I just bought a used sail boat that will need a fair amount of work. That should keep me busy for the rest of my life, it takes a bit of work to sail a boat instead of motoring around.
Yes, well. As a long time yachter it's been my experience that while upkeep is indeed hard manual labour, or can be made as hard as you like, actual sailing isn't as tough as you'd think. I come back from holiday in worse shape since I don't move around as much on the boat and sailing itself isn't hard work. (In reasonable weather, when cruising not racing etc.) So good luck with the boat, but don't expect a cardio workout. If sailing was a cardio workout, you wouldn't se nearly as many of us holiday sailors out there...:-)
The same way that they can use a warrant to compel you to give them access to a safe that you own or possess which may contain evidence that implicates you. Neither that safe, your hard drive or your phone are protected by the 5th amendment.
No, your law doesn't work that way. And there's even precedent to that fact. In the case of the safe, whether you have to actually give up the combination to the safe is very much in doubt, with the supreme court seeming to weigh in on the "no" side.
So the fourth gives them access to the safe, and any key, should you have it. But a combination to the safe that's a hole nuther ball of wax.
Analogously, sure they can have the hard drive. No-one's questioning that. Whether they can have any passwords or keys, that's a different matter. Otherwise, where would it stop? The fifth amendment has very little power if it doesn't stop the state from forcing you to say things that may incriminate you. What's the difference between "Tell me your password" and "Tell us where the body is hidden"? Before it has been established that there even is a body to be found?
Yes, I have an (somewhat) calibrated plasma, and while I have no trouble with regular content, even compressed regular content, there is some banding in some scenes on Netflix in particular. The opening night sky on House of Cards is one I notice in particular.
However, there's no banding that pops out at me during the rest of the show, even in scenes where there could be, so I don't know what to make of that.
Now, stuttering on a 50 Mbps connection shouldn't of course happen, unless it's either not really 50 Mbps goodput, i.e. it gets overloaded, or there is a bottleneck somewhere else (peering, server or whatever).
I can say that I've never had any problem with Netflix bandwidth here, and I monitor my connection. Never any problem. Now of course, there have been other services that have had problems from time to time, e.g. youtube, but that also hasn't been on the connection side (again monitored). So even though it says 50Mbps on the box, that's not necessarily true. At least not all the time. If you have problems like that, a faster connection won't of course necessarily help. Even though Netflix is farily bursty in nature (even very bursty), they don't buffer that long, so if you have a unstable connection, speed when it actually works won't help much. You need stable bandwidth above all else.
Yes, that's another factor. Of course I live in the first world when it comes to broadband connectivity, i.e. Sweden.:-) So I'm getting my 7 Mbps consistently with lots of room to spare. If you're throttled already at your connection, then you will suffer. (I didn't say that YIFY qualtity wasn't noticeable.)
And yes, there are of course objective differences in image quality, but a) I'm married, and hence not allowed to sit close enough to the TV to take full advantage of even 1080p (I know of no married man that is), and b) my eyes aren't what they used to be. So while it may be objectively worse, I'm not convinced that it subjectively matters that much. There are such a things as "good enough" and "diminishing returns." (Which is why I think 4k will/is mattering more for computer screens than TV. Most people won't be able to take advantage of the resolution per se. I'm personally more interested in the increased colour space and refresh rate, like we'll even see much of those...)
And yes, audio is DD 5.1, but that's also more than most can take any real advantage of. I have a pretty good 4.1 setup with decent, aka large hi-fi fronts and real speakers for rears and I'm actually happy as is. My room is the limitation, and that's with optimum positioning. That's above and beyond almost all people I know, and even I'm happy with Netflix sound quality. (But then again I watch shows like "House of cards", not filmed opera).
Bigger question is with all the money that has been poured in to combating climate change and we still get the running reports and claims of "warmest year ever" which has been ramped up to monthly proclamations now? If the amount that we have spent and cut back on pollution has done nothing to quell it, I think there needs to be rethinking on the amount being given.
You haven't cut back CO2 emissions by one iota, and neither has anybody else, so why are you surprised that the climate is doing what it's doing? And even if we cut back on emissions right now, the CO2 level in the atmosphere isn't going to just magically drop overnight, so why would you expect to have seen any change by now, even if we had cut back?
CO2 isn't "pollution" in the general sense. It's a very specific pollutant. That you've spent money and cut back on other pollutants that you have seen great benefits from (less smog, rivers not catching fire much lately, ozone layer recovering) etc. doesn't have much of anything to do with climate change.
And it would also be interesting to see how different parts of the world do at wiring up their rural areas.
Yes. We're pretty good at that in Sweden as well. People in rural areas are banding together in co-ops and doing it themselves. They see it as a "must have" in order to remain competitive and e.g. enticing young people to stay.
While there is more mileage in rural areas to cover, it's generally cheaper to do so. Fibre is cheap, the main cost is digging. And it's easier to dig in rural areas than asphalted over cities. People in rural areas also often have the equipment and know-how to dig, so that can also bring the price down.
In general we used our subsidies to make sure the towns and villages had good central connection. I.e. were on the back-bone, and then left it up to other market/co-op/what have you actors to figure out the rest. (There's a subsidy of a couple of thousand dollars per connection you can apply for as well.).
While from the US we hear of legislation forbidding towns to build their own fibre infrastructure, that's actually very common here, and better for all involved as these are invariably run as "open" networks. You have your choice of ISP to buy service from, with a small fee for the network itself. I'm on such a network myself, laid down by the district heating company, where I have a choice of eight ISPs or so for internet, phone, IP-TV etc. (But it's also a cable-TV network, with only one supplier, and I'm actually on that instead of going IP-TV.) I pay $40/month for 100Mbps symmetric and IP telephony (Calls are metered separately).
So to reiterate, that the US doesn't have "modern" first world broadband penetration, doesn't have one iota to do with population (density or otherwise) geography or the like. It's all down to political will.
Yeah, you need to check again. You're off by a factor of two. Their highest rate is 3GB/hour, which comes out at 7Mbps for HD content.
Which is OK given modern codecs. This is after all compares to the file size on torrent sites (We will not mention YIFY. Ever.) that are the most popular. So vox populi 7Mbps is good enough for everyone. (Aka, you don't count.:-))
For starters, as I mentioned, they're hanging the fiber from the polls. Secondly, fiber can't be bent more than 40 degrees before it is ruined.
Let's stop right there!:-) Fibre can bend as many degrees as you like. You can have great big loops of fibre, you say so yourself, so degree is clearly not the unit of measurement you're looking for.
What fibre can't do is bend too quickly, i.e. have too small a turn radius. Depending on the fibre/cladding about the radius/diameter of a snuff box (that's the handy analogy here in Sweden:-) is all right. That is to say, don't bend it tighter than a circle ~70mm in diameter, i.e. 2 3/4 inches.
So, why are the large bobbins on the ships sooo much larger than that? Well, a) you couldn't fit the cable if you wrapped it that tight, and b) it's a different kind of cable. It has to withstand extreme pressure, harsh environments, substantial tensile load, provide power to repeaters etc. etc. The cable that'll be run to your house will be much, much thinner, contain far fewer strands, carry no high tension power etc. It will however be reinforced. Steel or something similar will be providing the tensile strength, not the fibre per se.
So, actual experience as it stands, seems to indicate that fibre isn't any more susceptible to those kinds of problems than copper is. With the caveat that most copper today is very old. We don't have much to compare with with regard to new copper wire, as we don't hang any of that anymore. (In fact in Sweden we're actively tearing down the copper infrastructure. It's too expensive and needs replacing. We're replacing that with fibre of course). As previously mentioned, about the only advantage of copper over fibre is ease of splicing. (But then again, splicing of copper affects DSL adversely, so it's not a 100% advantage.)
It should be noted that your copper line can't take a much tighter bend either. If you do, the insulation will be overstressed and crack, leading to water ingress, leading to the "no DLS when it rains" phenomenon that is so common.
As someone else pointed out, the reason you can't get higher uplink DSL speed is that it is ADSL. Furthermore, the "A" is there for a reason. Due to the medium, i.e. unshielded slow twist copper wire, you can't get the same up and down link speeds using the same bandwidth, due to alien crosstalk. When the lines enter the telco switch, it's bundled into thick trunks of many subscriber pairs. (Hence "trunk" line). As they're very close together crosstalk is going to be a major problem, and hence you need a much higher S/N margin to transmit the same amount of information as you could in a less noisy environment. Like the one you have at home, where your neighbours line is very far away from yours. So it's not just that people usually will require lower uplink bandwidth than downlink that resulted in the system being built with asymmetry. There are actual physical limitations that drive that decision.
Now, I've had fibre since 2007, and of course there's no turning back. However, it's buried, that's how we do almost all our fibre installation in Sweden. It's the way to go and neatly sidesteps all problems of falling trees. Sweden's 55% forested, so we're acutely aware of the "trees falling on lines" problem. We're burying our rural power lines as well, as we speak, to mitigate the problems you're talking about.
The headline isn't the raw number, it's the improvement in detection rate, which is a substantial step forward.
No, not really. They compare with their own (so called) state of the art unsupervised learner, and conclude that a bit of supervised learning beats that hands down. Yes, well, that's not really surprising, and it's not really a new result in intrusion detection research either. "Active learning" approaches have been proposed since at least 2004, and since they don't compare with state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods or systems it's very difficult to tell if their approach actually amounts to anything.
They do after all report false alarm rates of ~5% or so (down from ~20%! for their baseline) which is a completely unworkable number, due to the base-rate fallacy/class imbalance problem. With that high an FA rate you'll drown in false alarms before you'll find a single intrusion/attack. Even if your detection rate is 100%. And theirs isn't.
It's a real pity they didn't submit this paper to a more established computer security conference, one that was around when IDS research was in it's hey-day, back when we were doing "big data" security, but didn't know to call it that yet.
(P.S. And yes, self learning algorithms have the problem that they can be made to drift towards inefficiency with a surprisingly low amount of feedback on how they're doing. As a matter of fact, there are examples of using a machine learning algorithm to learn how to make the detecting algorithm as bad at its job as possible.)
On the other hand, you have plenty of historical examples of native forces doing just fine against interlopers, quite on their own without help from an interloper-insider (which is less common in real life than in stories anyway).
Against western interlopers? That's not the lesson I take away from history. Quite the opposite. I'll allow the locals a few tactical or even strategic successes, but they only postpone the inevitable and make the ending that much worse, when it finally comes.
Even the Zulu couldn't keep the British out when the latter were finally pissed off enough to take them seriously. And the Zulu didn't need any outsider to tell them how to run a war. They were top notch, as far as locals go.
In fact off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of Pizarro-moments, but not a single example to the contrary, i.e. where the native forces ran an imperial force out, and made it stay out. But I'm always eager to have my ignorance set straight.
I mean, we're not critical of the western imperialist nations and people for being ineffective. Quite the opposite, we think they were much too good at what they were doing...
I think you're not giving the white guy enough credit. Any time you're fighting an enemy, especially if that enemy is very different from you, any intelligence (inside information) you can get on that enemy is extremely valuable. The Na'vi aren't stupid, but they're also not a technological species (and arguably because they didn't need to be; they have a great lifestyle as they are as they haven't overpopulated and outgrown their food supply as we humans did before we invented agriculture; basically they live in paradise). They don't have the kind of experience with warfare and combat that we do, and they sure as hell don't have the weaponry we do. But they do have real skills and talents, and then got themselves the most valuable asset of all: a defector from their enemy. There's a big reason the US encouraged defection from the USSR during the cold war: there's no better source of information.
And even if it's not a "defector" per se, history is chock full of examples of outside talent "helping the natives" be much more effective than they could be on their own. Due to skill, contacts, knowledge, experience, and yes, intelligence in both the broad and narrow sense.
It's no accident that Scottish mercenaries show up time and time again leading the locals to yet another victory. Or on the subject of "defectors" why not Arminius himself, that through having grown up in Rome as a hostage, gained intimate knowledge of how the romans thought and fought, and being a "king" at home could unite the local quarrelling tribes long enough to isolate and defeat in detail three whole roman legions. Or why not Lawrence of Arabia, as a more modern, and romantic example. (In fact, being an outsider is actually a great help when it comes to aligning internal factions, as you are not one of the factions to begin with, you can appear neutral in the local conflicts.)
So, no, that a professional solider, who know the enemy intimately (because he is one of them) can increase the effectiveness of the locals manyfold, locals who are emphatically not professional soldiers, is not surprising at all.
If that wasn't true, the US wouldn't have a whole arm dedicated to the task of training and leading the locals. It is the US Army special forces main task to this day.
It's very much officials' prerogative to pick and chose what information to disclose and when to disclose it, regardless of the chain of command.
Hence the old British civil service joke that the verb dealing with official secrets is: "I brief. You leak, but he/she commits a criminal offence by divulging secret information".
It's very much in practice in the eye of the beholder.
(Now, do I think that's its a good idea for government officials to use their own email servers. No, I do not. I think it's a crap idea, mostly for accountability purposes.)
It's of course apt to have a code example from probably the most compact programming language (binary wise) in history when talking about how many gigabytes of memory you've already filled up, and it's still not enough!:-)
Brings me right back though. Maybe I should try and wrestle the phones away from my kids long enough to bring the Jupiter Ace out of the basement and show them what "computing" was like when I was their age. 3kB can last a lot longer than you think!:-)
But for it to count as a hello-world programme, it should probably be : hello." Hello world"; right?
It gives you certain rights, but not the freedom to take the same rights away from others.
Which some of us mean makes it more free, not less. We wouldn't call a society that allowed slavery more "free" than one that forbade it. Freedom is not about the number of rules/restrictions. It's about what those rules are.
A country needs military to continue to exist as a sovereign state...
Yeah, why don't I think that your level of spending is because if you just reduced it a tiny bit, the very existence of the US would be threatened...
Why, if you spent just a billion less on defence, the Canadian hordes would be pouring over the borders within the year.
If its the continued existence of the US against military threat that is the issue, you could probably secure that much cheaper than you currently do. Much cheaper...
Cinemas use 24 pictures per second, and not many complain about the picture flashing too much...
Actually they probably would. In a traditional film projector for 24 frame/sec projection, the individual frame is "double gated" (or even triple gated), i.e. the gate has two slots in it, showing the same frame twice. This is to reduce flicker, which would be much more noticeable if the frame was only projected once.
That said, they are in good company. We're talking about an aircraft that is severely delayed, underperforms compared to spec and with a programme cost of twice what was originally planned.
Now, that things are going to take longer, perform less than expected and be more expensive than anticipated is almost a given in these projects, but the F-35 breaks a couple of records even given that. They don't call it "The plane that ate the Pentagon" for nothing.
So who's exaggerating more? My money isn't on the news media this time, usual a suspect as they are...
Well, what you did was force the computer to reevaluate the game tree from every move, as the moves you made had been pruned from the tree the computer actually evaluated.
So, of course, against a computer which has to rely heavily on pruning to get the tree down to manageable size in order to search ahead enough plys, then going "off script" as it were, is a strategy.
And this strategy was often tried early on in computer chess, hence the old saying that "computers don't understand sacrifice". However, Moores law put that strategy to bed pretty early on in the game, as computers quickly became fast enough to search through both deeper trees, and perform less pruning. It is after all a strategy of quickly diminishing returns. Stupid moves are called "stupid" for a reason, and it's a fine line to thread to try and make "stupid" moves that are dumb enough (i.e. locally so unattractive) that they are ignored from computer analysis, but smart enough that they can actually lead to a stronger position later. Sacrificing you high value pieces early on in the game, with no gain to show for it, will mostly lead to a quicker end-game that you'll lose.
Sure, Denmark (or my own Sweden for that matter) is perhaps a stretch. We're after all very much smaller and somewhat homogeneous (well, we were).
But Brittain is 60+ million, Germany is 80 million, and France is almost 70 million. These are not homogeneous countries, and not small by any stretch of the imagination. Their health care systems work reasonably well by all accounts, esp. the German and French, with the French being top-notch. (The NHS does have its problems though). Now, of course the French spend quite a lot on their system, but at least they're getting their moneys worth. You spend even more than the French and you're way down there...
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down.
On land yes. In water, where most of the Fukushima pollution ended up, not so much. It was spread out over a much larger area/volume in no time flat. This is a good thing. You either want it all in one big pile, or spread out as well as possible.
And as someone living in a country that was actually hit with fallout from Tjernobyl, the silver lining with bio-accumulation is that it's really easy to measure. So it was relatively easy to keep out of the food chain. (The only foodstuff that was really affected to any mentionable degree were reindeer. Turns out you can live a full live without snacking on Rudolph every other day.)
Someone's already dealt with the chameleon cancers.
Sure, call me an "armchair expert" if you will. (That's not strictly true, but my time in the business is long ago, and I was only ever on the outskirts).
But, that doesn't unfortunately save you from underestimating the complexities of even the "simple" battlefield scenario you're drawing up.
Even in an all out shooting war, with nothing civilian in the air---the only remotely modern situation I can think of is the Falklands---you still cannot escape the IFF problem. You don't know if "those aircraft over there" are a flight of enemies starting their attack on you, or a flight of your people, returning from a job well done, or someone else. They won't be running active IFF over enemy territory, for many good reasons (Google "MiG in the middle" for one explanation why that is not a good idea, but there are others, such as when German night fighters used RAF tail gunner IFF signals to direction find the bombers during WWII).
This is especially true in a more complex situation in an all out shooting war, where you'll have allies, and the enemies allies to contend with as well. There are too many variables, and too many things that can go wrong, for you to start shooting at everything that doesn't squawk today's code. And since there aren't that many codes to go around (due to radar limitations), in a few days the enemy will know all your variations, and will pick up on them really fast. Faster than you can change them. And the faster you change them, the higher the risk that someone will not get the message.
And data links are good and well, but they don't work in a highly contested ECM battlefield, you know, the kind that a technologically advanced enemy can muster. And the more you transmit the easier you are to find. (Our data links are better than yours, i.e. NATO's, and ours don't work nearly as well as you advertise. And yes we have our own mini-"AWACS" in the grid as well.)
So no, its not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It's like a (missile) air defence officer told me just the other year, after a cooperation with her american counterparts: "So I was very keen to learn how they handled the more complex situations on the modern battlefield that we can only handle by not shooting. And even though they have all this gear we can only dream of, their answer was the same as ours, they don't shoot either!"
So the situation still isn't that different from the Falklands, you sit in the actions information centre of the Cardiff and you see a blip with no IFF that matches the expected flight profile of an Argentinian C130 Hercules. Do you take the shot? The people on board the Cardiff did take the shot. To their regret...
Or the friends and family of the passengers of Iranian Air 655...
Now granted, and to their credit, the crew of the USS Vincennes did try to make the ID, but failed, with horrible results. If that had been an F-14 instead, the pilot+RIO would have had even worse tools at their disposal to make the ID...
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I just bought a used sail boat that will need a fair amount of work. That should keep me busy for the rest of my life, it takes a bit of work to sail a boat instead of motoring around.
Yes, well. As a long time yachter it's been my experience that while upkeep is indeed hard manual labour, or can be made as hard as you like, actual sailing isn't as tough as you'd think. I come back from holiday in worse shape since I don't move around as much on the boat and sailing itself isn't hard work. (In reasonable weather, when cruising not racing etc.) So good luck with the boat, but don't expect a cardio workout. If sailing was a cardio workout, you wouldn't se nearly as many of us holiday sailors out there... :-)
The same way that they can use a warrant to compel you to give them access to a safe that you own or possess which may contain evidence that implicates you. Neither that safe, your hard drive or your phone are protected by the 5th amendment.
No, your law doesn't work that way. And there's even precedent to that fact. In the case of the safe, whether you have to actually give up the combination to the safe is very much in doubt, with the supreme court seeming to weigh in on the "no" side.
So the fourth gives them access to the safe, and any key, should you have it. But a combination to the safe that's a hole nuther ball of wax.
Analogously, sure they can have the hard drive. No-one's questioning that. Whether they can have any passwords or keys, that's a different matter. Otherwise, where would it stop? The fifth amendment has very little power if it doesn't stop the state from forcing you to say things that may incriminate you. What's the difference between "Tell me your password" and "Tell us where the body is hidden"? Before it has been established that there even is a body to be found?
Yes, I have an (somewhat) calibrated plasma, and while I have no trouble with regular content, even compressed regular content, there is some banding in some scenes on Netflix in particular. The opening night sky on House of Cards is one I notice in particular.
However, there's no banding that pops out at me during the rest of the show, even in scenes where there could be, so I don't know what to make of that.
Now, stuttering on a 50 Mbps connection shouldn't of course happen, unless it's either not really 50 Mbps goodput, i.e. it gets overloaded, or there is a bottleneck somewhere else (peering, server or whatever).
I can say that I've never had any problem with Netflix bandwidth here, and I monitor my connection. Never any problem. Now of course, there have been other services that have had problems from time to time, e.g. youtube, but that also hasn't been on the connection side (again monitored). So even though it says 50Mbps on the box, that's not necessarily true. At least not all the time. If you have problems like that, a faster connection won't of course necessarily help. Even though Netflix is farily bursty in nature (even very bursty), they don't buffer that long, so if you have a unstable connection, speed when it actually works won't help much. You need stable bandwidth above all else.
Yes, that's another factor. Of course I live in the first world when it comes to broadband connectivity, i.e. Sweden. :-) So I'm getting my 7 Mbps consistently with lots of room to spare. If you're throttled already at your connection, then you will suffer. (I didn't say that YIFY qualtity wasn't noticeable.)
And yes, there are of course objective differences in image quality, but a) I'm married, and hence not allowed to sit close enough to the TV to take full advantage of even 1080p (I know of no married man that is), and b) my eyes aren't what they used to be. So while it may be objectively worse, I'm not convinced that it subjectively matters that much. There are such a things as "good enough" and "diminishing returns." (Which is why I think 4k will/is mattering more for computer screens than TV. Most people won't be able to take advantage of the resolution per se. I'm personally more interested in the increased colour space and refresh rate, like we'll even see much of those...)
And yes, audio is DD 5.1, but that's also more than most can take any real advantage of. I have a pretty good 4.1 setup with decent, aka large hi-fi fronts and real speakers for rears and I'm actually happy as is. My room is the limitation, and that's with optimum positioning. That's above and beyond almost all people I know, and even I'm happy with Netflix sound quality. (But then again I watch shows like "House of cards", not filmed opera).
So, no, neither of us count. :-)
Bigger question is with all the money that has been poured in to combating climate change and we still get the running reports and claims of "warmest year ever" which has been ramped up to monthly proclamations now? If the amount that we have spent and cut back on pollution has done nothing to quell it, I think there needs to be rethinking on the amount being given.
You haven't cut back CO2 emissions by one iota, and neither has anybody else, so why are you surprised that the climate is doing what it's doing? And even if we cut back on emissions right now, the CO2 level in the atmosphere isn't going to just magically drop overnight, so why would you expect to have seen any change by now, even if we had cut back?
CO2 isn't "pollution" in the general sense. It's a very specific pollutant. That you've spent money and cut back on other pollutants that you have seen great benefits from (less smog, rivers not catching fire much lately, ozone layer recovering) etc. doesn't have much of anything to do with climate change.
And it would also be interesting to see how different parts of the world do at wiring up their rural areas.
Yes. We're pretty good at that in Sweden as well. People in rural areas are banding together in co-ops and doing it themselves. They see it as a "must have" in order to remain competitive and e.g. enticing young people to stay.
While there is more mileage in rural areas to cover, it's generally cheaper to do so. Fibre is cheap, the main cost is digging. And it's easier to dig in rural areas than asphalted over cities. People in rural areas also often have the equipment and know-how to dig, so that can also bring the price down.
In general we used our subsidies to make sure the towns and villages had good central connection. I.e. were on the back-bone, and then left it up to other market/co-op/what have you actors to figure out the rest. (There's a subsidy of a couple of thousand dollars per connection you can apply for as well.).
While from the US we hear of legislation forbidding towns to build their own fibre infrastructure, that's actually very common here, and better for all involved as these are invariably run as "open" networks. You have your choice of ISP to buy service from, with a small fee for the network itself. I'm on such a network myself, laid down by the district heating company, where I have a choice of eight ISPs or so for internet, phone, IP-TV etc. (But it's also a cable-TV network, with only one supplier, and I'm actually on that instead of going IP-TV.) I pay $40/month for 100Mbps symmetric and IP telephony (Calls are metered separately).
So to reiterate, that the US doesn't have "modern" first world broadband penetration, doesn't have one iota to do with population (density or otherwise) geography or the like. It's all down to political will.
Yeah, you need to check again. You're off by a factor of two. Their highest rate is 3GB/hour, which comes out at 7Mbps for HD content.
Which is OK given modern codecs. This is after all compares to the file size on torrent sites (We will not mention YIFY. Ever.) that are the most popular. So vox populi 7Mbps is good enough for everyone. (Aka, you don't count. :-))
For starters, as I mentioned, they're hanging the fiber from the polls. Secondly, fiber can't be bent more than 40 degrees before it is ruined.
Let's stop right there! :-) Fibre can bend as many degrees as you like. You can have great big loops of fibre, you say so yourself, so degree is clearly not the unit of measurement you're looking for.
What fibre can't do is bend too quickly, i.e. have too small a turn radius. Depending on the fibre/cladding about the radius/diameter of a snuff box (that's the handy analogy here in Sweden :-) is all right. That is to say, don't bend it tighter than a circle ~70mm in diameter, i.e. 2 3/4 inches.
So, why are the large bobbins on the ships sooo much larger than that? Well, a) you couldn't fit the cable if you wrapped it that tight, and b) it's a different kind of cable. It has to withstand extreme pressure, harsh environments, substantial tensile load, provide power to repeaters etc. etc. The cable that'll be run to your house will be much, much thinner, contain far fewer strands, carry no high tension power etc. It will however be reinforced. Steel or something similar will be providing the tensile strength, not the fibre per se.
So, actual experience as it stands, seems to indicate that fibre isn't any more susceptible to those kinds of problems than copper is. With the caveat that most copper today is very old. We don't have much to compare with with regard to new copper wire, as we don't hang any of that anymore. (In fact in Sweden we're actively tearing down the copper infrastructure. It's too expensive and needs replacing. We're replacing that with fibre of course). As previously mentioned, about the only advantage of copper over fibre is ease of splicing. (But then again, splicing of copper affects DSL adversely, so it's not a 100% advantage.)
It should be noted that your copper line can't take a much tighter bend either. If you do, the insulation will be overstressed and crack, leading to water ingress, leading to the "no DLS when it rains" phenomenon that is so common.
As someone else pointed out, the reason you can't get higher uplink DSL speed is that it is ADSL. Furthermore, the "A" is there for a reason. Due to the medium, i.e. unshielded slow twist copper wire, you can't get the same up and down link speeds using the same bandwidth, due to alien crosstalk. When the lines enter the telco switch, it's bundled into thick trunks of many subscriber pairs. (Hence "trunk" line). As they're very close together crosstalk is going to be a major problem, and hence you need a much higher S/N margin to transmit the same amount of information as you could in a less noisy environment. Like the one you have at home, where your neighbours line is very far away from yours. So it's not just that people usually will require lower uplink bandwidth than downlink that resulted in the system being built with asymmetry. There are actual physical limitations that drive that decision.
Now, I've had fibre since 2007, and of course there's no turning back. However, it's buried, that's how we do almost all our fibre installation in Sweden. It's the way to go and neatly sidesteps all problems of falling trees. Sweden's 55% forested, so we're acutely aware of the "trees falling on lines" problem. We're burying our rural power lines as well, as we speak, to mitigate the problems you're talking about.
Oh, but of course there is. What, you thought the Army left M1s that threw a track just littering the landscape? :-)
So you're off roading dream is safe! ;-)
The headline isn't the raw number, it's the improvement in detection rate, which is a substantial step forward.
No, not really. They compare with their own (so called) state of the art unsupervised learner, and conclude that a bit of supervised learning beats that hands down. Yes, well, that's not really surprising, and it's not really a new result in intrusion detection research either. "Active learning" approaches have been proposed since at least 2004, and since they don't compare with state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods or systems it's very difficult to tell if their approach actually amounts to anything.
They do after all report false alarm rates of ~5% or so (down from ~20%! for their baseline) which is a completely unworkable number, due to the base-rate fallacy/class imbalance problem. With that high an FA rate you'll drown in false alarms before you'll find a single intrusion/attack. Even if your detection rate is 100%. And theirs isn't.
It's a real pity they didn't submit this paper to a more established computer security conference, one that was around when IDS research was in it's hey-day, back when we were doing "big data" security, but didn't know to call it that yet.
(P.S. And yes, self learning algorithms have the problem that they can be made to drift towards inefficiency with a surprisingly low amount of feedback on how they're doing. As a matter of fact, there are examples of using a machine learning algorithm to learn how to make the detecting algorithm as bad at its job as possible.)
On the other hand, you have plenty of historical examples of native forces doing just fine against interlopers, quite on their own without help from an interloper-insider (which is less common in real life than in stories anyway).
Against western interlopers? That's not the lesson I take away from history. Quite the opposite. I'll allow the locals a few tactical or even strategic successes, but they only postpone the inevitable and make the ending that much worse, when it finally comes.
Even the Zulu couldn't keep the British out when the latter were finally pissed off enough to take them seriously. And the Zulu didn't need any outsider to tell them how to run a war. They were top notch, as far as locals go.
In fact off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of Pizarro-moments, but not a single example to the contrary, i.e. where the native forces ran an imperial force out, and made it stay out. But I'm always eager to have my ignorance set straight.
I mean, we're not critical of the western imperialist nations and people for being ineffective. Quite the opposite, we think they were much too good at what they were doing...
I think you're not giving the white guy enough credit. Any time you're fighting an enemy, especially if that enemy is very different from you, any intelligence (inside information) you can get on that enemy is extremely valuable. The Na'vi aren't stupid, but they're also not a technological species (and arguably because they didn't need to be; they have a great lifestyle as they are as they haven't overpopulated and outgrown their food supply as we humans did before we invented agriculture; basically they live in paradise). They don't have the kind of experience with warfare and combat that we do, and they sure as hell don't have the weaponry we do. But they do have real skills and talents, and then got themselves the most valuable asset of all: a defector from their enemy. There's a big reason the US encouraged defection from the USSR during the cold war: there's no better source of information.
And even if it's not a "defector" per se, history is chock full of examples of outside talent "helping the natives" be much more effective than they could be on their own. Due to skill, contacts, knowledge, experience, and yes, intelligence in both the broad and narrow sense.
It's no accident that Scottish mercenaries show up time and time again leading the locals to yet another victory. Or on the subject of "defectors" why not Arminius himself, that through having grown up in Rome as a hostage, gained intimate knowledge of how the romans thought and fought, and being a "king" at home could unite the local quarrelling tribes long enough to isolate and defeat in detail three whole roman legions. Or why not Lawrence of Arabia, as a more modern, and romantic example. (In fact, being an outsider is actually a great help when it comes to aligning internal factions, as you are not one of the factions to begin with, you can appear neutral in the local conflicts.)
So, no, that a professional solider, who know the enemy intimately (because he is one of them) can increase the effectiveness of the locals manyfold, locals who are emphatically not professional soldiers, is not surprising at all.
If that wasn't true, the US wouldn't have a whole arm dedicated to the task of training and leading the locals. It is the US Army special forces main task to this day.
It's very much officials' prerogative to pick and chose what information to disclose and when to disclose it, regardless of the chain of command.
Hence the old British civil service joke that the verb dealing with official secrets is: "I brief. You leak, but he/she commits a criminal offence by divulging secret information".
It's very much in practice in the eye of the beholder.
(Now, do I think that's its a good idea for government officials to use their own email servers. No, I do not. I think it's a crap idea, mostly for accountability purposes.)
." Hello world"
It's of course apt to have a code example from probably the most compact programming language (binary wise) in history when talking about how many gigabytes of memory you've already filled up, and it's still not enough! :-)
Brings me right back though. Maybe I should try and wrestle the phones away from my kids long enough to bring the Jupiter Ace out of the basement and show them what "computing" was like when I was their age. 3kB can last a lot longer than you think! :-)
But for it to count as a hello-world programme, it should probably be : hello ." Hello world" ; right?
It gives you certain rights, but not the freedom to take the same rights away from others.
Which some of us mean makes it more free, not less. We wouldn't call a society that allowed slavery more "free" than one that forbade it. Freedom is not about the number of rules/restrictions. It's about what those rules are.
A country needs military to continue to exist as a sovereign state...
Yeah, why don't I think that your level of spending is because if you just reduced it a tiny bit, the very existence of the US would be threatened...
Why, if you spent just a billion less on defence, the Canadian hordes would be pouring over the borders within the year.
If its the continued existence of the US against military threat that is the issue, you could probably secure that much cheaper than you currently do. Much cheaper...
Cinemas use 24 pictures per second, and not many complain about the picture flashing too much...
Actually they probably would. In a traditional film projector for 24 frame/sec projection, the individual frame is "double gated" (or even triple gated), i.e. the gate has two slots in it, showing the same frame twice. This is to reduce flicker, which would be much more noticeable if the frame was only projected once.
Media exaggerating? Never...
That said, they are in good company. We're talking about an aircraft that is severely delayed, underperforms compared to spec and with a programme cost of twice what was originally planned.
Now, that things are going to take longer, perform less than expected and be more expensive than anticipated is almost a given in these projects, but the F-35 breaks a couple of records even given that. They don't call it "The plane that ate the Pentagon" for nothing.
So who's exaggerating more? My money isn't on the news media this time, usual a suspect as they are...
Well, what you did was force the computer to reevaluate the game tree from every move, as the moves you made had been pruned from the tree the computer actually evaluated.
So, of course, against a computer which has to rely heavily on pruning to get the tree down to manageable size in order to search ahead enough plys, then going "off script" as it were, is a strategy.
And this strategy was often tried early on in computer chess, hence the old saying that "computers don't understand sacrifice". However, Moores law put that strategy to bed pretty early on in the game, as computers quickly became fast enough to search through both deeper trees, and perform less pruning. It is after all a strategy of quickly diminishing returns. Stupid moves are called "stupid" for a reason, and it's a fine line to thread to try and make "stupid" moves that are dumb enough (i.e. locally so unattractive) that they are ignored from computer analysis, but smart enough that they can actually lead to a stronger position later. Sacrificing you high value pieces early on in the game, with no gain to show for it, will mostly lead to a quicker end-game that you'll lose.
Which makes it a bigger offence. Which was the point.
Sure, Denmark (or my own Sweden for that matter) is perhaps a stretch. We're after all very much smaller and somewhat homogeneous (well, we were).
But Brittain is 60+ million, Germany is 80 million, and France is almost 70 million. These are not homogeneous countries, and not small by any stretch of the imagination. Their health care systems work reasonably well by all accounts, esp. the German and French, with the French being top-notch. (The NHS does have its problems though). Now, of course the French spend quite a lot on their system, but at least they're getting their moneys worth. You spend even more than the French and you're way down there...
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down.
On land yes. In water, where most of the Fukushima pollution ended up, not so much. It was spread out over a much larger area/volume in no time flat. This is a good thing. You either want it all in one big pile, or spread out as well as possible.
And as someone living in a country that was actually hit with fallout from Tjernobyl, the silver lining with bio-accumulation is that it's really easy to measure. So it was relatively easy to keep out of the food chain. (The only foodstuff that was really affected to any mentionable degree were reindeer. Turns out you can live a full live without snacking on Rudolph every other day.)
Someone's already dealt with the chameleon cancers.
Sure, call me an "armchair expert" if you will. (That's not strictly true, but my time in the business is long ago, and I was only ever on the outskirts).
But, that doesn't unfortunately save you from underestimating the complexities of even the "simple" battlefield scenario you're drawing up.
Even in an all out shooting war, with nothing civilian in the air---the only remotely modern situation I can think of is the Falklands---you still cannot escape the IFF problem. You don't know if "those aircraft over there" are a flight of enemies starting their attack on you, or a flight of your people, returning from a job well done, or someone else. They won't be running active IFF over enemy territory, for many good reasons (Google "MiG in the middle" for one explanation why that is not a good idea, but there are others, such as when German night fighters used RAF tail gunner IFF signals to direction find the bombers during WWII).
This is especially true in a more complex situation in an all out shooting war, where you'll have allies, and the enemies allies to contend with as well. There are too many variables, and too many things that can go wrong, for you to start shooting at everything that doesn't squawk today's code. And since there aren't that many codes to go around (due to radar limitations), in a few days the enemy will know all your variations, and will pick up on them really fast. Faster than you can change them. And the faster you change them, the higher the risk that someone will not get the message.
And data links are good and well, but they don't work in a highly contested ECM battlefield, you know, the kind that a technologically advanced enemy can muster. And the more you transmit the easier you are to find. (Our data links are better than yours, i.e. NATO's, and ours don't work nearly as well as you advertise. And yes we have our own mini-"AWACS" in the grid as well.)
So no, its not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It's like a (missile) air defence officer told me just the other year, after a cooperation with her american counterparts: "So I was very keen to learn how they handled the more complex situations on the modern battlefield that we can only handle by not shooting. And even though they have all this gear we can only dream of, their answer was the same as ours, they don't shoot either!"
So the situation still isn't that different from the Falklands, you sit in the actions information centre of the Cardiff and you see a blip with no IFF that matches the expected flight profile of an Argentinian C130 Hercules. Do you take the shot? The people on board the Cardiff did take the shot. To their regret...
Yes, but it missed the mark this time. The title could as well have been:
Nuclear power plants perfectly safe, even if you get sucked into the cooling water intake!
Now, try to fly through the wings of a wind turbine and see how far you get! :-)
Or the friends and family of the passengers of Iranian Air 655...
Now granted, and to their credit, the crew of the USS Vincennes did try to make the ID, but failed, with horrible results. If that had been an F-14 instead, the pilot+RIO would have had even worse tools at their disposal to make the ID...