Wouldn't it be better to place as much of the work (and responsibility) on the state asking for the taxes? Have the state maintain a real time online database for the sellers to query which returns tax owed for any given item and destination. If they don't maintain it, they don't get the tax. If they make mistakes, they (the state) gets penalized. If it is really worth all of the added complexity, shouldn't the state pay the price?
I'm ignoring the political realities that government prefers to accumulate authority while delegating responsibility.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. If these emails can be accessed at a later date they're obviously being stored somewhere. Now I lose my right to privacy because I've opened an email?
Their position was once it has been read by the addressee and not deleted, it becomes data stored on a third party server and no longer subject to the protections of the stored communications act.
My email and safe deposit box are held by third parties, each of which has the ability to look inside.
One of the differences here is that the government argued that the email is protected on a third party server under the stored communications act until you read it after which it becomes third party data subject to fewer protections. That in itself should be a big warning sign to anybody relying on third party servers to hold anything except unread email (and I would argue not even that).
If you care about your email privacy, host it on your own hardware and assume it is a postcard instead of a letter in an envelope.
We also had an experimental device that would give us true north by sensing the rotation of the Earth. I was on the team that tested it but I do not know if it ever went into production and field use or not.
A gyrocompass can be designed to find true north via the earth's rotation.
Stories about exotic government hardware are always interesting. Thanks.
On a hunch, I checked the other two "high-altitude" routers we had, and sure enough, they both had a statistically higher failure rate for "transient memory errors".
One of the relatively recent papers I read on DRAM ECC use and cosmic ray induced bit errors had a graph showing normalized error rate versus altitude. Denver had about 10 times the error rate of sea level while passenger jet aircraft had about 10 times the rate of Denver. There were a couple of cases described where moving a large computer system into a basement measurably improved the soft error rate.
As long as those showers are big enough, the energy of the individual particles will be less than the original particle.
Cosmic radiation may be ionising, even on the earth's surface, but I can imagine it is strong enough to actually cause nuclear fission or so to occur in the shielding. Thus no way to gain energy for this shower of particles, and while you may hav a few more ionising particles the energies of those are far less and they are spread out over a relative large surface, so I think even in such a case the chance of actual damage (i.e. disturbing the electronics) is still lessened by shielding.
Improper shielding selection can have the effect of converting weakly interacting high energy particles into a mass of more strongly interacting particles of lower total energy. The way it was described to me, when the single higher energy particle hits the chip itself without intervening shielding, by the time the particle shower has grown it has already left the bottom of the chip (depending on the geometry of the strike of course) causing less damage than if the particle had created the shower earlier.
Neutron radiation isn't considered ionizing, yet interactions between the neutrons and the silicon in a typical chip will create charged particles that cause current surges. These current surges can interfere with the correct operation of a circuit and that includes individual transistors, not just bits in memory.
My admittedly hazy recollection of my Harris Radiation Hardening Handbook is that neutron damage primarily causes crystal lattice dislocations which can alter threshold voltage, gain, leakage, and matching rather than single event upset or latchup.
When you consider the effect of Moore's Law on the size of the capacitor used within the DRAM over the last 30 years (the bit flip is caused by the radioactive decay particle discharging this capacitor) and the fact we can't make perfectly pure materials at an economic cost, it is surprising that this problem is not more obvious now. I suspect software bugs are more likely to be the cause however.
The last few process generations of DRAM have not become more susceptible to radiation induced soft errors as originally predicted but instead have leveled off or even gotten a little better. CPU static RAM based cache has an order of magnitude higher susceptibility for a number of different reasons but there, ECC (or parity for instruction cache since bad instructions can just be reloaded) has been routine for quite a while. Larger memory sizes make systems as a whole more susceptible though and the cosmic ray induced soft error rate is measurable on modern PCs with altitude making a difference of at least 2 orders of magnitude. Sea level has about 1/10th the rate of Denver which has about 1/10th the rate of a cruising passenger jet airplane.
For DRAM, I suspect what is going on is that the smaller charge storage volume means that any given ionization event is spread over more cells while each cell's higher charge density makes it less susceptible.
I have had full ECC support on my last three home workstations (P3 1GByte, P4 2GByte, and now a Phenom 2 8GByte since Intel was not an option) but have not recorded enough events to draw a meaningful conclusion.
You don't encrypt your email or seal your correspondence in a tamper-proof opaque envelope because you want privacy, you do that because you want your private email to be secure against someone violating your privacy. Not to create the concept of expectation of privacy in the first place.
Does encrypting Internet communications create a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents, triggering Fourth Amendment protection? At first blush, it seems that the answer must be yes: A reasonable person would surely expect that encrypted communications will remain private. In this paper, Professor Kerr explains why this intuitive answer is entirely wrong: Encrypting communications cannot create a reasonable expectation of privacy. The reason is that the Fourth Amendment regulates access, not understanding: no matter how unlikely it is that the government will successfully decrypt ciphertext, the Fourth Amendment offers no protection if it succeeds. As a result, the government does not need a search warrant to decrypt encrypted communications. This surprising result is consistent with Fourth Amendment caselaw: it matches how courts have resolved cases involving the reassembly of shredded documents, recovery of deleted files, and the translation of foreign languages. The Fourth Amendment may regulate government access to ciphertext, but it does not regulate government efforts to translate ciphertext into plaintext.
AMD's flagship chip does indeed cost $195, but then, it's about the same speed (as the benchmarks showed) as the Core i5 750, which costs $199. AMD isn't offering better bang for you're buck, they're offering high energy use CPUs with comparable performance to intel's similarly priced CPUs.
It is really more comparable to the Intel Xeon X3450 ($241) because the Core i5 series lacks ECC support.
Are you aware that randomly generating a specific protein is much more difficult than that? I've heard a number around 1 in 10^113. That would be just ONE of the proteins we need for life.
So. Either it needs to be rethought what is actually numerically possible, or that the genetic make-up of life was guided by chance.
But that is randomly generating a specific protein without working from an earlier protein. Asimov called that the hemoglobin number and used it as an example of why evolution could not work using blind chance. Hemoglobin is just part of a family of proteins called globins and the actual differences among them are relatively small. The evolution of hemoglobin did not happen by chance all in one step but by accumulating change via many much smaller steps from an existing protein.
Strong cryptographic algorithms are specifically designed to be resistant to the type of analysis which would allow you to derive parts of the key until you have the whole thing. Either you have it all, or you have nothing. Evolution of proteins does not work that way.
I knew some guys once that were crew chiefs on C-130 cargo planes, which also use 400Hz AC onboard. I was told it's done to reduce the size/weight of the parts needed to supply that power. Inductors and capacitors sized for 400Hz are evidently much smaller/lighter than those used for 60Hz.
It is just a power to weight and volume issue. Using a higher frequency increases the losses due to magnetic hysteresis and eddy currents but that can be made up for using more expensive designs and materials if needed. Switching power supplies use powdered iron or ferrite instead of laminated steel for this reason.
The rule of thumb for a standard rectifier and capacitor power supply input stage is about 8200uF of capacitance per amp x volt (drop). The capacitor size is inversely proportional to frequency so at 400 Hz the capacitor will be about 1/6th the size. Transformers and inductors become smaller to the same proportion.
A lot of computer and consumer equipment will work fine on 120/240 volt 400 Hz AC or even 170/340 volt DC.
Inverted curve outputs is clever. My first thought was to implement synchronous excitation and detection (as used with LVDTs) but inverted curve outputs have the advantage of being easier to diagnose and maintain. I am still of the opinion that consumer car stuff is too cheap to be reliable without direct mechanical linkages and fail-safes. I try and own as primitive a car as possible forgoing anything automatic or power.
Since they used a hall effect sensor, I wonder what kind of problem an external magnet sticking to the sensor assembly or even to the driver's shoe would cause.
Furthermore, ANY electrical power generating plant has a maximum theoretical efficiency of 50% for the energy it consumes. If the "internal" resistance of the plant increase or decreases away from that ideal resistance which maximizes the power output the efficiency always drops. This can be easily verified with an ordinary Alkaline battery, rheostat and amp meter. The current flow is the greatest when the resistance of the rheostat equals the internal resistance of the battery.
This is not true at all.
Maximum power is drawn and the efficiency is 50% when the load resistance equals the internal resistance of a generator. The efficiency rises as the load resistance increases above the generator internal resistance but the power delivered to the load decreases while the power lost in the generator decreases even faster. If 50% of the power was being dissipated in the generator, you would see multi-megawatt sized heat sinks mounted to them. Available output power is limited by internal temperature rise among other things. Efficiencies can approach 100%.
This can be easily verified with an ordinary Alkaline battery, rheostat and amp meter. The current flow is the greatest when the resistance of the rheostat equals the internal resistance of the battery.
The current will be greatest when the load resistance is zero. The power will be greatest when the load resistance equals the battery's internal resistance. The efficiency will be greatest with a high load resistance.
What part of even the most government-run health care isn't covered by the "general welfare" clause of the US Constitution? You may not like its existence, but it puts general welfare on a par with defense (they're parallel clauses in the text).
None of it is covered. The general welfare clause is a justification and not an enumerated power. If it were a power, it could be used much like the interstate commerce clause is misused.
"The laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They [Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose." - Thomas Jefferson
The article doesn't say where the WD facility is, I assume California. I see some isolation pads under equipment, but how do you handle vibration in a seismically active area?
Where I worked in Covina they were running full scale dead load tests (a couple hundred thousand pounds I think) when the Whittier Narrows earthquake hit. There was no way to unload the machine without a warning so they just had to let it break. The USGS had at least one seismograph you could listen to in the area (tone modulated FM in the VHF band) which usually provided 5 to 20 seconds of warning depending on the geometry but earthquakes were rare enough that a fail safe was not considered worthwhile.
Unless I'm mistaken, the highest voltage capacitor type is a vacuum capacitor (vacuum is the dielectric) hence it being potentially more lightweight than any other type of capacitor.
Adding a dielectric to a vacuum capacitor both increases the capacitance and the maximum voltage. A good example of the former is replacing an air capacitor (air and vacuum have almost the same dielectric constant) with a teflon dielectric capacitor because the lower volume reduces the effect and number of cosmic ray events in sensitive circuits. Vacuum capacitors are usually used where the lowest loss and tuning is required like in high power RF amplifiers.
A capacitor's voltage is limited by both the dielectric and imperfections in the dielectric. Voids in the dielectric will allow ionization which damages the dielectric and causes failure. That is why oil or another fluid is used to surround the plates and dielectric in high voltage capacitors.
Too many variables. How much charge is in the current battery, how much wear and tear are in the battery you just got versus what you just gave, what happens when you get a partial dud, how many batteries can be swapped out a day, the physical labor of swapping batteries, what do you charge/how do you come to the cost and how does that make you competitive with your competition.
Does the battery EULA allow it to be used in your car? Does the station even carry the battery necessary for your car after 3 years?
The military has funded a lot of research for ultracapacitors to replace batteries for the electronics on missiles, an ideal application since missiles potentially sit on the shelf for years, and then need to function precisely for a very short period of time. (the cap would be charged as part of the launch procedure.)
Primary batteries with an indefinite shelf life already exist in the from of reserve batteries. Flooded cell secondary batteries also have an indefinite shelf life if the electrolyte is separate from the cells. Flooded cell lead-acid, nickel-iron, and nickel-cadmium are usually stored and shipped that way.
For a lot of applications, minimum battery size is limited by power density instead of energy density so high energy density capacitors could have an advantage in size and weight. A significant disadvantage however is their voltage discharge curve which both complicates power conditioning and limits usable energy and power.
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Wouldn't it be better to place as much of the work (and responsibility) on the state asking for the taxes? Have the state maintain a real time online database for the sellers to query which returns tax owed for any given item and destination. If they don't maintain it, they don't get the tax. If they make mistakes, they (the state) gets penalized. If it is really worth all of the added complexity, shouldn't the state pay the price?
I'm ignoring the political realities that government prefers to accumulate authority while delegating responsibility.
Their position was once it has been read by the addressee and not deleted, it becomes data stored on a third party server and no longer subject to the protections of the stored communications act.
One of the differences here is that the government argued that the email is protected on a third party server under the stored communications act until you read it after which it becomes third party data subject to fewer protections. That in itself should be a big warning sign to anybody relying on third party servers to hold anything except unread email (and I would argue not even that).
If you care about your email privacy, host it on your own hardware and assume it is a postcard instead of a letter in an envelope.
A gyrocompass can be designed to find true north via the earth's rotation.
Stories about exotic government hardware are always interesting. Thanks.
One of the relatively recent papers I read on DRAM ECC use and cosmic ray induced bit errors had a graph showing normalized error rate versus altitude. Denver had about 10 times the error rate of sea level while passenger jet aircraft had about 10 times the rate of Denver. There were a couple of cases described where moving a large computer system into a basement measurably improved the soft error rate.
Improper shielding selection can have the effect of converting weakly interacting high energy particles into a mass of more strongly interacting particles of lower total energy. The way it was described to me, when the single higher energy particle hits the chip itself without intervening shielding, by the time the particle shower has grown it has already left the bottom of the chip (depending on the geometry of the strike of course) causing less damage than if the particle had created the shower earlier.
My admittedly hazy recollection of my Harris Radiation Hardening Handbook is that neutron damage primarily causes crystal lattice dislocations which can alter threshold voltage, gain, leakage, and matching rather than single event upset or latchup.
The last few process generations of DRAM have not become more susceptible to radiation induced soft errors as originally predicted but instead have leveled off or even gotten a little better. CPU static RAM based cache has an order of magnitude higher susceptibility for a number of different reasons but there, ECC (or parity for instruction cache since bad instructions can just be reloaded) has been routine for quite a while. Larger memory sizes make systems as a whole more susceptible though and the cosmic ray induced soft error rate is measurable on modern PCs with altitude making a difference of at least 2 orders of magnitude. Sea level has about 1/10th the rate of Denver which has about 1/10th the rate of a cruising passenger jet airplane.
For DRAM, I suspect what is going on is that the smaller charge storage volume means that any given ionization event is spread over more cells while each cell's higher charge density makes it less susceptible.
I have had full ECC support on my last three home workstations (P3 1GByte, P4 2GByte, and now a Phenom 2 8GByte since Intel was not an option) but have not recorded enough events to draw a meaningful conclusion.
What? Both of them?
I do not know how common it is but every mechanical throttle I have worked on had dual redundant throttle return springs.
Endemic rent seeking is not a positive endorsement.
Encryption does not create any expectation of privacy. I just posted a comment on this very subject:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1584520&cid=31511952
Just to expand on this, Orin Kerr has a paper discussing this very issue. Encryption does NOT create an expectation of privacy.
Does encrypting Internet communications create a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents, triggering Fourth Amendment protection? At first blush, it seems that the answer must be yes: A reasonable person would surely expect that encrypted communications will remain private. In this paper, Professor Kerr explains why this intuitive answer is entirely wrong: Encrypting communications cannot create a reasonable expectation of privacy. The reason is that the Fourth Amendment regulates access, not understanding: no matter how unlikely it is that the government will successfully decrypt ciphertext, the Fourth Amendment offers no protection if it succeeds. As a result, the government does not need a search warrant to decrypt encrypted communications. This surprising result is consistent with Fourth Amendment caselaw: it matches how courts have resolved cases involving the reassembly of shredded documents, recovery of deleted files, and the translation of foreign languages. The Fourth Amendment may regulate government access to ciphertext, but it does not regulate government efforts to translate ciphertext into plaintext.
It is really more comparable to the Intel Xeon X3450 ($241) because the Core i5 series lacks ECC support.
But that is randomly generating a specific protein without working from an earlier protein. Asimov called that the hemoglobin number and used it as an example of why evolution could not work using blind chance. Hemoglobin is just part of a family of proteins called globins and the actual differences among them are relatively small. The evolution of hemoglobin did not happen by chance all in one step but by accumulating change via many much smaller steps from an existing protein.
Strong cryptographic algorithms are specifically designed to be resistant to the type of analysis which would allow you to derive parts of the key until you have the whole thing. Either you have it all, or you have nothing. Evolution of proteins does not work that way.
It is just a power to weight and volume issue. Using a higher frequency increases the losses due to magnetic hysteresis and eddy currents but that can be made up for using more expensive designs and materials if needed. Switching power supplies use powdered iron or ferrite instead of laminated steel for this reason.
The rule of thumb for a standard rectifier and capacitor power supply input stage is about 8200uF of capacitance per amp x volt (drop). The capacitor size is inversely proportional to frequency so at 400 Hz the capacitor will be about 1/6th the size. Transformers and inductors become smaller to the same proportion.
A lot of computer and consumer equipment will work fine on 120/240 volt 400 Hz AC or even 170/340 volt DC.
Inverted curve outputs is clever. My first thought was to implement synchronous excitation and detection (as used with LVDTs) but inverted curve outputs have the advantage of being easier to diagnose and maintain. I am still of the opinion that consumer car stuff is too cheap to be reliable without direct mechanical linkages and fail-safes. I try and own as primitive a car as possible forgoing anything automatic or power.
Since they used a hall effect sensor, I wonder what kind of problem an external magnet sticking to the sensor assembly or even to the driver's shoe would cause.
This is not true at all.
Maximum power is drawn and the efficiency is 50% when the load resistance equals the internal resistance of a generator. The efficiency rises as the load resistance increases above the generator internal resistance but the power delivered to the load decreases while the power lost in the generator decreases even faster. If 50% of the power was being dissipated in the generator, you would see multi-megawatt sized heat sinks mounted to them. Available output power is limited by internal temperature rise among other things. Efficiencies can approach 100%.
The current will be greatest when the load resistance is zero. The power will be greatest when the load resistance equals the battery's internal resistance. The efficiency will be greatest with a high load resistance.
With apologies to James Burke:
If it's not on XKCD, it doesn't exist.
They deserve to be punished for not being more persuasive.
None of it is covered. The general welfare clause is a justification and not an enumerated power. If it were a power, it could be used much like the interstate commerce clause is misused.
"The laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They [Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose." - Thomas Jefferson
Where I worked in Covina they were running full scale dead load tests (a couple hundred thousand pounds I think) when the Whittier Narrows earthquake hit. There was no way to unload the machine without a warning so they just had to let it break. The USGS had at least one seismograph you could listen to in the area (tone modulated FM in the VHF band) which usually provided 5 to 20 seconds of warning depending on the geometry but earthquakes were rare enough that a fail safe was not considered worthwhile.
I recently replaced my HP48g with an HP50g and have no significant complaints. Even better, it takes 4 x AAA instead of the 48s 3 x AAA.
Adding a dielectric to a vacuum capacitor both increases the capacitance and the maximum voltage. A good example of the former is replacing an air capacitor (air and vacuum have almost the same dielectric constant) with a teflon dielectric capacitor because the lower volume reduces the effect and number of cosmic ray events in sensitive circuits. Vacuum capacitors are usually used where the lowest loss and tuning is required like in high power RF amplifiers.
A capacitor's voltage is limited by both the dielectric and imperfections in the dielectric. Voids in the dielectric will allow ionization which damages the dielectric and causes failure. That is why oil or another fluid is used to surround the plates and dielectric in high voltage capacitors.
Does the battery EULA allow it to be used in your car? Does the station even carry the battery necessary for your car after 3 years?
Primary batteries with an indefinite shelf life already exist in the from of reserve batteries. Flooded cell secondary batteries also have an indefinite shelf life if the electrolyte is separate from the cells. Flooded cell lead-acid, nickel-iron, and nickel-cadmium are usually stored and shipped that way.
For a lot of applications, minimum battery size is limited by power density instead of energy density so high energy density capacitors could have an advantage in size and weight. A significant disadvantage however is their voltage discharge curve which both complicates power conditioning and limits usable energy and power.