I saw it being used downtown on Monday, the guy didn't appear affluent enough for one but there he was, all by himself, carrying on a animated conversation with no cell phone or ear piece visible, drinking something in a paper sack.
That's right, simple, and straight forward. It reminds me of days past (and present) when some institiution would get a call from "Agent Jones" of the FBI (or local police or...) requesting some confidential information and even offering a call back number.
The correct call back would be get a phone number via a phone book or information (trusted source) and call THAT number before even thinking of giving out any information. Social engineering has not changed all that much in the last century.
California, at lesat, has stalking laws that makes it a criminal offense to follow another person around etc. Now we need laws that would make it illegal for companies to stalk, archive, or release personal financial records to third parties. In particular it should be be legal for any person or corporation, such as a bank, that reports financial matters about a person to the IRS to request or store social security numbers. The rest should be subject for severe penalties. I suppose that the companies would then just move off shore, thoug.
We in Southern Califonia were advised that we should watch our credit reports for unusual activity to detect identity theft. That activity might be a request for a credit report from Honest John's Automobile sales in Texas. You can get a free credit report once a year from each credit agency - the rest you pay for. Great.
The article has inaccuracies but IMHO the conclusion is accurate.
It says that 100 lbs (about 45 kg) of U235, enough to achieve critiacl mass is the size of a bowling ball but it's the size of a grapefruit. Other sources say that 50 lbs is needed for critical mass but it's not clear what degree of enrichment was used for the calculatons and whether depleted uranium or other neutron reflector is used. A neutron reflector effectivly lowers the amount of fissionable material needed to achieve critical mass.
Fabricating a U235 device should be fairly easy after enough U235 is obtained especially compared to a PU device.
Even if the detonationn would be a spectacular fizzle there would be deaths and radioactive contamination and the psycological impact would be tremendous.
Let's see, go to the bathroom or other place where your presence won't be noticed, wrap the badge in aluminum foil, leave the campus to do what you wish. Return, go to the bathroom, remove the foil and resume your day.
Do the same but attend class.
Steal someone's badge, hid it in the bathroom, later on put it in the owners back pack.
And so on...
When confronted "know nothing". The system must be unreliable so the administrtation and parents can't trust it.
I think that the legal problems of who is liable after a crash will need to be worked out before acceptance of automated driving beyond cruise control technology.
I can envision a driver falling asleep or is otherwise not paying attention, the technology fails, and there's a crash. Perhaps a piece of paper blows up and covers the sensors, they get iced over, or just fail.
Who's to blame, that is, whose pockets will be targeted? If it's the manufacturers then IMHO you won't see this technology anytime soon.
Automated freeway driving is being tested on a section of freeway in San Diego that is used for extra lanes in rush hour. When it's not being used you might observe 5 or 5 cars traveling in a group, tailgating, with not one person actually driving. They don't need cameras to see the lanes or side of the road, they just follow a trail of magnets imbedded in the lanes.
NASA Ames Research Center tried this from a light twin aircraft three or four years ago with good results. AFAIK they were using 802.11b. As I recall they used an off-the-shelf antenna on the belly of he aircraft and transmitted data to a ground station in Hawaii. I can't recall if they used a directional antenna on the ground station or one of the high gain following antennas they have.
How is the transit time calculated? By dividing the great circle distance between the cities by the crusing speed? How long does it take to reach altitude and cruising speed?
>>... Avatar will use a combination of turbofan, ramjet and scramjet engines to reach a cruising altitude of 10 kilometres before a cryogenic rocket engine takes over for the final push into space.
And how long to decelatate from altitude and crusing speed? The airliners that I flew in last week took at least a half hour for this.
Well if they can commercialize it for air travel it will still be lots faster.
The tactical air controller could probably send one in since it would belong to the agency fighting the fire but it's too small to be seen by him or the water drop aircraft or the lead plane and you may have noticed that there have been some tankers lost in the last 18 months.b
Typically visibility is bad sround the fire from all the smoke unless the fire is burning into the wind and the UAVs must be in sight of the controller.
We fly our remote imaging aircraft at 16,500 and we are part of the fire supression.
I still contend that the UAVs could only have a very limited role and that wouldn't justify the expense of obtaining and flying them for wildfire.
There are lots of labs working on projects like the one you describe, NASA comes to mind, but the FAA has lots of flight and operation rules regarding where and how high and requires visual contact at all times. Not good for fire supression activities.
I'm involved with imaging forest fires and I agree with you. Flying the UAV out of site of the controller is an FAA violation as well. The area around forest fires is closed to aircraft not under the control of the Tactical Air Controller so this adds another problem.
To be useful it would have to have an imaging system far enough into the infrared to "see" through smoke and would probably have to be capable of providing images with more than 10 or 12 bits of data per pixel to avoid the condition where all kind of hot ground shows up as 0xFF and you can't tell the active fire front from the mearly hot ground behind it. We use 16 bits per pixel.
The images become quite usefully when geodata is available with the image. I think that the cost and weight of such a UAV would be well in excess of $15K/3-ounces an not useful enough to for the agencies responsible for wildfire suppression to purchase the hundreds of them needed for a reasonable deployment.
It's the coolest small UAV I've seen, though, since it requires minimal training for the controller. The total sytem cost skyrockets when you have to have 2 or more trained controllers per group of UAVs.
I use SpamBayes (free) with Outlook on my W2K machine. I trained it with over 400 SPAM and over 1000 non-SPAM emails. I get about 45 SPAM each day and my ISP, attglobal, filters out about 40 of them. The SPAM that gets to my mailbox are the ones that pass through the attglobal filter and that filter has NEVER given me a false positive for more than 2000 SPAM. Those SPAM are put in special folder on the server for inspection but I now just delete them en-mass every week or so.
That means that SpamBayes is filtering only the hardest emails to classify and so far it has only given me one false positive. I got one false negative after training it for the first time. SpamBayes also has a folder for messages that it is not sure of and so far they have all been SPAM. I seldom have to do more than inspect the sender and subject to confirm that they are SPAM.
Each time a message is automatically moved to the SPAM folder (or moved back to the Incoming folder) the training set is adjusted for that email so I don't have to re-train.
To sum up I'm really impressed by well designed Bayesian filters and this one in particular. I think it's worth while to take the time to build up a corpus of SPAM and "good" messages as I can then evaluate competing filters.
I gave my wife an aquamarine engagement ring rather than a diamond. Our choices were between aquamarine and emerald and, in our opinion, both look better than diamond. We are also opposed to paying an inflated price for diamond and supporting the African wars.
The vulnerability of electronic voting systems to fraud has been discussed in tech circles but has caught the attention of almost no one in political office. For instance Riverside County and other counties now use electronic voting systems and Los Angeles County, among others, is poised to implement electronic voting. It appears that the county politicians are ignoring the issues of fraud and hacking. Then there is the issue if the machines can be configured to handle 150+ candidates.
What is your opinion of the suitability of electronic voting in California elections?
The San Diego International Airport is in the city so aircraft fly across the edge of the city center. I guess that San Diego will be excluded or it will be the only target left.
Slashdot Mirror
So John must be a vegetarian, too?
I saw it being used downtown on Monday, the guy didn't appear affluent enough for one but there he was, all by himself, carrying on a animated conversation with no cell phone or ear piece visible, drinking something in a paper sack.
Nate
That's right, simple, and straight forward. It reminds me of days past (and present) when some institiution would get a call from "Agent Jones" of the FBI (or local police or ...) requesting some confidential information and even offering a call back number.
The correct call back would be get a phone number via a phone book or information (trusted source) and call THAT number before even thinking of giving out any information. Social engineering has not changed all that much in the last century.
Nate
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
Not if the opinion of the two women at the table next to me at luch last week is correct!
Searching for
movie: Play it, Sam
did not find Casablanca. Alas.
California, at lesat, has stalking laws that makes it a criminal offense to follow another person around etc. Now we need laws that would make it illegal for companies to stalk, archive, or release personal financial records to third parties. In particular it should be be legal for any person or corporation, such as a bank, that reports financial matters about a person to the IRS to request or store social security numbers. The rest should be subject for severe penalties. I suppose that the companies would then just move off shore, thoug.
We in Southern Califonia were advised that we should watch our credit reports for unusual activity to detect identity theft. That activity might be a request for a credit report from Honest John's Automobile sales in Texas. You can get a free credit report once a year from each credit agency - the rest you pay for. Great.
The article has inaccuracies but IMHO the conclusion is accurate.
It says that 100 lbs (about 45 kg) of U235, enough to achieve critiacl mass is the size of a bowling ball but it's the size of a grapefruit. Other sources say that 50 lbs is needed for critical mass but it's not clear what degree of enrichment was used for the calculatons and whether depleted uranium or other neutron reflector is used. A neutron reflector effectivly lowers the amount of fissionable material needed to achieve critical mass.
Fabricating a U235 device should be fairly easy after enough U235 is obtained especially compared to a PU device.
Even if the detonationn would be a spectacular fizzle there would be deaths and radioactive contamination and the psycological impact would be tremendous.
Let's see, go to the bathroom or other place where your presence won't be noticed, wrap the badge in aluminum foil, leave the campus to do what you wish. Return, go to the bathroom, remove the foil and resume your day.
Do the same but attend class.
Steal someone's badge, hid it in the bathroom, later on put it in the owners back pack.
And so on...
When confronted "know nothing". The system must be unreliable so the administrtation and parents can't trust it.
>
Imagine, I'm rarly in my car for even 45 minutes a working day and it's going to save me two hours!
Wonder how much else is hype?
I think that the legal problems of who is liable after a crash will need to be worked out before acceptance of automated driving beyond cruise control technology.
I can envision a driver falling asleep or is otherwise not paying attention, the technology fails, and there's a crash. Perhaps a piece of paper blows up and covers the sensors, they get iced over, or just fail.
Who's to blame, that is, whose pockets will be targeted? If it's the manufacturers then IMHO you won't see this technology anytime soon.
Automated freeway driving is being tested on a section of freeway in San Diego that is used for extra lanes in rush hour. When it's not being used you might observe 5 or 5 cars traveling in a group, tailgating, with not one person actually driving. They don't need cameras to see the lanes or side of the road, they just follow a trail of magnets imbedded in the lanes.
NASA Ames Research Center tried this from a light twin aircraft three or four years ago with good results. AFAIK they were using 802.11b. As I recall they used an off-the-shelf antenna on the belly of he aircraft and transmitted data to a ground station in Hawaii. I can't recall if they used a directional antenna on the ground station or one of the high gain following antennas they have.
How is the transit time calculated? By dividing the great circle distance between the cities by the crusing speed? How long does it take to reach altitude and cruising speed?
>>... Avatar will use a combination of turbofan, ramjet and scramjet engines to reach a cruising altitude of 10 kilometres before a cryogenic rocket engine takes over for the final push into space.
And how long to decelatate from altitude and crusing speed? The airliners that I flew in last week took at least a half hour for this.
Well if they can commercialize it for air travel it will still be lots faster.
The tactical air controller could probably send one in since it would belong to the agency fighting the fire but it's too small to be seen by him or the water drop aircraft or the lead plane and you may have noticed that there have been some tankers lost in the last 18 months.b
Typically visibility is bad sround the fire from all the smoke unless the fire is burning into the wind and the UAVs must be in sight of the controller.
We fly our remote imaging aircraft at 16,500 and we are part of the fire supression.
I still contend that the UAVs could only have a very limited role and that wouldn't justify the expense of obtaining and flying them for wildfire.
There are lots of labs working on projects like the one you describe, NASA comes to mind, but the FAA has lots of flight and operation rules regarding where and how high and requires visual contact at all times. Not good for fire supression activities.
I'm involved with imaging forest fires and I agree with you. Flying the UAV out of site of the controller is an FAA violation as well. The area around forest fires is closed to aircraft not under the control of the Tactical Air Controller so this adds another problem.
To be useful it would have to have an imaging system far enough into the infrared to "see" through smoke and would probably have to be capable of providing images with more than 10 or 12 bits of data per pixel to avoid the condition where all kind of hot ground shows up as 0xFF and you can't tell the active fire front from the mearly hot ground behind it. We use 16 bits per pixel.
The images become quite usefully when geodata is available with the image. I think that the cost and weight of such a UAV would be well in excess of $15K/3-ounces an not useful enough to for the agencies responsible for wildfire suppression to purchase the hundreds of them needed for a reasonable deployment.
It's the coolest small UAV I've seen, though, since it requires minimal training for the controller. The total sytem cost skyrockets when you have to have 2 or more trained controllers per group of UAVs.
I started using the uppercase form, without engaging my brain, when some spellchecker suggested it. Well, it's not as bad as ATM Machine...
>Spam isn't an acronym btw (doesn't need to be IN CAPS ;).
Damn, I knew that!
Thanks
I use SpamBayes (free) with Outlook on my W2K machine. I trained it with over 400 SPAM and over 1000 non-SPAM emails. I get about 45 SPAM each day and my ISP, attglobal, filters out about 40 of them. The SPAM that gets to my mailbox are the ones that pass through the attglobal filter and that filter has NEVER given me a false positive for more than 2000 SPAM. Those SPAM are put in special folder on the server for inspection but I now just delete them en-mass every week or so.
That means that SpamBayes is filtering only the hardest emails to classify and so far it has only given me one false positive. I got one false negative after training it for the first time. SpamBayes also has a folder for messages that it is not sure of and so far they have all been SPAM. I seldom have to do more than inspect the sender and subject to confirm that they are SPAM.
Each time a message is automatically moved to the SPAM folder (or moved back to the Incoming folder) the training set is adjusted for that email so I don't have to re-train.
To sum up I'm really impressed by well designed Bayesian filters and this one in particular. I think it's worth while to take the time to build up a corpus of SPAM and "good" messages as I can then evaluate competing filters.
I gave my wife an aquamarine engagement ring rather than a diamond. Our choices were between aquamarine and emerald and, in our opinion, both look better than diamond. We are also opposed to paying an inflated price for diamond and supporting the African wars.
The vulnerability of electronic voting systems to fraud has been discussed in tech circles but has caught the attention of almost no one in political office. For instance Riverside County and other counties now use electronic voting systems and Los Angeles County, among others, is poised to implement electronic voting. It appears that the county politicians are ignoring the issues of fraud and hacking. Then there is the issue if the machines can be configured to handle 150+ candidates.
What is your opinion of the suitability of electronic voting in California elections?
The San Diego International Airport is in the city so aircraft fly across the edge of the city center. I guess that San Diego will be excluded or it will be the only target left.
Most of the science "experiments" are done by school kids and most of the rest don't get published in first rate peer review journals.
There isn't much justification for most of the expensive and trivial science experiments carried out by astronauts.
They have a good rep but do they have a horoscope column?
In the USA it's called alfalfa.