We finally pass meaningful health care reform, and there is a Republican Judge, waiting to strike it down, killing thousands in the process.
As opposed to:
1) letting the "meaningful" health care reform modify the health care availability in the US in a way that will kill millions, many of them deliberately while
2).etting the constitutional limits on the government be consigned to the dustbin of history, resulting in a runaway government that kills hundreds of millions?
No, thanks. I'll stick with keeping the government within its authorized boundaries whenever possible. Yes, even when (like a crime kingpin donating to a charity) it might use some of its ill-gotten money to do some good for a few. And I'll look into non-governmental solutions to help those the government CLAIMS to help.
Fortunately, practicality and principle virtually always agree when dealing with governments. No matter WHAT problem they claim to be solving, their activities to "solve" it have always made it worse, usually while creating additional problems requiring "solution".
Though to be fair, it would only be the equivalent of the cheaper certs that only verify domain control for authority when issuing certs. The higher-level certs truly do involve a third-party verification of identity of the cert recipient.
Seems to me that would be adequate for most purposes. The main thing the cert mechanism catches is a man-in-the-middle forging a response from a machine within a domain, while it's the user's job to go to the correct domain in the first place. If the servers and the company's DNS records are under control of the same IT operation, and the remote user has accessed the correct domain, why shouldn't the company's IT operation self sign and publish their signatures through DNS, rather than paying somebody else to construct certificates for their internal machines?
Meanwhile, the fact that the higher-level certs verify things beyond the scope of DNS administration - such as that a given cert really IS held by the Seventh Bank of Whatsistan - means the cert authorities wouldn't lose their whole market. For starters, they could sell higher-level certs for DNS. B-)
Or at least the Nobel piece prize, as things go to pieces. B-)
Appropriate, since Nobel made his fortune by inventing dynamite (and was inspired to endow the prizes as a way to undo some of the damage done by dynamite's use in war).
See the case Monsanto v. Oakhurst Dairy of Maine. Monsanto sued, forcing Oakhurst dairy to modify their labels.
Since you don't provide a link to the documents, I'll ask:
Did Oakhurst Dairy fight it in court and lose? Or did they settle out of court without a battle?
One of the downsides of civil law is that anybody can sue anybody else for anything. Whether they can WIN on it is another story. But a lot of businesses might decide it is better for their stockholders to change a label and abort a minor marketing program than to fight an expensive court battle and win.
(Knuckling under to a bully is usually a bad move, because it seldom stops there and ends up more expensive in the long run. But try telling that to a Harvard Business School grad.)
Apple is Bullying Competitors -- Including Linux -- Using Software Patents > Apple is suing to embargo Linux-based phones/phone makers, using software patents to generally remove competition or remove features from competitors' products.
Apple has a long history of using legal "Intellectual Property" attacks against competitors.
Two shining examples were the "Look and Feel" suits they filed against Digital Research's GEM in 1985 and Microsoft's early Windows product in 1988.
If I understand it correctly: These attempted to stretch copyright and trademark law to treat the overall appearance of a windowing interface as a "performance" (like a play) and the individual elements and/or their grouping and interaction as a trademark. Allowing this would have given Apple a monopoly on windowing systems lasting as long as copyrights and trademarks (virtually forever and as long as they were used for business, respectively).
Digital Research knuckled under, crippled their product, and fell by the wayside. Microsoft fought an won on virtually all points (except for the desktop "wastebasket" and disk-drive icons/functionality.)
A punitive amount too, not a happy negotiated amount. If the normal is %1 they should pay %10. If it's %10 they should pay %50. Theft should not at the end of the day, be profitable for stealing technology!
If I recall correctly the patent system already has a punitive damage multiplier of 3x for willful patent infringement. By that standard 1% becomes 3%, 10% becomes 30%.
Sadly, the sacrifice of liberty for the illusion of security isn't even a scam that someone is running on us. We're demanding it.
Lone Ranger: We're surrounded by hostile Indians. Get ready to shoot our way out. Tonto: Who you calling 'We', white man?
Who are you calling "We"?
Some aggregate dreamed up by a polling organization? The politicians and newsies?
It sure doesn't include ME! Or my wife. We no longer fly - and haven't for almost a decade - specifically BECAUSE we refuse to be subjected to this crap.
Two years ago we visited family 2,500 miles away, by TRAIN.
This year Amtrack wouldn't let us carry something "dangerous" (read that "politically incorrect") even in checked luggage - so we DROVE it. Two weeks on the road. Towing a 20-foot trailer. Which almost wiped out on the freeway at one point (when we had to dodge a car at high speed and the fishtailing was stopped by our smart brake controller) - and blew a tire leaving only two rubber sidewall disks at another. (Good design of its axles and suspension, though: No damage except for the blown tire itself.)
This is the sort of inconvenience and hazard *our* version of WE is willing to put up with rather than submit to having our rights violated.
"I have a bomb, open the cockpit or I push the button"
And a handfull of people in the aircraft - who have an angle on him where the backstop is something other than another passenger - each put a bullet through his head. (It's easy at that range.)
Of course that means some of the passengers need to be exercising their SECOND Amendment rights in the aircraft. Oops...
Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and independently operated, there's a central computer managing traffic routing.
They're also virtually impossible inside the tubes due to the physics of the situation. Pistons blown through cylinders by air have an inherent buffer of air between them. If something stops one, the air between it and any following it compresses and decelerates the follower. Worst case is a slightly leaky stuck cylinder letting a second one ease up against it - to continue on as a double load.
If the tube is used two-way, it has to be cleared before reversing. If it's not, any capsules forgotten and left midway in the tube will just be blown back the other way.
Different story at the terminal, of course, where exhaust venting lets capsules pile into each other (in a reasonably gentle and controlled fashion) and stack up.
You believe that urban myth that everybody carried guns in the Old West?... "Dodge City, 1878. The sign warns visitors to check their guns."
Actually they were quite common. (You needed them for a number of things - including to kill your own horse if it fell over with you on it and panicked.) And the crime rate per capita was far lower in the "Wild West" than in east coast cities, both at the time and compared to the much higher urban crime rate in gun-banned modernity.
Dodge City was atypical. It was under control of the Earp Gang - Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday. Also known as the "Pimp Gang", they monopolized the local brothels, bars, and gambling halls, and instituted an in-town gun ban to help keep the citizens under their thumbs.
The town had the railhead which was a major target of cattle drives and was "powered" mostly by the money from the cowboys' payoffs, spent in the Earp's monopolized entertainment complex. It withered when the railroads moved the railhead to another town (because the corruption in Dodge and the cowboys' aversion to it made it more profitable to drive the cattle elsewhere - even if the trip was longer - and avoid the problems.)
There are people in the West who have a family tradition of urinating on Wyat Earp's grave when they're in the area. Making that gangster a culture hero was perhaps Hollywood's most egregious distortion of the history of the west.
I wonder why the NRA doesn't reach out to the urban non-white populations and encourage them to exercise their 2nd amendment rights. Perhaps the NAACP could change that A from Advancement to Arming.
They DO. And Roy Innis (head of the Congress of Racial Equality - CORE) is an NRA board member.
You just don't hear about THAT in the lamestream media.
but let's be realistic. The first retard -- and there will be many -- the first retard who lets his child handle his gun, resulting in accidental death... or the first retard who accidentally shoots his friend while showing him/her his "cool" new toy... will create such a media circus that public opinion will come crashing down
Except that it's been happening for decades - at least since Florida broke the ice on non-discretionary CCW (Carrying Concealed Weapon) licensing. And that just hasn't been the effect.
It turns out that people with guns are even better at kid-proofing their houses with respect to guns (and safety-training their older children) than they are for other thing (like power tools, poisons, and kitchen cutlery). Fatal toddler accidents with legally-owned guns are only a handfull per year, far less likely than dying from tipping over a tricycle, falling into a swimming pool, or even drowning from falling head-down into a full bucket and being unable to get back out. And even if there WERE a couple extra cases buried in the law-of-small-numbers noise, armed citizens cause such a drastic reduction in violent crime that increased CCW produces an enormous reduction in kid fatalities.
And the anti-gunners TRIED to create exactly the media circus that you mentioned. But it didn't work. Instead it set up a crowd of straight-men for the pro-gunners to get the truth out. These days they don't even TRY it with the media, and confine their hand-wringing and bogus child-death stats (counting teenage gangsters - and some in their 30s - as "kids") to occasional preaching-to-the-choir staged events.
As man-centuries of CCW have accumulated over the years, along with the data on its effect of LOWERING injury and death rates, progressively more states have gone shall-issue. And you don't hear about it - or the feared toddler bloodbath - in the national media.
Of course it doesn't hurt that Nadja Adolf caught the Million Mom March getting free rent of a whole floor from a San Francisco hospital, and teamed with Jim March (yes, the one now with Black Box Voting) to get 'em kicked out - and also cut off from the funds from Oakland Children's Hospital that they had been using to bus people to Sacramento for their lobbying demonstration. Pulling them off the government teat left 'em so cash strapped that they had fire most of their staff and merge into another anti-gun organization.
Why NOT gasoline? Seems to me the mass of the train, rails, and spike itself would tend to hold the burning vapors in place long enough for the pressure to do some damage.
Even if the damage was just splitting the ties, losing integrity in a number of spike-tie connections would still result in the rail detaching and the train derailing - especially if the train was on an outside mountain curve and the outer rail went. And if a large cloud of vapor between the train and the roadbed went, FAE-bomb style, it could lift the train enough to derail it, lift one or more cars off the "trucks" (they're only sitting on the pivots, not fastened to them like a toy train), or blow the floors up into the cars.
One of the linked articles shows a rough illustration of the antenna: A big parabolic umbrella with a forest of feed "horns" (Actually log-periodic crossed YAGIs) on one end of the main satellite at the focus. This maps the feed horns' patterns into an equivalent hexagonal array of slightly overlapping regions on the Earth's surface.
However the illustration also has each feed horn illuminated by a patch on a similar hexagonal array laid out on the surface of the mirror umbrella. That's bogus. In such an antenna the whole reflector illuminates each of the horns.
It's equivalent to a camera lens or a reflector telescope - where light for each pixel on the film is collected by the whole lens/main mirror, but each pixel is illuminated by light arriving from a different direction. The bigger the lens/mirror, the more light that's collected for each pixel, and the tighter the focus, i.e. the larger the number of pixels and the smaller the area each one covers. This is the same game with the "film" consisting of an array of antennas, rather than silver grains or photosensitive spots on a retina chip.
"Slugs" (mass that weighs one pound under one standard g) never caught on in general American English usage.
Oops. Meant pound-mass (lb-sub-m lbm), not slug. A slug is about 32.17405 lb-mass, the mass which accelerates by one foot per second squared under a force of one pound.
The "total spacecraft mass of about 5,953.5 pounds"? What is this in kilograms? I know at sea level 1 pound is about 2.2. kg - but in low earth orbit?
Sorry, AC. "Slugs" (mass that weighs one pound under one standard g) never caught on in general American English usage. A one-standard-g field is assumed when the context says you're talking about mass and the unit is given as force (weight). The distinction is reserved for discussions among practitioners, teachers, and students of specialized fields (such as physics), who are often dealing with situations where it does matter.
The Toledo Scale motto would be "No Springs, Honest Mass!" if not for this convention. (They're a mass-balance mechanism and not affected by the magnitude of local gravitation, provided it's sufficient for them to operate properly and not high enough to damage the internal components.)
I brought a just an internal sata hard drive to Canada from the US, while in Canada I wiped it clean. On the way back into the US they stopped me for a few hours.. When I got home there were large files all over the drive..
Sounds like one of three things:
1) They installed some spyware on it.
2) Their machine was virus-infested and infested your drive.
3) Your "wipe" was a remove rather than a reformat-with-surface-analysis and they ran an undelete utility. (Were those files your previous content?)
I hope you held on to that drive - and kept it separate from any machine you're continuing to trust. If it's door number 1) you've got a pristine sample of their latest spyware tools without extraneous files for distraction. B-)
empty laptop... download an encrypted "project package" at your destination... encrypt and upload your product data... and [wipe] the laptop before return.
And how does this protect you from the installation of hardware keyloggers, BIOS and other firmware-based malware, activation of Intel AMT or other firmware remote-management tools, and so on? Once they get their hands on the laptop as you cross the border the hardware can't be trusted, even if wiped and reinstalled from read-only media.
format? What a waste. He should take advantage of the opportunity and hand the machine over to an organization with the capability to perform the most detailed examination of hardware, software and firmware to produce hard evidence (if it should exist) of EXACTLY what was done to the machine by the agents.
You beat me to it. B-)
This is a golden opportunity to do some reverse-engineering on what malware - soft and firm - the government may be installing on people they want to surveil.
It should be noted that the USG has steadfastly avoided violating the 3rd amendment, and should certainly be commended for its restraint in this matter.
Except when it comes to installing spyware on people's computers - the cybernetic equivalent.
The point of "quartering troops" in people's homes was not just the seizure of the homeowners' resources to support the occupying army. It was also that the troops - living with the family, eating at their table, etc. - doubled as government spies scrutinizing all aspects of their behavior and most of their belongings. They destroyed the privacy of the home.
Spyware is the same story: Active agents of the governmental power, resident in the victims' space, supported by their resources, privy to their dealings and information, and reporting it back to the powers-that-be.
Next up: the police starts killing people so they can use the higher homicide rates to motivate expansion.
Interestingly, there have been a number of instances of firemen, or whole fire departments, who committed repeated and serious arson.
Probably more for the fun of putting the fires out than as a budget booster, but still...
However police administrations also have a long history of prescribing "solutions" to crime rates that actually increase them. The commonest one is opposing private use of guns for self-protection, which drastically hikes violentcrime rates. Others include the "DARE" program, which increases illegal drug use and related crime.
And practically everything governments do create more problems than they claim to solve - often the same ones they claim to be solving. Wars on poverty increase the number and misery of the poor. Housing assistance ends up with people being thrown out of their homes. (This round isn't the first for the US: Search for "HUD houses".) Education. "Homeland Security". "War on terrorism" and the resulting "blowback" is just the latest in foreign policy bullying-inspiring-retaliation-by-asymmetric-warfare.
Slashdot Mirror
We finally pass meaningful health care reform, and there is a Republican Judge, waiting to strike it down, killing thousands in the process.
As opposed to: .etting the constitutional limits on the government be consigned to the dustbin of history, resulting in a runaway government that kills hundreds of millions?
1) letting the "meaningful" health care reform modify the health care availability in the US in a way that will kill millions, many of them deliberately while
2)
No, thanks. I'll stick with keeping the government within its authorized boundaries whenever possible. Yes, even when (like a crime kingpin donating to a charity) it might use some of its ill-gotten money to do some good for a few. And I'll look into non-governmental solutions to help those the government CLAIMS to help.
Fortunately, practicality and principle virtually always agree when dealing with governments. No matter WHAT problem they claim to be solving, their activities to "solve" it have always made it worse, usually while creating additional problems requiring "solution".
Though to be fair, it would only be the equivalent of the cheaper certs that only verify domain control for authority when issuing certs. The higher-level certs truly do involve a third-party verification of identity of the cert recipient.
Seems to me that would be adequate for most purposes. The main thing the cert mechanism catches is a man-in-the-middle forging a response from a machine within a domain, while it's the user's job to go to the correct domain in the first place. If the servers and the company's DNS records are under control of the same IT operation, and the remote user has accessed the correct domain, why shouldn't the company's IT operation self sign and publish their signatures through DNS, rather than paying somebody else to construct certificates for their internal machines?
Meanwhile, the fact that the higher-level certs verify things beyond the scope of DNS administration - such as that a given cert really IS held by the Seventh Bank of Whatsistan - means the cert authorities wouldn't lose their whole market. For starters, they could sell higher-level certs for DNS. B-)
Aren't you kind of saying that "Free speech is for the rich" as stated above? I know not literally, but it all boils down to it.
No. I'm saying "Free speech is for those who are willing to fight for it."
"The rich" often aren't, and free speech is rarely free of all costs.
I smell the Nobel peace prize already.
Or at least the Nobel piece prize, as things go to pieces. B-)
Appropriate, since Nobel made his fortune by inventing dynamite (and was inspired to endow the prizes as a way to undo some of the damage done by dynamite's use in war).
See the case Monsanto v. Oakhurst Dairy of Maine. Monsanto sued, forcing Oakhurst dairy to modify their labels.
Since you don't provide a link to the documents, I'll ask:
Did Oakhurst Dairy fight it in court and lose? Or did they settle out of court without a battle?
One of the downsides of civil law is that anybody can sue anybody else for anything. Whether they can WIN on it is another story. But a lot of businesses might decide it is better for their stockholders to change a label and abort a minor marketing program than to fight an expensive court battle and win.
(Knuckling under to a bully is usually a bad move, because it seldom stops there and ends up more expensive in the long run. But try telling that to a Harvard Business School grad.)
Apple is Bullying Competitors -- Including Linux -- Using Software Patents
> Apple is suing to embargo Linux-based phones/phone makers, using software patents to generally remove competition or remove features from competitors' products.
Apple has a long history of using legal "Intellectual Property" attacks against competitors.
Two shining examples were the "Look and Feel" suits they filed against Digital Research's GEM in 1985 and Microsoft's early Windows product in 1988.
If I understand it correctly: These attempted to stretch copyright and trademark law to treat the overall appearance of a windowing interface as a "performance" (like a play) and the individual elements and/or their grouping and interaction as a trademark. Allowing this would have given Apple a monopoly on windowing systems lasting as long as copyrights and trademarks (virtually forever and as long as they were used for business, respectively).
Digital Research knuckled under, crippled their product, and fell by the wayside. Microsoft fought an won on virtually all points (except for the desktop "wastebasket" and disk-drive icons/functionality.)
For this one: Rah Microsoft! B-)
A punitive amount too, not a happy negotiated amount. If the normal is %1 they should pay %10. If it's %10 they should pay %50. Theft should not at the end of the day, be profitable for stealing technology!
If I recall correctly the patent system already has a punitive damage multiplier of 3x for willful patent infringement. By that standard 1% becomes 3%, 10% becomes 30%.
Good enough for ya? B-)
Sadly, the sacrifice of liberty for the illusion of security isn't even a scam that someone is running on us. We're demanding it.
Lone Ranger: We're surrounded by hostile Indians. Get ready to shoot our way out.
Tonto: Who you calling 'We', white man?
Who are you calling "We"?
Some aggregate dreamed up by a polling organization? The politicians and newsies?
It sure doesn't include ME! Or my wife. We no longer fly - and haven't for almost a decade - specifically BECAUSE we refuse to be subjected to this crap.
Two years ago we visited family 2,500 miles away, by TRAIN.
This year Amtrack wouldn't let us carry something "dangerous" (read that "politically incorrect") even in checked luggage - so we DROVE it. Two weeks on the road. Towing a 20-foot trailer. Which almost wiped out on the freeway at one point (when we had to dodge a car at high speed and the fishtailing was stopped by our smart brake controller) - and blew a tire leaving only two rubber sidewall disks at another. (Good design of its axles and suspension, though: No damage except for the blown tire itself.)
This is the sort of inconvenience and hazard *our* version of WE is willing to put up with rather than submit to having our rights violated.
What version of WE are you in?
"I have a bomb, open the cockpit or I push the button"
And a handfull of people in the aircraft - who have an angle on him where the backstop is something other than another passenger - each put a bullet through his head. (It's easy at that range.)
Of course that means some of the passengers need to be exercising their SECOND Amendment rights in the aircraft. Oops...
It's flawed in the same way DRM is flawed, you can't give someone else the key and not give them the key at the same time.
You also can't give everyone the same key without the cracking of one person's device cracking everybody's device. B-b
Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and independently operated, there's a central computer managing traffic routing.
They're also virtually impossible inside the tubes due to the physics of the situation. Pistons blown through cylinders by air have an inherent buffer of air between them. If something stops one, the air between it and any following it compresses and decelerates the follower. Worst case is a slightly leaky stuck cylinder letting a second one ease up against it - to continue on as a double load.
If the tube is used two-way, it has to be cleared before reversing. If it's not, any capsules forgotten and left midway in the tube will just be blown back the other way.
Different story at the terminal, of course, where exhaust venting lets capsules pile into each other (in a reasonably gentle and controlled fashion) and stack up.
You believe that urban myth that everybody carried guns in the Old West? ... "Dodge City, 1878. The sign warns visitors to check their guns."
Actually they were quite common. (You needed them for a number of things - including to kill your own horse if it fell over with you on it and panicked.) And the crime rate per capita was far lower in the "Wild West" than in east coast cities, both at the time and compared to the much higher urban crime rate in gun-banned modernity.
Dodge City was atypical. It was under control of the Earp Gang - Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday. Also known as the "Pimp Gang", they monopolized the local brothels, bars, and gambling halls, and instituted an in-town gun ban to help keep the citizens under their thumbs.
The town had the railhead which was a major target of cattle drives and was "powered" mostly by the money from the cowboys' payoffs, spent in the Earp's monopolized entertainment complex. It withered when the railroads moved the railhead to another town (because the corruption in Dodge and the cowboys' aversion to it made it more profitable to drive the cattle elsewhere - even if the trip was longer - and avoid the problems.)
There are people in the West who have a family tradition of urinating on Wyat Earp's grave when they're in the area. Making that gangster a culture hero was perhaps Hollywood's most egregious distortion of the history of the west.
I wonder why the NRA doesn't reach out to the urban non-white populations and encourage them to exercise their 2nd amendment rights. Perhaps the NAACP could change that A from Advancement to Arming.
They DO. And Roy Innis (head of the Congress of Racial Equality - CORE) is an NRA board member.
You just don't hear about THAT in the lamestream media.
but let's be realistic. The first retard -- and there will be many -- the first retard who lets his child handle his gun, resulting in accidental death... or the first retard who accidentally shoots his friend while showing him/her his "cool" new toy... will create such a media circus that public opinion will come crashing down
Except that it's been happening for decades - at least since Florida broke the ice on non-discretionary CCW (Carrying Concealed Weapon) licensing. And that just hasn't been the effect.
It turns out that people with guns are even better at kid-proofing their houses with respect to guns (and safety-training their older children) than they are for other thing (like power tools, poisons, and kitchen cutlery). Fatal toddler accidents with legally-owned guns are only a handfull per year, far less likely than dying from tipping over a tricycle, falling into a swimming pool, or even drowning from falling head-down into a full bucket and being unable to get back out. And even if there WERE a couple extra cases buried in the law-of-small-numbers noise, armed citizens cause such a drastic reduction in violent crime that increased CCW produces an enormous reduction in kid fatalities.
And the anti-gunners TRIED to create exactly the media circus that you mentioned. But it didn't work. Instead it set up a crowd of straight-men for the pro-gunners to get the truth out. These days they don't even TRY it with the media, and confine their hand-wringing and bogus child-death stats (counting teenage gangsters - and some in their 30s - as "kids") to occasional preaching-to-the-choir staged events.
As man-centuries of CCW have accumulated over the years, along with the data on its effect of LOWERING injury and death rates, progressively more states have gone shall-issue. And you don't hear about it - or the feared toddler bloodbath - in the national media.
Of course it doesn't hurt that Nadja Adolf caught the Million Mom March getting free rent of a whole floor from a San Francisco hospital, and teamed with Jim March (yes, the one now with Black Box Voting) to get 'em kicked out - and also cut off from the funds from Oakland Children's Hospital that they had been using to bus people to Sacramento for their lobbying demonstration. Pulling them off the government teat left 'em so cash strapped that they had fire most of their staff and merge into another anti-gun organization.
Maybe it was gunpowder, not gasoline?
Why NOT gasoline? Seems to me the mass of the train, rails, and spike itself would tend to hold the burning vapors in place long enough for the pressure to do some damage.
Even if the damage was just splitting the ties, losing integrity in a number of spike-tie connections would still result in the rail detaching and the train derailing - especially if the train was on an outside mountain curve and the outer rail went. And if a large cloud of vapor between the train and the roadbed went, FAE-bomb style, it could lift the train enough to derail it, lift one or more cars off the "trucks" (they're only sitting on the pivots, not fastened to them like a toy train), or blow the floors up into the cars.
Not crooks: Geniuses! :-)
Geniuses? It only took them EIGHTEEN YEARS to deploy something that was published in Phrack.
One of the linked articles shows a rough illustration of the antenna: A big parabolic umbrella with a forest of feed "horns" (Actually log-periodic crossed YAGIs) on one end of the main satellite at the focus. This maps the feed horns' patterns into an equivalent hexagonal array of slightly overlapping regions on the Earth's surface.
However the illustration also has each feed horn illuminated by a patch on a similar hexagonal array laid out on the surface of the mirror umbrella. That's bogus. In such an antenna the whole reflector illuminates each of the horns.
It's equivalent to a camera lens or a reflector telescope - where light for each pixel on the film is collected by the whole lens/main mirror, but each pixel is illuminated by light arriving from a different direction. The bigger the lens/mirror, the more light that's collected for each pixel, and the tighter the focus, i.e. the larger the number of pixels and the smaller the area each one covers. This is the same game with the "film" consisting of an array of antennas, rather than silver grains or photosensitive spots on a retina chip.
"Slugs" (mass that weighs one pound under one standard g) never caught on in general American English usage.
Oops. Meant pound-mass (lb-sub-m lbm ), not slug. A slug is about 32.17405 lb-mass, the mass which accelerates by one foot per second squared under a force of one pound.
The "total spacecraft mass of about 5,953.5 pounds"? What is this in kilograms? I know at sea level 1 pound is about 2.2. kg - but in low earth orbit?
Sorry, AC. "Slugs" (mass that weighs one pound under one standard g) never caught on in general American English usage. A one-standard-g field is assumed when the context says you're talking about mass and the unit is given as force (weight). The distinction is reserved for discussions among practitioners, teachers, and students of specialized fields (such as physics), who are often dealing with situations where it does matter.
The Toledo Scale motto would be "No Springs, Honest Mass!" if not for this convention. (They're a mass-balance mechanism and not affected by the magnitude of local gravitation, provided it's sufficient for them to operate properly and not high enough to damage the internal components.)
I brought a just an internal sata hard drive to Canada from the US, while in Canada I wiped it clean. On the way back into the US they stopped me for a few hours.. When I got home there were large files all over the drive..
Sounds like one of three things:
1) They installed some spyware on it.
2) Their machine was virus-infested and infested your drive.
3) Your "wipe" was a remove rather than a reformat-with-surface-analysis and they ran an undelete utility. (Were those files your previous content?)
I hope you held on to that drive - and kept it separate from any machine you're continuing to trust. If it's door number 1) you've got a pristine sample of their latest spyware tools without extraneous files for distraction. B-)
Especially after we've had some articles on slashdot in the past about some chinese manufacturers doing -just- that.
Not to mention chip companies building it in and selling it as a feature. (See "Intel AMT" for one example.)
empty laptop ... download an encrypted "project package" at your destination ... encrypt and upload your product data ... and [wipe] the laptop before return.
And how does this protect you from the installation of hardware keyloggers, BIOS and other firmware-based malware, activation of Intel AMT or other firmware remote-management tools, and so on? Once they get their hands on the laptop as you cross the border the hardware can't be trusted, even if wiped and reinstalled from read-only media.
format? What a waste.
He should take advantage of the opportunity and hand the machine over to an organization with the capability to perform the most detailed examination of hardware, software and firmware to produce hard evidence (if it should exist) of EXACTLY what was done to the machine by the agents.
You beat me to it. B-)
This is a golden opportunity to do some reverse-engineering on what malware - soft and firm - the government may be installing on people they want to surveil.
It should be noted that the USG has steadfastly avoided violating the 3rd amendment, and should certainly be commended for its restraint in this matter.
Except when it comes to installing spyware on people's computers - the cybernetic equivalent.
The point of "quartering troops" in people's homes was not just the seizure of the homeowners' resources to support the occupying army. It was also that the troops - living with the family, eating at their table, etc. - doubled as government spies scrutinizing all aspects of their behavior and most of their belongings. They destroyed the privacy of the home.
Spyware is the same story: Active agents of the governmental power, resident in the victims' space, supported by their resources, privy to their dealings and information, and reporting it back to the powers-that-be.
Next up: the police starts killing people so they can use the higher homicide rates to motivate expansion.
Interestingly, there have been a number of instances of firemen, or whole fire departments, who committed repeated and serious arson.
Probably more for the fun of putting the fires out than as a budget booster, but still ...
However police administrations also have a long history of prescribing "solutions" to crime rates that actually increase them. The commonest one is opposing private use of guns for self-protection, which drastically hikes violentcrime rates. Others include the "DARE" program, which increases illegal drug use and related crime.
And practically everything governments do create more problems than they claim to solve - often the same ones they claim to be solving. Wars on poverty increase the number and misery of the poor. Housing assistance ends up with people being thrown out of their homes. (This round isn't the first for the US: Search for "HUD houses".) Education. "Homeland Security". "War on terrorism" and the resulting "blowback" is just the latest in foreign policy bullying-inspiring-retaliation-by-asymmetric-warfare.
I could go on for pages.