Its a good thing SMS is guaranteed realtime with guaranteed delivery. I've never had a text show up hours after it was sent while I'm now standing next to the person who sent it. Yep, its a beautiful service, one I'm happy to put my life in the care of.
There's nothing technical preventing real-time delivery to emergency services, who are connected via fixed line. The main reason SMS get delayed are (core) network overload between operators and the recipients phone being out of range. None of which applies here.
As someone else already mentioned. SMS uses the control signaling between the cell and your phone. If the phone could be used at all an SMS will get through, and there are many scenarios where there a call can't be made but an SMS will still manage to get through (the control signal will "reach" further than voice slots typically and congestion will fill the voice slots faster. An emergency call will kick those out though).
Is it perfect? No you should still probably call in most circumstances, not only will the operator be able to quickly ask follow-up questions, but you also get confirmation that someone has heard you and are one the case. But if you *can't*, (or won't) then an SMS is much better than nothing.
I would say "no". To my mind there has to be malice, i.e. a hidden agenda for an expression to count as astro turfing. I.e. it's a fake, grass roots movement. An organisation/special interest group that is open with the fact that that's what they are, cannot thus be astro turfing.
Nah. If you look at the statistics (we have almost as many guns in Sweden as you do in the US), the only conclusion you can draw is that "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people." (Or hyper correct: "While guns don't kill people, Americans with handguns kill people.")
Another factor was rate of descent. The American planes could dive better than the Zero. I'm not sure if the cost of getting above the Zero offset the advantage of being able to dive upon it
Yes it was crucial. Witness the success of the P-38 in the Pacific theatre. Fighting the energy-fight and staying out of a level turning fight at all cost enabled US top aces to rack up impressive numbers against their Japanese adversaries. The top two scoring US aces flew the P-38 in the Pacific.
In the words of US Pacific ace Thomas McGuire; "Never get low, never get slow, and never attack with your drop tank on." I.e. use the vertical.
If technological advancement leads to greater and greater destructive powers, and destructive powers are much more easy to develop and implement than constructive powers, then how to do explain the human population explosion? It seems to me that the constructive sciences have far outstripped the destructive ones - at least, so far.
Sure, if society has anything to do with it. I.e. society puts a much higher value on construction than destruction and works to promote one over the other. Even the cold war didn't go hot over just this issue, society didn't want to take the risk. And society is usually smart enough to handle this. (Law of large numbers).
However, when more and more destructive power trickles down to the individual, the rationality argument goes away. One person can be crazy, or act as near as being effectively crazy anyway. Behring Breivik made maximum use of the technology available to him, a ~1 ton ANFO bomb and a semi automatic rifle and pistol, in one of (if not the) greatest single person attrocities to date. If he had had a nuclear bomb, it wouldn't have stopped at
Whether humanity will survive I find a pretty uninteresting questions. Total collapse of civilisation as we know it is good enough of a doomesday scenario for me, thank you very much...
They probably knew the person. He didn't show up and start throwing 2400 dollars around.
Then, if they're there chummy with a would be drug smuggler and willing to look the other way for $2400, what on *earth* were they doing working for the TSA?!
That's just the sort of association any background check worth its salt is there to catch.
But what happens to efficiency when it's freezing and I turn on the heater during my trip?
What I've seen in Sweden (many years ago) was an Eberspächer petrol/diesel power heater that came on when it got too cold. It had something like a 5 liter tank that lasted "forever", i.e. you don't need to burn nearly as much fuel if you only need to heat a car vs. moving it. (I've read that some ultra low consumption diesels now come with them as well, as there isn't enough waste heat from the engine for low temps.)
Now cooling is going to be tougher, you'd have to use some battery energy to run a compressor of some kind in order to get any efficiency.
VW beetle... And yet my family drove one for almost two decades, and it was safe, cheap, and reliable.
Nope. Cheap and somewhat (but not extremely) reliable I'll grant you. But "safe", esp. from a passive safety perspective, not so much. Risk = Likelihood x Outcome. That you didn't crash only goes to show that the likelihood is rather low, not that the outcome wouldn't have been catastrophic. And with 50's style cars, the outcome usually was.
We've done risk reduction when driving mainly by working on the outcome part of the equation. Drivers haven't really improved much. Some, yes, but enough to make a difference? Not really.
Also, you have your rose tinted hindsight glasses on. It wasn't that great of a car. The heating system was crap (I'm from Sweden), the engine didn't last due to overheating problems (that you could overhaul them easily was a necessity, you had to). Add too much noise and no ride comfort (and if you needed to haul stuff, like ordinary luggage, then you'd better not be more than two, 'cause you'd need that back seat).
It was kind of fun for a first car, though. And working on it was easy. I remember me and a friend just lifting off the entire body of the car with our bare hands. Ah, happy times.:-)
I guess there will always be those who don't think for themselves.
Oh but they did. Only about (what 1/4) of the southern population could afford to keep slaves, so the majority, esp. the bulk of the white southern forces didn't have any slaves. There was plenty of complaints from soldiers about having to fight for "their niggers", i.e. "their" refering to the richer plantation owning strata of southern society.
That's of course not to say that they were against slavery as such, just miffed at having to die to fight the "mans" war.
Exactly, the "anaconda plan" set out to prevent both exports from the south and import to it. And the British seriously considered intervention to protect their access to cotton. Which was a very important crop in mercantile Brittain (the industrial revolution was to a large part the textile industrial revolution).
But the slavery issue, together with success in growing (lower quality) cotton in Egypt later kept them out. And that sealed the fate of the south.
During WW2, the High Command of the RAF had a statistical wing that was demonstrating that (a) carpet bombing was a failure and (b) air crews did not become safer with experience.
As I recall it, the details are even more interesting. Bomber crews did get safer with more experience, until the Luftwaffe fielded Schräge Musik. After that, experience didn't matter (as much) any more. In fact, after that getting rid of defensive armaments (and the associated weight and personell, saving even more weight) would have been a net positive. But Bomber command was reluctant to do that, and I can't say I very much blame them. There's also the morale factor to take into account, and the analysis that said "chuck the guns" didn't take that into account. (That morale can be crucial in bomber warfare was demonstrated by another operations researcher, latter US secretary of defense, R. McNamara. When LeMay heard that he fixed it by threatening his bomber crews with an automatic court martial...)
nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.
Yes it is. Specifically, you need three to not only detect that one is misbehaving, but also to determine which is more likely to misbehave. This is if you can trust you comparison node. If you cannot, then in general you need at a minimum of 3n+1 nodes to detect 'n' nodes misbehaving given a Byzantine failure formulation. (That's why the Space Shuttle had 4 primary flight control computers all running the same software. And a fifth one that didn't, but that was different.) Many systems, e.g. in telecoms, still make due with two, and then go to a special fautl recovery mode when a failure/error is detected.
Indeed, having three separate channels, all running the same software, is the most common in e.g. flight control situations. Running "different" software doesn't actually work, (Knight and Leveson demonstrated this quite some time ago, see e.g. http://sunnyday.mit.edu/critics.pdf which contains their response to later critisisms and a ref to the original study), i.e. programmers don't make independent faults. Different software does wreak havoc with running in parallell though, so it's rarely (if ever) done in practice.
Or, to add to your list of persistent titles, military officer ranks: Colonel, Admiral, General, etc. Even once they retire, they are still entitled to refer to themselves, or be referred to as, "General So-And-So."
Technically, a commissioned officer is a commissioned officer as long as they don't resign their commission. This is whether they're paid by the military or not. As long as they retain their commissioned they're entitled to the rank. If they do resign their commission (which is unusual) they technically also lose their rank and title.
what's going to keep a dedicated terrorist from using old fashioned C4 explosive hidden in an obvious body cavity. I've seen enough internet porn to know that with proper training and motivation, a quite sizeable chunk of explosives could be hidden within the body
Al Queda apparently also watches internet porn. They've already tried this attack against a saudi prince (head of counter terrorism in Saudi).
If the attacker in that case had had the sense to use a lavatory and extract the bomb (or turn the right way) the attack would most likely have been successful.
But you're right. Since there's no reasonable way to defend against this attack, we're all just ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist. The reason we haven't seen it used against an airliner is that there just aren't enough terrorists to be worth screening for. (Intelligence and god old fashioned police work, yes. Screening at air ports, not so much.
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and SmÃ¥land are much more congenial
Well if you're contemplating leaving Sweden anyway, there's no need to settle for Skåne. Just go the whole hog and move somewhere worth while, e.g. the continent proper.:-)
And if you need help with your accent then we'd be happy to help in Göteborg, but "congenial" I wouldn't go that far.:-)
4: Safety. 12 VDC shocks are annoying; a shock from 380VDC will be fatal, especially because of DC's tendency to get muscles to "lock". (This is why stun fences uses AC, while kill electric fences use DC so they can keep the target locked on the wires long enough to get the amps across the heart.)
While 380VDC is really bad news, the myth that DC is more dangerous than AC is just that. A myth. In fact, AC will induce tetanus more readily than DC and cause fibrilation at much lower currents. (Given typical frequencies. High frequencies will not due to skin effect.) i.e.:
The high voltage direct current (DC) electrocution tends to cause a single muscle contraction, throwing its victim from the source. These patients tend to have more blunt trauma. Direct current electrocution can also cause cardiac dysrrhythmias, depending on the phase of the cardiac cycle affected. This action is similar to the affect of a cardiac defibrillator.
Low voltage alternating current (AC) electrocution is three times more dangerous than DC current at the same voltage. The lowest frequency for electrical current in the United States is 60 Hertz (Hz) because this is the lowest frequency at which an incandescent light functions. With AC electrocution, continuous muscle contractions (tetany) may occur, since the muscle fibers are stimulated at between 40 to 110 times per second. With tetany, the victim tends to hold on to the source of current output, thereby increasing the duration of contact and worsening the injury.[2]
(http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410681_3)
I've had the original Berkeley student experiments where they studied tetanus and AC vs DC, but I've lost the link. In either case, the results were much as they are reported above, i.e. it takes more than twice the DC current to "lock" someone onto a conductor than it takes low frequency AC. Hence AC is worse in this respect, not better.
Even worse, the people who profit from war know exactly which notes to hit to get everyone to stand up and march around and DEMAND WAR.
You're of course aware of Göring's thoughts on the issue, but for those that aren't:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
and
After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on.
-- At lunch during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal (11 December 1945); Nuremberg Diary p.66, 1947 edition.
Quoting the docs: "A newly spawned Erlang process uses 309 words of memory in the non-SMP emulator without HiPE support. (SMP support and HiPE support will both add to this size.)... The size includes 233 words for the heap area (which includes the stack). The garbage collector will increase the heap as needed."
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Its a good thing SMS is guaranteed realtime with guaranteed delivery. I've never had a text show up hours after it was sent while I'm now standing next to the person who sent it. Yep, its a beautiful service, one I'm happy to put my life in the care of.
There's nothing technical preventing real-time delivery to emergency services, who are connected via fixed line. The main reason SMS get delayed are (core) network overload between operators and the recipients phone being out of range. None of which applies here.
As someone else already mentioned. SMS uses the control signaling between the cell and your phone. If the phone could be used at all an SMS will get through, and there are many scenarios where there a call can't be made but an SMS will still manage to get through (the control signal will "reach" further than voice slots typically and congestion will fill the voice slots faster. An emergency call will kick those out though).
Is it perfect? No you should still probably call in most circumstances, not only will the operator be able to quickly ask follow-up questions, but you also get confirmation that someone has heard you and are one the case. But if you *can't*, (or won't) then an SMS is much better than nothing.
I would say "no". To my mind there has to be malice, i.e. a hidden agenda for an expression to count as astro turfing. I.e. it's a fake, grass roots movement. An organisation/special interest group that is open with the fact that that's what they are, cannot thus be astro turfing.
"guns don't kill people, people with guns do"
Nah. If you look at the statistics (we have almost as many guns in Sweden as you do in the US), the only conclusion you can draw is that "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people." (Or hyper correct: "While guns don't kill people, Americans with handguns kill people.")
Another factor was rate of descent. The American planes could dive better than the Zero. I'm not sure if the cost of getting above the Zero offset the advantage of being able to dive upon it
Yes it was crucial. Witness the success of the P-38 in the Pacific theatre. Fighting the energy-fight and staying out of a level turning fight at all cost enabled US top aces to rack up impressive numbers against their Japanese adversaries. The top two scoring US aces flew the P-38 in the Pacific.
In the words of US Pacific ace Thomas McGuire; "Never get low, never get slow, and never attack with your drop tank on." I.e. use the vertical.
That's a good point. However, I fear the "little bioengineer" kits will start selling a lot sooner than we'll have a worthwhile presence in space...
If technological advancement leads to greater and greater destructive powers, and destructive powers are much more easy to develop and implement than constructive powers, then how to do explain the human population explosion? It seems to me that the constructive sciences have far outstripped the destructive ones - at least, so far.
Sure, if society has anything to do with it. I.e. society puts a much higher value on construction than destruction and works to promote one over the other. Even the cold war didn't go hot over just this issue, society didn't want to take the risk. And society is usually smart enough to handle this. (Law of large numbers).
However, when more and more destructive power trickles down to the individual, the rationality argument goes away. One person can be crazy, or act as near as being effectively crazy anyway. Behring Breivik made maximum use of the technology available to him, a ~1 ton ANFO bomb and a semi automatic rifle and pistol, in one of (if not the) greatest single person attrocities to date. If he had had a nuclear bomb, it wouldn't have stopped at
Whether humanity will survive I find a pretty uninteresting questions. Total collapse of civilisation as we know it is good enough of a doomesday scenario for me, thank you very much...
They probably knew the person. He didn't show up and start throwing 2400 dollars around.
Then, if they're there chummy with a would be drug smuggler and willing to look the other way for $2400, what on *earth* were they doing working for the TSA?!
That's just the sort of association any background check worth its salt is there to catch.
But what happens to efficiency when it's freezing and I turn on the heater during my trip?
What I've seen in Sweden (many years ago) was an Eberspächer petrol/diesel power heater that came on when it got too cold. It had something like a 5 liter tank that lasted "forever", i.e. you don't need to burn nearly as much fuel if you only need to heat a car vs. moving it. (I've read that some ultra low consumption diesels now come with them as well, as there isn't enough waste heat from the engine for low temps.)
Now cooling is going to be tougher, you'd have to use some battery energy to run a compressor of some kind in order to get any efficiency.
VW beetle ... And yet my family drove one for almost two decades, and it was safe, cheap, and reliable.
Nope. Cheap and somewhat (but not extremely) reliable I'll grant you. But "safe", esp. from a passive safety perspective, not so much. Risk = Likelihood x Outcome. That you didn't crash only goes to show that the likelihood is rather low, not that the outcome wouldn't have been catastrophic. And with 50's style cars, the outcome usually was.
We've done risk reduction when driving mainly by working on the outcome part of the equation. Drivers haven't really improved much. Some, yes, but enough to make a difference? Not really.
Also, you have your rose tinted hindsight glasses on. It wasn't that great of a car. The heating system was crap (I'm from Sweden), the engine didn't last due to overheating problems (that you could overhaul them easily was a necessity, you had to). Add too much noise and no ride comfort (and if you needed to haul stuff, like ordinary luggage, then you'd better not be more than two, 'cause you'd need that back seat).
It was kind of fun for a first car, though. And working on it was easy. I remember me and a friend just lifting off the entire body of the car with our bare hands. Ah, happy times. :-)
I guess there will always be those who don't think for themselves.
Oh but they did. Only about (what 1/4) of the southern population could afford to keep slaves, so the majority, esp. the bulk of the white southern forces didn't have any slaves. There was plenty of complaints from soldiers about having to fight for "their niggers", i.e. "their" refering to the richer plantation owning strata of southern society.
That's of course not to say that they were against slavery as such, just miffed at having to die to fight the "mans" war.
Exactly, the "anaconda plan" set out to prevent both exports from the south and import to it. And the British seriously considered intervention to protect their access to cotton. Which was a very important crop in mercantile Brittain (the industrial revolution was to a large part the textile industrial revolution).
But the slavery issue, together with success in growing (lower quality) cotton in Egypt later kept them out. And that sealed the fate of the south.
During WW2, the High Command of the RAF had a statistical wing that was demonstrating that (a) carpet bombing was a failure and (b) air crews did not become safer with experience.
As I recall it, the details are even more interesting. Bomber crews did get safer with more experience, until the Luftwaffe fielded Schräge Musik. After that, experience didn't matter (as much) any more. In fact, after that getting rid of defensive armaments (and the associated weight and personell, saving even more weight) would have been a net positive. But Bomber command was reluctant to do that, and I can't say I very much blame them. There's also the morale factor to take into account, and the analysis that said "chuck the guns" didn't take that into account. (That morale can be crucial in bomber warfare was demonstrated by another operations researcher, latter US secretary of defense, R. McNamara. When LeMay heard that he fixed it by threatening his bomber crews with an automatic court martial...)
nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.
Yes it is. Specifically, you need three to not only detect that one is misbehaving, but also to determine which is more likely to misbehave. This is if you can trust you comparison node. If you cannot, then in general you need at a minimum of 3n+1 nodes to detect 'n' nodes misbehaving given a Byzantine failure formulation. (That's why the Space Shuttle had 4 primary flight control computers all running the same software. And a fifth one that didn't, but that was different.) Many systems, e.g. in telecoms, still make due with two, and then go to a special fautl recovery mode when a failure/error is detected.
Indeed, having three separate channels, all running the same software, is the most common in e.g. flight control situations. Running "different" software doesn't actually work, (Knight and Leveson demonstrated this quite some time ago, see e.g. http://sunnyday.mit.edu/critics.pdf which contains their response to later critisisms and a ref to the original study), i.e. programmers don't make independent faults. Different software does wreak havoc with running in parallell though, so it's rarely (if ever) done in practice.
There is never any good reason to return a book.
It was a gift, and you already had the book and would rather read something else?
Wooosh!
Or, to add to your list of persistent titles, military officer ranks: Colonel, Admiral, General, etc. Even once they retire, they are still entitled to refer to themselves, or be referred to as, "General So-And-So."
Technically, a commissioned officer is a commissioned officer as long as they don't resign their commission. This is whether they're paid by the military or not. As long as they retain their commissioned they're entitled to the rank. If they do resign their commission (which is unusual) they technically also lose their rank and title.
NCOs lose it when they quit though. Being NCOs.
Pay the russians to fly you to the ISS and you will be a legitimate astronaut.
No you'd be a cosmonaut. Which is a title I guess might not go too well on a US ballot. ;-)
what's going to keep a dedicated terrorist from using old fashioned C4 explosive hidden in an obvious body cavity. I've seen enough internet porn to know that with proper training and motivation, a quite sizeable chunk of explosives could be hidden within the body
Al Queda apparently also watches internet porn. They've already tried this attack against a saudi prince (head of counter terrorism in Saudi).
If the attacker in that case had had the sense to use a lavatory and extract the bomb (or turn the right way) the attack would most likely have been successful.
But you're right. Since there's no reasonable way to defend against this attack, we're all just ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist. The reason we haven't seen it used against an airliner is that there just aren't enough terrorists to be worth screening for. (Intelligence and god old fashioned police work, yes. Screening at air ports, not so much.
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and SmÃ¥land are much more congenial
Well if you're contemplating leaving Sweden anyway, there's no need to settle for Skåne. Just go the whole hog and move somewhere worth while, e.g. the continent proper. :-)
And if you need help with your accent then we'd be happy to help in Göteborg, but "congenial" I wouldn't go that far. :-)
"fiscally conservative social liberals" is an oxymoron.
You mean like Sweden.?
By the inventors of the laser no less. Check http://www.youtube.com/v/CoGsoH2UtMM at 17:18.
4: Safety. 12 VDC shocks are annoying; a shock from 380VDC will be fatal, especially because of DC's tendency to get muscles to "lock". (This is why stun fences uses AC, while kill electric fences use DC so they can keep the target locked on the wires long enough to get the amps across the heart.)
While 380VDC is really bad news, the myth that DC is more dangerous than AC is just that. A myth. In fact, AC will induce tetanus more readily than DC and cause fibrilation at much lower currents. (Given typical frequencies. High frequencies will not due to skin effect.) i.e.:
The high voltage direct current (DC) electrocution tends to cause a single muscle contraction, throwing its victim from the source. These patients tend to have more blunt trauma. Direct current electrocution can also cause cardiac dysrrhythmias, depending on the phase of the cardiac cycle affected. This action is similar to the affect of a cardiac defibrillator.
Low voltage alternating current (AC) electrocution is three times more dangerous than DC current at the same voltage. The lowest frequency for electrical current in the United States is 60 Hertz (Hz) because this is the lowest frequency at which an incandescent light functions. With AC electrocution, continuous muscle contractions (tetany) may occur, since the muscle fibers are stimulated at between 40 to 110 times per second. With tetany, the victim tends to hold on to the source of current output, thereby increasing the duration of contact and worsening the injury.[2]
(http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410681_3)
I've had the original Berkeley student experiments where they studied tetanus and AC vs DC, but I've lost the link. In either case, the results were much as they are reported above, i.e. it takes more than twice the DC current to "lock" someone onto a conductor than it takes low frequency AC. Hence AC is worse in this respect, not better.
Even worse, the people who profit from war know exactly which notes to hit to get everyone to stand up and march around and DEMAND WAR.
You're of course aware of Göring's thoughts on the issue, but for those that aren't:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
and
After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on.
-- At lunch during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal (11 December 1945); Nuremberg Diary p.66, 1947 edition.
Quoting the docs: "A newly spawned Erlang process uses 309 words of memory in the non-SMP emulator without HiPE support. (SMP support and HiPE support will both add to this size.) ... The size includes 233 words for the heap area (which includes the stack). The garbage collector will increase the heap as needed."
Somehow still doubt they're down to 300 bytes per thread... :-)