The fact that many people believe it doesn't make it true.
Personally, I' don't want to feel "safe" if it means I'm not paying attention to threats I shouldn't ignore. And given current trends, I feel far more threatened by the government of my own country than I ever did by swarthy bearded foreign terrorists..
There are times when it would be helpful (or at least less harmful) for sales/marketing people to have *some* grasp of the logical/factual side of interacting with the computers they are selling and marketing. When sales people don't have at least a basic factual grasp of what they're selling, they promise everything but the kitchen sink and set unrealistic expectations that will inevitably fail to be met when the customer gets the machine home and turns it on and starts actually trying to use it. When marketing people don't have at least a basic factual grasp of what they're marketing, they censor the company's technical information sources and kill knowledge base articles that say anything at all negative about the products, including articles that might head off tech support call drivers and give people solutions quickly. And both of these things wind up one way or the other in tech support which has to take the hit for customers being dissatisfied -- and since support is usually a cost center anyway, tech support then becomes the black sheep of the family.
So it goes both ways. Yes, I'd make a lousy salesman or marketing person. But we've got to meet in the middle here somewhere.
There's certainly hype, possibly too much, but the devil is in the details here.
Gasoline-based internal combustion engines get a theoretical maximum 30% efficiency in converting the heat of burning the fuel into work. (This is the major reason why the conventional direct-drive internal-combustion engine configuration requires a radiator -- that lost 70% is being dumped out of the car as waste heat, minus the small fraction that's used to heat the interior of the car in the winter.) Non-hybrid configurations also have to size the engine for the maximum power output it's expected to have to handle -- usually accelerating to highway speeds -- and there are numerous compromises in the engine design that make it able to rapidly change power output across a wide range of power demands, all of which make it somewhat less efficient to operate in the more or less steady-state output it's called on to deliver for highway cruising.
Generally, that engine sized for peak demand during highway acceleration and tuned to be able to go from idle to maximum power and then back down to cruising throttle power over very short time spans is going to be less than the theoretical 30% Otto-cycle efficiency most places in the power band. (And chances are it's tuned to deliver maximum efficiency under the parameters of the EPA mileage tests, which the manufacturers know as well as the EPA, so no, you'll never get those EPA numbers in actual day to day use.)
The reason the hybrid concept has as much potential as it does is that electric motors have a far higher efficiency in terms of translating electrical power into torque, particularly with switching mode AC motor controllers and other high efficiency tricks, and typical battery technologies are around 70% efficient (measured as discharge/charge energy ratio), and having a battery allows the engine to be sized much smaller and in most cases run at steady-state power output while the battery handles the peak demand, so, for certain driving styles and trip profiles, the hybrid has a significant advantage. Hybrids require smaller engines because all the engine has to do is maintain charge on the battery at or below a certain break-even speed dictated mostly by drag coefficient. But how much of a differece hybrid vs conventional makes for any given driver or any given set of daily driving routes is going to depend on a fairly large number of variables, and this is true for both hybrid and conventional platforms.
So it's more complicated than just "enough hype" vs "not enough"/"too much"..
$10k/pound. Maybe less depending on which launch carrier will give you a ride to orbit, and how many sats can be taken up per launch, and how easily you can get each one into the orbit you want. And extra sats, because launch payloads don't always make it.
Latency. Not as bad as with GEO sat links if you have a constellation of LEO sats, but packet round trip times are going to be seriously long, especially if you have multiple sat-to-sat line-of-sight hops on long connections. Unless you're connecting to a host in the footprint of the same sat you're connecting on, those trip times might cause TCP connections to drop if they're not aware of the longer latency. (This was a major problem with commercial "satellite Internet" ISP's a few years ago, as I recall.)
Infrastructure. There will need to be at least one nameserver on the network, ideally a distributed name service that can propagate from a root name authority, and while it's probably not too outrageous to put the backbone routers on the sats and have them dynamically manage their routing tables based on which sats they can see (and possibly determining their locations via SGPS so they can route geographically) and maybe host the distributed DNS service as well, a fair bit of the core infrastructure and management will have to be on the ground somewhere. If it's in a country that doesn't absolutely love the idea of this system being operational, expect that ground control rackspace to be raided at some point. And if it's in an isolated location that isn't well defended by a willing host country, or the host country becomes unwilling at some point in the future, same hazard. (This actually makes some risks far greater because
Attrition. LEO is LEO, and one of the facts of life at LEO altitudes is drag, at least at perigee. The sats will have to have some propulsion capability to maintain orbit, or more will have to be launched periodically to replace the ones that have de-orbited. Higher altitudes are far less susceptible to drag, but increase latency and possibly exposure to van Allen belt radiation. And there's always the danger of random collisions with space debris at almost any altitude, although low-LEO orbits are a lot more full of trash than higher altitudes.
That's just off the top of my head. A worthy endeavor, but one that would require significant investment and planning.
The difference with computers is that people have been conditioned by the media, from the very beginning of the computer age, to believe that computers are incomprehensible. Rather than encourage a culture where at least one person in each household is computer literate, we have encouraged a culture where everyone fears their computers.
Exactly.
Computers are complex, and going from no understanding of them at all to basic competence with them is a significant challenge, probably more so than going from basic competence to expert-level knowledge and understanding of them, and that challenge will only continue to increase over time. But there's no reason to fear them, or even believe (as many seem to) that they cannot be understood at all by people of average mental capacity. There's no magic to them.. contrary to what a large number of people seem to believe..
Its like being upset that most people are "illiterate illiterate" or innumerate. How can we stay on top, without people to look down upon?
Of all the conditions of humanity to champion, I don't think ignorance lacks for help, you can probably stand down.
I see it less from a personal-self perspective than as a factor in the overall evolution of the society. A significant enough majority of ignorance, illiteracy (tech or otherwise), innumeracy, etc. can by itself dominate mainstream culture in ways that at the very least throw sand in the gears, and the kind of culture that grows out of that always has the potential to at least be suspicious of people who have unsanctioned knowledge, and possibly much worse. I don't see an ignorant society as something I can differentiate myself from as an outlier, I consider it a sleeping monster that might someday wake up and line people like me up against the wall. It's happened before and I don't think for a moment that it can't happen again.
Structured BASIC has been around for almost 30 years. BASIC did not begin and end with your C64.
One might argue that learning to code on C64's, Apple II's, TRS-80's, and other 8-bit machines taught plenty of its own lessons about how to code efficiently, both in terms of optimizing performance (bitwise logic, integer math, lookup tables, etc. vs floating point, trig, and other high-cost operations on processors that didn't even have built in multiply operations, let alone hardware floating point) and cramming code into limited space (when 64k was a lot of RAM because it was all the CPU could address). In the old-school BASIC interpreters one soon learned tricks like putting the subroutines in first, with the most performance-critical ones right at the beginning where the seek times were shorter because the interpreter stepped in from the beginning when seeking any given line reference. The performance limitations of the 8-bit machines were formidable challenges in terms of coding well. I don't knock them, and if anything, I consider myself a better programmer for having experienced coding within those constraints and I wish later generations could have had that experience, especially seeing some of the code that's come out in recent years. The only thing I can think of today that's comparable is Arduino.
It's possible latter-day BASIC doesn't need such techniques to squeeze extra performance out of it, but if it's interpreted, somehow I doubt it..
And it [BASIC] doesn't have a stack, or variable scoping, or any number of other handy things.
Wow, you couldn't be more wrong. It's like you went out of your way to be as uninformed as possible.
When I was exposed to it, it had none of those things. But I did bail out of it rather early.. about the time Pascal and C first became available. It's probably evolved somewhat in the past 30 years, so perhaps you're right about its current incarnation. I haven't found myself in need of anything it offered over other languages, so what I remember goes back a ways. Which happens with people who've been doing this for that long.
It does rather enable bad habits. It's possible to do reasonably good programming in it, but it involves knowing things one doesn't find out just by playing around with the language itself. (And it doesn't have a stack, or variable scoping, or any number of other handy things. And even C does for() better..)
(1) People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling, and even from water flowing through pipes.
Possible, I'd say. Not holding my breath, but this is at least benign.
(2) You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password and thus redefine the word 'hack.'
Yes you will. Authentication that relies on a single factor has been proven time and time again to be inadequate. The most viable authentication methods have almost always relied on at least two factors, the rule of thumb being "something you have and something you know".. the latter being a password, or a PIN, or some other piece of information you memorize. Until we can all do public-key encryption in our heads, passwords or other memory-based authentication factors will be necessary. Even if they take a form like "crimson, eleven, delight, petrichor".
(3) Mind reading is no longer science fiction. Scientists are working on headsets with sensors that can read brain activity and recognize facial expressions, excitement, and more without needing any physical inputs from the wearer.
Only a complete extrovert would find this idea anything other than absolutely horrifying. (Granted, extrovert-chauvinism is endemic to this culture, so it's not surprising this would be seen by major decision-makers as a good thing.) I cannot imagine any future where I would trust any real-world government run by any of the kinds of people who've been running things until now with any knowledge of what's going on in my mind. The moment they think they know what's going on in our heads with any degree of reliability, people start getting preemptively locked up by "precrime" units for crimes the state thinks they were about to commit, either in a genuine (if misguided) effort to protect "the public", or as a pretext for locking up people who disagree with them.. most likely the latter, in my experience. (And I'm not even going to open up the can of worms of whether they really do know what people are thinking. Being convinced they know and being wrong is even worse than actually knowing.)
(4) The digital divide will cease to exist. Mobile phones will make it easy for even the poorest of poor to get connected.
Probably. The continuing value of being "connected" just for its own sake remains to be seen.
(5) Junk mail will become priority mail. "In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem that spam is dead."
I'm almost as disturbed by this as by (3) above. There's a real danger in the cognitive merger of advertising and human interaction that, again, I'm not sure is getting nearly as much critical attention as it deserves because the type of people who promote advertising tend to be extreme extroverts who don't have much of a grasp of the self/other boundary. However, for those of us who value our own internal identities and prefer to draw a clear distinction between interacting with actual human beings on an individual level and the (increasingly intrusive) encroachment of advertising on those interactions, or for me at least if I'm the only one, spam will always be spam, because unsolicited messages designed to persuade the recipient to buy a certain product or have a certain positive emotional reaction to a certain brand will be intrusive whether they're personalized or not. And I for one don't want them personalized and indistinguishable from my interactions with family and friends. I want there to be a clear distinction between the two -- I want advertising to be honest about the fact that it's trying to sell me something.
One of my biggest concerns with blurring that particular boundary is that advertising sells candidates for public offi
I'd be OK with having to stop to send texts. It's possible to set the phone up so incoming texts just pop alerts, so I don't have to touch it, and if the message requires more brain effort to parse than I can safely devote to it, again, I can pull over.
But navigation in dense urban areas whose traffic situations may evolve rapidly during the day is considerably more difficult (and requires considerably more concentration on route planning than I feel is safe when I'm driving) without real-time traffic data on a map app. I need a moving-map display with at least near-real-time traffic density info, because if I know a slowdown or a complete backup is ahead before I hit it, I can re-route to avoid it and not get stuck in traffic to begin with. (And possibly avoid a rear-end-collision situation that's put me in danger more than once when traffic abruptly stops.) Sorry, NTSB, but navigation is an entirely different class of interaction with electronic devices than texting or email. It's part of the job of driving. I'll dock the phone if I have to, but I need real-time navigation info anytime I'm not driving on highways between cities.
Unfortunately these ISP's will almost certainly be interfering with the sharing of file's which have free license's (e.g. Creative Common's).
Unfortunately these ISP's will almost certainly be interfering with the sharing of file's which have free license's (e.g. Creative Common's).
Exactly. There is such a thing as legal file sharing, and artists just starting out and trying to get their work in front of people, or those less interested in profit (and there are such artists), can and often do use P2P to get exposure and build an audience. Which the major labels don't like, because they used to be the only game in town.. they've been making money off of past generations of new talent and they're not happy at all with the idea of this generation and future ones bypassing their contract racket.. so of course they lump it all in with "piracy", and legal sharing of CC and public-domain work is "piracy" only in the sense that they didn't get their cut for "producing" it themselves.
When will government's stop serving the interest's of corporation's and start serving the interest's of their citizen's?
As soon as their citizen's (:p ) wake up and start following up on how well they're doing their job..
CW is also a system that works with very little equipment, and often very little power, on the transmitting end. If you have enough of a receiver to pick up the person you're talking to, *transmitting* is often little more than some batteries, a transistor oscillator (of which all the parts but the transistor can be improvised in the field if you know what you're doing), a tuner, and a random wire antenna. If you're trying to get health and safety reports out of a disaster area, the ability to bodge together a basic QRP transmitter can mean the difference between news getting out and news not getting out when all the infrastructure is so thoroughly trashed it'll be months before it's all back online.
(I know of one county whose sheriff's department radio system was totally dependent on the base station for the radios in the cars to work. When an F5 tornado came through and demolished the building with the base station in it, they had to put a ham with a 2 meter HT in the front seat of every department vehicle. No, the cell towers didn't fare much better. 2 meter FM worked just fine.)
Wired updated their story with an important caveat
Our original report named “Rascatripas” as a forum moderator for Nuevo Laredo in Vivo. That’s now appears to be off-base. At least one local reporter says there’s “no proof” yet that the decapitated man found Wednesday was actually murdered for his online activity. And administrators for Nuevo Laredo en Vivo now say that “Rascatripas” wasn’t one of theirs. “Negative,” they tweet (thanks to Xeni Jardin for the translation, and for the tip). “He was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat to scare others. The person executed is not a collaborator with our site, but this was without doubt an attempt to silence the voices of Nuevo Laredo.”
Which raises a very important and much lower-tech question: why would cartels be deterred by technical obstacles keeping them from identifying the real bloggers? Grab some random techy-looking guy off the street and kill him, and pin a note to him claiming he's a blogger with a warning to others not to report on cartel activities, and who'll know the difference locally? (And even if the actual bloggers are so thoroughly anonymized as to be undetectable.. that's got to make anyone on the street nervous about whether or not they're really anonymous..)
'“The thing that troubles me about it is [in] the preprint, [t]hey had originally had a supplemental figure at the end that showed the original results for the individual quasars they measured,” Orzel said. He explained that in that figure, the Keck telescope in the Northern Hemisphere seemed to predominantly measure the variation of alpha in one direction while Chile’s VLT in the Southern Hemisphere measured it in going the other way. “It looks a lot like what they’re seeing is coming from a difference between the two telescopes.”'
Very much want to see independent confirmation of this result, if instrumentation error hasn't been controlled for..
.. that the days of technology being an obstacle to invasion of privacy are over.
Like it or not, technical/technological solutions to protecting privacy are already ineffective, both against direct invasion of privacy and indirect approaches involving analytical data mining of large amounts of seemingly trivial data to draw aggregate conclusions. Even if there are still tech-based solutions that are still moderately effective, it's still a white hat/black hat arms race, and no solution will be effective forever, and the rate at which the systems on both sides evolve, the window of advantage will get narrower with each game-changing development.
The only true solution is one that involves promoting, and enforcing, the ethical use of personal information, with the enforcement aspect under the charge of trustworthy entities. (And the unsettling aspect of this is that many of the entities whose responsibility this will ultimately become have, repeatedly, proven themselves both untrustworthy and beholden to partisan agendas..)
If you can bring enough stuff to set up a small Arduino lab for the Q&A, and let them play around in the IDE a bit, that'll definitely wake a few of them up..
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that many people believe it doesn't make it true.
Personally, I' don't want to feel "safe" if it means I'm not paying attention to threats I shouldn't ignore. And given current trends, I feel far more threatened by the government of my own country than I ever did by swarthy bearded foreign terrorists..
There are times when it would be helpful (or at least less harmful) for sales/marketing people to have *some* grasp of the logical/factual side of interacting with the computers they are selling and marketing. When sales people don't have at least a basic factual grasp of what they're selling, they promise everything but the kitchen sink and set unrealistic expectations that will inevitably fail to be met when the customer gets the machine home and turns it on and starts actually trying to use it. When marketing people don't have at least a basic factual grasp of what they're marketing, they censor the company's technical information sources and kill knowledge base articles that say anything at all negative about the products, including articles that might head off tech support call drivers and give people solutions quickly. And both of these things wind up one way or the other in tech support which has to take the hit for customers being dissatisfied -- and since support is usually a cost center anyway, tech support then becomes the black sheep of the family.
So it goes both ways. Yes, I'd make a lousy salesman or marketing person. But we've got to meet in the middle here somewhere.
There's certainly hype, possibly too much, but the devil is in the details here.
Gasoline-based internal combustion engines get a theoretical maximum 30% efficiency in converting the heat of burning the fuel into work. (This is the major reason why the conventional direct-drive internal-combustion engine configuration requires a radiator -- that lost 70% is being dumped out of the car as waste heat, minus the small fraction that's used to heat the interior of the car in the winter.) Non-hybrid configurations also have to size the engine for the maximum power output it's expected to have to handle -- usually accelerating to highway speeds -- and there are numerous compromises in the engine design that make it able to rapidly change power output across a wide range of power demands, all of which make it somewhat less efficient to operate in the more or less steady-state output it's called on to deliver for highway cruising.
Generally, that engine sized for peak demand during highway acceleration and tuned to be able to go from idle to maximum power and then back down to cruising throttle power over very short time spans is going to be less than the theoretical 30% Otto-cycle efficiency most places in the power band. (And chances are it's tuned to deliver maximum efficiency under the parameters of the EPA mileage tests, which the manufacturers know as well as the EPA, so no, you'll never get those EPA numbers in actual day to day use.)
The reason the hybrid concept has as much potential as it does is that electric motors have a far higher efficiency in terms of translating electrical power into torque, particularly with switching mode AC motor controllers and other high efficiency tricks, and typical battery technologies are around 70% efficient (measured as discharge/charge energy ratio), and having a battery allows the engine to be sized much smaller and in most cases run at steady-state power output while the battery handles the peak demand, so, for certain driving styles and trip profiles, the hybrid has a significant advantage. Hybrids require smaller engines because all the engine has to do is maintain charge on the battery at or below a certain break-even speed dictated mostly by drag coefficient. But how much of a differece hybrid vs conventional makes for any given driver or any given set of daily driving routes is going to depend on a fairly large number of variables, and this is true for both hybrid and conventional platforms.
So it's more complicated than just "enough hype" vs "not enough"/"too much"..
.. but no need for change-for-the-sake-of-it really ..
My impression was that change-for-the-sake-of-it was Microsoft's primary business model.
That's just off the top of my head. A worthy endeavor, but one that would require significant investment and planning.
The difference with computers is that people have been conditioned by the media, from the very beginning of the computer age, to believe that computers are incomprehensible. Rather than encourage a culture where at least one person in each household is computer literate, we have encouraged a culture where everyone fears their computers.
Exactly.
Computers are complex, and going from no understanding of them at all to basic competence with them is a significant challenge, probably more so than going from basic competence to expert-level knowledge and understanding of them, and that challenge will only continue to increase over time. But there's no reason to fear them, or even believe (as many seem to) that they cannot be understood at all by people of average mental capacity. There's no magic to them .. contrary to what a large number of people seem to believe..
.. is man-made .. :)
Radio beacon with telemetry and a ranging transponder would be intriguing and probably not all that hard to deploy .. :)
Its like being upset that most people are "illiterate illiterate" or innumerate. How can we stay on top, without people to look down upon?
Of all the conditions of humanity to champion, I don't think ignorance lacks for help, you can probably stand down.
I see it less from a personal-self perspective than as a factor in the overall evolution of the society. A significant enough majority of ignorance, illiteracy (tech or otherwise), innumeracy, etc. can by itself dominate mainstream culture in ways that at the very least throw sand in the gears, and the kind of culture that grows out of that always has the potential to at least be suspicious of people who have unsanctioned knowledge, and possibly much worse. I don't see an ignorant society as something I can differentiate myself from as an outlier, I consider it a sleeping monster that might someday wake up and line people like me up against the wall. It's happened before and I don't think for a moment that it can't happen again.
.. did we not learn our lesson from Rise of the Planet of the Apes?
Structured BASIC has been around for almost 30 years. BASIC did not begin and end with your C64.
One might argue that learning to code on C64's, Apple II's, TRS-80's, and other 8-bit machines taught plenty of its own lessons about how to code efficiently, both in terms of optimizing performance (bitwise logic, integer math, lookup tables, etc. vs floating point, trig, and other high-cost operations on processors that didn't even have built in multiply operations, let alone hardware floating point) and cramming code into limited space (when 64k was a lot of RAM because it was all the CPU could address). In the old-school BASIC interpreters one soon learned tricks like putting the subroutines in first, with the most performance-critical ones right at the beginning where the seek times were shorter because the interpreter stepped in from the beginning when seeking any given line reference. The performance limitations of the 8-bit machines were formidable challenges in terms of coding well. I don't knock them, and if anything, I consider myself a better programmer for having experienced coding within those constraints and I wish later generations could have had that experience, especially seeing some of the code that's come out in recent years. The only thing I can think of today that's comparable is Arduino.
It's possible latter-day BASIC doesn't need such techniques to squeeze extra performance out of it, but if it's interpreted, somehow I doubt it..
And it [BASIC] doesn't have a stack, or variable scoping, or any number of other handy things.
Wow, you couldn't be more wrong. It's like you went out of your way to be as uninformed as possible.
When I was exposed to it, it had none of those things. But I did bail out of it rather early .. about the time Pascal and C first became available. It's probably evolved somewhat in the past 30 years, so perhaps you're right about its current incarnation. I haven't found myself in need of anything it offered over other languages, so what I remember goes back a ways. Which happens with people who've been doing this for that long.
How much fun would it possibly be if it weren't possible to save programs?
And if you could save programs, then the interpreter would have access to filesystem I/O. Which, I'd bet, is unacceptably "powerful"..
It does rather enable bad habits. It's possible to do reasonably good programming in it, but it involves knowing things one doesn't find out just by playing around with the language itself. (And it doesn't have a stack, or variable scoping, or any number of other handy things. And even C does for() better..)
(1) People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling, and even from water flowing through pipes.
Possible, I'd say. Not holding my breath, but this is at least benign.
(2) You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password and thus redefine the word 'hack.'
Yes you will. Authentication that relies on a single factor has been proven time and time again to be inadequate. The most viable authentication methods have almost always relied on at least two factors, the rule of thumb being "something you have and something you know" .. the latter being a password, or a PIN, or some other piece of information you memorize. Until we can all do public-key encryption in our heads, passwords or other memory-based authentication factors will be necessary. Even if they take a form like "crimson, eleven, delight, petrichor".
(3) Mind reading is no longer science fiction. Scientists are working on headsets with sensors that can read brain activity and recognize facial expressions, excitement, and more without needing any physical inputs from the wearer.
Only a complete extrovert would find this idea anything other than absolutely horrifying. (Granted, extrovert-chauvinism is endemic to this culture, so it's not surprising this would be seen by major decision-makers as a good thing.) I cannot imagine any future where I would trust any real-world government run by any of the kinds of people who've been running things until now with any knowledge of what's going on in my mind. The moment they think they know what's going on in our heads with any degree of reliability, people start getting preemptively locked up by "precrime" units for crimes the state thinks they were about to commit, either in a genuine (if misguided) effort to protect "the public", or as a pretext for locking up people who disagree with them .. most likely the latter, in my experience. (And I'm not even going to open up the can of worms of whether they really do know what people are thinking. Being convinced they know and being wrong is even worse than actually knowing.)
(4) The digital divide will cease to exist. Mobile phones will make it easy for even the poorest of poor to get connected.
Probably. The continuing value of being "connected" just for its own sake remains to be seen.
(5) Junk mail will become priority mail. "In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem that spam is dead."
I'm almost as disturbed by this as by (3) above. There's a real danger in the cognitive merger of advertising and human interaction that, again, I'm not sure is getting nearly as much critical attention as it deserves because the type of people who promote advertising tend to be extreme extroverts who don't have much of a grasp of the self/other boundary. However, for those of us who value our own internal identities and prefer to draw a clear distinction between interacting with actual human beings on an individual level and the (increasingly intrusive) encroachment of advertising on those interactions, or for me at least if I'm the only one, spam will always be spam, because unsolicited messages designed to persuade the recipient to buy a certain product or have a certain positive emotional reaction to a certain brand will be intrusive whether they're personalized or not. And I for one don't want them personalized and indistinguishable from my interactions with family and friends. I want there to be a clear distinction between the two -- I want advertising to be honest about the fact that it's trying to sell me something.
One of my biggest concerns with blurring that particular boundary is that advertising sells candidates for public offi
I'd be OK with having to stop to send texts. It's possible to set the phone up so incoming texts just pop alerts, so I don't have to touch it, and if the message requires more brain effort to parse than I can safely devote to it, again, I can pull over.
But navigation in dense urban areas whose traffic situations may evolve rapidly during the day is considerably more difficult (and requires considerably more concentration on route planning than I feel is safe when I'm driving) without real-time traffic data on a map app. I need a moving-map display with at least near-real-time traffic density info, because if I know a slowdown or a complete backup is ahead before I hit it, I can re-route to avoid it and not get stuck in traffic to begin with. (And possibly avoid a rear-end-collision situation that's put me in danger more than once when traffic abruptly stops.) Sorry, NTSB, but navigation is an entirely different class of interaction with electronic devices than texting or email. It's part of the job of driving. I'll dock the phone if I have to, but I need real-time navigation info anytime I'm not driving on highways between cities.
Unfortunately these ISP's will almost certainly be interfering with the sharing of file's which have free license's (e.g. Creative Common's).
Unfortunately these ISP's will almost certainly be interfering with the sharing of file's which have free license's (e.g. Creative Common's).
Exactly. There is such a thing as legal file sharing, and artists just starting out and trying to get their work in front of people, or those less interested in profit (and there are such artists), can and often do use P2P to get exposure and build an audience. Which the major labels don't like, because they used to be the only game in town .. they've been making money off of past generations of new talent and they're not happy at all with the idea of this generation and future ones bypassing their contract racket .. so of course they lump it all in with "piracy", and legal sharing of CC and public-domain work is "piracy" only in the sense that they didn't get their cut for "producing" it themselves.
When will government's stop serving the interest's of corporation's and start serving the interest's of their citizen's?
As soon as their citizen's ( :p ) wake up and start following up on how well they're doing their job ..
CW is also a system that works with very little equipment, and often very little power, on the transmitting end. If you have enough of a receiver to pick up the person you're talking to, *transmitting* is often little more than some batteries, a transistor oscillator (of which all the parts but the transistor can be improvised in the field if you know what you're doing), a tuner, and a random wire antenna. If you're trying to get health and safety reports out of a disaster area, the ability to bodge together a basic QRP transmitter can mean the difference between news getting out and news not getting out when all the infrastructure is so thoroughly trashed it'll be months before it's all back online.
(I know of one county whose sheriff's department radio system was totally dependent on the base station for the radios in the cars to work. When an F5 tornado came through and demolished the building with the base station in it, they had to put a ham with a 2 meter HT in the front seat of every department vehicle. No, the cell towers didn't fare much better. 2 meter FM worked just fine.)
No, they don't match any other places. They're just for calibration. US has similar ones in Arizona.
And Texas. (Although that one was a NASA photogrammetry calibration target, I think..)
So the iPhone can't really do the speech recognition and synthesis by itself? That's quite underwhelming.
Indeed. Doing it all server side just seems like cheating, somehow ..
.. can you ask Siri "where to hide a body" before a backend notification gets emailed to a detective at your local PD?
Wired updated their story with an important caveat
Which raises a very important and much lower-tech question: why would cartels be deterred by technical obstacles keeping them from identifying the real bloggers? Grab some random techy-looking guy off the street and kill him, and pin a note to him claiming he's a blogger with a warning to others not to report on cartel activities, and who'll know the difference locally? (And even if the actual bloggers are so thoroughly anonymized as to be undetectable .. that's got to make anyone on the street nervous about whether or not they're really anonymous..)
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Because there's more to real life than tech
'“The thing that troubles me about it is [in] the preprint, [t]hey had originally had a supplemental figure at the end that showed the original results for the individual quasars they measured,” Orzel said. He explained that in that figure, the Keck telescope in the Northern Hemisphere seemed to predominantly measure the variation of alpha in one direction while Chile’s VLT in the Southern Hemisphere measured it in going the other way. “It looks a lot like what they’re seeing is coming from a difference between the two telescopes.”'
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Very much want to see independent confirmation of this result, if instrumentation error hasn't been controlled for
.. that the days of technology being an obstacle to invasion of privacy are over.
Like it or not, technical/technological solutions to protecting privacy are already ineffective, both against direct invasion of privacy and indirect approaches involving analytical data mining of large amounts of seemingly trivial data to draw aggregate conclusions. Even if there are still tech-based solutions that are still moderately effective, it's still a white hat/black hat arms race, and no solution will be effective forever, and the rate at which the systems on both sides evolve, the window of advantage will get narrower with each game-changing development.
The only true solution is one that involves promoting, and enforcing, the ethical use of personal information, with the enforcement aspect under the charge of trustworthy entities. (And the unsettling aspect of this is that many of the entities whose responsibility this will ultimately become have, repeatedly, proven themselves both untrustworthy and beholden to partisan agendas..)
.. and all the things they end up in.
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If you can bring enough stuff to set up a small Arduino lab for the Q&A, and let them play around in the IDE a bit, that'll definitely wake a few of them up