I am curious how the heck LVPD is involved. Reno is 450 miles from Vegas and Black rock is an additional 125 miles north. By comparison Albany, NT is 150 miles from NYC. The distance from Cleveland OK to Ny, NY at ~450 miles is about the same. Salt lake City is alto about the same 450 miles away and the reach of the FBI and IRS from SLC to Nevada is legendary.
One potential connection is cell phone tracking Friends report that BM has cell coverage for the first time in their memory of the event. It is possible that cell phone intercept technology is the draw that reaches to Vegas. It that is true the lack of warrants could be enough to force dismantling of all FBI and State cell phone abusive tech.
For those that monitor such things technologically the BR is so far from interference that an audit of intercept and methods would be easy to gather with passive tech. There are enough tech folk there and yes some astoundingly rich folk that technology and litigation would not be the abusive asymmetric context that allows abuses to continue. Some are also aggressive and dismissing or dropping of charges would not be seen as a win as much as it would seem to be an opportunity to play.
The good news is I have no privileged information on this and my words are highly speculative and as/. says mine. I might like to use this as the nut of a fictional novel so all rights reserved world wide.
I wonder what this transgression really is. Is it connecting https to twitter or Gmail? Is this cellphone traffic (commonly encrypted today). Satellite links... Encrypted laptops to protect company data.
Curious what is the IP address map of all the piggyback Xfinity public WiFi access ports and how difficult is it to impersonate a real authorized user.
I am very tempted to never use my "normal" Comcast connection.
Too many forget that courts are a contest between "story tellers" arbitrated by compliance to rules but not facts.
Some of us watch fictional movies and suspend normal belief systems to allow the story to unfold without distraction.
This suspension of disbelief is critical. If you disbelieve because one fact fails and that fact cracks the illusion for you the show or book can bomb (if it does not fit you must acquit' ).
Some communities are so imbued with a point of view that nothing cracks the bias or fiction. This can be very polarizing and can cause civil unrest or be the anchor for humor.
Consider HC and her email server. For some no story or fact can crack the POV that she is smarmy. Same for BO, Same for.... This is sadly what we are seeing now... we are being subjected to the setup for a punch line.
Watch out for the ad hominem attacks and other attempts to crack the story being told by the other side.
I was able to light my grandparents well water coming out of the tap 40 years ago. This isn't new.
Correct.... not new. The fracking issue mostly is simply some historic issue looking for deep pockets to dig into. Energy companies drilling for oil and mining coal. Attorneys looking for deep pockets to dig money out of.
I said mostly... there are some troubles in paradise but fracking is not the issue to pay attention to.
The most serious conundrum is RF is so ubiquitous that litigation of and changes in the school will not solve this if it was real. All the new phones worthy of buying have dual band WIFI hardware, bluetooth, and a gazillion cell service bands.
Unknown and rejected by the tinfoil hats is the reality that more and closser Cell, WiFi towers and routers is the only way to enable dynamic systems to operate at lower power levels. The further away a modern router is the more power a phone or laptop must use to hold up the near end of transmission pair.
WiFi inside of aircraft... WiFi in coffee shops, WiFi in grocery stores so the stock clerks can scan and check a gazillon items an hour and via wifi send the data back to the home office three time zones away. WiFi in an aircraft is interesting... the aircraft would reflect in inside the cabin and even at low antenna power the RF noise could be a thing.
My guess is the parents of this child put their cell phone in the kids stroller... and continue to use their devices in the automobile and more.
I would love this to go to court and the judge slam the heck out of the first plaintiff attorney that flips open a laptop and connect to the courthouse WiFi in the presence of the child.
If their child has a true problem and they have not moved to one of the rare almost RF free locations the parents need to be relieved of the child by child protective services.
I worry about this too but the risk of a broken leg after tripping over yet another wire is a bigger risk AFAICT.
not changing anything about how corporations have to secure data, or even (god forbid!) be punished for having sloppy security.
And why should it? For the sake of argument do you think the government should tell you that you MUST install a home security system,....................
This is almost interesting -- if we look at the Pile of Stuff that is WindowZ the need to install patches is astounding. The need to run an anti virus add on is too obvious. One dog in the yard called Windows 10 may act like a government forcing a home security update process on ya. We can debate what could go wrong but for the vast farms of attack bots assembled around the globe and under control of random bad and "good" guys the move we are seeing with Windows 10 may help.
Nothing keeps companies and agencies like the State Department from doing bad things. There is a hook to allow a company to take charge of the update flow....
But yes, we are mandating health care in the US and via proxy software vaccinations.
At one instant in time the no fly list was intended to be a list of people that posed a risk while flying.
Now it is a list to restrict the free movement of individuals.
Persons that pose a national security risk do so sitting at home. I am not sure this list continues to provide a service. It does deny components of life, liberty and the pursuit of happyness. It does so without due process...
I guess nothing would go wrong with "automatically installing firmware updates".
Well we know the folly of letting customers update firmware and pass words.
I almost dislike this but the more I learn about flaws and blunders hidden in routers and other devices the more I lean to the update me camp.
I would like a hardware gate that gives me absolute control but a handful of security folk at Google do have a clue and do take security seriously.
One might ask why Google security gets the attention and the budget they have -- well they have a lot of value in the data they collect and own. That valued data is their business and they are serious about protecting the business they are in.
I have been shopping for a new generation router... I will have to see what this one brings. The price is higher than I want but I will still look hard at this. I have decent hardware now so I can watch and evaluate the reviews.
Simply hovering -- Now my system will connect to things I would elect to not connect to. It is clear that network connections and data in a cache are no longer valid in a court of law.
With such a feature there is no reasonable expectation that anyone looked at or was in fact interested in anything. The good news is web sites that count will see their hit count jump for joy... Ponder an email with https://www.hillaryclinton.com... https://23.235.47.75/
Perhaps millions of compromised systems will be recovered.
And update servers will be compromised...
Valid concern... Of interest to some might be the p2p bandwidth enhancements. If MS got the digital signature technology correct MS will be able to push patches out quick enough that zero day exploits will be less and less an issue. By the time hackers can run differences and discover the bug to exploit vastly more machines will be updated.
Skepticism applies but it appears that they have a plan. Last year there was no visibility of a plan.
Now off to shop for a better firewall... I want gig in and gig out and low cost.
Look up "letters of marque and reprisal", and perhaps "privateering", too.
Yes and look deeper at history to see how badly that turned out. Law outside of the law is not a solution.
The one missing executive order that could help internet security is that all federal TLA class agencies report defects to vendors. Some will elect to use a proxy... but defects are serious trouble and need to be squashed.
Follow that with failure to act legislation...
Of all the parts in Windows 10 the update policy may prove to be the most important policy decision they made. Because the update is free to the globe many bot systems will be eliminated. Perhaps millions of compromised systems will be recovered.
Mounting a gun on my car and driving it around is illegal.
Is it?
Fine and dandy, that is what the gun rack in my pick-um up truck is for. Loaded not legal. Discharge from a vehicle commonly illegal with some rodent exceptions. Partly because of the power of the spot light and the damage to water control levies and the risk from flood damage when a levy breaks. Yabbees?
Hunting laws make it clear that firearms in a vehicle are a no no in most locations.
These jail terms are higher than an armed assault theft, or murder... All this indicates excessive lobbying or even corruption.
It is not just the jail term -- the ugly part is: " proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content". Mainly I am against legislation that is mainly targeted to one poorly specified class of offenders. The abusers are ready and waiting in the wings.
By way of bad law example the Asset forfeiture or asset seizure laws in the US was mainly intended to gather up the ill gotten gains of drug lords domestic and international. To this end the requirement for a conviction was not written in the law and now we are seeing cities, towns, states and federal agencies squabbling over the piles of assets that are extracted.
A copyright violation might be a foolish student with a difficult to pronounce foreign name that appeared to submit a ghost written paper as his or her own.
Is it convenient? If I take the transit and it only extends my commute from say 10 minutes to 20 minutes, but I don't have to worry about paying for parking, finding parking, etc. sure I'd take it. But I probably already would be. If it took 1.5 hours and two transfers where I have to wait 20 minutes each at a terminal, vs 30 minutes driving, no, I would not take transit.
As a test to see if public transit had coverage for the origins and destinations the drivers are interested in it was a success.
Most automobiles are already paid for or continue to have a loan payment most would opt to use what they are already paying for.
If by chance the test ran long enough that auto replacements could be deferred or skipped.
In this area public transit has sad coverage the trains run on the half hour to destinations that are only 15 min away by car and then require a 40 min walk. Miss the express to the city by ten seconds and the trip balloons from 40 min to 90 min. With clear traffic it is 35-40 min. Parking on the other hand is expensive unless you add in an hour of billable time to take a bus from the train station cross town.
Groceries for three... ice cream is melted before you get home too.
Public transportation statistics are full of averages applied to binomial distributions. They under serve one hump and over serve another. The customers that are overserved are often the politically active rich that talk the talk but do not walk to the public ride.
You do realize this is the UK? We don't use dollars here.
I agree however, with the sentiment of your post.
What is the smallest coin in the UK? My guess it is still 100+ times too valuable to represent the cost of the electricity an iPhone could gather in an hour. Someone with data please do the math.
We have been making progress towards a much better world. The problem is that it doesn't leave room for doomsayers and scaremongers
Also doesn't leave room for millions of other species.
The interesting component in this seems to be invasive species. Cats took out the Dodo bird.
This invasive species component alone can account for a large percentage as the small, medium and large invaders upset the local ecology.
Replacing one species with another reduces the resilience of the eco system but the modern mobility and transportation of species is new. Grasslands now grow grain... and feed billions, is this good or bad.
This invasion effect is new and will so dominate the data that important perhaps smaller changes can be missed until too late.
You know... it's funny because a few weeks ago, I made the point on Slashdot that I, too, believed Windows 10 was Microsoft's vehicle for moving people to a subscription model for their OS upgrades. But I was immediately modded down as a troll.
....snip.....
You may be right. Borrowed a spare tinfoil hat from a neighbor and got the impression that there was a gentle PUSH from a TLA to fix some or all of the security issues in WindowZ and also...
The subscriber model makes it easy to deliver targeted software and it also makes it easy to squash the world wide explosion of bot systems abused by criminals and foreign nationals.
The security flaws are seen as a power token by some small minded departments but the net sum of the known bugs risks global chaos.
Actually, eating one banana per day increases your risk of getting a cancer as much as smoking half of a cigarette per year.
WTF does all this shit come from?..... Also the detector shit is a fairytale since human beings contain more radioactive material than a banana.
Banana boats can be differentiated from a boat load of pears simply based on the K40 radiation signature. Same is true for many of the "low sodium" salt replacements that replace NaCl with KCl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... As for bananas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
K40 is very easy to measure. The Beta and Gamma radiation is vastly easier to measure in a mass than alpha emissions of other isotopes.
While a small percentage of K in the crust K40 is still a major component of the natural radiation dose because there is so much of it (K) in the crust of the earth.
The sensitivity of nuclear measurement tools is hard to comprehend.
One interesting application involves the abrasive qualities of tooth paste. Irradiated dental material is "brushed" with a test toothpaste and the trivial abrasion is measurable. Given that people brush their teeth for a lifetime the measurement of abrasion is a real world application of some interest to all.
Some cosmic rays have astounding energies... approaching the energy of a thrown baseball.
The problem is that schools don't teach science......
I recall my HS teacher teaching us about the "hollow earth" theory. He "taught" a longish list that included accepted and OMG foolish old theories. He did not take sides to the point that I at the time I wondered how the heck the hollow earth thing worked. Raquel Welch sort of made me not care if it was real for a couple hours...
Ultimately he had us looking at the list and thinking about it critically. Some were so silly as to be easy to dismiss but he had us dismiss them.
Yes the notion of critical thinking was rather soft but he had us do it.
The reality is science if full of historic ideas that have mostly been replaced with new and improved ideas. The puffery of some science guys on TV belies the reality that we only think we know something that is true, today.
Sigh... some of modern science is so astoundingly expensive that this may be the only way to play the game for the vast majority of talent.
However as a man with knowledge of Greek said he has little issue with the language.
Yet, one man published a paper that caused harm. The Wakefield Lancet paper was presented as science yet was just a well crafted fiction. It is this Wakefield like cruft that must be squashed.
A neighbor mentioned in passing that it can be more difficult to write fiction than fact because fiction must be consistent. He referred me to to M Twain.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Mark Twain
OK how does science update observations without a time machine?
Observations are observed facts and by their nature do not change unless a calibration was found to be incorrect and then it is not the observation that changes it is the computed result after application of calibration data.
I am a believer in global warming and global climate change. I am not a believer in much of the "science". I balk at consensus science.
My personal bias has many origins but the one the gets me was a "customer" complaining that his new supercomputer was giving him an incorrect 19th digit in the resulting output. I cracked open the deck (old FORTRAN) and noted on the first screen "PI = 3.14". This tells me that NOTHING in the output that involved PI had any validity beyond three digits. Yet this guy was concerned with the 19th.
I asked why he did not substitute a value of PI from math.h and he explained that the code was unstable if given more digits to PI. OMG I said to myself.
Then I looked at his published research and yes he was worried about CO2 in the ocean but in specific he wanted to eliminate natural regions of the sea floor low enough in O2 to sequester organic matter. i.e. he was worried about a natural process that reduced CO2 in the air and wanted to eliminate it.
I happen to live down wind of "El Niño" and am astounded by the inability of the global weather services to model and measure this. I see headlines like: ""El Niño might “push the needle on global temperature” toward unprecedented warmth"" This is a conjecture for the 2015-2016 rainy season in Calif less than a year away and others are telling me that the sky is falling in 100 years.
Like I said I am a believer that man is altering the planet weather. I do believe that the ostriches in government need to fund quality research and fund better data gathering efforts.
The United nations needs to mandate that all commercial aircraft, trains and all ships at sea carry an instrument package to assist in data collecting efforts. And that that data be delivered to the UN for use by all UN members. This does leave big data voids but it would be a start.
Orwellian commercial and governmental surveillance, censorship by various nations,......
...the executive order [EO 12333] authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.
Now you say that that only pertains to data that is scooped up in foreign communications, but you have to realize that in modern telecommunication networks, data often transverses borders as packets are routed to phone switches that may be physically located in, say, Canada. So call from you in Nevada to your mom in Michigan may be recorded if your call is routed through a phone switch in Toronto, Canada.
It is interesting that the set of agencies commonly made reference to as the TLAs at this point have near total control over most of the routing infrastructure and could change routes such that the data passes through an international resource.
I find it amusing that my "location services" often get my location wrong by three time zones. One time my location was N. Virginia another time some place in MD and I believe I have been triangulated west and south of the Golden Trumpet just west of one of the largest holes in the earth known to exist in N. America.
These routing anomalies mostly appeared to be the phone and ISP folk shaping traffic in ways to give "data" truth to their position that internet transparency and net neutrality now I wonder... wonder should I click PA or not...
Exodus from Earth. We need space ships to spread out in the galaxy!
Errr... No. The math shows that as immortals migrate the growing demands inside the bubble are never met. Starvation and worse.... Like a swarm of cannibalistic locusts we might invade the galaxy... but the wreckage we leave behind... oh my.
Slashdot Mirror
I am curious how the heck LVPD is involved. Reno is 450 miles from Vegas and Black rock is an additional 125 miles north.
By comparison Albany, NT is 150 miles from NYC. The distance from Cleveland OK to Ny, NY at ~450 miles is about the same.
Salt lake City is alto about the same 450 miles away and the reach of the FBI and IRS from SLC to Nevada is legendary.
One potential connection is cell phone tracking Friends report that BM has cell coverage for the first time in their memory of the event.
It is possible that cell phone intercept technology is the draw that reaches to Vegas. It that is true the lack of warrants
could be enough to force dismantling of all FBI and State cell phone abusive tech.
For those that monitor such things technologically the BR is so far from interference that an audit of intercept
and methods would be easy to gather with passive tech. There are enough tech folk there and yes some astoundingly
rich folk that technology and litigation would not be the abusive asymmetric context that allows abuses to continue.
Some are also aggressive and dismissing or dropping of charges would not be seen as a win as much as it would
seem to be an opportunity to play.
The good news is I have no privileged information on this and my words are highly speculative and as /. says mine.
I might like to use this as the nut of a fictional novel so all rights reserved world wide.
I wonder what this transgression really is.
Is it connecting https to twitter or Gmail?
Is this cellphone traffic (commonly encrypted today).
Satellite links...
Encrypted laptops to protect company data.
This is worth watching.
Curious what is the IP address map of all the piggyback Xfinity public
WiFi access ports and how difficult is it to impersonate a real authorized user.
I am very tempted to never use my "normal" Comcast connection.
Too many forget that courts are a contest between "story tellers" arbitrated
by compliance to rules but not facts.
Some of us watch fictional movies and suspend normal belief systems
to allow the story to unfold without distraction.
This suspension of disbelief is critical. If you disbelieve because one fact fails
and that fact cracks the illusion for you the show or book can bomb (if it does not
fit you must acquit' ).
Some communities are so imbued with a point of view that nothing cracks the bias or fiction.
This can be very polarizing and can cause civil unrest or be the anchor for humor.
Consider HC and her email server. For some no story or fact can crack the POV that she is ....
smarmy. Same for BO, Same for
This is sadly what we are seeing now... we are being subjected to the setup for a punch line.
Watch out for the ad hominem attacks and other attempts to crack the story being told
by the other side.
Courts are the worst context to discover science.
I was able to light my grandparents well water coming out of the tap 40 years ago. This isn't new.
Correct.... not new.
The fracking issue mostly is simply some historic issue looking for deep pockets to dig into.
Energy companies drilling for oil and mining coal.
Attorneys looking for deep pockets to dig money out of.
I said mostly... there are some troubles in paradise but fracking is not the issue
to pay attention to.
LMGTFY: http://www.who.int/peh-emf/pub...
The most serious conundrum is RF is so ubiquitous that litigation of and changes in the school
will not solve this if it was real. All the new phones worthy of buying have dual band WIFI hardware, bluetooth,
and a gazillion cell service bands.
Unknown and rejected by the tinfoil hats is the reality that more and closser Cell, WiFi towers and
routers is the only way to enable dynamic systems to operate at lower power levels. The further
away a modern router is the more power a phone or laptop must use to hold up the near end
of transmission pair.
WiFi inside of aircraft... WiFi in coffee shops, WiFi in grocery stores so the stock clerks can
scan and check a gazillon items an hour and via wifi send the data back to the home office three
time zones away. WiFi in an aircraft is interesting... the aircraft would reflect in inside the cabin
and even at low antenna power the RF noise could be a thing.
My guess is the parents of this child put their cell phone in the kids stroller...
and continue to use their devices in the automobile and more.
I would love this to go to court and the judge slam the heck out of the first plaintiff attorney
that flips open a laptop and connect to the courthouse WiFi in the presence of the child.
If their child has a true problem and they have not moved to one of the rare almost RF free
locations the parents need to be relieved of the child by child protective services.
I worry about this too but the risk of a broken leg after tripping over yet another wire
is a bigger risk AFAICT.
not changing anything about how corporations have to secure data, or even (god forbid!) be punished for having sloppy security.
And why should it? For the sake of argument do you think the government should tell you that you MUST install a home security system, ................... .
This is almost interesting -- if we look at the Pile of Stuff that is WindowZ the need to install patches is astounding. The need to run an anti virus add on is too obvious.
One dog in the yard called Windows 10 may act like a government forcing a home security update process on ya.
We can debate what could go wrong but for the vast farms of attack bots assembled around the globe and under
control of random bad and "good" guys the move we are seeing with Windows 10 may help.
Nothing keeps companies and agencies like the State Department from doing bad things. There is a hook to allow
a company to take charge of the update flow....
But yes, we are mandating health care in the US and via proxy software vaccinations.
At one instant in time the no fly list was intended to be a list of
people that posed a risk while flying.
Now it is a list to restrict the free movement of individuals.
Persons that pose a national security risk do so sitting at home.
I am not sure this list continues to provide a service. It does
deny components of life, liberty and the pursuit of happyness.
It does so without due process...
I guess nothing would go wrong with "automatically installing firmware updates".
Well we know the folly of letting customers update firmware and pass words.
I almost dislike this but the more I learn about flaws and blunders hidden in
routers and other devices the more I lean to the update me camp.
I would like a hardware gate that gives me absolute control
but a handful of security folk at Google do have a clue and
do take security seriously.
One might ask why Google security gets the attention and the budget they have -- well
they have a lot of value in the data they collect and own. That valued data is their business and
they are serious about protecting the business they are in.
I have been shopping for a new generation router... I will have to see what this one brings.
The price is higher than I want but I will still look hard at this. I have decent hardware now
so I can watch and evaluate the reviews.
Simply hovering --
Now my system will connect to things I would elect to not connect to.
It is clear that network connections and data in a cache are no
longer valid in a court of law.
With such a feature there is no reasonable expectation that anyone
looked at or was in fact interested in anything.
The good news is web sites that count will see their hit count
jump for joy... Ponder an email with
https://www.hillaryclinton.com...
https://23.235.47.75/
Then that would be okay.
No it would not...
But hey let us VOTE on it!
Perhaps millions of compromised systems will be recovered.
And update servers will be compromised...
Valid concern...
Of interest to some might be the p2p bandwidth enhancements.
If MS got the digital signature technology correct MS will be able to
push patches out quick enough that zero day exploits will be less
and less an issue. By the time hackers can run differences and discover the
bug to exploit vastly more machines will be updated.
Skepticism applies but it appears that they have a plan.
Last year there was no visibility of a plan.
Now off to shop for a better firewall... I want gig in and gig out
and low cost.
Look up "letters of marque and reprisal", and perhaps "privateering", too.
Yes and look deeper at history to see how badly that turned out. Law outside of the
law is not a solution.
The one missing executive order that could help internet security is that
all federal TLA class agencies report defects to vendors. Some will elect
to use a proxy... but defects are serious trouble and need to be squashed.
Follow that with failure to act legislation...
Of all the parts in Windows 10 the update policy may prove to be the
most important policy decision they made. Because the update is free
to the globe many bot systems will be eliminated. Perhaps millions of
compromised systems will be recovered.
Mounting a gun on my car and driving it around is illegal.
Is it?
Fine and dandy, that is what the gun rack in my pick-um up truck is for.
Loaded not legal. Discharge from a vehicle commonly illegal with some rodent exceptions.
Partly because of the power of the spot light and the damage to water control levies
and the risk from flood damage when a levy breaks. Yabbees?
Hunting laws make it clear that firearms in a vehicle are a no no in most locations.
These jail terms are higher than an armed assault theft, or murder...
All this indicates excessive lobbying or even corruption.
It is not just the jail term -- the ugly part is: " proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content".
Mainly I am against legislation that is mainly targeted to one poorly specified class of offenders. The abusers are ready
and waiting in the wings.
By way of bad law example the Asset forfeiture or asset seizure laws in the US was mainly intended to gather
up the ill gotten gains of drug lords domestic and international. To this end the requirement for a conviction
was not written in the law and now we are seeing cities, towns, states and federal agencies squabbling over
the piles of assets that are extracted.
A copyright violation might be a foolish student with a difficult to pronounce foreign name
that appeared to submit a ghost written paper as his or her own.
Bad laws are just bad.
Is it convenient? If I take the transit and it only extends my commute from say 10 minutes to 20 minutes, but I don't have to worry about paying for parking, finding parking, etc. sure I'd take it. But I probably already would be. If it took 1.5 hours and two transfers where I have to wait 20 minutes each at a terminal, vs 30 minutes driving, no, I would not take transit.
As a test to see if public transit had coverage for the origins and
destinations the drivers are interested in it was a success.
Most automobiles are already paid for or continue to have a loan payment
most would opt to use what they are already paying for.
If by chance the test ran long enough that auto replacements could be deferred
or skipped.
In this area public transit has sad coverage the trains run on the half hour to destinations
that are only 15 min away by car and then require a 40 min walk. Miss the express to the city by ten seconds and
the trip balloons from 40 min to 90 min. With clear traffic it is 35-40 min.
Parking on the other hand is expensive unless you add in an hour of billable
time to take a bus from the train station cross town.
Groceries for three... ice cream is melted before you get home too.
Public transportation statistics are full of averages applied to binomial distributions.
They under serve one hump and over serve another. The customers that are overserved
are often the politically active rich that talk the talk but do not walk to the public ride.
Public transport is hard..
You do realize this is the UK? We don't use dollars here.
I agree however, with the sentiment of your post.
What is the smallest coin in the UK?
My guess it is still 100+ times too valuable to represent the
cost of the electricity an iPhone could gather in an hour.
Someone with data please do the math.
We have been making progress towards a much better world. The problem is that it doesn't leave room for doomsayers and scaremongers
Also doesn't leave room for millions of other species.
The interesting component in this seems to be invasive species.
Cats took out the Dodo bird.
This invasive species component alone can account for a large percentage
as the small, medium and large invaders upset the local ecology.
Replacing one species with another reduces the resilience of the eco system
but the modern mobility and transportation of species is new.
Grasslands now grow grain... and feed billions, is this good or bad.
This invasion effect is new and will so dominate the data that important perhaps smaller changes
can be missed until too late.
You know... it's funny because a few weeks ago, I made the point on Slashdot that I, too, believed Windows 10 was Microsoft's vehicle for moving people to a subscription model for their OS upgrades. But I was immediately modded down as a troll.
....snip.....
You may be right.
Borrowed a spare tinfoil hat from a neighbor and got the
impression that there was a gentle PUSH from a TLA to
fix some or all of the security issues in WindowZ and also...
The subscriber model makes it easy to deliver targeted software
and it also makes it easy to squash the world wide explosion
of bot systems abused by criminals and foreign nationals.
The security flaws are seen as a power token by some small minded
departments but the net sum of the known bugs risks global chaos.
WTF does all this shit come from? ..... Also the detector shit is a fairytale since human beings contain more radioactive material than a banana.
Banana boats can be differentiated from a boat load of pears
simply based on the K40 radiation signature. Same is true for
many of the "low sodium" salt replacements that replace NaCl with KCl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As for bananas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
K40 is very easy to measure. The Beta and Gamma radiation
is vastly easier to measure in a mass than alpha emissions of
other isotopes.
While a small percentage of K in the crust K40 is still a major component
of the natural radiation dose because there is so much of it (K) in the
crust of the earth.
The sensitivity of nuclear measurement tools is hard to comprehend.
One interesting application involves the abrasive qualities of tooth paste.
Irradiated dental material is "brushed" with a test toothpaste and
the trivial abrasion is measurable. Given that people brush their teeth
for a lifetime the measurement of abrasion is a real world application
of some interest to all.
Some cosmic rays have astounding energies... approaching the energy
of a thrown baseball.
The problem is that schools don't teach science. .....
I recall my HS teacher teaching us about the "hollow earth" theory.
He "taught" a longish list that included accepted and OMG foolish
old theories. He did not take sides to the point that I at the time
I wondered how the heck the hollow earth thing worked. Raquel Welch
sort of made me not care if it was real for a couple hours...
Ultimately he had us looking at the list and thinking about it
critically. Some were so silly as to be easy to dismiss but
he had us dismiss them.
Yes the notion of critical thinking was rather soft but he had
us do it.
The reality is science if full of historic ideas that have mostly
been replaced with new and improved ideas. The puffery
of some science guys on TV belies the reality that we only
think we know something that is true, today.
Sigh... some of modern science is so astoundingly expensive
that this may be the only way to play the game for the vast
majority of talent.
However as a man with knowledge of Greek said he has
little issue with the language.
Yet, one man published a paper that caused harm.
The Wakefield Lancet paper was presented as science yet was
just a well crafted fiction. It is this Wakefield like cruft that
must be squashed.
A neighbor mentioned in passing that it can be more difficult
to write fiction than fact because fiction must be consistent.
He referred me to to M Twain.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Mark Twain
OK how does science update observations without a time machine?
Observations are observed facts and by their nature do not
change unless a calibration was found to be incorrect and
then it is not the observation that changes it is the computed
result after application of calibration data.
I am a believer in global warming and global climate change.
I am not a believer in much of the "science".
I balk at consensus science.
My personal bias has many origins but the one the gets me
was a "customer" complaining that his new supercomputer
was giving him an incorrect 19th digit in the resulting output.
I cracked open the deck (old FORTRAN) and noted on the
first screen "PI = 3.14". This tells me that NOTHING in
the output that involved PI had any validity beyond three digits.
Yet this guy was concerned with the 19th.
I asked why he did not substitute a value of PI from math.h
and he explained that the code was unstable if given more
digits to PI. OMG I said to myself.
Then I looked at his published research and yes he was worried
about CO2 in the ocean but in specific he wanted to eliminate
natural regions of the sea floor low enough in O2 to sequester
organic matter. i.e. he was worried about a natural process that
reduced CO2 in the air and wanted to eliminate it.
I happen to live down wind of "El Niño" and am astounded by the inability
of the global weather services to model and measure this. I see
headlines like: ""El Niño might “push the needle on global temperature” toward unprecedented warmth""
This is a conjecture for the 2015-2016 rainy season in Calif less than a year away
and others are telling me that the sky is falling in 100 years.
Like I said I am a believer that man is altering the planet weather.
I do believe that the ostriches in government need to fund quality
research and fund better data gathering efforts.
The United nations needs to mandate that all commercial aircraft, trains and all ships at
sea carry an instrument package to assist in data collecting efforts.
And that that data be delivered to the UN for use by all UN members.
This does leave big data voids but it would be a start.
Orwellian commercial and governmental surveillance, censorship by various nations,......
...the executive order [EO 12333] authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.
Now you say that that only pertains to data that is scooped up in foreign communications, but you have to realize that in modern telecommunication networks, data often transverses borders as packets are routed to phone switches that may be physically located in, say, Canada. So call from you in Nevada to your mom in Michigan may be recorded if your call is routed through a phone switch in Toronto, Canada.
It is interesting that the set of agencies commonly made reference to as the TLAs
at this point have near total control over most of the routing infrastructure and could
change routes such that the data passes through an international resource.
I find it amusing that my "location services" often get my location wrong by three time zones.
One time my location was N. Virginia another time some place in MD and I believe
I have been triangulated west and south of the Golden Trumpet just west of one
of the largest holes in the earth known to exist in N. America.
These routing anomalies mostly appeared to be the phone and ISP folk shaping traffic
in ways to give "data" truth to their position that internet transparency and net neutrality
now I wonder... wonder should I click PA or not...
Exodus from Earth. We need space ships to spread out in the galaxy!
Errr... No.
The math shows that as immortals migrate the growing demands inside the bubble
are never met. Starvation and worse....
Like a swarm of cannibalistic locusts we might invade the galaxy...
but the wreckage we leave behind... oh my.