So a man is languishing in solitary confinement for years, not allowed visitors, and is mistreated to a degree that if he were a prisoner of war it would be considered a war crime under the Geneva convention, without being charged, given a trial, or given an opportunity to defend himself... and when this man is finally released, they'll be sending him back to jail because he enabled people to download music and movies... and he's only in that country because of the aforementioned.
Just put the 3D printer and the material in an oxygen-depleted environment. It's not like a canister of Nitrogen is expensive, or even dangerous (the gas, not the risk of explosive decompression if you go full retard). It's pretty easy to build a glass enclosure to seal everything in. That way, you could work with wood that would ordinarily burst into flames and it won't. You'll need to setup a infrared thermometer to rake the workbench after and only unlock once the material has cooled, obviously... and air-cooling something that's several hundred degrees takes a few hours... but I see no problem here.
It's simple to design safety features for a design like this. As a backup, you could put a water pressure sprayer in the containment area as well, in case the seals break while the material is in a super-heated state.
I'm still waiting for an english-only voice processing software package that can translate boston and texan accents, and god help you if you have a southern drawl, or english-as-a-second-language. Poor bastards who speak Russian can't 'V' to save their soul.
So that sounds quite simple to me. At which stage does the US system differ? The recall list is very long here, but on the other hand, chances are your hospital doesn't use everything on the list and you can completely ignore the ones you haven't stocked.
I can't speak to every clinic or hospital involved in the recall, but the pain clinic here in the midwest only recorded the batch numbers in their inventory control system. They did not record which patients received doses from which batch. So all they can say is "batch N was used from date X to date Y." Several batches may have been released from inventory at the same time. As well, we have no national recall framework; It is being run at the state level with varying levels of responsiveness and oversight. In fact, it was the compounding pharmacy that initiated the recall, not the government. The federal government did not issue a recall order until almost a week later -- and that recall order then went to the state health departments, who then decided (based on their own policy) how to go about handling the recall.
In some states, the hospital is responsible for notifying patients. In others, it's the state. While (thankfully) every state has a law or policy to contact the patient, it's actually not required by federal law. If you happened to live in a state that decided recalls weren't important... it would be totally legal for it to simply not happen.:( This is one of the major problems of the United States' "marble cake" government -- each level above pre-empts the level below, but each level below can then interpret the law or impliment it in their own way. And what's worse, funding levels vary by state -- while federal tax dollars are sometimes set aside for enforcement, very often it's left entirely up to the state to fund it. A cash-strapped state may only have 1 guy handling the recall on behalf of the state, and nuts if he's out of town that weekend. Not that this actually happens, but it's an example of what could happen thanks to our marble cake love-in.
Adding even more confusion to an already hopelessly dysfunctional system... we live with privatized health care right now, and even with ObamaCare, the problem will persist. It's not the manufacturers, clinics, or government's responsibility to pay for the testing and/or treatment resulting from a recall. It's you, the individual, who are responsible. You might well guess what some poor bastard without insurance is gonna do when he hears "Danger! Life-threatening illness. It could be you!"... Like so many other poor people, poor bastard here is going to ignore it until he's obviously sick. And by law, it was his own damn fault for not coming in, going bankrupt, and living in financial ruin for the rest of his life... our culture and our laws pretty much put the individual in the frying pan as early and often as possible. So if you croak, you deserved it... but only if you live here. In any other part of the world, such thinking would be considered barbaric. Here, we call it Tuesday.
The point is, it would be useful, everyone would still get paid the market rate for the work they've created, and it is (thanks to stupid laws) totally illegal. When something that would benefit almost everyone is illegal, the law is broken.
What happens when these PR goons become the new prateroian guard?
Er, we stand up, yell "Praetorian!," and then wait patiently while he throws his water bottle away, draws his sword, and charges us. Then we stab him to death, steal his horse, and ride to the capital where, after a series of hilarious and tragic blunders and some compulsory phy ed, we kill the emperor.
Women are no longer the "bad driver" stereotype. You have to upgrade your bigotry to a different arbitrary victim.
Dude, I live in suburbia. It's all older white people, and the stereotype is very much alive there. People my age don't have that preconception, but the older crowd, the ones that own homes and stuff, very much do. And besides, nobody suspects a woman to be up to anything... it never ceases to amaze me how much crap my friends can get away with just by playing dumb and playing with their boobs when questioned.
This is not just a problem for the USofA. It is a problem for everybody in the world. Well, unless you are a CEO or a lawyer, that is.
I've been helping an ex-pat friend of mine in China set this exact thing up. You wanna know what the government and investors told him after he propped the idea: "Let's do it. We'll make sure you get the approval you need." And by approval, they meant bribes. They love ex-pats over there, and even the everyday joe here can, with a modicum of business sense, become a demigod over there. The only reason I don't move over there is... well, it's still China. I could be rich, but I like my freedoms more than money.
Your post sounded plausible until the last paragraph. Nobody would be billed for getting checked if they received one of these injections. Plus if your relative was given antibiotics the doctor must have had a reason for doing so, a reason as in a lab test that showed that he/she had some kind of an infection. So their record would show what caused the infection.
Lulz. First, my relative got a bill. I've seen it, it's real. Hell, I got a bill for a rape kit once... I didn't pay. A family who's kid was run over by a police car (officer was 100% at fault) was billed for the repair of the dent to the car. That's an argument you just aren't going to win, man. Second, labs don't always test for the bacteria. Take a bladder infection -- if they see red blood cells, that's confirmation of a bladder infection and they prescribe a generic antibiotic. They may or may not send the urine off for a more detailed analysis, depending on severity of symptoms etc. Not every sample is checked for every thing -- this isn't CSI: Your Healthcare Plan.
First, I have a relative who received an injection at one of the clinics, and I can speak firsthand to what's going on right now.
This article talks about the tracking problem. Well, it's a problem because nobody knows which batches were infected; The lead time on these things can be weeks or months before there's confirmation of a pathogen. By that time, there's potentially hundreds of infected batches out there. We still don't know (and likely won't for up to a year) which batches tested positive. It could be just a one off -- someone missed a sterilization step in a single batch, and the rest are fine. What's happening right now is an abundance of caution approach. They're recalling everything and testing everyone because we don't know exactly where the problem started and ended.
Also, a lot of patients potentially infected haven't been contacted yet and may never be because of out of date or incorrect contact information. Here, the health department has been tasked with contacting patients -- the clinic hasn't reached out at all. When I heard about this on the news, I called her and we went down to ER and got things sorted (tested negative), but the "Contact the patient" step isn't happening for a lot of people.
And lastly, even when they are contacted, and are tested, some of these patients may have already had the infection cleared due to unrelated treatment. My relative, for example, was put on antibiotics for an unrelated condition not long after the injection, and indicated to the doctors symptoms similar to what they were looking for but they cleared up prior to testing. So that data point is lost: They don't know whether the batch used on that patient was a positive now. And given the low rates of patient return and contacting, that one data point could represent hundreds of patients that need to be put on the priority list for contacting.
By far the biggest problem here is a lack of resources and accurate information. It's not that they're incompetent, or that procedures weren't followed (though both could be true)... but the response has been botched because there just aren't enough people to do the leg work. And don't forget: Whether it's their fault or not, you're still the one being billed. A lot of people don't want to eat their deductible or pay for a hospital visit or testing out of pocket (or copay), unless they know there's a problem. Wouldn't be a problem with nationalized healthcare, but with privatized healthcare "preventative medicine" is practically a swear word.
I'm actually in a suburban city in the midwestern United States, and the neighborhood is very middle class. If I go downtown, there are over 250 access points and well over 1,500 clients visible using the same method of discovery. If I head to the 'rich' part of town, there are fewer access points, but a lot more clients connected to them on average. And the poor parts of town are usually apartment housing, which is much denser and so has a higher number of access points... but a lower number of associated clients per, on average. So overall, except for high density commercial environments, the number of devices per mile doesn't vary much based on income -- it's pretty locked in on the number of people per mile. But again, these are averages from having sampled dozens of neighborhoods. In any given neighborhood, you're going to find locations that are very dense and others almost barren, sometimes separated by only a few hundred feet. Statistics, you know...
I would like to know more about how you measured the number of associated clients though.
I cheated, and it was probably illegal, though petty. I salvaged a grey fiberglass enclosure pod previously used for housing cable TV equipment, and then modified it so it could be quickly and discreetly attached to a telephone pole. Inside was a 'microATX' computer with a pair of SD cards to boot off of, and was underclocked and undervolted, the fans stripped off and replaced with large passive fins. water-resistant wire netting was added along the inside (the part facing the pole) and thermally bonded to oversized heatsinks. Two wifi antennas were mounted along the front at 45 degree angles (to catch both vertically and horizontally-aligned signals) and attached via SMC connectors to adapters. One was 'a', the other was 'a/b/g/n'. Last was a special diagnostic adapter with three antennas which cost an arm and a leg. It was a spectrum analyzer designed to identify sources of high EMR and localize the source. The remaining space was packed tight with high capacity deep cycle batteries. The unit could run for about 86 hours before it ran out of juice.
It recorded every MAC address and associated BSSID, etc., as well as encoding and some other properties. You can catch new clients because before they associate, they broadcast the SSID they want to connect to in the clear. Over a period of three days it collected all that information and then wrote it out to the SDcards. Drag it home, hook it up to the car charger and pull the cards. Rinse, wash, repeat.
You're the first post I've come to on this thread that has mentioned the sad relationship between microwave ovens and channel 6. Other people mentioned the noise floor early in the discussion, but I didn't notice any of them actually referencing that to Shannon's Law, either. You should be modded informative a couple of times, but I won't be surprised if the 'sociopathic answer' part gets you downmodded instead.
I wouldn't be surprised either. Slashdot ought to just replace their mod system with "like" and "dislike", since that's really what it boils down to. I frequently get downmodded for saying something that is technically correct or possible, without addressing the ethical considerations. I prefer to tell people the whole truth and let them make their own choices, rather than leaving out critical information because I don't trust them enough not to do something stupid. People need to know what's possible, not just what's legal or ethical. This idea was summed up beautifully for me years ago on a forum far, far, away, when someone wrote "You can't expect a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces." Criminals don't give a damn about you or the law; They are there to grab the low-hanging fruit, and unless you know what's possible, how they operate, you can't defend against attacks.
You can't be a good white hat without having worn the black hat.
This study only looks at the first order effects. What about the technologies that are going undeployed or never see commercial application because of patents and copyrights? They were originally supposed to inspire innovation, not inspire innovative people to flee our country to sell their work overseas. I have any number of ideas that could create jobs and help our economy that simply aren't possible in this country because of our stupid laws.
Take auto-updating software and system security. Right now, the only thing the end-user has is overpriced anti-virus and malware software, and they have to go to "Geek Squad" or some other place and pay an arm and a leg to do routine maintenance. If I could package and distribute software, and somehow integrate licensing and payment into a single deployment platform, I could help people keep their software current and establish my own "app store", but with finer-grained controls and the ability to not just download and install software, but actually integrate support for the product as well. No more searching for a phone number to call, or floundering with "how do I do X in this?" If you got infected with some malware, someone could remote in anytime and fix it, at a very low cost due to economy of scale.
But unless you're a multibillion dollar company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft, there's no way you can hire enough lawyers or have enough market clout to get something like that off the ground. The cost of entry into the market is so high that only mega corporations can afford it. Rather than lowering the barrier to innovation, it's created a massive wall to it, where only a select few can release anything new.
And then we get crap like the FCC -- they botched the digital TV transition so bad they should all be hung by their balls in the public square until they drop off. It was pure profit, and the consumer suffered in terms of price fixing, limited supplies of converter boxes, and the spectrum that was sold off hasn't really benefited them in any way -- they took public spectrum and made it private, while raking in billions. And then they cost us billions more in conversion costs, when they should have been using the money from those auctions to help out the people they forced to upgrade in the firstplace. This is the kind of shit copyright and patenting do -- force people into only a handful of solutions, all overpriced and not competitive, and deny anyone else the chance to come up with a better solution that would benefit someone other than the corporate overlords.
Except that they demand money. Ripping of some ip and sharing it for free is different from ripping it of and selling it for profit.
Bingo. Nail. Head. Bang. I'm a proud pirate (yarr!), and I love being able to give my friends access to movies and media they wouldn't otherwise be able to get on account of being too poor to afford it on their own. I don't charge (except postage and possibly the USB or SD Card cost), and I never will. It's counter to the spirit of it. Pirates recognize artists are entitled to compensation, and we tell people if they really like something to buy it or send money directly to the artist... and unsurprisingly a lot of my friends do just that. The fact is, most movies and TV episodes people only watch once or a couple of times. Take Hunger Games. I liked the movie, but I don't feel it has much replay value. So I'm not going to buy that. But NCIS? I psychotically love that show, and have picked up several disks on Bluray from pawn shops. It's something I'll be rewatching for years to come. Same with Battlestar Galactica or the new Batman trilogy. I've even sent money to the actors of Star Trek: TNG, because I love their work. And if I had more money, I'd probably go to concerts more than once in a blue moon.
Piracy doesn't mean not paying money -- for most of us, it's a way to stay in touch with our collective culture without breaking the bank. When everyone is talking about the latest Batman movie, and you're too broke to go see it in theatres, you're going to come to me and say "Hey, I wanna see what all the fuss is about." Well, okay then, here's a copy. And a few months later, I'm over at their house, and there on their shelf is a new Bluray or DVD of it. I certainly didn't give it to them, and they probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't exposed them to it ahead of time.
Piracy isn't anti-artist, it's very much pro-artist. It restores an element sadly lacking in today's market: Try before you buy. Netflix is the only thing that comes close, and you know what? I'm a pirate, and I have a Netflix. I love my Netflix -- it's cheap, and even with the DVD/bluray plans they have, I can get it faster than I can download it, at better quality, and it maintains my ratings so when I have a few extra bucks I can go back and look at my bucket list of things I wanna pickup the next time I'm out at the stores.
This is how most pirates operate: We love music and movies. We love them so much, we want to share them with others. But since we're not millionaires but working stiffs like you, we help people make sure that when they buy something, they're going to enjoy it. No buyer's remorse when you're a pirate: Every purchase will be something you love, and supporting an artist who deserves it on the merits of his/her work, not marketing buzz.
...but the noise floor has increased substantially, degrading performance.
Bingo! You hit the nail on the head. Wifi is now commonly found in most homes. And the overwhelming majority are b/g routers. That means that everyone's "last mile" internet is running on only three non-overlapping channels (in the United States), with a maximum capacity of only 54mbps for each of those channels. While your effective range decreases, your signal still continues to interfere with others out to its maximum range, which is typically around 300 feet. Beyond that, it's only a decibel or so above the noise floor (about -96dB) and is basically ambient. So consider urban density: In a 300 foot hemisphere, how many transmitters will be in that space?
Well, I live in a residential neighborhood that is mostly single-dwelling homes, which is about as ideal as you can get from a low-density city environment. Using a pringles can, I took a neighborhood survey and found about 26 access points within 300 feet of my home. Now, this is a survey that took several days to complete because of the marginal signal integrity, after which I drove my car in circles matching associated clients to those APs. Each access point had approximately 2.25 clients associated with it. So that's about 60 transmitting devices, in an ideal urban environment. And that's just those using wifi.
2.4GHz is also used by: Wireless phones, microwaves, wireless "hifi" stereo systems, etc. It's also used by wireless mice/trackballs and keyboards. So, realistically, I've got at least 100 devices that are transmitting with a signal high enough to interfere with the front-end RF of my wifi.
Shannon's Law stands tall in all of this: As you increase the noise floor, the amount of data you can transmit regardless of encoding scheme or receiver selectivity falls proportionally. Every device added decreases your own devices' performance.
Solutions
I found that by setting my router to 'g' only and then forcing the bitrate down to 24mbps, I was able to get a much more reliable and speedy signal. Every WiFi standard is designed to cope with interference by renegotiating to a higher or lower bitrate dynamically. Which would be fine if they were isolated, but in an environment where they're in close proximity to each other, what happens is as each device broadcasts and interferes with the other, they detect this and then renegotiate, generating more interference; And pretty soon you've got routers constantly in a state of renegotiation, with fluxuating bitrates. Manually force your router to a specific bitrate and don't allow re-negotiation, and you'll find that those momentary spikes in the noise level won't wash out your signal -- renegotiation takes 10--30ms, and during that time, you can't send/receive any data. The data burst that caused it is over long before the renegotiation completes.
So in short, it's not your transmitter, it's the environment. Take your transmitter out of its default settings and enable RTS/CTS (if available) and you'll be fine. Another, more sociopathic answer, is to get a 100W 2.4ghz booster (you'll have to build it), mount it on your roof, tune it to one of the 3 non-overlapping channels (I suggest 1 or 11, since most microwave ovens tend to tune at the middle of the band -- channel 6), and then let it run for about 3--5 days. Everyone will bail off that channel because nothing tuned to it will operate over a distance of even a few feet. Again, very illegal, very sociopathic... but very effective. You'll have to do "plow the spectrum" about once every month or two, so count on downtime.
Occasionally someone will have the decency to say something like "hmm that's a good point, you've made me think differently about this" but real adults who can do that are rare. Most are just overgrown two-year-olds, fevered egos trying to save face as if they are fooling anyone.
Yeah. You've done that to me a few times. Like everyone, I very carefully looked over everything you wrote about ten times beforehand, and unlike everyone I admitted you had me. It's rare for me to get things wrong, and much more common to end with an "agree to disagree" stance, but... being able to admit it feels a lot better than being annoyed. Being wrong for me, once I'm over the initial shock of having tripped over it, is exciting and refreshing. It means there's something about the world that isn't known (to me anyway).
And what kind of scientist, geek, or technology person would I be if I didn't get excited by new, shiny things?:)
The only question I have is, have they fixed the problem with the chameleon circuit? Because otherwise, all I can build with it is a big blue box. -- Some madman
Well, Italy hardly stands alone. Here in the United States, idiot judges and legislators have been doing whack-ass stuff like declaring women pregnant two weeks before conception (by law). Other legislators have passed resolutions effectively banning global warming research, or attempting to legislate how said research is conducted so as to prevent certain conclusions from being reached. All around us, worldwide, science is under attack from the idiocracy.
Science is dangerous because is allows people like you and me to understand the world. Knowledge is power, and science as an institution makes no bones about who gets it. That's why the Dark Ages happened, and why we're just one major disaster or war away from it happening again. Every time science shows us a way to improve the lives of everyone, it gets locked down, barricaded behind licensing and laws, shuffled into a box marked "top secret", and buried. Pharmaceuticals spend billions developing new versions of dick hardening pills, while research into HIV, cancer, and other serious quality of life diseases languish. It seems that lifelong illnesses are only ever treated anymore, never cured. Curing a patient means denying yourself all that profit from name-brand life-saving drugs. I could come up with a hundred more examples from every industry in every country worldwide -- but you get the point.
Soon, we're going to have to start hiding printing presses and books in our basement, writing down how to rebuild our technology after our governments fail and the world plunges into darkness... all because we tolerate allowing people to become too rich and powerful, and invariably they turn into sociopaths and destroy us.:(
How lucky you feel today? The problem is not that they won't go after everyone, the real problem is if they will go against you in particular, and use that as an example to intimidate the rest even more
Okay, how can I make this more clear: Attention Recording Industry Suits O Doom: Fuck you. I'm a pirate. I'm dropping my pants right now and showing you my curvy white ass. Nana Nana boo boo, stick your head in doo doo. Come and find me!
Immaturity aside, let me be crystal-clear here: I don't care if they come after me. I don't care if they come after me with tanks, shotguns, and black helicopters. No matter how much they throw at me, they're still morally and ethically in the wrong. And for me, it's just that simple. Whether they succeed or fail is irrelevant -- I know I'm right, they're wrong, and that's that. And if they do come and try to make an example out of me, they're going to find out that I don't go down easily, I don't surrender, and I make a lot of noise in the process. I'll do everything I can to make the case as high profile as possible. I'll tell them to shove their million dollar lawsuit, and demand they make it a billion or trillion dollars. I'll claim to have pirated everything ever made since 1896. I'll wear t-shirts saying "Fuck this Court" in front of TV cameras. I will turn hating them into a goddamned religion, launching a massive PR campaign on Facebook and everywhere else. I'll stage a worldwide campaign to clog every fax machine in every judge, clerk, and legislator's office 24/7. And I'll do it all without having a penny to my name. They'll collect exactly dick from me, and I'll make that perfectly clear. I'll start an offshore bank account and ask for donations, and live with friends, on welfare... doesn't matter to me. I'll never work another day once the judgement lands just to deny them the extraction of a single fucking penny for their immoral acts. And all the while, I'll be right here, screaming bloody murder on the internet and every other medium I can inject myself into, calling these bastards out on the carpet.
This isn't about luck, it's about convictions. Let. Them. Come.
The first copyright law was the The Statute of Anne in 1709 in Britain. It did not apply to the colonies. The first copyright act in the US was the US Copyright Act of 1790.. it was similar to the Statute of Anne.
If we're going to have a measuring contest over who can nitpick the best, I'm going to win. The first copyright law in the United States was common law, which our laws were derived from, and Clause 8 of the US Constitution. In other words, until 1790, all our laws were case law, decided by judges. After that, a small portion of copyright law was codified. That's the very small part you quoted. Fair use predates that and continued after the passage of that law in our common law system.
Now, if you'd be so kind, please reply with another wall of text only tangentially-related, as is traditional when someone pulls your pants down around your ankles and giggles at your ineptitude in a public forum...
Hey does anyone in Kansas City have a REALLY long ethernet cord?
Anything much more than 100 meters and it's useless. First, there's capacitive, inductive, and ohmic losses -- all of which eat away at signal integrity. But even if you cryogenically cooled it so it had zero line loss, signal latency still puts an upper limit of only a few miles. The ethernet standard has certain timing requirements and links become unstable, if not totally unusable, if the signal become desyncronized. There are other high speed networking standards that are made to go over long distances. Some of them could even be run over a several mile length of ethernet wire (if you were feeling more Scotty than LaForge). But basic 10/100/1000-BaseT? Forget it.
If they have to start giving up customers, you damn well better believe the ISPs are going to start fighting, kicking and screaming.
Not exactly. I have yet to see very many companies not roll over and play dead at the threat of legal action. The only time they ever do is when complying with the demand costs them more money than the retainer's fee. Someone sat down in some meeting room and decided with a few other people to go ahead and do this. That someone is very high up in the company, and it would take them hemmoraging cash before they swallowed their pride. Techies always think about the system, never about the people in it. No, they'll lose customers left and right, bleeding them out, until the shareholders ask why earnings are down. Then, and only at that point, will Pridey McPrides-a-lot reconsider.
And here's the thing: If all the other ISPs in your area decide to do the same thing (collusion!), they're going to figure there's not much incentive. You may switch to a competitor, but you'll still have the same problem there, and so on and so on, until you're out of the market. All these ISPs have been told nobody will go without internet -- and all internet providers have to "be in it together". But, if people do start dropping off, and not buying internet at all, the entire industry will convulse and retaliate then.
Not that I expect that to happen. I do, however, expect and ask that anyone who gets their internet shut off file lawsuits against the company. It does not matter if it's justified. It does not matter if you think you can win or not. File one. Everybody, file a lawsuit. File many lawsuits if you can. Keep them busy, keep them in court, and most importantly: Cost them money. And cost the courts time. Because they're overloaded, it takes months to get in on a civil action -- and lawmakers and judges will sit up and take notice when their dockets start filling up with the same thing over and over again. You hammer them, over and over, force them to spend money defending themselves. And at the same time -- make sure your assets are safe. Ask your family to take the title to the car, etc., once you file the lawsuit. Make sure you have nothing they can take away from you.
Kick those fuckers in the balls so hard their kids are born dizzy. That's how you win. And trust me: It works. If even 1% of the population contested their speeding tickets, the court system would implode just on that. I mean, as in, smoking crater of ruin. I'm not asking everyone who gets a letter to do something: I'm asking 1% of you to. If you can, if you're in a position to put up a fight... do it. Stand up for something.
Slashdot Mirror
So a man is languishing in solitary confinement for years, not allowed visitors, and is mistreated to a degree that if he were a prisoner of war it would be considered a war crime under the Geneva convention, without being charged, given a trial, or given an opportunity to defend himself... and when this man is finally released, they'll be sending him back to jail because he enabled people to download music and movies... and he's only in that country because of the aforementioned.
Does that seem right to you?
Just put the 3D printer and the material in an oxygen-depleted environment. It's not like a canister of Nitrogen is expensive, or even dangerous (the gas, not the risk of explosive decompression if you go full retard). It's pretty easy to build a glass enclosure to seal everything in. That way, you could work with wood that would ordinarily burst into flames and it won't. You'll need to setup a infrared thermometer to rake the workbench after and only unlock once the material has cooled, obviously... and air-cooling something that's several hundred degrees takes a few hours... but I see no problem here.
It's simple to design safety features for a design like this. As a backup, you could put a water pressure sprayer in the containment area as well, in case the seals break while the material is in a super-heated state.
I'm still waiting for an english-only voice processing software package that can translate boston and texan accents, and god help you if you have a southern drawl, or english-as-a-second-language. Poor bastards who speak Russian can't 'V' to save their soul.
So that sounds quite simple to me. At which stage does the US system differ? The recall list is very long here, but on the other hand, chances are your hospital doesn't use everything on the list and you can completely ignore the ones you haven't stocked.
I can't speak to every clinic or hospital involved in the recall, but the pain clinic here in the midwest only recorded the batch numbers in their inventory control system. They did not record which patients received doses from which batch. So all they can say is "batch N was used from date X to date Y." Several batches may have been released from inventory at the same time. As well, we have no national recall framework; It is being run at the state level with varying levels of responsiveness and oversight. In fact, it was the compounding pharmacy that initiated the recall, not the government. The federal government did not issue a recall order until almost a week later -- and that recall order then went to the state health departments, who then decided (based on their own policy) how to go about handling the recall.
In some states, the hospital is responsible for notifying patients. In others, it's the state. While (thankfully) every state has a law or policy to contact the patient, it's actually not required by federal law. If you happened to live in a state that decided recalls weren't important... it would be totally legal for it to simply not happen. :( This is one of the major problems of the United States' "marble cake" government -- each level above pre-empts the level below, but each level below can then interpret the law or impliment it in their own way. And what's worse, funding levels vary by state -- while federal tax dollars are sometimes set aside for enforcement, very often it's left entirely up to the state to fund it. A cash-strapped state may only have 1 guy handling the recall on behalf of the state, and nuts if he's out of town that weekend. Not that this actually happens, but it's an example of what could happen thanks to our marble cake love-in.
Adding even more confusion to an already hopelessly dysfunctional system... we live with privatized health care right now, and even with ObamaCare, the problem will persist. It's not the manufacturers, clinics, or government's responsibility to pay for the testing and/or treatment resulting from a recall. It's you, the individual, who are responsible. You might well guess what some poor bastard without insurance is gonna do when he hears "Danger! Life-threatening illness. It could be you!" ... Like so many other poor people, poor bastard here is going to ignore it until he's obviously sick. And by law, it was his own damn fault for not coming in, going bankrupt, and living in financial ruin for the rest of his life... our culture and our laws pretty much put the individual in the frying pan as early and often as possible. So if you croak, you deserved it... but only if you live here. In any other part of the world, such thinking would be considered barbaric. Here, we call it Tuesday.
The point is, it would be useful, everyone would still get paid the market rate for the work they've created, and it is (thanks to stupid laws) totally illegal. When something that would benefit almost everyone is illegal, the law is broken.
What happens when these PR goons become the new prateroian guard?
Er, we stand up, yell "Praetorian!," and then wait patiently while he throws his water bottle away, draws his sword, and charges us. Then we stab him to death, steal his horse, and ride to the capital where, after a series of hilarious and tragic blunders and some compulsory phy ed, we kill the emperor.
Women are no longer the "bad driver" stereotype. You have to upgrade your bigotry to a different arbitrary victim.
Dude, I live in suburbia. It's all older white people, and the stereotype is very much alive there. People my age don't have that preconception, but the older crowd, the ones that own homes and stuff, very much do. And besides, nobody suspects a woman to be up to anything... it never ceases to amaze me how much crap my friends can get away with just by playing dumb and playing with their boobs when questioned.
This is not just a problem for the USofA. It is a problem for everybody in the world. Well, unless you are a CEO or a lawyer, that is.
I've been helping an ex-pat friend of mine in China set this exact thing up. You wanna know what the government and investors told him after he propped the idea: "Let's do it. We'll make sure you get the approval you need." And by approval, they meant bribes. They love ex-pats over there, and even the everyday joe here can, with a modicum of business sense, become a demigod over there. The only reason I don't move over there is... well, it's still China. I could be rich, but I like my freedoms more than money.
Your post sounded plausible until the last paragraph. Nobody would be billed for getting checked if they received one of these injections. Plus if your relative was given antibiotics the doctor must have had a reason for doing so, a reason as in a lab test that showed that he/she had some kind of an infection. So their record would show what caused the infection.
Lulz. First, my relative got a bill. I've seen it, it's real. Hell, I got a bill for a rape kit once... I didn't pay. A family who's kid was run over by a police car (officer was 100% at fault) was billed for the repair of the dent to the car. That's an argument you just aren't going to win, man. Second, labs don't always test for the bacteria. Take a bladder infection -- if they see red blood cells, that's confirmation of a bladder infection and they prescribe a generic antibiotic. They may or may not send the urine off for a more detailed analysis, depending on severity of symptoms etc. Not every sample is checked for every thing -- this isn't CSI: Your Healthcare Plan.
First, I have a relative who received an injection at one of the clinics, and I can speak firsthand to what's going on right now.
This article talks about the tracking problem. Well, it's a problem because nobody knows which batches were infected; The lead time on these things can be weeks or months before there's confirmation of a pathogen. By that time, there's potentially hundreds of infected batches out there. We still don't know (and likely won't for up to a year) which batches tested positive. It could be just a one off -- someone missed a sterilization step in a single batch, and the rest are fine. What's happening right now is an abundance of caution approach. They're recalling everything and testing everyone because we don't know exactly where the problem started and ended.
Also, a lot of patients potentially infected haven't been contacted yet and may never be because of out of date or incorrect contact information. Here, the health department has been tasked with contacting patients -- the clinic hasn't reached out at all. When I heard about this on the news, I called her and we went down to ER and got things sorted (tested negative), but the "Contact the patient" step isn't happening for a lot of people.
And lastly, even when they are contacted, and are tested, some of these patients may have already had the infection cleared due to unrelated treatment. My relative, for example, was put on antibiotics for an unrelated condition not long after the injection, and indicated to the doctors symptoms similar to what they were looking for but they cleared up prior to testing. So that data point is lost: They don't know whether the batch used on that patient was a positive now. And given the low rates of patient return and contacting, that one data point could represent hundreds of patients that need to be put on the priority list for contacting.
By far the biggest problem here is a lack of resources and accurate information. It's not that they're incompetent, or that procedures weren't followed (though both could be true)... but the response has been botched because there just aren't enough people to do the leg work. And don't forget: Whether it's their fault or not, you're still the one being billed. A lot of people don't want to eat their deductible or pay for a hospital visit or testing out of pocket (or copay), unless they know there's a problem. Wouldn't be a problem with nationalized healthcare, but with privatized healthcare "preventative medicine" is practically a swear word.
I wonder what your neighbors thought when they saw you doing that.
"Damn woman driver..."
on stories complaining about absurd patents pay up slashdot
4Chan called... they said it's invalid: they're prior art and patented online absurdity in its entirety.
I would like to know more about how you measured the number of associated clients though.
I cheated, and it was probably illegal, though petty. I salvaged a grey fiberglass enclosure pod previously used for housing cable TV equipment, and then modified it so it could be quickly and discreetly attached to a telephone pole. Inside was a 'microATX' computer with a pair of SD cards to boot off of, and was underclocked and undervolted, the fans stripped off and replaced with large passive fins. water-resistant wire netting was added along the inside (the part facing the pole) and thermally bonded to oversized heatsinks. Two wifi antennas were mounted along the front at 45 degree angles (to catch both vertically and horizontally-aligned signals) and attached via SMC connectors to adapters. One was 'a', the other was 'a/b/g/n'. Last was a special diagnostic adapter with three antennas which cost an arm and a leg. It was a spectrum analyzer designed to identify sources of high EMR and localize the source. The remaining space was packed tight with high capacity deep cycle batteries. The unit could run for about 86 hours before it ran out of juice.
It recorded every MAC address and associated BSSID, etc., as well as encoding and some other properties. You can catch new clients because before they associate, they broadcast the SSID they want to connect to in the clear. Over a period of three days it collected all that information and then wrote it out to the SDcards. Drag it home, hook it up to the car charger and pull the cards. Rinse, wash, repeat.
You're the first post I've come to on this thread that has mentioned the sad relationship between microwave ovens and channel 6. Other people mentioned the noise floor early in the discussion, but I didn't notice any of them actually referencing that to Shannon's Law, either. You should be modded informative a couple of times, but I won't be surprised if the 'sociopathic answer' part gets you downmodded instead.
I wouldn't be surprised either. Slashdot ought to just replace their mod system with "like" and "dislike", since that's really what it boils down to. I frequently get downmodded for saying something that is technically correct or possible, without addressing the ethical considerations. I prefer to tell people the whole truth and let them make their own choices, rather than leaving out critical information because I don't trust them enough not to do something stupid. People need to know what's possible, not just what's legal or ethical. This idea was summed up beautifully for me years ago on a forum far, far, away, when someone wrote "You can't expect a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces." Criminals don't give a damn about you or the law; They are there to grab the low-hanging fruit, and unless you know what's possible, how they operate, you can't defend against attacks.
You can't be a good white hat without having worn the black hat.
This study only looks at the first order effects. What about the technologies that are going undeployed or never see commercial application because of patents and copyrights? They were originally supposed to inspire innovation, not inspire innovative people to flee our country to sell their work overseas. I have any number of ideas that could create jobs and help our economy that simply aren't possible in this country because of our stupid laws.
Take auto-updating software and system security. Right now, the only thing the end-user has is overpriced anti-virus and malware software, and they have to go to "Geek Squad" or some other place and pay an arm and a leg to do routine maintenance. If I could package and distribute software, and somehow integrate licensing and payment into a single deployment platform, I could help people keep their software current and establish my own "app store", but with finer-grained controls and the ability to not just download and install software, but actually integrate support for the product as well. No more searching for a phone number to call, or floundering with "how do I do X in this?" If you got infected with some malware, someone could remote in anytime and fix it, at a very low cost due to economy of scale.
But unless you're a multibillion dollar company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft, there's no way you can hire enough lawyers or have enough market clout to get something like that off the ground. The cost of entry into the market is so high that only mega corporations can afford it. Rather than lowering the barrier to innovation, it's created a massive wall to it, where only a select few can release anything new.
And then we get crap like the FCC -- they botched the digital TV transition so bad they should all be hung by their balls in the public square until they drop off. It was pure profit, and the consumer suffered in terms of price fixing, limited supplies of converter boxes, and the spectrum that was sold off hasn't really benefited them in any way -- they took public spectrum and made it private, while raking in billions. And then they cost us billions more in conversion costs, when they should have been using the money from those auctions to help out the people they forced to upgrade in the firstplace. This is the kind of shit copyright and patenting do -- force people into only a handful of solutions, all overpriced and not competitive, and deny anyone else the chance to come up with a better solution that would benefit someone other than the corporate overlords.
Except that they demand money. Ripping of some ip and sharing it for free is different from ripping it of and selling it for profit.
Bingo. Nail. Head. Bang. I'm a proud pirate (yarr!), and I love being able to give my friends access to movies and media they wouldn't otherwise be able to get on account of being too poor to afford it on their own. I don't charge (except postage and possibly the USB or SD Card cost), and I never will. It's counter to the spirit of it. Pirates recognize artists are entitled to compensation, and we tell people if they really like something to buy it or send money directly to the artist... and unsurprisingly a lot of my friends do just that. The fact is, most movies and TV episodes people only watch once or a couple of times. Take Hunger Games. I liked the movie, but I don't feel it has much replay value. So I'm not going to buy that. But NCIS? I psychotically love that show, and have picked up several disks on Bluray from pawn shops. It's something I'll be rewatching for years to come. Same with Battlestar Galactica or the new Batman trilogy. I've even sent money to the actors of Star Trek: TNG, because I love their work. And if I had more money, I'd probably go to concerts more than once in a blue moon.
Piracy doesn't mean not paying money -- for most of us, it's a way to stay in touch with our collective culture without breaking the bank. When everyone is talking about the latest Batman movie, and you're too broke to go see it in theatres, you're going to come to me and say "Hey, I wanna see what all the fuss is about." Well, okay then, here's a copy. And a few months later, I'm over at their house, and there on their shelf is a new Bluray or DVD of it. I certainly didn't give it to them, and they probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't exposed them to it ahead of time.
Piracy isn't anti-artist, it's very much pro-artist. It restores an element sadly lacking in today's market: Try before you buy. Netflix is the only thing that comes close, and you know what? I'm a pirate, and I have a Netflix. I love my Netflix -- it's cheap, and even with the DVD/bluray plans they have, I can get it faster than I can download it, at better quality, and it maintains my ratings so when I have a few extra bucks I can go back and look at my bucket list of things I wanna pickup the next time I'm out at the stores.
This is how most pirates operate: We love music and movies. We love them so much, we want to share them with others. But since we're not millionaires but working stiffs like you, we help people make sure that when they buy something, they're going to enjoy it. No buyer's remorse when you're a pirate: Every purchase will be something you love, and supporting an artist who deserves it on the merits of his/her work, not marketing buzz.
I wish I had mod points. You've hit the nail on the head with a hammer even Thor would respect.
...but the noise floor has increased substantially, degrading performance.
Bingo! You hit the nail on the head. Wifi is now commonly found in most homes. And the overwhelming majority are b/g routers. That means that everyone's "last mile" internet is running on only three non-overlapping channels (in the United States), with a maximum capacity of only 54mbps for each of those channels. While your effective range decreases, your signal still continues to interfere with others out to its maximum range, which is typically around 300 feet. Beyond that, it's only a decibel or so above the noise floor (about -96dB) and is basically ambient. So consider urban density: In a 300 foot hemisphere, how many transmitters will be in that space?
Well, I live in a residential neighborhood that is mostly single-dwelling homes, which is about as ideal as you can get from a low-density city environment. Using a pringles can, I took a neighborhood survey and found about 26 access points within 300 feet of my home. Now, this is a survey that took several days to complete because of the marginal signal integrity, after which I drove my car in circles matching associated clients to those APs. Each access point had approximately 2.25 clients associated with it. So that's about 60 transmitting devices, in an ideal urban environment. And that's just those using wifi.
2.4GHz is also used by: Wireless phones, microwaves, wireless "hifi" stereo systems, etc. It's also used by wireless mice/trackballs and keyboards. So, realistically, I've got at least 100 devices that are transmitting with a signal high enough to interfere with the front-end RF of my wifi.
Shannon's Law stands tall in all of this: As you increase the noise floor, the amount of data you can transmit regardless of encoding scheme or receiver selectivity falls proportionally. Every device added decreases your own devices' performance.
Solutions
I found that by setting my router to 'g' only and then forcing the bitrate down to 24mbps, I was able to get a much more reliable and speedy signal. Every WiFi standard is designed to cope with interference by renegotiating to a higher or lower bitrate dynamically. Which would be fine if they were isolated, but in an environment where they're in close proximity to each other, what happens is as each device broadcasts and interferes with the other, they detect this and then renegotiate, generating more interference; And pretty soon you've got routers constantly in a state of renegotiation, with fluxuating bitrates. Manually force your router to a specific bitrate and don't allow re-negotiation, and you'll find that those momentary spikes in the noise level won't wash out your signal -- renegotiation takes 10--30ms, and during that time, you can't send/receive any data. The data burst that caused it is over long before the renegotiation completes.
So in short, it's not your transmitter, it's the environment. Take your transmitter out of its default settings and enable RTS/CTS (if available) and you'll be fine. Another, more sociopathic answer, is to get a 100W 2.4ghz booster (you'll have to build it), mount it on your roof, tune it to one of the 3 non-overlapping channels (I suggest 1 or 11, since most microwave ovens tend to tune at the middle of the band -- channel 6), and then let it run for about 3--5 days. Everyone will bail off that channel because nothing tuned to it will operate over a distance of even a few feet. Again, very illegal, very sociopathic... but very effective. You'll have to do "plow the spectrum" about once every month or two, so count on downtime.
Occasionally someone will have the decency to say something like "hmm that's a good point, you've made me think differently about this" but real adults who can do that are rare. Most are just overgrown two-year-olds, fevered egos trying to save face as if they are fooling anyone.
Yeah. You've done that to me a few times. Like everyone, I very carefully looked over everything you wrote about ten times beforehand, and unlike everyone I admitted you had me. It's rare for me to get things wrong, and much more common to end with an "agree to disagree" stance, but... being able to admit it feels a lot better than being annoyed. Being wrong for me, once I'm over the initial shock of having tripped over it, is exciting and refreshing. It means there's something about the world that isn't known (to me anyway).
And what kind of scientist, geek, or technology person would I be if I didn't get excited by new, shiny things? :)
The only question I have is, have they fixed the problem with the chameleon circuit? Because otherwise, all I can build with it is a big blue box. -- Some madman
Well, Italy hardly stands alone. Here in the United States, idiot judges and legislators have been doing whack-ass stuff like declaring women pregnant two weeks before conception (by law). Other legislators have passed resolutions effectively banning global warming research, or attempting to legislate how said research is conducted so as to prevent certain conclusions from being reached. All around us, worldwide, science is under attack from the idiocracy.
Science is dangerous because is allows people like you and me to understand the world. Knowledge is power, and science as an institution makes no bones about who gets it. That's why the Dark Ages happened, and why we're just one major disaster or war away from it happening again. Every time science shows us a way to improve the lives of everyone, it gets locked down, barricaded behind licensing and laws, shuffled into a box marked "top secret", and buried. Pharmaceuticals spend billions developing new versions of dick hardening pills, while research into HIV, cancer, and other serious quality of life diseases languish. It seems that lifelong illnesses are only ever treated anymore, never cured. Curing a patient means denying yourself all that profit from name-brand life-saving drugs. I could come up with a hundred more examples from every industry in every country worldwide -- but you get the point.
Soon, we're going to have to start hiding printing presses and books in our basement, writing down how to rebuild our technology after our governments fail and the world plunges into darkness... all because we tolerate allowing people to become too rich and powerful, and invariably they turn into sociopaths and destroy us. :(
How lucky you feel today? The problem is not that they won't go after everyone, the real problem is if they will go against you in particular, and use that as an example to intimidate the rest even more
Okay, how can I make this more clear: Attention Recording Industry Suits O Doom: Fuck you. I'm a pirate. I'm dropping my pants right now and showing you my curvy white ass. Nana Nana boo boo, stick your head in doo doo. Come and find me!
Immaturity aside, let me be crystal-clear here: I don't care if they come after me. I don't care if they come after me with tanks, shotguns, and black helicopters. No matter how much they throw at me, they're still morally and ethically in the wrong. And for me, it's just that simple. Whether they succeed or fail is irrelevant -- I know I'm right, they're wrong, and that's that. And if they do come and try to make an example out of me, they're going to find out that I don't go down easily, I don't surrender, and I make a lot of noise in the process. I'll do everything I can to make the case as high profile as possible. I'll tell them to shove their million dollar lawsuit, and demand they make it a billion or trillion dollars. I'll claim to have pirated everything ever made since 1896. I'll wear t-shirts saying "Fuck this Court" in front of TV cameras. I will turn hating them into a goddamned religion, launching a massive PR campaign on Facebook and everywhere else. I'll stage a worldwide campaign to clog every fax machine in every judge, clerk, and legislator's office 24/7. And I'll do it all without having a penny to my name. They'll collect exactly dick from me, and I'll make that perfectly clear. I'll start an offshore bank account and ask for donations, and live with friends, on welfare... doesn't matter to me. I'll never work another day once the judgement lands just to deny them the extraction of a single fucking penny for their immoral acts. And all the while, I'll be right here, screaming bloody murder on the internet and every other medium I can inject myself into, calling these bastards out on the carpet.
This isn't about luck, it's about convictions. Let. Them. Come.
Must be a MSCE... ;)
I'm neither, actually, I'm a BORED.
The first copyright law was the The Statute of Anne in 1709 in Britain. It did not apply to the colonies. The first copyright act in the US was the US Copyright Act of 1790.. it was similar to the Statute of Anne.
If we're going to have a measuring contest over who can nitpick the best, I'm going to win. The first copyright law in the United States was common law, which our laws were derived from, and Clause 8 of the US Constitution. In other words, until 1790, all our laws were case law, decided by judges. After that, a small portion of copyright law was codified. That's the very small part you quoted. Fair use predates that and continued after the passage of that law in our common law system.
Now, if you'd be so kind, please reply with another wall of text only tangentially-related, as is traditional when someone pulls your pants down around your ankles and giggles at your ineptitude in a public forum...
Hey does anyone in Kansas City have a REALLY long ethernet cord?
Anything much more than 100 meters and it's useless. First, there's capacitive, inductive, and ohmic losses -- all of which eat away at signal integrity. But even if you cryogenically cooled it so it had zero line loss, signal latency still puts an upper limit of only a few miles. The ethernet standard has certain timing requirements and links become unstable, if not totally unusable, if the signal become desyncronized. There are other high speed networking standards that are made to go over long distances. Some of them could even be run over a several mile length of ethernet wire (if you were feeling more Scotty than LaForge). But basic 10/100/1000-BaseT? Forget it.
If they have to start giving up customers, you damn well better believe the ISPs are going to start fighting, kicking and screaming.
Not exactly. I have yet to see very many companies not roll over and play dead at the threat of legal action. The only time they ever do is when complying with the demand costs them more money than the retainer's fee. Someone sat down in some meeting room and decided with a few other people to go ahead and do this. That someone is very high up in the company, and it would take them hemmoraging cash before they swallowed their pride. Techies always think about the system, never about the people in it. No, they'll lose customers left and right, bleeding them out, until the shareholders ask why earnings are down. Then, and only at that point, will Pridey McPrides-a-lot reconsider.
And here's the thing: If all the other ISPs in your area decide to do the same thing (collusion!), they're going to figure there's not much incentive. You may switch to a competitor, but you'll still have the same problem there, and so on and so on, until you're out of the market. All these ISPs have been told nobody will go without internet -- and all internet providers have to "be in it together". But, if people do start dropping off, and not buying internet at all, the entire industry will convulse and retaliate then.
Not that I expect that to happen. I do, however, expect and ask that anyone who gets their internet shut off file lawsuits against the company. It does not matter if it's justified. It does not matter if you think you can win or not. File one. Everybody, file a lawsuit. File many lawsuits if you can. Keep them busy, keep them in court, and most importantly: Cost them money. And cost the courts time. Because they're overloaded, it takes months to get in on a civil action -- and lawmakers and judges will sit up and take notice when their dockets start filling up with the same thing over and over again. You hammer them, over and over, force them to spend money defending themselves. And at the same time -- make sure your assets are safe. Ask your family to take the title to the car, etc., once you file the lawsuit. Make sure you have nothing they can take away from you.
Kick those fuckers in the balls so hard their kids are born dizzy. That's how you win. And trust me: It works. If even 1% of the population contested their speeding tickets, the court system would implode just on that. I mean, as in, smoking crater of ruin. I'm not asking everyone who gets a letter to do something: I'm asking 1% of you to. If you can, if you're in a position to put up a fight... do it. Stand up for something.
This is how you fight authority... and win.