from what I gather... [Huawei boxes] are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
And then there are the analysts who believe they may contain Chinese governmental spyware.
Given that the IP theft that allegedly went into them was allegedly performed for them by the Chinese military and diplomatic intelligence network, that would be an expected reciprocal back-scratch. (Not to mention how handy it would be for domestic surveillance back home in China.)
From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well.
Redback/Ericsson, as well, uses a virtually identical CLI except where it must change to support Redback specific features. This was done deliberately, to make it easy for people trained on Cisco gear and/or interfacing with it or porting configurations from it. It's like making the steering wheel turn the same way as Ford's. B-)
Huawei may be a special case: I have heard claims that their equipment, at least initially, was a straight clone of Cisco hardware and software. (Things like identical, obscure, automatically-generated error messages, for starters.)
I do wonder what changed after the alleged period when occasional reproduction occurred.
Not just successful reproduction, but offspring whose genetics was carried forward into current populations to be detected by such research.
One possibility is the two branches diverged enough that crosses muled out. Another is that some crosses might still have remained fertile but the populations resulting from crosses after the cutoff date might have later died out without crossing back into those lines that did survive. (Perhaps cultural values or differing ideas of beauty led to a separation of these two branches of Humanity.)
Will this course teach enough to be useful for those who want to go into networking on a professional basis? For instance, will it enable them to pass the first of the Cisco network certifications? Will it confer enough skill and knowledge to do anything practical? Give credit or fill a prerequisite in a program that will go that far? Or is it just a feel-good class?
In my experience with Universities, "FOO for non FOO majors" and other survey classes have impressed me as snow jobs, shoveling out a lot of material in a disconnected and difficult to absorb way. They seemed directed more at giving non FOO majors an increased level of respect for specialists who have mastered the subject than to confer any useful skill or knowledge. I'm hoping this isn't another of the form.
Their theory states that by lubricating the fault lines with the pumped in waste water, the fault lines are able to slip earlier than they would have without the water.
I've generally assumed that it's not just lubrication that's at issue. The water has to be pumped in at enormous pressure (and just getting it down there adds about another half PSI per foot of depth due to gravity.) This high-pressure water acts over an enormous surface area, pushing the two sides of the fault apart.
Think of the fault as two rough pieces of rock with gradually rising spring pressure trying to make them slide across each other - which only happens when the pressure gets high enough to break the static frictin. Then think of the injected water as turning the fault system into a hydraulic jack the side of several counties, prying the fault open.
Sure it's not enough to pry it open, all by itself. But it's many tons of opposition to the force squeezing the fault together, and thus a corresponding reduction in the static friction. So the quake happens now rather than decades later (when the crosswise force from continental drift would have climbed high enough to cause the quake without help from the "jack".)
The big brother society... Marches on steady. Unstoppable and with an insatiable appetite for new technology
It also deploys very quietly these days. It's already up and running before people notice it's there.
We already HAVE four federally mandated car trackers on all passenger cars (along with most other vehicles) since 2007.
It's called a "Tire Pressure Monitoring System". It works by having (typically) a lithium-cell powered device in the valve stem on each wheel that transmits the tire pressure information along with a unique serial number (so your dashboard computer doesn't get confused by nearby cars). These can also be read by loops in the road.
I think you misunderstood ungrounded lightning's point: that the guy trying to make the plans to print a firearm online should be concerned about an overzealous law enforcement agency ruthlessly prosecuting him for something that is not actually illegal.
He was not suggesting that those AK websites were doing anything criminal, but he may be of the opinion that the ATF would prosecute them anyway, and from his tone, it's clear he wouldn't AGREE with the ATF about that.
You called it.
With one slight tweak: I was saying that the guy who leased the printer TO the project probably came to a similar conclusion, which is why he pulled the hardware back, and that based on BATF's actions in the past IMHO his decision was reasonable, not overcautious.
The way it works is the program runs on your GPU, and computes some unknown (to you) function based on inputs provided by the authenticator. If it produces the right outputs, the program must have been run on the right CPU, and you're authenticated.
And different instances of the digital device give different answers? That's exactly the thing that digital circuitry is supposed to avoid. If you can do it the GPU design is faulty. They're depending not only on it being faulty but being faulty in a way that doesn't make it unusaleable.
I'm guessing this was done because the printer manufacturer is worried about the press that would hurt their buisiness, not because it's "illicit" or anything like that.
IMHO he's far more likely to be worried about being convicted on conspiracy charges and spending most of the rest of his life in federal PMITA prison if even one person who makes a gun using information from this project breaks even one tiny regulation.
The federal firearms regulations are intended to ban most weapons manufacturing and transfer except under very controlled conditions. But the federal government didn't have the constitutional authorization to write such laws - so they were written as a tax. Because they're a tax, the courts have carved out this one loophole. But the federal agencies charged with enforcing the de facto ban does everything it can to find a way to prevent the use of this loophole.
The primary agency in question is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) - recently expanded to "and explosives (BATFE). They are notorious for their "zeal", general incompetence, extreme violence, willingness to bend the rules to make an arrest, and for prosecuting obviously failing cases until the accused is bankrupted and loses by default. They have put literally tens of thousands of people in federal prison for minor paperwork errors or claims that fender washers or pieces of muffler tubing are parts of silencers, or that dummy grenades are being made live. They have raided collectors (often licensed as "dealers" because it's WAY cheaper that way) because their own paperwork was fouled - or for no discernible reason. In one incident they threw a pregnant woman up against a wall (she miscarried shortly after) and deliberately stomped a kitten to death, just to show their power. They set up the situation in Ruby Ridge that ended with a federal sniper shooting a woman holding her baby, and in Waco where a church camp was burned to the ground - in both cases over a dispute about "a $200 tax". They are referred to as "F troop" by other federal law agencies. The "Jackbooted Thugs" ad campaign was the NRA's most effective recruiting aid.
One of their favorite tricks is to have an agent pose as a curious teenager and ask someone at a gun show how to make a gun shoot full-auto. If he tells them, they arrest him for "conspiracy to violate the federal firearms act". (First amendment? What's that?) You can bet that they'd hang similar charges on the people running a company that leased a machine to a project that is attempting to enable the general population to sidestep the same laws easily and cheaply. It looks like the operator of the company is betting that way, too.
Do a google search with the four words: designing studio windows soundproof and you'll get a bunch of instructional articles and videos.
It's not expensive: Essentially two or more windows "in series" at slightly different tilt angles, sealed very tightly (an air leak is a sound leak) with attention to how it's mounted. If you can build a window frame and a window you can build a soundproof window.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
I'm using Ubuntu Oneric w/ Libre Office 3.4.4 (which is what was distributed with it). I'm in the middle of a distance learning course so there's no way I'm about to upgrade right now.
I discovered, when attempting to modify a critical document, that this version of Libre Office could import it, edit it, and write it out. Once. But if I tried to import the modified document for another edit, Libre Office would hang. I worked around by converting the document to the Windows 97 version of.doc, which worked just fine.
If I'd had any data stored with google I'd likely have been seriously hosed. While the workaround would work, since it's a "hang on SECOND edit" bug I could easily have ended up with corrupted documents.
= = = = =
Giving people one week's notice before removing a substantial feature which may be critical for some users' processes is irresponsible. This is the kind of thing that needs months of notice for migration planning and execution. I think customers' trust in Google's services, and cloud computing in general, is about to take a substantial hit.
Both technologies [high-speed Internet and cellular phones] are great examples of the FAILURE OF CAPITALISM in an unregulated and greed driven free market system.
As I understand it this is primarily a failure of the regulators, who mistakenly thought that two competitors are "competition". In fact the equilibrium with two is to split the customer base about equally and keep the price as high as practical. They can do this with price signals and market research rather than explicit collusion (and don't even have to do it deliberately - it's where the profit maximum sits.) Competition driving the price down toward costs doesn't typically happen until there are at least three players and can't be counted on until there are four or more.
In the case of cellphones, in the early rollout the FCC split the available bandwidth into two equal chunks, giving on to the current phone monopoly in an area and the other to one competitor. Eventually more bandwidth became available (at very high prices) to let more than two play. But by then the first two had a strong early-mover advantage compared to upstarts trying to suck in their customers.
In the case of wireline the FCC initially forced the telephone companies to rent the legacy government-subsidized copper wiring to competitors at reasonable rates. But then it deemed that, for "information services", a one-cable-company, one-phone-company "duopoly" was enough competition, and eliminated the requirement for data. Oops! (The wireless alternatives don't have the price/performance to be an effective third competitor.)
South Korea has a special circumstance: (According to a marketing guy at a router company where I worked) About 95% of their population lives in giant apartment buildings - large enough that they have telephone central offices in their basements.
You don't have to dig up the neighborhood to get the service to them. You can just put an edge router in the basement, run indoor cat5-or-better up the existing communication conduits (if it wasn't there already), and feed them 100M (maybe 1G by now) Ethernet, which gets from building to building and to the backbone via fibers in the bundle that was already there (in old construction) for the telephone service. This makes installation VERY cheap and wiring distances short enough that high speeds are easy.
With that speed available the biggest bandwidth user (according to this guy) was live 1-to-1 naked video "phone calls" between youngsters of opposite sexes still living with their parents. It let them do their courtship form their bedrooms without being in each other's presence unsupervised, or making physical contact (either of which would cause much consternation with their elders in their strongly regimented society). It's much like the way affordable automobiles and drive-in movies changed the courtship habits in the US, especially after WW II.
The sad fact is that the starving billions support the few millions enthusiastically, or at least tolerate them. Otherwise this could not go on for long.
When you're armed and confronted by a crowd that's not, with less bullets than the crowd, the trick is to pick off the first ones to attack, and let them know that this is how you will procede. The crowd is confronted with the fact that, though they might be able to overwhelm you after losing a few, leading the attack means getting hurt or dead. Even if an attack starts at all the crowd will usually run out of leaders before you run out of bullets.
This works just as well when the ones with the guns are jackbooted thugs and the ones with the numbers are the downtrodden masses.
This is why gun bans for the general population are popular with despotic regimes. It's also why adding gun control to an otherwise non-despotic (or not-very-despotic) legal system is usually followed by despotism within a couple decades.
"75% of the population"? How about a percentage of the LAND AREA. Like 99+%?
The whole POINT of wireless is that you can use it when you're ON THE ROAD, somewhere OUT OF A CITY, or otherwise anywhere but parked at home or the office. The carriers seem to have lost track of that.
Perhaps it's a side-effect of the FCC's abandonment of access requirements to the legacy, subsidized, landline infrastructure, leaving landlines to a duality of incumbent Tellcos and Cable companies, which only have to incrementally upgrade while their no-longer-existent competition must wire the world from scratch? That ends up with wireless data carriage repurposed as a cheaper-to-install alternative to landlines, driving mobile service into secondary status in corporate mindshare. Of course, in such a market the incumbents (like AT&T), with their existing landline structure, have less incentive to roll out service than their wireless-only and wireless-mainly competition.
Am I the only one... to think that this is a really terrible idea. It sounds like a great way to enable massive CO2 release just by any heating accident or lack of maintenance.
I was about to post something similar but was checking whether anybody had beaten me to it. You came close.
This looks like a DANDY way to set up a runaway-positive-feedback event:
1) Make gigatons of dry ice by freezing CO2 out of the atmosphere.
2) Bury it in Antarctica.
3) Pray that it stays cold.
4) If the temperature of the burial site rises above â'78.5 ÂC (â'109.3 ÂF) the dry ice starts sublimating, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
5) The released CO2 increases the greenhouse effect, which captures more heat, which raises the temperature, which sublimates more dry ice.
6) Rinse and repeat.
7) Prophet!
Even if the global warming observations aren't the sign of an oncoming anthropogenic overheating disaster, THIS could create one. Artificially sequestering the CO2 would retard natural sequestration mechanisms (such as increased photosynthesis stimulated by higher CO2 levels). Then suddenly (in geologic time) releasing the stockpile back into the atmosphere could leave you with a substantially higher CO2 level than if you hadn't run the project in the first place.
Nice thought. But it's 2 kW / cubic meter - of active cell. If you only have a house and family I'd guess you probably don't have enough sewage to feed the bugs to power more than a small lamp.
If you have a nontrivial farm it might be another matter.
He's mentally ill, and really does need help (even if you can't force it). The guy seriously believes that George W. Bush is living in a secret castle in Colorado where he rapes and sacrifices children.
Does he? Really?
I've seen at least one report claiming the postings were taken out of context from where he was playing a(n Illuminati-themed) game on Facebook. (I'd love to see more info on this.) Is everybody who plays such a game, or had a hand in writing one, or who writes or quotes song lyrics or satirical books, now to be considered dangerously nuts?
Of course if you put him in a loony bin and medicate him enough he'll believe it eventually. Probably very soon: It's hard NOT to believe they're after you when they ARE after you. B-b
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
Wrong.
in fact, a strong immune system increases the risk of paralysis. The virus masquerades as nerve sheathes to try to delay immune system response by triggering a mechanism that protects motor nerves. If the immune system isn't fooled it will often go on to attack motor nerves as well, which is what causes the paralysis. (It's similar to Multiple Sclerosis, which can develop from an allergy to cow's milk.)
5% [of those exposed] will have mild symptoms such as fever. Paralysis occurs in 1 of every 1000 of this 5%, and it's theorized that this group has genetic and anatomic susceptibility.
Whose behind did you pull those numbers out of? The CDC's MMWR has the fraction of paralytic vs. non-paralytic cases (in the years they distinguished them before the vaccines started knocking the numbers down) running in the 35%-48% range, not the 0.01% you claim. Given that, I also chose to reject your 5% number for "any noticeable symptoms at all among those exposed."
A polio victim's organization has a fine summary of those numbers, for those who don't want to look up decades of CDC reports and do their own math.
One way to think about "group immunity" it is to compare disease spread to a nuclear reactor. Push in the control rods until one slow neutron produces less than one new one on the average and the reaction peters out. Pull them out until it produces more than one and the reaction grows exponentially. Same with a case of disease causing more or less than one new case on the average.
Another way to think about it is that only the susceptible population matters for disease transmission. The immune are just background (like furniture) who might carry contagion on their surface until they're cleaned or it degrades, but won't generate new bugs. If there are too few potential victims the disease peters out, just as if there were only so few people wandering around in a wilderness that a sick person, while contagious, encounters less than one other person on the average.
Too many skipping the vaccination means the population of susceptibles becomes dense enough for an epidemic to occur. If only those who skipped out got sick the rest of us wouldn't care. But I hear the no-immunity-developed rate for typical vaccinations is often the two-digit percentages. So a lot of people could be hurt if a disease gets going again. Further, even if the multiplier on the exponential IS above one, the higher it is the faster the disease spreads. So keeping it down makes it possible to contain and extinguish occasional outbreaks (with supplemental vaccinations, quarantine, increased sanitation, reduced interpersonal contact, and other public health measures), as was done late in the elimination of smallpox. Anti-vaxx ideologues and their victims defeat this, as well.
Re: Polio: For a long time there were two types of vaccine: Salk and Sabin. (These days there may be more. Like something assembled from biotech-generated virus components made without any actual virus involved.)
Salk was the first: It was made of killed virus. The surface proteins provoke the immune reaction. It has a slight risk of producing full-blown polio, if some virus doesn't get killed. (In the very early days there was a significant amount of that: Turns out the virus crystalizes under some conditions. When that happens the virus in the middle of the crystal doesn't all get killed. Oops! They got that figured out pretty quick and made sure the conditions weren't right in the killing stage. Meanwhile, even with a few cases caused by early defective batches of vaccine, they were still ahead of the then-rampant natural transmission.)
Sabin was the second. It is a "weakened virus", a live, mutated, version of the virus that doesn't cause paralysis. (Think of polio as a cold that happens to look enough like motor nerves that, once you've had it, your body now thinks motor nerves are a disease and attacks them. Sabin vaccine gives you the cold, doesn't look enough like nerves to give you paralysis, but DOES look enough like wild polio that if you've had one you're immune to the other. Just like cowpox vs. smallpox.) It was preferred because actually having a disease gives much longer-lasting immunity than just being exposed to its components (plus an "adjuvant" to do enough damage to signal the body something is bad.) Also: As a live virus it is contagious. Thus the immunization is also contagious. If a few kids in a school don't get the vaccine, they may still get the "cold". And it doesn't need to be injected - just eat the sugar cube with the pink drop on it. The risk is that, very occasionally, the virus may mutate BACK into real, paralytic polio - and spread.
Except this isn't research, it's one researcher with a foregone conclusion simply wishing it to be true. There is no mechanism for gamete production in human females that have been born.
You're mischaracterizing it. As I understand it:
- Until recently it was assumed that, in mammals at least, females were born with all the egg cells they would ever have, rather than having new ones developed from stem cells over time.
- But this was apparently based on the observation that the number of immature egg cells present diminished with time from initial numbers were adequate (by a couple orders of magnitude) for the "born with 'em all" explanation to work, not by some hypothetical experiment marking some girl's egg cells and then examining her ovaries later in life to see if there were unmarked cells.
- Recently it was noticed that the explanation didn't hang together well for mice.
- Further experiments on mice showed that they had special stem cells in their ovaries (apparently the same kind as produce sperm in males) and that these cells did form new egg cells (or at least immature egg cell precursors) during the mouse's adult life.
- This new reported experiment shows that human ovaries have the same sort of stem cell, and that transplanting human ovary tissue with labeled pre-egg stem cells into a suitable mouse ovary (where they can be observed and receive both human and mouse signals) causes them to produce new immature human egg cells (in human ovary tissue!), just like the mouse stem cells do for the mice.
This strongly suggests that they may do the same in human ovaries. If so, the menopause is something else shutting down ongoing egg production, not necessarily the exhaustion of a fixed-at-birth supply.
It ALSO strongly suggest that, even IF the human immature egg production IS stopped by the time of birth (or some other very young age) and the menopause IS an exhaustion of a fixed supply, providing appropriate chemical signals could (re)activate the egg cell production, delaying or reversing menopause. (It also hints that this could be done without extensive side-effects beyond those you'd expect from ongoing fertility, because it appears to be a normal mechanism in at least some mammals.)
Either way it shows that drug intervention to delay or reverse menopause in humans is a realistic target.
Further, a releated article referenced from this one ("Old Mice Made 'Young'-May Lead to Anti-Aging Treatments.") describes an in-vitro experiment on reactivating senescent stem cells with signals from non-senescent cells, by growing them in a flask separated by a membrane that allows signaling chemicals, but not cells, through. If the same can be done stimulating egg production in human ovary tissue, an extension of the experiment with the signaling chemicals transferred between separate cultures using an intermediate step that sorts out the chemicals (for instance by chromatography) could home in on the responsible chemicals, leading to their identification and the identification of the relevant receptors. That's enough information to enable the design of drugs and therapies to achieve the same effect in adult humans.
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from what I gather ... [Huawei boxes] are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
And then there are the analysts who believe they may contain Chinese governmental spyware.
Given that the IP theft that allegedly went into them was allegedly performed for them by the Chinese military and diplomatic intelligence network, that would be an expected reciprocal back-scratch. (Not to mention how handy it would be for domestic surveillance back home in China.)
From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well.
Redback/Ericsson, as well, uses a virtually identical CLI except where it must change to support Redback specific features. This was done deliberately, to make it easy for people trained on Cisco gear and/or interfacing with it or porting configurations from it. It's like making the steering wheel turn the same way as Ford's. B-)
Huawei may be a special case: I have heard claims that their equipment, at least initially, was a straight clone of Cisco hardware and software. (Things like identical, obscure, automatically-generated error messages, for starters.)
I do wonder what changed after the alleged period when occasional reproduction occurred.
Not just successful reproduction, but offspring whose genetics was carried forward into current populations to be detected by such research.
One possibility is the two branches diverged enough that crosses muled out. Another is that some crosses might still have remained fertile but the populations resulting from crosses after the cutoff date might have later died out without crossing back into those lines that did survive. (Perhaps cultural values or differing ideas of beauty led to a separation of these two branches of Humanity.)
Will this course teach enough to be useful for those who want to go into networking on a professional basis? For instance, will it enable them to pass the first of the Cisco network certifications? Will it confer enough skill and knowledge to do anything practical? Give credit or fill a prerequisite in a program that will go that far? Or is it just a feel-good class?
In my experience with Universities, "FOO for non FOO majors" and other survey classes have impressed me as snow jobs, shoveling out a lot of material in a disconnected and difficult to absorb way. They seemed directed more at giving non FOO majors an increased level of respect for specialists who have mastered the subject than to confer any useful skill or knowledge. I'm hoping this isn't another of the form.
The Korean artist PSY's moves have been described as "a comical horse-riding dance". But to me it looks a lot like like "Jailhouse Rock".
Not the Elvis Presley song, but the deadly family of unarmed martial arts which includes moves designed to be performed while handcuffed or shackled.
Their theory states that by lubricating the fault lines with the pumped in waste water, the fault lines are able to slip earlier than they would have without the water.
I've generally assumed that it's not just lubrication that's at issue. The water has to be pumped in at enormous pressure (and just getting it down there adds about another half PSI per foot of depth due to gravity.) This high-pressure water acts over an enormous surface area, pushing the two sides of the fault apart.
Think of the fault as two rough pieces of rock with gradually rising spring pressure trying to make them slide across each other - which only happens when the pressure gets high enough to break the static frictin. Then think of the injected water as turning the fault system into a hydraulic jack the side of several counties, prying the fault open.
Sure it's not enough to pry it open, all by itself. But it's many tons of opposition to the force squeezing the fault together, and thus a corresponding reduction in the static friction. So the quake happens now rather than decades later (when the crosswise force from continental drift would have climbed high enough to cause the quake without help from the "jack".)
The big brother society ... Marches on steady. Unstoppable and with an insatiable appetite for new technology
It also deploys very quietly these days. It's already up and running before people notice it's there.
We already HAVE four federally mandated car trackers on all passenger cars (along with most other vehicles) since 2007.
It's called a "Tire Pressure Monitoring System". It works by having (typically) a lithium-cell powered device in the valve stem on each wheel that transmits the tire pressure information along with a unique serial number (so your dashboard computer doesn't get confused by nearby cars). These can also be read by loops in the road.
I think you misunderstood ungrounded lightning's point: that the guy trying to make the plans to print a firearm online should be concerned about an overzealous law enforcement agency ruthlessly prosecuting him for something that is not actually illegal.
He was not suggesting that those AK websites were doing anything criminal, but he may be of the opinion that the ATF would prosecute them anyway, and from his tone, it's clear he wouldn't AGREE with the ATF about that.
You called it.
With one slight tweak: I was saying that the guy who leased the printer TO the project probably came to a similar conclusion, which is why he pulled the hardware back, and that based on BATF's actions in the past IMHO his decision was reasonable, not overcautious.
The way it works is the program runs on your GPU, and computes some unknown (to you) function based on inputs provided by the authenticator. If it produces the right outputs, the program must have been run on the right CPU, and you're authenticated.
And different instances of the digital device give different answers? That's exactly the thing that digital circuitry is supposed to avoid. If you can do it the GPU design is faulty. They're depending not only on it being faulty but being faulty in a way that doesn't make it unusaleable.
I'm guessing this was done because the printer manufacturer is worried about the press that would hurt their buisiness, not because it's "illicit" or anything like that.
IMHO he's far more likely to be worried about being convicted on conspiracy charges and spending most of the rest of his life in federal PMITA prison if even one person who makes a gun using information from this project breaks even one tiny regulation.
The federal firearms regulations are intended to ban most weapons manufacturing and transfer except under very controlled conditions. But the federal government didn't have the constitutional authorization to write such laws - so they were written as a tax. Because they're a tax, the courts have carved out this one loophole. But the federal agencies charged with enforcing the de facto ban does everything it can to find a way to prevent the use of this loophole.
The primary agency in question is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) - recently expanded to "and explosives (BATFE). They are notorious for their "zeal", general incompetence, extreme violence, willingness to bend the rules to make an arrest, and for prosecuting obviously failing cases until the accused is bankrupted and loses by default. They have put literally tens of thousands of people in federal prison for minor paperwork errors or claims that fender washers or pieces of muffler tubing are parts of silencers, or that dummy grenades are being made live. They have raided collectors (often licensed as "dealers" because it's WAY cheaper that way) because their own paperwork was fouled - or for no discernible reason. In one incident they threw a pregnant woman up against a wall (she miscarried shortly after) and deliberately stomped a kitten to death, just to show their power. They set up the situation in Ruby Ridge that ended with a federal sniper shooting a woman holding her baby, and in Waco where a church camp was burned to the ground - in both cases over a dispute about "a $200 tax". They are referred to as "F troop" by other federal law agencies. The "Jackbooted Thugs" ad campaign was the NRA's most effective recruiting aid.
One of their favorite tricks is to have an agent pose as a curious teenager and ask someone at a gun show how to make a gun shoot full-auto. If he tells them, they arrest him for "conspiracy to violate the federal firearms act". (First amendment? What's that?) You can bet that they'd hang similar charges on the people running a company that leased a machine to a project that is attempting to enable the general population to sidestep the same laws easily and cheaply. It looks like the operator of the company is betting that way, too.
Do a google search with the four words: designing studio windows soundproof and you'll get a bunch of instructional articles and videos.
It's not expensive: Essentially two or more windows "in series" at slightly different tilt angles, sealed very tightly (an air leak is a sound leak) with attention to how it's mounted. If you can build a window frame and a window you can build a soundproof window.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
I'm using Ubuntu Oneric w/ Libre Office 3.4.4 (which is what was distributed with it). I'm in the middle of a distance learning course so there's no way I'm about to upgrade right now.
I discovered, when attempting to modify a critical document, that this version of Libre Office could import it, edit it, and write it out. Once. But if I tried to import the modified document for another edit, Libre Office would hang. I worked around by converting the document to the Windows 97 version of .doc, which worked just fine.
If I'd had any data stored with google I'd likely have been seriously hosed. While the workaround would work, since it's a "hang on SECOND edit" bug I could easily have ended up with corrupted documents.
= = = = =
Giving people one week's notice before removing a substantial feature which may be critical for some users' processes is irresponsible. This is the kind of thing that needs months of notice for migration planning and execution. I think customers' trust in Google's services, and cloud computing in general, is about to take a substantial hit.
Both technologies [high-speed Internet and cellular phones] are great examples of the FAILURE OF CAPITALISM in an unregulated and greed driven free market system.
As I understand it this is primarily a failure of the regulators, who mistakenly thought that two competitors are "competition". In fact the equilibrium with two is to split the customer base about equally and keep the price as high as practical. They can do this with price signals and market research rather than explicit collusion (and don't even have to do it deliberately - it's where the profit maximum sits.) Competition driving the price down toward costs doesn't typically happen until there are at least three players and can't be counted on until there are four or more.
In the case of cellphones, in the early rollout the FCC split the available bandwidth into two equal chunks, giving on to the current phone monopoly in an area and the other to one competitor. Eventually more bandwidth became available (at very high prices) to let more than two play. But by then the first two had a strong early-mover advantage compared to upstarts trying to suck in their customers.
In the case of wireline the FCC initially forced the telephone companies to rent the legacy government-subsidized copper wiring to competitors at reasonable rates. But then it deemed that, for "information services", a one-cable-company, one-phone-company "duopoly" was enough competition, and eliminated the requirement for data. Oops! (The wireless alternatives don't have the price/performance to be an effective third competitor.)
South Korea has a special circumstance: (According to a marketing guy at a router company where I worked) About 95% of their population lives in giant apartment buildings - large enough that they have telephone central offices in their basements.
You don't have to dig up the neighborhood to get the service to them. You can just put an edge router in the basement, run indoor cat5-or-better up the existing communication conduits (if it wasn't there already), and feed them 100M (maybe 1G by now) Ethernet, which gets from building to building and to the backbone via fibers in the bundle that was already there (in old construction) for the telephone service. This makes installation VERY cheap and wiring distances short enough that high speeds are easy.
With that speed available the biggest bandwidth user (according to this guy) was live 1-to-1 naked video "phone calls" between youngsters of opposite sexes still living with their parents. It let them do their courtship form their bedrooms without being in each other's presence unsupervised, or making physical contact (either of which would cause much consternation with their elders in their strongly regimented society). It's much like the way affordable automobiles and drive-in movies changed the courtship habits in the US, especially after WW II.
The sad fact is that the starving billions support the few millions enthusiastically, or at least tolerate them. Otherwise this could not go on for long.
When you're armed and confronted by a crowd that's not, with less bullets than the crowd, the trick is to pick off the first ones to attack, and let them know that this is how you will procede. The crowd is confronted with the fact that, though they might be able to overwhelm you after losing a few, leading the attack means getting hurt or dead. Even if an attack starts at all the crowd will usually run out of leaders before you run out of bullets.
This works just as well when the ones with the guns are jackbooted thugs and the ones with the numbers are the downtrodden masses.
This is why gun bans for the general population are popular with despotic regimes. It's also why adding gun control to an otherwise non-despotic (or not-very-despotic) legal system is usually followed by despotism within a couple decades.
"75% of the population"? How about a percentage of the LAND AREA. Like 99+%?
The whole POINT of wireless is that you can use it when you're ON THE ROAD, somewhere OUT OF A CITY, or otherwise anywhere but parked at home or the office. The carriers seem to have lost track of that.
Perhaps it's a side-effect of the FCC's abandonment of access requirements to the legacy, subsidized, landline infrastructure, leaving landlines to a duality of incumbent Tellcos and Cable companies, which only have to incrementally upgrade while their no-longer-existent competition must wire the world from scratch? That ends up with wireless data carriage repurposed as a cheaper-to-install alternative to landlines, driving mobile service into secondary status in corporate mindshare. Of course, in such a market the incumbents (like AT&T), with their existing landline structure, have less incentive to roll out service than their wireless-only and wireless-mainly competition.
Or bricks? Or cinder blocks?
Why not use a wooden or metal box?
Make that:
4) If the temperature of the burial site rises above -78.5 C (-109.3 F) the dry ice starts sublimating, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Am I the only one ... to think that this is a really terrible idea.
It sounds like a great way to enable massive CO2 release just by any heating accident or lack of maintenance.
I was about to post something similar but was checking whether anybody had beaten me to it. You came close.
This looks like a DANDY way to set up a runaway-positive-feedback event:
1) Make gigatons of dry ice by freezing CO2 out of the atmosphere.
2) Bury it in Antarctica.
3) Pray that it stays cold.
4) If the temperature of the burial site rises above â'78.5 ÂC (â'109.3 ÂF) the dry ice starts sublimating, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
5) The released CO2 increases the greenhouse effect, which captures more heat, which raises the temperature, which sublimates more dry ice.
6) Rinse and repeat.
7) Prophet!
Even if the global warming observations aren't the sign of an oncoming anthropogenic overheating disaster, THIS could create one. Artificially sequestering the CO2 would retard natural sequestration mechanisms (such as increased photosynthesis stimulated by higher CO2 levels). Then suddenly (in geologic time) releasing the stockpile back into the atmosphere could leave you with a substantially higher CO2 level than if you hadn't run the project in the first place.
Oops!
Nice thought. But it's 2 kW / cubic meter - of active cell. If you only have a house and family I'd guess you probably don't have enough sewage to feed the bugs to power more than a small lamp.
If you have a nontrivial farm it might be another matter.
He's mentally ill, and really does need help (even if you can't force it). The guy seriously believes that George W. Bush is living in a secret castle in Colorado where he rapes and sacrifices children.
Does he? Really?
I've seen at least one report claiming the postings were taken out of context from where he was playing a(n Illuminati-themed) game on Facebook. (I'd love to see more info on this.) Is everybody who plays such a game, or had a hand in writing one, or who writes or quotes song lyrics or satirical books, now to be considered dangerously nuts?
Of course if you put him in a loony bin and medicate him enough he'll believe it eventually. Probably very soon: It's hard NOT to believe they're after you when they ARE after you. B-b
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
Wrong.
in fact, a strong immune system increases the risk of paralysis. The virus masquerades as nerve sheathes to try to delay immune system response by triggering a mechanism that protects motor nerves. If the immune system isn't fooled it will often go on to attack motor nerves as well, which is what causes the paralysis. (It's similar to Multiple Sclerosis, which can develop from an allergy to cow's milk.)
5% [of those exposed] will have mild symptoms such as fever. Paralysis occurs in 1 of every 1000 of this 5%, and it's theorized that this group has genetic and anatomic susceptibility.
Whose behind did you pull those numbers out of? The CDC's MMWR has the fraction of paralytic vs. non-paralytic cases (in the years they distinguished them before the vaccines started knocking the numbers down) running in the 35%-48% range, not the 0.01% you claim. Given that, I also chose to reject your 5% number for "any noticeable symptoms at all among those exposed."
A polio victim's organization has a fine summary of those numbers, for those who don't want to look up decades of CDC reports and do their own math.
Very good explanation.
One way to think about "group immunity" it is to compare disease spread to a nuclear reactor. Push in the control rods until one slow neutron produces less than one new one on the average and the reaction peters out. Pull them out until it produces more than one and the reaction grows exponentially. Same with a case of disease causing more or less than one new case on the average.
Another way to think about it is that only the susceptible population matters for disease transmission. The immune are just background (like furniture) who might carry contagion on their surface until they're cleaned or it degrades, but won't generate new bugs. If there are too few potential victims the disease peters out, just as if there were only so few people wandering around in a wilderness that a sick person, while contagious, encounters less than one other person on the average.
Too many skipping the vaccination means the population of susceptibles becomes dense enough for an epidemic to occur. If only those who skipped out got sick the rest of us wouldn't care. But I hear the no-immunity-developed rate for typical vaccinations is often the two-digit percentages. So a lot of people could be hurt if a disease gets going again. Further, even if the multiplier on the exponential IS above one, the higher it is the faster the disease spreads. So keeping it down makes it possible to contain and extinguish occasional outbreaks (with supplemental vaccinations, quarantine, increased sanitation, reduced interpersonal contact, and other public health measures), as was done late in the elimination of smallpox. Anti-vaxx ideologues and their victims defeat this, as well.
Re: Polio: For a long time there were two types of vaccine: Salk and Sabin. (These days there may be more. Like something assembled from biotech-generated virus components made without any actual virus involved.)
Salk was the first: It was made of killed virus. The surface proteins provoke the immune reaction. It has a slight risk of producing full-blown polio, if some virus doesn't get killed. (In the very early days there was a significant amount of that: Turns out the virus crystalizes under some conditions. When that happens the virus in the middle of the crystal doesn't all get killed. Oops! They got that figured out pretty quick and made sure the conditions weren't right in the killing stage. Meanwhile, even with a few cases caused by early defective batches of vaccine, they were still ahead of the then-rampant natural transmission.)
Sabin was the second. It is a "weakened virus", a live, mutated, version of the virus that doesn't cause paralysis. (Think of polio as a cold that happens to look enough like motor nerves that, once you've had it, your body now thinks motor nerves are a disease and attacks them. Sabin vaccine gives you the cold, doesn't look enough like nerves to give you paralysis, but DOES look enough like wild polio that if you've had one you're immune to the other. Just like cowpox vs. smallpox.) It was preferred because actually having a disease gives much longer-lasting immunity than just being exposed to its components (plus an "adjuvant" to do enough damage to signal the body something is bad.) Also: As a live virus it is contagious. Thus the immunization is also contagious. If a few kids in a school don't get the vaccine, they may still get the "cold". And it doesn't need to be injected - just eat the sugar cube with the pink drop on it. The risk is that, very occasionally, the virus may mutate BACK into real, paralytic polio - and spread.
You're mischaracterizing it. As I understand it:
- Until recently it was assumed that, in mammals at least, females were born with all the egg cells they would ever have, rather than having new ones developed from stem cells over time.
- But this was apparently based on the observation that the number of immature egg cells present diminished with time from initial numbers were adequate (by a couple orders of magnitude) for the "born with 'em all" explanation to work, not by some hypothetical experiment marking some girl's egg cells and then examining her ovaries later in life to see if there were unmarked cells.
- Recently it was noticed that the explanation didn't hang together well for mice.
- Further experiments on mice showed that they had special stem cells in their ovaries (apparently the same kind as produce sperm in males) and that these cells did form new egg cells (or at least immature egg cell precursors) during the mouse's adult life.
- This new reported experiment shows that human ovaries have the same sort of stem cell, and that transplanting human ovary tissue with labeled pre-egg stem cells into a suitable mouse ovary (where they can be observed and receive both human and mouse signals) causes them to produce new immature human egg cells (in human ovary tissue!), just like the mouse stem cells do for the mice.
This strongly suggests that they may do the same in human ovaries. If so, the menopause is something else shutting down ongoing egg production, not necessarily the exhaustion of a fixed-at-birth supply.
It ALSO strongly suggest that, even IF the human immature egg production IS stopped by the time of birth (or some other very young age) and the menopause IS an exhaustion of a fixed supply, providing appropriate chemical signals could (re)activate the egg cell production, delaying or reversing menopause. (It also hints that this could be done without extensive side-effects beyond those you'd expect from ongoing fertility, because it appears to be a normal mechanism in at least some mammals.)
Either way it shows that drug intervention to delay or reverse menopause in humans is a realistic target.
Further, a releated article referenced from this one ("Old Mice Made 'Young'-May Lead to Anti-Aging Treatments.") describes an in-vitro experiment on reactivating senescent stem cells with signals from non-senescent cells, by growing them in a flask separated by a membrane that allows signaling chemicals, but not cells, through. If the same can be done stimulating egg production in human ovary tissue, an extension of the experiment with the signaling chemicals transferred between separate cultures using an intermediate step that sorts out the chemicals (for instance by chromatography) could home in on the responsible chemicals, leading to their identification and the identification of the relevant receptors. That's enough information to enable the design of drugs and therapies to achieve the same effect in adult humans.
The road is now clearly mapped.