Because that's not how a civilized society works out it's issues. We have all agreed on a system by which our laws are determined. It's called "the consent of the governed".
If the government expects us to obey the law, then it should set a better example.
Cool, so can we blow off all subpoenas? Because that's your argument. By your same argument, the court can't compel testimony to be honest, because that's a violation of free speech. And clearly, writing software is speech, because that software is clearly public.
That was not illegal for Apple to do. Because Apple has no other standing to challenge the subpoena in court, for instance they have no privacy interest in the data, they *must* violate the subpoena, or in this case the All Writs Act, in order to generate their own standing to challenge it in court. They can not follow the subpoena but also challenge it because then they would have no standing to challenge it and the court would dismiss their challenge for lack of standing.
Microsoft had to do the same thing in the recent case where the court ordered them to take action to retrieve data from overseas.
If only there was a trusted US producer of a secure hardware and software for phones which can be operated with a privately secured server but that would compromise law enforcement and national security.
Incidentally, NYT is categorized as "slightly left leaning" and "factual".
Is there a catagory for "propaganda arm of the U.S. government and moneyed interests"?
After their reporting of WMDs in Iraq leading up to the war, the NYT is not to be trusted. Of course this applies to most news agencies and they should not be trusted either but some got it right.
Any solar sail that can manage to keep accelerating long enough to get up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light will have no prayer at stopping, because solar sails only work within star systems and it'll be going so fast it'll pass through the star system in far, far less time than it spent accelerating in ours. You need an equal amount of time in the same energy conditions to decelerate as you had to accelerate.
So either dive into the sun at the target system or do what Robert Forward suggested:
Why not refuel? Would the cost of a refueling mission be greater than a whole new telescope?
That is basically the issue. The cost of designing, building, and launching a refueling mission is comparable to the cost of launching a replacement probe if you planned ahead by making more than one and the probe has a limited and unknown remaining operating life.
Considering the cost of Shuttle launches, I suspect the same applied to the Hubble but it made a great justification for the Shuttle.
Oh, I know there will be some clever reason why the change is superior. This story just points out where 'clever' sometimes leads.
So we can discreetly pop a canister of helium on the bus to kill all the iGadgets?
There are a couple of reasons MEMS oscillators are used in place of quartz crystal oscillators:
1. MEMS oscillators are generally smaller than quartz oscillators which is important in portable applications.
2. The integrated (single chip) construction of a MEMS oscillator is more reliable and less expensive than the hybrid construction of a quartz crystal oscillator.
However while MEMS oscillators can have a similar frequency accuracy to quartz crystal oscillators, they have worse short term stability, worse aging, worse phase noise and jitter, worse power consumption, and worse start up time.
Another name for a hardware device that cuts off a device when the lid is closed is a "switch", and it's hardly innovative, even my 30 year old home furnace has a cutoff switch for when the cover is opened.
This switch implementation by Apple is innovative because it may be secretly bypassed in software for lawful surveillance purposes.
What matters is cache size, L2 and L1. Losing a few cores and bolstering cache will improve performance in quite a lot of cases.
This is easier said that done, especially for the L1 cache. L1 cache size is limited by the cycle time and load-to-use latency of the instruction pipeline. If they could make the L1 cache larger without sacrificing clock rate and load-to-use latency, they would.
This is why complex out-of-order instruction pipelines *must* be used to achieve high clock rates. They increase the allowable load-to-use latency which increases the allowable latency of the L1 cache. But good luck pushing the load-to-use latency above the current 4 cycles without just burning lots of power for no gain.
Higher layers of cache are not tightly coupled to the instruction pipeline but the same considerations still apply.
For now. I can imagine seeing Disney requiring a year long contract for their service and then everyone else following in because it's obviously an easy money grab. But who knows, maybe it turns into an interesting bit of ad wars between services.
"These guys want you to pay for a year but what's the point when you've binged your shows in two weekends?" "Those guys don't have enough content you want to watch so they don't care if you stick around. We always have stuff year round."
Or only a rotating selection will be available to subscribers so you cannot view the whole series at any given time. Didn't one of the subscription services already do this with new episodes?
I don't think it's physics as much as financial. The demand is currently not there. A 5 year old laptop was faster than most current laptops/desktops/tablets/phones. Most people have stopped demanding high performance CPUs. Even gamers have shifted their focus to the video cards not the CPUs and a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486. Because of the low processing power and low energy requirements of phones/tablets, the stuff that might have created demand like voice recognition has shifted to the cloud instead.
Moore's law was and has always been about economics. It is about the cost per transistor even at the expense of performance. Integration increases with greater density, larger area, and improved packaging which all contribute to lower cost per transistor.
However for people that aren't in PreCheck, why would it matter if we know who they are? As long as they pass the normal screening process, it should be safe enough to let them on the plane.
Intimidation helps maintain order in a police state. Every level of law enforcement uses it routinely.
No, at the right altitude-- about 56 km above the surface-- Venus is remarkably Earthlike.
No oxygen, of course, but in temperature and pressure, very close.
I wrote a paper about this: "Colonization of Venus", back in 2003. Glad to see my work is being taken seriously!
Wouldn't the lack of hydrogen be a larger problem than the lack of oxygen? Oxygen is at least available bound with carbon dioxide but water vapor is just a trace.
(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?!
The old standard in service documentation was to use "A" for repairable assemblies which included printed circuit boards. These days I would not consider printed circuit boards with the higher density surface mount parts to be repairable so they would just need to be replaced. Wire bonded hybrids are easier to repair with the proper equipment.
However many failures, especially in consumer devices, involve power supplies (and batteries) which tend to be very repairable or at least replaceable if suitable service documentation is provided.
I have physical access to all my emails and I use Gmail. Every one has physical access to their email. What was your point?
The point might have been that by operating your own SMTP server, your email is physically secure from others at least in the sense that you will know if it is seized.
Unless this company is acting as a VPN endpoint or a mail relay with this thing, there are very large numbers of (residential) customers where this thing just won't work. And if they are acting as a VPN endpoint or a mail relay, this company has the option to read all your shit, as well as have you dependent on their survival for this thing to not be a $500 paperweight.
Using a VPN tunnel is a common way to avoid ISP and SMTP restrictions. It is no more insecure than using email alone because security has to be provided by the connections to the email server anyway so ideally, the VPN only carries encrypted encrypted connections anyway.
Blah, blah, blah... remember the General Welfare Clause?
"General Welfare" is mentioned in two places in the Constitutiont. In the preamble it only indicates the intention of the Constitution. In Article 1 which enumerates the powers of Congress, it limits the Taxing and Spending Clause. In neither case does it grant any power to Congress or the government and in the second case it actually limits the power of Congress.
Sony have deprived him of goods (ie games) that he has paid for.
He only rented them for as long as Sony chose to allow. Banks now play this game also; when someone hacks the bank, it is *your* money and *your* identity which are stolen.
I wonder if the Dragon can be retrofitted for spacewalks.. I don't think you could use the same airlock as for docking, they'd need full vacuum spacesuits and June next year is just supposed to be a test flight...
There is no room for an airlock so the whole craft would need to be depressurized like the Apollo era craft.
It won't work. It can't work. I say this because it uses the same materials for the salt and piping as molten salt nuclear reactors and I've been told the salt will simply eat through the pipes and all you will have is an expensive mess.
Let's assume this solar salt thermal storage technology does work, then molten salt nuclear reactors will work. Research in one molten salt technology is directly applicable to the other. If these solar thermal plants gain any traction and prove the technology on molten salts then molten salt nuclear reactors will soon follow.
The materials used in molten salt nuclear reactors have to withstand both radiation, especially neutron radiation which causes embrittlement of iron and nickel based alloys, and chemically active decay products.
The milder conditions for thermal storage make the salts much easier to contain.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's not how a civilized society works out it's issues. We have all agreed on a system by which our laws are determined. It's called "the consent of the governed".
If the government expects us to obey the law, then it should set a better example.
Cool, so can we blow off all subpoenas? Because that's your argument. By your same argument, the court can't compel testimony to be honest, because that's a violation of free speech. And clearly, writing software is speech, because that software is clearly public.
That was not illegal for Apple to do. Because Apple has no other standing to challenge the subpoena in court, for instance they have no privacy interest in the data, they *must* violate the subpoena, or in this case the All Writs Act, in order to generate their own standing to challenge it in court. They can not follow the subpoena but also challenge it because then they would have no standing to challenge it and the court would dismiss their challenge for lack of standing.
Microsoft had to do the same thing in the recent case where the court ordered them to take action to retrieve data from overseas.
If only there was a trusted US producer of a secure hardware and software for phones which can be operated with a privately secured server but that would compromise law enforcement and national security.
Incidentally, NYT is categorized as "slightly left leaning" and "factual".
Is there a catagory for "propaganda arm of the U.S. government and moneyed interests"?
After their reporting of WMDs in Iraq leading up to the war, the NYT is not to be trusted. Of course this applies to most news agencies and they should not be trusted either but some got it right.
Any solar sail that can manage to keep accelerating long enough to get up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light will have no prayer at stopping, because solar sails only work within star systems and it'll be going so fast it'll pass through the star system in far, far less time than it spent accelerating in ours. You need an equal amount of time in the same energy conditions to decelerate as you had to accelerate.
So either dive into the sun at the target system or do what Robert Forward suggested:
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.25...
Why not refuel? Would the cost of a refueling mission be greater than a whole new telescope?
That is basically the issue. The cost of designing, building, and launching a refueling mission is comparable to the cost of launching a replacement probe if you planned ahead by making more than one and the probe has a limited and unknown remaining operating life.
Considering the cost of Shuttle launches, I suspect the same applied to the Hubble but it made a great justification for the Shuttle.
They quit using quartz based clocks?
Why?
Oh, I know there will be some clever reason why the change is superior. This story just points out where 'clever' sometimes leads.
So we can discreetly pop a canister of helium on the bus to kill all the iGadgets?
There are a couple of reasons MEMS oscillators are used in place of quartz crystal oscillators:
1. MEMS oscillators are generally smaller than quartz oscillators which is important in portable applications.
2. The integrated (single chip) construction of a MEMS oscillator is more reliable and less expensive than the hybrid construction of a quartz crystal oscillator.
However while MEMS oscillators can have a similar frequency accuracy to quartz crystal oscillators, they have worse short term stability, worse aging, worse phase noise and jitter, worse power consumption, and worse start up time.
Another name for a hardware device that cuts off a device when the lid is closed is a "switch", and it's hardly innovative, even my 30 year old home furnace has a cutoff switch for when the cover is opened.
This switch implementation by Apple is innovative because it may be secretly bypassed in software for lawful surveillance purposes.
What matters is cache size, L2 and L1. Losing a few cores and bolstering cache will improve performance in quite a lot of cases.
This is easier said that done, especially for the L1 cache. L1 cache size is limited by the cycle time and load-to-use latency of the instruction pipeline. If they could make the L1 cache larger without sacrificing clock rate and load-to-use latency, they would.
This is why complex out-of-order instruction pipelines *must* be used to achieve high clock rates. They increase the allowable load-to-use latency which increases the allowable latency of the L1 cache. But good luck pushing the load-to-use latency above the current 4 cycles without just burning lots of power for no gain.
Higher layers of cache are not tightly coupled to the instruction pipeline but the same considerations still apply.
You can cancel at any moment though.
For now. I can imagine seeing Disney requiring a year long contract for their service and then everyone else following in because it's obviously an easy money grab. But who knows, maybe it turns into an interesting bit of ad wars between services.
"These guys want you to pay for a year but what's the point when you've binged your shows in two weekends?"
"Those guys don't have enough content you want to watch so they don't care if you stick around. We always have stuff year round."
Or only a rotating selection will be available to subscribers so you cannot view the whole series at any given time. Didn't one of the subscription services already do this with new episodes?
I don't think it's physics as much as financial. The demand is currently not there. A 5 year old laptop was faster than most current laptops/desktops/tablets/phones. Most people have stopped demanding high performance CPUs. Even gamers have shifted their focus to the video cards not the CPUs and a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486. Because of the low processing power and low energy requirements of phones/tablets, the stuff that might have created demand like voice recognition has shifted to the cloud instead.
Moore's law was and has always been about economics. It is about the cost per transistor even at the expense of performance. Integration increases with greater density, larger area, and improved packaging which all contribute to lower cost per transistor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Diesel trains had already replaced coal fired steam engines.
Coal fired steam engines were initially replaced with oil fired steam engines. Some were even converted.
However for people that aren't in PreCheck, why would it matter if we know who they are? As long as they pass the normal screening process, it should be safe enough to let them on the plane.
Intimidation helps maintain order in a police state. Every level of law enforcement uses it routinely.
No, at the right altitude-- about 56 km above the surface-- Venus is remarkably Earthlike.
No oxygen, of course, but in temperature and pressure, very close.
I wrote a paper about this: "Colonization of Venus", back in 2003. Glad to see my work is being taken seriously!
Wouldn't the lack of hydrogen be a larger problem than the lack of oxygen? Oxygen is at least available bound with carbon dioxide but water vapor is just a trace.
Once the city is completed, humans could colonize it and begin terraforming Venus from the cloud tops downward.
There is millennia of red heat latent in carbonate formation.
No, he would have been extradited to the US.
For what? He hasn't broken any US laws. If you do not have a security clearance, it is legal to publish classified information that is leaked to you.
At most he would only need to be indicted and a warrant issued.
Also, the UK and US are extremely close allies with nearly-identical legal systems. It would be far, far, easier to extradite Assange from the UK.
I doubt it makes a significant difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?!
The old standard in service documentation was to use "A" for repairable assemblies which included printed circuit boards. These days I would not consider printed circuit boards with the higher density surface mount parts to be repairable so they would just need to be replaced. Wire bonded hybrids are easier to repair with the proper equipment.
However many failures, especially in consumer devices, involve power supplies (and batteries) which tend to be very repairable or at least replaceable if suitable service documentation is provided.
I have physical access to all my emails and I use Gmail. Every one has physical access to their email. What was your point?
The point might have been that by operating your own SMTP server, your email is physically secure from others at least in the sense that you will know if it is seized.
Unless this company is acting as a VPN endpoint or a mail relay with this thing, there are very large numbers of (residential) customers where this thing just won't work. And if they are acting as a VPN endpoint or a mail relay, this company has the option to read all your shit, as well as have you dependent on their survival for this thing to not be a $500 paperweight.
Using a VPN tunnel is a common way to avoid ISP and SMTP restrictions. It is no more insecure than using email alone because security has to be provided by the connections to the email server anyway so ideally, the VPN only carries encrypted encrypted connections anyway.
Blah, blah, blah ... remember the General Welfare Clause?
"General Welfare" is mentioned in two places in the Constitutiont. In the preamble it only indicates the intention of the Constitution. In Article 1 which enumerates the powers of Congress, it limits the Taxing and Spending Clause. In neither case does it grant any power to Congress or the government and in the second case it actually limits the power of Congress.
We don't let law enforcement DNA test random or innocent people, why should they get access to these databases to go around the law?
We do if law enforcement can get ahold of some "abandoned" DNA and it has been that way for years.
http://volokh.com/2011/10/06/c...
The party of the current president, senate majority, or house majority made no difference. Every level of government failed on this one.
Why buy one party when you can have two for twice the price?
Sony have deprived him of goods (ie games) that he has paid for.
He only rented them for as long as Sony chose to allow. Banks now play this game also; when someone hacks the bank, it is *your* money and *your* identity which are stolen.
I wonder if the Dragon can be retrofitted for spacewalks.. I don't think you could use the same airlock as for docking, they'd need full vacuum spacesuits and June next year is just supposed to be a test flight...
There is no room for an airlock so the whole craft would need to be depressurized like the Apollo era craft.
It won't work. It can't work. I say this because it uses the same materials for the salt and piping as molten salt nuclear reactors and I've been told the salt will simply eat through the pipes and all you will have is an expensive mess.
Let's assume this solar salt thermal storage technology does work, then molten salt nuclear reactors will work. Research in one molten salt technology is directly applicable to the other. If these solar thermal plants gain any traction and prove the technology on molten salts then molten salt nuclear reactors will soon follow.
The materials used in molten salt nuclear reactors have to withstand both radiation, especially neutron radiation which causes embrittlement of iron and nickel based alloys, and chemically active decay products.
The milder conditions for thermal storage make the salts much easier to contain.