The real problem with the FDIV bug is in how Intel handled it - they refused to replace an admittedly defective part unless...
Well, that was the first response. Eventually, though, they bit the bullet
"Monday, December 19 [1994] we changed out policy completely. We decided to replace anybody's part who wanted it replaced... replacing people's chips by the hundreds of thousands... We created a service network to handle the physical replacement for people who didn't ant to do it themselves."
-- from Only the Paranoid Survive , Andrew S. Grove, 1996
This would be more like your neighbor filing a request to get the results of the rabies test of the bat that bit you.
And actually framed in that context it makes the decision seem more reasonable IMO.
More reasonable, but not acceptable.
It is rather important to know if our neighborhood's
bats are rabid. So important, that the information ought not to be suppressed when/if a neighbor is bit. This has nothing to do with a diagnosis of the neighbor, it's about the public interest in a health hazard.
The only reason for public records, is that they serve the public interests. If one loses that, the state is too corrupt to function.
If we build a large number of reactors we certainly must have a much safer type than currently exist.
Half-truth. Probably most of the (dozens?) of designs now in use are safe. The only design that
seems alarming to me, is the Chernobyl type (RBMK, or somesuch?). The Fukushima
problem wasn't in the design, it was in the unprecedented earthquake followed by an
unexpectedly large tsunami. The site was in the middle of a disaster that claimed
tens of thousands of lives, after all: cleanup at Fukushima was a long news story, not
a loss-of-life disaster.
We also must seriously consider what will be required in the way of waste products and removal of reactors that age.
That, too is a half-truth; in the US, 'serious consideration' means a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY)
debate, and we don't need that. We need a decision, but it's easier (and so far, safe) to
just defer everything. The reprocessing of 'spent' fuel is a good idea. It doesn't happen
in the US because of NIMBY arguments. When Jimmy Carter decided not to do it, some of
the NIMBY noise, mercifully, abated. I have mixed feelings about that.
There is no 'lack of fuel' problem for the nuclear-plant buildup, at least in the first millenia.
In order to make the argument work, one assumes measured 'proved reserves'
of 'economically viable' ores.
The first problem, is that 'economically viable' isn't a fixed point. The production of oil
from Canada's tar sands
was deemed 'not economically viable' a few decades ago, but
the price of oil rose. That's a general truth:
as rich ores are used up, less-rich ores
become economically viable.
The second problem, is that 'proved reserves' only exist because someone goes out
and hunts for ores! When you get proof of all the uranium ore you need for a century, why
do you keep paying prospectors for new exploration? Mainly, you DON'T.
It might be useful to note that on the scale of our planet's land surface area, and the
depth of achievable mines, we've mainly just scratched at the surface in terms of
exploration. That already got us enough fossil fuel to pollute the atmosphere to
horrifying greenhouse gas levels. We need to be less destructive in our choice
of what to scratch for. Our future can be bleak if we do too much coal.
Sure you get the benefit of not having to pay for the installation (through taxes), but then the customers are stuck dealing with a for-profit monopoly.
What "monopoly"? Most cities already have multiple for-profit wired broadband providers, and even more wireless providers. Tacoma has at least five broadband providers according to the National Broadband Map
Tacoma has history of licensing providers with contractual obligation to include internet service, and getting
the full buildout of everything except the internet service. They know not to trust a commercial entity
(and don't, generally, do so). The 'five broadband providers' aren't doing enough, I'd guess. Tacoma knows what they're doing.
The one thing municipal broadband seems to be better at than commercial services at is delivering very high speeds. That's why geeks and intellectuals like it. But, in effect, the lower costs for high speeds are subsidized by...
Yeah, that's the value-add of being in a well-run municipality. Your basic services (water, sewer. electricity, gas, garbage
collection, telecom, roads, stormwater drainage) needn't be negotiated with an engineer toting up-front costs and measuring your wallet. You pay according to the same formula as your neighbors or competitors,
and minor costs (getting water to the top of hills costs extra, as does pumping sewage from the lower
regions) are averaged.
The water connection to my home is the same pipe size and capacity as it was half a century ago. Maybe
gigabit speeds are sufficient for the foreseeable future, and it's time, right now, to install the last-mile infrastructure.
Geeks and intellectuals like it, because they have a vision of the future. I'm with them.
US industry got out of the reactor business... all we have is servicing companies.
I guess if you think of Westinghouse (based in Pittsburgh, PA, but owned mostly by Toshiba) and GE-Hitachi (based in Willmington NC) as strictly Japanese companies.
In any case, given that the two largest reactor builders Rosatom (Russia), and Ariva (France) are bordering on insolvency, perhaps it's best that US industry got out the the reactor construction business.
There's a small trickle of regular business in US reactor manufacture, for the military.
Even if a company is 'out of the business' for a year or two, they might get back in,
when another purchase order for submarines falls on their desk. More important, Rosatom and
Ariva are presumably historically state-supported, and 'bordering on insolvency' is
not an important condition for such institutions.
If global warming is more expensive than replacement of coal with nuclear, the worldwide
enforcement of wise treaties will necessarily mean that government (the sole user of force)
must mandate the nuclear power option. It will be a sound economic decision,
and it won't look good on any corporate balance sheet. The return to investors is
NOT the totality of economics, and this is yet another example of the undocumented
cost of pollution, borne by us all, and not subject to accounting disclosure at PowerCoInc,com
Mnemonics being easier to type is definitely a VERY good reason that FORTRAN used mnemonics. I mean, you try typing > on a 1966 era kyyboard which doesn't have the > symbol. You will find that doing so is exceptionally difficult.
Even F77 was limited to +-*/().,'$:= because they couldn't rely on computers having anything else at all.
This is an interesting point: we use language symbols, other than full spelled-out words, for reasons of
brevity. Boolean operators (not, and, or, nand, nor, xor, xnor) don't qualify for either a full set of symbolic
representations, nor do there exist words that most folk would recognize for them. Numeric
comparisons likewise aren't fully covered by conventional (ASCII) symbols.
The least confusing, most natural computer-language way to include all these, is with library functions
x = a.and. b
becomes
x = and(a, b)
Alas, it seems everyone is so wedded to the math-formula expression syntax that the only
perceived options are inline operators, with all the syntactic confusion that follows from the
familiar use of "=" for assignment
F=ma so a=F/m
"Anything is possible"? No, basic physics can't be worked around. More mass means more fuel to achieve an equivalent acceleration.
That's a misread of the physics. Acceleration isn't the important energy sink, since the car starts at rest and
when you park it, it's once again at rest. Regenerative braking is not unheard of, and it would be
possible to get all of your forward-acceleration energy back.
What doesn't come back, are atmospheric drag, friction and tire-flex heating, and exhaust
temperature (you paid for the fuel to heat that exhaust gas). None of those losses are proportional
to the mass of the vehicle, or at least not directly, except for friction heating in brakes. Many hours of driving can pass before you use the brakes.
... I thought the definition of a "core" was a unit that can run a process independently. Not "integer only" process. Then AMD should advertise it's CPUs as "8 integer cores, but only 4 floating point cores".
Cores don't run processes independently, however. They contend for memory, disk, I/O... You might be
expecting something unrealistic, here.
...when you buy a CPU expecting 8 fully independent cores, as I did, because it says "8 cores" on the box, you won't be unpleasantly surprised that it can't actually run 8 processes in parallel
That's why AMD will prevail in this suit. The cores DO, in parallel, run eight processes. Few, if any, situations
in a typical computer's workload are FPU-bound, and having eight queues for four FPUs is certainly an
improvement over four-core (four queues and four FPUs) systems. That's because there are eight cores.
A good optimizing compiler that can handle this kind of system might do some novel things, though. A
pre-compiled benchmark won't necessarily do justice to this architecture, and that means the trial situation
could be a tangled mess. Lawyers for the complainant probably like that.
The person in this article was in custody and being interviewed in a controlled environment by law enforcement. There seems to be no excuse for the FBI not following proper procedure and requesting his return for an appropriate interrogation and investigation.
Actually, the FBI is the wrong place to complain. He should instead point out that the State Department (in the person of one or more ambassadors) did not properly aid a US citizen being detained abroad, without any legal charge against hiim. I'm not sure what the FBI did, but simply
finding the guy and asking questions seems like normal investigation procedure. Leaving
him unaided in a foreign jail, however, is NOT normal diplomatic support for a citizen traveling abroad.
From the looks of it, the tech that got killed was unaware that the wire that got him was energized, due to...
Not to detract from the other, very real, issues that are being discussed here, but isn't this something that any competent electrician would test for before working on the wire?
Any competent, licensed, journeyman or master electrician would take responsibility for his safety in a number of ways: often, by disabling power to a box and applying a padlock so no other worker could reenable that power. It isn't clear from the article what the issue was, but the citation that went with the fine indicates a failure of an extended team to communicate. Some of the people involved knew that
the box had live wires, while the victim did not, perhaps? Did the victim have his own electrical tester, or was he a semiskilled helper?
The "information creators" you speak of get zero compensation for their works being sold by the journals.
They get their work circulated, read and cited. They gain prestige...
Well, duh. The gain, on the part of the information creators, is exactly the same
when the papers are circulated by the 'publisher' and when they are
circulated by the 'pirate'. The same gain in prestige due to 'pirate' copies also accrues to the
'publisher', which is the referred-to source in any subsequent citations of that
original work.
The pre-modern situation was that any academic paper was available outside of library journal collections, by sending a postcard to the authors, asking for a reprint. Those reprints were available for the cost of a few stamps, and the publisher would typically
start the author off with a few dozen paper copies. I've mailed out many such,
and requested some (but not many: I had a good university's tech library).
Every working research lab maintains a collection of relevant papers, there's no other
way to get new researchers up to speed. Building a PDF collection, though,
requires either piracy, or workarounds (my draft before editing is NOT the
work the 'publisher' can protect), or a budget in the dozens-of-dollars-per-page
combined with an e-library digital rights management scheme.
Piracy
is winning (and workarounds are going to win if the publishers push too hard).
Workarounds winning, would kill Elsevier's profits as surely as piracy.
Lots of folks here on Slashdot are serious IT professionals. We deal with things like security policies and instances every day. A private email server in a basement somewhere, managed by a what the fuck yahoo, and totally not being able to be audited . . . that's grounds for firing in most companies is this world.
Nonsense, of course. Government officials are generally discouraged from using any official e-mail for their
personal business, and investigators have marked 99% of the emails they found 'not worthy of investigation'.
No company policy has ever prevented me from using e-mail in any form whatever, nor
even physical dead-trees mail.
Any Secretary of State of this country can and will enter into confidential discussions, including with
foreign officials (that's the job). That means many discussions are, or touch, confidential subject matter,
and supports the notion that investigation IS called for. It isn't clear that her server was insecure or
compromised. She controlled access, after all: she granted the access when the investigators asked for it.
I think Snowden means to say, that if you have an uncompressed data signal there will be many repeating symbols which would stand out if we could see it.
Yes, exactly!
In our own telecommunication history, VHF and UHF stations broadcasting TV signals sent sync pulses
(for timing, to keep the picture from jittering) periodically. Those sync pulses were a kind of
modulation that would make it easy to detect; if the signal were swamped in noise, the
repetitive nature meant that a FFT of the received signal + noise could be analyzed to
find the signal presence.
Earth's RF spectrum presence was mainly a 50 Hz modulated broadcast (the sync
signals for European television) alternating with a 60 Hz modulated broadcast (television in
the US, Japan, and the Americas). I'm pretty sure Woody Sullivan at University of Washington
published on this, but cannot give a specific reference.
While some 'analog' broadcast may still exist, the modern digital television signal doesn't contain
that kind of modulation, and would be easily detected only if it were EQUAL OR ABOVE the noise level. That
means that Earth has dimmed in its RF signal presence, by several orders of magnitude, even though
the RF energy output is undiminished.
The whole article is how this device was used to build the bomb.....get to the end and they add a correction. The FERMIAC wasn't used until after the Manhattan project was completed. Basically the whole article is wrong...
The artcle described the use of the device in a clever "Monte Carlo" physical modeling scheme for complex
geometries of multiple materials. That's how you design reactors, and multistage nuclear bombs (like
the Super, or H-bomb, or 'thermonuclear weapon'). Yeah, the first three explosives (Trinity, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki) didn't benefit from this particular device. The article isn't wrong, just the clickbait Slashdot
title "made the atomic bomb" was an anachronism.
Teasers are like that, sometimes. The article (and its author) are blameless here.
[about MIMO and polarization and other trickery for broadcast]
Whatever you can get in the air, you can get more in a cable or fibre.
I disagree. That's the way it is now but it might not always remain that way. Copper and fiber are both single channel mediums. You might be able to put more than one frequency on them but they are still a single tiny channel. There is nothing that says you can't have 10000 parallel channels running thru the air.
Broadcast means collisions. Narrowing the beam, polarization, antenna trickery can help,
but only factor-of-ten, not ten thousand. For high multiplicity, like a city of 200,000
residents will need, one wants to exclude channels used by other communication.
That is the reason fiber wins. You can get, on a fiber, all the bandwidth a home can
use (more than your senses can absorb). Your fiber is fed ONLY the packets you send
or solicit, the vast sea of other data is held back.
Routers are better than switches, switches are better than hubs, and any
broadcast medium is inevitably similar to a hub; it does not prevent
collisions.
Fiber transceivers are a well-understood interface to high capacity data channels: simple, low power, low maintenance, interference-free. Use. Enjoy.
There's another reason, of course; transmit power can be a horrendous disincentive, when a city full of buildings gets a chance to absorb the signal. Your broadcast station, and everyone else's, would keep
the electric meters spinning all over town.
Unless you are someone important, people won't spend the significant effort required to hack your car.
As long as the world only contains individuals, that's a major concern put to rest.
When examined at any larger social scale, though...
There are also corporate entities, including bad actors whose antics include
all sorts of chaos-inducing mischief. So, what happens when New Jersey political
actors shut down a busy bridge? Oh, wait, that didn't involve electromagnetics...
When Russia wants to tie up all the traffic in a Ukrainian city? China versus India?
India versus Pakistan? Ukraine versus Russia? Tibet versus China?
The vulnerabilities of national transportation infrastructure are very much
a concern related to 'the common defense', and a dose of national involvement is very
likely in the near future. From a LOT of nations, not just the US. Maybe
the UN should sponsor laboratories for internet-of-things safety qualification.
It does look like there's a shortage of modern read-only tech these days, optical disc appears to really be the only game in town and it comes with its own baggage.
It's a buck for a blank CD-ROM, or less. It has no more baggage than a USB stick.
And if you say you can't trust the CD from the vendor to be malware free, then you need to explain why you would trust a USB PROM to be malware free from the vendor.
It gets a bit more complicated, trusting a USB PROM; a CD filesystem can be end-user inspected and its MD5
checksum matched. A USB device, though, could include a PROM and a virtual keyboard with
a script of malicious commands... or a transmitter or receiver.
So you can trust YOUR USB device, but not one that came in the mail; the mail has man-in-the-middle
vulnerability that you cannot work around by matching a checksum. Secure data must arrrive on a CD or similarly transparent medium, that doesn't support the range of sneaky things that come in USB boxes.
Methane has a far stronger Greenhouse Effect (IR Radiation absorption rate) than Carbon Dioxide. If we can convert the methane into CO2, that's actually probably going to reduce overall global warming.
Not an economically feasible treatment. Methane in the
atmosphere turns into CO2 when it 'decays', so the advantage is only for the decay
time duration. If the methane decays in 3 months,
for instance, then you've only gained a single step advantage in the amount of 3 months of atmospheric (methane minus CO2) load, and THAT REMAINS CONSTANT. It doesn't accumulate.
But, the cost of feed additives DOES accumulate.
To solve greenhouse gasses by carbon sequestration (taking carbon from biosphere + atmosphere and inserting into lithosphere) has a net cumulative effect. To do that, it might be economic to do something that has accumulating costs.
The Deepwater Horizon accident caused loss of life, loss of expensive
equipment, bad publicity, fines, and payment of significant damages.
BP corporate interests were heavily impacted, and it's hard to imagine
that any US regulatory change would focus more attention on safety
and efficiency in future drilling.
Hey, the US doesn't OWN all of 'offshore', or even Gulf of Mexico, you know!
If BP wanted to do something silly again, they could dodge any and all regulation, by
simple selection of a foreign drilling site.
But, BP won't do something silly again. Not for a long time. BP will, for
purely profit-seeking reasons, manage better in future. BP employees,
for their own personal safety, will be more inclined to caution and prudence.
The best thing the US government can do, is to insist on full disclosure of
any and all safety-related information, that could be of use in future
planning (including regulation) by any and all persons, anywhere in the world,
The courts (not regulators, not legislators) did perform that function, I hope
adequately. BP cooperated, responsibly (IMHO).
The author of the article clearly wants restrictions on 'them', as a kind of punishment
for a criime, even if it means some kind of ex-post-facto criminalization. He's
missing the productive possibility of doing things better, because he wants to
see someone's time wasted in a public pillory.
Ok lets say it has to be a permanent heart valve.
So to calculate how many days it will take to go through 10 million cycles...nearly 4 months.
So unless they can get say 100 million or more out of it I don't think this will find much use outside of a temporary heart valve.
That was ten million THERMAL cycles, where a thermal pulse was used to reset the material
to its exact original shape. It can flex thousands of times, weaken, then one thermal cycle
can restore it to its original shape (reset it, in other words). It can't be intended to thermal-cycle
as fast as one heartbeat, certainly!
It's unclear how the heat is applied inside a living body, and unclear what structure made
of the alloy makes it good heart-valve material (is it a flap, smart hinge, an
adjustable spring, or a motor?).
This is such a transparently bogus argument, one doesn't NEED to shoot holes in it to see the light.
NASA must continue to plan and operate space missions for weather/climate monitoring,
because that's in their charter. NOAA has no business 'taking over' parts of NASA.
Snide references to nonexistent rivalries and 'siphoning billions' are complete rubbish.
I suspect someone has hired a PR consultant, and not a very bright one, to compose this longwinded, rambling diatribe. It would
even work, if it got everyone's eyes to glaze over (the technique
is sometimes called 'reductio ad nauseum') .
NASA must serve (excerpts from its charter)
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space
...
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space
...
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment.
The right way to level things (in all court dealings) would be to have both parties pay into a legal fund that compensates the lawyers for both sides.
In the US, law is based on the Roman model, with each party allowed to hire
a representative/advocate. There ARE other models; in Sharia law, I'm told, the judge
is the investigator for both sides of an issue.
Alas, by the US constitution, 'due process' is required, and it is customary
to have each party hire/choose/command their own representative.
A 'legal fund' payment scheme would likely be overturned on appeal, as not
being 'due process'. It would also be corruptible in the sense that a chosen
lawyer for a large corporation could anticipate lots of future work, while
the lawyer for an individual or small group would have less incentive.
Simple way to level things -- make the compensatory stakes (not counting fines) the smaller of the two sets of legal fees. That way the small person has nothing to lose if they are in the right, and an acceptable cost if they are not.
Unfortunately, that would mean the judge might not review the fee schedule.
This induces a corporate attorney to assign all his compensation and overhead for
a period of months (even if he did other tasks during that period). It would
also encourage big-fee-but-a-secret-kickback negotiations (which are not
discoverable, due to attorney-client privilege). This is a common failing
when relying on factoids that are determined by the recordkeeping and
other actions of... your opponent (dare I say, enemy?).
Example: a shell corporation sues, the lawyer for the shell corporation 'hires'
out lots of expensive work to the parent corporation for technical support.
When the lsoer pays for this work, the parent corporation profits twice... and
the second payment is tax-free (it's a recovery of 'costs').
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that was the first response. Eventually, though, they bit the bullet
"Monday, December 19 [1994] we changed out policy completely. We decided to replace anybody's part who wanted it replaced... replacing people's chips by the hundreds of thousands... We created a service network to handle the physical replacement for people who didn't ant to do it themselves."
-- from Only the Paranoid Survive , Andrew S. Grove, 1996
It was estimated this cost Intel $475 million.
More reasonable, but not acceptable.
It is rather important to know if our neighborhood's bats are rabid. So important, that the information ought not to be suppressed when/if a neighbor is bit. This has nothing to do with a diagnosis of the neighbor, it's about the public interest in a health hazard.
The only reason for public records, is that they serve the public interests. If one loses that, the state is too corrupt to function.
Half-truth. Probably most of the (dozens?) of designs now in use are safe. The only design that seems alarming to me, is the Chernobyl type (RBMK, or somesuch?). The Fukushima problem wasn't in the design, it was in the unprecedented earthquake followed by an unexpectedly large tsunami. The site was in the middle of a disaster that claimed tens of thousands of lives, after all: cleanup at Fukushima was a long news story, not a loss-of-life disaster.
That, too is a half-truth; in the US, 'serious consideration' means a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) debate, and we don't need that. We need a decision, but it's easier (and so far, safe) to just defer everything. The reprocessing of 'spent' fuel is a good idea. It doesn't happen in the US because of NIMBY arguments. When Jimmy Carter decided not to do it, some of the NIMBY noise, mercifully, abated. I have mixed feelings about that.
In order to make the argument work, one assumes measured 'proved reserves' of 'economically viable' ores.
The first problem, is that 'economically viable' isn't a fixed point. The production of oil from Canada's tar sands was deemed 'not economically viable' a few decades ago, but the price of oil rose. That's a general truth: as rich ores are used up, less-rich ores become economically viable.
The second problem, is that 'proved reserves' only exist because someone goes out and hunts for ores! When you get proof of all the uranium ore you need for a century, why do you keep paying prospectors for new exploration? Mainly, you DON'T.
It might be useful to note that on the scale of our planet's land surface area, and the depth of achievable mines, we've mainly just scratched at the surface in terms of exploration. That already got us enough fossil fuel to pollute the atmosphere to horrifying greenhouse gas levels. We need to be less destructive in our choice of what to scratch for. Our future can be bleak if we do too much coal.
An important exception occurs when we're talking about MTBF. Fast doesn't mean performant, at all.
Tacoma has history of licensing providers with contractual obligation to include internet service, and getting the full buildout of everything except the internet service. They know not to trust a commercial entity (and don't, generally, do so). The 'five broadband providers' aren't doing enough, I'd guess. Tacoma knows what they're doing.
Yeah, that's the value-add of being in a well-run municipality. Your basic services (water, sewer. electricity, gas, garbage collection, telecom, roads, stormwater drainage) needn't be negotiated with an engineer toting up-front costs and measuring your wallet. You pay according to the same formula as your neighbors or competitors, and minor costs (getting water to the top of hills costs extra, as does pumping sewage from the lower regions) are averaged.
The water connection to my home is the same pipe size and capacity as it was half a century ago. Maybe gigabit speeds are sufficient for the foreseeable future, and it's time, right now, to install the last-mile infrastructure. Geeks and intellectuals like it, because they have a vision of the future. I'm with them.
There's a small trickle of regular business in US reactor manufacture, for the military. Even if a company is 'out of the business' for a year or two, they might get back in, when another purchase order for submarines falls on their desk. More important, Rosatom and Ariva are presumably historically state-supported, and 'bordering on insolvency' is not an important condition for such institutions.
If global warming is more expensive than replacement of coal with nuclear, the worldwide enforcement of wise treaties will necessarily mean that government (the sole user of force) must mandate the nuclear power option. It will be a sound economic decision, and it won't look good on any corporate balance sheet. The return to investors is NOT the totality of economics, and this is yet another example of the undocumented cost of pollution, borne by us all, and not subject to accounting disclosure at PowerCoInc,com
This is an interesting point: we use language symbols, other than full spelled-out words, for reasons of brevity. Boolean operators (not, and, or, nand, nor, xor, xnor) don't qualify for either a full set of symbolic representations, nor do there exist words that most folk would recognize for them. Numeric comparisons likewise aren't fully covered by conventional (ASCII) symbols.
The least confusing, most natural computer-language way to include all these, is with library functions x = a .and. b
becomes
x = and(a, b)
Alas, it seems everyone is so wedded to the math-formula expression syntax that the only perceived options are inline operators, with all the syntactic confusion that follows from the familiar use of "=" for assignment
That's a misread of the physics. Acceleration isn't the important energy sink, since the car starts at rest and when you park it, it's once again at rest. Regenerative braking is not unheard of, and it would be possible to get all of your forward-acceleration energy back.
What doesn't come back, are atmospheric drag, friction and tire-flex heating, and exhaust temperature (you paid for the fuel to heat that exhaust gas). None of those losses are proportional to the mass of the vehicle, or at least not directly, except for friction heating in brakes. Many hours of driving can pass before you use the brakes.
Cores don't run processes independently, however. They contend for memory, disk, I/O... You might be expecting something unrealistic, here.
That's why AMD will prevail in this suit. The cores DO, in parallel, run eight processes. Few, if any, situations in a typical computer's workload are FPU-bound, and having eight queues for four FPUs is certainly an improvement over four-core (four queues and four FPUs) systems. That's because there are eight cores.
A good optimizing compiler that can handle this kind of system might do some novel things, though. A pre-compiled benchmark won't necessarily do justice to this architecture, and that means the trial situation could be a tangled mess. Lawyers for the complainant probably like that.
Actually, the FBI is the wrong place to complain. He should instead point out that the State Department (in the person of one or more ambassadors) did not properly aid a US citizen being detained abroad, without any legal charge against hiim. I'm not sure what the FBI did, but simply finding the guy and asking questions seems like normal investigation procedure. Leaving him unaided in a foreign jail, however, is NOT normal diplomatic support for a citizen traveling abroad.
Any competent, licensed, journeyman or master electrician would take responsibility for his safety in a number of ways: often, by disabling power to a box and applying a padlock so no other worker could reenable that power. It isn't clear from the article what the issue was, but the citation that went with the fine indicates a failure of an extended team to communicate. Some of the people involved knew that the box had live wires, while the victim did not, perhaps? Did the victim have his own electrical tester, or was he a semiskilled helper?
Well, duh. The gain, on the part of the information creators, is exactly the same when the papers are circulated by the 'publisher' and when they are circulated by the 'pirate'. The same gain in prestige due to 'pirate' copies also accrues to the 'publisher', which is the referred-to source in any subsequent citations of that original work.
The pre-modern situation was that any academic paper was available outside of library journal collections, by sending a postcard to the authors, asking for a reprint. Those reprints were available for the cost of a few stamps, and the publisher would typically start the author off with a few dozen paper copies. I've mailed out many such, and requested some (but not many: I had a good university's tech library).
Every working research lab maintains a collection of relevant papers, there's no other way to get new researchers up to speed. Building a PDF collection, though, requires either piracy, or workarounds (my draft before editing is NOT the work the 'publisher' can protect), or a budget in the dozens-of-dollars-per-page combined with an e-library digital rights management scheme.
Piracy is winning (and workarounds are going to win if the publishers push too hard).
Workarounds winning, would kill Elsevier's profits as surely as piracy.
Nonsense, of course. Government officials are generally discouraged from using any official e-mail for their personal business, and investigators have marked 99% of the emails they found 'not worthy of investigation'.
No company policy has ever prevented me from using e-mail in any form whatever, nor even physical dead-trees mail.
Any Secretary of State of this country can and will enter into confidential discussions, including with foreign officials (that's the job). That means many discussions are, or touch, confidential subject matter, and supports the notion that investigation IS called for. It isn't clear that her server was insecure or compromised. She controlled access, after all: she granted the access when the investigators asked for it.
Yes, exactly!
In our own telecommunication history, VHF and UHF stations broadcasting TV signals sent sync pulses (for timing, to keep the picture from jittering) periodically. Those sync pulses were a kind of modulation that would make it easy to detect; if the signal were swamped in noise, the repetitive nature meant that a FFT of the received signal + noise could be analyzed to find the signal presence.
Earth's RF spectrum presence was mainly a 50 Hz modulated broadcast (the sync signals for European television) alternating with a 60 Hz modulated broadcast (television in the US, Japan, and the Americas). I'm pretty sure Woody Sullivan at University of Washington published on this, but cannot give a specific reference.
While some 'analog' broadcast may still exist, the modern digital television signal doesn't contain that kind of modulation, and would be easily detected only if it were EQUAL OR ABOVE the noise level. That means that Earth has dimmed in its RF signal presence, by several orders of magnitude, even though the RF energy output is undiminished.
The artcle described the use of the device in a clever "Monte Carlo" physical modeling scheme for complex geometries of multiple materials. That's how you design reactors, and multistage nuclear bombs (like the Super, or H-bomb, or 'thermonuclear weapon'). Yeah, the first three explosives (Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) didn't benefit from this particular device. The article isn't wrong, just the clickbait Slashdot title "made the atomic bomb" was an anachronism.
Teasers are like that, sometimes. The article (and its author) are blameless here.
Broadcast means collisions. Narrowing the beam, polarization, antenna trickery can help, but only factor-of-ten, not ten thousand. For high multiplicity, like a city of 200,000 residents will need, one wants to exclude channels used by other communication. That is the reason fiber wins. You can get, on a fiber, all the bandwidth a home can use (more than your senses can absorb). Your fiber is fed ONLY the packets you send or solicit, the vast sea of other data is held back.
Routers are better than switches, switches are better than hubs, and any broadcast medium is inevitably similar to a hub; it does not prevent collisions.
Fiber transceivers are a well-understood interface to high capacity data channels: simple, low power, low maintenance, interference-free. Use. Enjoy.
There's another reason, of course; transmit power can be a horrendous disincentive, when a city full of buildings gets a chance to absorb the signal. Your broadcast station, and everyone else's, would keep the electric meters spinning all over town.
As long as the world only contains individuals, that's a major concern put to rest. When examined at any larger social scale, though...
There are also corporate entities, including bad actors whose antics include all sorts of chaos-inducing mischief. So, what happens when New Jersey political actors shut down a busy bridge? Oh, wait, that didn't involve electromagnetics... When Russia wants to tie up all the traffic in a Ukrainian city? China versus India? India versus Pakistan? Ukraine versus Russia? Tibet versus China?
The vulnerabilities of national transportation infrastructure are very much a concern related to 'the common defense', and a dose of national involvement is very likely in the near future. From a LOT of nations, not just the US. Maybe the UN should sponsor laboratories for internet-of-things safety qualification.
It gets a bit more complicated, trusting a USB PROM; a CD filesystem can be end-user inspected and its MD5 checksum matched. A USB device, though, could include a PROM and a virtual keyboard with a script of malicious commands... or a transmitter or receiver.
So you can trust YOUR USB device, but not one that came in the mail; the mail has man-in-the-middle vulnerability that you cannot work around by matching a checksum. Secure data must arrrive on a CD or similarly transparent medium, that doesn't support the range of sneaky things that come in USB boxes.
Not an economically feasible treatment. Methane in the atmosphere turns into CO2 when it 'decays', so the advantage is only for the decay time duration. If the methane decays in 3 months, for instance, then you've only gained a single step advantage in the amount of 3 months of atmospheric (methane minus CO2) load, and THAT REMAINS CONSTANT. It doesn't accumulate. But, the cost of feed additives DOES accumulate.
To solve greenhouse gasses by carbon sequestration (taking carbon from biosphere + atmosphere and inserting into lithosphere) has a net cumulative effect. To do that, it might be economic to do something that has accumulating costs.
Hey, the US doesn't OWN all of 'offshore', or even Gulf of Mexico, you know! If BP wanted to do something silly again, they could dodge any and all regulation, by simple selection of a foreign drilling site.
But, BP won't do something silly again. Not for a long time. BP will, for purely profit-seeking reasons, manage better in future. BP employees, for their own personal safety, will be more inclined to caution and prudence.
The best thing the US government can do, is to insist on full disclosure of any and all safety-related information, that could be of use in future planning (including regulation) by any and all persons, anywhere in the world, The courts (not regulators, not legislators) did perform that function, I hope adequately. BP cooperated, responsibly (IMHO).
The author of the article clearly wants restrictions on 'them', as a kind of punishment for a criime, even if it means some kind of ex-post-facto criminalization. He's missing the productive possibility of doing things better, because he wants to see someone's time wasted in a public pillory.
That was ten million THERMAL cycles, where a thermal pulse was used to reset the material to its exact original shape. It can flex thousands of times, weaken, then one thermal cycle can restore it to its original shape (reset it, in other words). It can't be intended to thermal-cycle as fast as one heartbeat, certainly!
It's unclear how the heat is applied inside a living body, and unclear what structure made of the alloy makes it good heart-valve material (is it a flap, smart hinge, an adjustable spring, or a motor?).
Snide references to nonexistent rivalries and 'siphoning billions' are complete rubbish. I suspect someone has hired a PR consultant, and not a very bright one, to compose this longwinded, rambling diatribe. It would even work, if it got everyone's eyes to glaze over (the technique is sometimes called 'reductio ad nauseum') .
NASA must serve (excerpts from its charter)
In the US, law is based on the Roman model, with each party allowed to hire a representative/advocate. There ARE other models; in Sharia law, I'm told, the judge is the investigator for both sides of an issue. Alas, by the US constitution, 'due process' is required, and it is customary to have each party hire/choose/command their own representative.
A 'legal fund' payment scheme would likely be overturned on appeal, as not being 'due process'. It would also be corruptible in the sense that a chosen lawyer for a large corporation could anticipate lots of future work, while the lawyer for an individual or small group would have less incentive.
Unfortunately, that would mean the judge might not review the fee schedule. This induces a corporate attorney to assign all his compensation and overhead for a period of months (even if he did other tasks during that period). It would also encourage big-fee-but-a-secret-kickback negotiations (which are not discoverable, due to attorney-client privilege). This is a common failing when relying on factoids that are determined by the recordkeeping and other actions of ... your opponent (dare I say, enemy?).
Example: a shell corporation sues, the lawyer for the shell corporation 'hires'
out lots of expensive work to the parent corporation for technical support.
When the lsoer pays for this work, the parent corporation profits twice... and
the second payment is tax-free (it's a recovery of 'costs').