I've always disliked the term "cord-cutting", because it presumes that having a cable TV subscription is the normal default state of affairs,
If you have cable TV, then yes, the normal state of affairs is that you have a "cord" that can be cut. Nothing about that term deals with anyone who has no cord to begin with.
I'm not a cord-cutter, because I never had a cord to cut.
So you're not part of the group being referred to by that term. What's your problem?
How many of the tallied "cord-cutters" in these figures are like me?
None. Statistics about how many people drop cable service ('cord-cutters') come from how many people drop cable service.
they are unlikely to waste even starting up service for an unnecessary entertainment package
How do you cut a cord that never existed? Do you spend much of your life thinking about such things? How sad. Maybe you need a hobby, like watching cable TV?
Even if the net neutrality legislation we dream of became the law of the land, most ISPs would still have a monopoly,
Most ISPs cannot have a monopoly. A monopoly means "one". "Most" means more than one.
People keep confusing "the wireline telephone company" which has a true monopoly, the "cable company" which may have a de-facto monopoly but has no government-granted monopoly, and "ISP" which has NEVER had monopoly status ever. There are simply too many ISPs for anyone to claim that any ISP is a monopoly.
The real solution is to introduce competition into the ISP marketplace. Prohibit local governments from awarding monopoly service contracts to cable and telephone companies.
FEDERAL LAW has prohibited cable television exclusive franchises (the term for a government-granted monopoly) FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS. Telephone companies have a monopoly for wired telephone service, but nobody cares anymore because users are fleeing wired telephone service anyway. (So nobody is going to even try competing in that obsolete marketplace. Complaining that a wired telephone company has a monopoly today is like complaining because the government just granted one company a monopoly on the manufacture of buggy whips. ) NOBODY has a monopoly for being an ISP.
The government is already not in the way of ISP competition. How do you "introduce competition" in a market where there are no legal boundaries to competition? The limiting factor is saturation -- i.e., no new competitor can make a profit because there is not enough market share for him to pick up without people leaving their existing ISP. People hesitate to do that because it's a pain in the ass to change ISPs, often with a change of email address going with it. Yes, gmail helps with that, if you're running all your email through Google's microscope.
This wouldn't have worked 30 years ago when we didn't know what was the best way to lay out a cable network,
And it won't work today because nobody will invest the money in building this new, managed, multi-source network system. We've already got networks. Replacing them is not cost-effective. "Multi-provider via one wire" works for power companies only because nobody cares which electrons come out the wire just as long as enough electrons from the right sources go into the wires, and the wires didn't need to be replaced to manage who gets which. If the electric companies had had to replace their entire distribution system to enable "Blue Sky" or other alternative energy providers using the same system, it would not have happened yet.
all the cable companies now use the same DOCSIS equipment and transmit video using the same QAM encoding.
Yes, all the cable companies distribute their CABLE TV services using similar, if not the same, hardware. Broadcasting TV works great that way because the same stuff comes out your wire as what comes out the next door neighbor's. The same encrypted data streams go everywhere -- your set top box is told what it can decrypt for you. Imagine if everyone's network data went to every home and your "network set top box" knew what it could decrypt. Imagine the congestion.
The only reason ISPs are able to blackmail Netflix into paying them is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to their monopoly.
The fact that there is only one CABLE system in a town due to an economic monopoly does not prevent someone from switching to any of the other, non-cable TV, ISPs. It's only misinformation that keeps them from doing it -- the misinformation that somehow there is just one ISP they can use. Why bother looking if everyone says you won't find one, even if when you look you actually will?
Drugs, toothpaste, different chemicals all show up as something different.
Things with different densities show up as different. It's not chemistry, it's density.
Add some color
CT scanners don't create color images. They create INTENSITY maps, and you can apply pseudo-color colormaps to the intensity images to highlight small variations in density.
and a GUI
Oh, my, you should have said that first. Of course with a GUI they can detect reversals in the polarity of the neutron flow and all kinds of other things, too.
and such scans will find a lot of what is attempted to be hidden.
THAT is the important part of using a CT scanner instead of a simple X-ray. If you are carrying a 10" knife and make sure it is standing on its tip as it passed through an X-ray, they don't see a knife, they see a very small cross-section of something. With a CT scanner, you can't hide the knife that way.
I am reminded of the old saying about technology sufficiently advanced appears as magic. CT scanners appear to be sufficiently advanced for some folk here, and they're being given all kinds of magical abilities.
Ah, but the equipment configuration of a CT machine *could* be used in the same way as am x-ray spectroscopy setup,
if only a CAT scanner had spectroscopy hardware and not just a density (intensity) detector. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
especially if you are removing the majority of the moving parts of a CT machine by putting a ring of detectors around the object to be observed and then you could detect the diffractions and reflections from a point source of X-Rays.
So, yeah, if they replace all the hardware for a CT scanner and replace it with X-ray spectroscopy hardware, they'd have an X-ray spectroscopy system.
Remember, what makes a CT generate images is the post processing of the collected data to calculate the X-Ray blocking of the material and a specific point, by passing a beam of X-Rays though the object as the detector and source go around it.
It seems I know what a CT scanner does a lot better than you do, since you're imagining all kinds of different hardware that isn't in one. Don't tell me to "remember" when you haven't.
Interesting enough to make a determination about it's chemical composition and tell explosives apart from shampoo, shaving cream and mouthwash.
The liquid limitations are not because someone tried to smuggle a liquid explosive on board, it was because they tried to smuggle the components to make a liquid explosive on board. Acetone and hydrogen peroxide, to be specific.
Why isolate netflix or music streaming, instead of going after anything that people pay attention to?
Because many people are MOVING from broadcast TV/radio or cable to Netflix or Spotify, thus LOSING an existing alert mechanism. Perhaps you see them here? They're the ones who, in every mention of cable TV, proudly announce they've "cut the cord", even if the article has nothing to do with cutting the cord.
Your first claim is factually incorrect. They could not detect any more radiation. They didn't even measure it.
The first sentence of paragraph 2 of the arxiv paper:
"The technique used is low background gamma spectrometry and measurements are made at the PRISNA
facility." Gamma spectrometry is a measurement of the energy spectrum of gamma rays -- in other words, a measurement of radioactivity. (Yes, you have to integrate over all energies to get a total radioactivity, but it's measuring radioactivity just the same.)
What they did was simply to look for presence of any cesium 137 atoms in a spectrometer.
Your claim is factually incorrect. Gamma measurements do not directly measure the number of Cs 137 atoms. Cs137 decays via a beta particle to produce either stable Ba or unstable Ba (~95%), which further decays via the emission of gamma radiation. It is the gamma from Ba decay that is measured, so they are actually measuring, indirectly, the number of unstable Ba atoms.
Your second claim is blatant whitewashing.
Since you are too lazy to quote what you are referring to, I can only guess that you are referring to my statement of fact -- that the article did not claim any harm would come to anyone from this "2X" factor. Sorry, that's a fact. I don't know what you think needs to be whitewashed, unless it's some bizarre idea that all radiation is bad and that people drinking Cali wines should stop because they're now too polluted with that awful radiation stuff.
You hear a siren. What does it mean? What is the correct course of action for you to take?
1. It's a tornado warning, seek shelter in the basement. Exposed high ground makes you a target.
2. It's a tsunami warning, get to high ground. You'll drown in your basement.
3. It's an earthquake warning. Get outside away from buildings. You don't need to take the time to get to high ground, and you better not hide in the basement that will have your house collapsed on top of you.
And what about the vast spaces in the US that have no sirens?
Where you live has you covered in some rudimentary fashion. Nothing else is needed for anyone else. Got it.
Netflix doesn't need to know your location today, nor does it require the device to be connected to watch content - it can pre-cache of even download full content for offline viewing.
I don't use Netflix so I don't know (or care) if that is true. The answer is, if the device is not STREAMING, then there is no DELIVERY OF ALERTS possible via that stream.
When I said device, I meant your cell phone for example,
Cell phones are not the only "devices" that Netflix shows up on, so limiting your argument about who sends what alerts where based on having a cell phone is self-defeating.
and has the ability to alert you to low battery, incoming call, so why not an emergency alert?
The first two are local events. The latter is something it already does. Your question about "why not emergency alert(s)" is, umm, what is the word for a meaningless question?
By your logic, every web-site should be obligated to send emergency alerts,
Bullshit. I said nothing of the kind, and what I said can't reasonably be twisted to wind up with that result.
why not require all the websites to track you so we can get rid of the pesky privacy issue
Nice rant. Irrelevant, but nice.
What a stupid question. How would showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" provide alerts for any disaster?
Easy, pretty much all test alerts are scheduled ahead of time.
You did a fine job of ignoring the question and substituting your own answer. Scheduled tests are not an issue. Why do you think showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" would do anything to help disseminate a real alert? Why the hell would a "test alert" be generated from an offline copy of some Netflix video? What would be the use? The answer is, NO, there wouldn't be any alerts disseminated by Netflix to people who are not actively streaming a video. Period.
What I conclude is that this testing method, removing the 99.5% water mass, simply makes it possible to detect otherwise undetectable amounts of cesium-137.
Then you would be wrong. "Background" and "undetectable" are not synonyms. "Background" can be quite a bit higher than the detection limit.
What removing the water and ashing the remainder does is concentrate the sample and bring the level above background, which is what you would expect if you concentrate anything. Doing the same thing to a pre-Fuk wine of recent vintage results in a reading of X. Post-Fuk you get 2*X. In both cases X is detectable and above background. Unconcentrated wines don't measure above background, and if "background" was undetectable then you wouldn't know what background is to know if they are above or below it.
And if that "double dose" of radioactivity is still 4 orders of magnitude less than, say, standing out in direct sunlight, then it's a bit dishonest to publish this "conclusion" and pretend it's very significant.
It is significant. It shows that the difference can be measured in something as common as wine. It doesn't claim that anyone is going to die because of it, or even be harmed. It just reports a scientific finding.
> "It seems there is an increase in activity in 2011 by a factor of two," conclude the team.
...over background noise.
No. The background noise statement was referring to unopened bottles. The "factor of two" statement refers to concentrated samples without water or glass shielding.
It's still "a factor of two" compared to a baseline that is unstated and probably not much above background -- a meaningless statement couched in scientific terms.
If you read TFA, however, it is a bit clearer:
That probably won't be very useful for fraud detection in California wine -- the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable, and even then, only if the wine is destroyed.
They also show a graph, with unusable numbers for recent years due to axis compression from the 60's and 70's nuclear testing years. So, tempest in a wine decanter.
there are only so many manufacturers and so they can be forced
It has nothing to do with how many manufacturers there are, the law covers them all. One or one hundred.
That's harder to do when you get to really small form factors like phones, though. You can still do it, but your phone would be huge.
It would also not be allowed to talk to the cell network and would be completely illegal. Building your own phone is not like building your own ham radio.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system
Yes, there should be a consistent API so that all services disseminating alerts talk to one local demon that can identify and manage them all. Further, alerts should be coded like the SAME message for NOAA weather alerts.
BUT, every service still needs to be able to disseminate the alerts since not every device will be running every service. My daily-carry tablet isn't a phone, it can't show Amber alerts or any phone-based alerts. My phone will never be used for Netflix so it would get only phone-based alerts. Spotify and Netflix are pretty orthogonal. People running Spotify aren't going to be running Netflix, so both would disseminate alerts.
The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably.
No, not all devices can do that.
The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs.
Please explain how my daily-carry will "talk to the alert system" without any third-party servers or costs.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash
I envision the opening credits from Second City where people are throwing TVs out windows.
Because that is how alerts are delivered to the device. Something has to, the device doesn't make them up on its own.
What if the device is offline,
Hmmm, let's see, that's a tough one. If the device is offline then it isn't receiving the service which is delivering the alerts, so... ummm, can anyone help here? I'm stumped. I know if my TV is not connected to cable or broadcast TV I don't get any of the EBS alerts. I'm going to go out on a very long limb here and guess... THE DEVICE DOESN'T GET THE ALERT?
should it show pre-scheduled test alerts?
What a stupid question. How would showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" provide alerts for any disaster?
No. No one "has" to join the CCP. The vast majority do not.
Why would a libertarian not join a party that encompasses his ideology? Unless, of course, the party actually doesn't.
Now, the only way I know that one party can encompass contradicting ideologies is if the ideologies aren't important to the party. It's like a US political party encompassing people who have blond hair as well as redheads and brunettes. Hair color is not important. But to say that the Chinese Communist Party would find the principles of libertarianism to be unimportant in its role as the only political party in the state, well, I have to question that claim.
There are HUGE differences in how different regions are governed.
There is a big difference between how regions are governed and the communist party encompassing all ideologies.
Bo Xilai was dismissed from the communist party for advocating... communism.
Proving my point for me. They did not tolerate his version of communism so they threw him out. Tell me again how the communist party encompasses all ideologies. Ask Bo if he thinks his ideology was "encompassed".
No. It's like saying if there were only one model of car, everyone would drive it, whether they like it or not.
The PARTY does not change because people joining it believe something else. The PARTY is not driven by the people, it is driven by the leaders of the party. The Chinese Communist Party is not a democracy, nor is it egalitarian. E.g., if a Falung Gong believer joined the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party would not encompass Falung Gong, it would still try to eliminate it, and would kick him out as fast as he is identified. This is clearly NOT a party that encompasses a wide range of member's ideologies, even if it tolerates many of them for as long as it takes to eliminate the ones it really doesn't like.
Now, perhaps you are confused because in the US the political parties ARE member-driven in large part, because the parties are seeking VOTES from those members -- which provides a great deal of democracy in the direction the party goes. Not completely, but a hell of a lot more than the members of the Chinese Communist Party get to vote for their leadership.
Tell me, when was the last time party members told Xi Jinping that he must change the beliefs of the party or they'd vote for his competitor? I don't mean party leaders telling him, I mean rank and file. And which competitor?
Unless they somehow learned to crack modern encryption, then they cannot look at the data.
I seem to recall a recent case where the US government wanted Apple to decrypt someone's iPhone for them so it could be used in a court of law as evidence, and Apple (and every other smart person) laughed at them for even thinking it could be done. Absolutely impossible.
And then someone in Israel came and did it.
I also seem to recall being told how secure "modern encryption" was, and now I cannot even use those forms of encryption because they aren't secure.
I guess it's possible that in China they've added another encryption key to the mix, but I doubt it.
Of course they haven't. And of course Apple will say it's secure, because admitting it isn't would be bad for business. Just like every website that ever collected credit card data claims to store it securely.
I get the feeling that if this was the US government saying that all Apple iCloud data had to be stored on US government-run servers, people would be screaming about government violation of their privacy. But because it is China, people are saying "oh, the Chinese can't actually access any of the stuff they're storing on their servers..."
There are many more than two models of cars. The only reason you rarely see anything but those two is because there aren't enough people buying the others to create a significant presence.
This system is infinitely better than a one-car system where you must drive that model and if you complain about it you go to prison. Note that you are quite free to complain because you think there are only two models here and yet you have no fear of being abducted in the middle of the night and taken to political prison. Or maybe you do have that fear, but the actual likelyhood of it happening is still zilch.
In China, there is only one party, so it encompasses every possible ideology.
That's like saying if there were only one model of car, everyone would like that model of car.
While the PEOPLE who join the party for non-political purposes may have any number of philosophical ideals, the party itself does not. It does not "encompass" every ideology, but it may barely tolerate members who do.
That's the problem. How far do they go in tolerating them?
Allowing a ref to have some unknown ability to control the time is just opening up the door to corruption.
You do realize that it is pretty easy to have corruption if the ref can call for the clock to be stopped any time he wants, and much less opportunity if he cannot, don't you? It's not some "unknown ability to control the time", it's "we're 45:00 from the time the game started, the ref can justify two minutes of stoppage after consultation with the other three officials. Several million people are watching, including the league ref management..."
Even with your magical system of signals to call for the start and stop of the clock, you see refs calling for time to be put back on the clock because it was started by mistake, or because a call he just made cancelled a play that consumed time. It always seems to be at the most critical times in the game when the clock gets "fixed" this way. It's not this perfect system you seem to think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always disliked the term "cord-cutting", because it presumes that having a cable TV subscription is the normal default state of affairs,
If you have cable TV, then yes, the normal state of affairs is that you have a "cord" that can be cut. Nothing about that term deals with anyone who has no cord to begin with.
I'm not a cord-cutter, because I never had a cord to cut.
So you're not part of the group being referred to by that term. What's your problem?
How many of the tallied "cord-cutters" in these figures are like me?
None. Statistics about how many people drop cable service ('cord-cutters') come from how many people drop cable service.
they are unlikely to waste even starting up service for an unnecessary entertainment package
How do you cut a cord that never existed? Do you spend much of your life thinking about such things? How sad. Maybe you need a hobby, like watching cable TV?
Even if the net neutrality legislation we dream of became the law of the land, most ISPs would still have a monopoly,
Most ISPs cannot have a monopoly. A monopoly means "one". "Most" means more than one.
People keep confusing "the wireline telephone company" which has a true monopoly, the "cable company" which may have a de-facto monopoly but has no government-granted monopoly, and "ISP" which has NEVER had monopoly status ever. There are simply too many ISPs for anyone to claim that any ISP is a monopoly.
The real solution is to introduce competition into the ISP marketplace. Prohibit local governments from awarding monopoly service contracts to cable and telephone companies.
FEDERAL LAW has prohibited cable television exclusive franchises (the term for a government-granted monopoly) FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS. Telephone companies have a monopoly for wired telephone service, but nobody cares anymore because users are fleeing wired telephone service anyway. (So nobody is going to even try competing in that obsolete marketplace. Complaining that a wired telephone company has a monopoly today is like complaining because the government just granted one company a monopoly on the manufacture of buggy whips. ) NOBODY has a monopoly for being an ISP.
The government is already not in the way of ISP competition. How do you "introduce competition" in a market where there are no legal boundaries to competition? The limiting factor is saturation -- i.e., no new competitor can make a profit because there is not enough market share for him to pick up without people leaving their existing ISP. People hesitate to do that because it's a pain in the ass to change ISPs, often with a change of email address going with it. Yes, gmail helps with that, if you're running all your email through Google's microscope.
This wouldn't have worked 30 years ago when we didn't know what was the best way to lay out a cable network,
And it won't work today because nobody will invest the money in building this new, managed, multi-source network system. We've already got networks. Replacing them is not cost-effective. "Multi-provider via one wire" works for power companies only because nobody cares which electrons come out the wire just as long as enough electrons from the right sources go into the wires, and the wires didn't need to be replaced to manage who gets which. If the electric companies had had to replace their entire distribution system to enable "Blue Sky" or other alternative energy providers using the same system, it would not have happened yet.
all the cable companies now use the same DOCSIS equipment and transmit video using the same QAM encoding.
Yes, all the cable companies distribute their CABLE TV services using similar, if not the same, hardware. Broadcasting TV works great that way because the same stuff comes out your wire as what comes out the next door neighbor's. The same encrypted data streams go everywhere -- your set top box is told what it can decrypt for you. Imagine if everyone's network data went to every home and your "network set top box" knew what it could decrypt. Imagine the congestion.
The only reason ISPs are able to blackmail Netflix into paying them is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to their monopoly.
The fact that there is only one CABLE system in a town due to an economic monopoly does not prevent someone from switching to any of the other, non-cable TV, ISPs. It's only misinformation that keeps them from doing it -- the misinformation that somehow there is just one ISP they can use. Why bother looking if everyone says you won't find one, even if when you look you actually will?
Drugs, toothpaste, different chemicals all show up as something different.
Things with different densities show up as different. It's not chemistry, it's density.
Add some color
CT scanners don't create color images. They create INTENSITY maps, and you can apply pseudo-color colormaps to the intensity images to highlight small variations in density.
and a GUI
Oh, my, you should have said that first. Of course with a GUI they can detect reversals in the polarity of the neutron flow and all kinds of other things, too.
and such scans will find a lot of what is attempted to be hidden.
THAT is the important part of using a CT scanner instead of a simple X-ray. If you are carrying a 10" knife and make sure it is standing on its tip as it passed through an X-ray, they don't see a knife, they see a very small cross-section of something. With a CT scanner, you can't hide the knife that way.
I am reminded of the old saying about technology sufficiently advanced appears as magic. CT scanners appear to be sufficiently advanced for some folk here, and they're being given all kinds of magical abilities.
Ah, but the equipment configuration of a CT machine *could* be used in the same way as am x-ray spectroscopy setup,
if only a CAT scanner had spectroscopy hardware and not just a density (intensity) detector. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
especially if you are removing the majority of the moving parts of a CT machine by putting a ring of detectors around the object to be observed and then you could detect the diffractions and reflections from a point source of X-Rays.
So, yeah, if they replace all the hardware for a CT scanner and replace it with X-ray spectroscopy hardware, they'd have an X-ray spectroscopy system.
Remember, what makes a CT generate images is the post processing of the collected data to calculate the X-Ray blocking of the material and a specific point, by passing a beam of X-Rays though the object as the detector and source go around it.
It seems I know what a CT scanner does a lot better than you do, since you're imagining all kinds of different hardware that isn't in one. Don't tell me to "remember" when you haven't.
However, the components to make an explosive may be detectable using x-ray spectroscopy
A CAT scan is not x-ray spectroscopy. It is a 3-D x-ray, based on density and not chemistry.
I'm guessing they have the capability to do this in the hardware
Unlikely.
Interesting enough to make a determination about it's chemical composition and tell explosives apart from shampoo, shaving cream and mouthwash.
The liquid limitations are not because someone tried to smuggle a liquid explosive on board, it was because they tried to smuggle the components to make a liquid explosive on board. Acetone and hydrogen peroxide, to be specific.
Why isolate netflix or music streaming, instead of going after anything that people pay attention to?
Because many people are MOVING from broadcast TV/radio or cable to Netflix or Spotify, thus LOSING an existing alert mechanism. Perhaps you see them here? They're the ones who, in every mention of cable TV, proudly announce they've "cut the cord", even if the article has nothing to do with cutting the cord.
Your first claim is factually incorrect. They could not detect any more radiation. They didn't even measure it.
The first sentence of paragraph 2 of the arxiv paper: "The technique used is low background gamma spectrometry and measurements are made at the PRISNA facility." Gamma spectrometry is a measurement of the energy spectrum of gamma rays -- in other words, a measurement of radioactivity. (Yes, you have to integrate over all energies to get a total radioactivity, but it's measuring radioactivity just the same.)
What they did was simply to look for presence of any cesium 137 atoms in a spectrometer.
Your claim is factually incorrect. Gamma measurements do not directly measure the number of Cs 137 atoms. Cs137 decays via a beta particle to produce either stable Ba or unstable Ba (~95%), which further decays via the emission of gamma radiation. It is the gamma from Ba decay that is measured, so they are actually measuring, indirectly, the number of unstable Ba atoms.
Your second claim is blatant whitewashing.
Since you are too lazy to quote what you are referring to, I can only guess that you are referring to my statement of fact -- that the article did not claim any harm would come to anyone from this "2X" factor. Sorry, that's a fact. I don't know what you think needs to be whitewashed, unless it's some bizarre idea that all radiation is bad and that people drinking Cali wines should stop because they're now too polluted with that awful radiation stuff.
Having sirens is enough.
You hear a siren. What does it mean? What is the correct course of action for you to take?
1. It's a tornado warning, seek shelter in the basement. Exposed high ground makes you a target.
2. It's a tsunami warning, get to high ground. You'll drown in your basement.
3. It's an earthquake warning. Get outside away from buildings. You don't need to take the time to get to high ground, and you better not hide in the basement that will have your house collapsed on top of you.
And what about the vast spaces in the US that have no sirens?
Where you live has you covered in some rudimentary fashion. Nothing else is needed for anyone else. Got it.
Netflix doesn't need to know your location today, nor does it require the device to be connected to watch content - it can pre-cache of even download full content for offline viewing.
I don't use Netflix so I don't know (or care) if that is true. The answer is, if the device is not STREAMING, then there is no DELIVERY OF ALERTS possible via that stream.
When I said device, I meant your cell phone for example,
Cell phones are not the only "devices" that Netflix shows up on, so limiting your argument about who sends what alerts where based on having a cell phone is self-defeating.
and has the ability to alert you to low battery, incoming call, so why not an emergency alert?
The first two are local events. The latter is something it already does. Your question about "why not emergency alert(s)" is, umm, what is the word for a meaningless question?
By your logic, every web-site should be obligated to send emergency alerts,
Bullshit. I said nothing of the kind, and what I said can't reasonably be twisted to wind up with that result.
why not require all the websites to track you so we can get rid of the pesky privacy issue
Nice rant. Irrelevant, but nice.
What a stupid question. How would showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" provide alerts for any disaster?
Easy, pretty much all test alerts are scheduled ahead of time.
You did a fine job of ignoring the question and substituting your own answer. Scheduled tests are not an issue. Why do you think showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" would do anything to help disseminate a real alert? Why the hell would a "test alert" be generated from an offline copy of some Netflix video? What would be the use? The answer is, NO, there wouldn't be any alerts disseminated by Netflix to people who are not actively streaming a video. Period.
What I conclude is that this testing method, removing the 99.5% water mass, simply makes it possible to detect otherwise undetectable amounts of cesium-137.
Then you would be wrong. "Background" and "undetectable" are not synonyms. "Background" can be quite a bit higher than the detection limit.
What removing the water and ashing the remainder does is concentrate the sample and bring the level above background, which is what you would expect if you concentrate anything. Doing the same thing to a pre-Fuk wine of recent vintage results in a reading of X. Post-Fuk you get 2*X. In both cases X is detectable and above background. Unconcentrated wines don't measure above background, and if "background" was undetectable then you wouldn't know what background is to know if they are above or below it.
And if that "double dose" of radioactivity is still 4 orders of magnitude less than, say, standing out in direct sunlight, then it's a bit dishonest to publish this "conclusion" and pretend it's very significant.
It is significant. It shows that the difference can be measured in something as common as wine. It doesn't claim that anyone is going to die because of it, or even be harmed. It just reports a scientific finding.
> "It seems there is an increase in activity in 2011 by a factor of two," conclude the team.
...over background noise.
No. The background noise statement was referring to unopened bottles. The "factor of two" statement refers to concentrated samples without water or glass shielding.
It's still "a factor of two" compared to a baseline that is unstated and probably not much above background -- a meaningless statement couched in scientific terms.
If you read TFA, however, it is a bit clearer:
They also show a graph, with unusable numbers for recent years due to axis compression from the 60's and 70's nuclear testing years. So, tempest in a wine decanter.
there are only so many manufacturers and so they can be forced
It has nothing to do with how many manufacturers there are, the law covers them all. One or one hundred.
That's harder to do when you get to really small form factors like phones, though. You can still do it, but your phone would be huge.
It would also not be allowed to talk to the cell network and would be completely illegal. Building your own phone is not like building your own ham radio.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system
Yes, there should be a consistent API so that all services disseminating alerts talk to one local demon that can identify and manage them all. Further, alerts should be coded like the SAME message for NOAA weather alerts.
BUT, every service still needs to be able to disseminate the alerts since not every device will be running every service. My daily-carry tablet isn't a phone, it can't show Amber alerts or any phone-based alerts. My phone will never be used for Netflix so it would get only phone-based alerts. Spotify and Netflix are pretty orthogonal. People running Spotify aren't going to be running Netflix, so both would disseminate alerts.
The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably.
No, not all devices can do that.
The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs.
Please explain how my daily-carry will "talk to the alert system" without any third-party servers or costs.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash
I envision the opening credits from Second City where people are throwing TVs out windows.
We already have emergency sirens all over the place that ought to be good enough.
No, WE don't. You might. YMMV.
Why should Netflix be delivering alerts?
Because that is how alerts are delivered to the device. Something has to, the device doesn't make them up on its own.
What if the device is offline,
Hmmm, let's see, that's a tough one. If the device is offline then it isn't receiving the service which is delivering the alerts, so ... ummm, can anyone help here? I'm stumped. I know if my TV is not connected to cable or broadcast TV I don't get any of the EBS alerts. I'm going to go out on a very long limb here and guess ... THE DEVICE DOESN'T GET THE ALERT?
should it show pre-scheduled test alerts?
What a stupid question. How would showing a "pre-scheduled test alert" provide alerts for any disaster?
No. No one "has" to join the CCP. The vast majority do not.
Why would a libertarian not join a party that encompasses his ideology? Unless, of course, the party actually doesn't.
Now, the only way I know that one party can encompass contradicting ideologies is if the ideologies aren't important to the party. It's like a US political party encompassing people who have blond hair as well as redheads and brunettes. Hair color is not important. But to say that the Chinese Communist Party would find the principles of libertarianism to be unimportant in its role as the only political party in the state, well, I have to question that claim.
There are HUGE differences in how different regions are governed.
There is a big difference between how regions are governed and the communist party encompassing all ideologies.
Bo Xilai was dismissed from the communist party for advocating ... communism.
Proving my point for me. They did not tolerate his version of communism so they threw him out. Tell me again how the communist party encompasses all ideologies. Ask Bo if he thinks his ideology was "encompassed".
No. It's like saying if there were only one model of car, everyone would drive it, whether they like it or not.
The PARTY does not change because people joining it believe something else. The PARTY is not driven by the people, it is driven by the leaders of the party. The Chinese Communist Party is not a democracy, nor is it egalitarian. E.g., if a Falung Gong believer joined the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party would not encompass Falung Gong, it would still try to eliminate it, and would kick him out as fast as he is identified. This is clearly NOT a party that encompasses a wide range of member's ideologies, even if it tolerates many of them for as long as it takes to eliminate the ones it really doesn't like.
Now, perhaps you are confused because in the US the political parties ARE member-driven in large part, because the parties are seeking VOTES from those members -- which provides a great deal of democracy in the direction the party goes. Not completely, but a hell of a lot more than the members of the Chinese Communist Party get to vote for their leadership. Tell me, when was the last time party members told Xi Jinping that he must change the beliefs of the party or they'd vote for his competitor? I don't mean party leaders telling him, I mean rank and file. And which competitor?
Unless they somehow learned to crack modern encryption, then they cannot look at the data.
I seem to recall a recent case where the US government wanted Apple to decrypt someone's iPhone for them so it could be used in a court of law as evidence, and Apple (and every other smart person) laughed at them for even thinking it could be done. Absolutely impossible.
And then someone in Israel came and did it.
I also seem to recall being told how secure "modern encryption" was, and now I cannot even use those forms of encryption because they aren't secure.
I guess it's possible that in China they've added another encryption key to the mix, but I doubt it.
Of course they haven't. And of course Apple will say it's secure, because admitting it isn't would be bad for business. Just like every website that ever collected credit card data claims to store it securely.
I get the feeling that if this was the US government saying that all Apple iCloud data had to be stored on US government-run servers, people would be screaming about government violation of their privacy. But because it is China, people are saying "oh, the Chinese can't actually access any of the stuff they're storing on their servers..."
This system is infinitely better than a one-car system where you must drive that model and if you complain about it you go to prison. Note that you are quite free to complain because you think there are only two models here and yet you have no fear of being abducted in the middle of the night and taken to political prison. Or maybe you do have that fear, but the actual likelyhood of it happening is still zilch.
In China, there is only one party, so it encompasses every possible ideology.
That's like saying if there were only one model of car, everyone would like that model of car.
While the PEOPLE who join the party for non-political purposes may have any number of philosophical ideals, the party itself does not. It does not "encompass" every ideology, but it may barely tolerate members who do.
That's the problem. How far do they go in tolerating them?
I would like to know about these "internet stills", what kind of proof alcohol do they produce and how much does it cost?
It may run in some fashion, but it is horribly inefficient. They have to throw away the HEADs from all the web page requests or else they'll go blind.
Their whole country is more or less under water,
A large part of the country is below sea level. That's not the same as underwater. Yes, there are parts that are underwater: the canals, for example.
I think they have invented some kind of anti-gravity water control technology,
It's called a "pump", and some of them are driven by windmills. They didn't invent the pump, they just use a lot of them.
and just are keeping it as a secret to themselves.
Damn, now that I've told you, I'll have to kill you.
Allowing a ref to have some unknown ability to control the time is just opening up the door to corruption.
You do realize that it is pretty easy to have corruption if the ref can call for the clock to be stopped any time he wants, and much less opportunity if he cannot, don't you? It's not some "unknown ability to control the time", it's "we're 45:00 from the time the game started, the ref can justify two minutes of stoppage after consultation with the other three officials. Several million people are watching, including the league ref management ..."
Even with your magical system of signals to call for the start and stop of the clock, you see refs calling for time to be put back on the clock because it was started by mistake, or because a call he just made cancelled a play that consumed time. It always seems to be at the most critical times in the game when the clock gets "fixed" this way. It's not this perfect system you seem to think it is.