You would need a magnifying lens to modify the focal length to a short distance. That shouldn't be too difficult to find. Jeweller, watchmaker, electronic technician and medical suppliers often have magnifying lenses/eyeglasses that are designed for close up work.
The funny thing is that the concentration of ozone is between 2 and 8 parts per million, while the "hole" is when this distribution falls to 30% of these values.
It's like having a very thin layer of UV absorbing glass around the atmosphere that happens to be becoming worn thin in places.
I must admit I always had some suspicions of web browsers that visit dozens of websites before they even visit your own home page. Running 'tcpdump -vv' and 'netstat -a', while a browser is very enlightening, even more so when doing 'whois' on those websites I've never heard of.
Never could understand why 'firefox' was opening a shttp link to weather.noaa.gov, or who "stopbadware.org" was.
I could believe in branes. Some time ago it was explained that the theory is that there are at least two higher dimension planes. When they intersect, particles are created. Thus particles that give out positive and negative charges (protons, electrons) are really like atomic-sized wormholes into an upstream/downstream of those higher dimensions.
Any line in a higher dimensions would appear as a point in three dimensions, so it seems to make sense.
Maybe fundamental questions such as "Is the gravitational field around a large nucleus constant?", or "Where does an ion (proton) store the information that it is moving?" would be easier to answer.
From the PC evolution time-charts, those must have been 90MHz Pentiums and above.
Remember seeing game development teams download their levels geometry onto a PC, set up their BSP compiler, place yellow-post it notes on the screen, a cardboard box over the keyboard, and surround the desk with office cleaners warning cones and tape. All to make sure no-one touched that PC.
Then they went off for a beer, while the PC churned away.
That was with 1 Megabyte of memory, enough for a single office block, warehouse or factory complex. 16 Gigabytes is going to be enough to build a city. Wow....
Games which allow you to throw grenades, but don't factor in which arm is blocked by a wall drive me nuts. More than once, I'd throw a grenade only for it to bounce against a wall and straight under my feet
In the real world, when playing snowball fights, I'd use either arm to throw. (had rural country friends who lived in a isolated farmhouse who liked to play war games in the surrounding wild fields).
That's why international investors wanted open borders and the elimination of trade barriers - it's well known that countries with strong trade links are far less likely to go to war with each other over resources. California hasn't gone to war with New York or Texas, and UK hasn't gone to war with Germany for over 65 years now.
Now when some countries start putting restrictions on the export of rare metals used for dual-purpose technology, then you have to wonder...
Knew a guy in my high-school year who did exactly that. Ended up with the end of his finger being burnt black and green, and having to have it amputated by his GP.... ugh!
Remember as a teenager, having to go through a hotel disco we were staying at, in order to order a meal at the bar. Tried to look inconspicuous, but the cheap washing powder we had brought with us, made my T-shirts and jeans glow in the black-light. Which was a bit of shame, because those kind of powders were banned in the state we were in.
Simple way to test - get some camera lens filters (Hoya) of suitable wavelengths, turn them into a pair of "The Chronicles of Riddick" glasses, let your eyes adjust to the relative darkness of the view, then you'll find out whether or not you can perceive that wavelength of light.
Did that with some Hoya (72) filters which only allow infra-red light through.
Blu Ray streams data at a top rate of 40 Mbits/s, while HD DVD streams data at 28 Mbits/s. Largest data capacity is 100Gbytes, which is around 18 hours of HD video and HD video resolutions go up to 1920x1080 @ 30 frames/second.
PCI 2.3 (from 2004) has a data transfer rates of 133 Mbytes/second, while PCI Express goes up to 8 Gigabytes/second.
A raw 1920x1080 image takes 50 mbits/s. At 60 frames/seconds, that's 3000 mbits/s.
The data gets streamed from the DVD player directly to the graphics card via the PCI bus. CUDA processors are used to compress the data directly into the framebuffer. There's enough processing power to support the HD picture-in-picture feature.
The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading Was anyone technical ever dumb enough to ever believe that? Anyone? Ever? Marketing P.R. BS doesn't count.
I guess you would need to be able to afford that piece of hardware/sensor setup. If you want to replicate the entire control system of chemical plant, nuclear reactor or CAT scanner, that's probably going to more than max out your credit card.
20 years ago, you'd need $100K+ to put together a UNIX development setup. Workstations and servers cost $10K each, OS licenses, software development kits and manuals even more.
Now, you get workstation performance out of a bargain-bucket laptop, free and full OS application development software with Linux, software I2C, USB and Bluetooth bus snooping, free SCADA software development kits and low budget PLC boards connected via USB.
It was intended to stop trade in child-porn - they thought a simple "the creation, distribution or acquisition of any semi-naked image of a juvenile under the age of 17" law should result in both the photographer and the customer being sent to a high-security federal penitentiary for life.
That was when you needed expensive professional camera equipment, access to commercial CD manufacturing, print facilities to make and distribute any kind of static or moving imagery.
They didn't quite think that Tammy the cheerleader would use her mobile phone to send a picture of her new comfy-fit underwear to Jock, the local high-school football team star.
Maybe there is some inverse insight in your comment.
I'm getting fed up of visiting so many websites which seem to be like a Sierra Entertainment DOS game - keep moving the mouse pointer around objects in the current screen, until you find something that you can click on. Then click it to see if it does what you want, otherwise go back.
On a website like here, anything green or grey is something clickable. Anything in black isn't.
Countries are no longer allowed to maintain their own money supply. They can't just print money as the economy grows and needs it. Instead their central banks have to borrow it from international banks like the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and loan that out to high-street banks. Then they pay interest back to the central bank from the growth of the economy.
If they don't buy into this program, they don't get international investment money or trade.
The developers are using third party API's which can do all sorts of odd things, like send out multicasts or broadcasts for servers on the local network (eg. 127.0.0.1 -> xx.yy.zz.255, xx.yy.255.255, xx.255.255.255), while sys-admins are responsible for the network topology including firewalls, bridges, routers, and general IP routing.
Sysadmins fail to set up the IP filter tables correctly, and local broadcasts intended for an small network can go circulating around the entire corporate network. Any in-house protocol can implement a ping/whois feature to process multicast/broadcast messages. One stray packet, and ten thousand machines try to reply, but the messages aren't received because the replies don't get past the correctly set IP filters.
It's bad enough with admin's submitting staff E-mails to every mailing list that gets created, only to get a "please remove me" E-mail storm every afternoon.
I've take some modern 2.5" hard disk drives apart. The stickers are there to cover up the locking screws to the clamshell case. There is a hole in the casing to allow for some air flow in and out of the drive to compensate for changes in atmospheric pressure and heat. Though there is a filter on the inside to catch all the dust. Also, the top and bottom platters of the drive aren't used. Data is stored on the inside platters only.
Early 3.5" PC hard disk drives stored the disk drive format (tracks/sectors/platters) information in the BIOS. So if those type of disk drives have been removed from the PC, it's going to be hard to get any sort of external USB enclosure to work with them as it won't know the data format. Later disk drives stored this information in the firmware.
I've got two hard disk drives of the earlier type - backed up the data, and wiped the data files. Just deleted the file system and rewrote junk files into the top level directory until the disk was full. Won't work with external USB cases - both of them just make ticking or grinding noises.
Always two things can happen in this situation. Either someone proposes unifying hardware standards like the MSX hardware standard in the 1980's for consoles.
Problem is with this scheme, every vendor adopts the hardware standard as their base platform, but adds some extra features to differentiate their product. In those days, it was a light-gun controller, keyboard, extra memory, higher screen resolution. Thus, each company expected that their competitors titles would run on their system, but their titles would be exclusive to their platform. So the whole scheme fell apart.
Or someone proposes a software API to unify the hardware differences. This has the problem that the API only supports the common denominator of all systems. Any API has to anticipate how the hardware will evolve; 3D screens, touch sensitive UI, local networking (bluetooth, infra-red, wifi, networked displays. Somebody will always do something to turn things upside down and require a rewrite.
Out of curiousity, I found and tried running one of those old PC magazine performance test programs from the 1990's (SpeedPro or something similar) on a modern PC (3 GHz, dual-core Intel). Performance was 120,000 faster than the original IBM XT, not taking into the use of GPU's. Tests were doing things like random disk access, FFT transform, memory operations.
Given that for some tasks a GPU is 100x faster than a CPU, and cloud computing puts together a grid of thousands or such PC's, that is an insane amount of computing power to do any calculation.
Most insects which munch on vegetation can move from plant to plant as well as regurgitate cellular material and carry it on their mandibles. I wouldn't be surprised that genetic material can be transferred from plant to plant, especially if mosquitoes, fleas and ticks can transfer bacterial/viral material from mammal to mammal.
Certain water meters operated by actually measuring the distortion of the base level magnetic field due to the presence of ions in the water (metals from minerals, leeched elements from the pipes along with hydrogen and oxygen). The water meter was simply a ring of copper put around the pipe. Any changes in the flow of water created a fluctuation in the magnetic field, which in turn creates a current in the coil.
Normally, these were intended for small pipes, but I guess it scales up for large pipes.
Nimrod airplanes were used to detect submarines in this way. Even though they were underwater and had been de-Gaussed, they would still distort the magnetic field.
I guess if magnetic shielding can be made to work in real-world environments, we'll move over to gravitometric detection methods like they use in Iraq/Afghanistan to detect underground tunnels.
Slashdot Mirror
So in effect, they get to know your online usernames plus all the websites and comments you make?
You would need a magnifying lens to modify the focal length to a short distance. That shouldn't be too difficult to find. Jeweller, watchmaker, electronic technician and medical suppliers often have magnifying lenses/eyeglasses that are designed for close up work.
The funny thing is that the concentration of ozone is between 2 and 8 parts per million, while the "hole" is when this distribution falls to 30% of these values.
It's like having a very thin layer of UV absorbing glass around the atmosphere that happens to be becoming worn thin in places.
I must admit I always had some suspicions of web browsers that visit dozens of websites before they even visit your own home page. Running 'tcpdump -vv' and 'netstat -a', while a browser is very enlightening, even more so when doing 'whois' on those websites I've never heard of.
Never could understand why 'firefox' was opening a shttp link to weather.noaa.gov, or who "stopbadware.org" was.
I could believe in branes. Some time ago it was explained that the theory is that there are at least two higher dimension planes. When they intersect, particles are created. Thus particles that give out positive and negative charges (protons, electrons) are really like atomic-sized wormholes into an upstream/downstream of those higher dimensions.
Any line in a higher dimensions would appear as a point in three dimensions, so it seems to make sense.
Maybe fundamental questions such as "Is the gravitational field around a large nucleus constant?", or "Where does an ion (proton) store the information that it is moving?" would be easier to answer.
From the PC evolution time-charts, those must have been 90MHz Pentiums and above.
Remember seeing game development teams download their levels geometry onto a PC, set up their BSP compiler, place yellow-post it notes on the screen, a cardboard box over the keyboard, and surround the desk with office cleaners warning cones and tape. All to make sure no-one touched that PC.
Then they went off for a beer, while the PC churned away.
That was with 1 Megabyte of memory, enough for a single office block, warehouse or factory complex. 16 Gigabytes is going to be enough to build a city. Wow....
Does anyone still use flowcharts? Gantt charts? Jackson diagrams?
Looking back, those flowcharts seem so low-level, does any project have the time to produce two pages of documentation for every half-page of code?
Games which allow you to throw grenades, but don't factor in which arm is blocked by a wall drive me nuts. More than once, I'd throw a grenade only for it to bounce against a wall and straight under my feet
In the real world, when playing snowball fights, I'd use either arm to throw. (had rural country friends who lived in a isolated farmhouse who liked to play war games in the surrounding wild fields).
That's why international investors wanted open borders and the elimination of trade barriers - it's well known that countries with strong trade links are far less likely to go to war with each other over resources. California hasn't gone to war with New York or Texas, and UK hasn't gone to war with Germany for over 65 years now.
Now when some countries start putting restrictions on the export of rare metals used for dual-purpose technology, then you have to wonder...
The Citizens for Decent Literature would agree....
Knew a guy in my high-school year who did exactly that. Ended up with the end of his finger being burnt black and green, and having to have it amputated by his GP .... ugh!
Remember as a teenager, having to go through a hotel disco we were staying at, in order to order a meal at the bar. Tried to look inconspicuous, but the cheap washing powder we had brought with us, made my T-shirts and jeans glow in the black-light. Which was a bit of shame, because those kind of powders were banned in the state we were in.
Simple way to test - get some camera lens filters (Hoya) of suitable wavelengths, turn them into a pair of "The Chronicles of Riddick" glasses, let your eyes adjust to the relative darkness of the view, then you'll find out whether or not you can perceive that wavelength of light.
Did that with some Hoya (72) filters which only allow infra-red light through.
Blu Ray streams data at a top rate of 40 Mbits/s, while HD DVD streams data at 28 Mbits/s. Largest data capacity is 100Gbytes, which is around 18 hours of HD video and HD video resolutions go up to 1920x1080 @ 30 frames/second.
PCI 2.3 (from 2004) has a data transfer rates of 133 Mbytes/second, while PCI Express goes up to 8 Gigabytes/second.
A raw 1920x1080 image takes 50 mbits/s. At 60 frames/seconds, that's 3000 mbits/s.
A comparision of theGT 520 vs the GT 430 has a bandwidth of 14.4 GB/s
The data gets streamed from the DVD player directly to the graphics card via the PCI bus. CUDA processors are used to compress the data directly into the framebuffer. There's enough processing power to support the HD picture-in-picture feature.
The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading
Was anyone technical ever dumb enough to ever believe that? Anyone? Ever? Marketing P.R. BS doesn't count.
I guess you would need to be able to afford that piece of hardware/sensor setup. If you want to replicate the entire control system of chemical plant, nuclear reactor or CAT scanner, that's probably going to more than max out your credit card.
20 years ago, you'd need $100K+ to put together a UNIX development setup. Workstations and servers cost $10K each, OS licenses, software development kits and manuals even more.
Now, you get workstation performance out of a bargain-bucket laptop, free and full OS application development software with Linux, software I2C, USB and Bluetooth bus snooping, free SCADA software development kits and low budget PLC boards connected via USB.
It was intended to stop trade in child-porn - they thought a simple "the creation, distribution or acquisition of any semi-naked image of a juvenile under the age of 17" law should result in both the photographer and the customer being sent to a high-security federal penitentiary for life.
That was when you needed expensive professional camera equipment, access to commercial CD manufacturing, print facilities to make and distribute any kind of static or moving imagery.
They didn't quite think that Tammy the cheerleader would use her mobile phone to send a picture of her new comfy-fit underwear to Jock, the local high-school football team star.
Maybe there is some inverse insight in your comment.
I'm getting fed up of visiting so many websites which seem to be like a Sierra Entertainment DOS game - keep moving the mouse pointer around objects in the current screen, until you find something that you can click on. Then click it to see if it does what you want, otherwise go back.
On a website like here, anything green or grey is something clickable. Anything in black isn't.
Countries are no longer allowed to maintain their own money supply. They can't just print money as the economy grows and needs it. Instead their central banks have to borrow it from international banks like the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and loan that out to high-street banks. Then they pay interest back to the central bank from the growth of the economy.
If they don't buy into this program, they don't get international investment money or trade.
The developers are using third party API's which can do all sorts of odd things, like send out multicasts or broadcasts for servers on the local network (eg. 127.0.0.1 -> xx.yy.zz.255, xx.yy.255.255, xx.255.255.255), while sys-admins are responsible for the network topology including firewalls, bridges, routers, and general IP routing.
Sysadmins fail to set up the IP filter tables correctly, and local broadcasts intended for an small network can go circulating around the entire corporate network.
Any in-house protocol can implement a ping/whois feature to process multicast/broadcast messages. One stray packet, and ten thousand machines try to reply, but the messages aren't received because the replies don't get past the correctly set IP filters.
It's bad enough with admin's submitting staff E-mails to every mailing list that gets created, only to get a "please remove me" E-mail storm every afternoon.
I've take some modern 2.5" hard disk drives apart. The stickers are there to cover up the locking screws to the clamshell case. There is a hole in the casing to allow for some air flow in and out of the drive to compensate for changes in atmospheric pressure and heat. Though there is a filter on the inside to catch all the dust. Also, the top and bottom platters of the drive aren't used. Data is stored on the inside platters only.
Early 3.5" PC hard disk drives stored the disk drive format (tracks/sectors/platters) information in the BIOS. So if those type of disk drives have been removed from the PC, it's going to be hard to get any sort of external USB enclosure to work with them as it won't know the data format. Later disk drives stored this information in the firmware.
I've got two hard disk drives of the earlier type - backed up the data, and wiped the data files. Just deleted the file system and rewrote junk files into the top level directory until the disk was full. Won't work with external USB cases - both of them just make ticking or grinding noises.
Always two things can happen in this situation. Either someone proposes unifying hardware standards like the
MSX hardware standard in the 1980's for consoles.
Problem is with this scheme, every vendor adopts the hardware standard as their base platform, but adds some extra features to differentiate their product. In those days, it was a light-gun controller, keyboard, extra memory, higher screen resolution. Thus, each company expected that their competitors titles would run on their system, but their titles would be exclusive to their platform. So the whole scheme fell apart.
Or someone proposes a software API to unify the hardware differences. This has the problem that the API only supports the common denominator of all systems. Any API has to anticipate how the hardware will evolve; 3D screens, touch sensitive UI, local networking (bluetooth, infra-red, wifi, networked displays. Somebody will always do something to turn things upside down and require a rewrite.
Out of curiousity, I found and tried running one of those old PC magazine performance test programs from the 1990's (SpeedPro or something similar) on a modern PC (3 GHz, dual-core Intel). Performance was 120,000 faster than the original IBM XT, not taking into the use of GPU's. Tests were doing things like random disk access, FFT transform, memory operations.
Given that for some tasks a GPU is 100x faster than a CPU, and cloud computing puts together a grid of thousands or such PC's, that is an insane amount of computing power to do any calculation.
Most insects which munch on vegetation can move from plant to plant as well as regurgitate cellular material and carry it on their mandibles. I wouldn't be surprised that genetic material can be transferred from plant to plant, especially if mosquitoes, fleas and ticks can transfer bacterial/viral material from mammal to mammal.
Certain water meters operated by actually measuring the distortion of the base level magnetic field due to the presence of ions in the water (metals from minerals, leeched elements from the pipes along with hydrogen and oxygen).
The water meter was simply a ring of copper put around the pipe. Any changes in the flow of water created a fluctuation in the magnetic field, which in turn creates a current in the coil.
Normally, these were intended for small pipes, but I guess it scales up for large pipes.
Nimrod airplanes were used to detect submarines in this way. Even though they were underwater and had been de-Gaussed, they would still distort the magnetic field.
I guess if magnetic shielding can be made to work in real-world environments, we'll move over to gravitometric detection methods like they use in Iraq/Afghanistan to detect underground tunnels.
Flying drone can crack wifi networks and snoop on cell phones
They would be handy if there is a power outage, then you could fly a whole squadron of them over a city and create a new cellphone network.