This technique is a lot more invasive than casting, and it's not injectable. They cut you open and place it just like the metal counterpart; the improvement is that you don't have to be cut open twice.
This would have been nice when I broke a finger about a year ago. Because the tension of the tendons would pull it out of a "set" they had to drill and insert two wires - then later open me up to pull them back out again.
A couple pins that dissolved gracefully once the bone had knit would have been a great improvement on a second operation (and, unless they were VERY expensive, a great cost savings, too.) And I don't think I'd have had a lot of trouble with osteoporosis due to the magnesium in a couple inch-long hunks of wire.
... it depends detection of a significant number of machines being compromised to produce the detection event and response. Meanwhile a significant number of machines have been compromised. The horses are out of those barns by the time the doors are closed.
Rinse and repeat, with a fresh variant of the malware, until "all your horse are belong to us".
Meanwhile, all they're doing is detecting a pattern of distribution of a pattern of data, without any way to differentiate whether the data itself is malware. Surprise: This same pattern occurs with news and with ideas. Do we really want a surveillance system to treat the spread of, say, stories of government corruption, as a malware infection?
If you think Linux is inherently more secure than Windows, you're absolutely nuts.
Linux is more secure against malware than Windows in the same way that a solid storm window with a few pinhole air leaks at the edge of the frame is more secure against poison gas than a window screen.
This is a "feature" of the way Windows and its application suite are designed.
Now that elaborate malware constructs have been designed and debugged for decades on the Windows Swiss Cheese platforms, and a multibillion dollar malware industry built upon them, if Windows should ever be displaced as the dominant platform by Linux you can expect the payloads to be ported. Then ANY successful Linux exploit the authors can find will give them a new "infection head" and an opportunity to pull the same stunts on Linux, despite the far smaller number of vulnerabilities.
So Windows' security issues (and the failure of the company and users to adequately address them) have made things bad, not just for Windows users, but for everybody. The plague has been bred to enormous strength and virulence in other species and now poses a general threat - much like H1N1 in birds and pigs now poses a threat to humans. Thanks, Microsoft.
Meanwhile, with Windows still the big target, avoiding it in favor of the harder-to-crack, quicker-to-fix, less-profit-for-bad-guys-meanwhile Linux platform remains a benefit for those who use it.
And if it ever DOES become a big enough target to go after, we can hope that the lower number of vulnerabilities, more rapid fix cycle, the model of "fix the holes" in preference to "identify and intercept the latest mutant strains", and the far more varied population of instalations, might keep the problems far smaller than it is with Windows.
Re:I'm signed up to have my head put in cryostorag
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There's a company that will load your ashes into shotgun shells,
Or if one of your sympathetic buddies reloads his own shotgun shells he can do that by mixing in your ashes from an ordinary cremation.
Re:I'm signed up to have my head put in cryostorag
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I seriously doubt someone will someday say, "Hey, we don't have enough old rich dudes. Let's go resurrect some." Nope. Instead, you are going to be turned into an experiment. If you ever resurrect, it's not gonna be pretty.
Given WHO some of the "old (not usually very) rich dude"s are - many being historical figures in the technological revolution or participants in other activities that ended up looking historically significant - there's a good chance some would be reanimated just to ask them questions. Then they are their own support group and, should any be sufficiently successful, they might well chip in for the reanimation of others. (I hear some are making little teaser biography plaques.)
(And no I won't admit online who I am mundanely, or why someone might possibly be that interested in talking to me. Whats the point of a pseudonym if you broadcast your identity all the time? B-) )
However the hope is that the community that has formed around cryonics will have living members still interested in reanimating the suspended if/when it becomes practical. And that others still living will want to do it - in the hope that if THEY should need such service in the future others would similarly be interested.
Remember that, absent a crash of civilization (which would also likely disable the refrigeration and make it moot), the future in question is likely to arrive within the (unsuspended) lifetimes of many of those now living and participating on Slashdot. Say 30 years at the outside.
Re:I'm signed up to have my head put in cryostorag
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You really need to read "Rammer" by Larry Niven.
Already did, thanks.
AIDS, Hep-C, CJD, etc. put the spikes in Niven's organ-banks dystopia.
Meanwhile, technologies like 3-D rapid prototyping with collagen, growth-factors, tissue-type markers, and pluripotent stem cells make it look like "writing" replacement organs with the donor's own tissue cloned from a small dab of biopsied fat (at a month or two from start to implant-ready) will be ready for prime time within a few years (plus the interminable FDA approval process). It already "just works" starting from a cleaned-out donor collagen scaffold with its ready-made tissue-type-marker distribution and seeded with said adult stem cells.
And the _Children of the State_ memory-RNA transplant was based on the flatworm research which turned out to be flawed. Transplanting the mind looks to be a matter of using nanobots to "read" the cortical-columns and tune up the replacements to match.
So I'm not too worried about waking up in one of Niven's water-monopoly empires. (But even if I do, for somebody who isn't convinced of an afterlife that hasn't been manufactured in a lab it sure beats the alternative. B-) )
Re:I'm signed up to have my head put in cryostorag
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Not everyone can afford to have a proper geek burial
It's not all that expensive - especially if you sign up young.
For instance: ALCOR: You buy an insurance policy to cover the costs of the actual suspension and storage ($800ish/year for me - will depend on how old you are when you sign up) and pay your dues ($400/yr) and standby fee (your share of keeping the ambulance and such ready) ($120/year). $1400ish a year is not chump change. But it doesn't take a millionaire to do it either.
I'm signed up to have my head put in cryostorage..
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... which IMHO is about the geekiest funeral there is. (Think "the intent of the pyramids" but with stainless steel dewars and liquid nitrogen condensation fog.)
They can do what they want with the rest of my body once I'm done with it.
And who knows - there's some slight chance they WILL figure out how to download the person from a frozen-head-saved-game into a new model body (or fix the cracks in the brain, implant it in a cloned corpus, and restart it) - and somebody will think it's worthwhile to try it with me. Then it's time travel to the far future.
While we're at it, where did those dollar amounts come from?
- Was the NSF paying the credit card bills for porn sites? I doubt that.
- Was it added bandwidth cost? On an NSF internet feed? I doubt that, too.
- Was it supposed cost of the workers' time? Salaried white collar workers are not paid hourly, or overtime if they stay later because of time spent porn-surfing. Three strikes.
So either the dollar amounts are coming from some "misconduct" OTHER than porn surfing or there's something else fishy going on.
Also:
How do they know the guy was actually porn surfing? I know at the company where I'm working the nannyware gets all bent when I follow links to certain ISPs. For instance:
- When I'm trying to follow up a whistle-blower news report and the whistleblower posted a video on a site that's sufficiently open that OTHER people have posted X-rated videos or malware on it and so the nannyware has it on the list. Or:
- When I follow an archived link to a site that's gone and the sitename has been snatched by a domain squatter who also does porn sites, or
- When I typo a URL and there's a typosquatter with a porn site, to name just three that I recall.
I don't usually follow this stuff up - since it would require an outside feed to check what the heck the site is really about plus a lot of internal red tape. But if you looked at the nannyware logs and assumed I meant to go after whatever the nannyware THOUGHT those sites were about you'd think I was regularly surfing for porn and malware.
Some americans have some pretty funny ideas about things which they don't have well implemented but work quite well elsewhere. Where the hell do you get these ideas about public transport?
From lots of research.
The scale and layout of much of the US makes mass transit impractical. In some places (like post-fire Chicago and dense-rectangular-grid New York City) it does work - quite well. But in others (like the San Francisco Bay area) it does not. Even if the various agencies worked together rather than building little fiefdoms studies indicate that it would never approach the per-ride total cost of private cars.
In still others (like rural Nevada or even outside a dense city) it's a joke. To have practical mass transit you need masses of people in some places and masses of destinations in others.
A car is in 99.9% of all cases more risky and more expensive for the owner.
You're not counting things like muggers and gangs working bus and train lines or exposure to seasonal flu, TB, and other diseases among "risks", are you?
As for cost I'm not comparing the tax-subsidized fare paid by a rider. I'm talking the total cost of the construction and operation of the bus/train service divided by rides vs. total cost of ownership and operation of an automobile (including its share of road construction and maintenance where it's not double-counted due to gas/license taxation) divided by equivalent rides. Cars beat buses or trains by a factor of several, even if the latter use exisiting rail lines.
Indeed, here in the SF Bay area we have several bus lines where the per-ride cost is in the thousands. It would be cheaper to decommission the line and use the tax money to take each of the regular riders, lease them a Mercedes every year, provide enough gas to make the equivalent trips. As for BART the cars are non-standard, built in France, and cost six million each as of a decade ago. Divide the depreciation over the cars' lifetimes by the number of riders, add in the amortized cost of the land under the (non-standard-gauge) rails, the construction, and the operation. Cars come out 'WAY ahead - even paying the horrible bridge tolls that help subsidize the BART system.
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Nope. I'm saying that they'd be VERY productive and were the one I picked to vote for as the best of the lot.
(Though I must admit that doing PR for engineering to counter the anti-tech and anti-success bias drummed into the public school kids was also very attractive.)
Many of them appeared to be:
- Things that should already be done by well-defined organizations (usually governmental).
- Things that shouldn't be done (because the downsides, like creating databased of personal information that can be used to harm individuals, violate Franklin's rule: (He who trades freedom for safety...)
- Things that have proven cost-ineffective (such as public transport which, except in special circumstances, tends to cost far more per ride - in money, risk, and rider lifetime - than individual vehicles).
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
Isn't this the first time the GPL has proven enforcible by a CUSTOMER demanding the source? All the stuff I recall so far is the COPYRIGHT HOLDER doing the enforcement.
Anyone releasing code to the masses should make it public domain to remove any legal controversies that may arise over it.
GPL was created specifically to overcome the problems of public domain release.
If your code is public domain, somebody else can appropriate it, make a change (fix a bug, add a feature, etc.) and copyright THAT. Then everybody else, including the original author, is locked out of the derived work. You'll never be able to fix that bug, add that feature (without doing a very different version from scratch), and so on.
GPL (and the other open source licenses) keeps the work under copyright in order to let the original authors enforce licensing terms that prohibit such shenanigans.
Is there anybody out there who seriously still has a Thatcheristic fear that they'll be burning the Reichstag again?
IMHO the main effect of the ongoing censorship is to keep the new generations ignorant of the way the NAZIs actually operated. It will be much more difficult for them to recognize it if it raises its smooth head again, draped in a new set of symbols but sending the same old message. So the net result is an INcrease of the risk of a repeat, rather than a DEcrease.
The wartime anti-NAZI propaganda paints a distorted picture of what it was like. Part of the horror was how ATTRACTIVE and SWEET and "TOUGH LOVE" it all was to those who experienced it directly (and weren't part of the out-groups in the later stages). Another part was how it all followed in easy steps from the Weimar Republic's age of enlightenment and precursor cluster of ideologies (consensus decision-making, health food/vegetarianism, new-age occultism, animal rights, wealth redistribution, government control of "corporate greed" for the public good,...) that we'd recognize under another name today.
Does the Looking Glass radio signal also fire the missiles DIRECTLY via a completely automated system?
I thought (from government-published PR pieces) that it authorized two guys in a bunker at each cluster of (land-based) missiles (and the equivalent for subs, ships, bombers, airbases, etc.) to proceed with their launch procedures. As such it would be subject to human judgment that the situation might be such that the signal was bogus.
Another possibility is that there ISN'T such a system but, now that things are heating up between the US and Russia, the Former Soviets would like us to THINK there is.
Things get really twisted when you're playing the superpower saber-rattling game.
Its construction might have had less to do with Reagan and more to do with the fact that a single moment of restraint [by a soviet officer who got a bogus five-missile launch detection from a satellite during a crisis] two years earlier had stopped a nuclear war.
Same thing happened the other way, too.
The DEW line was turned on to operational status a few days before the announced date - in case the Soviets decided to stage a strike just before it was turned on. A few hours after that it began reporting waves of missile launches. (But it didn't predict the targets they would hit.) The general in charge decided that this might be bogus and held off pending reports of actual hits.
Turns out he was dead right. The big radars had seen the Moon rising - and misinterpreted the strong, long-delayed, echo as a bunch of echoes from later pulses (and thus a bunch of closer targets). And since the moon wasn't about to crash into the Earth the computers couldn't figure out where this cloud of phantom missiles were going to touch down.
The problem was fixed and the DEW Line went into service.
On the first page it explains all the conditions that must be met for this thing to go off. They include:
1. Enabled by military
2. No contact from headquarters
3. Detected nuclear detonation
4. Button press by guy in bunker
It's not automated....
And then:
5. Several "command missiles" are launched, which radio coded commands to:
6. Lots of nuclear-tipped missiles that are already sitting around waiting for commands and will arm and launch in response to them.
So there are a metric buttload of missiles lying around all over The Former Soviet Union, just waiting for coded radio signals that will launch them.
Wouldn't getting hold of THOSE codes be interesting? They'd amount to the capability for any terrorist with the codes and a radio to launch a nuclear strike on the West.
Also wouldn't it be interesting if there was a failure mode that convinced one or a cluster of the missiles that the code had been sent.
(The only mitigating circumstance I can see is if step 1. involved arming the missiles and they didn't make that explicit. Then the hypothetical terrorist or failure mode would only work while the "Former Soviet Union" was in a declared military crisis.)
You're confusing impedance with resistance. It's really about voltage/current tradeoff for the parasitic currents that charge the stray capacitance through the stray inductance and stray resistance.
Lower impedance means higher charging currents, which means higher losses in stray resistance. So you want your transmission line impedance high and your frequency low - the lower the better. And in the case of AC-powered third-rail trains (such as subways and the Chicago Elevated) the unavoidable low impedance from the enormous stray capacitance of the miles of third-rail next to the ground is compensated for by running at a LOWER frequency. (The downside to lower frequency is that you need more core material in your transformers and motors - not a big problem for an electric railroad engine (which also needs weight for traction) or an electric self-propelled car - because the power to accelerate the extra weight is mostly returned by regenerative braking to be used elsewhere.)
You may also be confusing signal propagation with single-frequency power transmission. In the latter you do NOT try to match the impedance of the line. (You can't - because the resistive component of the load varies with how much power you're pulling - and you want to provide a voltage that dips only slightly with load, not drops to half the unloaded value.) Any energy that "bounces off" the "underterminated" load connections just goes to feed some OTHER load - or back to the generator to reduce it's mechanical energy consumption. You just try to roughly match the reactive component, mainly using lump-constant capacitors and relay switching, to avoid out-of-phase currents (which deliver no power but produce real resistive losses).
A half-wavelength of 60 Hz is about 776 miles (a little less due mainly to the refractive index of the air and the insulators), so lump power-factor correction is generally adequate to keep transmission-line pathologies under control (and switching transients get phase-shifted but are generally just that - transient). Meanwhile, "reflected power flowing backward" has the effect of REDUCING line current, and thus losses. The approximation of "put it in anywhere and take it out anywhere, less some resistive losses" is pretty close to the actual case for a single frequency sinusoid on an underloaded transmission line.
So you want an impedance which is low at the individual loads (to mitigate voltage dip and transient generation on switching) but as high as practical on long transmission lines (both to minimize LOAD current - the usual explanation - but also to minimize parasitic capacitance charging current and the associated resistive losses.) Fortunately, the voltage step-up transformers also step up the impedance (by the square of the voltage ratio), which is just what you want.
... if they can hook this system up to an electrode and an input device like a mouthcontrolled switch (if someone is fully paralyzed) it would give them great freedom again!
Or arm-controlled for paras and partially-quads.
But it would have other advantages.
The paralysis of the lower body from loss of brain control due to spinal injury produces a host of medical complications. Restoring and maintaining nerve and muscle function below the break, even if it requires prosthetic assist to control it, would head off most, if not all, of these. (There are other systems than legs-walking that would benefit from the same approach, as well.)
With months or years of all functions but the direct brain control kept healthy, attempts to restore the broken connection (whether by training promoting regrowth of nerve connections, stem-cell treatment, or whatever) would be greatly aided. (Currently, by the time you can try to regrow and retrain the nerves there's a good chance the stuff you're trying to control has broken down partially or completely. Oh, well...)
The scare scenario given in TFA seems to be a variant of... Taking out a local section of the grid and leaving the rest unable to serve its load. (Though I'm not sure, having not paid for a copy of the not-adequately-quoted article.)
And a closer reading of TFA2, referenced by TFA, makes that clearer.
It was an "aha" moment: Of COURSE disrupting the LIGHTLY loaded subnets (where there is a surplus of generation feeding the HEAVILY loaded sections) causes more failures than attacking those with heavy loads:
- Taking down a section with a generation surplus reduces the available power on the rest of the net, leading to local shortfalls that trip protective breakers on generators and produce the cascade failure.
- Taking down a section with a generation shortage may even help, taking out enough excess load to make up for the loss of the transmission capacity through the section and thus limiting or eliminating failure cascades into its neighbors.
Going "smarter" is a big boondoggle for the makers of the "smart network" equipment. Last I saw it would not pay for itself with either electrical savings AND reduced costs of outages combined. And it has extra failure modes of its own.
Replacing the current grid with a DC distribution similarly would be a great way to funnel government money into the pockets of campaign contributors but would hardly pay for itself in energy savings (though if done right it MIGHT raise reliability somewhat). Switching to DC across the grid would eliminate the AC transmission line phasing failure modes. But those are handled well already. It wouldn't do squat for the "not enough generation and transmission capacity to carry the load" failures - local or cascading.
The scare scenario given in TFA seems to be a variant of one of the latter: Taking out a local section of the grid and leaving the rest unable to serve its load. (Though I'm not sure, having not paid for a copy of the not-adequately-quoted article.) Presuming this is true it doesn't argue for the remedies suggested - either transmission line upgrades or "smart grid" technology.
Seems to me the right thing to do is build new long-haul transmission lines with DC where appropriate and stop wringing hands about it.
(It might also be good to boost the voltage of any new new DC transmission lines by about a factor of 2 from the current stuf, to match the voltage of hydrogen-boron fusion products. That would significantly reduce the amount of equipment needed to build a generation plant if any of the schemes that do direct conversion, such as Polywell fusors, work out.)
There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.
The main reason AC scaled better than DC was that simple transformers could be used to boost the voltage or long-distance transmission on affordable diameter wire and back down to what could be safely handled in a home. Shifting DC, at the time, required rotary converters and was limited in voltage by the arcing and size of the commutators.
Since about the 1960s or so DC conversion for long-lines has been practical. And with modern semiconductors it's now economically competitive. With that, DC lines become practical for a makeover.
AC, unfortunately, introduces propagation timing effects that make things a bit more complex to keep running. DC doesn't have those failure modes AND it makes somewhat better use of a given amount of metal in the wire.
(A downside of DC vs AC is that a DC arc is harder to extinguish.)
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This technique is a lot more invasive than casting, and it's not injectable. They cut you open and place it just like the metal counterpart; the improvement is that you don't have to be cut open twice.
This would have been nice when I broke a finger about a year ago. Because the tension of the tendons would pull it out of a "set" they had to drill and insert two wires - then later open me up to pull them back out again.
A couple pins that dissolved gracefully once the bone had knit would have been a great improvement on a second operation (and, unless they were VERY expensive, a great cost savings, too.) And I don't think I'd have had a lot of trouble with osteoporosis due to the magnesium in a couple inch-long hunks of wire.
... it depends detection of a significant number of machines being compromised to produce the detection event and response. Meanwhile a significant number of machines have been compromised. The horses are out of those barns by the time the doors are closed.
Rinse and repeat, with a fresh variant of the malware, until "all your horse are belong to us".
Meanwhile, all they're doing is detecting a pattern of distribution of a pattern of data, without any way to differentiate whether the data itself is malware. Surprise: This same pattern occurs with news and with ideas. Do we really want a surveillance system to treat the spread of, say, stories of government corruption, as a malware infection?
If you think Linux is inherently more secure than Windows, you're absolutely nuts.
Linux is more secure against malware than Windows in the same way that a solid storm window with a few pinhole air leaks at the edge of the frame is more secure against poison gas than a window screen.
This is a "feature" of the way Windows and its application suite are designed.
Now that elaborate malware constructs have been designed and debugged for decades on the Windows Swiss Cheese platforms, and a multibillion dollar malware industry built upon them, if Windows should ever be displaced as the dominant platform by Linux you can expect the payloads to be ported. Then ANY successful Linux exploit the authors can find will give them a new "infection head" and an opportunity to pull the same stunts on Linux, despite the far smaller number of vulnerabilities.
So Windows' security issues (and the failure of the company and users to adequately address them) have made things bad, not just for Windows users, but for everybody. The plague has been bred to enormous strength and virulence in other species and now poses a general threat - much like H1N1 in birds and pigs now poses a threat to humans. Thanks, Microsoft.
Meanwhile, with Windows still the big target, avoiding it in favor of the harder-to-crack, quicker-to-fix, less-profit-for-bad-guys-meanwhile Linux platform remains a benefit for those who use it.
And if it ever DOES become a big enough target to go after, we can hope that the lower number of vulnerabilities, more rapid fix cycle, the model of "fix the holes" in preference to "identify and intercept the latest mutant strains", and the far more varied population of instalations, might keep the problems far smaller than it is with Windows.
There's a company that will load your ashes into shotgun shells,
Or if one of your sympathetic buddies reloads his own shotgun shells he can do that by mixing in your ashes from an ordinary cremation.
I seriously doubt someone will someday say, "Hey, we don't have enough old rich dudes. Let's go resurrect some." Nope. Instead, you are going to be turned into an experiment. If you ever resurrect, it's not gonna be pretty.
Given WHO some of the "old (not usually very) rich dude"s are - many being historical figures in the technological revolution or participants in other activities that ended up looking historically significant - there's a good chance some would be reanimated just to ask them questions. Then they are their own support group and, should any be sufficiently successful, they might well chip in for the reanimation of others. (I hear some are making little teaser biography plaques.)
(And no I won't admit online who I am mundanely, or why someone might possibly be that interested in talking to me. Whats the point of a pseudonym if you broadcast your identity all the time? B-) )
However the hope is that the community that has formed around cryonics will have living members still interested in reanimating the suspended if/when it becomes practical. And that others still living will want to do it - in the hope that if THEY should need such service in the future others would similarly be interested.
Remember that, absent a crash of civilization (which would also likely disable the refrigeration and make it moot), the future in question is likely to arrive within the (unsuspended) lifetimes of many of those now living and participating on Slashdot. Say 30 years at the outside.
You really need to read "Rammer" by Larry Niven.
Already did, thanks.
AIDS, Hep-C, CJD, etc. put the spikes in Niven's organ-banks dystopia.
Meanwhile, technologies like 3-D rapid prototyping with collagen, growth-factors, tissue-type markers, and pluripotent stem cells make it look like "writing" replacement organs with the donor's own tissue cloned from a small dab of biopsied fat (at a month or two from start to implant-ready) will be ready for prime time within a few years (plus the interminable FDA approval process). It already "just works" starting from a cleaned-out donor collagen scaffold with its ready-made tissue-type-marker distribution and seeded with said adult stem cells.
And the _Children of the State_ memory-RNA transplant was based on the flatworm research which turned out to be flawed. Transplanting the mind looks to be a matter of using nanobots to "read" the cortical-columns and tune up the replacements to match.
So I'm not too worried about waking up in one of Niven's water-monopoly empires. (But even if I do, for somebody who isn't convinced of an afterlife that hasn't been manufactured in a lab it sure beats the alternative. B-) )
Not everyone can afford to have a proper geek burial
It's not all that expensive - especially if you sign up young.
For instance: ALCOR: You buy an insurance policy to cover the costs of the actual suspension and storage ($800ish/year for me - will depend on how old you are when you sign up) and pay your dues ($400/yr) and standby fee (your share of keeping the ambulance and such ready) ($120/year). $1400ish a year is not chump change. But it doesn't take a millionaire to do it either.
... which IMHO is about the geekiest funeral there is. (Think "the intent of the pyramids" but with stainless steel dewars and liquid nitrogen condensation fog.)
They can do what they want with the rest of my body once I'm done with it.
And who knows - there's some slight chance they WILL figure out how to download the person from a frozen-head-saved-game into a new model body (or fix the cracks in the brain, implant it in a cloned corpus, and restart it) - and somebody will think it's worthwhile to try it with me. Then it's time travel to the far future.
While we're at it, where did those dollar amounts come from?
- Was the NSF paying the credit card bills for porn sites? I doubt that.
- Was it added bandwidth cost? On an NSF internet feed? I doubt that, too.
- Was it supposed cost of the workers' time? Salaried white collar workers are not paid hourly, or overtime if they stay later because of time spent porn-surfing. Three strikes.
So either the dollar amounts are coming from some "misconduct" OTHER than porn surfing or there's something else fishy going on.
Also:
How do they know the guy was actually porn surfing? I know at the company where I'm working the nannyware gets all bent when I follow links to certain ISPs. For instance:
- When I'm trying to follow up a whistle-blower news report and the whistleblower posted a video on a site that's sufficiently open that OTHER people have posted X-rated videos or malware on it and so the nannyware has it on the list. Or:
- When I follow an archived link to a site that's gone and the sitename has been snatched by a domain squatter who also does porn sites, or
- When I typo a URL and there's a typosquatter with a porn site,
to name just three that I recall.
I don't usually follow this stuff up - since it would require an outside feed to check what the heck the site is really about plus a lot of internal red tape. But if you looked at the nannyware logs and assumed I meant to go after whatever the nannyware THOUGHT those sites were about you'd think I was regularly surfing for porn and malware.
Some americans have some pretty funny ideas about things which they don't have well implemented but work quite well elsewhere. Where the hell do you get these ideas about public transport?
From lots of research.
The scale and layout of much of the US makes mass transit impractical. In some places (like post-fire Chicago and dense-rectangular-grid New York City) it does work - quite well. But in others (like the San Francisco Bay area) it does not. Even if the various agencies worked together rather than building little fiefdoms studies indicate that it would never approach the per-ride total cost of private cars.
In still others (like rural Nevada or even outside a dense city) it's a joke. To have practical mass transit you need masses of people in some places and masses of destinations in others.
A car is in 99.9% of all cases more risky and more expensive for the owner.
You're not counting things like muggers and gangs working bus and train lines or exposure to seasonal flu, TB, and other diseases among "risks", are you?
As for cost I'm not comparing the tax-subsidized fare paid by a rider. I'm talking the total cost of the construction and operation of the bus/train service divided by rides vs. total cost of ownership and operation of an automobile (including its share of road construction and maintenance where it's not double-counted due to gas/license taxation) divided by equivalent rides. Cars beat buses or trains by a factor of several, even if the latter use exisiting rail lines.
Indeed, here in the SF Bay area we have several bus lines where the per-ride cost is in the thousands. It would be cheaper to decommission the line and use the tax money to take each of the regular riders, lease them a Mercedes every year, provide enough gas to make the equivalent trips. As for BART the cars are non-standard, built in France, and cost six million each as of a decade ago. Divide the depreciation over the cars' lifetimes by the number of riders, add in the amortized cost of the land under the (non-standard-gauge) rails, the construction, and the operation. Cars come out 'WAY ahead - even paying the horrible bridge tolls that help subsidize the BART system.
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Nope. I'm saying that they'd be VERY productive and were the one I picked to vote for as the best of the lot.
(Though I must admit that doing PR for engineering to counter the anti-tech and anti-success bias drummed into the public school kids was also very attractive.)
What a bunch of lame ideas.
Many of them appeared to be: ...)
- Things that should already be done by well-defined organizations (usually governmental).
- Things that shouldn't be done (because the downsides, like creating databased of personal information that can be used to harm individuals, violate Franklin's rule: (He who trades freedom for safety
- Things that have proven cost-ineffective (such as public transport which, except in special circumstances, tends to cost far more per ride - in money, risk, and rider lifetime - than individual vehicles).
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
Isn't this the first time the GPL has proven enforcible by a CUSTOMER demanding the source? All the stuff I recall so far is the COPYRIGHT HOLDER doing the enforcement.
Anyone releasing code to the masses should make it public domain to remove any legal controversies that may arise over it.
GPL was created specifically to overcome the problems of public domain release.
If your code is public domain, somebody else can appropriate it, make a change (fix a bug, add a feature, etc.) and copyright THAT. Then everybody else, including the original author, is locked out of the derived work. You'll never be able to fix that bug, add that feature (without doing a very different version from scratch), and so on.
GPL (and the other open source licenses) keeps the work under copyright in order to let the original authors enforce licensing terms that prohibit such shenanigans.
Is there anybody out there who seriously still has a Thatcheristic fear that they'll be burning the Reichstag again?
IMHO the main effect of the ongoing censorship is to keep the new generations ignorant of the way the NAZIs actually operated. It will be much more difficult for them to recognize it if it raises its smooth head again, draped in a new set of symbols but sending the same old message. So the net result is an INcrease of the risk of a repeat, rather than a DEcrease.
The wartime anti-NAZI propaganda paints a distorted picture of what it was like. Part of the horror was how ATTRACTIVE and SWEET and "TOUGH LOVE" it all was to those who experienced it directly (and weren't part of the out-groups in the later stages). Another part was how it all followed in easy steps from the Weimar Republic's age of enlightenment and precursor cluster of ideologies (consensus decision-making, health food/vegetarianism, new-age occultism, animal rights, wealth redistribution, government control of "corporate greed" for the public good, ...) that we'd recognize under another name today.
Does the Looking Glass radio signal also fire the missiles DIRECTLY via a completely automated system?
I thought (from government-published PR pieces) that it authorized two guys in a bunker at each cluster of (land-based) missiles (and the equivalent for subs, ships, bombers, airbases, etc.) to proceed with their launch procedures. As such it would be subject to human judgment that the situation might be such that the signal was bogus.
Another possibility is that there ISN'T such a system but, now that things are heating up between the US and Russia, the Former Soviets would like us to THINK there is.
Things get really twisted when you're playing the superpower saber-rattling game.
Its construction might have had less to do with Reagan and more to do with the fact that a single moment of restraint [by a soviet officer who got a bogus five-missile launch detection from a satellite during a crisis] two years earlier had stopped a nuclear war.
Same thing happened the other way, too.
The DEW line was turned on to operational status a few days before the announced date - in case the Soviets decided to stage a strike just before it was turned on. A few hours after that it began reporting waves of missile launches. (But it didn't predict the targets they would hit.) The general in charge decided that this might be bogus and held off pending reports of actual hits.
Turns out he was dead right. The big radars had seen the Moon rising - and misinterpreted the strong, long-delayed, echo as a bunch of echoes from later pulses (and thus a bunch of closer targets). And since the moon wasn't about to crash into the Earth the computers couldn't figure out where this cloud of phantom missiles were going to touch down.
The problem was fixed and the DEW Line went into service.
On the first page it explains all the conditions that must be met for this thing to go off. They include:
1. Enabled by military
2. No contact from headquarters
3. Detected nuclear detonation
4. Button press by guy in bunker
It's not automated. ...
And then:
5. Several "command missiles" are launched, which radio coded commands to:
6. Lots of nuclear-tipped missiles that are already sitting around waiting for commands and will arm and launch in response to them.
So there are a metric buttload of missiles lying around all over The Former Soviet Union, just waiting for coded radio signals that will launch them.
Wouldn't getting hold of THOSE codes be interesting? They'd amount to the capability for any terrorist with the codes and a radio to launch a nuclear strike on the West.
Also wouldn't it be interesting if there was a failure mode that convinced one or a cluster of the missiles that the code had been sent.
(The only mitigating circumstance I can see is if step 1. involved arming the missiles and they didn't make that explicit. Then the hypothetical terrorist or failure mode would only work while the "Former Soviet Union" was in a declared military crisis.)
You're confusing impedance with resistance. It's really about voltage/current tradeoff for the parasitic currents that charge the stray capacitance through the stray inductance and stray resistance.
Lower impedance means higher charging currents, which means higher losses in stray resistance. So you want your transmission line impedance high and your frequency low - the lower the better. And in the case of AC-powered third-rail trains (such as subways and the Chicago Elevated) the unavoidable low impedance from the enormous stray capacitance of the miles of third-rail next to the ground is compensated for by running at a LOWER frequency. (The downside to lower frequency is that you need more core material in your transformers and motors - not a big problem for an electric railroad engine (which also needs weight for traction) or an electric self-propelled car - because the power to accelerate the extra weight is mostly returned by regenerative braking to be used elsewhere.)
You may also be confusing signal propagation with single-frequency power transmission. In the latter you do NOT try to match the impedance of the line. (You can't - because the resistive component of the load varies with how much power you're pulling - and you want to provide a voltage that dips only slightly with load, not drops to half the unloaded value.) Any energy that "bounces off" the "underterminated" load connections just goes to feed some OTHER load - or back to the generator to reduce it's mechanical energy consumption. You just try to roughly match the reactive component, mainly using lump-constant capacitors and relay switching, to avoid out-of-phase currents (which deliver no power but produce real resistive losses).
A half-wavelength of 60 Hz is about 776 miles (a little less due mainly to the refractive index of the air and the insulators), so lump power-factor correction is generally adequate to keep transmission-line pathologies under control (and switching transients get phase-shifted but are generally just that - transient). Meanwhile, "reflected power flowing backward" has the effect of REDUCING line current, and thus losses. The approximation of "put it in anywhere and take it out anywhere, less some resistive losses" is pretty close to the actual case for a single frequency sinusoid on an underloaded transmission line.
So you want an impedance which is low at the individual loads (to mitigate voltage dip and transient generation on switching) but as high as practical on long transmission lines (both to minimize LOAD current - the usual explanation - but also to minimize parasitic capacitance charging current and the associated resistive losses.) Fortunately, the voltage step-up transformers also step up the impedance (by the square of the voltage ratio), which is just what you want.
... if they can hook this system up to an electrode and an input device like a mouthcontrolled switch (if someone is fully paralyzed) it would give them great freedom again!
Or arm-controlled for paras and partially-quads.
But it would have other advantages.
The paralysis of the lower body from loss of brain control due to spinal injury produces a host of medical complications. Restoring and maintaining nerve and muscle function below the break, even if it requires prosthetic assist to control it, would head off most, if not all, of these. (There are other systems than legs-walking that would benefit from the same approach, as well.)
With months or years of all functions but the direct brain control kept healthy, attempts to restore the broken connection (whether by training promoting regrowth of nerve connections, stem-cell treatment, or whatever) would be greatly aided. (Currently, by the time you can try to regrow and retrain the nerves there's a good chance the stuff you're trying to control has broken down partially or completely. Oh, well...)
The scare scenario given in TFA seems to be a variant of ... Taking out a local section of the grid and leaving the rest unable to serve its load. (Though I'm not sure, having not paid for a copy of the not-adequately-quoted article.)
And a closer reading of TFA2, referenced by TFA, makes that clearer.
It was an "aha" moment: Of COURSE disrupting the LIGHTLY loaded subnets (where there is a surplus of generation feeding the HEAVILY loaded sections) causes more failures than attacking those with heavy loads:
- Taking down a section with a generation surplus reduces the available power on the rest of the net, leading to local shortfalls that trip protective breakers on generators and produce the cascade failure.
- Taking down a section with a generation shortage may even help, taking out enough excess load to make up for the loss of the transmission capacity through the section and thus limiting or eliminating failure cascades into its neighbors.
Going "smarter" is a big boondoggle for the makers of the "smart network" equipment. Last I saw it would not pay for itself with either electrical savings AND reduced costs of outages combined. And it has extra failure modes of its own.
Replacing the current grid with a DC distribution similarly would be a great way to funnel government money into the pockets of campaign contributors but would hardly pay for itself in energy savings (though if done right it MIGHT raise reliability somewhat). Switching to DC across the grid would eliminate the AC transmission line phasing failure modes. But those are handled well already. It wouldn't do squat for the "not enough generation and transmission capacity to carry the load" failures - local or cascading.
The scare scenario given in TFA seems to be a variant of one of the latter: Taking out a local section of the grid and leaving the rest unable to serve its load. (Though I'm not sure, having not paid for a copy of the not-adequately-quoted article.) Presuming this is true it doesn't argue for the remedies suggested - either transmission line upgrades or "smart grid" technology.
Seems to me the right thing to do is build new long-haul transmission lines with DC where appropriate and stop wringing hands about it.
(It might also be good to boost the voltage of any new new DC transmission lines by about a factor of 2 from the current stuf, to match the voltage of hydrogen-boron fusion products. That would significantly reduce the amount of equipment needed to build a generation plant if any of the schemes that do direct conversion, such as Polywell fusors, work out.)
There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.
The main reason AC scaled better than DC was that simple transformers could be used to boost the voltage or long-distance transmission on affordable diameter wire and back down to what could be safely handled in a home. Shifting DC, at the time, required rotary converters and was limited in voltage by the arcing and size of the commutators.
Since about the 1960s or so DC conversion for long-lines has been practical. And with modern semiconductors it's now economically competitive. With that, DC lines become practical for a makeover.
AC, unfortunately, introduces propagation timing effects that make things a bit more complex to keep running. DC doesn't have those failure modes AND it makes somewhat better use of a given amount of metal in the wire.
(A downside of DC vs AC is that a DC arc is harder to extinguish.)
And Wikipedia comes through again:
After a twenty-two-month pregnancy, the mother will give birth to a calf that will weigh about 113 kg (250 lb) ...
Gosh, what a coincidence!