Parent of this post has it exactly right: this "forensic analysis" is bull.
The article's pretty clear on what the "analysis" does: it adds a little bit of noise ("static") to a JPEG, re-compresses it, then takes the difference between the original photo and the noisy version. JPEG tends to smooth out slight variations in large blocks of color and concentrate on accurately representing sharp edges and transitions, so the largest differences will be in high-contrast "edgy" areas: text, bookshelves, beards, and the edges of tables, lampshades, etc.
And you see that, manipulation or no, that's exactly what the analysis technique is picking up. The "researcher" has gone a long way to invent the high-pass filter. Congratulations.
The whole point was they don't need to, because it's easily handled by the user. Less IT work is a good thing, if you can just release your claws a little from grasping everything that comes within reach. If I can jump on the bandwagon again here, let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in the distant '80s, there was a large research lab. This lab did a lot of work with computers. The computers of the day were giant VAXen which filled a basement room, with tentacles reaching out to terminals in users' offices throughout the building. The computers was complicated and confusing, and an army of highly trained, very smart support people worked on them. These high priests and acolytes lurked in the basement, worshipping the VAX god and interpreting its prophecies to the users. They did this job well.
But the users looked at the sacrifices they were making to the VAX god and its acolytes, and realized, "I can get much more done with far less money if I buy a small workstation for my office." The priests in the basement said, "but we won't be able to control and service the machine. What will you do when it breaks?" The users replied, "I'll buy a new one. They cost as much as two days of your salary." Lo, the priests in their basement temple feared for their jobs, feared that their great god, the source of their power, would be lost forever.
The priests were right, up to a point. The workstation users discovered viruses, and hackers, and spam, and the rest of the ten plagues of the Internet. They learned to do some of the work the priests once did on the VAX. But the new workstations were so much cheaper, and so much easier to use and maintain, that they found it a fair trade. The great VAX was cast out of the basement, and died the sad death of all forgotten gods, but the priests met a happier ending. The eldest took a generous early retirement; the neophytes re-trained, and learned to serve the new pantheon of desktop workstations. By letting go, by giving up their ability to control and manage and dominate, the priests made their users happier and more productive, and saved the lab a hell of a lot of money....
Then, one day, in the empty, dusty temple where the VAX god was once worshipped, the first Beowulf clusters sprouted. And as they grew and spread their tentacles, a new breed of priests arose to serve them...
The "moron"-level user, which IT security nazis seem to spend all their time worrying about, docks his iPhone every day or two. He does this to charge it, and to get his music, calendars, contacts, etc synced with his computer. Whenever he does this, he will automatically get the update. Unless he clicks "don't update". If you're worried about users rejecting updates, you should worry about them trying to swallow the phone too.
People have complained about how the iPhone is tethered to a desktop computer. Not only is this not a hassle -- you need to plug it into something to charge it anyway, why not your computer? -- but it builds a useful habit in the user: software updates will happen automatically whenever it's docked.
Here's an analogy for you. Imagine a mobile device is like a car. If you're not driving an iPhone, you need to go to three separate service stations for gas, for minor maintenance, and to get major repairs. On iPhone, you pull in for gas, and an army of attendants come out to check your oil, wash the windows, and oh by the way, there's a recall out on your airbag, would you like us to fix that real quick for ya? If you're not on an iPhone, best-case scenario is a tow truck pulls you over on the highway and fixes your airbag on the roadside. Worst-case is, you don't find out there's a recall until it's too late.
Or do you believe that patches never break anything? Maybe they do on Windows, but I have never, *ever* had a security patch break something on my Mac. Not once.
You try to get rid of the "squishiness" of the floor because it's unpleasant to walk on, like walking on sand. But that squishiness is crucial: if the floor doesn't move, displacement = 0, and no work is done on the floor, so no energy can be extracted. Piezo crystals can tolerate large forces but allow only tiny tiny displacements: they can generate large voltages, but only miniscule amounts of energy.
You also do no work on a springy floor: you apply a force to push it down, and then it applies the same force to push you back up again, and the total force * displacement adds up to zero.
Squishy surfaces are exhausting to walk on *because* you have to do extra work. That energy doesn't come for free: you can feel it in your leg muscles. Any "more comfortable" alternative will generate little electrical energy.
But see the post above (text search for "1/200 horsepower"), which correctly points out that the amount of power generated will be miniscule.
The fact that it's a Fox affiliate isn't relevant, really Sure it is. Whether the submitter had a "Fox News Sucks" agenda or not, you need to call institutions out by name when they're acting like morons. ABC, NBC, or Fox, they deserve to have their name in blink tags over this one.
Air conditioners typically have a coefficient of performance of 2-4, meaning that by consuming 1 kW-h of electricity, they move 2-4 kW-h of heat out of the building. So the energy wasted by cooling the monitors is a fraction of the energy used to power the monitors in the first place, not enough to affect the point I'm making.
No, they've killed one and a half dozen astronauts through making mistakes... making mistakes is part of their mission Well, there's mistakes and there's mistakes. Chunk of foam comes off the external tank and puts a hole in your heat shield, well, maybe you should have seen that coming, but it's a pretty subtle mode of failure. Ditto for using a slightly wrong kind of rubber in your rocket booster gaskets.
But filling a capsule with 1 bar O2, a lot of electricity, and three flammable humans? Apollo-era NASA deserves to be cut some slack, but anyone could tell you ahead of time that was a total bonehead maneuver.
Now you know why many companies are throwing out / have thrown out long ago their CRTs Do the math.
2000 work hours per year times 100 watts energy savings = 200 kilowatt-hours. At 8 cents/KwH, the electricity savings come to 16 bucks a year per monitor. A new LCD monitor will not "pay for itself" in energy costs over its lifetime. If you're buying a new monitor anyway, it makes sense to replace it with LCD, but you're shooting yourself in the foot to throw out a working CRT.
If all you care about is energy savings and cost is no object, I higly doubt trashing a bunch of perfectly good CRTs and replacing them with LCDs (which took energy to make) is a net energy gain either, but I don't have data to back that up.
To summarize your post: "Many people believe microwaves are unhealthy" (you, your father, the government of Switzerland, etc.) Many people believe the Earth is 6000 years old, too. But that doesn't make it true.
(and 'cause I know someone will call me on it, of *course* microwaves are unhealthy when you've got enough of them to cook popcorn. But that has no bearing on the cell phone question. Clean drinking water will kill you if you drown in a giant tank of it: does that make it unhealthy?)
Specifically re your friend who can tell when her neighbor leaves his TV on: I can do that too. My hearing is good enough to notice the high-pitched whine of the flyback transformer. It has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic death rays.
From TFA:
[Fuzzing] involves sending malformed data to the device in an effort to cause a fault and make it crash. The vulnerability we discovered and exploited was found in MobileSafari using fuzzing. Since MobileSafari crashes every ten minutes or so for me with *well*-formed data, I'm not surprised to hear that this is possible. Apple *seriously* needs to push out a Safari bugfix asap, not just for security, but for usability.
I made this analogy in another post, but it's good here too...
The suit doesn't apply a fixed pressure; it would be designed so it was more like a bottle with a fixed volume.
Imagine a glass bottle full of 95 liters of water, plus a plastic bag full of 5 liters of air. (The bag represents the lungs.) The plastic bag has a tube (the throat and mouth) leading out of the bottle. Now, place the bottle in a 16-psi atmosphere, with the tube open to the air. The bottle provides zero back-pressure; the air pressure inside the plastic bag is also 16 psi.
Now put the bottle in a vacuum, but connect the tube up to a 16-psi air supply. The bottle walls now push back as the air inside tries to expand, and the pressure inside the bag is still 16 psi.
Now, the question is, how do you exchange air between the plastic bag and the air supply, if the bottle volume is fixed? The answer is, you make the bottle walls just *slightly* stretchy, so that a little bit of force (provided by the astronaut's chest muscles) can expand and contract the container.
The key is, when lung pressure equals outside environment pressure, the suit is "slack", and exerts no force on the body inside.
Ahem. Vacuum is a wonderful insulator. Your sunward side gets only a little more sun than it does at the beach, and that's assuming you don't have a (nonpressurized) reflective layer to minimize radiative transfer. The opposite side doesn't radiate that much more than it does on a clear night, same comment about screening. No. On a clear night, your body is radiating infrared energy with an effective temperature of 310 Kelvin, and the ground beneath you and the air above you is radiating infrared energy right back with an effective temperature of 250-300 K. In interplanetary space, the void around you radiates infrared energy back at you with an effective temperature near absolute zero K. (closer to 3k, but who's counting.) And the emitted energy goes like the fourth power of the temperature: this is a huge, huge difference.
But it's easy to solve this the same way our current spacesuits solve it: several layers of reflective mylar film with vacuum between them, which reduce outgoing infrared to a manageable level.
Air? We don't need no steenking air! Has it occurred to you that several light-years of vacuum is about as good as it gets in terms of removing bodily outgassing? I'd say the problem is more likely the other way around: losing too *much* water vapor. Vacuum has a humidity of zero; even worse, air provides a diffusive boundary layer which tends to trap water near the surface of the skin: the air molecules get in the way of the water molecules trying to escape. For skin within a porous fabric suit exposed to vacuum, evaporation is going to be far worse than the worst desert conditions imaginable on Earth.
OK, you say, I'll just make sure to bring along some moisturizing lotion. There's another problem. A space suit of this type is basically a bottle of fixed volume. Suppose I take a 100-liter bottle and fill it with 95 liters of water plus a ziploc baggie containing 5 liters of air -- the 5 liters of air represents the astronaut's lung volume. Now, it's quite common for a hard-working person to lose a liter of water an hour through perspiration and respiration. Say we double that for the reasons given above. After an hour of hard work, the 100-liter bottle representing our space suit now holds 93 liters of water, and so must hold 7 liters of air. Uh-oh! our baggie can't hold that much air, and ruptures.
I'm overstating the case a little bit, but the point remains that in a constant-volume suit like this, with no air space, any change in body volume, via perspiration, drinking, urination or defacation, comes at the expense of lung volume. If you don't keep things perfectly balanced, you don't get to breathe. On the longer term, if the astronaut goes off his diet and gains say 5 pounds of fat, that's 2-3 fewer liters of lung volume, and again, the astronaut can't breathe. They always said those twinkies would kill ya...
Author has no *idea* of the space and timescales required, and needs to read Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, by Martyn Fogg. The following oversimplifies matters but gives you some idea: humanity is currently investing its entire productive capacity to warm the earth as fast as possible. (Sure, the warming's a side benefit, but we couldn't do it much faster if we tried.) To warm Mars to habitability, you'd need to output *20-50 times* as much carbon dioxide as we've released into Earth's atmosphere in the past century. And you'd have to do it without an easy-to-use carbon reservoir such as fossil fuels. (There's not enough CO2 in Mars's polar caps to do a lot of good.) And *then* you need to figure out a way to keep the planet warm while producing a breathable atmosphere. (In his Mars books, Kim Stanley Robinson copped out on this problem, genetically re-engineering humans to tolerate high CO2.) And then you have to keep the atmosphere from escaping to space.
We're talking millenia here, not decades. Just because some random retired physics professor read a few science fiction novels doesn't make him an expert, and TFA has no evidence that he has a clue what he's talking about.
Notice that in the article, it was the author's 8-year-old son who actually "circumvented the access control mechanism". This is a suspiciously convenient alibi, but I'm not complaining.
I like compact fluorescents, but I do notice their color, flicker, and startup time, even on the expensive ones. (Often, the flicker and startup time is great at first, but gets worse over time.) I use CFs in ceiling fixtures which usually have 2 bulbs inside: I put one incandescent and one fluorescent in each. I save half the power, and the incandescent fills in the flicker and startup time very nicely. Plus, having one wasteful incandescent in there encourages me to turn the lights off when I'm not using them.
Also, according to this site (which manufactures low-pressure sodium lamps) doubling the efficiency of traditional incandescents to 30 lumens/watt would leave them less efficient than halogens and LEDs, and still far, far short of fluorescents.
No, "Malware" includes any software the person using the term doesn't like. To be honest, anything less secure than a direct video pipe into your brain's optical cortex is malware from the MPAA's viewpoint.
1) Haven't these people heard of a metal detector?
2) Now that this is public, have the authorities or AOL taken steps to stop random people sneaking onto this poor family's property in the dead of night to do a little digging?
According to this site, government can use a patent wthout permission using eminent domain laws. The government does, in fact, have to compensate the patent holder.
Yes, that's why I said eminent-domain *style* process. If US patent law doesn't specifically allow this, you'd definitely need a new law to permit it. If the government revokes a patent without justification within U.S. law, the patent holder has grounds to sue.
This "patent revocation" thing could be really useful to society, but also very worrying to inventors. On the one hand, the government could force really important public safety inventions like an AIDS drug or a vaccine into the public domain, saving countless lives. On the other hand, if the drug companies are aware that will happen, they won't bother researching the drugs in the first place.
Some of this dilemma can be solved by taking another page from the eminent domain laws: Require that the government must offer "fair market value" when it revokes a patent. This might be tough for the gov't, since lifetime licensing on, say, a major AIDs or cancer drug could run into the tens of billions of dollars (at a wild guess).
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Parent of this post has it exactly right: this "forensic analysis" is bull.
The article's pretty clear on what the "analysis" does: it adds a little bit of noise ("static") to a JPEG, re-compresses it, then takes the difference between the original photo and the noisy version. JPEG tends to smooth out slight variations in large blocks of color and concentrate on accurately representing sharp edges and transitions, so the largest differences will be in high-contrast "edgy" areas: text, bookshelves, beards, and the edges of tables, lampshades, etc.
And you see that, manipulation or no, that's exactly what the analysis technique is picking up. The "researcher" has gone a long way to invent the high-pass filter. Congratulations.
Once upon a time, in the distant '80s, there was a large research lab. This lab did a lot of work with computers. The computers of the day were giant VAXen which filled a basement room, with tentacles reaching out to terminals in users' offices throughout the building. The computers was complicated and confusing, and an army of highly trained, very smart support people worked on them. These high priests and acolytes lurked in the basement, worshipping the VAX god and interpreting its prophecies to the users. They did this job well.
But the users looked at the sacrifices they were making to the VAX god and its acolytes, and realized, "I can get much more done with far less money if I buy a small workstation for my office." The priests in the basement said, "but we won't be able to control and service the machine. What will you do when it breaks?" The users replied, "I'll buy a new one. They cost as much as two days of your salary." Lo, the priests in their basement temple feared for their jobs, feared that their great god, the source of their power, would be lost forever.
The priests were right, up to a point. The workstation users discovered viruses, and hackers, and spam, and the rest of the ten plagues of the Internet. They learned to do some of the work the priests once did on the VAX. But the new workstations were so much cheaper, and so much easier to use and maintain, that they found it a fair trade. The great VAX was cast out of the basement, and died the sad death of all forgotten gods, but the priests met a happier ending. The eldest took a generous early retirement; the neophytes re-trained, and learned to serve the new pantheon of desktop workstations. By letting go, by giving up their ability to control and manage and dominate, the priests made their users happier and more productive, and saved the lab a hell of a lot of money.
Then, one day, in the empty, dusty temple where the VAX god was once worshipped, the first Beowulf clusters sprouted. And as they grew and spread their tentacles, a new breed of priests arose to serve them...
People have complained about how the iPhone is tethered to a desktop computer. Not only is this not a hassle -- you need to plug it into something to charge it anyway, why not your computer? -- but it builds a useful habit in the user: software updates will happen automatically whenever it's docked.
Here's an analogy for you. Imagine a mobile device is like a car. If you're not driving an iPhone, you need to go to three separate service stations for gas, for minor maintenance, and to get major repairs. On iPhone, you pull in for gas, and an army of attendants come out to check your oil, wash the windows, and oh by the way, there's a recall out on your airbag, would you like us to fix that real quick for ya? If you're not on an iPhone, best-case scenario is a tow truck pulls you over on the highway and fixes your airbag on the roadside. Worst-case is, you don't find out there's a recall until it's too late. Or do you believe that patches never break anything? Maybe they do on Windows, but I have never, *ever* had a security patch break something on my Mac. Not once.
Try running a mile on a sandy beach, and come back and post again.
Or to put it another way: there's a reason we switched from animal power to steam power 200 years ago, and the ASPCA had nothing to do with it.
Basic physics: work = force * displacement.
You try to get rid of the "squishiness" of the floor because it's unpleasant to walk on, like walking on sand. But that squishiness is crucial: if the floor doesn't move, displacement = 0, and no work is done on the floor, so no energy can be extracted. Piezo crystals can tolerate large forces but allow only tiny tiny displacements: they can generate large voltages, but only miniscule amounts of energy.
You also do no work on a springy floor: you apply a force to push it down, and then it applies the same force to push you back up again, and the total force * displacement adds up to zero.
Squishy surfaces are exhausting to walk on *because* you have to do extra work. That energy doesn't come for free: you can feel it in your leg muscles. Any "more comfortable" alternative will generate little electrical energy.
But see the post above (text search for "1/200 horsepower"), which correctly points out that the amount of power generated will be miniscule.
Air conditioners typically have a coefficient of performance of 2-4, meaning that by consuming 1 kW-h of electricity, they move 2-4 kW-h of heat out of the building. So the energy wasted by cooling the monitors is a fraction of the energy used to power the monitors in the first place, not enough to affect the point I'm making.
But filling a capsule with 1 bar O2, a lot of electricity, and three flammable humans? Apollo-era NASA deserves to be cut some slack, but anyone could tell you ahead of time that was a total bonehead maneuver.
2000 work hours per year times 100 watts energy savings = 200 kilowatt-hours. At 8 cents/KwH, the electricity savings come to 16 bucks a year per monitor. A new LCD monitor will not "pay for itself" in energy costs over its lifetime. If you're buying a new monitor anyway, it makes sense to replace it with LCD, but you're shooting yourself in the foot to throw out a working CRT.
If all you care about is energy savings and cost is no object, I higly doubt trashing a bunch of perfectly good CRTs and replacing them with LCDs (which took energy to make) is a net energy gain either, but I don't have data to back that up.
[quote]Yeah, but setting blackle.com as your homepage earns blackle.com a whole lot of money from Google Custom Search.[/quote]
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.
Thread finished.
To summarize your post: "Many people believe microwaves are unhealthy" (you, your father, the government of Switzerland, etc.) Many people believe the Earth is 6000 years old, too. But that doesn't make it true.
(and 'cause I know someone will call me on it, of *course* microwaves are unhealthy when you've got enough of them to cook popcorn. But that has no bearing on the cell phone question. Clean drinking water will kill you if you drown in a giant tank of it: does that make it unhealthy?)
Specifically re your friend who can tell when her neighbor leaves his TV on: I can do that too. My hearing is good enough to notice the high-pitched whine of the flyback transformer. It has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic death rays.
I made this analogy in another post, but it's good here too...
The suit doesn't apply a fixed pressure; it would be designed so it was more like a bottle with a fixed volume.
Imagine a glass bottle full of 95 liters of water, plus a plastic bag full of 5 liters of air. (The bag represents the lungs.) The plastic bag has a tube (the throat and mouth) leading out of the bottle. Now, place the bottle in a 16-psi atmosphere, with the tube open to the air. The bottle provides zero back-pressure; the air pressure inside the plastic bag is also 16 psi.
Now put the bottle in a vacuum, but connect the tube up to a 16-psi air supply. The bottle walls now push back as the air inside tries to expand, and the pressure inside the bag is still 16 psi.
Now, the question is, how do you exchange air between the plastic bag and the air supply, if the bottle volume is fixed? The answer is, you make the bottle walls just *slightly* stretchy, so that a little bit of force (provided by the astronaut's chest muscles) can expand and contract the container.
The key is, when lung pressure equals outside environment pressure, the suit is "slack", and exerts no force on the body inside.
OK, you say, I'll just make sure to bring along some moisturizing lotion. There's another problem. A space suit of this type is basically a bottle of fixed volume. Suppose I take a 100-liter bottle and fill it with 95 liters of water plus a ziploc baggie containing 5 liters of air -- the 5 liters of air represents the astronaut's lung volume. Now, it's quite common for a hard-working person to lose a liter of water an hour through perspiration and respiration. Say we double that for the reasons given above. After an hour of hard work, the 100-liter bottle representing our space suit now holds 93 liters of water, and so must hold 7 liters of air. Uh-oh! our baggie can't hold that much air, and ruptures.
I'm overstating the case a little bit, but the point remains that in a constant-volume suit like this, with no air space, any change in body volume, via perspiration, drinking, urination or defacation, comes at the expense of lung volume. If you don't keep things perfectly balanced, you don't get to breathe. On the longer term, if the astronaut goes off his diet and gains say 5 pounds of fat, that's 2-3 fewer liters of lung volume, and again, the astronaut can't breathe. They always said those twinkies would kill ya...
We're talking millenia here, not decades. Just because some random retired physics professor read a few science fiction novels doesn't make him an expert, and TFA has no evidence that he has a clue what he's talking about.
"The iPhone is not for business... It's not a business phone, it's a PERSONAL phone. Apple makes PERSONAL computers."
Circular reasoning: see Reasoning, circular.
Reasoning, circular: see Circular Reasoning.
Notice that in the article, it was the author's 8-year-old son who actually "circumvented the access control mechanism". This is a suspiciously convenient alibi, but I'm not complaining.
I like compact fluorescents, but I do notice their color, flicker, and startup time, even on the expensive ones. (Often, the flicker and startup time is great at first, but gets worse over time.) I use CFs in ceiling fixtures which usually have 2 bulbs inside: I put one incandescent and one fluorescent in each. I save half the power, and the incandescent fills in the flicker and startup time very nicely. Plus, having one wasteful incandescent in there encourages me to turn the lights off when I'm not using them.
Also, according to this site (which manufactures low-pressure sodium lamps) doubling the efficiency of traditional incandescents to 30 lumens/watt would leave them less efficient than halogens and LEDs, and still far, far short of fluorescents.
Nice press release. Could this be low-pressure sodium vaporware?
No, "Malware" includes any software the person using the term doesn't like. To be honest, anything less secure than a direct video pipe into your brain's optical cortex is malware from the MPAA's viewpoint.
Two questions:
1) Haven't these people heard of a metal detector?
2) Now that this is public, have the authorities or AOL taken steps to stop random people sneaking onto this poor family's property in the dead of night to do a little digging?
According to this site, government can use a patent wthout permission using eminent domain laws. The government does, in fact, have to compensate the patent holder.
Yes, that's why I said eminent-domain *style* process. If US patent law doesn't specifically allow this, you'd definitely need a new law to permit it. If the government revokes a patent without justification within U.S. law, the patent holder has grounds to sue.
This "patent revocation" thing could be really useful to society, but also very worrying to inventors. On the one hand, the government could force really important public safety inventions like an AIDS drug or a vaccine into the public domain, saving countless lives. On the other hand, if the drug companies are aware that will happen, they won't bother researching the drugs in the first place.
Some of this dilemma can be solved by taking another page from the eminent domain laws: Require that the government must offer "fair market value" when it revokes a patent. This might be tough for the gov't, since lifetime licensing on, say, a major AIDs or cancer drug could run into the tens of billions of dollars (at a wild guess).