this guy should be congratulated for uncovering such slack security.
If he told the owner about the insecurity and didn't exploit it himself, yes.
imagine what havoc he could have made if he had been malicious, or had sold the passwords to Osama....
Or if he kept it quiet and exploited it himself - stealing services and running up bills for the victimized system owners, building a business on it and pocketing money for himself and his co-conspirators.
Wait... That's what he did, isn't it?
No, he should not be congratulated. He should be convicted and punished as the thief he is.
Better yet: Why not have a unique default password that's printed on the device, or a function of a unique number that's printed on the device and NOT accessible from the network?
That way the bad guy would need physical access to the particular box to read that label to get what he needs to construct the default password. (Since it's a default password the "view the label" hole could be instantly plugged just by changing it.)
(Not from the MAC address, of course, nor the serial number if that's available in SNMP, etc. Not even from a cryptographic function from such stuff - since that leaves the company using internally a secret that could divulge the default password of all their boxes if it leaked - which it no doubt would, as it get passed around internally so the help center could use it...)
Seriously though, why would ANYONE consider it smart to get out of jury duty when the decisions of the juries impacts case law like no other. Why is "Getting out of jury duty" considered smart? Yes, it is a hassle and there are opportunity costs involved, but think of the cost of ALL JURIES BEING RETARDED.
Because the jury selection process has been corrupted to the point that anyone with any background in the subject in question, or an engineering background in general, will be deliberately excluded from the selection.
If I understand it correctly, this apparently started out to avoid having jury members bring into their deliberations any personal knowledge of information that is not in evidence (and thus was not subject to challenge by the litigating parties). But the net effect is to exclude exactly those people with the educational toolkit to make informed judgements on technical issues, rather than being led around by the rhetorical skills of the attorneys.
People with technical backgrounds are, in fact, excluded from most trials. The ability to reason logically is seen as a liability by both prosecuting and defending attorneys.
One result is that the panels finally selected are far from a statistical sample of the population - with a statistical bias that subverts the intent of the jury system - and thus justice - to an extreme degree.
The other result is that going through jury selection is, for most technical people (along with anybody with a strong political position, knowledge of guns or crime, etc.), a massive waste of time. They will almost never be selected.
= = = =
By the way: You won't find the phrase "jury of his peers" in the US legal system. This is because we're all supposed to be peers before the law. Thus you have no case if you, as an engineer, object to being tried by a jury that systematically excludes engineers and consists exclusively of people who are retired or on welfare.
Having lived through the period in question, and having been a voracious reader since about 1955 (with access to literature from before that), a regular listener to radio since before transistor sets, and an intermittent viewer of television since the McCarthy era, I can safely make assertions about the quality and quantity of science writing during that period.
It started going downhill about the "summer of love", with the demonization of technology and the popularization of the Malthusian dystopia, and was on a continuous slide until the advent of computers and networking (in the form of netnews, conferencing systems on university timesharing services, and BBSes on the early CP/M and Apple machines) created a new venue for the technophile culture.
Yes there was always some good stuff to be had. (For instance: in Scientific American - until they were bought out, dumbed down, and rendered PC by their current publisher.) But in the mainstream media it has been progressively fewer and farther between, even into the current decade.
That's why we spend our time ON the net instead of in front of the Boob Tube, isn't it? B-)
Look at the science fact articles by various authors in Analog magazine when it was under John Campbell. Also look at Isaac Asimov's science fact articles in various publications during the same period.
Journalism has been dumbed down greatly since the post-Vietnam politicization of news and the television "vast wasteland" era concept of news as entertainment for people too dumb to read. This is why you have to go back to about WWII and its pre- and post-war periods to find most of the examples of good pre-web science writing.
... is this is yet another example of governmental intervention where it is not due?
When considering government interference with free speech and balancing this with libel and other criminal written speech, please remember that the schools and government in question are in the UK.
The UK government does NOT have a constitutional guarantee of a right to free speech and freedom of the press. Its libel laws are quite different from those of the US as well. (It's one of the major differences between the legal systems of the two - in the US truth is an absolute defense aganst claims of defamation, and "public figures" have an extra burden of proving deliberate malace when bringing a charge.)
Now the question was about whether such intervention was PROPER. IMHO that doesn't vary as you cross The Pond - though others may disagree. But what's LEGAL, what's standard governmental practice, and the theoretical underpinnings behind decisions and reasoning about them DO differ drastically. So what the courts will let the government get away with, and how to go about getting them to force the government to back off, will also differ greatly.
One of the things they're adding is a time-based cache for unused images. For example, if after 5 seconds an image isn't used, it's freed from memory. This alone gave them a huge memory boost, IIRC.
Can you imagine how that will work with "forward", "back", and tabbed browsing on a slow dialup line? B-b
When I'm out in the sticks and have just spent several minutes loading an image I don't want to do it all over again just because I flipped to something else for a few seconds.
It drives me nuts - even when I'm on a fast DSL or T-carrier line - when web designers build in lots of graphics to prettify their pages without considering the download time for somebody who's not on the same machine or LAN with the server containing the files. So now the BROWSER developers want to "Speed up my browsing experience by freeing memory"? Yeah, right.
Perhaps the culprit is C++. Languages with auto-garbage-collection or are database-engine-based tend to clean up automatically or cache to disk more effectively. C/C++ just seems to have so many low-level crevices to accidently mess up with.
Like C, C++ gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself.
C++ has four memory models for object instances:
- Global/static: (permanent one-per-program instances).
- Stack/locally scoped: (local variables of class type in functions/subroutines or limited scope (between curly-brackets) within them.
- Member/class scoped: (non-static variables of class type which are members of another class.)
- Heap/dynamic: (created with "new" and released with "delete")
The programming model for management of dynamic memory is algorithmic: The programmer is expected to keep track of when objects are no longer reachable and free them.
C++ provides enough hooks to construct reference-counting smartpointers that can delete dynamic instances when their refcounts go to zero. But reference counting isn't a general solution: A set of mutually-referencing objects can become disconnected. They can no longer be reached and should be freed. But each references another, so their reference counts are non-zero and they persist. This is why garbage collection requires full-blown forest-walks (or incremental partitions of them) to reliably avoid memory leaks.
Unfortunately, C++ has a subtle bug in the specification (and standards) that prevents building a general garbage collection system within it (even with preprocessor assistance).
The problem is that garbage collection is one of the ways that an external routine can (properly) call a virtual member function (or do the equivalent) on an object that is midway through its construction or destruction and absolutely must get the correct version of the function for the stage of construction in question.
This occurs because an object can have pointers to heap-allocated ("dynamic") objects as variables at multiple levels of inheritance. To build in a garbage collector your objects need a way for the collector to identify their pointers and follow them. Anything that allocates memory may provoke it do to this as a side-effect, and routines called during construction (or destruction) may allocate memory, or call something (that calls something that calls something...) which does so. If this occurs in the base class of a derived class with member variables which are pointers, the latter aren't initialized and contain leftover heap or stack junk. So the garbage collector can go awry and get totally lost.
To avoid this you build heap-allocated objects (and those which point to them) so that they contain a virtual function that enumerates the pointers in its own level (and those more baseward) and override this as you proceed through the stages of construction, so the pointers at each level are enumerated only IF they have been initialized. (There are constructs other than garbage collection with similar issues, and for some of them the issues are also significant on destruction, as various levels are finalized and their virtual functions would no longer perform correctly.)
C++ actually gets this correct during the execution of the objects' own constructors and destructors themselves. (Other OOP languages, such as Smalltalk and Objective C, don't. Smalltalk gives you the "subclass" version during the construction of all the levels of "superclasses" - thus breaking the debugging of the superclasses whenever you override a method that is used in a constructor. It gets away with garbage collection because it's built-in and handled separately.)
Unfortunately, member variables of object type also have construction and destruction, which might provoke garbage collection (or what-have-you) as a side-effect. During the construction of members you're guaranteed to have times when other members are not yet initialized - which ma
- Security people are paid to have NO sense of humor.
- Bad guys are known to probe security with plausibly-deniable bogus threats, in order to identify weaknesses, before perpetrating the real action. To counter this, when security detects such a probe they must react in a way that takes the bad guy out of circulation, rather than letting him continue to probe until he finds and exploits a weakness. If that means such "artists" as this one who deliberately probe security become "collateral damage", too bad. They knew the rules when they performed their "art". (But it's still up to security to distinguish between deliberate probes and accidental appearances, to avoid penalizing true innocents.)
My mobile # is on the DNC list and I still get calls.
My landlines ditto lately - especially on/near the Labor Day holiday. Two of the callers I remember claimed to be Sears and a car dealership I'd never heard of.
I've been assuming these calls were not actually from the companies claimed, but instead either phishing scams or crooks looking for unoccupied houses to rob.
They also want to use magnetic containment, rather than an Orion-style "pusher plate" sprayed with oil. Unclear if that can be made to work.
Ought to be a cake-walk once they've got the field in place to make it go "bang".
The pellet is ALREADY confined in a mag field. The re-expanding plasma from the explosion dumps much of its energy into compressing the field between the plasma and the conductor that created it, making the field stronger (and dumping a bunch of the energy back into the conductor as electricity for potential reuse or consumption).
Should be easy to create a selective leak in the desired direction and more fields to guide the plasma as it makes its getaway. (In fact the compressed field toward the vehicle can be used as a spring to return some of that collected energy to the plasma, further increasing the exhaust velocity. And/or the energy from the compressed field could be used to create or strengthen the "nozzle" guiding fields, just-in-time to guide the burst of plasma.)
Lots of opportunity for cute electric/magnetic/plasma engineering tricks here.
And unlike fusion the time scale, from ignition to completion of the exhaust cycle, is short, so plasma instabilities aren't an issue.
You do realize that burning coal has put more Uranium into the air than all the atomic explosions combined right?
I'm more worried about Strontium 90 and radioactive iodine.
Given that Hanford deliberately released a BUNCH of radioactive iodine upwind of an indian reservation at least partly to see what its effects would be on the "marginal population" of indians and rednecks downwind (leading to a considerable increase in birth defect constelations and graves' disease), I suspect others are with me on that.
For all the talk of Small Government, NCLB is a huge intrusion into local control of schools and it's agenda is to sabotage public education by setting up schools to fail. But I was under the impression that the public schools had largely ALREADY failed (do in some extent to previous federal interventions), they were on a downward spiral, and the NCLB's agenda was to put them on a spot where, one-by-one, they either cleaned up their act or were destroyed and the kids moved elsewhere.
Of course it's not MY agenda to defend the NCLB. (IMHO the solution is to get the fed out of the business of education altogether, rather than trying to patch its previous mismanagement with more layers of management.) But let's at least characterize it correctly.
Anti ILLEGAL immigration. (As in "They have to go back home and get in line behind those who DID follow the rules. No prizes for breaking the law.")
bad bad bad for tech.
Really? How does illegal immigration help tech?
Last time I looked illegal immigration was mainly good for breaking unions, increasing the number of unemployed, and providing cheap labor to businesses at pay scales and working conditions below those a citizen is ALLOWED to accept, subsidized by mainly-citizen and LEGAL immigrant taxpayers (at least those who still remain employed) in the forms of loads on tax-supported social services for the illegal workers and their families.
And while may illegal immigrants may be "honest working people just trying to make a living", a system that takes people who come from a country where the law is a corrupt joke and requires them to break OUR laws even to be here makes it hard to convince them that any OTHER laws ought to be obeyed. Instead it rewards those who gratuitously break laws whenever it's in their interest and provides a selection pressure for such people to come here while the more law-abiding stay behind.
(as well as unconstitutional, unlegitimate,...
Quite the contrary: Congress is explicitly authorized by the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8) "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization... throughout the United States"
And I'll skip the remainder of your claims (which are value judgements) with the comment that gratuitous assertions can be gratuitously denied. B-)
If your hearing in both ears is good and the environment isn't too noisy, you don't need a headband full of electronics and sensors for this.
With practice you can "image" enough of your environment to get around just from echoes of your own body's sounds or other ambient noises of suitable waveshape. (This is how you get the "closing in" feeling in tight spaces.)
There are reports of a totally blind kid using this effect to ride a bicycle and avoid obstacles. (He made clicking sounds with his mouth to provide a controlled, sharp (low-distance-error) sound, effectively emulating one mode of a bat's sonar.)
"Chirps" (single tones rapidly "swept" at a constant change of frequency per unit time) are potentially far better for imaging and ranging than "clicks" (impulses or short sound bursts that approximate them). But it's not clear that the human brain and vocal system has the necessary structures for generating and processing them correctly.
= = = =
Of course the headband might be much more effective than training up your own sound-generating and sensory systems - which (unlike a bat's or a cetacean's) aren't optimized for this service.
Apple's model is unprecedented, and allows people to get a phone that isn't "subsidized" traditionally...
Instead it's subsidized non-traditionally but about as effectively - counting on a large number of people to actually activate the phone in the subsidizing manner (and no doubt with the subsidy set high enough to cover the look-gift-horse-in-mouth fraction that don't get activated).
What kind of gift is it when you have to pay hundreds of dollars per year to make it be more than a paperweight?
Now if you're talking about people who ARE AT&T iPhone customers that simply choose to unlock their iPhone, I'd agree [that Apple doesn't lose money if the phones are unlocked] - to a point. But I'm talking about iPhones unlocked and never activated or used on AT&T, which is going to be an increasing number of iPhones. That's a much bigger market than you think it is.
But the question is, if the iPhone couldn't be unlocked:
a) How many of those phones would have been bought and activated with AT&T (at a potential gain for Apple of $250-$200 bounty plus $9/month for 2 years), and
b) How many would have NOT BEEN SOLD (at whatever their profit margin is on the vastly overpriced piece of commodity hardware)?
IMHO, while a) is very lucrative per phone, b) is a LOT more phones. Especially if the ability to crack iPhones retards the rise of lower-priced but unlocked competitive products. (For starters there are areas of the US that AT&T doesn't cover but some other carrier does. People who live/work/travel there have no reason to buy an iPhone unless they can unlock it.)
Apple needed a network partner to insure connectivity and enable the launch. And the partnership is an enormous revenue stream. So they needed to launch the phone as a locked product and not visibly encourage circumvention of their partner's lock-in. But as long as it doesn't jeopardize their revenue from the phones that are subscribed with their partner it's in their interest to have people buy additional phones and unlock them to use with other carriers.
5) The electric company doesn't care how much I use. The more the merrier.
The more you use, the higher your rate plan goes. Exceeding the set baseline puts you into a higher per-kWh charge. You pay for the amount you use.
Rising cost per unit of power with rising usage is a government mandate, imposed due to pressure by enviromentalists. Left to itself the power company would be happy to give you a lower rate with increased usage - as it does by giving lower rates to large users. Especially if your usage is not during their peak power period, when they have to use the more expensive generation to meet the demand.
In fact, if you look at your bill, within each government-mandated tier you're actually paying less per unit of power as you approach the high end. This is because there's a flat "be connected to the grid" fee that is amortized over a larger amount of power.
Disconnect at a minimum charge to protect batteries from undercharge would be a good idea, too.
Meaning: Disconnect the laptop's load from the external power source if the voltage at the laptop power jack or renewable-energy-brick input is at a voltage indicating minimum acceptable charge level on an external battery - to protect the RE system's batteries from undercharge.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, shoot. How did I miss the second part of your posting where you propose the same thing in different words?
Guess it comes from trying to read slashdot in a cave...
this guy should be congratulated for uncovering such slack security.
If he told the owner about the insecurity and didn't exploit it himself, yes.
imagine what havoc he could have made if he had been malicious, or had sold the passwords to Osama....
Or if he kept it quiet and exploited it himself - stealing services and running up bills for the victimized system owners, building a business on it and pocketing money for himself and his co-conspirators.
Wait... That's what he did, isn't it?
No, he should not be congratulated. He should be convicted and punished as the thief he is.
Wait... That's what happened, isn't it?
Isn't it nice
Better yet: Why not have a unique default password that's printed on the device, or a function of a unique number that's printed on the device and NOT accessible from the network?
That way the bad guy would need physical access to the particular box to read that label to get what he needs to construct the default password. (Since it's a default password the "view the label" hole could be instantly plugged just by changing it.)
(Not from the MAC address, of course, nor the serial number if that's available in SNMP, etc. Not even from a cryptographic function from such stuff - since that leaves the company using internally a secret that could divulge the default password of all their boxes if it leaked - which it no doubt would, as it get passed around internally so the help center could use it...)
Seriously though, why would ANYONE consider it smart to get out of jury duty when the decisions of the juries impacts case law like no other. Why is "Getting out of jury duty" considered smart? Yes, it is a hassle and there are opportunity costs involved, but think of the cost of ALL JURIES BEING RETARDED.
Because the jury selection process has been corrupted to the point that anyone with any background in the subject in question, or an engineering background in general, will be deliberately excluded from the selection.
If I understand it correctly, this apparently started out to avoid having jury members bring into their deliberations any personal knowledge of information that is not in evidence (and thus was not subject to challenge by the litigating parties). But the net effect is to exclude exactly those people with the educational toolkit to make informed judgements on technical issues, rather than being led around by the rhetorical skills of the attorneys.
People with technical backgrounds are, in fact, excluded from most trials. The ability to reason logically is seen as a liability by both prosecuting and defending attorneys.
One result is that the panels finally selected are far from a statistical sample of the population - with a statistical bias that subverts the intent of the jury system - and thus justice - to an extreme degree.
The other result is that going through jury selection is, for most technical people (along with anybody with a strong political position, knowledge of guns or crime, etc.), a massive waste of time. They will almost never be selected.
= = = =
By the way: You won't find the phrase "jury of his peers" in the US legal system. This is because we're all supposed to be peers before the law. Thus you have no case if you, as an engineer, object to being tried by a jury that systematically excludes engineers and consists exclusively of people who are retired or on welfare.
Having lived through the period in question, and having been a voracious reader since about 1955 (with access to literature from before that), a regular listener to radio since before transistor sets, and an intermittent viewer of television since the McCarthy era, I can safely make assertions about the quality and quantity of science writing during that period.
It started going downhill about the "summer of love", with the demonization of technology and the popularization of the Malthusian dystopia, and was on a continuous slide until the advent of computers and networking (in the form of netnews, conferencing systems on university timesharing services, and BBSes on the early CP/M and Apple machines) created a new venue for the technophile culture.
Yes there was always some good stuff to be had. (For instance: in Scientific American - until they were bought out, dumbed down, and rendered PC by their current publisher.) But in the mainstream media it has been progressively fewer and farther between, even into the current decade.
That's why we spend our time ON the net instead of in front of the Boob Tube, isn't it? B-)
Look at the science fact articles by various authors in Analog magazine when it was under John Campbell. Also look at Isaac Asimov's science fact articles in various publications during the same period.
Journalism has been dumbed down greatly since the post-Vietnam politicization of news and the television "vast wasteland" era concept of news as entertainment for people too dumb to read. This is why you have to go back to about WWII and its pre- and post-war periods to find most of the examples of good pre-web science writing.
... is this is yet another example of governmental intervention where it is not due?
When considering government interference with free speech and balancing this with libel and other criminal written speech, please remember that the schools and government in question are in the UK.
The UK government does NOT have a constitutional guarantee of a right to free speech and freedom of the press. Its libel laws are quite different from those of the US as well. (It's one of the major differences between the legal systems of the two - in the US truth is an absolute defense aganst claims of defamation, and "public figures" have an extra burden of proving deliberate malace when bringing a charge.)
Now the question was about whether such intervention was PROPER. IMHO that doesn't vary as you cross The Pond - though others may disagree. But what's LEGAL, what's standard governmental practice, and the theoretical underpinnings behind decisions and reasoning about them DO differ drastically. So what the courts will let the government get away with, and how to go about getting them to force the government to back off, will also differ greatly.
Fair deal? Not to worry -- the feature is disabled by default."
But does the "enable" interface inform the user that Google gets their browsing history as a side-effect of providing the blacklist?
One of the things they're adding is a time-based cache for unused images. For example, if after 5 seconds an image isn't used, it's freed from memory. This alone gave them a huge memory boost, IIRC.
Can you imagine how that will work with "forward", "back", and tabbed browsing on a slow dialup line? B-b
When I'm out in the sticks and have just spent several minutes loading an image I don't want to do it all over again just because I flipped to something else for a few seconds.
It drives me nuts - even when I'm on a fast DSL or T-carrier line - when web designers build in lots of graphics to prettify their pages without considering the download time for somebody who's not on the same machine or LAN with the server containing the files. So now the BROWSER developers want to "Speed up my browsing experience by freeing memory"? Yeah, right.
Perhaps the culprit is C++. Languages with auto-garbage-collection or are database-engine-based tend to clean up automatically or cache to disk more effectively. C/C++ just seems to have so many low-level crevices to accidently mess up with.
...) which does so. If this occurs in the base class of a derived class with member variables which are pointers, the latter aren't initialized and contain leftover heap or stack junk. So the garbage collector can go awry and get totally lost.
Like C, C++ gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself.
C++ has four memory models for object instances:
- Global/static: (permanent one-per-program instances).
- Stack/locally scoped: (local variables of class type in functions/subroutines or limited scope (between curly-brackets) within them.
- Member/class scoped: (non-static variables of class type which are members of another class.)
- Heap/dynamic: (created with "new" and released with "delete")
The programming model for management of dynamic memory is algorithmic: The programmer is expected to keep track of when objects are no longer reachable and free them.
C++ provides enough hooks to construct reference-counting smartpointers that can delete dynamic instances when their refcounts go to zero. But reference counting isn't a general solution: A set of mutually-referencing objects can become disconnected. They can no longer be reached and should be freed. But each references another, so their reference counts are non-zero and they persist. This is why garbage collection requires full-blown forest-walks (or incremental partitions of them) to reliably avoid memory leaks.
Unfortunately, C++ has a subtle bug in the specification (and standards) that prevents building a general garbage collection system within it (even with preprocessor assistance).
The problem is that garbage collection is one of the ways that an external routine can (properly) call a virtual member function (or do the equivalent) on an object that is midway through its construction or destruction and absolutely must get the correct version of the function for the stage of construction in question.
This occurs because an object can have pointers to heap-allocated ("dynamic") objects as variables at multiple levels of inheritance. To build in a garbage collector your objects need a way for the collector to identify their pointers and follow them. Anything that allocates memory may provoke it do to this as a side-effect, and routines called during construction (or destruction) may allocate memory, or call something (that calls something that calls something
To avoid this you build heap-allocated objects (and those which point to them) so that they contain a virtual function that enumerates the pointers in its own level (and those more baseward) and override this as you proceed through the stages of construction, so the pointers at each level are enumerated only IF they have been initialized. (There are constructs other than garbage collection with similar issues, and for some of them the issues are also significant on destruction, as various levels are finalized and their virtual functions would no longer perform correctly.)
C++ actually gets this correct during the execution of the objects' own constructors and destructors themselves. (Other OOP languages, such as Smalltalk and Objective C, don't. Smalltalk gives you the "subclass" version during the construction of all the levels of "superclasses" - thus breaking the debugging of the superclasses whenever you override a method that is used in a constructor. It gets away with garbage collection because it's built-in and handled separately.)
Unfortunately, member variables of object type also have construction and destruction, which might provoke garbage collection (or what-have-you) as a side-effect. During the construction of members you're guaranteed to have times when other members are not yet initialized - which ma
Dead on. (Almost literally.) Some addenda:
- Security people are paid to have NO sense of humor.
- Bad guys are known to probe security with plausibly-deniable bogus threats, in order to identify weaknesses, before perpetrating the real action. To counter this, when security detects such a probe they must react in a way that takes the bad guy out of circulation, rather than letting him continue to probe until he finds and exploits a weakness. If that means such "artists" as this one who deliberately probe security become "collateral damage", too bad. They knew the rules when they performed their "art". (But it's still up to security to distinguish between deliberate probes and accidental appearances, to avoid penalizing true innocents.)
Reading the license, it looks like a pretty ordinary, simple, GPL-ish license. ... I'm still completely in the dark about why it's so incompatible.
Same here.
But in legal issues the devil is in the details.
I'd like to see an explanation from OSI of what the (alleged) incompatibilities are.
My mobile # is on the DNC list and I still get calls.
My landlines ditto lately - especially on/near the Labor Day holiday. Two of the callers I remember claimed to be Sears and a car dealership I'd never heard of.
I've been assuming these calls were not actually from the companies claimed, but instead either phishing scams or crooks looking for unoccupied houses to rob.
They also want to use magnetic containment, rather than an Orion-style "pusher plate" sprayed with oil. Unclear if that can be made to work.
Ought to be a cake-walk once they've got the field in place to make it go "bang".
The pellet is ALREADY confined in a mag field. The re-expanding plasma from the explosion dumps much of its energy into compressing the field between the plasma and the conductor that created it, making the field stronger (and dumping a bunch of the energy back into the conductor as electricity for potential reuse or consumption).
Should be easy to create a selective leak in the desired direction and more fields to guide the plasma as it makes its getaway. (In fact the compressed field toward the vehicle can be used as a spring to return some of that collected energy to the plasma, further increasing the exhaust velocity. And/or the energy from the compressed field could be used to create or strengthen the "nozzle" guiding fields, just-in-time to guide the burst of plasma.)
Lots of opportunity for cute electric/magnetic/plasma engineering tricks here.
And unlike fusion the time scale, from ignition to completion of the exhaust cycle, is short, so plasma instabilities aren't an issue.
You do realize that burning coal has put more Uranium into the air than all the atomic explosions combined right?
I'm more worried about Strontium 90 and radioactive iodine.
Given that Hanford deliberately released a BUNCH of radioactive iodine upwind of an indian reservation at least partly to see what its effects would be on the "marginal population" of indians and rednecks downwind (leading to a considerable increase in birth defect constelations and graves' disease), I suspect others are with me on that.
I recall that troops in Iraq had already started using silly string to detect IED's.
I wonder if a light spray of this stuff would make a hidden IED stand out as a bright red spot?
And perhaps with red trails marking how it arrived and where the people who delivered it went when they left?
For all the talk of Small Government, NCLB is a huge intrusion into local control of schools and it's agenda is to sabotage public education by setting up schools to fail.
But I was under the impression that the public schools had largely ALREADY failed (do in some extent to previous federal interventions), they were on a downward spiral, and the NCLB's agenda was to put them on a spot where, one-by-one, they either cleaned up their act or were destroyed and the kids moved elsewhere.
Of course it's not MY agenda to defend the NCLB. (IMHO the solution is to get the fed out of the business of education altogether, rather than trying to patch its previous mismanagement with more layers of management.) But let's at least characterize it correctly.
Ron Paul is anti-immigration,
...
... throughout the United States"
Anti ILLEGAL immigration. (As in "They have to go back home and get in line behind those who DID follow the rules. No prizes for breaking the law.")
bad bad bad for tech.
Really? How does illegal immigration help tech?
Last time I looked illegal immigration was mainly good for breaking unions, increasing the number of unemployed, and providing cheap labor to businesses at pay scales and working conditions below those a citizen is ALLOWED to accept, subsidized by mainly-citizen and LEGAL immigrant taxpayers (at least those who still remain employed) in the forms of loads on tax-supported social services for the illegal workers and their families.
And while may illegal immigrants may be "honest working people just trying to make a living", a system that takes people who come from a country where the law is a corrupt joke and requires them to break OUR laws even to be here makes it hard to convince them that any OTHER laws ought to be obeyed. Instead it rewards those who gratuitously break laws whenever it's in their interest and provides a selection pressure for such people to come here while the more law-abiding stay behind.
(as well as unconstitutional, unlegitimate,
Quite the contrary: Congress is explicitly authorized by the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8) "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization
And I'll skip the remainder of your claims (which are value judgements) with the comment that gratuitous assertions can be gratuitously denied. B-)
If your hearing in both ears is good and the environment isn't too noisy, you don't need a headband full of electronics and sensors for this.
With practice you can "image" enough of your environment to get around just from echoes of your own body's sounds or other ambient noises of suitable waveshape. (This is how you get the "closing in" feeling in tight spaces.)
There are reports of a totally blind kid using this effect to ride a bicycle and avoid obstacles. (He made clicking sounds with his mouth to provide a controlled, sharp (low-distance-error) sound, effectively emulating one mode of a bat's sonar.)
"Chirps" (single tones rapidly "swept" at a constant change of frequency per unit time) are potentially far better for imaging and ranging than "clicks" (impulses or short sound bursts that approximate them). But it's not clear that the human brain and vocal system has the necessary structures for generating and processing them correctly.
= = = =
Of course the headband might be much more effective than training up your own sound-generating and sensory systems - which (unlike a bat's or a cetacean's) aren't optimized for this service.
Apple's model is unprecedented, and allows people to get a phone that isn't "subsidized" traditionally ...
Instead it's subsidized non-traditionally but about as effectively - counting on a large number of people to actually activate the phone in the subsidizing manner (and no doubt with the subsidy set high enough to cover the look-gift-horse-in-mouth fraction that don't get activated).
What kind of gift is it when you have to pay hundreds of dollars per year to make it be more than a paperweight?
Now if you're talking about people who ARE AT&T iPhone customers that simply choose to unlock their iPhone, I'd agree [that Apple doesn't lose money if the phones are unlocked] - to a point. But I'm talking about iPhones unlocked and never activated or used on AT&T, which is going to be an increasing number of iPhones. That's a much bigger market than you think it is.
But the question is, if the iPhone couldn't be unlocked:
a) How many of those phones would have been bought and activated with AT&T (at a potential gain for Apple of $250-$200 bounty plus $9/month for 2 years), and
b) How many would have NOT BEEN SOLD (at whatever their profit margin is on the vastly overpriced piece of commodity hardware)?
IMHO, while a) is very lucrative per phone, b) is a LOT more phones. Especially if the ability to crack iPhones retards the rise of lower-priced but unlocked competitive products. (For starters there are areas of the US that AT&T doesn't cover but some other carrier does. People who live/work/travel there have no reason to buy an iPhone unless they can unlock it.)
Apple needed a network partner to insure connectivity and enable the launch. And the partnership is an enormous revenue stream. So they needed to launch the phone as a locked product and not visibly encourage circumvention of their partner's lock-in. But as long as it doesn't jeopardize their revenue from the phones that are subscribed with their partner it's in their interest to have people buy additional phones and unlock them to use with other carriers.
I trust the administrators of the system will make sure the code is robust against the epoch rollover.
5) The electric company doesn't care how much I use. The more the merrier.
The more you use, the higher your rate plan goes. Exceeding the set baseline puts you into a higher per-kWh charge. You pay for the amount you use.
Rising cost per unit of power with rising usage is a government mandate, imposed due to pressure by enviromentalists. Left to itself the power company would be happy to give you a lower rate with increased usage - as it does by giving lower rates to large users. Especially if your usage is not during their peak power period, when they have to use the more expensive generation to meet the demand.
In fact, if you look at your bill, within each government-mandated tier you're actually paying less per unit of power as you approach the high end. This is because there's a flat "be connected to the grid" fee that is amortized over a larger amount of power.
On the other hand: Libraries of Congress per Fortnight would actually be a bandwidth measurement.
Disconnect at a minimum charge to protect batteries from undercharge would be a good idea, too.
Meaning: Disconnect the laptop's load from the external power source if the voltage at the laptop power jack or renewable-energy-brick input is at a voltage indicating minimum acceptable charge level on an external battery - to protect the RE system's batteries from undercharge.