Well, it appears that I was wrong. My information came from a book on children's health that we were reading. I don't have it handy, or I would give the citation and quote the passage.
I do believe that the book is correct in that a normal fever (up to 105) without other complications won't hurt you. That pretty much agrees with the references you cited. The book also stated that a "fever" above 105 is generally caused by external overheating, not the body itself, which is contradicted by the citations. However, all sources seem to agree that temperatures above 105 are a problem.
Also, back to the context of the article, the flu should not cause a fever that is medically dangerous, so lowering the fever and allowing the disease to spread further is a lose-lose proposition. That said, I dispute that people, for the most part, are taking medications to lower the fever, but instead to treat other symptoms (with the fever lowering being a side-effect) so that they can go to work. Going to work when you're going to spread a disease is a bad idea.
Of course, when they get the vaccine right for the flu strain, only people who want to get the flu have to worry about it.
Thanks for fixing that for me. Yes, there are plenty of disorders and diseases that involve a misbehaving immune system to the point where it can kill you. A normal fever response, however, isn't one of those.
Fevers don't kill people. The immune system isn't that self-destructive. The fear of fevers is a holdover from pandemics like polio where diseases associated with high fevers could kill or cause brain damage. The fever wasn't what caused the problems, but people didn't know better.
I've heard that $1M/mile number thrown around, but in the context of putting all utilities underground. Most of that cost is for the electric lines that probably have to be put in deeper with a backhoe. When they put in the FiOS lines in our neighborhood, they used the same equipment that they would use to put in a sprinkler system. The conduit is probably two feet down. Probably the most expensive part was repaving where they had to cut through sidewalks and driveways.
I don't know about the details in Kansas City, but in Massachusetts, when Verizon was doing the FiOS roll-out, the typical franchise agreement with each town required that they offer service to every resident within five years of the initial agreement. This typically meant that those with above-ground utilities got it in the first year, and everyone else had to wait until the fourth or fifth year.
You need to talk to your elected officials in town. Find out when the license is up for renewal. It may be a ten-year deal with the town (that's not unusual). Push hard to have the town require universal access to all residents within a reasonable time as a condition on any license renewal.
The simple fact is that, taken as a whole, most towns with a mix of above and below-ground utilities still result in a profit for cable companies when they have to install service to all neighborhoods. Below-ground utilities alone are still profitable, but the payback is longer, so they prefer to invest in infrastructure elsewhere.
In the middle of the year they replaced the Cromemco systems with PC Juniors. That was a major upgrade.
Of course, the best thing my school district did was, in 6th grade Gifted and Talented, they did a unit where they bused us across town to the one school that had Apple II computers to teach us BASIC. That eventually lead to a major in CS and a career in software.
I took the AP Computer Science exam in 1986. The class was very popular in my high school, but there wasn't room for a lot of students, so the class was offered during zero-hour, before most classes started. That meant to be in the class, you had to show up an hour early for school.
And interestingly, this was at Boise High School, and Idaho is one of the states cited in the original article. Apparently there were still only 50 students taking the exam last year. We had a third of that number back in 1986 from just my school, though I suspect we were the only school in the state to offer the class.
You are correct. Tunderbolt is essentially an extension to Displayport that includes PCIe. My bad.
I know that SATA does DMA, unlike USB, but I'm not clear on how much control can be initiated from the outside. A quick search suggests that it's safe.
I doubt there's much you can do to prevent a DMA attack through a laptop's docking port, though you might be able to disable the card slot (Express Card, PCMCIA, or whatever it is now).
Plenty of ports can do DMA, dumping all physical memory without any say by the operating system, all without opening the case. Anything on the PCI bus can do it; do you have an external PCI port? No? Did you know that PCI is routed over DisplayPort? And of course Firewire can do it. And so can ESATA. And laptops have card slots and docking station ports that expose a lot more avenues for attack.
Good luck getting all those disabled, not just in the OS, but in the hardware layer.
In theory, there is still some signal from modern LCD monitors, but it's much harder to pick up than the old CRTs. The same technology could be used to determine what a CPU is doing or any other electronic component, but, again, it's very difficult to get a strong enough signal at a distance to make use of it.
One thing I wish our house had more of is outdoor electrical outlets. You never know when you will need them for gardening tools or holiday decorations. Having them switched is even better, especially if you do a lot of holiday decorating.
We can have a fun debate as to how the Empire (and the Galactic Republic before that) built things, but my point about using robots for space mining stands.
You bring up a good point mentioning the "obsolescence of the need to mine these asteroids," but I disagree that we'll hit that point for two reasons.
1) Materials science keeps coming up with fascinating new things that we can do, but often requiring exotic (i.e., rare) elements. Sure, there's tons of things we can do with carbon, but there will always be things where other materials are needed. Unless you're going to argue that it will be cheaper to make elements on demand through nuclear reactions, new sources of rare materials is always a good thing. (And then there's the environmental advantage of mining asteroids over terrestrial mining.)
2) For space exploration, sources of materials off-planet are an advantage.
What we need for this to work is essentially the Star Wars economy. Wonder how they built the Death Star and all those massive ships? Droids. If we can launch something up there that can harvest enough materials and build what it needs up there to keep going, then it just takes one launch. It sends robots to the right asteroid. They extract metals, build more robots, build space ships, go to other asteroids, and keep repeating the process. Occasionally they send shipments back home.
We're a long ways away from that level of technology, but I don't think there's anything preventing us from getting there.
For energy, the robots could either build nuclear or solar power systems.
For manufacturing, 3-D printing is likely an enabling technology. It needs to advance way beyond where it is now, such as making full computers.
Refining the raw materials found on the asteroids is another obstacle.
Right now, peak prices are during peak demand, which is typically in the afternoon. However, there are two factors that may change this over the next decade.
In many places, solar power will soon be a significant portion of the power supply, and solar production matches peak demand. Solar is a sunk cost, so any dynamic pricing is based on being able to scale back production at gas-fired plants and the like. Hence, it may be that power costs will be higher when it's dark, even if demand is lower. Expect peak prices in the evening and morning hours.
Also, as electric cars become a significant portion of the vehicles, demand for charging at night will go up significantly, so peak demand may well be at night. Utilities will certainly work to get car owners to install smart chargers that optimize charging based on power availability with the goal of a full charge by a certain time (such as when you typically leave in the morning). [And of course, by "full," that means 80% to maximize the life of the battery unless you're planning a trip.]
Of course, the combination of widespread adoption of both solar power and electric cars suggests that the optimal time to charge is during the day, but good luck getting that to work for the majority of workers.
Yes, Atari had a serial bus that was quite nice in its day. Too bad they didn't promote it as a standard for other computer makers of the day to use. There are some significant parallels to USB, as well as many differences.
But what really sets it apart from USB is the lack of standardization, not technical differences. USB was part of a vision for all computers. Atari never considered pushing SIO for use with Apple or Commodore.
Yes, it's not the big hot thing anymore. Laptops took over the hot spot a few years ago, but for the purpose of software, they're generally the same as desktops. Now tablets and phones are cutting into the laptop market.
But the markets are huge. Even a 90% decline would still leave a substantial market with opportunities for new products. It's only a problem for companies with established dominant products. If you are depending on upgrade or support sales to an established base, then a declining base is a problem.
The comparison to mainframe may be particularly apt. While everyone likes to talk about how the mainframe was replaced my mini computers and later desktops, this isn't really true. There are lots of companies with large mainframe deployments. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry.
The big difference now, besides the general complexity, is that software is written in higher-level languages and compiled. Sure, you can disassemble it and try to make sense of it, but good luck with reverse compilation to get something resembling the original code. And making sense of compiler-generated assembly is a pain. (Yes, I do it often when debugging systems code, but when a problem is easy to recreate, I recompile the offending module without optimization for easy debugging.)
Sure, you would lose comments, labels, and a few macros that were originally there, but for the most part the binary that shipped was the equivalent of the code that the developers wrote.
It was published by Compute! Books, not Atari. DOS was written under contract for Atari by a third party, so I'm not sure how much Atari had to do with it. But importantly, it was the original code with comments and extended explanations.
De Re Atari was published by Atari in 1981, and was probably the most detailed programming manual. It didn't have listings for the OS, but it provided enough detail that you wouldn't need them to understand how to use almost every aspect of the machine. (My Atari is in storage, but that happens to still be on my shelf.)
I don't have the OS listings. I'm not sure they were published.
Back in the day, the source code for Atari DOS was included in a published book that explained exactly how it worked. That's one of the things that was great about that platform--so much information was readily available.
It was all written in 6502 assembly. Anyone that cared would disassemble it themselves, so it's not like there were any big proprietary secrets to protect. I'm surprised that this wasn't published 30 years ago.
OTA broadcast is, as you say, MPEG. Or, more precisely, MPEG-2. To say it is uncompressed is completely false. It may not be over-compressed, but you still see artifacts in scenes that the compression can't handle well, particularly scenes with rain or fire--anything chaotic where there are massive changes between frames.
Another reporter slept through science class and failed to remember the concept of significant digits.
Clearly a witness who claimed to have run 200 meters was estimating, so there's at best one significant digit. It would have been much better to use "(over 600 feet)" as the conversion. Or why not go with "(656 feet, 2 and 1/64 inches)?"
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Well, it appears that I was wrong. My information came from a book on children's health that we were reading. I don't have it handy, or I would give the citation and quote the passage.
I do believe that the book is correct in that a normal fever (up to 105) without other complications won't hurt you. That pretty much agrees with the references you cited. The book also stated that a "fever" above 105 is generally caused by external overheating, not the body itself, which is contradicted by the citations. However, all sources seem to agree that temperatures above 105 are a problem.
Also, back to the context of the article, the flu should not cause a fever that is medically dangerous, so lowering the fever and allowing the disease to spread further is a lose-lose proposition. That said, I dispute that people, for the most part, are taking medications to lower the fever, but instead to treat other symptoms (with the fever lowering being a side-effect) so that they can go to work. Going to work when you're going to spread a disease is a bad idea.
Of course, when they get the vaccine right for the flu strain, only people who want to get the flu have to worry about it.
Thanks for fixing that for me. Yes, there are plenty of disorders and diseases that involve a misbehaving immune system to the point where it can kill you. A normal fever response, however, isn't one of those.
Fevers don't kill people. The immune system isn't that self-destructive. The fear of fevers is a holdover from pandemics like polio where diseases associated with high fevers could kill or cause brain damage. The fever wasn't what caused the problems, but people didn't know better.
That's $177,027.40/mile. I suspect that's still an exaggeration, but it's certainly less than $1M/mile.
I've heard that $1M/mile number thrown around, but in the context of putting all utilities underground. Most of that cost is for the electric lines that probably have to be put in deeper with a backhoe. When they put in the FiOS lines in our neighborhood, they used the same equipment that they would use to put in a sprinkler system. The conduit is probably two feet down. Probably the most expensive part was repaving where they had to cut through sidewalks and driveways.
Exactly!
I don't know about the details in Kansas City, but in Massachusetts, when Verizon was doing the FiOS roll-out, the typical franchise agreement with each town required that they offer service to every resident within five years of the initial agreement. This typically meant that those with above-ground utilities got it in the first year, and everyone else had to wait until the fourth or fifth year.
You need to talk to your elected officials in town. Find out when the license is up for renewal. It may be a ten-year deal with the town (that's not unusual). Push hard to have the town require universal access to all residents within a reasonable time as a condition on any license renewal.
The simple fact is that, taken as a whole, most towns with a mix of above and below-ground utilities still result in a profit for cable companies when they have to install service to all neighborhoods. Below-ground utilities alone are still profitable, but the payback is longer, so they prefer to invest in infrastructure elsewhere.
In the middle of the year they replaced the Cromemco systems with PC Juniors. That was a major upgrade.
Of course, the best thing my school district did was, in 6th grade Gifted and Talented, they did a unit where they bused us across town to the one school that had Apple II computers to teach us BASIC. That eventually lead to a major in CS and a career in software.
I took the AP Computer Science exam in 1986. The class was very popular in my high school, but there wasn't room for a lot of students, so the class was offered during zero-hour, before most classes started. That meant to be in the class, you had to show up an hour early for school.
And interestingly, this was at Boise High School, and Idaho is one of the states cited in the original article. Apparently there were still only 50 students taking the exam last year. We had a third of that number back in 1986 from just my school, though I suspect we were the only school in the state to offer the class.
How hard can it be to do this? Start with standard general anesthesia. One the person is out, then administer cyanide or whatever.
Or use the same thing we use for animals.
Or look at how they do assisted suicide. There are plenty of solutions there.
You are correct. Tunderbolt is essentially an extension to Displayport that includes PCIe. My bad.
I know that SATA does DMA, unlike USB, but I'm not clear on how much control can be initiated from the outside. A quick search suggests that it's safe.
I found this, which discusses the issue further:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2516445
It talks about dealing with 1394 and Thunderbolt DMA attacks.
I doubt there's much you can do to prevent a DMA attack through a laptop's docking port, though you might be able to disable the card slot (Express Card, PCMCIA, or whatever it is now).
Plenty of ports can do DMA, dumping all physical memory without any say by the operating system, all without opening the case. Anything on the PCI bus can do it; do you have an external PCI port? No? Did you know that PCI is routed over DisplayPort? And of course Firewire can do it. And so can ESATA. And laptops have card slots and docking station ports that expose a lot more avenues for attack.
Good luck getting all those disabled, not just in the OS, but in the hardware layer.
Yes. Here's the link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
In theory, there is still some signal from modern LCD monitors, but it's much harder to pick up than the old CRTs. The same technology could be used to determine what a CPU is doing or any other electronic component, but, again, it's very difficult to get a strong enough signal at a distance to make use of it.
One thing I wish our house had more of is outdoor electrical outlets. You never know when you will need them for gardening tools or holiday decorations. Having them switched is even better, especially if you do a lot of holiday decorating.
We can have a fun debate as to how the Empire (and the Galactic Republic before that) built things, but my point about using robots for space mining stands.
You bring up a good point mentioning the "obsolescence of the need to mine these asteroids," but I disagree that we'll hit that point for two reasons.
1) Materials science keeps coming up with fascinating new things that we can do, but often requiring exotic (i.e., rare) elements. Sure, there's tons of things we can do with carbon, but there will always be things where other materials are needed. Unless you're going to argue that it will be cheaper to make elements on demand through nuclear reactions, new sources of rare materials is always a good thing. (And then there's the environmental advantage of mining asteroids over terrestrial mining.)
2) For space exploration, sources of materials off-planet are an advantage.
What we need for this to work is essentially the Star Wars economy. Wonder how they built the Death Star and all those massive ships? Droids. If we can launch something up there that can harvest enough materials and build what it needs up there to keep going, then it just takes one launch. It sends robots to the right asteroid. They extract metals, build more robots, build space ships, go to other asteroids, and keep repeating the process. Occasionally they send shipments back home.
We're a long ways away from that level of technology, but I don't think there's anything preventing us from getting there.
For energy, the robots could either build nuclear or solar power systems.
For manufacturing, 3-D printing is likely an enabling technology. It needs to advance way beyond where it is now, such as making full computers.
Refining the raw materials found on the asteroids is another obstacle.
I would guess it's 50 to 100 years out.
Right now, peak prices are during peak demand, which is typically in the afternoon. However, there are two factors that may change this over the next decade.
In many places, solar power will soon be a significant portion of the power supply, and solar production matches peak demand. Solar is a sunk cost, so any dynamic pricing is based on being able to scale back production at gas-fired plants and the like. Hence, it may be that power costs will be higher when it's dark, even if demand is lower. Expect peak prices in the evening and morning hours.
Also, as electric cars become a significant portion of the vehicles, demand for charging at night will go up significantly, so peak demand may well be at night. Utilities will certainly work to get car owners to install smart chargers that optimize charging based on power availability with the goal of a full charge by a certain time (such as when you typically leave in the morning). [And of course, by "full," that means 80% to maximize the life of the battery unless you're planning a trip.]
Of course, the combination of widespread adoption of both solar power and electric cars suggests that the optimal time to charge is during the day, but good luck getting that to work for the majority of workers.
Yes, Atari had a serial bus that was quite nice in its day. Too bad they didn't promote it as a standard for other computer makers of the day to use. There are some significant parallels to USB, as well as many differences.
But what really sets it apart from USB is the lack of standardization, not technical differences. USB was part of a vision for all computers. Atari never considered pushing SIO for use with Apple or Commodore.
The desktop isn't even pretending to die.
Yes, it's not the big hot thing anymore. Laptops took over the hot spot a few years ago, but for the purpose of software, they're generally the same as desktops. Now tablets and phones are cutting into the laptop market.
But the markets are huge. Even a 90% decline would still leave a substantial market with opportunities for new products. It's only a problem for companies with established dominant products. If you are depending on upgrade or support sales to an established base, then a declining base is a problem.
The comparison to mainframe may be particularly apt. While everyone likes to talk about how the mainframe was replaced my mini computers and later desktops, this isn't really true. There are lots of companies with large mainframe deployments. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry.
The big difference now, besides the general complexity, is that software is written in higher-level languages and compiled. Sure, you can disassemble it and try to make sense of it, but good luck with reverse compilation to get something resembling the original code. And making sense of compiler-generated assembly is a pain. (Yes, I do it often when debugging systems code, but when a problem is easy to recreate, I recompile the offending module without optimization for easy debugging.)
Sure, you would lose comments, labels, and a few macros that were originally there, but for the most part the binary that shipped was the equivalent of the code that the developers wrote.
"Inside Atari DOS" is now online:
http://www.atariarchives.org/iad/
It was published by Compute! Books, not Atari. DOS was written under contract for Atari by a third party, so I'm not sure how much Atari had to do with it. But importantly, it was the original code with comments and extended explanations.
De Re Atari was published by Atari in 1981, and was probably the most detailed programming manual. It didn't have listings for the OS, but it provided enough detail that you wouldn't need them to understand how to use almost every aspect of the machine. (My Atari is in storage, but that happens to still be on my shelf.)
I don't have the OS listings. I'm not sure they were published.
Back in the day, the source code for Atari DOS was included in a published book that explained exactly how it worked. That's one of the things that was great about that platform--so much information was readily available.
It was all written in 6502 assembly. Anyone that cared would disassemble it themselves, so it's not like there were any big proprietary secrets to protect. I'm surprised that this wasn't published 30 years ago.
So when they say "shipping" do they mean they mailed themselves a demonstration model? They haven't announced the price yet.
Wake me up when you can order them from NewEgg.
(Though the technology is interesting.)
OTA broadcast is, as you say, MPEG. Or, more precisely, MPEG-2. To say it is uncompressed is completely false. It may not be over-compressed, but you still see artifacts in scenes that the compression can't handle well, particularly scenes with rain or fire--anything chaotic where there are massive changes between frames.
Another reporter slept through science class and failed to remember the concept of significant digits.
Clearly a witness who claimed to have run 200 meters was estimating, so there's at best one significant digit. It would have been much better to use "(over 600 feet)" as the conversion. Or why not go with "(656 feet, 2 and 1/64 inches)?"