Mi Casa Verde makes the Vera home automation system. It's built on OpenWRT. For security systems it supports several different brands of Z-wave wireless sensors. It can control lights, locks, alarms, blinds, temperature, IP cameras, etc. It speaks Z-wave via a built in radio, but can also control Insteon and other home automation systems. And it's meant to be hacked and extended. You can even install a growl plugin for Vera, and then a growl notification app on your cell phone, if you want to be alerted by it. Nothing requires a monthly fee.
They offer a free service for remote access, but you certainly don't need them to do it for you. (All their service does is eliminate hassles with DNS and firewalls by serving as a proxy.) Some people simply poke a hole in their firewall allowing them to SSL directly into it.
The company is really good with their customers.
My only complaint is that no matter what they say, it still takes technical ability to set it up. It's not what I'd call plug-and-play ready to sell at Home Depot. No home automation system has reached that level of maturity yet.
I don't get it... we can't even secure our nuclear power plants, water and waste processing facilities, and other critical public infrastructure from attacks on industrial infrastructure. Why would anyone in their right mind think home automation would be any more secure?
We wouldn't think they're more secure, because we don't need to take them as seriously. By the same logic, why would anyone worry too much about their home automation system when there are so many other more valuable systems to attack?
I don't yet have door locks, windows, or security systems tied into mine, so pretty much all a bad guy could do would be to blink the lights. If he was way smarter than me, he might figure out how to turn on my TV remotely (I'm still having problems integrating it, and would likely appreciate his assistance.) About the most damage he could do would be to disable my water sensors, so if my sump pump failed my basement would get wet without alerting me. He could threaten to hold my house hostage, denying me the use of my home automation system unless I paid him - which would earn him nothing but scorn until I disconnected and reconfigured the systems.
But if he attacked a water plant he could shut down water, burst pipes, or blow out pumps, causing millions of dollars in damages. He could hold the city hostage. It's a much more interesting and lucrative target.
The cypherpunk community has long pooh-poohed allowing "weak" encryption to become entrenched and create a false sense of security. But this "secutrity through purity" approach has resulted in the abject failure of the widespread adoption of encryption at all levels.
Hardly. The inability of the community was due to a legal morass of import and export laws, patents, prohibitions, and fears. Pioneers like Zimmerman were harassed at customs, and investigated by the FBI. Efforts to standardize encryption were thwarted by things like CALEA, and hardware like the Clipper chip. Even RSA included key escrow in their PGP offerings.
Can we not find some sort of barely acceptable common standard and just start routinely implementing it and make the marketing people figure out how to describe it as a sexy feature?
What, pray tell, is a barely acceptable common standard? All we know about the NSA's capabilities are gross capacity requirements, like "the Utah data center will require 65MW and 1,000,000 gallons of water a day." That doesn't tell me if they can routinely break RSA, DH, or SSL. It doesn't tell me if they know a cryptanalytic attack on AES or 3DES. It doesn't tell me if they have 4096-bit quantum computers that can open anything instantly.
It also doesn't solve any of the still-unsolved hard problems of authentication. How do I know your real identity is conspirator23? How do I know this is your key? How do I know we're not being played by an Agency-in-the-middle?
Having weak security puts us in the position we were in last month: we were being monitored but were unaware of it. In many ways weak security is worse. At least today we have no illusion of security.
It doesn't take much of a slip-up to reveal your identity.
Look at Panopticlick from the EFF. They can uniquely identify most computers just from the fingerprints in the browser - your collection of fonts, browser plug-ins, and other customizations are usually unique to one machine. So if you ever used Google and did anything that identifies yourself, such as purchased something online and had it shipped to your house, and you later use that same browser through Tor and surf to any site they are observing, or through any exit node under their scrutiny, or to any site loading javascripts from an NSA collaborator such as Google, they would be able to associate your anonymous activities with your identified session. (Ironically, an iPad or iPhone is usually very generic because Apple doesn't allow Safari to be modified. However, they still accept cookies and have no deliberate provisions for anonymity.)
We also have evidence that the intelligence agencies already understand this, and are actively using such information. The Gauss malware installs a font named Palida Narrow, which enables any site you visit to surreptitiously check to see if you're infected with Gauss. It's the same idea and the same mechanism.
To safely use Tor, you really need to be careful. You need a stock generic browser, launched from a clean OS image, and you should hope many other people are doing the same. A browser that returns randomly varying attributes to every request would be useful. Block flash, block cookies, and block javascript and all scripts entirely - you dont want Google Analytics or any of the thousand other profiling services to accidentally tag you. You need to connect from varying locations, none of which are your home. A wifi card that allows you to set a random MAC may help. And you likely need to do more - I certainly don't know everything they can observe.
I find it used to be very common to see PWM tail/brake lights flickering. It's definitely pronounced when there's relative motion between the other car and mine: when he's entering a turn, for example, or when I'm scanning around looking for traffic. If my eyes are already tracking him, it's much less noticeable.
If it's true that more new cars are using LED tail lights than before, (cost and cosmetic reasons,) then I'd expect to notice it more than I have been. I'm thinking that means they have a higher pulse rate. Either that or I'm getting older and don't notice it as much, or my eyes aren't as responsive as they once were, or my driving has improved and I'm tracking them more often.
You had a family of elephants? Luxury. We had a tribe of howler monkeys move in next door, where they apparently rewarded their children's behavior of "squealing when excited", "shrieking when talking", and "screaming when unhappy". The only good to come out of the housing crisis was when they were foreclosed upon and moved out.
80% over a period of 15 years, when compared to 40% over two months, makes their peso look rock solid.
The problem with an unstable currency is it attracts currency speculators. They will come in and suck value from the economy, while contributing nothing but minuscule trading fees.
For all the cries that Bitcoin is "unstable", it seems to have settled quite nicely after its April spike.
That's the one that got me. Two months where the price only fluctuated by less than 40% does not a pattern of stability make! There is no trend on this chart that leads me to believe it's ever been any more stable than the Iranian Rial.
Seriously, UV dye taggants have been around for decades. You sprinkle fairy dust on the stuff you don't want touched, then UV shine the people who might have touched it. If their fingers glow, they're a suspect; you have probable cause to check them for stolen property. But if they go home and wash their hands, that means you failed to catch them in the act and you suck at your job as a security person.
Being near the ventilation system outlets, or washing the clothes of a warehouse employee, or of sitting next to him on the bus, or standing in line at McDonalds when he sneezes, all those sound like ways to spread the DNA tags. It'll be meaningless fast, if it can prove nothing conclusively.
[ Disclaimer: I spent several years working in a precision grinding shop, grinding machined parts to very tight tolerances, measuring them with carefully calibrated tools, and achieving accuracy that lathes simply are not capable of achieving. So what I consider acceptable accuracy and what you consider accurate will likely vary more than slightly. ]
A 3D extrusion printer is not exactly a precision tool. There is a limit to the precision of the parts it can print. That's neither good nor bad, it's simply a fact of the design of the machine and the tolerance of the parts that it was built from, as well as the plastic extrusion process itself.
I fully understand that you can build a device with 3D printed parts, and it will function. But those parts are not precise, and devices built that rely on them will not operate with precision or accuracy. For most of the parts you're likely printing, that's not a requirement. For example, the parts that join rods together on a RepRap don't have to be accurate or precise, they just need to grip the rods securely. The person doing the assembly will align the rods accurately.
However, there are components in the movement chain where precision is important. If the 3D printed gear feeding plastic into the extrusion nozzle is not perfectly round, it can cause minute alterations to the feed speed of the filament, producing small differences in the thickness of the extruded plastic as a result. Building layer upon layer of the output will probably average out the differences rendering them invisible for most projects, but if you were to print a square wall with a perimeter that was a multiple of the pitch circumference of the extruder gear, you might get a wavy or bumpy wall as a result.
As more imprecise parts are added to the chain of parts controlling the motion of the printer, they will have an additive effect they on the accuracy of the printed results. I'm not saying you have a bad or crappy machine. Whether or not the printer is producing parts that meet your tolerance needs is up to you. Geckos, figurines, and weighted companion cubes don't have to be precise.
And yes, you can print an oversized part and grind it down to meet a tight tolerance, but that's not the result of a precision printer, that's the result of the process of a careful craftsman.
There is another paper out there that I couldn't find that discusses the measurement of the ice core temperatures at the various depths, and correlated with the average global temperature. I seem to recall that they found it accurate to within 0.1 degree, but without the actual study to cite, I wouldn't suggest you take my word on it.
I do remember seeing that there is a shift that starts to skew the older temperatures due to warming of the earth's core, making the direct readings slightly less certain once they get back something like 10,000 years ago or older.
The main point is that they demonstrated scientifically that the measurement and correlation approach is valid. They have several independent drilling sites, operated and studied by independent teams. They have cross checked their data with each other. The anomalies that were found were understood and accounted for. We know that global climate history data is preserved, available and accurate.
No, he is saying he doesn't know how accurate the measurements are. That doesn't mean they aren't accurate.
The researchers doing the work definitely know how accurate their measurements are.
The readings taken from ice cores are correlated with average global temperatures taken from satellites, ground stations, etc. Fluctuations in the average are reflected in fluctuations in the core samples. Seasonal variations are readily identified. Once that correlation is established, it is used for "hindcasting" where individual core readings are compared with known measured temperatures to prove the validity of the estimating technique.
Greenhouse gas samples trapped in the ice are similarly correlated with overall planetary gas levels. Methane levels measured in ice cores map very accurately to methane levels measured around the globe for the last 35 years. The uncertainty of the methane measurements has been determined to be accurate to within 10 parts per billion. Timeframe accuracy varies based on the age of the sample, but is accurate to within two years for dates since 1805 A.D. And current ice sheet data only goes back less than a million years, although there is an attempt underway to find 1.5 million year old ice.
The ice cores are not the only sources of historical climate data. Geological data reveals ice damage to rocks, the formation of glacial moraines, etc. Dendroclimatology measures the temperature by examining plant growth. Tree rings are often cited because many people are familiar with the concepts, but there are other ways to use plants to measure climate. The geologic record shows the prevalence of the types of plants growing at certain distances from the equator - the historical equivalent of USDA Plant Hardiness Zones. The edge of a range of a certain type of fast-spreading plant will indicate the minimum temperatures at which that plant would survive the winter. The age of the plants can be determined through radiocarbon dating. For samples that are less than 26,000 years old, calibrated radiocarbon dating gives an accuracy of no worse than 163 years. For older samples or fossils, sediment layers are used to identify the age of origin of the sample. These are calibrated by comparing the strata layer with other known events, such as volcanic eruptions, sea level changes, etc.
All these sources of data are correlated to give a bigger picture. Like anything else, it's messier the farther back you go. Certain studies will show wide variations, others will show narrow variations. And even though they don't always agree to within the exact degree, they all show similar consistent broad trends in temperature, gasses, and the effects.
This situation smells strongly of scapegoat, but perhaps not the scapegoat you're thinking of.
"It's a trap!"
Think about the IT manager. This is someone who already has the job, and who influenced the boss enough to get that job. Pointing out that he's incompetent will be perceived as a slap in the face by all those who have backed him so far.
Be prepared to be placed in direct conflict with not only him, but the executive leadership. And unless you have evidence of actual malfeasance, the incumbents almost always win the case when the Old Boys' Network is the judge and jury.
This is one of those situations that has no winners. If you're already stuck in the middle of it, start polishing your resume and emailing everyone you know on LinkedIn.
I was amused that he built it because his 3D printed Jacquard Loom was even less reliable.
3D plastic extrusion printing is fine for printing a pencil cup or a replacement game token, but a precision manufacturing process it is not. There's a reason machined parts have tight tolerances: without them, moving parts bind, jam, and break.
Unfortunately, trading the set of seasoned, competent crooks for naïve, incompetent crooks just opens the floodgates for the very experienced lobbying and bribing industries to fully ensnare them at a tender age.
I still like a three-strikes constitutional amendment for federal politicians: if you vote to pass (or sign into law) three bills that are later overturned by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional, you were incompetent and/or corrupt, you enabled the theft of rights from the citizenry, and you get a 15 year prison sentence - no statute of limitations, just a 3:30 AM ninja raid and you go to prison. There should be consequences for stealing our rights through the misuse of the force of law.
So 10 seconds of Googling made you an industry expert, with years of virtual experience discovering the shortcomings and valuable features of each product? You read only the honest reviews that weren't salted by salespeople and SEO trolls? You know all the cool features of the custom implementations? And it only took you 10 seconds?
Actually, languages have been consolidating and standardizing rapidly with the advent of the printing press, effective and affordable transportation, broadcast media like TV and radio, and the Internet. Diversity of language is rapidly disappearing.
The way things are going now, there will be only a few dozen languages left at the end of this century, and possibly only a handful after the hundred years that follow.
Although it's entirely possible that technology will preserve native languages, too. If machine translation becomes as easy as slipping a Babel fish in your ear, people won't feel the need to drop their mother tongue for English or Mandarin.
No matter what, we'll all still be yelling hateful things at each other, but at least we'll understand the insults the other guy is hurling.
Doesn't mean that most businesses wouldn't benefit significantly from upgrading to internet.
You conveniently abandoned your core argument here of wired vs. wireless (and "low latency"), and instead switched the comparison from sneakernet to internet.
Which is utterly incapable of replacing copper pair for the simple reason known as "physics".
Really? There are millions of people running their successful small businesses on various combinations of GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G, 802.11, and WiMax.
Most small firms don't have huge bandwidth or speed needs. They need a payment terminal to process credit cards, an email client to handle customer service, a web browser to look up parts and order materials online, someone to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter, and maybe an online QuickBooks account. But most of these people spend the bulk of their days on the sales floor or in the workshop. They don't need a land line, or a server rack, or even a T1. These small businesses used to use dial-up, but everything they need now is available via cellular towers and iPhones.
They don't need the constant reliability that a remote technology worker might need. If the network is down, there's always another order to be filled, a floor to be swept, or shelves to be straightened.
Their buildings still have Cat-3 wiring and old POTS phones gathering dust in the backrooms. But there's no dialtone on them anymore, and there won't be.
So, what happens if one or both legs fail? By the time it is needed to power the boosters, a parachute would probably already have been deployed for a safe landing. If not, then whats the benefit. What are the backup measures in place?
A big tarp with a hay bale in the middle. The hay bale is to arrest the fall of the jumper. The tarp makes the inevitable outcome easier to clean up.
Slashdot Mirror
Mi Casa Verde makes the Vera home automation system. It's built on OpenWRT. For security systems it supports several different brands of Z-wave wireless sensors. It can control lights, locks, alarms, blinds, temperature, IP cameras, etc. It speaks Z-wave via a built in radio, but can also control Insteon and other home automation systems. And it's meant to be hacked and extended. You can even install a growl plugin for Vera, and then a growl notification app on your cell phone, if you want to be alerted by it. Nothing requires a monthly fee.
They offer a free service for remote access, but you certainly don't need them to do it for you. (All their service does is eliminate hassles with DNS and firewalls by serving as a proxy.) Some people simply poke a hole in their firewall allowing them to SSL directly into it.
The company is really good with their customers.
My only complaint is that no matter what they say, it still takes technical ability to set it up. It's not what I'd call plug-and-play ready to sell at Home Depot. No home automation system has reached that level of maturity yet.
All your base belong to us!
A meme, and perfectly on topic! Congratulations, sir, you win at Internet today. Do a barrel roll!
I don't get it... we can't even secure our nuclear power plants, water and waste processing facilities, and other critical public infrastructure from attacks on industrial infrastructure. Why would anyone in their right mind think home automation would be any more secure?
We wouldn't think they're more secure, because we don't need to take them as seriously. By the same logic, why would anyone worry too much about their home automation system when there are so many other more valuable systems to attack?
I don't yet have door locks, windows, or security systems tied into mine, so pretty much all a bad guy could do would be to blink the lights. If he was way smarter than me, he might figure out how to turn on my TV remotely (I'm still having problems integrating it, and would likely appreciate his assistance.) About the most damage he could do would be to disable my water sensors, so if my sump pump failed my basement would get wet without alerting me. He could threaten to hold my house hostage, denying me the use of my home automation system unless I paid him - which would earn him nothing but scorn until I disconnected and reconfigured the systems.
But if he attacked a water plant he could shut down water, burst pipes, or blow out pumps, causing millions of dollars in damages. He could hold the city hostage. It's a much more interesting and lucrative target.
The cypherpunk community has long pooh-poohed allowing "weak" encryption to become entrenched and create a false sense of security. But this "secutrity through purity" approach has resulted in the abject failure of the widespread adoption of encryption at all levels.
Hardly. The inability of the community was due to a legal morass of import and export laws, patents, prohibitions, and fears. Pioneers like Zimmerman were harassed at customs, and investigated by the FBI. Efforts to standardize encryption were thwarted by things like CALEA, and hardware like the Clipper chip. Even RSA included key escrow in their PGP offerings.
Can we not find some sort of barely acceptable common standard and just start routinely implementing it and make the marketing people figure out how to describe it as a sexy feature?
What, pray tell, is a barely acceptable common standard? All we know about the NSA's capabilities are gross capacity requirements, like "the Utah data center will require 65MW and 1,000,000 gallons of water a day." That doesn't tell me if they can routinely break RSA, DH, or SSL. It doesn't tell me if they know a cryptanalytic attack on AES or 3DES. It doesn't tell me if they have 4096-bit quantum computers that can open anything instantly.
It also doesn't solve any of the still-unsolved hard problems of authentication. How do I know your real identity is conspirator23? How do I know this is your key? How do I know we're not being played by an Agency-in-the-middle?
Having weak security puts us in the position we were in last month: we were being monitored but were unaware of it. In many ways weak security is worse. At least today we have no illusion of security.
One thing's for sure: you won't be able to organize a 20 million person march anonymously.
It doesn't take much of a slip-up to reveal your identity.
Look at Panopticlick from the EFF. They can uniquely identify most computers just from the fingerprints in the browser - your collection of fonts, browser plug-ins, and other customizations are usually unique to one machine. So if you ever used Google and did anything that identifies yourself, such as purchased something online and had it shipped to your house, and you later use that same browser through Tor and surf to any site they are observing, or through any exit node under their scrutiny, or to any site loading javascripts from an NSA collaborator such as Google, they would be able to associate your anonymous activities with your identified session. (Ironically, an iPad or iPhone is usually very generic because Apple doesn't allow Safari to be modified. However, they still accept cookies and have no deliberate provisions for anonymity.)
We also have evidence that the intelligence agencies already understand this, and are actively using such information. The Gauss malware installs a font named Palida Narrow, which enables any site you visit to surreptitiously check to see if you're infected with Gauss. It's the same idea and the same mechanism.
To safely use Tor, you really need to be careful. You need a stock generic browser, launched from a clean OS image, and you should hope many other people are doing the same. A browser that returns randomly varying attributes to every request would be useful. Block flash, block cookies, and block javascript and all scripts entirely - you dont want Google Analytics or any of the thousand other profiling services to accidentally tag you. You need to connect from varying locations, none of which are your home. A wifi card that allows you to set a random MAC may help. And you likely need to do more - I certainly don't know everything they can observe.
I find it used to be very common to see PWM tail/brake lights flickering. It's definitely pronounced when there's relative motion between the other car and mine: when he's entering a turn, for example, or when I'm scanning around looking for traffic. If my eyes are already tracking him, it's much less noticeable.
If it's true that more new cars are using LED tail lights than before, (cost and cosmetic reasons,) then I'd expect to notice it more than I have been. I'm thinking that means they have a higher pulse rate. Either that or I'm getting older and don't notice it as much, or my eyes aren't as responsive as they once were, or my driving has improved and I'm tracking them more often.
You had a family of elephants? Luxury. We had a tribe of howler monkeys move in next door, where they apparently rewarded their children's behavior of "squealing when excited", "shrieking when talking", and "screaming when unhappy". The only good to come out of the housing crisis was when they were foreclosed upon and moved out.
Yeah, but it's a moist heat.
How do you ensure "blazing fast network access" and latency?
By replacing the retina display with a 7-segment LED display.
Sure, it wont fix latency, but the bandwidth available would make their phones display those numbers fast.
80% over a period of 15 years, when compared to 40% over two months, makes their peso look rock solid.
The problem with an unstable currency is it attracts currency speculators. They will come in and suck value from the economy, while contributing nothing but minuscule trading fees.
You missed
For all the cries that Bitcoin is "unstable", it seems to have settled quite nicely after its April spike.
That's the one that got me. Two months where the price only fluctuated by less than 40% does not a pattern of stability make! There is no trend on this chart that leads me to believe it's ever been any more stable than the Iranian Rial.
A "Man Trap" is considered legal to have?
I hope so. I married one.
Seriously, UV dye taggants have been around for decades. You sprinkle fairy dust on the stuff you don't want touched, then UV shine the people who might have touched it. If their fingers glow, they're a suspect; you have probable cause to check them for stolen property. But if they go home and wash their hands, that means you failed to catch them in the act and you suck at your job as a security person.
Being near the ventilation system outlets, or washing the clothes of a warehouse employee, or of sitting next to him on the bus, or standing in line at McDonalds when he sneezes, all those sound like ways to spread the DNA tags. It'll be meaningless fast, if it can prove nothing conclusively.
[ Disclaimer: I spent several years working in a precision grinding shop, grinding machined parts to very tight tolerances, measuring them with carefully calibrated tools, and achieving accuracy that lathes simply are not capable of achieving. So what I consider acceptable accuracy and what you consider accurate will likely vary more than slightly. ]
A 3D extrusion printer is not exactly a precision tool. There is a limit to the precision of the parts it can print. That's neither good nor bad, it's simply a fact of the design of the machine and the tolerance of the parts that it was built from, as well as the plastic extrusion process itself.
I fully understand that you can build a device with 3D printed parts, and it will function. But those parts are not precise, and devices built that rely on them will not operate with precision or accuracy. For most of the parts you're likely printing, that's not a requirement. For example, the parts that join rods together on a RepRap don't have to be accurate or precise, they just need to grip the rods securely. The person doing the assembly will align the rods accurately.
However, there are components in the movement chain where precision is important. If the 3D printed gear feeding plastic into the extrusion nozzle is not perfectly round, it can cause minute alterations to the feed speed of the filament, producing small differences in the thickness of the extruded plastic as a result. Building layer upon layer of the output will probably average out the differences rendering them invisible for most projects, but if you were to print a square wall with a perimeter that was a multiple of the pitch circumference of the extruder gear, you might get a wavy or bumpy wall as a result.
As more imprecise parts are added to the chain of parts controlling the motion of the printer, they will have an additive effect they on the accuracy of the printed results. I'm not saying you have a bad or crappy machine. Whether or not the printer is producing parts that meet your tolerance needs is up to you. Geckos, figurines, and weighted companion cubes don't have to be precise.
And yes, you can print an oversized part and grind it down to meet a tight tolerance, but that's not the result of a precision printer, that's the result of the process of a careful craftsman.
There is another paper out there that I couldn't find that discusses the measurement of the ice core temperatures at the various depths, and correlated with the average global temperature. I seem to recall that they found it accurate to within 0.1 degree, but without the actual study to cite, I wouldn't suggest you take my word on it.
I do remember seeing that there is a shift that starts to skew the older temperatures due to warming of the earth's core, making the direct readings slightly less certain once they get back something like 10,000 years ago or older.
The main point is that they demonstrated scientifically that the measurement and correlation approach is valid. They have several independent drilling sites, operated and studied by independent teams. They have cross checked their data with each other. The anomalies that were found were understood and accounted for. We know that global climate history data is preserved, available and accurate.
No, he is saying he doesn't know how accurate the measurements are. That doesn't mean they aren't accurate.
The researchers doing the work definitely know how accurate their measurements are.
The readings taken from ice cores are correlated with average global temperatures taken from satellites, ground stations, etc. Fluctuations in the average are reflected in fluctuations in the core samples. Seasonal variations are readily identified. Once that correlation is established, it is used for "hindcasting" where individual core readings are compared with known measured temperatures to prove the validity of the estimating technique.
Greenhouse gas samples trapped in the ice are similarly correlated with overall planetary gas levels. Methane levels measured in ice cores map very accurately to methane levels measured around the globe for the last 35 years. The uncertainty of the methane measurements has been determined to be accurate to within 10 parts per billion. Timeframe accuracy varies based on the age of the sample, but is accurate to within two years for dates since 1805 A.D. And current ice sheet data only goes back less than a million years, although there is an attempt underway to find 1.5 million year old ice.
The ice cores are not the only sources of historical climate data. Geological data reveals ice damage to rocks, the formation of glacial moraines, etc. Dendroclimatology measures the temperature by examining plant growth. Tree rings are often cited because many people are familiar with the concepts, but there are other ways to use plants to measure climate. The geologic record shows the prevalence of the types of plants growing at certain distances from the equator - the historical equivalent of USDA Plant Hardiness Zones. The edge of a range of a certain type of fast-spreading plant will indicate the minimum temperatures at which that plant would survive the winter. The age of the plants can be determined through radiocarbon dating. For samples that are less than 26,000 years old, calibrated radiocarbon dating gives an accuracy of no worse than 163 years. For older samples or fossils, sediment layers are used to identify the age of origin of the sample. These are calibrated by comparing the strata layer with other known events, such as volcanic eruptions, sea level changes, etc.
All these sources of data are correlated to give a bigger picture. Like anything else, it's messier the farther back you go. Certain studies will show wide variations, others will show narrow variations. And even though they don't always agree to within the exact degree, they all show similar consistent broad trends in temperature, gasses, and the effects.
Here are a couple of papers studying the accuracy of gas measurements in ice cores: http://faculty.washington.edu/steig/papers/recent/Steig_Annals_2005.pdf
and http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/atm_meth/lawdome_meth.html
This situation smells strongly of scapegoat, but perhaps not the scapegoat you're thinking of.
"It's a trap!"
Think about the IT manager. This is someone who already has the job, and who influenced the boss enough to get that job. Pointing out that he's incompetent will be perceived as a slap in the face by all those who have backed him so far.
Be prepared to be placed in direct conflict with not only him, but the executive leadership. And unless you have evidence of actual malfeasance, the incumbents almost always win the case when the Old Boys' Network is the judge and jury.
This is one of those situations that has no winners. If you're already stuck in the middle of it, start polishing your resume and emailing everyone you know on LinkedIn.
I was amused that he built it because his 3D printed Jacquard Loom was even less reliable.
3D plastic extrusion printing is fine for printing a pencil cup or a replacement game token, but a precision manufacturing process it is not. There's a reason machined parts have tight tolerances: without them, moving parts bind, jam, and break.
Unfortunately, trading the set of seasoned, competent crooks for naïve, incompetent crooks just opens the floodgates for the very experienced lobbying and bribing industries to fully ensnare them at a tender age.
I still like a three-strikes constitutional amendment for federal politicians: if you vote to pass (or sign into law) three bills that are later overturned by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional, you were incompetent and/or corrupt, you enabled the theft of rights from the citizenry, and you get a 15 year prison sentence - no statute of limitations, just a 3:30 AM ninja raid and you go to prison. There should be consequences for stealing our rights through the misuse of the force of law.
So 10 seconds of Googling made you an industry expert, with years of virtual experience discovering the shortcomings and valuable features of each product? You read only the honest reviews that weren't salted by salespeople and SEO trolls? You know all the cool features of the custom implementations? And it only took you 10 seconds?
You must be the awesomest Googler ever.
Actually, languages have been consolidating and standardizing rapidly with the advent of the printing press, effective and affordable transportation, broadcast media like TV and radio, and the Internet. Diversity of language is rapidly disappearing.
The way things are going now, there will be only a few dozen languages left at the end of this century, and possibly only a handful after the hundred years that follow.
Although it's entirely possible that technology will preserve native languages, too. If machine translation becomes as easy as slipping a Babel fish in your ear, people won't feel the need to drop their mother tongue for English or Mandarin.
No matter what, we'll all still be yelling hateful things at each other, but at least we'll understand the insults the other guy is hurling.
Doesn't mean that most businesses wouldn't benefit significantly from upgrading to internet.
You conveniently abandoned your core argument here of wired vs. wireless (and "low latency"), and instead switched the comparison from sneakernet to internet.
And to think, I fed the troll.
Which is utterly incapable of replacing copper pair for the simple reason known as "physics".
Really? There are millions of people running their successful small businesses on various combinations of GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G, 802.11, and WiMax.
Most small firms don't have huge bandwidth or speed needs. They need a payment terminal to process credit cards, an email client to handle customer service, a web browser to look up parts and order materials online, someone to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter, and maybe an online QuickBooks account. But most of these people spend the bulk of their days on the sales floor or in the workshop. They don't need a land line, or a server rack, or even a T1. These small businesses used to use dial-up, but everything they need now is available via cellular towers and iPhones.
They don't need the constant reliability that a remote technology worker might need. If the network is down, there's always another order to be filled, a floor to be swept, or shelves to be straightened.
Their buildings still have Cat-3 wiring and old POTS phones gathering dust in the backrooms. But there's no dialtone on them anymore, and there won't be.
So, what happens if one or both legs fail? By the time it is needed to power the boosters, a parachute would probably already have been deployed for a safe landing. If not, then whats the benefit. What are the backup measures in place?
A big tarp with a hay bale in the middle. The hay bale is to arrest the fall of the jumper. The tarp makes the inevitable outcome easier to clean up.