Industry concerns are mounting that modifying these ECUs and the software coding that runs them could lead to vulnerabilities in vehicle safety and cyber security. Imagine an amateur makes a coding mistake that causes brakes to fail and a car crash ensues. Furthermore, automakers say these modifications could render cars non-compliant with environmental laws that regulate emissions.
This is not about replacing brakes, oil changes, replacing spark plugs, etc. It is about making software changes that most people do not have the experience or knowledge to do.
The "industry concerns" are just horror stories from hired lawyers. That DMCA is a criminal law, and it
doesn't only cover "most people", it covers everyone. And it covers many situations other than "modifying these ECUs",
including normal repair/upkeep/modernization for the durable-goods item that is an automobile (or truck,
or self-propelled vacation home).
Face it, manufacturers completely abandon product service after a few years, which causes aftermarket
suppliers at the high end, and junkyards at the low end, to take over. When you criminalize aftermarket/junkyard
operations, some manufacturer gets another new-product sale (and some owner has to abandon his
vehicle for metal scrap value). So, some (not all) manufacturers might hire lawyers to argue for criminalization.
I wince whenever I hear flaky claims like "most people do not have the experience or knowledge..."; heck,
most people don't have the experience or knowledge to read Slashdot. That is just arrogance, and dismissal,
and is entirely unworthy.
If broadband was an absolute necessity, the idiot software developer should have moved to a civilized place. Hell, I'm sure he could have found a comparably priced home in a neighborhood serviced by a fiber provider.
Yeah, blaming the victim is always a popular activity. He IS in a civilized place, and the distance to a service location is about half a mile. This suggests that he could set up a one-room office somewhere in walking distance of his home, and get the internet service there.
But, the infrastructure cost to dangle half a mile of wire onto existing poles is much less; there is an effective policy (of long standing) of requiring electric utility services to connect any customer, but allowing internet utility services to charge arbitrary fees and/or deny service entirely.
As for 'a fiber provider', that's COMPLETELY out of the question. There's no license for fiber right-of-way until/unless the law is changed/regulations are amended.
What on earth is "an Uruguay syndrom", and why does google have no idea either.
An attempt to be cute with the concept of the "China syndrome,"... self-sustaining molten nuclear fuel melts its way through the earth - then up and out the other side (*eye twitch*).
The problem being it's utter bollocks. Anything that becomes molten will mix into the fuel and dilute it, lowering the reaction rate and moving you further and further away from a self-sustaining reaction.
It IS nonsense, but the amount of fuel in a reactor only generates large amounts of heat if there's a core and a careful geometric distribution of the fuel. When the fuel melts and runs out of the core, that geometry change alone quenches the chain reaction. There's still heat, there's still mess, but not reactor-scale chain reaction. Neutron flux is the real hazard, not that there will be so much heat that the bedrock (or even the containment metal vessel) melts.
Yeah, the cliche engine was working hard when this show was designed and marketed. A mature woman psychologist in charge of the technical wizards... that's suggesting that the young whiz kids are still living with mom, and/or a bit of therapy is what every tech genius really needs.
If Snowden wants a fair hearing, he'd better not wait for this show to impact the public consciousness.
He created the work while employed by someone. That someone provided him with all the equipment and capabilities to do the research why the hell should he be awarded the patent?
If you are part of a team who gets the patent? It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
This is loaded language. Firstly, creation of an artwork doesn't automatically confer ownership onto an employer. Unless, you are perhaps talking about slavery? An employee who does research and development will usually have some kind of salary or bonus or profit participation arrangement that pays him for his creation. He can also expect his name on the patent (he has a moral right to sign his work). He ought to expect, though, that the exclusive rights that come with a patent are a company asset. This will be in his employment contract, generally. Another employee, who mops floors, can expect to be able to patent a new wetmop design, even if the idea came to him at work, without any ownership claim by his employer. Either of these employees can patent a new species of apple that they grew in their backyard, the employer gets nothing of that (unless the contract is VERY oddly written).
The phrase 'all the equipment and capabilities' is likewise loaded: there's no equipment required for a patent, you just have to describe the invention clearly enough for it to be fabricated. The 'capabilities' might include your grasp of arithmetic, an inspiring letter from Aunt Lucy, an instructive afternoon repairing a broken lawnmower. Bringing your pencil from home would be a major threat to corporate claims on your work product if these rights had strong dependence on ownership-of-tools!
The compensation this inventor expected, pursuant to his employment contract, wasn't paid. He sued, but Japanese courts don't have strong tools to compel an accounting by the employer, and the inventor accepted a settlement without ever seeing full disclosure of the book value of his patent(s).
It's also true of non-primes, and trivial to prove.
But, it's not generally true, because x, y must be nonzero... and requiring primes does achieve that distinction. A weak theorem is better than a false conjecture
I would like to see why you think it's run well (really).
The article has sentences like this, " Itâ(TM)s essentially a bottomless bucket, as long as it's used efficiently and in a cost-effective manner." So which is it, a bottomless bucket, or something that must be used efficiently? Which is it, free, or something that you have to worry about...
The resource is 'free' only in the sense that it isn't encumbered by administrators outside the state educational system. The indication that it's run well is the claim that the network has been nearly trouble-free (i.e. that the telco horror-story of $100 per month per user of 'costs' is a fantasy).
When public servants run a wide-area network, they provide a wide open window to view the cost and performance tradeoffs. It's worth looking out that window and noting the landscape. For-profit service providers only show you billboards... and bills.
you can't run a version of Safari on 10.6.x that will actually load content on sites like Youtube).
That's because you are using a version of Safari that hasn't been updated for about 6 years....Fortunately, you have several alternatives:
1. Update OS X to Yosemite. It's FREE (as in beer).
Yeah, FREE (as in beer) and UNAVAILABLE (as in roast dodo). The "forced upgrade policy" means that a generation of Macintoshes is arbitrarily decared too old for the installer to put a newer OS onto it. My MacPro, four Xeon cores and 20GB of RAM, with six drive bays, doesn't have a MacOS upgrade path beyond 10.6.8, won't load any Safari browser version that came with 10.7+, and most prebuilt browsers of other pedigree are just as OS-intolerant (TenFourFox being the notable exception).
Apple's OS and app install process discriminates on the basis of last-time-we-got-paid-for-hardware.
That said, I still think the basic notion of regulating internet access is an idea with merit even if the ruling parties aren't exactly brilliant at it.
Really? You just tossed out the constitution. WTG! And by that, the right to communicate with whomever you choose (1st) without oversight (4th).
Nonsense! The constitution (of the USA) hands control of 'post offices and post roads' as well as 'navigable waterways' to Federal goverment. That puts ALL of telecommunication as known in the eighteenth century into Federal jurisdiction.
And as for 'right to communicate', as far as a non-neutral Internet is concerned, only some service providers, never their customers, have access to that. Network neutrality regulation is a way to extend access to the leaf nodes of the Internet. Ought we, as a society, do that? I think so. Is there another practical way to do that? I think not.
The error is not small. If you read the article, on certain very reasonable inputs (not pathological at all), you can sometimes wind up with only _four_ bits being correct.
The issue here, is that any computed sine value outside the first quadrant (input values 0 to pi/2) is computed by reducing the input quantity. The function is periodic, so adding or subtracting any multiple of the period (2 pi) from the input value, is mathematically valid. So, the error is made to be small for each value in that first quadrant, and the Intel documentation correctly quotes the errors there. The 'reducing the input quantity' step, however, doesn't use extended precision arithmetic, so the (add 2pi) step adds roundoff error (and that roundoff error generates output errors).
Thus, the sin(1.14159) calculation, with a 10-decimal-place accurate representation of that number (1.14159), gives roughly a 10-decimal-place determination of the proper sine value. But, the sin(1.14159 x 10**9) will get LOTS of leading digits truncated when you scale the input, and can only determine a 1-decimal-place scaled input value, thus only a 1-decimal-place sine.
And, if the hypothetical, perfect, sine value has leading zeroes, it looks terrible as a 'percent error'. Any roundofff error at all, in a sin(3.14159265358979323846264338...) calculation, will get a divide-by-zero boost when you calculate a percent error. The absolute error, though, is just what is to be expected from roundoff error in a step that takes the remainder after dividing by (2pi + roundoff_error(2pi) ).
The biggest problem is that anyone can call themselves a scientist. There really is not definition of what it takes to be qualified as a scientist. One who practices science regardless of comptence?
In the science community, of course, this isn't a problem. One can look up the author's peer-reviewed publications, and judge from that. Outside the science community, alas, there won't be much access to (or comprehension of) that information. Scientists won't offer any (vague, general, personal) interpretive comments if they can avoid it.
As a rule, a scientist publishes his best work, and its supporting data and reasoning, in a peer-reviewed setting. There's no reason a prudent observer would look beyond that body of published work, but any reporter will be imprudent, to jazz it up for a news story. General, vague, and personal are the hooks that get attention, in a one minute spot.
It's been shown that all these "helical" polarization schemes are degenerate forms of MIMO essentially, and can't achieve speeds better then what MIMO antenna configurations can.
While it may be argued that circular polarization is another MIMO scheme, it CAN achieve better speeds, because it DOESN'T REQUIRE EXTRA CHANNELS. MIMO, generally, does. There's nothing 'degenerate' about the relationship of the two schemes.
The real limitation here, is that this is a beam technology, it isn't for broadcast (i.e. you have to aim the sender and receiver antennae). The article mentions a 'phase plate', which implies the beam is directed perpendicular to the plane of that plate... The real benefit, is that you get a factor of two without using any extra bandwidth from the available RF allocation.
It's possible to make a lot of approximations, and some of them depend on the dimensionality. Three atoms thick is close enough to two dimensional that a lot of the (quantum mechanical) calculations ARE 2-D. So, the distinction makes sense (and there's precedent in so-called quantum dot structures) to call this two-dimensional.
Alas, I'm unsure how one would create such a thing and keep it intact for a substantial service life with an oxygen atmosphere around.
This water layer ion creation effect is fairly well known in materials physics. Until now, I don't think it was well known that it played any role in static generation.
While it might not be well known, it IS the best theory I've seen for lightning (air currents and gravity sorting ice particles causing charge separation).
There are historic instances of telecommunications NON-neutrality to consider, too. I favor internet neutrality.
Ben Franklin, as a printer in the colonies, knew the danger of selection in telecommunication; his competitor (Bradford) in Philadelphia was also the local postmaster. Bradford's publications were sent by post, but as for Ben's printed work
" what I did send was by bribing the riders, who took them privately, Bradford being unkind enough to forbid it"
Our constitution was written to make telecommunication a priority of the new federal government, "to establish post offices and post roads", and our first postmaster-general, Ben Franklin, saw to it that postal regulations forbade favoritism. He wanted the carriers to remain neutral. It worked well.
At the dawn of telephonic communication, a similar circumstance came up: an undertaker thought his business suffered because a telephone operator was related to a competitor. Mr. Strowger invented a gizmo, the Strowger Switch, that allowed a caller to connect without talking to an operator (and dial phones worked on this principle for years). Again, the solution to Mr. Strowger's problem was to keep telecommunications neutral; we have all enjoyed the benefits for so long, that it seems quaint that this ever WAS a problem.
So, at least twice before in history we have seen preference in telecommunications, executed by carriers who had mixed motives (usually related to a profit scheme) which caused anguish to the people of this country. Any worthy Federal Communications Commission should exert itself to ensure that the customary fairness of messaging is maintained into the foreseeable future. I will be watching.
Truly, it is foolish to think millions of 'users' can be handed the security problem, and advised to take action individually.
We should all cringe in horror when we hear that millions of nontechnical users are being encouraged to 'take the problem seriously'. It's like asking all the residents of an apartment building to safety-check the steam boiler (probably only one or two will want to tighten the relief valve spring).
There have been attempts to 'take the problem seriously' with draconian legal sentences: that, too, is doomed. The law moves too slowly, and relies on things, like electronic documentation, that can be SO easily corrupted.
There have been attempts to 'take the problem seriously' with proliferation of passwords, and password-generating rules and password replacement schedules, and by moving controls into obscure places (what port do YOU open for SMTP?), which entirely miss the target of security, because the poor user has to write those things down (I know I have to!).
Instead, we should be building institutional watchers and code (walls, if necessary, and alarms, and a few traps) to deal with such issues. Sadly, government and commercial interests aren't good for personal computer security- we need OTHER institutions.
If the public pays for it, the public should receive it in its entirety.
But, this was 'freedom of information act' request, and that act refers only to the records of government civil agencies.
The researcher had a teaching job, and acted as an independent contractor in pursuing a research topic.
The researcher's phone calls, e-mails, piles of scratchings and musings, aren't the proper product of his funded research at all. Only the finished report, and/or any publishable papers (in peer-reviewed, edited journals) are the concern of the research funding agency (probably National Science Foundation). The NSF isn't a party to the request, they and the researcher are presumably satisfied that the research findings WERE published.
Neither the editors of peer-reviewed journals, nor the authors, want undue attention paid to unclear, misspelled, poorly-supported or otherwise unpublishable debris from the research process. The researcher (and the University of Virginia) acted properly in not handing over every tatter of e-mail that could be found. The supreme court of the state just agreed with that.
This bill is silly. And, the arguments in McCaskill's webpage are HILARIOUS.
>>'74%' [ of articles available from other sources]
That test (this is the INTERNET we're talking about) is so ephemeral as to be meaningless. Here this week, gone the next, or renamed, or miscatalogged (or, that page actually has a really CUTE pic of a kitty- **awww...). Ten years from April 2014, who will be able to locate an unedited copy of the McCaskill argument page, to understand this discussion?
>>'sold only 8%' [of the available articles, recently]
I'm pretty sure I haven't looked up anywhere near 0.1% of the listings in my local phone directory, but I'm not burning the book to save shelf space! This also, is meaningless.
A copy of a scholarly study (which I got from NTIS and wore to tatters) is of great value to me, and whenever I pass my work on, there will be a nice scholarly reference to it, with NTIS being listed as the source. Anyone following good scholarship procedures will require access and NTIS IS THAT ACCESS.
Kill the bill. It looks like someone : thinks libraries are run for profit; thinks bookburning is an easy 'final solution'; perceives inefficiency; and doesn't see the increase in value of old literature. Internet availability of articles and discussions WITH SCHOLARLY REFERENCES means that many streams now trace to those old sources.
...he only had 4 combinations to try. Only 4 pins of a RJ-45 are used. If it was PoE then he'd have damaged his laptop.
Since Ethernet has two (in 100baseT) transformers, there's a possibility that one bridges two POE (power over Ethernet) poles with a receiver transformer. Compliant POE sources, though, shut down if there's a short, so it shouldn't harm anything.
If the experimenter used a simple voltmeter, he could see power presence, and (if he also tested the resistance) would know which wires went together in pairs. Then, there's two polarities in each pair, and swapping pairs, so that's eight possibilities. Without probing, there'd be 4*3*2 = 12 possibilities.
Sorry, thats a load of bollocks - the NHS has had over half a decade to do something about their situation and they failed... UK law requires that a purchase be fit for a reasonable period of time (depending on the item involved, but the maximum time is typically six years), and XP is well past that test...
The government is to blame here, not Microsoft, so its only right that the government pay the fine, not Microsoft.
That's a bit too strong, surely! The NHS is intended to serve health care, and they HAVEN'T failed.
The 'reasonable period of time' argument does hold some water, and of course the extension of software support is worth paying for. But, don't try to set a maximum time of six years! No major project (road, hydrolectric dam, harbor) is ever funded on such a short period, and there's no reason to stick such a software expiration date into every system that relies on software!
Microsoft has decided, for marketing reasons, to kill off XP software maintenance. Third party replacement is difficult, or impossible, or more costly than buying a new version. Big customers can and should fight for any modifications of the 'deadline for support' that they deem appropriate. Kudos to NHS!
I would have thought that the fact that the experiments with leaves brought there from elsewhere decaying slower demonstrate that merely bringing foreign organisms (the collected leaves are not sterile, of course) is not going to help.
It's a full set of organisms you need; if, for instance, the earthworms were missing, a few strips of sod (or waiting for 'foreign' worms to migrate in) would be effective, but a pile of leaves wouldn't.
While there may be millions of possible reconstructions for a fuzzy, ill-defined image, the simplest (sparsest) version is probably the best fit."
Of the millions of possibilities, the sparsest is MOST likely. Perhaps it's twice as likely as any other possibility. That still means it's 99.999% likely to be wrong
I interpreted this to be a description of maximum-entropy filtering (i.e. making an output image with least information, consistent with input image with sparse information content overlaid with full-textured noise.) It certainly works for (for example) starfields seen in a badly focused telescope; NASA used this for Hubble reconstructions. Every possible reconstruction will have some 'wrong' content, because noise is guaranteed (if only by the quantum uncertainty principle). That doesn't make the maximum-entropy filter useless, it just means the utility depends on the subject's compliance with the minimum-information assumption.
Frozen ground is only waterproof if there are no holes. Frost heaves tend to break up the ground and make holes.
Actually, a frozen region in the soil is a good container, because water that starts to
leak through... freezes solid and plugs the leak.
Frost heave is caused by thermal gradient, and transports water to the coldest spot (which is the container wall, safely underground) then freezes it. So, no problem there!
Any cast metal needs machining afterwards, even if it's just to clean up the sprue area and to cut screw threads. Difficulties in casting are not why we don't see conventional metals used...
Yes, and no: most cast metal shrinks markedly when it cools, so there's an oversize pattern (two percent for iron) used in making the mold. Amorphous metal has almost the same density when it's cool, it shrinks only slightly (an order of magnitude less shrinkage).
Slashdot Mirror
The "industry concerns" are just horror stories from hired lawyers. That DMCA is a criminal law, and it doesn't only cover "most people", it covers everyone. And it covers many situations other than "modifying these ECUs", including normal repair/upkeep/modernization for the durable-goods item that is an automobile (or truck, or self-propelled vacation home).
Face it, manufacturers completely abandon product service after a few years, which causes aftermarket suppliers at the high end, and junkyards at the low end, to take over. When you criminalize aftermarket/junkyard operations, some manufacturer gets another new-product sale (and some owner has to abandon his vehicle for metal scrap value). So, some (not all) manufacturers might hire lawyers to argue for criminalization.
I wince whenever I hear flaky claims like "most people do not have the experience or knowledge..."; heck, most people don't have the experience or knowledge to read Slashdot. That is just arrogance, and dismissal, and is entirely unworthy.
Yeah, blaming the victim is always a popular activity. He IS in a civilized place,
and the distance to a service location is about half a mile. This suggests
that he could set up a one-room office somewhere in walking distance of
his home, and get the internet service there.
But, the infrastructure cost to dangle half a mile of wire onto existing poles
is much less; there is an effective policy (of long standing) of requiring
electric utility services to connect any customer, but allowing internet
utility services to charge arbitrary fees and/or deny service entirely.
As for 'a fiber provider', that's COMPLETELY out of the question. There's no
license for fiber right-of-way until/unless the law is changed/regulations are amended.
It IS nonsense, but the amount of fuel in a reactor only generates large amounts of heat if there's a
core and a careful geometric distribution of the fuel. When the fuel melts and runs out of the core, that
geometry change alone quenches the chain reaction. There's still heat, there's still mess, but
not reactor-scale chain reaction. Neutron flux is the real hazard, not that
there will be so much heat that the bedrock (or even the containment metal vessel) melts.
Yeah, the cliche engine was working hard when this show was designed and marketed.
A mature woman psychologist in charge of the technical wizards... that's suggesting that the young whiz kids are still living with mom, and/or a bit of therapy is what every tech genius really needs.
If Snowden wants a fair hearing, he'd better not wait for this show to impact the public consciousness.
This is loaded language. Firstly, creation of an artwork doesn't automatically confer ownership onto an employer. Unless, you are perhaps talking about slavery?
An employee who does research and development will usually have some kind of salary or bonus or profit participation arrangement that pays him for his creation. He can also expect his name on the patent (he has a moral right to sign his work). He ought to expect, though, that the exclusive rights that come with a patent are a company asset. This will be in his employment contract, generally.
Another employee, who mops floors, can expect to be able to patent a new wetmop design, even if the idea came to him at work, without any ownership claim by his employer.
Either of these employees can patent a new species of apple that they grew in their backyard, the employer gets nothing of that (unless the contract is VERY oddly written).
The phrase 'all the equipment and capabilities' is likewise loaded: there's no equipment required for a patent, you just have to describe the invention clearly enough for it to be fabricated. The 'capabilities' might include your grasp of arithmetic, an inspiring letter from Aunt Lucy, an instructive afternoon repairing a broken lawnmower. Bringing your pencil from home would be a major threat to corporate claims on your work product if these rights had strong dependence on ownership-of-tools!
The compensation this inventor expected, pursuant to his employment contract, wasn't paid. He sued, but Japanese courts don't have strong tools to compel an accounting by the employer, and the inventor accepted a settlement without ever seeing full disclosure of the book value of his patent(s).
But, it's not generally true, because x, y must be
nonzero... and requiring primes does achieve that
distinction. A weak theorem is better than a false conjecture
The resource is 'free' only in the sense that it isn't encumbered by administrators outside
the state educational system. The indication that it's run well is the claim that the network
has been nearly trouble-free (i.e. that the telco horror-story of $100 per month per user
of 'costs' is a fantasy).
When public servants run a wide-area network, they provide a wide open window
to view the cost and performance tradeoffs. It's worth looking out that window and
noting the landscape. For-profit service providers only show you billboards... and bills.
Yeah, FREE (as in beer) and UNAVAILABLE (as in roast dodo).
The "forced upgrade policy" means that a generation of
Macintoshes is arbitrarily decared too old for the installer to put a newer OS onto it.
My MacPro, four Xeon cores and 20GB of RAM, with six drive bays,
doesn't have a MacOS upgrade path beyond 10.6.8, won't load any Safari
browser version that came with 10.7+, and most prebuilt browsers
of other pedigree are just as OS-intolerant (TenFourFox being the notable exception).
Apple's OS and app install process discriminates on the basis of last-time-we-got-paid-for-hardware.
If one wishes a good written treatment, I can recommend Ice to India, by Keith Robertson. It's fiction, though.
Nonsense! The constitution (of the USA) hands control of 'post offices
and post roads' as well as 'navigable waterways' to Federal goverment.
That puts ALL of telecommunication as known in the eighteenth
century into Federal jurisdiction.
And as for 'right to communicate', as far as a non-neutral Internet is concerned,
only some service providers, never their customers, have access to that. Network
neutrality regulation is a way to extend access to the leaf nodes of the Internet.
Ought we, as a society, do that? I think so.
Is there another practical way to do that? I think not.
The issue here, is that any computed sine value outside the first quadrant (input values 0 to pi/2) is computed by reducing the input quantity. The function is periodic, so adding or subtracting any multiple of the period (2 pi) from the input value, is mathematically valid. So, the error is made to be small for each value in that first quadrant, and the Intel documentation correctly quotes the errors there. The 'reducing the input quantity' step, however, doesn't use extended precision arithmetic, so the (add 2pi) step adds roundoff error (and that roundoff error generates output errors).
Thus, the sin(1.14159) calculation, with a 10-decimal-place accurate representation of that number (1.14159), gives roughly a 10-decimal-place determination of the proper sine value. But, the sin(1.14159 x 10**9) will get LOTS of leading digits truncated when you scale the input, and can only determine a 1-decimal-place scaled input value, thus only a 1-decimal-place sine.
And, if the hypothetical, perfect, sine value has leading zeroes, it looks terrible as a 'percent error'. Any roundofff error at all, in a sin(3.14159265358979323846264338...) calculation, will get a divide-by-zero boost when you calculate a percent error. The absolute error, though, is just what is to be expected from roundoff error in a step that takes the remainder after dividing by (2pi + roundoff_error(2pi) ).
In the science community, of course, this isn't a problem. One can look up the author's peer-reviewed
publications, and judge from that.
Outside the science community, alas, there won't be much access to (or comprehension of) that
information. Scientists won't offer any (vague, general, personal) interpretive comments if they can avoid it.
As a rule, a scientist publishes his best work, and its supporting data and reasoning, in a peer-reviewed
setting. There's no reason a prudent observer would look beyond that body of published work,
but any reporter will be imprudent, to jazz it up for a news story. General, vague, and personal are the hooks that get attention, in a one minute spot.
While it may be argued that circular polarization is another MIMO scheme, it CAN achieve better speeds, because it DOESN'T REQUIRE EXTRA CHANNELS. MIMO, generally, does. There's nothing 'degenerate' about the relationship of the two schemes.
The real limitation here, is that this is a beam technology, it isn't for broadcast (i.e. you have to aim the sender and receiver antennae). The article mentions a 'phase plate', which implies the beam is directed perpendicular to the plane of that plate...
The real benefit, is that you get a factor of two without using any extra bandwidth from the available RF allocation.
It's possible to make a lot of approximations, and some of them depend on the dimensionality.
Three atoms thick is close enough to two dimensional that a lot of the (quantum mechanical)
calculations ARE 2-D.
So, the distinction makes sense (and there's precedent in so-called quantum dot structures)
to call this two-dimensional.
Alas, I'm unsure how one would create such a thing
and keep it intact for a substantial service life with an oxygen atmosphere around.
While it might not be well known, it IS the best
theory I've seen for lightning (air currents and gravity sorting ice particles causing charge separation).
Bravo!
There are historic instances of telecommunications NON-neutrality to consider, too.
I favor internet neutrality.
Ben Franklin, as a printer in the colonies, knew the danger of selection in telecommunication;
his competitor (Bradford) in Philadelphia was also the local postmaster.
Bradford's publications were sent by post, but as for Ben's printed work
" what I did send was by bribing the riders, who took them privately,
Bradford being unkind enough to forbid it"
Our constitution was written to make telecommunication a priority of the new federal government,
"to establish post offices and post roads", and our first postmaster-general, Ben Franklin,
saw to it that postal regulations forbade favoritism. He wanted the carriers to remain
neutral. It worked well.
At the dawn of telephonic communication, a similar circumstance came up: an undertaker
thought his business suffered because a telephone operator was related to a competitor.
Mr. Strowger invented a gizmo, the Strowger Switch, that allowed a caller to connect
without talking to an operator (and dial phones worked on this principle for years).
Again, the solution to Mr. Strowger's problem was to keep telecommunications
neutral; we have all enjoyed the benefits for so long, that it seems quaint that
this ever WAS a problem.
So, at least twice before in history we have seen preference in telecommunications,
executed by carriers who had mixed motives (usually related to a profit scheme)
which caused anguish to the people of this country. Any worthy Federal Communications
Commission should exert itself to ensure that the customary fairness of
messaging is maintained into the foreseeable future. I will be watching.
Truly, it is foolish to think millions of 'users' can be handed the
security problem, and advised to take action individually.
We should all cringe in horror when we hear that
millions of nontechnical users are being encouraged to
'take the problem seriously'. It's like asking all the residents
of an apartment building to safety-check the steam boiler (probably
only one or two will want to tighten the relief valve spring).
There have been attempts to 'take the problem seriously' with
draconian legal sentences: that, too, is doomed. The law moves
too slowly, and relies on things, like electronic documentation,
that can be SO easily corrupted.
There have been attempts to 'take the problem seriously' with
proliferation of passwords, and password-generating rules and
password replacement schedules, and by moving controls into
obscure places (what port do YOU open for SMTP?),
which entirely miss the target of security, because the poor
user has to write those things down (I know I have to!).
Instead, we should be building institutional watchers and code
(walls, if necessary, and alarms, and a few traps) to deal with
such issues. Sadly, government and commercial interests
aren't good for personal computer security- we need OTHER
institutions.
But, this was 'freedom of information act' request, and that act refers only to
the records of government civil agencies.
The researcher had a teaching job, and acted as an independent
contractor in pursuing a research topic.
The researcher's phone calls, e-mails, piles of scratchings and musings,
aren't the proper product of his funded research at all. Only the finished report,
and/or any publishable papers (in peer-reviewed, edited journals) are
the concern of the research funding agency (probably National Science
Foundation). The NSF isn't a party to the request, they and the researcher
are presumably satisfied that the research findings WERE published.
Neither the editors of peer-reviewed journals, nor the authors, want undue
attention paid to unclear, misspelled, poorly-supported or otherwise unpublishable
debris from the research process. The researcher (and the University of Virginia)
acted properly in not handing over every tatter of e-mail that could be found. The
supreme court of the state just agreed with that.
This bill is silly. And, the arguments in McCaskill's webpage are HILARIOUS.
>>'74%' [ of articles available from other sources]
That test (this is the INTERNET we're talking about) is so ephemeral as to be meaningless.
Here this week, gone the next, or renamed, or miscatalogged (or, that page actually has
a really CUTE pic of a kitty- **awww...). Ten years from April 2014, who will be able to
locate an unedited copy of the McCaskill argument page, to understand this discussion?
>>'sold only 8%' [of the available articles, recently]
I'm pretty sure I haven't looked up anywhere near 0.1% of the listings in my local
phone directory, but I'm not burning the book to save shelf space! This also, is meaningless.
A copy of a scholarly study (which I got from NTIS and wore to tatters) is of great
value to me, and whenever I pass my work on, there will be a nice scholarly reference to it, with
NTIS being listed as the source. Anyone following good scholarship procedures will require
access and NTIS IS THAT ACCESS.
Kill the bill. It looks like someone : thinks libraries are run for profit; thinks bookburning
is an easy 'final solution'; perceives inefficiency; and doesn't see the increase in value of
old literature. Internet availability of articles and discussions WITH SCHOLARLY REFERENCES
means that many streams now trace to those old sources.
In regard to probing ethernet wire combinations
Since Ethernet has two (in 100baseT) transformers, there's a possibility that one bridges two POE
(power over Ethernet) poles with a receiver transformer. Compliant POE sources, though, shut
down if there's a short, so it shouldn't harm anything.
If the experimenter used a simple voltmeter, he could see power presence, and (if he also tested
the resistance) would know which wires went together in pairs. Then, there's two polarities in
each pair, and swapping pairs, so that's eight possibilities. Without probing, there'd be 4*3*2 = 12
possibilities.
That's a bit too strong, surely! The NHS is intended to serve health care, and they HAVEN'T failed.
The 'reasonable period of time' argument does hold some water, and of course the extension of
software support is worth paying for. But, don't try to set a maximum time of six years! No
major project (road, hydrolectric dam, harbor) is ever funded on such a short period,
and there's no reason to stick such a software expiration date into every system that relies on software!
Microsoft has decided, for marketing reasons, to kill off XP software maintenance. Third party replacement
is difficult, or impossible, or more costly than buying a new version. Big customers can and should
fight for any modifications of the 'deadline for support' that they deem appropriate. Kudos to NHS!
I interpreted this to be a description of maximum-entropy filtering (i.e. making an output image with least information, consistent with input image with sparse information content overlaid with full-textured noise.)
It certainly works for (for example) starfields seen in a badly focused telescope; NASA used this for Hubble reconstructions.
Every possible reconstruction will have some 'wrong' content, because noise is guaranteed (if only by the quantum uncertainty principle). That doesn't make the maximum-entropy filter useless, it just means the utility depends on the subject's compliance with the minimum-information assumption.
Actually, a frozen region in the soil is a good container, because water that starts to
leak through... freezes solid and plugs the leak.
Frost heave is caused by thermal gradient, and
transports water to the coldest spot (which is
the container wall, safely underground) then freezes it.
So, no problem there!
Yes, and no: most cast metal shrinks markedly when it cools, so there's an oversize pattern (two percent for iron) used in making the mold. Amorphous metal has almost the same density when it's cool, it shrinks only slightly (an order of magnitude less shrinkage).