The thing is amnesty has nothing to do with border security. The two are very different issues.
I disagree, at least on one level. Amnesty without border security is like giving out free candy to trespassers, you are going to run out of candy if you don't enforce the "no trespassing" rule.
This is why I think border security is first, and only when the border is secure can we even start to talk about amnesty. So, the issues have at least a logical order, even if you don't think they are related.
What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically). Some folks think that this is a good thing, some don't. But I don't think you can make the case that this is a symbol of the party self destructing or going crazy. What is going on though is the party is being forced to recognize that it's base is not happy with it's leadership and that the Tea Party's conservative message has at least some resonance with the base. From my perspective, it is a good thing when a party's leadership represents it's members.
Now, it remains to be seen if this movement to the right translates into more votes and more success in elections or not. I have my theories on that... But the most telling fact one needs to consider is how the other party and the talking heads reporting are becoming apathetic about this. Remember back in May when they declared the Tea Party dead? Now, when it's obvious they where wrong, they are in a panic for some reason? Right....
Interesting.... I wonder which distributors have made the switch? I'm guessing I don't watch many of their films because I usually don't go to the really popular or heavily marketed films these days, which means I don't see many of the big studios' productions, at least in theater.
OBVIOUSLY, this system is useful in some way. Unless you just think the NSA folks are stupid dolts who don't think about what they are doing, in which case the system is totally useless and thus harmless.... Obviously you don't think the system is harmless....
"Platters" pfft.. You kids had it so easy. Real projectionists do change-overs every twenty minutes, and have to maintain the arc.
And Google Glass... Will there always be only one style? Y'know, there are lots of different kinds of spy glasses out there, and they look pretty geeky in an unfashionable way
Oh, never fear, I did the carbon arc thing only when we where running 35mm we could run about an hour on a reel and the lamp would run about an 75 min before you had to open up and reload the carbon rods. Most movies where two reels, some of the longer ones bled over into three. When we ran 70mm, we did reel changes every 20 min, mainly because you just couldn't lift much more than one reel over your head to load the projector. Personally, I hated 70mm features. They where a lot of work and heavy lifting because you had 20 min to thread the next reel, run it down to the start point, re-carbon the lamp, rewind the last reel and be ready for the changover. Where you could do all that in about 10 min easy, you only got about 5 min to sit before you had to be arching up the lamp in the next projector and getting everything stable for switching reels. If anything went wrong, you had very little time to recover, and keep the film on the screen. And the more in a hurry I was, it seemed that the more mistakes got made or things went wrong.
On the plus side.. As a college student, projection work was ideal. I was stuck in the booth with nothing but a desk and a chair and my home work and when running two houses I usually only got interrupted every hour or so to change reels or start a feature. I got paid union scale too, which included health insurance and paid vacation. I worked 40 hours a week or more and was able to do my studies while on the job. It was great.
I'm not so sure that's universal, even after 20 years. The majority of theaters are still showing 35mm film, which requires at least manual interaction beyond the button pushing. True, many chains are moving towards digital systems, but given the cost of digital, the large investment in print equipment they already have and the extremely low profit margins they run with they usually only go digital in their bigger houses, with the rest still running prints.
I know this is true because I can tell when I'm watching a print film over digital because you can see the emulsion grains and splicing tape in a print. And most of the places I go to are less than 5 years old. At least half of the houses are still running prints so I assume the industry has not fully adopted digital.
Besides, wasn't it found that most camcorder recordings of movies was coming from projector operators?
You mean the "projectionists"? They don't have those anymore, I know because I used to be one. These days you get some usher who knows how to load the film into the projector (for those places still using film) and mash the button to start. If you are lucky they focus the film and adjust the volume when the feature starts, but usually they don't come back until it's time to thread the projector again. They don't have time to set up the camera and tape anything.
The only time you will see somebody who can splice film or knows how to clean the projector is on Thursday when the guy who knows how to get the new prints loaded onto the platters during the day and break down the prints you are sending back after the last show. I used to do this and for an eight screen theater it took from about 4PM to well into Friday morning (about 2 AM or later) to do this. It was pretty hard work because I always cleaned the projector when I threaded it, always focused and set sound levels for the start of the trailers, then came back and did it again when the feature started. It was LOTS of running. The rest of the week, some usher did the threading and button mashing and they never cleaned anything by the looks of what I found on Thursday. This was 20 years ago, so I'm betting things have only gotten worse, and based on the dirty prints and out of focus films I've suffered though as a paying customer, I think I'm right.
But the "screeners" you are talking about are usually done after the place closes on Thursday. For big films, we used to sometimes let the staff see it on Thursday night before it opened. Mainly for films that we where expecting would be sold out for days. This was a nice fringe benefit for the staff who where going to have to work pretty hard over the next few days, not to mention it let the projectionist to actually SEE the film from a theater seat an not the office chair in the booth. I'm sure there are some managers who don't mind making screeners, as they are not the brightest bunch of people and don't get paid much for the long hours they work.
Where I think the results of your thought experiment would be interesting, the results of it would clearly be unusable as evidence and would not be something the SEC would have the legal right to do.
But, I would imagine that the number of people you could prove where insider trading doing this would be extremely limited. Apart from congress (who are exempt from the insider trading laws anyway), most people are usually not that prone to do things that are clearly illegal. Most of the companies who do trading are careful to train on insider trading and ethics for a reason. The companies are liable should they have folks doing illegal trades, the people leaking information are also criminally liable, even if they don't profit from the trades. The SEC has made it clear that this kind of crime doesn't pay, and if you get caught, it's not going to go well for you. I think the message has generally been received.
The problem has moved on to other things.... Now days, It's about shaving fractions of a penny on huge blocks of stock, duping retail customers into taking the hair cut in the process, and laughing all the way to the bank...
You act like it's some crazy notion that people in government would covertly collect information on private citizens for purposes of blackmail to "keep them in line"---not because those citizens are breaking any law, but because certain officials deem them to be dangerous to their own personal agendas and power structure. Have you ever heard of a guy named J. Edgar Hoover? Perhaps you should look into that.
Oh I don't discount the mis-use of government power, believe me. What I'm saying is that the NSA system requires a TARGET to look for or the data is pretty much worthless. Somebody has to formulate the data query, program the system to actually perform the query wanted, then set the query process in motion for a specified target before they will get results. As I understand this system, if a data item doesn't trigger some kind of flag that says it's of interest, it's going to be removed from the system fairly quickly, at least in its raw form.
So, if you are not already a target that sets off flags, you are lost in the noise and your data is deleted. If you are a target, heaven help you and your friends...
Totally aware of this technology, actually have done professional work with it.
Their challenge is not going to be pulling the data out of the haystack. It is going to be having enough analysts to sort through the results and enough guidance from on high as to which result sets to review first.
No, the challenge here is knowing what to look for in the data you collected. You have to use No-SQL techniques to sort though the raw data using map-reduce jobs and collect the information you want about the specific target(s). The individual data reduction steps are *easy* if you have a target to start with. What's hard is performing these steps in a resource constrained world when you have huge data sets that are constantly changing. So the Data part of this is not analyst constrained, it's compute and storage resource constrained. Analysts should only be formulating the queries and setting the queries loose on specific targets and then looking at the results.
he PROBLEM is that they simply collect too much data
Precisely. If they were doing what a legitimate government agency should be doing---targeted investigation of crimes and threats to national security---there wouldn't be a problem.
Where that is the seemingly practical solution, the question becomes what is deemed a "collected" piece of data?
If you are sorting through all the internet traffic on a link collecting traffic to/from an IP, you will have to look at a packet's headers. Does looking at the packet header mean you "collected" the packet? After all, that packet was transferred into NSA equipment.
No actually they are saying that a big enough system to take and keep a backup of the data they collect doesn't exist. Which, if you think about it, seems reasonable if what we are told about the NSA's collection ability is actually true.
Actually, I think they are telling the truth this time....
How much data do you think they are collecting? A Lot right? Or why would anybody be up in arms? The NSA is the all knowing, all seeing boogeyman you know, so they have to collect nearly everything. You cannot archive that much stuff forever, certainly there will be limits on how much they can keep online.
Since it would mean that they don't routinely hold onto this information for further analysis, future blackmail, etc. However, it seems far more likely that they are simply lying when they say they can't do this.
Shesh you guys have made the NSA into an all powerful, all knowing, all seeing boogeyman. Think about the "system" you describe and the huge amount of data that we KNOW the NSA routinely collects. Where I don't discount the possibility that the data could be used for blackmail, the problem you have is finding the data you need (the needle) in the huge data set they are collecting (the field of haystacks).
Do you load this in to some MySQL database so you can run an SQL query on it? Um, not if you want an answer anytime soon. There are ways to do this, but we are talking about really large numbers of disk drives, CPU's and specialized bits of software to dig through the haystacks. Not to mention that you simply must have a place to start looking, a target to investigate, unless you figure on just going after some random person and trying to find something you can use for profit... Then there is the pesky size of all this data. It seems very reasonable that the NSA is running out of space and needs to routinely purge older data.
So I don't think you have anything to fear from the NSA, especially if you fear blackmail for something that happened more than a few weeks ago.. Unless you are linked to a terrorist group or something....
So wait, the NSA's argument as to why their program is legal.. is that they're too incompetent to design a system that can follow the law. Shouldn't this be grounds to fire everyone at the NSA for incompetence, if this is the argument they're using?
Well, I'm not sure folks fully understand the issue and it's posts like this that really muddy the water.
The PROBLEM is that they simply collect too much data to have a prayer of being able to store and process it all. They are drowning in data and there is no practical way to store this data for any length of time so they routinely purge "old" data to make room. From news reports I've read in the past, I'm surmising that the raw data can only be kept for periods measured in days, maybe tens of days, before they run out of disk space.
When the NSA gets sued, they are subject to having to provide any and all data they have related to the suit. From the moment they get served, or have reason to believe that they are being sued, by law, they cannot delete any data that is related or could be related to the suit. Doing so is destroying evidence, which is a crime.
So what the NSA is saying, is that they simply don't have enough resources to retain data that might be subject to discovery in a lawsuit due to the number and length of the lawsuits they are facing. Which seems to be reasonable and not an intentional failure of the NSA to abide within the law with their system design and implementation. They got caught off guard with the scrutiny generated by the Snowden affair, and now in the flood of court actions find their data capacity strained.
I conclude that the NSA is not intending to violate the law, but they feel that the system operation is more important so they leave it running, risking deleting data subject to discovery. You can argue with their choice I suppose, but there ARE reasons for the system's existence and issues with just turning it off.
FYI... "Typical Oil Changes" are no longer 3,000 miles but twice that.
If you wait longer than 5,000 miles you're a boob.
Even if my owner's manual says 7,500 miles? Unless you have a really warn out engine, feel free to wait to 6,000 miles, no matter what you are driving, just be careful to check the oil and keep it full. You MIGHT have a case for 3,000 miles if you own a '56 Chevy w/o an oil filter, but for any water cooled car since the middle of the 60's when oil filters became standard equipment you are good at 6,000 miles.
Now if you have been running non-detergent oil for some reason (and I seriously don't know why you would or if you can even find it these days) and you switch to detergent oil, I would advise you run only a few thousand miles between the next few filter changes out of an abundance of caution, but after that you can back off to the 6,000 mile intervals with everybody else. But if you are pinching pennies enough to actually go looking for non-detergent oil, you are likely doing your own oil changes and probably don't need my advice anyway.
I don't think I'd say horses are easy to use, even if they do tend to fend for themselves. In my experience, if you intend to actually get a horse to do something useful, like carry a rider someplace or pull a wagon, there is a significant level of effort involved and no little risk that the horse might not be willing to cooperate with you reliably. Not to mention that their power output is generally limited to around ONE horsepower which limits the possible tasks you can use them for.
Actually, go to your local Quickie Oil change place and check out how many different kinds of Oil filters they actually use. I dare say that they have maybe 5 types they routinely use and about 80% of that comes from 2 or three. This is true because there are only a few engine manufacturers in the world.
So I think auto manufacturers do a lot of standardization, but it's mostly out of economic convenience and not a desire to conform.
Or ditch batteries altogether and fill a tank of hydrogen and run the electric car off a fuel cell.
No no... CNG is where it's at. Hydrogen gas comes from Natural Gas anyway (when you produce it on an industrial scale) so if you are willing to live with the issues of running hydrogen, just run CNG in your existing car. All the cost savings and environmental advantages of hydrogen, but you don't have to change anything else you are used to.
Almost all internal combustion engines in cars and trucks today can be converted to run on CNG with very little effort. Usually it's just an alternative set of fuel injectors with some wiring, hoses to deliver the fuel and a pressure regulator and an alternative engine controller to trigger the injectors. You might want to run some hardened valve seats and valves for durability, but that's just because CNG runs so clean there is little carbon to coat things and cut down wear.
If range anxiety is the issue, then we need to run headlong into CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) as a motor fuel, at least for the near term. It's not quite as dense as gasoline, but it burns clean and distribution systems already exist for it. Refueling times are comparable to gasoline, you just might have to do it more often.
A battery that needs to be replaced every 2,000 miles or so and cannot be recharged is not going to fix the electric car's problems. Where it does fix the range issue, you are creating other issues in the process. One issue I see is that the reforming of Aluminum Oxide back into Aluminum metal is an energy intensive process, so this "recharging" is going to be *very* costly especially if this administration continues to force the shuttering of coal fired power plants and forces electric rates up. Then there is all the transportation and manufacturing costs associated with the batteries life cycle that need to be factored in.
Call me a watchful skeptic, but I don't see this technology as having a good chance at success. CNG on the other hand, should be the long distance motor fuel of choice if you ask me.
On one hand, that's only a little less than 1/2 of a typical oil change interval. On the other hand, the actual oil change is eliminated, and swapping this sucker in should be a lot easier than actually doing an oil change. For one thing, they won't be leaving off your drain plug.
FYI... "Typical Oil Changes" are no longer 3,000 miles but twice that. Newer cars generally suggest 7,500 miles or more and you can go longer in that older car too because the oil being used has improved. The 3,000 mile interval was born in the days when oil filters where optional equipment and motor oil broke down faster. Now days, you are wasting money and oil if you do this more than every 6,000 miles. Save the cash and the environment.
Why is it that the holes can move but the electrons can't? I thought holes were just places where electrons could be but aren't, so moving holes implies movement of electrons.
Your description of "holes" is accurate. Understand that this term is used do describe how semi-conductors work and it really means "positive charged area" in some material. "Holes" is just easier to say than "a place where an electron could be but is not" or "Positively charged area".
In that case, you settle out of court before you run out of money. I would suggest perhaps a maximum fee recovery, based upon the kind of suit filed, unless the winner wants to pursue their full costs. by filing suit. But in order to get your full cost back, you have to prove that you didn't drag it out and run up costs though procedural delay.
I don't think a Billion is enough to do much more than a proof of concept. Google is going to have to pony up a few more bills or this will be a huge boondoggle. But if anybody has the money it's Google.
Next up will be the purchase of the spectrum space needed for this. I'm thinking LightSquared has some licenses they could get by talking to the bankruptcy judge..
Slashdot Mirror
Reports of the Tea Party's death are greatly exaggerated.
What a difference a month makes... Remember they declared the Tea Party dead just last May after the "Super Tuesday" elections.
The thing is amnesty has nothing to do with border security. The two are very different issues.
I disagree, at least on one level. Amnesty without border security is like giving out free candy to trespassers, you are going to run out of candy if you don't enforce the "no trespassing" rule.
This is why I think border security is first, and only when the border is secure can we even start to talk about amnesty. So, the issues have at least a logical order, even if you don't think they are related.
Not really... They are not going nuts...
What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically). Some folks think that this is a good thing, some don't. But I don't think you can make the case that this is a symbol of the party self destructing or going crazy. What is going on though is the party is being forced to recognize that it's base is not happy with it's leadership and that the Tea Party's conservative message has at least some resonance with the base. From my perspective, it is a good thing when a party's leadership represents it's members.
Now, it remains to be seen if this movement to the right translates into more votes and more success in elections or not. I have my theories on that... But the most telling fact one needs to consider is how the other party and the talking heads reporting are becoming apathetic about this. Remember back in May when they declared the Tea Party dead? Now, when it's obvious they where wrong, they are in a panic for some reason? Right....
Interesting.... I wonder which distributors have made the switch? I'm guessing I don't watch many of their films because I usually don't go to the really popular or heavily marketed films these days, which means I don't see many of the big studios' productions, at least in theater.
Have fun beating that shadow argument to death..
OBVIOUSLY, this system is useful in some way. Unless you just think the NSA folks are stupid dolts who don't think about what they are doing, in which case the system is totally useless and thus harmless.... Obviously you don't think the system is harmless....
"Platters" pfft.. You kids had it so easy. Real projectionists do change-overs every twenty minutes, and have to maintain the arc.
And Google Glass... Will there always be only one style? Y'know, there are lots of different kinds of spy glasses out there, and they look pretty geeky in an unfashionable way
Oh, never fear, I did the carbon arc thing only when we where running 35mm we could run about an hour on a reel and the lamp would run about an 75 min before you had to open up and reload the carbon rods. Most movies where two reels, some of the longer ones bled over into three. When we ran 70mm, we did reel changes every 20 min, mainly because you just couldn't lift much more than one reel over your head to load the projector. Personally, I hated 70mm features. They where a lot of work and heavy lifting because you had 20 min to thread the next reel, run it down to the start point, re-carbon the lamp, rewind the last reel and be ready for the changover. Where you could do all that in about 10 min easy, you only got about 5 min to sit before you had to be arching up the lamp in the next projector and getting everything stable for switching reels. If anything went wrong, you had very little time to recover, and keep the film on the screen. And the more in a hurry I was, it seemed that the more mistakes got made or things went wrong.
On the plus side.. As a college student, projection work was ideal. I was stuck in the booth with nothing but a desk and a chair and my home work and when running two houses I usually only got interrupted every hour or so to change reels or start a feature. I got paid union scale too, which included health insurance and paid vacation. I worked 40 hours a week or more and was able to do my studies while on the job. It was great.
I'm not so sure that's universal, even after 20 years. The majority of theaters are still showing 35mm film, which requires at least manual interaction beyond the button pushing. True, many chains are moving towards digital systems, but given the cost of digital, the large investment in print equipment they already have and the extremely low profit margins they run with they usually only go digital in their bigger houses, with the rest still running prints.
I know this is true because I can tell when I'm watching a print film over digital because you can see the emulsion grains and splicing tape in a print. And most of the places I go to are less than 5 years old. At least half of the houses are still running prints so I assume the industry has not fully adopted digital.
Besides, wasn't it found that most camcorder recordings of movies was coming from projector operators?
You mean the "projectionists"? They don't have those anymore, I know because I used to be one. These days you get some usher who knows how to load the film into the projector (for those places still using film) and mash the button to start. If you are lucky they focus the film and adjust the volume when the feature starts, but usually they don't come back until it's time to thread the projector again. They don't have time to set up the camera and tape anything.
The only time you will see somebody who can splice film or knows how to clean the projector is on Thursday when the guy who knows how to get the new prints loaded onto the platters during the day and break down the prints you are sending back after the last show. I used to do this and for an eight screen theater it took from about 4PM to well into Friday morning (about 2 AM or later) to do this. It was pretty hard work because I always cleaned the projector when I threaded it, always focused and set sound levels for the start of the trailers, then came back and did it again when the feature started. It was LOTS of running. The rest of the week, some usher did the threading and button mashing and they never cleaned anything by the looks of what I found on Thursday. This was 20 years ago, so I'm betting things have only gotten worse, and based on the dirty prints and out of focus films I've suffered though as a paying customer, I think I'm right.
But the "screeners" you are talking about are usually done after the place closes on Thursday. For big films, we used to sometimes let the staff see it on Thursday night before it opened. Mainly for films that we where expecting would be sold out for days. This was a nice fringe benefit for the staff who where going to have to work pretty hard over the next few days, not to mention it let the projectionist to actually SEE the film from a theater seat an not the office chair in the booth. I'm sure there are some managers who don't mind making screeners, as they are not the brightest bunch of people and don't get paid much for the long hours they work.
Where I think the results of your thought experiment would be interesting, the results of it would clearly be unusable as evidence and would not be something the SEC would have the legal right to do.
But, I would imagine that the number of people you could prove where insider trading doing this would be extremely limited. Apart from congress (who are exempt from the insider trading laws anyway), most people are usually not that prone to do things that are clearly illegal. Most of the companies who do trading are careful to train on insider trading and ethics for a reason. The companies are liable should they have folks doing illegal trades, the people leaking information are also criminally liable, even if they don't profit from the trades. The SEC has made it clear that this kind of crime doesn't pay, and if you get caught, it's not going to go well for you. I think the message has generally been received.
The problem has moved on to other things.... Now days, It's about shaving fractions of a penny on huge blocks of stock, duping retail customers into taking the hair cut in the process, and laughing all the way to the bank...
You act like it's some crazy notion that people in government would covertly collect information on private citizens for purposes of blackmail to "keep them in line"---not because those citizens are breaking any law, but because certain officials deem them to be dangerous to their own personal agendas and power structure. Have you ever heard of a guy named J. Edgar Hoover? Perhaps you should look into that.
Oh I don't discount the mis-use of government power, believe me. What I'm saying is that the NSA system requires a TARGET to look for or the data is pretty much worthless. Somebody has to formulate the data query, program the system to actually perform the query wanted, then set the query process in motion for a specified target before they will get results. As I understand this system, if a data item doesn't trigger some kind of flag that says it's of interest, it's going to be removed from the system fairly quickly, at least in its raw form.
So, if you are not already a target that sets off flags, you are lost in the noise and your data is deleted. If you are a target, heaven help you and your friends...
Isilon + Hadoop + Content Analyst (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Analyst_Company)
Totally aware of this technology, actually have done professional work with it.
Their challenge is not going to be pulling the data out of the haystack. It is going to be having enough analysts to sort through the results and enough guidance from on high as to which result sets to review first.
No, the challenge here is knowing what to look for in the data you collected. You have to use No-SQL techniques to sort though the raw data using map-reduce jobs and collect the information you want about the specific target(s). The individual data reduction steps are *easy* if you have a target to start with. What's hard is performing these steps in a resource constrained world when you have huge data sets that are constantly changing. So the Data part of this is not analyst constrained, it's compute and storage resource constrained. Analysts should only be formulating the queries and setting the queries loose on specific targets and then looking at the results.
he PROBLEM is that they simply collect too much data
Precisely. If they were doing what a legitimate government agency should be doing---targeted investigation of crimes and threats to national security---there wouldn't be a problem.
Where that is the seemingly practical solution, the question becomes what is deemed a "collected" piece of data?
If you are sorting through all the internet traffic on a link collecting traffic to/from an IP, you will have to look at a packet's headers. Does looking at the packet header mean you "collected" the packet? After all, that packet was transferred into NSA equipment.
This is not an easy question to decide...
No actually they are saying that a big enough system to take and keep a backup of the data they collect doesn't exist. Which, if you think about it, seems reasonable if what we are told about the NSA's collection ability is actually true.
NSA is lying.
Actually, I think they are telling the truth this time....
How much data do you think they are collecting? A Lot right? Or why would anybody be up in arms? The NSA is the all knowing, all seeing boogeyman you know, so they have to collect nearly everything. You cannot archive that much stuff forever, certainly there will be limits on how much they can keep online.
Since it would mean that they don't routinely hold onto this information for further analysis, future blackmail, etc. However, it seems far more likely that they are simply lying when they say they can't do this.
Shesh you guys have made the NSA into an all powerful, all knowing, all seeing boogeyman. Think about the "system" you describe and the huge amount of data that we KNOW the NSA routinely collects. Where I don't discount the possibility that the data could be used for blackmail, the problem you have is finding the data you need (the needle) in the huge data set they are collecting (the field of haystacks).
Do you load this in to some MySQL database so you can run an SQL query on it? Um, not if you want an answer anytime soon. There are ways to do this, but we are talking about really large numbers of disk drives, CPU's and specialized bits of software to dig through the haystacks. Not to mention that you simply must have a place to start looking, a target to investigate, unless you figure on just going after some random person and trying to find something you can use for profit... Then there is the pesky size of all this data. It seems very reasonable that the NSA is running out of space and needs to routinely purge older data.
So I don't think you have anything to fear from the NSA, especially if you fear blackmail for something that happened more than a few weeks ago.. Unless you are linked to a terrorist group or something....
So wait, the NSA's argument as to why their program is legal.. is that they're too incompetent to design a system that can follow the law. Shouldn't this be grounds to fire everyone at the NSA for incompetence, if this is the argument they're using?
Well, I'm not sure folks fully understand the issue and it's posts like this that really muddy the water.
The PROBLEM is that they simply collect too much data to have a prayer of being able to store and process it all. They are drowning in data and there is no practical way to store this data for any length of time so they routinely purge "old" data to make room. From news reports I've read in the past, I'm surmising that the raw data can only be kept for periods measured in days, maybe tens of days, before they run out of disk space.
When the NSA gets sued, they are subject to having to provide any and all data they have related to the suit. From the moment they get served, or have reason to believe that they are being sued, by law, they cannot delete any data that is related or could be related to the suit. Doing so is destroying evidence, which is a crime.
So what the NSA is saying, is that they simply don't have enough resources to retain data that might be subject to discovery in a lawsuit due to the number and length of the lawsuits they are facing. Which seems to be reasonable and not an intentional failure of the NSA to abide within the law with their system design and implementation. They got caught off guard with the scrutiny generated by the Snowden affair, and now in the flood of court actions find their data capacity strained.
I conclude that the NSA is not intending to violate the law, but they feel that the system operation is more important so they leave it running, risking deleting data subject to discovery. You can argue with their choice I suppose, but there ARE reasons for the system's existence and issues with just turning it off.
FYI... "Typical Oil Changes" are no longer 3,000 miles but twice that.
If you wait longer than 5,000 miles you're a boob.
Even if my owner's manual says 7,500 miles? Unless you have a really warn out engine, feel free to wait to 6,000 miles, no matter what you are driving, just be careful to check the oil and keep it full. You MIGHT have a case for 3,000 miles if you own a '56 Chevy w/o an oil filter, but for any water cooled car since the middle of the 60's when oil filters became standard equipment you are good at 6,000 miles.
Now if you have been running non-detergent oil for some reason (and I seriously don't know why you would or if you can even find it these days) and you switch to detergent oil, I would advise you run only a few thousand miles between the next few filter changes out of an abundance of caution, but after that you can back off to the 6,000 mile intervals with everybody else. But if you are pinching pennies enough to actually go looking for non-detergent oil, you are likely doing your own oil changes and probably don't need my advice anyway.
I don't think I'd say horses are easy to use, even if they do tend to fend for themselves. In my experience, if you intend to actually get a horse to do something useful, like carry a rider someplace or pull a wagon, there is a significant level of effort involved and no little risk that the horse might not be willing to cooperate with you reliably. Not to mention that their power output is generally limited to around ONE horsepower which limits the possible tasks you can use them for.
Actually, go to your local Quickie Oil change place and check out how many different kinds of Oil filters they actually use. I dare say that they have maybe 5 types they routinely use and about 80% of that comes from 2 or three. This is true because there are only a few engine manufacturers in the world.
So I think auto manufacturers do a lot of standardization, but it's mostly out of economic convenience and not a desire to conform.
Or ditch batteries altogether and fill a tank of hydrogen and run the electric car off a fuel cell.
No no... CNG is where it's at. Hydrogen gas comes from Natural Gas anyway (when you produce it on an industrial scale) so if you are willing to live with the issues of running hydrogen, just run CNG in your existing car. All the cost savings and environmental advantages of hydrogen, but you don't have to change anything else you are used to.
Almost all internal combustion engines in cars and trucks today can be converted to run on CNG with very little effort. Usually it's just an alternative set of fuel injectors with some wiring, hoses to deliver the fuel and a pressure regulator and an alternative engine controller to trigger the injectors. You might want to run some hardened valve seats and valves for durability, but that's just because CNG runs so clean there is little carbon to coat things and cut down wear.
If range anxiety is the issue, then we need to run headlong into CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) as a motor fuel, at least for the near term. It's not quite as dense as gasoline, but it burns clean and distribution systems already exist for it. Refueling times are comparable to gasoline, you just might have to do it more often.
A battery that needs to be replaced every 2,000 miles or so and cannot be recharged is not going to fix the electric car's problems. Where it does fix the range issue, you are creating other issues in the process. One issue I see is that the reforming of Aluminum Oxide back into Aluminum metal is an energy intensive process, so this "recharging" is going to be *very* costly especially if this administration continues to force the shuttering of coal fired power plants and forces electric rates up. Then there is all the transportation and manufacturing costs associated with the batteries life cycle that need to be factored in.
Call me a watchful skeptic, but I don't see this technology as having a good chance at success. CNG on the other hand, should be the long distance motor fuel of choice if you ask me.
On one hand, that's only a little less than 1/2 of a typical oil change interval. On the other hand, the actual oil change is eliminated, and swapping this sucker in should be a lot easier than actually doing an oil change. For one thing, they won't be leaving off your drain plug.
FYI... "Typical Oil Changes" are no longer 3,000 miles but twice that. Newer cars generally suggest 7,500 miles or more and you can go longer in that older car too because the oil being used has improved. The 3,000 mile interval was born in the days when oil filters where optional equipment and motor oil broke down faster. Now days, you are wasting money and oil if you do this more than every 6,000 miles. Save the cash and the environment.
Link: http://www.edmunds.com/car-car...
Why is it that the holes can move but the electrons can't? I thought holes were just places where electrons could be but aren't, so moving holes implies movement of electrons.
Your description of "holes" is accurate. Understand that this term is used do describe how semi-conductors work and it really means "positive charged area" in some material. "Holes" is just easier to say than "a place where an electron could be but is not" or "Positively charged area".
In that case, you settle out of court before you run out of money. I would suggest perhaps a maximum fee recovery, based upon the kind of suit filed, unless the winner wants to pursue their full costs. by filing suit. But in order to get your full cost back, you have to prove that you didn't drag it out and run up costs though procedural delay.
I don't think a Billion is enough to do much more than a proof of concept. Google is going to have to pony up a few more bills or this will be a huge boondoggle. But if anybody has the money it's Google.
Next up will be the purchase of the spectrum space needed for this. I'm thinking LightSquared has some licenses they could get by talking to the bankruptcy judge..