If you have good reason to believe your phone doesn't have apps you don't want your kids to use and the carrier sneaks them onto your phone without your permission or knowledge, how is that bad parenting?
If I sneak Hustler magazine into your kids room is it bad parenting to complain about that?
I had dinner with a guy who ran the ATM operations for a major Midwest bank about various schemes to defraud ATMs.
I remember in the 1980s seeing ATMs from his bank at the student union with exposed modems and I asked him explicitly about faking transactions. His response was that even back then they were running 3DES between ATM and bank and that it would have been pretty much impossible.
He says the best technique was and is just stealing the entire ATM and breaking into it at your convenience, which he said remained a considerable problem for freestanding ATMs. Sometimes alarms help, but he said the best defense was cash management -- filling those ATMs just before the biggest withdrawal periods and letting them run on minimal cash between.
I think a lot of average people went from 25" or 27" tube TVs to the discount priced 32 & 37" LCD TVs where the primary image difference with a clean signal is the distortion caused by stretching aspect ratio to fill the 16x9 panel and a zoomed SD letterbox image is, to these people, probably indistinguishable from the same image in HD on their sets.
My guess is that these are also the same people who grew up perfectly happy with 12" & 19" tube TVs.
I don't think mass adoption wall-sized images via projectors will happen due to the installation complexity and ambient light problems, but if they come up with new display technologies involving printable displays or printable films that can be applied to panels, then maybe.
It's always about PR for the very wealthy. "Security" is just a way of saying you have very bad PR and don't care about your image, just about the repercussions.
While you could probably trivially associated your tail number with a shell corporation, my guess is that the people at the WSJ are pretty good at tracing corporate ownership and these shell corporations are ultimately linked to the actual owners of the plane in question.
I'm sure that there is probably some chicanery associated with these records that can't easily be overcome, but my guess is you can't totally hide the info.
Burning oil needlessly has a negative affect on everyone and cannot be morally justified.
Define "needlessly" based on an objective criteria and then apply that standard to every single use of energy which produces CO2.
My sense is that you can't do this or if you can, your definition will be so broad that even the richest and most self-indulgent private jet owner's CO2 emissions will be such a tiny proportion that it won't matter.
Regardless of your standard, though, a luxury Jet owner CAN do things which will offset their CO2 usage -- plant trees, contribute money to some environmental cause which helps clean up waste, etc.
I've said the same thing. I've always wondered why there has never been a Federal RICO prosecution or conviction for spamming generally or spam businesses, which are usually some kind of illegal scam or selling something they're not supposed to (pills) to begin with.
A RICO investigation & prosecution would be great because it would expose the dark side of hosting, banking and credit card businesses that enable spammers to actually convert spam into cash. Under RICO laws all these people are part of the same criminal enterprise and are all culpable.
By cutting off the banking side of the equation you could really make spam kind of tough make money on, since you wouldn't be able to make or collect payments easily.
Do they? The depth of Netflix library, despite the apparent lack of quality, would seem to make it hard to cache or at least very inefficient unless the caching entity decided to bulk copy all of Netflix on-demand video library.
How many people are watching episode 20, season 2 of Rockford Files?
While this might make sense from a data storage perspective (even though I'd bet it's not), I could imagine licensees having issues with multiple third-party copies of their intellectual property.
What would make more sense would be Netflix "sponsoring" direct pipes from their storage farm directly to ISPs, bypassing "the internet", possibly even providing their own caching engines (thus keeping Hollywood's IP "in-house") for popular titles.
This takes the load off of a specific ISPs uplinks, the "sponsorship" keeps them on better terms with the ISPs and improves quality to customers and avoids the complexity (legal and technical) with using a generic caching/CDN.
...if you've had someone ask you with a straight face "..if you know of a good voice chat application for mobile phones."
Now, I know that this can be asked seriously in a specific way (ie, SIP specific, or "free" or whatever) but it still seems to suffer from a large amount of irony.
It's not hard to imagine an infectious disease scenario which really does resemble a zombie outbreak, up to and including biting as a means of infection -- imagine a rabies mutation, for example, which has an incubation period of a week but allows for the host to stay alive for 3-4 weeks. Presumably (like in 28 Days Later) they'd mostly die of starvation or dehydration, presuming that the symptoms of infection prevented most rational survival behavior like drinking and eating.
I'd generally worry more about the secondary effects of any widespread pandemic -- economic disruption, lack of health care resources for every other illness, and the general panic that would ensue (public trust is bad now, when you think death and illness are lurking, look out).
The CDC and other public health authorities create some of their own problems by casting political issues in public health terms (gun control, for example). My sense is they would have fewer problems if they focused on biological illness and didn't stray into gun control, seat belts, and other issues less directly connected to disease. I get the point they and others make on some of the issues related to food, but many others are tenuous at best and entirely political at worst.
To be fair to the Army, USAMRIID is a pretty big deal and probably has more civilian payback then you think.
The two main forces opposing sane drug laws are law enforcement and the pharmaceutical industry.
The former knows that without the WoD, they will lose a lot of their funding and authority and the public will likely push back on expansions of power without the bogeyman of "drugs" to justify things like no knock searches.
The pharmaceutical industry is opposed to it because they can't patent the drugs and would probably fear losing millions of anti-depressant prescriptions of marijuana was legalized.
I think that's where wind or tidal coupled with electrolysis of water come in. Wind power makes sense, but what to do with the electricity when it's available but not needed is the issue.
I know that hydrogen generation from water is energy-intensive, but why waste unused wind energy if you have the windmills in place, especially in some of the larger wind setups.
The hydrogen could be stored or converted to methane (less dangerous), possibly using the hydrogen or wind electricity as an energy source for the methane conversion process.
Overall it's very energy inefficient, but in the long haul you'd be using almost no external energy to produce a storable and transportable fuel that could be used in a wide variety of applications.
I know there's other schemes for storing wind power (high-pressure air, water pumping) but none produce a transportable fuel usable away from the storage site.
There's a cloud periphery of environmental complaints about power generation -- some complain about coal (greenhouse gases, pollution, etc), some complain about nuclear (waste, radiation).
Once you get through that, though, the solid core doesn't care about a solution for baseload electrical generation. Their answer is some kind of neo-primitivism involving no energy or extremely limited energy consumption.
Perhaps a fine dream, but I don't know how you get 6 billion people there.
A single gauge track network makes the most sense, but where you have multiple gauge networks, why not make the trucks adjustable? It sounds like a problem that even 19th century engineering could have solved.
The lab is located in a lower (the lowest?) level of the Soudan Mine. This mine is also a state park and you can tour the mine.
The tour (when I took it, about 9 years ago) took you down to the same level as the lab, which I think is the lowest level of the mine or within a level or two of the lowest level.
You ride a mine cart to a room where extraction of iron ore took place, hear some details about early mining, including a lights-out experience where they show you what it was like with nothing more than old-fashioned arc lamps on the miner's helmets.
Before you leave this level, you get to go into the lab area and get a look around. I don't think you go much past the entry way, but it's neat anyway.
The mine had a fire recently and I don't know if the tours are back in operation, but I believe they have every intention of continuing with them once they fix whatever happened.
The local cops don't care because they don't see a crime being committed against any local entity.
Furthermore, the media conglomerates see it as a national/global threat, not a local threat, so they want some kind of Federal entity involved.
The reason DHS gets involved is the media conglomerates like DHS-style power. So they call legislators who they have donated to heavily who also wield influence over DHS via committees or purse strings.
The legislators call DHS, insist that DHS should do something about this as it represents some kind of "homeland security threat" with subtle intimations about upcoming hearings, budget requests, etc.
DHS sees the political writing on the wall and gets involved.
My sense is DHS probably doesn't really care too much about this issue but at some bureaucratic level they think its good politics and it allows them to stake claims over new territory that they know, at some point, someone will claim and they hope that by being there first they can establish a de facto claim.
When someone comes close to challenging their power over the issue, they will then point at the history and "success" they have had in that sphere and get legislation passed making their claim de jure as well.
My sense is that people who actually *use* a computer also install dozens of applications and end up with complicated and highly tailored system configurations that are time consuming to get right and time consuming to recreate on a new system.
The effort to switch to a new system tends to outweigh the performance improvement and nobody does it until the performance improvement makes it really worthwhile (say, Q6600 to a new i5 or i7).
I've found that because I end up maintaining a system for a longer period, it pays to buy power today for applications very likely to need or use it in the lifetime of the machine. Avoid premature obsolescence.
And it's not a question of hiring "better" people -- sure, there are plenty of shops carrying a certain amount of dead weight, but I don't think that spending the same money for fewer, better people will necessarily be the solution.
I think you need a combination of more people and a way to improve your better people by providing access to more training.
Where I work, we're constantly bombarded with requests to obtain certifications or "get up to speed" on products yet no manager EVER makes a point to send someone to training to learn how to use a product correctly.
So we "figure it out on our own" -- usually we get it right, but I also see a ton of features that nobody has a strong enough grasp or enough time to learn on their own.
I ask those same questions about hybrid cars. The electric motors, batteries and more extensive electronics for regulating and controlling all of it takes real energy to mine and manufacture; rare earths likely used in the motors are not just intensive to mine but produce a ton of pollution to process.
I've even read that cars like Priuses with small tires consume more tires over their lifespan, further increasing their pollution in the vehicle's lifecycle.
I'm surprised they don't have a scope that can be programmed with ballistic info for your round. Either using canned data for a given projectile/load or with custom measurements taken using custom loads to account for velocity, bullet drop, wind speed and direction and humidity.
As I envision it, the scope would laser sight the distance to the target and adjust the reticule automatically to account for the distance, deviation from the horizontal plane, humidity, all using the data programmed into the scope.
You'd have to enter wind speed and direction at each shot, but that's more of a crapshoot because the wind can vary within the bullet path. Using actual measured data of wind impact on test shots, there's probably good statistical methods that could allow the scope to compensate based on rough estimates of wind speed and direction.
You might even be able to have the reticule adjust for the rifle recoil, too.
I put a half a case of.223 through my AR-15 on a hot day in July over the span of about two hours. I'm not sure I noticed much in changed accuracy, although I was only shooting clay targets set on edge at a 100 yards. I was still easily hitting the center of the targets.
I personally don't think that the barrel heating issue matters much for slow fire; perhaps at extreme distances (700+ yards), but I would also assume that bull barrels would compensate easily.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have good reason to believe your phone doesn't have apps you don't want your kids to use and the carrier sneaks them onto your phone without your permission or knowledge, how is that bad parenting?
If I sneak Hustler magazine into your kids room is it bad parenting to complain about that?
I want the digital signature to be embedded into the autopen signature so that the autopen signature can be digitally verified.
I just made that up, but could they do that?
I had dinner with a guy who ran the ATM operations for a major Midwest bank about various schemes to defraud ATMs.
I remember in the 1980s seeing ATMs from his bank at the student union with exposed modems and I asked him explicitly about faking transactions. His response was that even back then they were running 3DES between ATM and bank and that it would have been pretty much impossible.
He says the best technique was and is just stealing the entire ATM and breaking into it at your convenience, which he said remained a considerable problem for freestanding ATMs. Sometimes alarms help, but he said the best defense was cash management -- filling those ATMs just before the biggest withdrawal periods and letting them run on minimal cash between.
It may be a fringe benefit, but it is extremely valuable to work with calendars, email, etc while talking on the phone.
I hope this works in LTE.
I think a lot of average people went from 25" or 27" tube TVs to the discount priced 32 & 37" LCD TVs where the primary image difference with a clean signal is the distortion caused by stretching aspect ratio to fill the 16x9 panel and a zoomed SD letterbox image is, to these people, probably indistinguishable from the same image in HD on their sets.
My guess is that these are also the same people who grew up perfectly happy with 12" & 19" tube TVs.
I don't think mass adoption wall-sized images via projectors will happen due to the installation complexity and ambient light problems, but if they come up with new display technologies involving printable displays or printable films that can be applied to panels, then maybe.
What is this obsession people have with rules?
What is the obsession moralists have with making judgements based on ambiguous criteria?
It's always about PR for the very wealthy. "Security" is just a way of saying you have very bad PR and don't care about your image, just about the repercussions.
While you could probably trivially associated your tail number with a shell corporation, my guess is that the people at the WSJ are pretty good at tracing corporate ownership and these shell corporations are ultimately linked to the actual owners of the plane in question.
I'm sure that there is probably some chicanery associated with these records that can't easily be overcome, but my guess is you can't totally hide the info.
Burning oil needlessly has a negative affect on everyone and cannot be morally justified.
Define "needlessly" based on an objective criteria and then apply that standard to every single use of energy which produces CO2.
My sense is that you can't do this or if you can, your definition will be so broad that even the richest and most self-indulgent private jet owner's CO2 emissions will be such a tiny proportion that it won't matter.
Regardless of your standard, though, a luxury Jet owner CAN do things which will offset their CO2 usage -- plant trees, contribute money to some environmental cause which helps clean up waste, etc.
I've said the same thing. I've always wondered why there has never been a Federal RICO prosecution or conviction for spamming generally or spam businesses, which are usually some kind of illegal scam or selling something they're not supposed to (pills) to begin with.
A RICO investigation & prosecution would be great because it would expose the dark side of hosting, banking and credit card businesses that enable spammers to actually convert spam into cash. Under RICO laws all these people are part of the same criminal enterprise and are all culpable.
By cutting off the banking side of the equation you could really make spam kind of tough make money on, since you wouldn't be able to make or collect payments easily.
Do they? The depth of Netflix library, despite the apparent lack of quality, would seem to make it hard to cache or at least very inefficient unless the caching entity decided to bulk copy all of Netflix on-demand video library.
How many people are watching episode 20, season 2 of Rockford Files?
While this might make sense from a data storage perspective (even though I'd bet it's not), I could imagine licensees having issues with multiple third-party copies of their intellectual property.
What would make more sense would be Netflix "sponsoring" direct pipes from their storage farm directly to ISPs, bypassing "the internet", possibly even providing their own caching engines (thus keeping Hollywood's IP "in-house") for popular titles.
This takes the load off of a specific ISPs uplinks, the "sponsorship" keeps them on better terms with the ISPs and improves quality to customers and avoids the complexity (legal and technical) with using a generic caching/CDN.
...if you've had someone ask you with a straight face "..if you know of a good voice chat application for mobile phones."
Now, I know that this can be asked seriously in a specific way (ie, SIP specific, or "free" or whatever) but it still seems to suffer from a large amount of irony.
It's not hard to imagine an infectious disease scenario which really does resemble a zombie outbreak, up to and including biting as a means of infection -- imagine a rabies mutation, for example, which has an incubation period of a week but allows for the host to stay alive for 3-4 weeks. Presumably (like in 28 Days Later) they'd mostly die of starvation or dehydration, presuming that the symptoms of infection prevented most rational survival behavior like drinking and eating.
I'd generally worry more about the secondary effects of any widespread pandemic -- economic disruption, lack of health care resources for every other illness, and the general panic that would ensue (public trust is bad now, when you think death and illness are lurking, look out).
The CDC and other public health authorities create some of their own problems by casting political issues in public health terms (gun control, for example). My sense is they would have fewer problems if they focused on biological illness and didn't stray into gun control, seat belts, and other issues less directly connected to disease. I get the point they and others make on some of the issues related to food, but many others are tenuous at best and entirely political at worst.
To be fair to the Army, USAMRIID is a pretty big deal and probably has more civilian payback then you think.
The two main forces opposing sane drug laws are law enforcement and the pharmaceutical industry.
The former knows that without the WoD, they will lose a lot of their funding and authority and the public will likely push back on expansions of power without the bogeyman of "drugs" to justify things like no knock searches.
The pharmaceutical industry is opposed to it because they can't patent the drugs and would probably fear losing millions of anti-depressant prescriptions of marijuana was legalized.
I think that's where wind or tidal coupled with electrolysis of water come in. Wind power makes sense, but what to do with the electricity when it's available but not needed is the issue.
I know that hydrogen generation from water is energy-intensive, but why waste unused wind energy if you have the windmills in place, especially in some of the larger wind setups.
The hydrogen could be stored or converted to methane (less dangerous), possibly using the hydrogen or wind electricity as an energy source for the methane conversion process.
Overall it's very energy inefficient, but in the long haul you'd be using almost no external energy to produce a storable and transportable fuel that could be used in a wide variety of applications.
I know there's other schemes for storing wind power (high-pressure air, water pumping) but none produce a transportable fuel usable away from the storage site.
When it comes to Hollywood and media, who do you think they support? The Democrats are deeply in bed with Hollywood.
There's a cloud periphery of environmental complaints about power generation -- some complain about coal (greenhouse gases, pollution, etc), some complain about nuclear (waste, radiation).
Once you get through that, though, the solid core doesn't care about a solution for baseload electrical generation. Their answer is some kind of neo-primitivism involving no energy or extremely limited energy consumption.
Perhaps a fine dream, but I don't know how you get 6 billion people there.
That's because she's 11 years old, nitwit.
A single gauge track network makes the most sense, but where you have multiple gauge networks, why not make the trucks adjustable? It sounds like a problem that even 19th century engineering could have solved.
The lab is located in a lower (the lowest?) level of the Soudan Mine. This mine is also a state park and you can tour the mine.
The tour (when I took it, about 9 years ago) took you down to the same level as the lab, which I think is the lowest level of the mine or within a level or two of the lowest level.
You ride a mine cart to a room where extraction of iron ore took place, hear some details about early mining, including a lights-out experience where they show you what it was like with nothing more than old-fashioned arc lamps on the miner's helmets.
Before you leave this level, you get to go into the lab area and get a look around. I don't think you go much past the entry way, but it's neat anyway.
The mine had a fire recently and I don't know if the tours are back in operation, but I believe they have every intention of continuing with them once they fix whatever happened.
The local cops don't care because they don't see a crime being committed against any local entity.
Furthermore, the media conglomerates see it as a national/global threat, not a local threat, so they want some kind of Federal entity involved.
The reason DHS gets involved is the media conglomerates like DHS-style power. So they call legislators who they have donated to heavily who also wield influence over DHS via committees or purse strings.
The legislators call DHS, insist that DHS should do something about this as it represents some kind of "homeland security threat" with subtle intimations about upcoming hearings, budget requests, etc.
DHS sees the political writing on the wall and gets involved.
My sense is DHS probably doesn't really care too much about this issue but at some bureaucratic level they think its good politics and it allows them to stake claims over new territory that they know, at some point, someone will claim and they hope that by being there first they can establish a de facto claim.
When someone comes close to challenging their power over the issue, they will then point at the history and "success" they have had in that sphere and get legislation passed making their claim de jure as well.
My sense is that people who actually *use* a computer also install dozens of applications and end up with complicated and highly tailored system configurations that are time consuming to get right and time consuming to recreate on a new system.
The effort to switch to a new system tends to outweigh the performance improvement and nobody does it until the performance improvement makes it really worthwhile (say, Q6600 to a new i5 or i7).
I've found that because I end up maintaining a system for a longer period, it pays to buy power today for applications very likely to need or use it in the lifetime of the machine. Avoid premature obsolescence.
That's what I read into it.
And it's not a question of hiring "better" people -- sure, there are plenty of shops carrying a certain amount of dead weight, but I don't think that spending the same money for fewer, better people will necessarily be the solution.
I think you need a combination of more people and a way to improve your better people by providing access to more training.
Where I work, we're constantly bombarded with requests to obtain certifications or "get up to speed" on products yet no manager EVER makes a point to send someone to training to learn how to use a product correctly.
So we "figure it out on our own" -- usually we get it right, but I also see a ton of features that nobody has a strong enough grasp or enough time to learn on their own.
I ask those same questions about hybrid cars. The electric motors, batteries and more extensive electronics for regulating and controlling all of it takes real energy to mine and manufacture; rare earths likely used in the motors are not just intensive to mine but produce a ton of pollution to process.
I've even read that cars like Priuses with small tires consume more tires over their lifespan, further increasing their pollution in the vehicle's lifecycle.
I'm surprised they don't have a scope that can be programmed with ballistic info for your round. Either using canned data for a given projectile/load or with custom measurements taken using custom loads to account for velocity, bullet drop, wind speed and direction and humidity.
As I envision it, the scope would laser sight the distance to the target and adjust the reticule automatically to account for the distance, deviation from the horizontal plane, humidity, all using the data programmed into the scope.
You'd have to enter wind speed and direction at each shot, but that's more of a crapshoot because the wind can vary within the bullet path. Using actual measured data of wind impact on test shots, there's probably good statistical methods that could allow the scope to compensate based on rough estimates of wind speed and direction.
You might even be able to have the reticule adjust for the rifle recoil, too.
I put a half a case of .223 through my AR-15 on a hot day in July over the span of about two hours. I'm not sure I noticed much in changed accuracy, although I was only shooting clay targets set on edge at a 100 yards. I was still easily hitting the center of the targets.
I personally don't think that the barrel heating issue matters much for slow fire; perhaps at extreme distances (700+ yards), but I would also assume that bull barrels would compensate easily.