That input to a voice recognition system would be run through a notch (bandpass) filter only a little wider than human vocal range.
The point of the attack is that they're using the nonlinearity of the mechanical microphone to "mix" the ultrasonic carrier and sidebands to produce "demodulated" audio on the microphone output. Though there is no "baseband" audio in the air, that demodulated audio IS baseband. So no amount of filtering will separate it from a real voice signal.
The irony being that the Democratic party has the least Democratic primary process because of Super Delegates.
It's not irony at all. It's standard, in Public Relations, to claim to be the opposite of whatever unpopular things you are, in order to confuse the general public.
Just like it's standard to preemptively accuse the opponents of doing whatever bad stuff it is that they do, so if somebody calls them on it it looks like a playground-argument: "You're a FOO!" "No, YOU'RE a FOO!"
Want to know what the Democrats are? Just go down the list of everything bad they've ever accused the Republicans of being.
It's not symmetric. The Rs attract a DIFFERENT KIND of psychopath - the rule-bound, compensated sort, rather than the narcissistic, pathological liar, anything goes types. Working with Rs is like working with dynamite: Everything is fine until you do something that makes them think you're a bad guy, then BANG! Working with Ds is like working with nitroglycerine: BANG! at any moment for no apparent reason.
Capacity factor for nuclear tend to be around 90%, for solar it's location-dependent but in California it may go as high as 25%.
It varies with climate, season, latitude, and topography. But a quick rule of thumb is that a good solar location in the continental US (little cloud cover, midlatitude, not too close to a mountain, etc.) averages about 5 solar hours per day - about 21% of nameplate power.
"It was found that the latest firmware update (9.2.2h0d83) for the NVG589 and NVG599 modems enabled SSH and contained hardcoded credentials which can be used to gain access to the modem's 'cshTell' client over SSH.... [how to escalate this into full access...]
The latest update pushed to the modems opened this hole. Hmmm...
AT&T just pushed a couple updates to my Android phone a few weeks back. Like a complete version jump on the Android OS, followed by a tweak update a week or two later.
I wonder if they did the same sort of thing to the phones that they did to the U-Verse modems?
Is it preloaded with the latest NSA room bug spyware? Or does that have to be downloaded after you install it?
Is the built-in camera also of correspondingly high resolution? Then the facial recognition could work solidly at across-the-room distances. Maybe good enough for lip-reading apps. Or to read text from a distance as well.
Are the graphics processors good enough to do OCR and voice recognition on the platform? Then the upload bandwidth could be economized by doing that processing locally. Keyphrase search could be pushed to the platform as well, so the agencies wouldn't need such large server farms. (Ah, the convenience of distributed processing.)
= = = =
In other words, don't bother me with the new shiny until the platform is open - hardware (including onboard security and remote management processor), software, firmware - and can be checked, or replaced, by the owner.
I want a monitor, and don't need it bundled with 1984-style "telescreen" features.
I ran into a job description in 1999 that was looking for a Java developer with ten years of experience.
That reminds me of when UNIX was first penetrating the commercial market. The want ads were filled with openings, at entry-level salaries, requiring enough years of experience that only Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson need apply.
It inspired running gags about the cluelessness of executives in engineering and staff in HR departments.
Let me know when you get over ten million. Those IoT jobs have _tiny_ processors so your botnet has to have a whole lot of them to make it worth the hassle.
It doesn't take much processor speed to be an effective botnet bot. The limit is the network bandwidth, which can generally be saturated with little crunch.
Also: A "small processor" by today's standards is blazingly fast compared to those of even just a few years back. Typical IoT devices have plenty of processor speed, necessary to handle their networking protocols, which they only use in bursts. The battery powered ones achieve long life by spending almost all of their time "asleep", with nothing powered up but any persistent output lines and a wristwatch-crystal "alarm clock" to wake up the CPU when it's time to do some work - or turn on the radio and see if somebody needs to talk.
But the issue is not just botnet operators adding them to their net.
Those devices are doing some mission. If they can be rooted, an attacker can also take over and disrupt whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.
By the way: One of my concerns about the increased use of solar panels for power is that they absorb far more sunlight than the surfaces they shade - like nearly all of it, when much might have been reflected back to space. All of it goes to heat - about a fifth when the power is used (if the panels are very efficient), the rest right there at the panel as various losses.
But it turns out that this stuff re-radiates to space roughly as much energy as the panel absorbs. It also cools the panel, which makes it more efficient. And it's cheap enough that coating the panel adds more power-in-the-wires per buck than building the uncoated panel, so it will be a price-performance improvement that is likely to actually be deployed. Much better.
Ummm, sure. If you cover the _entire_ planet with them. That would only cost about $255 trillion going by your numbers.
Like I said: MUCH cheaper than the current government-based proposals. B-)
That's for the much more expensive plastic film, with the beads embedded and a vacuum sputtered silver coating on the down side.
Also: You don't have to cover the ENTIRE planet. Just a fifth of the sunny side of the land masses should do the trick. B-)
Grains of sand are nearly 2 million times larger than the microbeads you propose (assuming typical sand grains of about a millimeter)j
Knock an order of magnitude or two off that, then take into account that it's a fractal distribution. (I'd be more concerned that the smaller particles tend to go down and the larger up as the sand is disturbed.)
I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.
You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.
Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.
Or you could attack the alleged problem - heat - directly.
Orbital sunshades can give you as much cooling as you want. But that's pretty high tech (though far cheaper than the economic damage of most of the current prescriptions.) But there are cheaper and easier ways.
For instance: You could change the albedo so the Earth, or large parts of it, turned black in the infrared window. This can be done with a number of materials, some of them very cheap (like 0.8 micron glass microspheres - about a tenth the diameter of red blood cells).
Such microspheres, embedded in a plastic film with the bottom side silvered for reflectivity, produce 93 watts per square meter of net COOLING in the direct noonday sun - and they work 24/7. That's good for 10 degrees C (18 F) - which is more than four times the temperature rise that the global warming proponents are saying is catastrophic. The material can be made for $0.50/square meter even with current processes.
Without the mirror coating and plastic film, just scattered over the existing surfaces, I'd expect them to do at least half as well (as long as they were on top), and be a hell of a lot cheaper. So if they aren't more of an inhalation hazard than desert sand, scattering them over things like the Sahara could both drastically drop its temperature and substantially reduce that of the planet, as well.
But you'd better be REALLY SURE the planet is actually warming up - rather than, say, falling into the next ice age in a few hundred years. Sweeping up those glass beads (or undoing a number of other "warming mitigations") might be more difficult than deploying them.
It is also a consumer fraud, at lease on current users, since they are providing less service than what their advertising would be understood by customers as claiming.
The FCC is not good at regulating this. This kind if thing is exactly what the FTC (the federal government's primary consumer protection watchdog) handles, and often handles very well.
IMHO this kind of regulation (as well as the anti-competitive behavior of vertically integrating ISPs into content provision conglomerates and then treating their services' packets better than those of other or demanding to be double-paid by both the subscriber and the other provider) should be performed by the FTC, not the FCC.
And, yes, I KNOW that this would require enabling legislation, since that power was taken from the FTC some time between their forcing of the breakup of the Bell Telephone System and the "hands off the Internet" legislation. (I say something about this every time I post this proposal, but people keep following up to tell me about it. So here it is, in your face.)
The Trump administration has already made noises about doing this. Perhaps, now that they're not fully engaged with healthcare they might get around to slipping it in.
What humanity doesn't have now is a way to write and compute NP algorithms.
What humanity doesn't have now is a way to write and compute EFFICIENT NP algorithms.
We can do NP just fine - by explicitly and separately computing the results for each of the possibilities at each step. But as the problem size gets larger the number of combinations explodes.
That's why quantum computing is so desired: It can do all the possibilities in parallel in a single device, getting you down to polynomial time. But only for those problems where the exploding-combination steps can be reduced to something that maps to quantum operations - of which only a few are currently known. (Also: Getting a collection of qbits to stay in superposition for long enough to get the computation done and then to get the data out reliably is a real pain.)
I see a lot of talk about the benefits to corporations, a little about possible causes of the drop in life expectancy in the US.
But the latter is all about minor stuff. I haven't seen a single mention of the elephant in the room: Obamacare and its effect on the healthcare and finances of the older part of the popuation.
Obamacare drastically increased the cost of, and reduced access to, medical care for oldsters. In the case of my wife, for example:
- The premiums nearly QUADRUPLED. (Currently over $14,500 per year, just for her.) QUADRUPLED. (Currently over $14,500 per year, just for her.)
- The deductables increased.
- She had to change specialists (for several life-threatening conditions) twice (so far). Some went out of practice, others weren't on the limited plans available to her.
- During the hunt for competent replacements (and bringing them up to speed on her conditions) here treatments were thrashed: Substitution of inferior medication, interruption of medication for months, complete abandonment of any treatment for one condition, etc.
- The price of medical devices and treatments climbed. and so on. Her situation is not unique.
This is not surprising: Obamacare is (admittedly) based on the "Complete Lives System", which directs healthcare resources away from those under 15 (and especially under 6 months) and over 40, and toward those between those ages.
This was predicted. And not just once Obamacare (or even Hillarycare in the Clinton administration) was proposed.
As far back as the early '80s, the impending doom of the Social Security System and other government retirement programs was a big issue. (When CNN was new I recall one interview with a high federal bureaucrat, who said "we have to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate" - a "slip of the tongue" that got edited out in the three-hours-later rebroadcast of the live show. B-b )
Opponents of government programs to interfere with, or take over, medical care have long pointed out that the government treats the citizens, not like people, but like a herd of domestic animals, living and dying for the benefit of their owners. Maximum benefit is obtained when the weaker newborn are killed off before they cost more than they will ever produce, and those getting too old to produce are killed off, saving the costs of feeding and maintaining them.
By those principles, now that their income taxes and productive output is dropping (or about to drop) and their load on retirement and health-care programs is rising, it's time to first loot the savings of, then kill off, those approaching or passing retirement age - starting with the boomers and genXers.
Whether this was the actual purpose of Obamacare, that is certainly much of its effect. And now we're starting to see it in the lifespan statistics.
1. Notice that lots of people are making decisions based on the Global Warming hype, and that it's still believed by many but out of the news cycle for a few months. 2. Put together investment vehicles based on its expected effects. Sell a few to establish a low current price. 3. Publish a new global warming warning, bringing people's attention to the issue, spurring interest in the investment vehicles, and raising their price. 4. Point out that their price is rising, getting more people to buy them. Sell a few more but not enough to bring the price back down. 5. Profit! 6. Get a bubble going, with the price ramping up exponentially. 7. Once the bubble is inflated, sell off a bunch more, dumping the inflated paper and taking the money off the table. (Maybe buy some puts while you're at it. Do that through a different organization to avoid raising claims of securities fraud.) 8. BIG PROFIT! 9. Once the bubble collapses, exercise (or sell) the puts. 10. STILL MORE PROFIT!
This kind of thing has been going on for centuries. See _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_.
Using global warming as the driver has the advantage that governments are strongly bought-in to the idea and prosecuting a securities fraud based on it would also discredit the idea they're trying to push. So if the investment vehicles are not obviously fraudulent in some other way, things that could actually be expected to actually increase in value if catastrophic global warming did occur, the operators of the scheme would have more than just plausible deniability. They'd be doing exactly what financial service companies are supposed to do (identify or create investments that would pay off in an expected situation and sell them to those who expect that situation so THEY can profit if they're right) and expected to do (promote their product with publicity).
In the US, that is the point where your lawyer would interrupt and tell them he'll happily see them in court, because there's no way that any competent judge would hold him in contempt of court.
Why is it so different in Canada?
Because the US has a Constitution that includes (as part of the Fifth Amendment) a protection against self-incrimination. That's where the right to say nothing and not be penalized for it goes from a claim of natural rights to an integral part of the legal system.
VHF is still in use for DTV. After the transition, some channels were moved back to the VHF band, in the U.S. at least.
OK. So it just happened that all the stations where I am are UHF.
That just means that, if you happen to live within range of one of those (and want to see it), you may need to add the couple extra elements to bring in the VHF signals.
= = =
One nice thing about DTV is that it's OFDM with FEC. That means multipath just makes the signal stronger, rather than creating ghosting and degrading the image. So the antenna generally doesn't have to sort out off-path signals to achieve error-free reception and can be very non-directional. In turn, that means that a simple antenna can pick up good signals from many directions. Frequency allocation generally keeps any TV stations you can receive (without strong amplification) from interfering with any others ditto at any given place, at least in the US (though you may find a few fringe-range stations that share an air channel with something nearby.)
All you need for DTV is a balun. The stations are all moved to UHF and the channel number is nominal historic label, rather than a frequency designator (much as phone number portability disconnected phone numbers from geographic locations).
Now that the Shack is dying you can pick up TV baluns at hardware stores - for similarly low prices.
He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.
Or build your own for even less. Like for $10 if you buy all new parts rather than use stuff that's lying around.
With the analog-to-digital transition now pretty much done in the US, (and the nominal channel numbers no longer related to the actual frequencies, like portable phone numbers being unrelated to the phone's actual location), essentially all the TV stations are in the UHF band.
Perhaps the best broadband antenna design for UHF is the "Gray Hoverman", which was open sourced by the patent holder and can be built quite cheaply. Google it and you'll find lots of how-tos. Since you only need UHF you don't even need to do the extra-element tweaks to get VHF signals. Just build the basic double-tripple-u.
I'm in Silicon valley and all the stations I can get at all here (with one exception) moved to one of three towers. One north of me (in San Francisco), one south (on the hills near Fremont - and a naked-eye object from my yard), and one over a ridge to the north-east. With most of them either north or south I also left out the reflector, so the antenna would be bi-directional. (And the major lobe is broad, so it gets the third tower's signals as well.) Threw it together with a hunk of wood, a few screw, a couple lengths of #14 copper wire from some Romex I pulled in the last remodel, and a balun. Stuffed it behind the TV set and it gets all the stations just fine.
(With one exception: A legacy analog VHF station in the mountains south of San Jose, run by a church. It's on analog channel 6 so that the audio can also be received by FM tuners - just right for shut-ins who want to attend the services virtually.)
A nice thing about digital TV is that signals don't get crummy as the strength drops. They are either received correctly or drop out intermittently or completely. So you don't have to have your antenna get really good reception to get really good results on screen. Sticking such an antenna in the attic is just fine - and what I'd have done if the reception in the TV room was weak enough that some stations were flakey or missing.
No, it's competitor collusion and an illegal trust as per the Sherman Anti-Trust act.
Dead on.
Anticompetitive behavior: Now, thanks to the Internet, even the little guys get to play.
It just happens to be okay if you're not a registered S-corporation.
Really? Do you happen to know what part of the law limits the rules in that way?
(Serious question: I was assuming that they haven't been zorched because antitrust prosecutions are rare and usually directed at big players, not that the action was legal, or at least not having a defined penalty, for the little guys.)
The FTC tried to regulate NN under Obama. The court ruled that the FTC didn't have jurisdiction, and that the FCC specifically did. Hence, the FCC rules on NN.
Which is why I said:
- IF, of course, the law was tweaked to LET [the FTC] DO THAT, transferring this aspect of regulation to it from the FCC.
I have for years been pointing out that:
- The problems with network non-neutrality are mainly due to anticompetitive behavior by monopolistic, duopolistic, or cartel-forming ISPs, or vertical integration between the ISP transport operations and the operations that provide "content" and/or services (beyond commodity bandwidth) transported on their nets.
- Technical solutions tend to push for treating all packets the same, which blocks traffic management (particularly between TCP data transport and media streaming, which do NOT play well together), rather than just anticompetitive favoritism.
- The FCC is oriented around technical solutions and gets into trouble (and censorship) when it tries to deal with content.
- But the FTC is exactly the kind of consumer-protection organization that can attack the meat of the matter with big guns.
- IF, of course, the law was tweaked to LET IT DO THAT, transferring this aspect of regulation to it from the FCC.
I had high hopes for the Trump administration on this. After the way Trump was treated by the media/ISP conglomerates (and the lefties of hi-tech) he has no love for them (and would LOVE to shaft the media moguls who have been flaming him non-stop with what he perceives as fake news).
There was some talk from the administration about putting the FTC on the job, as the other half of killing the FCC's N.N. regs. But I haven't heard anything about it lately.
Of course it's not something the news departments of the media conglomerates who own the ISPs are likely to talk about, is it? B-b
Slashdot Mirror
Welp, looks like I'm never buying a new Android phone...
My phone company (AT&T) pushed an OS update onto my smartphone a couple weeks ago. I wonder if it enabled this "fix" (or if the next one will).
That input to a voice recognition system would be run through a notch (bandpass) filter only a little wider than human vocal range.
The point of the attack is that they're using the nonlinearity of the mechanical microphone to "mix" the ultrasonic carrier and sidebands to produce "demodulated" audio on the microphone output. Though there is no "baseband" audio in the air, that demodulated audio IS baseband. So no amount of filtering will separate it from a real voice signal.
The irony being that the Democratic party has the least Democratic primary process because of Super Delegates.
It's not irony at all. It's standard, in Public Relations, to claim to be the opposite of whatever unpopular things you are, in order to confuse the general public.
Just like it's standard to preemptively accuse the opponents of doing whatever bad stuff it is that they do, so if somebody calls them on it it looks like a playground-argument: "You're a FOO!"
"No, YOU'RE a FOO!"
Want to know what the Democrats are? Just go down the list of everything bad they've ever accused the Republicans of being.
It's not symmetric. The Rs attract a DIFFERENT KIND of psychopath - the rule-bound, compensated sort, rather than the narcissistic, pathological liar, anything goes types. Working with Rs is like working with dynamite: Everything is fine until you do something that makes them think you're a bad guy, then BANG! Working with Ds is like working with nitroglycerine: BANG! at any moment for no apparent reason.
Capacity factor for nuclear tend to be around 90%, for solar it's location-dependent but in California it may go as high as 25%.
It varies with climate, season, latitude, and topography. But a quick rule of thumb is that a good solar location in the continental US (little cloud cover, midlatitude, not too close to a mountain, etc.) averages about 5 solar hours per day - about 21% of nameplate power.
"It was found that the latest firmware update (9.2.2h0d83) for the NVG589 and NVG599 modems enabled SSH and contained hardcoded credentials which can be used to gain access to the modem's 'cshTell' client over SSH. ... [how to escalate this into full access ...]
The latest update pushed to the modems opened this hole. Hmmm...
AT&T just pushed a couple updates to my Android phone a few weeks back. Like a complete version jump on the Android OS, followed by a tweak update a week or two later.
I wonder if they did the same sort of thing to the phones that they did to the U-Verse modems?
Is it preloaded with the latest NSA room bug spyware? Or does that have to be downloaded after you install it?
Is the built-in camera also of correspondingly high resolution? Then the facial recognition could work solidly at across-the-room distances. Maybe good enough for lip-reading apps. Or to read text from a distance as well.
Are the graphics processors good enough to do OCR and voice recognition on the platform? Then the upload bandwidth could be economized by doing that processing locally. Keyphrase search could be pushed to the platform as well, so the agencies wouldn't need such large server farms. (Ah, the convenience of distributed processing.)
= = = =
In other words, don't bother me with the new shiny until the platform is open - hardware (including onboard security and remote management processor), software, firmware - and can be checked, or replaced, by the owner.
I want a monitor, and don't need it bundled with 1984-style "telescreen" features.
I ran into a job description in 1999 that was looking for a Java developer with ten years of experience.
That reminds me of when UNIX was first penetrating the commercial market. The want ads were filled with openings, at entry-level salaries, requiring enough years of experience that only Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson need apply.
It inspired running gags about the cluelessness of executives in engineering and staff in HR departments.
Because there is an alternative... not. AMD has the same shit.
Actually it has equivalent but DIFFERENT $#!7.
Let me know when you get over ten million. Those IoT jobs have _tiny_ processors so your botnet has to have a whole lot of them to make it worth the hassle.
It doesn't take much processor speed to be an effective botnet bot. The limit is the network bandwidth, which can generally be saturated with little crunch.
Also: A "small processor" by today's standards is blazingly fast compared to those of even just a few years back. Typical IoT devices have plenty of processor speed, necessary to handle their networking protocols, which they only use in bursts. The battery powered ones achieve long life by spending almost all of their time "asleep", with nothing powered up but any persistent output lines and a wristwatch-crystal "alarm clock" to wake up the CPU when it's time to do some work - or turn on the radio and see if somebody needs to talk.
But the issue is not just botnet operators adding them to their net.
Those devices are doing some mission. If they can be rooted, an attacker can also take over and disrupt whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.
By the way: One of my concerns about the increased use of solar panels for power is that they absorb far more sunlight than the surfaces they shade - like nearly all of it, when much might have been reflected back to space. All of it goes to heat - about a fifth when the power is used (if the panels are very efficient), the rest right there at the panel as various losses.
But it turns out that this stuff re-radiates to space roughly as much energy as the panel absorbs. It also cools the panel, which makes it more efficient. And it's cheap enough that coating the panel adds more power-in-the-wires per buck than building the uncoated panel, so it will be a price-performance improvement that is likely to actually be deployed. Much better.
Ummm, sure. If you cover the _entire_ planet with them. That would only cost about $255 trillion going by your numbers.
Like I said: MUCH cheaper than the current government-based proposals. B-)
That's for the much more expensive plastic film, with the beads embedded and a vacuum sputtered silver coating on the down side.
Also: You don't have to cover the ENTIRE planet. Just a fifth of the sunny side of the land masses should do the trick. B-)
Grains of sand are nearly 2 million times larger than the microbeads you propose (assuming typical sand grains of about a millimeter)j
Knock an order of magnitude or two off that, then take into account that it's a fractal distribution. (I'd be more concerned that the smaller particles tend to go down and the larger up as the sand is disturbed.)
I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.
Or you could attack the alleged problem - heat - directly.
Orbital sunshades can give you as much cooling as you want. But that's pretty high tech (though far cheaper than the economic damage of most of the current prescriptions.) But there are cheaper and easier ways.
For instance: You could change the albedo so the Earth, or large parts of it, turned black in the infrared window. This can be done with a number of materials, some of them very cheap (like 0.8 micron glass microspheres - about a tenth the diameter of red blood cells).
Such microspheres, embedded in a plastic film with the bottom side silvered for reflectivity, produce 93 watts per square meter of net COOLING in the direct noonday sun - and they work 24/7. That's good for 10 degrees C (18 F) - which is more than four times the temperature rise that the global warming proponents are saying is catastrophic. The material can be made for $0.50/square meter even with current processes.
Without the mirror coating and plastic film, just scattered over the existing surfaces, I'd expect them to do at least half as well (as long as they were on top), and be a hell of a lot cheaper. So if they aren't more of an inhalation hazard than desert sand, scattering them over things like the Sahara could both drastically drop its temperature and substantially reduce that of the planet, as well.
But you'd better be REALLY SURE the planet is actually warming up - rather than, say, falling into the next ice age in a few hundred years. Sweeping up those glass beads (or undoing a number of other "warming mitigations") might be more difficult than deploying them.
It is also a consumer fraud, at lease on current users, since they are providing less service than what their advertising would be understood by customers as claiming.
The FCC is not good at regulating this. This kind if thing is exactly what the FTC (the federal government's primary consumer protection watchdog) handles, and often handles very well.
IMHO this kind of regulation (as well as the anti-competitive behavior of vertically integrating ISPs into content provision conglomerates and then treating their services' packets better than those of other or demanding to be double-paid by both the subscriber and the other provider) should be performed by the FTC, not the FCC.
And, yes, I KNOW that this would require enabling legislation, since that power was taken from the FTC some time between their forcing of the breakup of the Bell Telephone System and the "hands off the Internet" legislation. (I say something about this every time I post this proposal, but people keep following up to tell me about it. So here it is, in your face.)
The Trump administration has already made noises about doing this. Perhaps, now that they're not fully engaged with healthcare they might get around to slipping it in.
Wait? Who said it wasn't [released in the wild and colonizing peoples' guts, sending them on a permanent psychedelic experience] palready???
Maybe that would explain the political situation of the last few years. B-)
What humanity doesn't have now is a way to write and compute NP algorithms.
What humanity doesn't have now is a way to write and compute EFFICIENT NP algorithms.
We can do NP just fine - by explicitly and separately computing the results for each of the possibilities at each step. But as the problem size gets larger the number of combinations explodes.
That's why quantum computing is so desired: It can do all the possibilities in parallel in a single device, getting you down to polynomial time. But only for those problems where the exploding-combination steps can be reduced to something that maps to quantum operations - of which only a few are currently known. (Also: Getting a collection of qbits to stay in superposition for long enough to get the computation done and then to get the data out reliably is a real pain.)
And all these years we've been using PnP computer hardware and PNP transistors.
Those were junction transistors. If P=NP there wouldn't be a junction.
I see a lot of talk about the benefits to corporations, a little about possible causes of the drop in life expectancy in the US.
But the latter is all about minor stuff. I haven't seen a single mention of the elephant in the room: Obamacare and its effect on the healthcare and finances of the older part of the popuation.
Obamacare drastically increased the cost of, and reduced access to, medical care for oldsters. In the case of my wife, for example:
- The premiums nearly QUADRUPLED. (Currently over $14,500 per year, just for her.) QUADRUPLED. (Currently over $14,500 per year, just for her.)
- The deductables increased.
- She had to change specialists (for several life-threatening conditions) twice (so far). Some went out of practice, others weren't on the limited plans available to her.
- During the hunt for competent replacements (and bringing them up to speed on her conditions) here treatments were thrashed: Substitution of inferior medication, interruption of medication for months, complete abandonment of any treatment for one condition, etc.
- The price of medical devices and treatments climbed.
and so on.
Her situation is not unique.
This is not surprising: Obamacare is (admittedly) based on the "Complete Lives System", which directs healthcare resources away from those under 15 (and especially under 6 months) and over 40, and toward those between those ages.
This was predicted. And not just once Obamacare (or even Hillarycare in the Clinton administration) was proposed.
As far back as the early '80s, the impending doom of the Social Security System and other government retirement programs was a big issue. (When CNN was new I recall one interview with a high federal bureaucrat, who said "we have to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate" - a "slip of the tongue" that got edited out in the three-hours-later rebroadcast of the live show. B-b )
Opponents of government programs to interfere with, or take over, medical care have long pointed out that the government treats the citizens, not like people, but like a herd of domestic animals, living and dying for the benefit of their owners. Maximum benefit is obtained when the weaker newborn are killed off before they cost more than they will ever produce, and those getting too old to produce are killed off, saving the costs of feeding and maintaining them.
By those principles, now that their income taxes and productive output is dropping (or about to drop) and their load on retirement and health-care programs is rising, it's time to first loot the savings of, then kill off, those approaching or passing retirement age - starting with the boomers and genXers.
Whether this was the actual purpose of Obamacare, that is certainly much of its effect. And now we're starting to see it in the lifespan statistics.
Hang in there - it will keep getting worse.
1. Notice that lots of people are making decisions based on the Global Warming hype, and that it's still believed by many but out of the news cycle for a few months.
2. Put together investment vehicles based on its expected effects. Sell a few to establish a low current price.
3. Publish a new global warming warning, bringing people's attention to the issue, spurring interest in the investment vehicles, and raising their price.
4. Point out that their price is rising, getting more people to buy them. Sell a few more but not enough to bring the price back down.
5. Profit!
6. Get a bubble going, with the price ramping up exponentially.
7. Once the bubble is inflated, sell off a bunch more, dumping the inflated paper and taking the money off the table. (Maybe buy some puts while you're at it. Do that through a different organization to avoid raising claims of securities fraud.)
8. BIG PROFIT!
9. Once the bubble collapses, exercise (or sell) the puts.
10. STILL MORE PROFIT!
This kind of thing has been going on for centuries. See _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_.
Using global warming as the driver has the advantage that governments are strongly bought-in to the idea and prosecuting a securities fraud based on it would also discredit the idea they're trying to push. So if the investment vehicles are not obviously fraudulent in some other way, things that could actually be expected to actually increase in value if catastrophic global warming did occur, the operators of the scheme would have more than just plausible deniability. They'd be doing exactly what financial service companies are supposed to do (identify or create investments that would pay off in an expected situation and sell them to those who expect that situation so THEY can profit if they're right) and expected to do (promote their product with publicity).
In the US, that is the point where your lawyer would interrupt and tell them he'll happily see them in court, because there's no way that any competent judge would hold him in contempt of court.
Why is it so different in Canada?
Because the US has a Constitution that includes (as part of the Fifth Amendment) a protection against self-incrimination. That's where the right to say nothing and not be penalized for it goes from a claim of natural rights to an integral part of the legal system.
Canada's legal system works by different rules.
VHF is still in use for DTV. After the transition, some channels were moved back to the VHF band, in the U.S. at least.
OK. So it just happened that all the stations where I am are UHF.
That just means that, if you happen to live within range of one of those (and want to see it), you may need to add the couple extra elements to bring in the VHF signals.
= = =
One nice thing about DTV is that it's OFDM with FEC. That means multipath just makes the signal stronger, rather than creating ghosting and degrading the image. So the antenna generally doesn't have to sort out off-path signals to achieve error-free reception and can be very non-directional. In turn, that means that a simple antenna can pick up good signals from many directions. Frequency allocation generally keeps any TV stations you can receive (without strong amplification) from interfering with any others ditto at any given place, at least in the US (though you may find a few fringe-range stations that share an air channel with something nearby.)
and a UHF/VHF transformer from Radio Shack
All you need for DTV is a balun. The stations are all moved to UHF and the channel number is nominal historic label, rather than a frequency designator (much as phone number portability disconnected phone numbers from geographic locations).
Now that the Shack is dying you can pick up TV baluns at hardware stores - for similarly low prices.
He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.
Or build your own for even less. Like for $10 if you buy all new parts rather than use stuff that's lying around.
With the analog-to-digital transition now pretty much done in the US, (and the nominal channel numbers no longer related to the actual frequencies, like portable phone numbers being unrelated to the phone's actual location), essentially all the TV stations are in the UHF band.
Perhaps the best broadband antenna design for UHF is the "Gray Hoverman", which was open sourced by the patent holder and can be built quite cheaply. Google it and you'll find lots of how-tos. Since you only need UHF you don't even need to do the extra-element tweaks to get VHF signals. Just build the basic double-tripple-u.
I'm in Silicon valley and all the stations I can get at all here (with one exception) moved to one of three towers. One north of me (in San Francisco), one south (on the hills near Fremont - and a naked-eye object from my yard), and one over a ridge to the north-east. With most of them either north or south I also left out the reflector, so the antenna would be bi-directional. (And the major lobe is broad, so it gets the third tower's signals as well.) Threw it together with a hunk of wood, a few screw, a couple lengths of #14 copper wire from some Romex I pulled in the last remodel, and a balun. Stuffed it behind the TV set and it gets all the stations just fine.
(With one exception: A legacy analog VHF station in the mountains south of San Jose, run by a church. It's on analog channel 6 so that the audio can also be received by FM tuners - just right for shut-ins who want to attend the services virtually.)
A nice thing about digital TV is that signals don't get crummy as the strength drops. They are either received correctly or drop out intermittently or completely. So you don't have to have your antenna get really good reception to get really good results on screen. Sticking such an antenna in the attic is just fine - and what I'd have done if the reception in the TV room was weak enough that some stations were flakey or missing.
No, it's competitor collusion and an illegal trust as per the Sherman Anti-Trust act.
Dead on.
Anticompetitive behavior: Now, thanks to the Internet, even the little guys get to play.
It just happens to be okay if you're not a registered S-corporation.
Really? Do you happen to know what part of the law limits the rules in that way?
(Serious question: I was assuming that they haven't been zorched because antitrust prosecutions are rare and usually directed at big players, not that the action was legal, or at least not having a defined penalty, for the little guys.)
Which is why I said:
I have for years been pointing out that:
- The problems with network non-neutrality are mainly due to anticompetitive behavior by monopolistic, duopolistic, or cartel-forming ISPs, or vertical integration between the ISP transport operations and the operations that provide "content" and/or services (beyond commodity bandwidth) transported on their nets.
- Technical solutions tend to push for treating all packets the same, which blocks traffic management (particularly between TCP data transport and media streaming, which do NOT play well together), rather than just anticompetitive favoritism.
- The FCC is oriented around technical solutions and gets into trouble (and censorship) when it tries to deal with content.
- But the FTC is exactly the kind of consumer-protection organization that can attack the meat of the matter with big guns.
- IF, of course, the law was tweaked to LET IT DO THAT, transferring this aspect of regulation to it from the FCC.
I had high hopes for the Trump administration on this. After the way Trump was treated by the media/ISP conglomerates (and the lefties of hi-tech) he has no love for them (and would LOVE to shaft the media moguls who have been flaming him non-stop with what he perceives as fake news).
There was some talk from the administration about putting the FTC on the job, as the other half of killing the FCC's N.N. regs. But I haven't heard anything about it lately.
Of course it's not something the news departments of the media conglomerates who own the ISPs are likely to talk about, is it? B-b