. And it wouldn't be rabbits, it'd be pigs, who possess a more similar liver to our own than a rabbit does.
The certification process actually does include running the devices by airport scanners these days. Who would have guessed?
Well, you would have, for one. Perhaps a citation would help in establishing your credibility regarding this claim? Let me show you how: If you google "diabetic airport scanner", and click on the first link, and they said this: "Medtronic has conducted official testing on the effects of the new full body scanners at airports with Medtronic medical devices and have found that some scanners may include x-ray. If you choose to go through an airport body scanner, you must remove your insulin pump and CGM (sensor and transmitter). Do not send your devices through the x-ray machine as an alternative. To avoid removing your devices, you may request an alternative screening process."
This would seem to suggest that the certification process does indeed now include airport scanners... principally in the "don't do this" column of the report.
Look, as somebody who actually works in this industry
... And whose identity is "Anonymous"
, multibeam sounders operate on very high frequencies, way over what whales can perceive.
And yet, I can take away your hearing by emitting ultrasound if it's powerful enough. You won't hear yourself going deaf, you'll just go deaf. Actually, I can even kill you with exposure of 180dB of ultrasound. But, working (anonymously) in the industry, you'd know that frequency is only part of the equation.
What's hilarious here is that the Slashdot circle-jerkers are already screaming EXXON...BAAAAD!
Statements like these definately add to your credibility. By making juvenile sexual jokes, it's immediately obvious to everyone that this is a man who makes six figures in the field of Oceanography.
But do you know what kind of sonar does make whales' ears bleed?
Yes: The very loud kind. Just like any other animal's ears. In fact, whale's ears are more suseptible to damage due to high decibel emissions than humans because in the human ear, air waves hit a membrane behind which there is a liquid-filled area, thus the energy of the wave can be dissipated; Pressure waves travelling through air are much less powerful than underwater, because of the density of the medium. Whales, unfortunately, have inner ears filled with the same liquid is its surrounding environment, and at the same pressure... meaning there is no transitive barrier to protect them.
The big fucking' spherical and cylindrical arrays you find in the tips of the bulbous dicks of ships and submarines.
Well, without knowing which ship was involved in a 6 year old incident, it's impossible to know whether any phallic-shaped devices were mounted to the ship. However, while lacking your literary ability in the many uses of the word 'fuck', an independent science team, perhaps with less impressive credentials than yours, found the ships' activities were the likely cause of the sudden displacement and eventual death of the whales. Oh, and the names of the members of that scientific team were the International Whaling Commission, the US Marine Mammal Commission, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production (Northern Madagascar) Ltd, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Government of Madagascar. They all think you're full of crap, but what would over a hundred scientists know compared to someone who swears like a sailor anonymously on slashdot?
Have you even seen a fucking multibeam? The transducer array is roughly the size of a shoebox.
You must have very big feet then. That's a picture of the NOAA's multibeam echosounder, an ER60. It is a low-power model, and in this case is being used to track the migratory movements of fish, and is of limited range. The kind that several sources have indicated were used by ExxonMobile inject high pressure air into the water; These are considerably larger, and more powerful, than these systems, which modulate a diaphram. It's the difference between your laptop's speakers, and a pneumatically-driven organ like those seen at older churches. Needless to say, the organ is much louder.
Idiots. I'm surrounded by goddamn idiots!
Yeah... I know this feeling well. Look at how often I get downmodded for providing factual and relevant commentary, instead of simp
Slashdot Mirror
Fanboy site takes one person's opinion and stretches it across entire group of people, fills rest of article with cherry-picked fluff from other sites.
While I applaud efforts to modernize aircraft guides, etc., I have to wonder if these will perform as well as regular print would in certain emergencies. Violent vibration is often a precursor to engine failure, for example, and anyone can tell you that trying to view an LCD that is on a vibrating surface is nearly impossible; Have they tested how well pilots can use this device in such an emergency?
I'd like to know more about the testing that has gone into how well these devices integrate into crew functions during an emergency -- is it as fast? Faster? Will it function well during, say, an explosive decompression (or will the display shatter)? Can it be read in direct sunlight, or when heavy smoke is in the cabin? What procedures are in place to deal with sudden device failure -- do they have backups, one per pilot, one per crew?
So far all I've heard is the benefits to Delta, the corporation: Reduced fuel costs. What I haven't heard of is how this affects flight safety. And to be clear, Delta doesn't have a great record when it comes to this -- AirTran and Southwest Airlines routinely beat them out, and these are budget airlines. Delta aspires to be the go-to for frequent business fliers, and those tickets are at a premium. Delta has routinely shown it is more profit than safety oriented, to the point that airlines with much smaller budgets routinely beat them on maintenance, training, and flight safety.
Well, Delta... did you already prepare a press release for when it's discovered that an inability to access critical checklists during an emergency because of device failure or lack of training wasn't your fault? Or have you done the responsible thing and made sure there's redundancy and adequate training? I know which one costs more... the question is, which one did you pick.
That's where your analogy breaks, you're not only floating away, when you say "If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed" you are actually contributing to sink the ship... not the one you left, but the one you're about to board.
You know, you're probably the only one who thinks that getting a well-paying job in exchange for having to donate a few hours of your time to some government agency doing mundane support work would be "sinking a ship". To most people, that's the working definition of "meaningful contribution".
If your world-view is "it's a lost cause, let me make it worse", than no, no pardon given. And please reflect more about it, because you are part of the problem.
Nice strawman. Took you longer than average though -- nearly a full paragraph, to build one. Work on that. Now, your poor use of cognitive errors aside, I'm fixing to leave. If I manage to, then I'm not part of the problem, you are. Because you're what's left. I'm out of the equation. So turn that finger right back around.
In other news, it may be shocking for you, but not everyone wants to turn everything into a political cause. Some of us pick and choose our battles -- we learn to tolerate what's left. It's not that we don't sympathize, just that if we don't focus our energy we accomplish nothing. A flashlight pointed at a piece of steel does nothing to the steel, but take the same light energy and focus and modulate it into a laser, and it'll slice through it like butter. This is the underlying truth of political activism: You can't be a part of every cause, you have to pick a few and focus on those, otherwise you won't accomplish much of anything, anywhere.
Now, if you want to go down with the ship, you go man. I'll be on the life boat floating off thattaway, noting that your noble sacrifice gave me a place to put my feet up.
Early testers have noted they "feel quite anonymous and undetectable" wearing the tinfoil hat, with no less than three extra layers of tinfoil to keep the NSA out.
Not nearly as amusing as the truth though; He became a successful CEO by starting a business whose product slogan is basically "Hey, that's a nice computer you got there; shame if something were to happen to it." After retiring, he was accused of murder, and then dressed up as a drunk tourist to elude and mock them, while insisting on his innocence. Recently, he has claimed that his brush with the keystone cops has granted him insight into the ubiquous surveillance present in our society, and for a small fee, can make you invisible to it.
There's very little left to this man except an ego, a thick wad of cash, and a seemingly limitless potential to exploit human stupidity as a fuel source for the aforementioned ego.
I'm sorry, you must be mistaken, the jobs are in Britain.
Unemployment rate, March 2013
Britain: 7.7%
United States: 7.6%
National health care
Britain: Available to all citizens. Emergency care for all, regardless of legal status. No personal cost, paid for by taxes.
United States: Some people meeting income or age requirements may qualify, for a fee. In an overhaul of the system soon to be deployed, there will be fewer requirements, but there will still be a fee.
Intentional homicide rate, 2012 ... Yeah. I'm definately mistaken here.
Britain: 1.2 per capita
United States: 4.7 per capita
That's exactly how the system works, make people dependent of "a job that pays the bills", even if that job is against what we agree are human rights. And while you are just a small gear in this machine, happily turning while the machine hums idly, don't complain when someone takes control of it and uses it as what it was really designed for. 1984 ftw.
Pardon me for taking the practical approach of, upon seeing the incredible wealth inequity of this country, far worse than countries in Africa dominated by warlords, even, deciding that it's a lost cause and opting to leave and suggest others do the same. I mean, dying or starving to death for the noble cause of staying where I was born is nice and all, but my activism has some practical limits; I don't wanna die to be part of somebody else's political statement.
Well, I'm in, as long as you have a job waiting for me in the private sector too. This country is a sinking ship. We aren't willing to pay top dollar for talent, instead going for saturating the market with immigrant visas to drive labor prices down. We've got a crazy patent and copyright system that all but eliminates opportunity for startups. If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed to have a job that pays the bills, good health care, and a home in a low-crime area, I'm not gonna waste any time... I'll pack my bags and be there inside a month.
Right now, our own 'cyber army' seems more intent on considering its own citizens the enemy; At least from what I've seen in the UK they have similar levels of surveillance but are far more subdued in their... zeal... for punishing people caught in their dragnets. It's not much, but it's something. Taken as a whole, I think it would be a better quality of life to be a British citizen than a US one. Plus, they still have a middle class.
Obviously that was long ago before the internet, but I have never trusted any system since then unless it was open source and open hardware, and even then I am not sure because I have seen spooks at the chip fab and I am sure they weren't there to get coffee.
Having the source, or the blueprints, does you little good if you do not know how to read and use them, and if you stopped to go through these things for every item you own, you would turn grey and cold long before completing this epic assignment. Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace and it simply isn't possible for any one person, or even a small group of people, to retain adequate working knowledge of all the technologies we come in contact with on a daily basis enough to provide viable protection from the multitude of potential attack vectors. This is something only large governments or organizations employing tens to hundreds of thousands of people can manage, and at that, still only manage to vet a fraction of the potential workload.
The simple truth here is that our technology has become an extension of a long-existant problem in human cultures; How can you trust someone you haven't met? There are billions of humans now on this planet, and yet we have meaningful relationships with perhaps 150-200 at any point in time -- this being the maximal amount, with the median being far, far lower. Think of the many tens of thousands of people that were responsible for the design of your car, your house, the power grid, the computer you're reading this on, your toaster... when you consider all the people that are abstractly involved in your life, it quickly becomes clear that trust is explicitly needed for society to work.
For the most part, it does. People are inherently social creatures. We don't harm one another, even abstractly, as a general rule. And this alone is what has allowed society to develop, indeed, allowed humans to become the dominant species on the planet. But our technology is continuously integrating itself, merging, reforming, reconnecting, in new and unexpected ways, and with ever-increasing complexity mirroring that of life itself, it is inevitable that vulnerabilities will become so prolific that anyone who chooses to will be able to find at least a few that haven't been discovered by others and use them to his/her advantage.
This is the essence of the hacker mindset. Stripped of everything else, it is "Knowledge is power", and hackers intuitively understand that the system being hacked is not the computer, but the people using it. It is the trust placed in the system that it will do as they expect it to, but without a deeper understanding of why it works as expected. Hackers know that sufficient time and effort put into understanding something will eventually take them to a place beyond the currently-accepted boundaries of human possibility. That is to say, they will have reached the edge of what is known, and may now contribute to pushing that barrier outwards... which they then do, because this end, in and of itself, is viewed as beneficial to society. And indeed it is, but it is not without its cost.
The time is rapidly approaching when we will be forced to confront the long-unaddressed social problems of our society. All security problems in IT eventually reduce to the trust relationship between two people.
Not the same, Stuxnet and even .bat files are run by default on a MicroSoft OS.
Okay, this is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. I'm discussing how improvements in this technology will one day make it possible to achieve what it does now with fewer requirements. You're off babbling about autorun on windows and how people don't care much for security. These are very different problems.
Proof of concept of something I've known since the early 90's that a computer system gives off electromagnetic energy and you can read that energy through a wall (apartment). They just made it smaller and moved it closer.
First, it's been known that electronic devices give off EM since the 19th century, not the early 90s. The first radio was created in 1906, by which time it was well-established that any alternating current source will give off EMR. But decades before that, Nikola Tesla was busy showing off technology to wirelessly transmit electricity in New York.
Secondly, none of that has exactly dick to do with what's being discussed -- which is the use of motion sensors to capture vibration, which is then via a complex software application, recreates the keystrokes entered from a nearby keyboard.
So you not only went on babbling off topic, but your off topic wasn't even remotely accurate. Your entire post was a waste of time, and I now feel slightly stupider for having taken the time to point this out, and my only consolation is that at least there's the chance that someone who reads it will click on my reply and come away with a better appreciation of both the subject material, and just how wrong someone can be while sounding perfectly reasonable if you don't know the subject material.
This is a child who is going to come of age not understanding how some people are unavailable sometimes because this is the only world she knows. She is precocious, but this is becoming the norm.
I'm not sure accepting that creating needy children who have no ability to be patient is a good thing; It will, and is, creating a slave generation. It has been proven time and time again that the ability to delay gratification is directly, and strongly, linked to long-term success as an adult. But if short-term thinking and immediate gratification got us into this mess, surely it can get us out as well.
I encourage this because when I was three years old access to daddy was something I would never again enjoy in this life to the present day, for even one minute. I feel the lack did not improve my level of joy throughout my life, though I could be wrong. Sometimes daddy is an ass. As my mother is dead I have to accept her judgement on the issue. I can aspire however to be better: to be the available, accessible and good daddy I wished for when I was my youngest daughter's age.
This explanation, while heartfelt and readily related to, is not a good reason to be doing what you are doing. A child who always has a parent to do things for him/her is a child who will not grow up. Part of growing up is taking personal responsibility, learning to be patient, and independent problem-solving ability. With an expectation that, with the push of a button, a parent will always be available to solve any problem that might arise, you are sowing weakness into the character of this malleable young person. You are, in a very real way, stunting emotional development.
I know this is an incredibly unpopular thing to say right now, but consider that the first thing we do to a new child born into this world is to slap them in the face. Why would we do that? Willingly induce pain to a brand new life that literally hasn't even been in the world a minute? It's to induce breathing. To get that child sucking down yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures. The pain is for the benefit of the child. All too often, letting a child learn something "the hard way" is seen as child abuse, but the reality is that human beings don't learn things by being told, they learn things by doing. And a lot of doing involves screwing up and getting hurt. You can't accomplish or amount to much of anything in life if you aren't willing to endure pain, and struggle, and loss. This is a lesson that has gone missing in the latest generation, and as they start to move into the workforce, we're seeing clear signs that it has created a pathological problem that may take them decades to sort out, and in the interim leave them emotionally, financially, and even physically vulnerable in ways previous generations were not.
The future is here and it is scary and amazingly awesome.
If I hopped in a time machine and went back 40 years and told everyone there that in the future, we will have instant real-time access to all of the knowledge of humanity, and global communication capability with billions of other humans, they would probably be shocked. And when I told them that in spite of these achievements, we mostly use these capabilities to entertain instead of educate, and have so ingrained them into daily life that we have created children incapable of functioning without continuous access to these devices, they would likely be equally shocked. I very much doubt they'd believe that this is how the technology would influence our society, believing it to be some kind of dystopian science fiction written by a hippie who smoked too much pot and got paranoid of the government.
You're right. It's scary and awesome. But on the level, I'm going to go with it being more scary than awesome; Our technology has created an unparalleled degree of dysfunction in the everyday person. But I hope, very much, that I will be wrong in this conclusion and that my inability to see a future in
A Nokia phone is the only thing that will survive a 4 year old. Now teaching someone how to use a phone before they've even learned to read is another matter entirely, as is the issue of what kind of a parent would want a 4 year old to have a phone, since at that age the kid shouldn't be away from the parent for any length of time. It begs the question of how involved the person asking the question really is with this child, and their motivations for giving them a device whose express purpose is remote communication at a time where being remote, either physically or emotionally, is considered by most to be child abuse.
There's no mention of damaged hearing organs in the article.
If I expose you to infrasonic tones, something proven to cause anxiety and stress in people, over a period of time, and then you later commit suicide, an autopsy will not find anything wrong with your ears. Nonetheless, that's what killed you. Now it doesn't work on everyone, and it works to varying degrees on the people it does effect, but searching for physical signs of trauma isn't always the best way of determining a cause of death; An autopsy is only one component in a murder investigation. You still have to investigate their environment, question eyewitnesses, and gather additional information.
It's not that much different, from a methodology standpoint, investigating the death of whales. A lack of damaged hearing organs doesn't mean it wasn't the proximate cause of death.
Can anyone more knowledgeable than me confirm/deny or improve this explanation?
Google, can you help this man?
Yes.
Thanks again, Google.
Your problem is that you're looking to television to inform you. The purpose of tv is to entertain and sell. That's it.
A television is just a device. It's a tool, like a hammer, a screwdriver, or a car. It has no innate purpose; it is up to the user to create purpose in it. While a TV, and televised material as a whole, is often used for entertainment and marketing, it is neither exclusively used as such, nor should we encourage it to only be used in that capacity.
"They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk." -- Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek
Typically most aerospace engineers try to do incremental changes rather than having so many like is being done here today.
Perhaps as an integrated system. But each component here has been previously tested in other designs. The big problems so far seem to have been software and integration issues. There was a non-fatal flaw in excessive vibration which caused a premature engine shut down, but these are all pretty normal from a systems integration perspective. The project has seen far fewer setbacks overall than what historically should be happening if it was a true clean sheet design.
(it was rumored they were going to try to fly the raw 2nd stage past the Moon with the remaining propellant). Instead, this stage is going to crash into the Earth eventually as just another piece of random space junk.
One hopes that a company would be responsible enough to dispose of its trash instead of shooting it at, or past, the moon, where it would likely be recaptured by the gravity well of another celestial...
The only other rocket that I'm aware of that did this many firsts all at once was the Saturn V, and that was done simply because the NASA officials involved didn't want to waste several launches proving new technologies and decided to do everything at once. The "space race" was also a major factor with the Saturn V as NASA was under some extreme time pressure to perform and get people to the Moon.
Are you saying that this private company isn't under "extreme time pressure to perform"?
First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your .mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."
You know, the same smartass attitude was held by our government officials regarding the "hollywood" possibility of hackers gaining control over power grids, missile launch systems, water distribution systems, etc. And then Stuxnet showed up, and took out a key element of a country's nuclear weapons program. It is exceptionally arrogant to say because you can't see a problem, one doesn't exist.
This is a proof of concept; It demonstrates that such an attack is now possible. Everything Stuxnet achieved, it did based on proof of concept code, which was then studied, refined, and weaponized. It's just a matter of time now. As mobile devices are loaded with more sensors, and yet retain their closed-source, integrated black box SoCs, etc., attacks of this sort will not only be practical, but one day trivial.
The ltibeam you link and the exxon one are considerably different. A 12kHz transducer is on the order of inches in size.
Er, go look at that picture again. The lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength. Which means, it'll be bigger, not smaller. Unless of course you build a transducer that, er, doesn't work. In which case sure, "inches in size" works great.
A bicycle is nice, but it won't help you evacuate your family and pets. It won't help you haul a generator, fuel, and two weeks worth of food home. It won't help you haul all of the debris out of your house and yard, sandbags to prevent flooding, or the tools you need to start fixing stuff.
No, it won't. You're expected to already have a generator, fuel, and two weeks worth of food home. And if there's substantial debris in your house, then you should probably relocate, as anyone would during a natural disaster. If there's debris in your yard, that's not a life-threatening emergency... just an eyesore. As for your pets... they're nice to have but let's be honest here: If it comes down to staying with your pets and perishing, or getting out alive... if you aren't willing to deal with the emotional loss of Fluffy you should just wander out into the road and yell "Zombie dinner! Come get some!"
So from your long list of complaints, we find that someone like you who bought a truck and called it "Mission: Accomplished" is in far worse shape than the person who bought a bike, and then stockpiled what was needed ahead of time. In fact, the only valid point you brought up was that not all of your family may be physically able to see to their own needs. If that's the case, you may want to invest in a shortwave radio or similar communications gear because if we're talking about preparedness... your family's survival shouldn't be dependent on whether or not your truck survives.
When MT says they plan an 'improved device', they mean it's ready now - just waiting for certification . . .
Alternatively, they've already identified potential design limitations but as the certification process takes longer than the development of a new model, they have opted to complete the certification process and begin getting a return on investment, while pursuing parallel development of a replacement model.
Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure.
Historically, new rockets have been of an untested design, without much in the way of previously-tested designs to use as a reference. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is built largely around previously-tested designs, on top of solid engineering. One would suppose this would give it a better than 50/50 chance of success. In fact, the space shuttle program, viewed over its total life, had something like 93% success rate for its engines. Much of the SpaceX projects' development is based on the results of those tests, designs, and engineering expertise.
It would be highly suspect of their rockets had a failure rate much higher than that -- one would expect a higher success rate due to incremental improvement, not worse.
Except for all the existing insulin pumps and existing continuous glucose monitors. Remember that time when a whole town of diabetics died because their insulin pumps... oh wait. That didn't happen. Or that time when a whole town of diabetics died because their CGMs.. oh wait. That didn't happen either. Hmm.
And yet, the FDA has been investigating an unusually high number of insulin pump failures, to the point that 13 recalls have been issued as of 2010. These failure rates were not anticipated during testing, and thus the likely explanation is environmental factors. And then there's people like this woman who has had multiple pump failures... a statistically unlikely event that happened to her twice in short order. And she's not the only one... the internet is filled with stories of people who have had "bad luck" with pumps. This is a strong indicator that environmental factors are in play in pump failures -- and the first one that comes to mind for me is EMI; that's why hospitals ask you to turn off cell phones. They can screwup devices a lot less sensitive than an insulin pump, and they're only pumping out a few hundred mW of RF when active. Airport scanners are several orders of magnitude more than that -- to the point Medtronic tells people not to take them through airport scanners because of the high probability of failure. And those gigawatt radar systems on aircraft carriers? Well... is it really that much of a stretch that if they can cause cable TV blackouts, lock owners out of cars, cause garage doors to randomly open and close... at a distance of over 40 miles... that this is an unlikely scenario? Especially when you consider something like 80% of the US population lives within 50 miles of one of the country's borders -- the majority of which is butted against two oceans?
... Apparently, suggesting the CDC might know something about disaster preparedness is "overrated". I should have used the word 'fuck' more often... then people might have accidentally read something logical that might save their life instead of promotional marketing material.
Exxon-Mobil's argument that saw no whales only fortifies the suspicion that they were driving the whales away.
Dude, stop using basic deductive reasoning. It'll get you into trouble on this website. Judging by the moderation on this thread, you need to swear more, use exclaimation points, and call everyone a moron -- this is apparently how you win arguments now.
Funny, you don't see many dead diabetics in the waiting area, do you?
You don't see many terrorists either, but few people would suggest they aren't out there simply because they aren't wearing their "I'm With the Taliban" t-shirts while going through customs.
You'd think with all of the media coverage given to people who just get stared at wrong by the TSA we would see a couple more of these sorts of disasters on CNN.
You'd think, from watching CNN, that only pretty, underage, white girls get kidnapped too. Unfortunately for minorities, boys, and ugly people, they get kidnapped too.
But give the engineers a bit of credit - they don't just stick these things on a bunch of rabbits and then go out to the bar (the engineers, not the rabbits).
Well, actually that's exactly what they do... prior to human testing, they test on animals. And it wouldn't be rabbits, it'd be pigs, who possess a more similar liver to our own than a rabbit does.
The certification process actually does include running the devices by airport scanners these days. Who would have guessed?
Well, you would have, for one. Perhaps a citation would help in establishing your credibility regarding this claim? Let me show you how: If you google "diabetic airport scanner", and click on the first link, and they said this: "Medtronic has conducted official testing on the effects of the new full body scanners at airports with Medtronic medical devices and have found that some scanners may include x-ray. If you choose to go through an airport body scanner, you must remove your insulin pump and CGM (sensor and transmitter). Do not send your devices through the x-ray machine as an alternative. To avoid removing your devices, you may request an alternative screening process."
This would seem to suggest that the certification process does indeed now include airport scanners... principally in the "don't do this" column of the report.
Look, as somebody who actually works in this industry
... And whose identity is "Anonymous"
, multibeam sounders operate on very high frequencies, way over what whales can perceive.
And yet, I can take away your hearing by emitting ultrasound if it's powerful enough. You won't hear yourself going deaf, you'll just go deaf. Actually, I can even kill you with exposure of 180dB of ultrasound. But, working (anonymously) in the industry, you'd know that frequency is only part of the equation.
What's hilarious here is that the Slashdot circle-jerkers are already screaming EXXON...BAAAAD!
Statements like these definately add to your credibility. By making juvenile sexual jokes, it's immediately obvious to everyone that this is a man who makes six figures in the field of Oceanography.
But do you know what kind of sonar does make whales' ears bleed?
Yes: The very loud kind. Just like any other animal's ears. In fact, whale's ears are more suseptible to damage due to high decibel emissions than humans because in the human ear, air waves hit a membrane behind which there is a liquid-filled area, thus the energy of the wave can be dissipated; Pressure waves travelling through air are much less powerful than underwater, because of the density of the medium. Whales, unfortunately, have inner ears filled with the same liquid is its surrounding environment, and at the same pressure... meaning there is no transitive barrier to protect them.
The big fucking' spherical and cylindrical arrays you find in the tips of the bulbous dicks of ships and submarines.
Well, without knowing which ship was involved in a 6 year old incident, it's impossible to know whether any phallic-shaped devices were mounted to the ship. However, while lacking your literary ability in the many uses of the word 'fuck', an independent science team, perhaps with less impressive credentials than yours, found the ships' activities were the likely cause of the sudden displacement and eventual death of the whales. Oh, and the names of the members of that scientific team were the International Whaling Commission, the US Marine Mammal Commission, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production (Northern Madagascar) Ltd, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Government of Madagascar. They all think you're full of crap, but what would over a hundred scientists know compared to someone who swears like a sailor anonymously on slashdot?
Have you even seen a fucking multibeam? The transducer array is roughly the size of a shoebox.
You must have very big feet then. That's a picture of the NOAA's multibeam echosounder, an ER60. It is a low-power model, and in this case is being used to track the migratory movements of fish, and is of limited range. The kind that several sources have indicated were used by ExxonMobile inject high pressure air into the water; These are considerably larger, and more powerful, than these systems, which modulate a diaphram. It's the difference between your laptop's speakers, and a pneumatically-driven organ like those seen at older churches. Needless to say, the organ is much louder.
Idiots. I'm surrounded by goddamn idiots!
Yeah... I know this feeling well. Look at how often I get downmodded for providing factual and relevant commentary, instead of simp