No, they're not magic bullets, but it ought to be possible to install on the buried lines RF sensors (or something comparable) that can be triggered from above ground (with a strong signal directed at the line) to perform a fast and simple search for the section of wire that has a problem.
Even during normal summer storms tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in our area lose power, and not just for a few minutes, but for hours, even days at a time. If the lines were under ground these kinds of vast and extreme outages would be history. Sure, people would get upset over shorter outages, instead, but not suffer the kinds of extreme hardships that plague us to the point where we paid for a whole-house generator hooked up to our gas line. Talk about expensive, but we got fed up with those multi-day outages all the time.
As much as I like to rant about the fact that the utility lines in huge, and relatively densely populated areas of the US remain exposed to the fickle and violent elements, there are some factors to be considered:
To lay utility lines under ground is said to cost 10x more than hanging them off a pole, but I suspect that their vulnerability would be reduced by about the same factor. Although most (all?) new dwelling clusters ("neighborhoods") are built with utility lines under ground (I seem to have a date of 1985 in my head when this became the norm?), a report on NPR today said that it would require decades and billions (10^9) of dollars to bring the existing sprawl up to modern standards. I use the word "sprawl" here as an indicator that the overall population density in the affected areas is probably much less than in other areas of the world where a kilometer of utility lines serves a lot more people. Google Maps can probably give some insights for those who are curious about this sprawl thing.
As to the repeated smashing of the fragile infrastructure by Mother Nature, I'm curious if anyone has done (or knows of) studies about the diminishing returns of having to fix things over and over again, including the cost to human lives, lost productivity, and the sheer pain and inconvenience of it all. Is it really cheaper to incur repeated damage and pain, than pay the up-front cost of fixing things so they stop getting smashed all the time?
You are right about the cause of delays if this were an isolated instance, but storms are not freak events, they happen all the time. Without even mentioning the smaller outages, we often lose power for extended periods of time (35 hours this time, 48 hours the year before, etc.) Each time this happens there are plenty of people who are looking at longer (week-long) outages.
In other words, this is not the first time this happened, but the next time it does and hundreds of thousands are without power for days on end, they will again blame the severity of the storm and the logistics of repairs, rather than the fact that they left their laundry flapping in the wind for the Nth time in a row.
It's because we never bother to maintain our infrastructure. We build bridges and let 'em fall down. We hang power lines off wooden poles, and never bother burying them. We sort of fix it when it breaks, but then it breaks again, but we don't really learn from it.
Cronyism will be the downfall of democracy. It's all become a game of the powerful, and whether votes are actually counted or conveniently discarded or even flipped is anybody's guess.
The solution is a real democracy, based on truly secure voting: secure, reliable, trustworthy, and verifiable votes. Expert law makers would be in the business of crafting laws and discussing their merit, and would put up the laws for a vote when ready. The votes would be cast by the people and nobody else. All the special interest groups would have to come out from behind the scenes and lobby everyone in the open. No more sly little contributions to line the pockets of a few law makers in order to serve those with the most money.
Open Democracy, wouldn't it be nice? Of course they're not going to allow it, those in power never want to give up that power...
Yes, Java was made Free (GPL2) by Sun before Oracle bought Sun, but Google wrote the Dalvik VM completely from scratch. Once Oracle's case was unraveling pre-trial, they were basically down to screaming that Google copied the package organization and method signatures. Basically, Oracle claimed that they owned the copyright on "int min(int,int)" and "int max(int,int)" and a bunch of other methods, i.e. they claimed that the Java APIs were copyrighted, implying that all APIs are copyrighted.
If there hadn't been so much at stake, it would have been a knee slapper from the start. It's turned into a face slapper, instead.
Considering that the majority of people will be decent enough to break their backs to pay back these loans, it stands to reason that the financial institutions have a vested interest in keeping these programs going and funding everybody who wants a loan. Of course, they will be happy to grab at every possible method that reduces the default rate.
It seems to me that students themselves need to take some responsibility for their future (perhaps with input from their parents) to evaluate carefully what they choose to study, what their future job prospects are, how much it will actually cost them, and how much of that borrowed money gets spent frivolously (and shouldn't be wasted like that).
Bottom line, it's a money game: Banksters vs. Students. Careless students pay more.
Sorry, AC, but I agree with shiftless: Learning is not achieved by using someone else's products, but by learning how the technology works. Any monkey can use tools, but how do you teach their design and construction? A university that doesn't eat its own dog food is just a fancy vocational school, and better not try to sell me a 4-year degree for more than a small fraction of that $100k debt.
Besides, I doubt that outsourcing IT infrastructure will result in more than $1k/year actual savings on a $100k total student debt, but now you have students who have learned only how to press a send button and call a help desk when things don't work, instead of actually understanding what's going on underneath the hood, and be able to analyze and fix things when they break, or ($DEITY forbid!) write better stuff from scratch.
Wrong. Microsoft got sued because they were calling it Java when it wasn't (it was missing some methods that would cause real Java software to fail on their implementation, and added other things to the API that would cause Microsoft's Java to run only on their own implementation). By comparison, Google is neither claiming that Android is Java, nor will you find the Java logo (the coffee/tea cup) on any Android devices.
Oracle is complaining that for a portion of the overall APIs, Android is using the same method signatures (package and method names, and parameter order and types) as Java, and says that the API itself is copyrighted and cannot be used without a license (bye-bye JDBC drivers, bye-bye Bouncy Castle, etc.)
I cannot see how, in a rational universe, Oracle can possibly hope to win this, but even having merely tried, they've earned my utter contempt, and I am beginning to consider it a necessary duty to work actively against Oracle and their products from now on.
I can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but there are likely statistical methods to determine the probability that an image is naturally noisy, or made so by artificial means (i.e. proof that steganography is present). Even in extreme cases the crypto would still protect the message itself, until someone pulls out the $5 wrench.
I've been wondering for a long time whether spam is not also a means for them to disseminate instructions in some way. It doesn't appear to come from an identifiable source, and does not seem directed at any particular recipient, but the people who expect to find something there would be able to find it.
Forget the Koreans, we need to defend against REAL ALIENS who are lurking in the asteroid field and are building bases on remote Jovian moons RIGHT NOW. If we don't close the SPACE GAP soon they're gonna ABDUCT OUR CHILDREN and force us to become communists!!!!!!eleventy1
Psychologically it's easily explained: There is no saturation point for power (or money for that matter) where the powerful or the rich says, "you know, I've got enough now, so I'm going to settle down, stop going for ever more power and cash, and I will just enjoy what I have amassed from now on." Never going to happen.
So the striving for more power and money continues, but as the gap widens between the powerful and the exploited (or rich and poor), the ones on top must jealously guard their position against others who would pull them down on the scramble for the top of the heap. And so laws are passed to help people at the top maintain their position of power.
CISPA is one of those laws, and it does away with a lot of the inconveniences of having to go through formal processes of getting approval from judges, protecting information, or holding the government responsible for the inevitable errors of incompetence that expose people's data, or ruin lives. It's a blank check for the government to get around all that, and just get done what they feel they should be doing and want to be doing.
Democracy? Oh yeah, the whole voting thing is basically just political entertainment. Doesn't much matter who wins, all of the players are in the pockets of industry anyway, and industry pays very well. What incentive do they have to turn their backs on the cash cow?
The people in power know that they can cow people into obedience with such methods. Sure, nobody wants to be inconvenienced by interrogation, delays, or some a--hat yelling that you're endangering security or whatever, but if we do not stand up for each other and everybody else's rights, then who can we ask to stand up for us when it's our turn to have our rights violated?
"Together we stand, divided we fall," doesn't have to be about violence or war, but simply about recognizing the value and the rights of others, and treat each other as members of a community, our community.
Freedom and liberty is not a license, it's about responsibility.
A bit off topic, but the frequently seen misuse of "advocate" bugs me severely: "Advocate" means "to speak or write in favor of," so "Advocate for something" means "To speak or write in favor of for something"... read that again, and weep! So, the relevant part in the summary should have read "people advocate their own theories" (strike "for").
You may now call me a grammar nazi and fling your rotted virtual vegetable and fruit. Thank you./bows
Actually, I propose that we let them have their way completely. We just have to stop fawning over their content and go on, instead, to something else. Let them rot in their lonely little tar pits like the dinosaurs that they are. A few years down the line, nobody will remember them.
Sony has lost thousands of dollars in sales from me alone over the past few years because of the way they slap their customers in the face, and stab them in the back. Whenever I have the opportunity I calmly explain the reasons why I refuse to purchase Sony's products. I am pleased now that for Sony it has come to this. Yes, Schadenfreude!
It was just a matter of time before this kind of stuff (linking publicly available data from multiple sources) moved from the domain of the targeted advertisers into the hands of mobile device market places. Is anyone really surprised by this? I guess the creep-factor comes into play when it's individuals who can stalk you, rather than corporations...
I'm afraid it may be too late for that already. All that Apple seems to have going for it right now is momentum, and a legal team to leech money from others who will increasingly out-innovate them. Wish it weren't so, but when I see companies shifting from innovation to litigation, I say the writing is on the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're not magic bullets, but it ought to be possible to install on the buried lines RF sensors (or something comparable) that can be triggered from above ground (with a strong signal directed at the line) to perform a fast and simple search for the section of wire that has a problem.
Even during normal summer storms tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in our area lose power, and not just for a few minutes, but for hours, even days at a time. If the lines were under ground these kinds of vast and extreme outages would be history. Sure, people would get upset over shorter outages, instead, but not suffer the kinds of extreme hardships that plague us to the point where we paid for a whole-house generator hooked up to our gas line. Talk about expensive, but we got fed up with those multi-day outages all the time.
As much as I like to rant about the fact that the utility lines in huge, and relatively densely populated areas of the US remain exposed to the fickle and violent elements, there are some factors to be considered:
To lay utility lines under ground is said to cost 10x more than hanging them off a pole, but I suspect that their vulnerability would be reduced by about the same factor. Although most (all?) new dwelling clusters ("neighborhoods") are built with utility lines under ground (I seem to have a date of 1985 in my head when this became the norm?), a report on NPR today said that it would require decades and billions (10^9) of dollars to bring the existing sprawl up to modern standards. I use the word "sprawl" here as an indicator that the overall population density in the affected areas is probably much less than in other areas of the world where a kilometer of utility lines serves a lot more people. Google Maps can probably give some insights for those who are curious about this sprawl thing.
As to the repeated smashing of the fragile infrastructure by Mother Nature, I'm curious if anyone has done (or knows of) studies about the diminishing returns of having to fix things over and over again, including the cost to human lives, lost productivity, and the sheer pain and inconvenience of it all. Is it really cheaper to incur repeated damage and pain, than pay the up-front cost of fixing things so they stop getting smashed all the time?
You are right about the cause of delays if this were an isolated instance, but storms are not freak events, they happen all the time. Without even mentioning the smaller outages, we often lose power for extended periods of time (35 hours this time, 48 hours the year before, etc.) Each time this happens there are plenty of people who are looking at longer (week-long) outages.
In other words, this is not the first time this happened, but the next time it does and hundreds of thousands are without power for days on end, they will again blame the severity of the storm and the logistics of repairs, rather than the fact that they left their laundry flapping in the wind for the Nth time in a row.
It's because we never bother to maintain our infrastructure. We build bridges and let 'em fall down. We hang power lines off wooden poles, and never bother burying them. We sort of fix it when it breaks, but then it breaks again, but we don't really learn from it.
Cronyism will be the downfall of democracy. It's all become a game of the powerful, and whether votes are actually counted or conveniently discarded or even flipped is anybody's guess.
The solution is a real democracy, based on truly secure voting: secure, reliable, trustworthy, and verifiable votes. Expert law makers would be in the business of crafting laws and discussing their merit, and would put up the laws for a vote when ready. The votes would be cast by the people and nobody else. All the special interest groups would have to come out from behind the scenes and lobby everyone in the open. No more sly little contributions to line the pockets of a few law makers in order to serve those with the most money.
Open Democracy, wouldn't it be nice? Of course they're not going to allow it, those in power never want to give up that power...
Yes, Java was made Free (GPL2) by Sun before Oracle bought Sun, but Google wrote the Dalvik VM completely from scratch. Once Oracle's case was unraveling pre-trial, they were basically down to screaming that Google copied the package organization and method signatures. Basically, Oracle claimed that they owned the copyright on "int min(int,int)" and "int max(int,int)" and a bunch of other methods, i.e. they claimed that the Java APIs were copyrighted, implying that all APIs are copyrighted.
If there hadn't been so much at stake, it would have been a knee slapper from the start. It's turned into a face slapper, instead.
And here I thought that religious kooks are a poorly evolved subspecies found only in North America
Of course he will be held accountable. I'm sure he'll take it well: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-06-30/
Considering that the majority of people will be decent enough to break their backs to pay back these loans, it stands to reason that the financial institutions have a vested interest in keeping these programs going and funding everybody who wants a loan. Of course, they will be happy to grab at every possible method that reduces the default rate.
It seems to me that students themselves need to take some responsibility for their future (perhaps with input from their parents) to evaluate carefully what they choose to study, what their future job prospects are, how much it will actually cost them, and how much of that borrowed money gets spent frivolously (and shouldn't be wasted like that).
Bottom line, it's a money game: Banksters vs. Students. Careless students pay more.
Yeah, screw IT knowledge, we need more universities that teach how to manage vendor relationships!
Sorry, AC, but I agree with shiftless: Learning is not achieved by using someone else's products, but by learning how the technology works. Any monkey can use tools, but how do you teach their design and construction? A university that doesn't eat its own dog food is just a fancy vocational school, and better not try to sell me a 4-year degree for more than a small fraction of that $100k debt.
Besides, I doubt that outsourcing IT infrastructure will result in more than $1k/year actual savings on a $100k total student debt, but now you have students who have learned only how to press a send button and call a help desk when things don't work, instead of actually understanding what's going on underneath the hood, and be able to analyze and fix things when they break, or ($DEITY forbid!) write better stuff from scratch.
Wrong. Microsoft got sued because they were calling it Java when it wasn't (it was missing some methods that would cause real Java software to fail on their implementation, and added other things to the API that would cause Microsoft's Java to run only on their own implementation). By comparison, Google is neither claiming that Android is Java, nor will you find the Java logo (the coffee/tea cup) on any Android devices.
Oracle is complaining that for a portion of the overall APIs, Android is using the same method signatures (package and method names, and parameter order and types) as Java, and says that the API itself is copyrighted and cannot be used without a license (bye-bye JDBC drivers, bye-bye Bouncy Castle, etc.)
I cannot see how, in a rational universe, Oracle can possibly hope to win this, but even having merely tried, they've earned my utter contempt, and I am beginning to consider it a necessary duty to work actively against Oracle and their products from now on.
I bet that for a while there he thought he's a real smarty pants!
I can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but there are likely statistical methods to determine the probability that an image is naturally noisy, or made so by artificial means (i.e. proof that steganography is present). Even in extreme cases the crypto would still protect the message itself, until someone pulls out the $5 wrench.
I've been wondering for a long time whether spam is not also a means for them to disseminate instructions in some way. It doesn't appear to come from an identifiable source, and does not seem directed at any particular recipient, but the people who expect to find something there would be able to find it.
Forget the Koreans, we need to defend against REAL ALIENS who are lurking in the asteroid field and are building bases on remote Jovian moons RIGHT NOW. If we don't close the SPACE GAP soon they're gonna ABDUCT OUR CHILDREN and force us to become communists!!!!!!eleventy1
(How else are we going to get NASA funded again?)
Psychologically it's easily explained: There is no saturation point for power (or money for that matter) where the powerful or the rich says, "you know, I've got enough now, so I'm going to settle down, stop going for ever more power and cash, and I will just enjoy what I have amassed from now on." Never going to happen.
So the striving for more power and money continues, but as the gap widens between the powerful and the exploited (or rich and poor), the ones on top must jealously guard their position against others who would pull them down on the scramble for the top of the heap. And so laws are passed to help people at the top maintain their position of power.
CISPA is one of those laws, and it does away with a lot of the inconveniences of having to go through formal processes of getting approval from judges, protecting information, or holding the government responsible for the inevitable errors of incompetence that expose people's data, or ruin lives. It's a blank check for the government to get around all that, and just get done what they feel they should be doing and want to be doing.
Democracy? Oh yeah, the whole voting thing is basically just political entertainment. Doesn't much matter who wins, all of the players are in the pockets of industry anyway, and industry pays very well. What incentive do they have to turn their backs on the cash cow?
The people in power know that they can cow people into obedience with such methods. Sure, nobody wants to be inconvenienced by interrogation, delays, or some a--hat yelling that you're endangering security or whatever, but if we do not stand up for each other and everybody else's rights, then who can we ask to stand up for us when it's our turn to have our rights violated?
"Together we stand, divided we fall," doesn't have to be about violence or war, but simply about recognizing the value and the rights of others, and treat each other as members of a community, our community.
Freedom and liberty is not a license, it's about responsibility.
A bit off topic, but the frequently seen misuse of "advocate" bugs me severely: "Advocate" means "to speak or write in favor of," so "Advocate for something" means "To speak or write in favor of for something" ... read that again, and weep! So, the relevant part in the summary should have read "people advocate their own theories" (strike "for").
You may now call me a grammar nazi and fling your rotted virtual vegetable and fruit. Thank you. /bows
Actually, I propose that we let them have their way completely. We just have to stop fawning over their content and go on, instead, to something else. Let them rot in their lonely little tar pits like the dinosaurs that they are. A few years down the line, nobody will remember them.
Sony has lost thousands of dollars in sales from me alone over the past few years because of the way they slap their customers in the face, and stab them in the back. Whenever I have the opportunity I calmly explain the reasons why I refuse to purchase Sony's products. I am pleased now that for Sony it has come to this. Yes, Schadenfreude!
It was just a matter of time before this kind of stuff (linking publicly available data from multiple sources) moved from the domain of the targeted advertisers into the hands of mobile device market places. Is anyone really surprised by this? I guess the creep-factor comes into play when it's individuals who can stalk you, rather than corporations...
Excellent story. My thanks for posting that link!
I'm afraid it may be too late for that already. All that Apple seems to have going for it right now is momentum, and a legal team to leech money from others who will increasingly out-innovate them. Wish it weren't so, but when I see companies shifting from innovation to litigation, I say the writing is on the wall.
We're told that we're safer, and many people actually believe that we're safer, but a false sense of security is the makings of a perfect trap.