"The container holding cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, he said."..."At around 1 a.m. Monday, a man armed with a handgun knocked on the passenger window. When the passenger rolled down his window, the gunman demanded the keys to the vehicle, Morales said. Both the driver and his assistant were taken to an empty lot where they were bound and told not to move. They heard one of the assailants use a walkie-talkie type device or phone to tell someone, "It's done," Morales said." http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/ [cnn.com]
"The container holding cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, he said."..."At around 1 a.m. Monday, a man armed with a handgun knocked on the passenger window. When the passenger rolled down his window, the gunman demanded the keys to the vehicle, Morales said.
Both the driver and his assistant were taken to an empty lot where they were bound and told not to move. They heard one of the assailants use a walkie-talkie type device or phone to tell someone, "It's done," Morales said." http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/
I knew a post-doc that worked with the stuff at the University of Chicago. One thing they tested with it was to see how long a rat would live being exposed to it. They had some kind of lead door between the rat and the source..I don't remember the specific number, but it wasn't all that long-- probably renal failure due to their kidneys not being able to handle such a massive amount of cell death... The exposure rate constant of Cobalt-60 is 1,350mR-m^2 / hr-Ci, and has a half life of 5.27 years. I wonder if the guys that opened it up are experiencing radiation sickness?
I have a engineer friend that accidentally walked in front of a radar dish that I think was placed inside of the nose cone of a fighter jet. He immediately lost his lunch; such response, I am told, is pretty typical with exposure, and they tend to be very careful about letter people know that they're on, and where the antennas are pointed..
As an engineer, I've spent a lot of time chasing the noise gremlins out of systems. For a time, I've worked on high power pulse lasers (+1J/pulse, sounded like gunfire every time it pulsed)..It was a challenge to keep the noise down in the ADC's, protecting the FPGA/microcontrollers, etc, but it was manageable with good ground plane design, proper shielding, zener diodes, inductor chokes, pi filters, twisted-pair lines, hard-line coax, EMI filters on AC power inputs , etc. We also tried hard for it not to be a strong EMI emitter; something that was a challenge for us..I wonder what kind of measures they take in cars, and are there low-hanging fruit? I am unfamiliar with protecting electronics from an EMP pulse, but am curious about how other engineers would model and protect against this. Faraday shields don't offer 100% attenuation, induced voltage gradients, etc.
I am completely gun-shy of tape for this reason as well. I've seen a lot of corrupted archives on consumer tape drives. I wonder what the reason is for their failure?
Was it your experience that they were ok soon after you made the archive, but seemed to go bad after sitting on a shelf for some time? Was it an interoperability problem, that a tape could only be written/read to on the same tapedrive? Tapes stretch, and is why video tape machines have phased locked loops to compensate..I wonder what measures tapedrives use to compensate for this.. What are the differences mechanically between the commercial and consumer drives? I looked up tape drives mentioned by other commentators, and found them to be in the kilodollar range.
I think we should be able to make any kind of independent test we want to make, and not be beholden to a priesthood of medicine, where only the doctors are privy to the details on your medical chart. The information provided is not something that you could get from a normal doctors visit. It gives you an estimate about your health risks, though it may not be 100% accurate, They are pretty clear about this in their documentation. I resent how medicine works in the US in general, and often feel those that I encounter are ether overwhelmed and overburdened, or are technicians that know next to nothing that are trained to draw blood or make measurements that will be interpreted later. Independent testing, cross checking, knowing your risk factors, etc are always useful.
I had a professor in college who's wife noticed a new mole on his back. He went to two different doctors that inspected it and told him he was fine. Not satisfied, he went directly to see a dermatologist without an appointment. He was informed to cancel his schedule for the next day, and that they were going to operate on him. It was an aggressive skin cancer that had not reached down far enough to spread all over his body. He's fine to this day, but every 6 months they inspect his whole body, and remove all of his moles..
I don't trust doctors to pay enough attention to my long term health interests.. They have hundreds of other patients to take care of.
We may type very differently throughout the day, especially at night, or close to a deadline. There would appear that you would need to do a significant amount of characterization to have any meaningful results. There are times when we can be really tired, but need to finish something. The last thing anyone needs is to fight your computer in addition to fighting a clock. I would refuse to work or quit any place that would consider using this kind of authentication. This kind of model can never be perfect.
Here is a plot of the cosmic ray flux ( coincidence counting rate per second) vs altitude. It's also not hard to build a detector that can detect these. You can use something called coincidence detection where two scintillator plates are placed right on top of one another, and each plate is connected to a photomultiplier tube. If both photomultiplier tubes trigger, it's a cosmic ray event.. If only the top one triggers it could still be a muon though..
As always, what do you want to do, and what tools for the job are appropriate, and what you need to measure, how much precision do you need, etc.. a spectrum analyzer is incredibly useful for debugging RF stuff, where a scope often is not.. A scope might be very good for looking at distortion, and harmonics like a spectrum analyzer would..A sine wave may just look like a sine wave on the scope, but on a spectrum analyzer you can see how narrow the peak is, and if there are nearby adjacent peaks, measure phase noise of the local oscillator, etc. Also, digital scopes generally only have 8 vertical bits of resolution, and therefor don't have much dynamic range in your display. A spectrum analyzer generally gives you much better resolution. Taking lots of data off a scope and analyzing it on matlab will not give you equivalent results. There is a certain Heisenberg uncertainty principle with instruments with regard to frequency and timing information..
some instruments are also much better at characterizing stuff that changes very slowly that's hard to catch on a scope, etc.
I wandered around via the virtual tour, but all the shelves were empty... I wonder what happened to the remains? It was curious to read the graffiti of names and dates, and the ancient signs on the wall but wasn't able to recognize all the writing, It looked like their was more than one language used for the official lettering. I saw dates like 1862, 1920, 1952, etc . Graffiti has been a part of human experience for a long time, and is one way historians can estimate how literate the average population was of an ancient civilization.. Did you know that we have access to the words and thoughts of the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum?
..I was just making up names, trying not to accidentally shill a real company, with visions of TV dinner add campaigns that played on the manly theme to convince people to buy bland prepackaged food. It's amazing how well some advertising themes can work.
..Is there such a thin"g as healthy / organic jerky? I have to go on a long trip for the holidays and need to keep a carload of people sated.. "meat mummies" however, does not sound as appealing as "hungry man" or "Smoked Bronco Billy's", or "snackmasters" ; don't think I could convince the wife..
It's not unreasonable that the NSA would have their own gear -- some kind of box connected in the middle. What evidence is there that cisco equipment has some kind of backdoor to the NSA, and this is not all FUD.. ?
I wonder what their reasoning is for cutting off all communications the citizenry? This looks to be another good motivator to get/renew your ham radio licence. It might be easy to kill the internet by turning off the root-servers and even cel-phones, but it would be hard to jam all the ham stations/radios in the area, repeater towers, etc. There are also modulation techniques that would make it even harder to jam, but are discouraged by the ARRL because it wouldn't be able to be easily detectable by other hams.. Software defined radio has been a hobby of mine, which gives you a lot of freedom to communicate..
A QPSS signal on 5Watts is purportedly detectable all over the world.. All you need is a microcontroller board, like the Arduino, and a little bit of hardware, and you could communicate far below the noise floor..The trick with QPSS is that each bit may take several/tens of seconds to transmit each bit on a very narrow frequency (the -174dBm noise floor reduces to -184dBm). If you lock your reference oscillator to GPS, you can synchronize both transceivers.
I wonder what chance that some of this material is available from other sources? It's a pity to read about destroyed archives. I've wanted to see some of David Attenborough's older material from the 50ies and 60ies that I read was very well made. The BBC had such great material, like the "Voyage of the Beagle", etc.
PBS also had a lot of great programming they're also not releasing; stuff I'm sure they have, but won't distribute.
This naturally implies that the Ministry keeps the data, but conveniently expunges public records. There can only be one Truth; that which is officially sanctioned by the Ministry.
It's too bad that there are currently only two alternatives -- laser fusion,which will probably never work, and the ITER that is a scaled up tokamak, both are exceedingly complicated and expensive. How does this compare with the Tandem Mirror Experiment, or the Axisysymmetric Tandem Mirror? I've read that the Gas Dynamic Trap axisymmetric mirror machine at Novosibirsk, Russia, has demonstrated plasma confinement with no turbulence, and that it's possible to generate electricity directly without the need to boil water to turn a turbine.. If you scaled this device up, how would it compare with the tokamak? Is it an inherently more stable platform, but less efficient? It's too bad that the numbers point to larger and larger Tokamak's to achieve fusion, but then we don't necessarily want a cheap source of a large quantity of neutrons..
Richard F Post has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, and was one of the scientists behind the magnetic mirror experiment at LLNL, that was mothballed before it ever started due to budget cuts..
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty." --Benjamin Franklin
This is a rather extreme sentiment, but it has a point.. Democracy is an experiment, one that is easily broken. People and governments are fickle creatures. Seasons change, and one might find themselves under unwanted scrutiny. A lot of lives were destroyed because of their political affiliations (Frank Oppenheimer lost his physics professorship, etc) Nixon has his enemies list, and now we find out that the IRS specifically targeted Tea party organizations. I can understand the want and need for information, but it can too easily be abused. Perhaps now so much in our current environment, but it can set a bad future precedent.
One of the best ways to influence people is to make a personal connection to understand you and where you're coming from. Befriending him can accomplish a lot. Eisenhower emphasized how important he thought a sense of humor was, and making personal connections, and was a big factor in why they made him the allied commander. He had to deal with many busy generals with out-sized personalities, but managed to reason with and influence them well enough to be promoted.
Posting on slashdot likely means that you don't have an open line of communication with him where you can easily make personal appeals. Invite him to lunch, get to know him. Soft people skills are very useful. If he considered you a friend, there is a chance that he would show you a great deal of consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
"The container holding cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, he said." ..."At around 1 a.m. Monday, a man armed with a handgun knocked on the passenger window. When the passenger rolled down his window, the gunman demanded the keys to the vehicle, Morales said. Both the driver and his assistant were taken to an empty lot where they were bound and told not to move. They heard one of the assailants use a walkie-talkie type device or phone to tell someone, "It's done," Morales said." http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/ [cnn.com]
"The container holding cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, he said." ..."At around 1 a.m. Monday, a man armed with a handgun knocked on the passenger window. When the passenger rolled down his window, the gunman demanded the keys to the vehicle, Morales said.
Both the driver and his assistant were taken to an empty lot where they were bound and told not to move. They heard one of the assailants use a walkie-talkie type device or phone to tell someone, "It's done," Morales said." http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/
I knew a post-doc that worked with the stuff at the University of Chicago. One thing they tested with it was to see how long a rat would live being exposed to it. They had some kind of lead door between the rat and the source..I don't remember the specific number, but it wasn't all that long-- probably renal failure due to their kidneys not being able to handle such a massive amount of cell death... The exposure rate constant of Cobalt-60 is 1,350mR-m^2 / hr-Ci, and has a half life of 5.27 years. I wonder if the guys that opened it up are experiencing radiation sickness?
I have a engineer friend that accidentally walked in front of a radar dish that I think was placed inside of the nose cone of a fighter jet. He immediately lost his lunch; such response, I am told, is pretty typical with exposure, and they tend to be very careful about letter people know that they're on, and where the antennas are pointed..
It would have been interested to read about them trying to rewire these things until they worked; simple measures like twisting conductor pairs, etc.
As an engineer, I've spent a lot of time chasing the noise gremlins out of systems. For a time, I've worked on high power pulse lasers (+1J/pulse, sounded like gunfire every time it pulsed) ..It was a challenge to keep the noise down in the ADC's, protecting the FPGA/microcontrollers, etc, but it was manageable with good ground plane design, proper shielding, zener diodes, inductor chokes, pi filters, twisted-pair lines, hard-line coax, EMI filters on AC power inputs , etc. We also tried hard for it not to be a strong EMI emitter; something that was a challenge for us. .I wonder what kind of measures they take in cars, and are there low-hanging fruit? I am unfamiliar with protecting electronics from an EMP pulse, but am curious about how other engineers would model and protect against this. Faraday shields don't offer 100% attenuation, induced voltage gradients, etc.
I am completely gun-shy of tape for this reason as well. I've seen a lot of corrupted archives on consumer tape drives. I wonder what the reason is for their failure? Was it your experience that they were ok soon after you made the archive, but seemed to go bad after sitting on a shelf for some time? Was it an interoperability problem, that a tape could only be written/read to on the same tapedrive? Tapes stretch, and is why video tape machines have phased locked loops to compensate..I wonder what measures tapedrives use to compensate for this.. What are the differences mechanically between the commercial and consumer drives? I looked up tape drives mentioned by other commentators, and found them to be in the kilodollar range.
I think we should be able to make any kind of independent test we want to make, and not be beholden to a priesthood of medicine, where only the doctors are privy to the details on your medical chart. The information provided is not something that you could get from a normal doctors visit. It gives you an estimate about your health risks, though it may not be 100% accurate, They are pretty clear about this in their documentation. I resent how medicine works in the US in general, and often feel those that I encounter are ether overwhelmed and overburdened, or are technicians that know next to nothing that are trained to draw blood or make measurements that will be interpreted later. Independent testing, cross checking, knowing your risk factors, etc are always useful.
I had a professor in college who's wife noticed a new mole on his back. He went to two different doctors that inspected it and told him he was fine. Not satisfied, he went directly to see a dermatologist without an appointment. He was informed to cancel his schedule for the next day, and that they were going to operate on him. It was an aggressive skin cancer that had not reached down far enough to spread all over his body. He's fine to this day, but every 6 months they inspect his whole body, and remove all of his moles..
I don't trust doctors to pay enough attention to my long term health interests.. They have hundreds of other patients to take care of.
We may type very differently throughout the day, especially at night, or close to a deadline. There would appear that you would need to do a significant amount of characterization to have any meaningful results. There are times when we can be really tired, but need to finish something. The last thing anyone needs is to fight your computer in addition to fighting a clock. I would refuse to work or quit any place that would consider using this kind of authentication. This kind of model can never be perfect.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/cosmic.html
How slow, and how good was the connection?
some instruments are also much better at characterizing stuff that changes very slowly that's hard to catch on a scope, etc.
I wandered around via the virtual tour, but all the shelves were empty. .. I wonder what happened to the remains? It was curious to read the graffiti of names and dates, and the ancient signs on the wall but wasn't able to recognize all the writing, It looked like their was more than one language used for the official lettering. I saw dates like 1862, 1920, 1952, etc . Graffiti has been a part of human experience for a long time, and is one way historians can estimate how literate the average population was of an ancient civilization.. Did you know that we have access to the words and thoughts of the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum?
..I was just making up names, trying not to accidentally shill a real company, with visions of TV dinner add campaigns that played on the manly theme to convince people to buy bland prepackaged food. It's amazing how well some advertising themes can work.
..Is there such a thin"g as healthy / organic jerky? I have to go on a long trip for the holidays and need to keep a carload of people sated.. "meat mummies" however, does not sound as appealing as "hungry man" or "Smoked Bronco Billy's", or "snackmasters" ; don't think I could convince the wife..
It's not unreasonable that the NSA would have their own gear -- some kind of box connected in the middle. What evidence is there that cisco equipment has some kind of backdoor to the NSA, and this is not all FUD.. ?
A QPSS signal on 5Watts is purportedly detectable all over the world.. All you need is a microcontroller board, like the Arduino, and a little bit of hardware, and you could communicate far below the noise floor..The trick with QPSS is that each bit may take several/tens of seconds to transmit each bit on a very narrow frequency (the -174dBm noise floor reduces to -184dBm). If you lock your reference oscillator to GPS, you can synchronize both transceivers.
This reminds me of the mirror fusion work done at LLNL.. They never even had the chance to turn it on..
I wonder what chance that some of this material is available from other sources? It's a pity to read about destroyed archives. I've wanted to see some of David Attenborough's older material from the 50ies and 60ies that I read was very well made. The BBC had such great material, like the "Voyage of the Beagle", etc. PBS also had a lot of great programming they're also not releasing; stuff I'm sure they have, but won't distribute.
This naturally implies that the Ministry keeps the data, but conveniently expunges public records. There can only be one Truth; that which is officially sanctioned by the Ministry.
It makes Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth more difficult if there are old archives available..
Richard F Post has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, and was one of the scientists behind the magnetic mirror experiment at LLNL, that was mothballed before it ever started due to budget cuts..
This is a reference to a movie called "Back to the Future"..
This is a rather extreme sentiment, but it has a point.. Democracy is an experiment, one that is easily broken. People and governments are fickle creatures. Seasons change, and one might find themselves under unwanted scrutiny. A lot of lives were destroyed because of their political affiliations (Frank Oppenheimer lost his physics professorship, etc) Nixon has his enemies list, and now we find out that the IRS specifically targeted Tea party organizations. I can understand the want and need for information, but it can too easily be abused. Perhaps now so much in our current environment, but it can set a bad future precedent.
Posting on slashdot likely means that you don't have an open line of communication with him where you can easily make personal appeals. Invite him to lunch, get to know him. Soft people skills are very useful. If he considered you a friend, there is a chance that he would show you a great deal of consideration.
-Joe