That hasn't been my experience. I'm considering them for backup storage, and I've had SSD's die without warning, apparently from being removed from power for too long. Not acceptable for a backup.
OTOH, what I'm talking about were thumb drives. But why should I think other removable SSDs would be different?
They are not different in this respect. Floating gate storage has a limited retention time which depends on feature size with smaller feature sizes being worse. Older memory chips could be counted on to retain their contents for 20 to 100 years but the quest for density and low cost per bit has brought this down to the range of months to years.
With this in mind, most (all?) SSDs and perhaps some removable storage implements background scrubbing while powered to detect and rewrite data while it can still be read and corrected. Some removable storage may only scrub on reads and some does not even do that so even if powered, data can be lost if not periodically rewritten.
Oddly enough I agree with the court but not for the reasons they give. No matter what court ruling exists, the government is going to collect every electronic record that they can whether legal or not and when used as part of an investigation, it will be laundered to prevent court review of the collection. Consider the DOJs current position that electronic records are not searched and seized *unless* they are actually reviewed by a human. Copying them off of the wire for storage is not a seizure as far as they are concerned and automated searches are not searches. Contrast this to copyright where an ephemeral copy of data is still a copy which required a law to protect.
On the other hand, ubiquitous encryption would work as a technical measure in place of what the court can not and will not do and that is why the government wants a meaningless court ruling protecting electronic records while simultaneously letting them collect everything out of sight of the court. With a ruling they can say that encryption is not needed because the court is enforcing the 4th amendment.
So the government lies and says it is only interested in metadata which is not protected? Fine. Encrypt everything and you can only see the metadata which includes source and destination IP address, time, and length. That is the metadata. Do you think they will be happy with that?
#1 Radio Shack NiCad D size battery from the late 1980's. 1.2V 1200 Mah
That is not a true D size battery. Even back then, true D sized NiCd cells had a capacity of 4 amp-hours. Your example is a C cell placed inside of a D cell enclosure which is still commonly done.
That is odd then when Toyota RAV4 EV with a 95 mile range successfully used these batteries until the patents were enforced against them by Chevron-Texaco. The second generation with lithium-ion batteries had a 103 mile range. Is a difference of 8 miles in range and 15 years in time enough to distinguish usable from unusable? If lithium batteries are the only feasible option, then where were they in 1997?
And that range was on a heavier and 15 year earlier 4-door SUV instead of a 2-door roadster.
The alternative NiMH batteries both came later and may still fall under the last of the Chevron-Texaco patents which do not finish expiring until 2020.
Well, the figure you obtain is about 0.2 gigawatt for some four minutes. This is the amount of energy produced and dissipated as heat, light, sound and about all of spectrum, from deep ultraviolet far past microwaves. No wonder no radio can push from a noise like that.
It is not the noise. Plasmas are electrically conductive and make fine RF shields. For the same reason there are no photons to see from before the recombination era which took place about 380,000 years after the big bang.
A galaxy full of upright walking bi-pedal aliens that all around just happen look and overall act like humans currently do. The notion of such widespread parallel evolution across such time and space is pretty darn unlikely. At the same time it is not like I can't suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction.
I can forgive all or most of the aliens resembling the indigenous tool using primate located on Sol 3 based on production costs the same way I can forgive ubiquitous artificial gravity. Everybody or most everybody can even speak the same language.
What I cannot forgive is interspecies reproduction. If the Sarek and the Amanda Grayson can have a child, let's name him Spock, then either Vulcans and Homo Sapiens are the same species or some almost magical technology was used and in either case, it better be justified somewhere other than Gene Roddenberry's ignorance of biology and evolution. Amanda Grayson might as well reproduce with a squid; it would be a close cousin compared to a Vulcan.
Niven sort of made the same mistake although for a good reason in his Known Space series with humans and primates being unrelated to other life on Earth except . . . what if there was an earlier Pak expedition? And they left no record so other Pak would not find them?
And the elite all speak with British accents, so you know they're elite.
A British accent is usually a sure sign that they are evil too. That and well groomed beards, favoured by bad guys everywhere. I guess they need something to stroke, and cats are never around when you need them.
I do not mind the language and accent thing so much given the alternative of listening to them speak in an artificial language or at best a strong accent which has no contextual meaning. In historic war movies, I prefer the Germans to speak English with a German accent instead of reading subtitles; it gets the point across so I can watch the movie without distraction.
As far as facial hair or the lack thereof if they are exploiting the Bald of Evil, it can serve the same purpose as having the score turn unsettling when the character is seen; it is an additional communications channel with the audience. The movie Aliens did this particularly well with the company boardroom scene; the executive's clothing immediately identified them as "suits", a well known stereotype, to the audience.
In "A Knight's Tale" we see spectators watching a jousting competition and the whole event resembles a modern football or soccer game. Is that historically accurate? Not a chance. But it gets the point across to the audience with a context that they can easily understand.
Trying to define an entire race or culture or planet with a 3 word phrase is asinine. Doing that for every race or culture or planet in a galaxy just makes me cringe. I can't read or watch it.
I agree although sometimes it is appropriate - Arrakis, Dune, Desert Planet, Home of the Spice.
It wasn't until I read Ringworld that I really appreciated that you can't dodge a laser. Can't see it to dodge it, by the time you can see it it is already too late. Even if it takes 8 minutes to get to you from its source, you won't know that it is coming.
It is not quite that bad as other Known Space (and Pournelle's Empire of Man) stories illustrate. If the laser is light-minutes away, then you perform evasive maneuvers and dodge before it gets to you even though you do not know where it will be aimed. This tactic was examined closely in the story Protector where battles happened at light-minutes of distance. The problem then becomes the attacker trying to estimate where you will be minutes in the future so he can aim his laser there.
What happened in Ringworld was an exception. The ship Lying Bastard was specifically designed by the Puppeteers to be targeted and disabled by the superthermal laser but not destroyed forcing a survivable impact on the Ringworld and exploration. They would already have known the parameters of the meteor defense weapon when an earlier Puppetteer probe was destroyed or shot down giving them the idea. The ship's name was more appropriate than Louis realized when he named it.
"The Mote in God's Eye" exists within Jerry Pournelle's Empire of Man (or CoDominium) series where at the outset steps were taken to make it hard science fiction and it represents the opposite of what Charlie Stross is complaining about.
For instance the Alderson FTL drive was specifically designed to allow military blockade actions and a long distance transportation situation roughly comparable to the 19th century where travel between nations across the Earth could take weeks to months.
Your own example shows this as well in another way. The logistics of providing fuel for the ships is critical to how the battles take place.
So this advanced energy weapon fires a "discreet glob of energy" that moves slower than a 20th-century handgun bullet?
While this would be a retcon since Lucas probably thought it was just cool and futuristic not needing any further justification, such a weapon would be preferable in boarding actions taking place in space if it does not blow holes in important things like hulls, bulkheads, and view ports. Babylon 5 had the PPG (Phased Plasma Gun) and at one point in the series specifically mentioned this as a justification.
PPGs are the sidearm of choice for most space-based fighting forces, as the plasma bolt is effective against organic targets and thin metals but will dissipate quickly when striking denser surfaces. This means that while in a pressurised environment, a stray shot will not cause a hull breach, as is the risk with slug throwers.
I'm perfectly OK with a complete ban on guns in civilian hands. Damn the torpedoes and let's do it and get it out of the way. We can call it the Second Civil War.
Which, of course, is exactly what was done. You, the citizen, had to bring your own weapon, your own powder, and on a specific date, perform drills.
And when they do this despite Congress' deliberate inaction to provide training for the unorganized militia, they get demonized as an evil militia. And oddly enough, one of the justifications for the 2nd amendment being a right of the *people* when it was drafted is that Congress could do that very thing which of course they did.
AT&T outsources email services to Yahoo as well and it is terrible. I have not been able to add or access my AT&T email accounts for more than a year. I still receive mail and I can send mail but I can no longer add my other email addresses so that I can use the AT&T (really Yahoo I assume) SMPT server to send email for them. The function is there but it does not work.
I assume that email will soon become another deprecated service like NNTP which will require a third party provider.
It's not so much about people freaking out, it's about them being banned by the National Firearms Act of 1934 - the same legislation that bans full-auto / burst fire machineguns, grenades, bombs, missiles, poison gas.
And short barreled rifles, and short barreled shotguns, and shoulder stocks for pistols.
Technically many of these things are not banned exactly but they require tax stamps, lengthy background checks, and in the case of machine guns, new ones may not be manufactured for civilians.
The original NFA included all handguns but that got removed.
I don't know what's scarier, ISIS itself, or the fact that international intelligence agencies are so clearly inept that they're actually incapable of stopping any sort of terror attacks.
It is not quite that bad. The FBI has stopped lots of FBI led terrorist attacks.
It is actually worse or better than that depending on your viewpoint.
Over the last several generations the limit has been power density. If you make a plot of total power versus chip area going back through at least the beginning of the Core2 line of processors, the power density is roughly constant. In addition, total chip area has decreased because process density has increased faster than area needed to implement the processor. The result is that power has decreased roughly following the decreasing chip area and newer chips are less expensive based on area and draw less power because they have no other choice do to physics.
So increasing the area used for a given number of transistors could offset higher clock rates however that will result in more expensive chips both because of fewer chips per wafer and lower yields do to defects. If you are someone like IBM that does not matter and they make the largest physical chip they can with power ratings to match but Intel only does that for server CPUs and check out how much they cost.
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They are not different in this respect. Floating gate storage has a limited retention time which depends on feature size with smaller feature sizes being worse. Older memory chips could be counted on to retain their contents for 20 to 100 years but the quest for density and low cost per bit has brought this down to the range of months to years.
With this in mind, most (all?) SSDs and perhaps some removable storage implements background scrubbing while powered to detect and rewrite data while it can still be read and corrected. Some removable storage may only scrub on reads and some does not even do that so even if powered, data can be lost if not periodically rewritten.
Under what conditions? They sure are not more reliable if you store them under good environmental conditions in an unpowered state.
Ya, that will work. I'll just vote for the *other* politician. Err, wait . . .
How many politicians do you have to own to get your way?
Both of them.
Oddly enough I agree with the court but not for the reasons they give. No matter what court ruling exists, the government is going to collect every electronic record that they can whether legal or not and when used as part of an investigation, it will be laundered to prevent court review of the collection. Consider the DOJs current position that electronic records are not searched and seized *unless* they are actually reviewed by a human. Copying them off of the wire for storage is not a seizure as far as they are concerned and automated searches are not searches. Contrast this to copyright where an ephemeral copy of data is still a copy which required a law to protect.
On the other hand, ubiquitous encryption would work as a technical measure in place of what the court can not and will not do and that is why the government wants a meaningless court ruling protecting electronic records while simultaneously letting them collect everything out of sight of the court. With a ruling they can say that encryption is not needed because the court is enforcing the 4th amendment.
So the government lies and says it is only interested in metadata which is not protected? Fine. Encrypt everything and you can only see the metadata which includes source and destination IP address, time, and length. That is the metadata. Do you think they will be happy with that?
Exactly! The people reelected either a Republican or Democrat so they must want a ubiquitous surveillance state!
That is not a true D size battery. Even back then, true D sized NiCd cells had a capacity of 4 amp-hours. Your example is a C cell placed inside of a D cell enclosure which is still commonly done.
That is odd then when Toyota RAV4 EV with a 95 mile range successfully used these batteries until the patents were enforced against them by Chevron-Texaco. The second generation with lithium-ion batteries had a 103 mile range. Is a difference of 8 miles in range and 15 years in time enough to distinguish usable from unusable? If lithium batteries are the only feasible option, then where were they in 1997?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And that range was on a heavier and 15 year earlier 4-door SUV instead of a 2-door roadster.
The alternative NiMH batteries both came later and may still fall under the last of the Chevron-Texaco patents which do not finish expiring until 2020.
It is not *that* difficult and if they are not going to bother, then they should not call it science fiction.
It is not the noise. Plasmas are electrically conductive and make fine RF shields. For the same reason there are no photons to see from before the recombination era which took place about 380,000 years after the big bang.
I can forgive all or most of the aliens resembling the indigenous tool using primate located on Sol 3 based on production costs the same way I can forgive ubiquitous artificial gravity. Everybody or most everybody can even speak the same language.
What I cannot forgive is interspecies reproduction. If the Sarek and the Amanda Grayson can have a child, let's name him Spock, then either Vulcans and Homo Sapiens are the same species or some almost magical technology was used and in either case, it better be justified somewhere other than Gene Roddenberry's ignorance of biology and evolution. Amanda Grayson might as well reproduce with a squid; it would be a close cousin compared to a Vulcan.
Niven sort of made the same mistake although for a good reason in his Known Space series with humans and primates being unrelated to other life on Earth except . . . what if there was an earlier Pak expedition? And they left no record so other Pak would not find them?
I do not mind the language and accent thing so much given the alternative of listening to them speak in an artificial language or at best a strong accent which has no contextual meaning. In historic war movies, I prefer the Germans to speak English with a German accent instead of reading subtitles; it gets the point across so I can watch the movie without distraction.
As far as facial hair or the lack thereof if they are exploiting the Bald of Evil, it can serve the same purpose as having the score turn unsettling when the character is seen; it is an additional communications channel with the audience. The movie Aliens did this particularly well with the company boardroom scene; the executive's clothing immediately identified them as "suits", a well known stereotype, to the audience.
In "A Knight's Tale" we see spectators watching a jousting competition and the whole event resembles a modern football or soccer game. Is that historically accurate? Not a chance. But it gets the point across to the audience with a context that they can easily understand.
Limited Production Budget.
I agree although sometimes it is appropriate - Arrakis, Dune, Desert Planet, Home of the Spice.
It is not quite that bad as other Known Space (and Pournelle's Empire of Man) stories illustrate. If the laser is light-minutes away, then you perform evasive maneuvers and dodge before it gets to you even though you do not know where it will be aimed. This tactic was examined closely in the story Protector where battles happened at light-minutes of distance. The problem then becomes the attacker trying to estimate where you will be minutes in the future so he can aim his laser there.
What happened in Ringworld was an exception. The ship Lying Bastard was specifically designed by the Puppeteers to be targeted and disabled by the superthermal laser but not destroyed forcing a survivable impact on the Ringworld and exploration. They would already have known the parameters of the meteor defense weapon when an earlier Puppetteer probe was destroyed or shot down giving them the idea. The ship's name was more appropriate than Louis realized when he named it.
In Star Fleet Battles this was explained away by ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) having negated any advancements in automated aiming.
"The Mote in God's Eye" exists within Jerry Pournelle's Empire of Man (or CoDominium) series where at the outset steps were taken to make it hard science fiction and it represents the opposite of what Charlie Stross is complaining about.
For instance the Alderson FTL drive was specifically designed to allow military blockade actions and a long distance transportation situation roughly comparable to the 19th century where travel between nations across the Earth could take weeks to months.
Your own example shows this as well in another way. The logistics of providing fuel for the ships is critical to how the battles take place.
While this would be a retcon since Lucas probably thought it was just cool and futuristic not needing any further justification, such a weapon would be preferable in boarding actions taking place in space if it does not blow holes in important things like hulls, bulkheads, and view ports. Babylon 5 had the PPG (Phased Plasma Gun) and at one point in the series specifically mentioned this as a justification.
PPGs are the sidearm of choice for most space-based fighting forces, as the plasma bolt is effective against organic targets and thin metals but will dissipate quickly when striking denser surfaces. This means that while in a pressurised environment, a stray shot will not cause a hull breach, as is the risk with slug throwers.
I'm perfectly OK with a complete ban on guns in civilian hands. Damn the torpedoes and let's do it and get it out of the way. We can call it the Second Civil War.
And when they do this despite Congress' deliberate inaction to provide training for the unorganized militia, they get demonized as an evil militia. And oddly enough, one of the justifications for the 2nd amendment being a right of the *people* when it was drafted is that Congress could do that very thing which of course they did.
AT&T outsources email services to Yahoo as well and it is terrible. I have not been able to add or access my AT&T email accounts for more than a year. I still receive mail and I can send mail but I can no longer add my other email addresses so that I can use the AT&T (really Yahoo I assume) SMPT server to send email for them. The function is there but it does not work.
I assume that email will soon become another deprecated service like NNTP which will require a third party provider.
And short barreled rifles, and short barreled shotguns, and shoulder stocks for pistols.
Technically many of these things are not banned exactly but they require tax stamps, lengthy background checks, and in the case of machine guns, new ones may not be manufactured for civilians.
The original NFA included all handguns but that got removed.
It is not quite that bad. The FBI has stopped lots of FBI led terrorist attacks.
It is actually worse or better than that depending on your viewpoint.
Over the last several generations the limit has been power density. If you make a plot of total power versus chip area going back through at least the beginning of the Core2 line of processors, the power density is roughly constant. In addition, total chip area has decreased because process density has increased faster than area needed to implement the processor. The result is that power has decreased roughly following the decreasing chip area and newer chips are less expensive based on area and draw less power because they have no other choice do to physics.
So increasing the area used for a given number of transistors could offset higher clock rates however that will result in more expensive chips both because of fewer chips per wafer and lower yields do to defects. If you are someone like IBM that does not matter and they make the largest physical chip they can with power ratings to match but Intel only does that for server CPUs and check out how much they cost.
With an external MAC and PHY, there is no reason for a USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller to use just one PCI Express 3.0 lane. PCIe is convenient that way.