The FCC only has authority over the U.S. radio spectrum. Now he's got some 200 more approvals to go.
Iridium did the same thing on a smaller scale back in the 90's when the company was owned by Motorola . The tech was worked out very quickly. It was the politics that slowed them to a crawl. Motorola found out exactly how hard it was to get all the world governments and incumbent telcos to agree to give them a sliver of spectrum. They had initially planned on direct satellite to phone communications until several telcos raised their hand and said no way, they had to go through ground stations where they could listen in on the conversations as well as charge access fees.
Musk just fired Starlink's executive team because they couldn't meet his timeline. If they were bogged down trying to get spectrum, it's no surprise - it took Motorola years and thousands of meetings and bribes to pull it off. Motorola's final approval only came after a Motorola lobbyist waited until a specific country's representatives fell asleep. The lobbyist knew the reps were going to vote against approving the worldwide spectrum at an international telecom conference. The lobbyist delayed until 4am in the morning when very few representatives were present and the known going-to-vote-no guys were present but asleep. Only then did he bring Motorola's request up for a vote. It passed and Iridium was born
After all that drama, Motorola/Iridium ended up with a very skinny slice of spectrum. More spectrum means more bandwidth. Bandwidth is something Iridium isn't known for.
I hadn't realized Adobe had gone subscription only. The last time I had to update Adobe Acrobat, it was still for sale. At some point I can see it needing an upgrade so I have to start thinking about how to alter the document production flow.
I use two pieces of Adobe Acrobat every day. One piece looks like a printer that my code prints to. The output consists of ps files that go to disk.
The other piece is Adobe Distiller which bundles up the multiple ps files into a single pdf. The pdf gets emailed to my clients.
IOS has a "feature" that the OS pops up a request for your Apple ID credentials at random times. Open Pandora and you'll get a popup. Open pretty much anything and the popup appears. There's no provenance to the pop up so you don't know what part of OS is asking for the credentials or why. Backup works without answering the request as you can be signed into iCloud and still get the pop up.
My response is to dismiss the pop up and continue with what I'm doing but it's a PITA. A naive user will enter their credentials in the hope the "feature" is mollified which it sometimes isn't.
The correct way for IOS to ask for the credential is for the popup to say "Open Settings/icloud ( or whatever) and enter your AppleID." Settings would second the request by posting a little icon indicating there's a response pending ala a text message. An animation within settings would guide the forgetful user if the path is more than one level deep in settings so they'd navigate to the proper IOS setting to satisfy the pop up.The point of all that is you know you're talking to Settings when you provide credentials.
The current scheme is ripe for an app to steal your Apple ID. Write an app that does something kind of useful, wait for the 10th, 20th, run and pop an identical pop up that looks just like the OS popup. The user can't tell if it's the app or IOS asking and enters their credentials. Voila, you have access to the user's Apple ID. A little more elided hacking will circumvent 2 factor if it's enabled.
Too much water has gone under the bridge that I guess an obvious attack is new again.
Cheaters will cheat. Doesn't mean that teaching is worthless because cheaters exist. Some folks taught themselves but most of us learned to read, write and compute in a classroom. Those of us who liked it, got good at it and those initial lessons were invaluable.
For me, taking a Fortran class way back when introduced me to syllogisms. Even though Fortran was an incredibly stilted language, it did teach the basics of logical thinking - a key skill that applies way beyond computers.
Few people know how to think coherently on their own. You may have just 'picked it up' but a lot of us benefited from being taught how to think logically.
I built a 64k RAM 8080 computer on an S-100 bus. I started it out with CPM but transitioned to a UCSD Pascal environment so I could run a 6502 cross compiler.
I used the computer to learn how to program the Atari VCS game machine using a "Magic Card" that provided an interface to the Atari's 6502. I built a keyboard interface that emulated key presses on the Magic Card to load and test my game code. The Atari VCS had 128 bytes of RAM and the Magic Card provide around 1 or 2 K of RAM that served as a ROM emulator for the VCS. You really had to hoard RAM when all you had were 128 bytes to work with.
The whole rig cost around $2,000 in 1980 dollars but more than paid for itself in that I ended up working at Imagic, an Atari video game startup. That was one of the best jobs I had as the people I worked with were amazingly talented.
They blew through $1 Billion before grinding to a halt when their carbon fiber oxygen tank delaminated during testing. Their budget was so tight, that a single setback like that one killed the project. They considered ditching CF in favor of an aluminum oxygen tank but the added weight didn't leave enough for any significant payload.
Perhaps this group has better carbon fiber manufacturing skills than Lockheed's Skunk works did back then and they'l be able to make good or perhaps it's just a "let's find some rubes and fleece them" scheme.
Time will tell.
Side story. I took a group of middle school students to Palmdale to see the X-33 chassis that was then under construction. It was the first time any of us had seen anything made with Carbon Fiber. The engineer giving us the tour handed us a CF strut to pass around and said "Carbon fiber is very light and much stronger than steel. It'll take a lot of abuse." When the strut was handed to this one particular kid, he started banging on it to see how much abuse it would take. The kid's mother freaked out while the engineer laughed it off and said "send him to work for us when he graduates. We need his kind of thinking."
All this time I had thought the archive was non-partisan. Sorry to see them choose a side. I'm a conservative and now I can't be sure I can trust them to be even handed when I archive pages that have a conservative slant.
Now to figure out how to stop auto-donating each month.
They'll make money from the cell phone service and they'll make money from the service fees they charge the cable customers for going over their data caps due to the cell phone traffic.
>Sorry, can you outline how many fly overs the russians made vs how many the americans did?
I don't ordinarily respond to cowards but this really needs addressing.
The Russians didn't fly over the U.S. for two reasons. One, they didn't have U2 or SR71 technology so they couldn't do flyovers without getting shot down. Two they didn't need to. Russia had entire cities that foreigners weren't allowed to travel. We on the other hand only restricted access to military bases. Hell, Khrushchev rode a train through one of our nuclear missile bases when he toured the U.S.
The USSR was a huge entity spanning 11 time zones so missiles in Turkey weren't anywhere near as threatening to Moscow as Cuban missiles were to Miami. Nonetheless, Kennedy agreed to remove them in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing their missiles from Cuba.
My thought is that cancer at its core is a bit error that is disabling apoptosis (cell suicide in response to its neighbors telling it to). Once a cell ignores apoptosis, all bets are off as to what that cell will do. It's free to reuse any genetic code that's available just like a virus can.
Consider that metastasis, the migration of cancer cells, is how we all got our start. After we were conceived, the fertilized egg migrated from a free floating organism in the fallopian tubes to attach itself to the uterine wall. Cancer uses those routines.
Once at the uterine wall, the fertilized egg sends out signals to the uterus to build a blood network to feed the egg. Cancer uses those routines.
The egg grows in an organized fashion into us. Perhaps because cancer has disabled apoptosis, it grows into a disorganized mess. Apoptosis is a pruning mechanism that keeps cells from varying too much from their neighbors. Sort of an HOA on steroids.
Consider that roughly 10^9 cells engage in cell divisions every day, that each cell has to copy around 10^9 base pairs which entails a huge number of parallel processes that have to coordinate during mitosis and it's amazing we don't all die from the errors that are bound to arise.
I have a scrambled 100,000+ English word dictionary. I have a javascript script that I feed 100 random bits drawn from John Walker's Hotbits. The script produces 4 random words when taken together are at least 16 characters long. To remember the four words, I construct a single sentence story that says something about the site.
Since I have the source code which I run in a browser that has never seen the web, I don't have to trust the author - that's me - to keep my passwords secret. The only thing I need to trust are the 72 bits are what Walker says they are and that his site isn't recording the bits he's handing out. If it ever comes to thinking otherwise, I have a lava lamp. Yeah, I'm that old.
I only use the script on moderately and very important to secure like email and work. For sites that I don't care if someone pretends to be me, I use one word passwords.
There are 10^20 possible combinations . Adding a fifth word for banking cranks that up to 10^25 combinations. I can type quickly so 4-6 word phrases aren't a problem for me.
I suspect a clever cryptologists could find several weaknesses in the approach (etaoin shrdlu comes to mind) but I think the resulting pass phrase will defeat most attacks.
Your prodigious display of math is all for naught since you've essentially proved 1=2.
I grew up in the early 60's when sonic booms were part of the background along with Duck and Cover. Nuclear war was just around the corner, or so we thought, and jets routinely generated sonic booms. Sometimes they'd sound like distant thunder and other times they'd rattle the house. Those were far louder, and more objectionable, than your putative 10 mph breeze.
Thankfully, they tapered off towards the end of the 60's as the Air Force realized people *really* didn't like being rattled and those same people objected to Congress. Since the later controlled the budget, the Air Force cut back on high speed overflight over the cities.
Booms weren't just domestic issues. NOVA interviewed a British Consul who was sitting in a tent in the Middle East discussing trade issues with his Middle Eastern counterparts. The Concorde flies overhead and the resultant boom startled all the conferees. The Consul said one of the men pointed at the sky and said "Concorde." at which point the Consul realized another trade issue had just been raised.
Some of those booms were anything but quiet and they sure weren't FUD as you assert.
Hard to worry about what happened over a 100 years ago. Had the issue bothered a lot of people, Hawaii wouldn't have voted to join the U.S. in 1959 by 93%.
The "rightful owners" wouldn't stand a chance against whatever power chose to occupy the islands were they to secede from the union.
It's hard to see this as anything more than a routine "pay us off and we'll shut up" shakedown.
These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
We don't have to break the treaty. We can withdraw from the treaty instead. From the treaty
Article XVI
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification.
Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany.
Had you gone to MIT or Stanford, you would have been surrounded by students who wanted nothing to do with being a wage slave but were looking to start the next fortune 500 company when they graduated. The lessons learned at college depend on the aspirations and talents of the student body.
The fields I drive by on my way to work put the lie to the author's premise. A week ago, I saw a road-scrapper type device running around a field that had a spinning laser positioned more or less in the center of the field. The laser provided a level reference that the scrapper responded to moment by moment by lifting or lowering the blade. The machines are designed to build a field with a precise gradient so the farmer can minimize the amount of water needed to irrigate the field as well as to uniformly irrigate the crop. The water may be free but lifting it from the aquifer isn't.
Further down the road, there was a device that was building perfect raised beds covered in plastic. Strawberries need to be grown in well drained soil and the raised beds provide that. The plastic is used to keep a fumigant on the bed until it decays instead of leaking into the atmosphere prior to seeding. Once the soil is fumigated, it's planted by an automated planter that leaves the plastic in place to reduce evaporation - again to save water.
The next field over was being harvested by a machine that requires two people to operate it. Ten years ago, there'd be a crew of 30 doing the same task.
The industrial revolution upended farming from what it was centuries ago and that process hasn't stopped since. The net result is fewer people are needed to grow more food at a lower cost. Downside is calories have become so cheap that most of us are overfed.
Slashdot Mirror
The FCC only has authority over the U.S. radio spectrum. Now he's got some 200 more approvals to go.
Iridium did the same thing on a smaller scale back in the 90's when the company was owned by Motorola . The tech was worked out very quickly. It was the politics that slowed them to a crawl. Motorola found out exactly how hard it was to get all the world governments and incumbent telcos to agree to give them a sliver of spectrum. They had initially planned on direct satellite to phone communications until several telcos raised their hand and said no way, they had to go through ground stations where they could listen in on the conversations as well as charge access fees.
Musk just fired Starlink's executive team because they couldn't meet his timeline. If they were bogged down trying to get spectrum, it's no surprise - it took Motorola years and thousands of meetings and bribes to pull it off. Motorola's final approval only came after a Motorola lobbyist waited until a specific country's representatives fell asleep. The lobbyist knew the reps were going to vote against approving the worldwide spectrum at an international telecom conference. The lobbyist delayed until 4am in the morning when very few representatives were present and the known going-to-vote-no guys were present but asleep. Only then did he bring Motorola's request up for a vote. It passed and Iridium was born
After all that drama, Motorola/Iridium ended up with a very skinny slice of spectrum. More spectrum means more bandwidth. Bandwidth is something Iridium isn't known for.
230 million websites. 400k poorly configured. 4*10^5/2.3*10^8 is less than 0.2% of websites surveyed screwed this up.
400k is a big number but it's good to know most developers aren't that stupid on this issue.
What with the censorship by Google, Twitter et. al., I really don't want mega corporations telling me whom I may and may not listen to.
Using Safari to listen or watch a podcast doesn't cut it for a variety of reasons.
It's time to resurrect dedicated rss players and bypass the Internet's censors.
I hadn't realized Adobe had gone subscription only. The last time I had to update Adobe Acrobat, it was still for sale. At some point I can see it needing an upgrade so I have to start thinking about how to alter the document production flow.
I use two pieces of Adobe Acrobat every day. One piece looks like a printer that my code prints to. The output consists of ps files that go to disk.
The other piece is Adobe Distiller which bundles up the multiple ps files into a single pdf. The pdf gets emailed to my clients.
Any suggestions for replacements?
IOS has a "feature" that the OS pops up a request for your Apple ID credentials at random times. Open Pandora and you'll get a popup. Open pretty much anything and the popup appears. There's no provenance to the pop up so you don't know what part of OS is asking for the credentials or why. Backup works without answering the request as you can be signed into iCloud and still get the pop up.
My response is to dismiss the pop up and continue with what I'm doing but it's a PITA. A naive user will enter their credentials in the hope the "feature" is mollified which it sometimes isn't.
The correct way for IOS to ask for the credential is for the popup to say "Open Settings/icloud ( or whatever) and enter your AppleID." Settings would second the request by posting a little icon indicating there's a response pending ala a text message. An animation within settings would guide the forgetful user if the path is more than one level deep in settings so they'd navigate to the proper IOS setting to satisfy the pop up.The point of all that is you know you're talking to Settings when you provide credentials.
The current scheme is ripe for an app to steal your Apple ID. Write an app that does something kind of useful, wait for the 10th, 20th, run and pop an identical pop up that looks just like the OS popup. The user can't tell if it's the app or IOS asking and enters their credentials. Voila, you have access to the user's Apple ID. A little more elided hacking will circumvent 2 factor if it's enabled.
Too much water has gone under the bridge that I guess an obvious attack is new again.
... oh wait.
Maybe Scott had a legitimate reason not to sign the letter.
Five years seems to a magic number....
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2010601/googles-brin-predicts-self-driving-cars-for-ordinary-people.html
Cheaters will cheat. Doesn't mean that teaching is worthless because cheaters exist. Some folks taught themselves but most of us learned to read, write and compute in a classroom. Those of us who liked it, got good at it and those initial lessons were invaluable.
For me, taking a Fortran class way back when introduced me to syllogisms. Even though Fortran was an incredibly stilted language, it did teach the basics of logical thinking - a key skill that applies way beyond computers.
Few people know how to think coherently on their own. You may have just 'picked it up' but a lot of us benefited from being taught how to think logically.
Not sure who the market is for yet another music feed.
If someone spends time curating their spotify/pandora/ feed are they really going to want to spend the time to curate a separate Tesla music feed?
I built a 64k RAM 8080 computer on an S-100 bus. I started it out with CPM but transitioned to a UCSD Pascal environment so I could run a 6502 cross compiler.
I used the computer to learn how to program the Atari VCS game machine using a "Magic Card" that provided an interface to the Atari's 6502. I built a keyboard interface that emulated key presses on the Magic Card to load and test my game code. The Atari VCS had 128 bytes of RAM and the Magic Card provide around 1 or 2 K of RAM that served as a ROM emulator for the VCS. You really had to hoard RAM when all you had were 128 bytes to work with.
The whole rig cost around $2,000 in 1980 dollars but more than paid for itself in that I ended up working at Imagic, an Atari video game startup. That was one of the best jobs I had as the people I worked with were amazingly talented.
The Lockheed X-33 Single Stage to Orbit Vehicle Skunk Works team was making identical claims back in the mid 90's.
They blew through $1 Billion before grinding to a halt when their carbon fiber oxygen tank delaminated during testing. Their budget was so tight, that a single setback like that one killed the project. They considered ditching CF in favor of an aluminum oxygen tank but the added weight didn't leave enough for any significant payload.
Perhaps this group has better carbon fiber manufacturing skills than Lockheed's Skunk works did back then and they'l be able to make good or perhaps it's just a "let's find some rubes and fleece them" scheme.
Time will tell.
Side story. I took a group of middle school students to Palmdale to see the X-33 chassis that was then under construction. It was the first time any of us had seen anything made with Carbon Fiber. The engineer giving us the tour handed us a CF strut to pass around and said "Carbon fiber is very light and much stronger than steel. It'll take a lot of abuse." When the strut was handed to this one particular kid, he started banging on it to see how much abuse it would take. The kid's mother freaked out while the engineer laughed it off and said "send him to work for us when he graduates. We need his kind of thinking."
The strut survived the kid's abuse.
I hate pointless fear mongering articles. Best example of fake news there is right here on slashdot.
Trump isn't likely to abuse the alert system but leave it to slashdot to make an issue of it.
Trump won. Get over it already.
All this time I had thought the archive was non-partisan. Sorry to see them choose a side. I'm a conservative and now I can't be sure I can trust them to be even handed when I archive pages that have a conservative slant.
Now to figure out how to stop auto-donating each month.
They'll make money from the cell phone service and they'll make money from the service fees they charge the cable customers for going over their data caps due to the cell phone traffic.
Clever !
>Sorry, can you outline how many fly overs the russians made vs how many the americans did?
I don't ordinarily respond to cowards but this really needs addressing.
The Russians didn't fly over the U.S. for two reasons. One, they didn't have U2 or SR71 technology so they couldn't do flyovers without getting shot down. Two they didn't need to. Russia had entire cities that foreigners weren't allowed to travel. We on the other hand only restricted access to military bases. Hell, Khrushchev rode a train through one of our nuclear missile bases when he toured the U.S.
The USSR was a huge entity spanning 11 time zones so missiles in Turkey weren't anywhere near as threatening to Moscow as Cuban missiles were to Miami. Nonetheless, Kennedy agreed to remove them in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing their missiles from Cuba.
My thought is that cancer at its core is a bit error that is disabling apoptosis (cell suicide in response to its neighbors telling it to). Once a cell ignores apoptosis, all bets are off as to what that cell will do. It's free to reuse any genetic code that's available just like a virus can.
Consider that metastasis, the migration of cancer cells, is how we all got our start. After we were conceived, the fertilized egg migrated from a free floating organism in the fallopian tubes to attach itself to the uterine wall. Cancer uses those routines.
Once at the uterine wall, the fertilized egg sends out signals to the uterus to build a blood network to feed the egg. Cancer uses those routines.
The egg grows in an organized fashion into us. Perhaps because cancer has disabled apoptosis, it grows into a disorganized mess. Apoptosis is a pruning mechanism that keeps cells from varying too much from their neighbors. Sort of an HOA on steroids.
Consider that roughly 10^9 cells engage in cell divisions every day, that each cell has to copy around 10^9 base pairs which entails a huge number of parallel processes that have to coordinate during mitosis and it's amazing we don't all die from the errors that are bound to arise.
I have a scrambled 100,000+ English word dictionary. I have a javascript script that I feed 100 random bits drawn from John Walker's Hotbits. The script produces 4 random words when taken together are at least 16 characters long. To remember the four words, I construct a single sentence story that says something about the site.
Since I have the source code which I run in a browser that has never seen the web, I don't have to trust the author - that's me - to keep my passwords secret. The only thing I need to trust are the 72 bits are what Walker says they are and that his site isn't recording the bits he's handing out. If it ever comes to thinking otherwise, I have a lava lamp. Yeah, I'm that old.
I only use the script on moderately and very important to secure like email and work. For sites that I don't care if someone pretends to be me, I use one word passwords.
There are 10^20 possible combinations . Adding a fifth word for banking cranks that up to 10^25 combinations. I can type quickly so 4-6 word phrases aren't a problem for me.
I suspect a clever cryptologists could find several weaknesses in the approach (etaoin shrdlu comes to mind) but I think the resulting pass phrase will defeat most attacks.
Your prodigious display of math is all for naught since you've essentially proved 1=2.
I grew up in the early 60's when sonic booms were part of the background along with Duck and Cover. Nuclear war was just around the corner, or so we thought, and jets routinely generated sonic booms. Sometimes they'd sound like distant thunder and other times they'd rattle the house. Those were far louder, and more objectionable, than your putative 10 mph breeze.
Thankfully, they tapered off towards the end of the 60's as the Air Force realized people *really* didn't like being rattled and those same people objected to Congress. Since the later controlled the budget, the Air Force cut back on high speed overflight over the cities.
Booms weren't just domestic issues. NOVA interviewed a British Consul who was sitting in a tent in the Middle East discussing trade issues with his Middle Eastern counterparts. The Concorde flies overhead and the resultant boom startled all the conferees. The Consul said one of the men pointed at the sky and said "Concorde." at which point the Consul realized another trade issue had just been raised.
Some of those booms were anything but quiet and they sure weren't FUD as you assert.
Hard to worry about what happened over a 100 years ago. Had the issue bothered a lot of people, Hawaii wouldn't have voted to join the U.S. in 1959 by 93%.
The "rightful owners" wouldn't stand a chance against whatever power chose to occupy the islands were they to secede from the union.
It's hard to see this as anything more than a routine "pay us off and we'll shut up" shakedown.
I don't see the problem here. Just put a straw downstream from the turbines and you have instant cioppino.
These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
The cave paintings in France are definitely art and were created around the same time.
Same thing happened in the 50's and 60's to Britain. Loads of smart people came here because there were so many jobs here and not at home.
Now the jobs are in China and the available positions are over there, not here.
We don't have to break the treaty. We can withdraw from the treaty instead. From the treaty
Article XVI
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the
Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary
Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of
this notification.
Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany.
Had you gone to MIT or Stanford, you would have been surrounded by students who wanted nothing to do with being a wage slave but were looking to start the next fortune 500 company when they graduated. The lessons learned at college depend on the aspirations and talents of the student body.
The fields I drive by on my way to work put the lie to the author's premise. A week ago, I saw a road-scrapper type device running around a field that had a spinning laser positioned more or less in the center of the field. The laser provided a level reference that the scrapper responded to moment by moment by lifting or lowering the blade. The machines are designed to build a field with a precise gradient so the farmer can minimize the amount of water needed to irrigate the field as well as to uniformly irrigate the crop. The water may be free but lifting it from the aquifer isn't.
Further down the road, there was a device that was building perfect raised beds covered in plastic. Strawberries need to be grown in well drained soil and the raised beds provide that. The plastic is used to keep a fumigant on the bed until it decays instead of leaking into the atmosphere prior to seeding. Once the soil is fumigated, it's planted by an automated planter that leaves the plastic in place to reduce evaporation - again to save water.
The next field over was being harvested by a machine that requires two people to operate it. Ten years ago, there'd be a crew of 30 doing the same task.
The industrial revolution upended farming from what it was centuries ago and that process hasn't stopped since. The net result is fewer people are needed to grow more food at a lower cost. Downside is calories have become so cheap that most of us are overfed.