Isn't it ironic...that the US wants foreign judges to consider US law as it judges things in its own jurisdiction, yet doesn't want US judges to consider foreign law as it judges matters here in the US?
That's an issue with the Supremes - and the appointment and confirmation process - right now.
Some of the "Consititution is a Living Document" crowd - who want to bend the protections into any convenient shape so they can be conveniently ignored - DO want the Supremes to "consider foreign law" when they make their decisions.
The problem is: that's ILLEGAL. The US government has ONLY the power granted it by the Constitution, and the whole POINT of the Supreme Court (in the current operation of the country) is to hold it to those limits. All US law derives from the Constitution. Giving foreign law ANY input into the decision-making at the judicial level risks breaking the single defense of citizens' rights (short of violent anti-government action.) Then you get to knuckle under or fight a war, probably lose, and end up broke and exhausted even if you DO win.
Foreign law properly gets incorporated through legislation to fulfill treaty obligations. Then the judiciary determines whether the chosen implementation is within the government's limits and sends it back for a rehack if not. Citizens and lawyers only have to deal with the law of the US.
In the absense of adherence to that set of limits the President can do anything he pleases and the Congress can pass any law they can get the President to enforce. Tyranny with a capital-T.
The Supreme Court puts the brakes on that by knocking down laws, regulations, and executive excesses when they exceed the constitutional bounds. (It keeps working over a significant time because the main source of their power is knocking down improper laws - and being seen as reasonably consistent and true to the meaning of the constitution when doing so.)
But recently a supreme court justice mentioned foreign law in a decision - in a way that makes it appear that it influenced that decision. Now whether new appointees are going to stick to the constitution or "legislate from the bench" by ad-libbing and/or giving foreign law some standing above portions of the Constitution itself is a big issue.
Jar Jar was one of the key players in Palpatine's rise to power... and is thus inderectly responsible for all those killed due to Imperial rule, which, of course, includes the entire population of Alderaan, as well as countless others.
It would be hard for Jabbar to do worse than that. B-)
But while Jar-Jar saved more people, Jabbar evacuated non-fictional people from a non-fictional disaster. And did it in New Orleans rather than long ago in a galaxy far away.
Also: Jar-Jar has already been raised to high office for his heroism. Last I heard Jabar is still a random-citizen refugee who has received only his 15 seconds of fame.
Since Jabbar did what the mayor SHOULD have done, did it decicively, in a timely fashion, and got it right, Mayor of New Orleans seems like a good office for him. B-)
Did Clear Logic:
1) just reverse engineer the masks of the FPGA to figure out how to decode the programming stream and automatically make an ASIC with the same functionality, or
2) actually clone significant sections of one or more of the FPGA masks themselves into the mask geometry generation step for the automatic ASIC design process, so that the geometry of the FPGA mask is reproduced (perhaps with edits, such as jumpers where programmable transistors would be) in the masks for the ASIC?
If 1), IMHO they were blameless. If 2), IMHO the jury called it correctly.
Sure you *can* get it unbundled, but you would loose out on the special $100 per month discount for having both services... and who wants $140 per month DSL just so it can be unbundled??
Removing cross-subsidies from the built-under-monopoly-subsidies local phone copper to the unregulated information services was the quid-pro-quo for letting the local phone companies play in the information business unregulated in the first place.
I wonder if:
- the management already sold "their" windows emulator to somebody,
- has finally figured out that "their" windows emulator is a thinly-disguised, nearly verbatim copy of wine, in violation of the license terms,
- they need to deliver Real Soon Now,
- have very little money, and
- are trying very hard to bail themselves out before the delivery date.
I think that it would be more responsible to first try this procedure on animals, like monkeys or pigs. For instance, maybe they could transplant a pig's face to a monkey.
Read The Fine Article.
They already did: Transplanted chunks of brown rats' faces onto white rats, giving them an appearance described as somewhat like a negative of a photograph of a raccoon.
Who would trade burn scars for 50% chance of death, likelyhood of chronic pain, likelyhood of further disfigurement, and no immune system for the rest of their lives?
Actually an impaired immune system - the drugs just suppress part of it. Still no fun though. (That part goes after cancers and virus-infested-but-functioning tissues, too, among other things...)
What I don't see is why they're replacing the whole skin. Why not take off the scar tissue and replace it with a collagen mask seeded with skin cells? This is done with many burn victims (along with at least one person who lost her whole dermis due to a rare drug reaction).
Perhaps it's because the damage is too deep and they need to replace the nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and other plumbing?
Does it fit.... under the windshield of a car? And does it still work if it's moving let's say... really fast (basically well above the reglementary 65mph)?
There are already laser speed-trap jammers. And they don't have to be this fancy: "Laser Radar" equipment emits easy-to-detect light signatures already.
And, of course, the eyes of some animals (cats, alligators) are strong and precise retroreflectors.
People, too.
That's why you get "red eye" in the picture if the flash is too close to the lens.
For people it's probably a vestigial remmanant.
For animals it's a night-vision adaptation. The retro-reflector is behind the light-sensitive part of the retina. Any light that makes it through the sensors is sent back (nearly) the way it came in, giving the retina a second chance to catch it and thus a tad under a 3db increase in sensitivity - at a slight cost to focus. The shine you see is what made two passes without being caught.
You're forgetting Samsung, which I believe is Korean.
And Korea these days is doing to Japan what Japan did to the US in the '60s. (Complete with riots of threatened Japanese workers...)
Ericsson is Sweeden. They make mainly central office equipment and the like and make their handsets in a joint ventur with Sony: "Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications". (Gee, where's Sony? B-) )
Nokia is Finland.
Motorola is US - and (like Nokia) is currently rolling out a bare-bones $40 cost handset, sans camera and the like. (They want to sell a billion of 'em - fast nickels being better than slow dimes.)
However: The crack in my original post implying the inclusion of cameras and text scanners might be a conspiracy by businesses in "places like Japan" to set up another opportunity for plausibly-deniable industrial espionage was intended as humor. (That's why the "tinfoil hat" preface. Besides: If it WERE serious you'd expect it from elsewhere anyhow. Japan already used that trick and is now a leader rather than a bootstrapper.)
The observation that Japan's corporations got away with major industrial espionage once with a camera fad, and lots of people could do it again with the current cellphone camera/text scanner features, is the meat of the post.
By the way: In case it wasn't clear from my previous post I agree that Demming-style management was indeed a major factor in the rise of Japanese industry. I've even brought that up myself in past postings.
However, corporate espionage was also a significant factor (and this is well documented).
IMHO the largest factor in the loss of US heavy industry is neither, however. It's a bunch of regulations and selective enforcement that together make it far cheaper to use foreign labor and sometimes foreign sites than documented US workers (subject to labor laws, wage minimums, and union contracts) and law-conforming US sites.
Weirdly enough, it was an American (don't recall the name) labor theorist that went to Japan and impressed them with the Theory Y style of management -- teams, listening to the line workers and giving them credit, and most especially treating them like a valued member of the company instead of a liability that needed to be cost controlled at all times.
Demming.
Workers at Japanese plants worked there for life. They received regular raises. They had good morale. They contributed to their companies much like they would their families, and the companies boomed.
Yep.
Now, remember that the US tried the same theories out
They didn't try them at the time, however. The McCarthy era was in full swing and management was in a panic. Demming's idea of paying attention to the workers sounded enough like socialism that they wouldn't have any of it. They deliberately cut the upward information path - with predictable results.
It wasn't until the Japanese car companies started eating Detroit's lunch that they even started to come around - and then it was only partially, specifically on quality issues.
, but since the Reagan era...
I'll stop here. I have a lot to say on that but it's too far off topic for this thread.
Meanwhile: If you want feel free to blame Nixon, Bush I, Clinton, neocons, short-term management incentives leading to corporate looting, outsourcing (and tax breaks encouraging it), NAFTA, or certain liberal programs (notably environmental regulations, the encouragement of illegal immigration, and the retargeting of industrial labor unions from supporting their members to laundering political slush funds - virtually destroying them). But I suggest you check your facts before laying this one entirely on the Gipper's desk.
This sounds like those 60s spy movies where they would use the miniature tie-camera to take spy photos
Or the "serious" ones where they used the Minox with the focus-string to copy documents - just like the real spys did.
After WWII japanese industry at first was synonymous with cheap, shoddy, stamped-metal goods. This went on for a decade or more. But as they got their industry built back up they began to make some quality goods. One of the first things to be made in production were inexpensive cameras with high-quality optics.
Back in the '60s there was a stereotype: The crowd of Japanese tourists with cameras, photographing everything: Stop signs, park benches, flowers, door knockers, etc. The impression was that photography was a fad in Japan, fueled by the availability of the good cameras and film.
In those days industries gave tours of their facilities as a PR thing, letting anybody who wanted see how things were made: Cars, steel, plastic parts, electronic devices, cerial, you name it. Of course the ubiquitous half-busload of vacationing Japanese would take the tours.
Shortly thereafter a host of japanese industries - auto, plastic, electronic, cerial, you name it - upgraded their processes. You might think it was just the inevitable "convergent evolution" of good engineering. But an exact clone of the Rice Crispies shot tower?
Turns out that, regardless of whether the fad itself was a put-on or an honest social phenomenon, Japanese industrial spys had taken advantage of it for corporate espionage.
And very effective corporate espionage: Japan went from a producer of cheap stamped-metal toys and cheap quality cameras to an industrial powerhouse. They became the dominant producer of automobiles and consumer electronics, to name just two major industries where the US HAD been the leader. The US steel industry and much of the manufacturing that used its output, meanwhile, became the "Rust Belt".
And US companies (such as Kellogs) stopped giving the plant tours that HAD been major tourist attractions for their localities. (With the result that a couple generations in the US have now grown up with negligible understanding of the internals of industrial mass production, one factor contributing to a their profound distrust of corporations.)
Now we have had cellphones with a built-in camera as a standard component for several years (until they're deployed ubiquitously), and news of document scanner software for the cameras. Sounds to me like a similar fad and a similar opportunity.
Ok, so it makes a noise. And YOU can't disable the noise. But I'm sure that there will soon appear a hack that will disable the noise. (If nothing else, the "cute" ones that use a recorded camera shutter for pictures and whatever they pick for a scanner function will play them from a table. So make a modified firmware load with an empty table, or a hidden extra menu option to select an table entry containing silence for the prefered sound.)
But if I take off my tinfoil hat I start to wonder: WHY do cellphones have cameras? Did YOU ask for your cellphone to have a camera? Did you WANT your cellphone to have a camera? Did you have a USE for your cellphone to have a camera?
Or did it suddenly appear, despite the added expense, on a consumer item in a cost-sensitve, highly competitive, industry?
Dominated by manufacturers in places like Japan... B-)
The problem with digg is that it presumes that the people voting are half way intelligent.
Isn't that the problem *anytime* *anything* is decided by letting everyone vote?
No.
In the case of the elections in republics (and to some extent in other democratic governmental forms) the purpose of elections is NOT to "tap the wisdom" of the population. It makes NO assumptions that the people are smart.
The purpose of the election is to find out how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it.
It doesn't have to be perfect - and can call an election wrong if it is close (provided it also calls the election as close). But if it does a good enough job, and it is BELIEVED to have done so, it stabilizes the country's governance and reduces or elimintaes internal warfare. The losing side realizes that it can't reverse the elction by violence (which would bring a bunch of people out who don't care about the issue but DO care about not reversing elections by warfare.)
Regardless of his intelligence level you can assume one thing about a voter: Nobody else in the world has a stronger incentive to vote in his interest.
What are the privacy implications if the study only uses anonymized location data, i.e. "in this field of 100m x 100m", there is a cell phone which now moves to this field etc.?
There are considerable privacy implications.
For example: Law enforcement might notice cellphone activity in an area where none is expected - and go see what's going on there. Result: The uncover SOMEthing (a rave, a tresspass, a hermit, a criminal enterpirse, a fugitive, a meeting of political dissenters,...) and initiate action - like a search to find out more.
Search without probable cause. Tainted.
Search based on telephone call traffic analysis. (In the US, at least, law enforcement is NOT supposed to have any call connection information unless they have obtained it pursuant to a limited-time authorization which must be obtained only when there is probable cause to believe a crime is committed BEFORE the information is released to the police.
Annoyance - or even busting - of innocents. (I.e. somebody out camping uses his cellphone a lot - like he's verbose or is reading email - and the cops are looking for drug farmers in that park and come by to search his campsite. And perhaps looking bad because they've now done this twenty times without finding anything and/or because the guy "looks guilty" they decide to plant something on him. Or the poor sap happened to set up camp twenty feet from a pot grower's garden...)
The very existance of that map may be an invasion of the privacy of the cellphone users in the area.
Another poster asked: "What the hell are MIT researchers doing at Austria?!?" Perhaps they were there because they couldn't get the data HERE due to our privacy laws.
I can only assume you mean with MIMO clients as it doesn't matter what your AP is capable of if it is talking to an 802.11b client. The client cannot push more than the 802.11b standard, period.
Right.
However a MIMO box at one end can still do better talking to a single-antenna box. It can phase the multiple antennas: to focus a higher fraction of the limited energy of a single 802.11b channel on the client, and to collect and combine the limited energy comming from the client over a larger area and thus catch more of it without catching more noise in proportion.
This improves the signal-to-noise raito in both directions. Even an ordinary 802.11b client can take advantage of this by working closer to the high end of the single standard channel's capacity.
Actually they're parallel processing the channel using arrays of virtual directional antennas, rather than multithreading (which has some degree of time-slicing implied, even with multiple instruction processors sharing data operation execution units).
Based on what the release says, I think it uses as many as four or five different channels. MIMO really only provides increased signal to noise and helps manage and utilize multipath. In and of itself, it doesn't provide a speed boost.
Yes the article is confusing. But I'm afraid you're wrong on two counts.
First: Even if all it did was improve the signal-to-noise ratio it would boost the speed - because you can trade away better signal-to-noise ratio for more bits - tightening modulation constelations to send more bits in the first place and/or lowering the overhead for error correction.
But MIMO also uses "spatial diversity" to get additional genuine bandwidth between the transmitter and receiver. Signals from different antennas add and cancel differently at different locations. So generating a set of several signals coherently (using a common clocking source so they maintain a stable phase relationship) and distributing them differently over several spatially separated transmitting antennas - then receiving them by several spacially separated receiving antennas, your receiver can sort them out again. If you have M transmitting and N receiving antennas you can end up multiplying the amount of data you can send by the smaller of M or N.
It's like sending morse with a flashlight and receiving it with a photocell. You can only modulate the flashlight so fast. But if you have an array of flashlights each sending separate morse streams, and an array of photocells at the image plane of a telescope, you can send as many times that much data as you have flashlights/photocells.
You're doing coherent-wave hacks to make your telescope imaging mechanism out of the antennas themselves - generating virtual antennas pointed differently and virtual "light sources" spread out and overlapping in varied (but sort-out-able) ways. But the effect is the same.
So unless you are going to argue that dropping a nuke on another country as a first strike is not a declaration of war, it is clear that the president does not have the authority to do so
But I'm doing exactly that.
The president does not have the power to declare war. That is reserved to congress.
The president has the POWER to MAKE war - including make preemptive nuclear strikes - without a declaration.
See the distinction?
And in case you didn't notice: The last time we had a DECLARED war, according to the constitutional definition (2/3 vote of the Senate to declare war), was WW II. Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Iraq I, "The Asprin Plant", Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq II, and a host of others have not been declared wars.
The president has been MAKING war, with various levels of support from the congress but NO declarations from the Senate and NO impeachment for misuse of the war power, for my (and probably your) entire lifetime.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. My point was that the president doesn't have authority to grant himself (or the Pentagon) the power to launch a preemptive nuclear strike.
You are incorrect.
The president has the power to do just about anything with the military that hasn't been specifically prohibited by legislation. (And if he DOES do something that IS prohibited the sole remedy is impeachment.)
Over a couple centuries there has been significant legislation to limit the president's powers. The two main items are the War Powers act and the Posse Comitatus act.
War Powers limits the time the president can make war without explicit congressional authorization. (He has to report on things no less often than every six months, and stop hostilities if the congress, if it's able to meet, hasn't voted him an extension within 60 days after a report.) Since a thermonuclear war takes maybe 90 MINUTES from ICBM launch to completion that's plenty of time for a large number of independent preemptive strikes.
The Posse Comitatus act limits the president's ability to use the military within the US, especially for law enforcement, except in certain circumstances authorized by legislation (such as the Insurrection act, the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials act (mainly drug war), or the Patriot act). None of this blocks a preemptive nuclear strike OUTSIDE the US.
(Posse Comitatus was the main reason for the allegedly "slow" federal response in New Orleans. The president couldn't order the military or FEMA in without authorization from the governor, which wasn't forthcoming for a couple days, and couldn't do anything to suppress the sniping at rescue workers without a declaration of martial law from the governor or mayor, ditto. So instead, while begging for the declarations, he pre-positioned the resources outside the area of expected devastation in the hands of the independent, civilian, Red Cross and Salvation Army organizations. After the hurricane those groups were blocked from the scene, again by state and local officials.)
I don't see how they think they have the authority to let the president authorize a first strike.
The article has it backward.
This is not the pentagon giving the president authority he didn't already have.
This is the pentagon, under the president's authority (and likely at his direction) preparing a document describing the president's current policy and the procedures for implementing it.
When they get it phrased to his liking he'll sign it, at which point it becomes an order to the military from the president.
The authority always was the president's. This is the military setting up the machinery and getting all the ducks aligned. Then if the president decides to "push the button" the mill grinds the enemy exceedingly fine with no further micromanagement required from the oval office.
For the last half of the twentieth century such procedures were in place for the cold-war scenarios: Nuclear war with certain superpowers, retaliation for chemical or biologic attacks by less-super powers, retaliation for nuclear/chemical/biological attack on non-nuclear signatories of the non-proliferation agreements, and so on.
Now the other superpowers aren't so super (though China is getting back into the game). But some lesser powers are joining the nuclear club: North Korea, maybe Iran. And other potential enemies are showing willingness to use nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks. Some of them are directly targetable. Others get major support from targetable sources.
As a result the use-of-nukes doctrine is due for an update. Looks like this is it.
And if you heat your telescope or its parts or housing you create convection currents that distort the viewing and distort the structure, fouling its alignment. B-(
Optical astronomy is a career for eskimos - and people dressed like them. B-)
Of course, the large temperature difference between the day and night in the desert it what drives it.
The linked article misstates what's going on at night. Actually it's not the low desert air nighttime temperature (though that helps), but the extremely low radiation temperature of the night sky, that cools the pit - to an equilibrium temperature far below that of the night air.
The pit shelters the conainer of water from air circulation, radiant heat from features at low angles (such as trees, mountains, and the rising/setting sun), and most conduction (dry dirt conducts poorly and holds temperature moderately well - after a day or two the pit, too, is very cold). And in a desert you don't get "warm" clouds between you and space - just a thin layer of "greenhouse gas", mostly at temperatures far below freezing.
The result is that the equilibrium temperature for the pit walls, floor, and the container of water is far below freezing - though not quite as low as the four degrees absolute of the night sky (excluding the sun) above the atmosphere.
Keep the sunlight (and moving air, warm, cold, or otherwise) out in the daytime with the reflective shields and you can make a lot of ice.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it ironic...that the US wants foreign judges to consider US law as it judges things in its own jurisdiction, yet doesn't want US judges to consider foreign law as it judges matters here in the US?
That's an issue with the Supremes - and the appointment and confirmation process - right now.
Some of the "Consititution is a Living Document" crowd - who want to bend the protections into any convenient shape so they can be conveniently ignored - DO want the Supremes to "consider foreign law" when they make their decisions.
The problem is: that's ILLEGAL. The US government has ONLY the power granted it by the Constitution, and the whole POINT of the Supreme Court (in the current operation of the country) is to hold it to those limits. All US law derives from the Constitution. Giving foreign law ANY input into the decision-making at the judicial level risks breaking the single defense of citizens' rights (short of violent anti-government action.) Then you get to knuckle under or fight a war, probably lose, and end up broke and exhausted even if you DO win.
Foreign law properly gets incorporated through legislation to fulfill treaty obligations. Then the judiciary determines whether the chosen implementation is within the government's limits and sends it back for a rehack if not. Citizens and lawyers only have to deal with the law of the US.
In the absense of adherence to that set of limits the President can do anything he pleases and the Congress can pass any law they can get the President to enforce. Tyranny with a capital-T.
The Supreme Court puts the brakes on that by knocking down laws, regulations, and executive excesses when they exceed the constitutional bounds. (It keeps working over a significant time because the main source of their power is knocking down improper laws - and being seen as reasonably consistent and true to the meaning of the constitution when doing so.)
But recently a supreme court justice mentioned foreign law in a decision - in a way that makes it appear that it influenced that decision. Now whether new appointees are going to stick to the constitution or "legislate from the bench" by ad-libbing and/or giving foreign law some standing above portions of the Constitution itself is a big issue.
Jar Jar was one of the key players in Palpatine's rise to power ... and is thus inderectly responsible for all those killed due to Imperial rule, which, of course, includes the entire population of Alderaan, as well as countless others.
It would be hard for Jabbar to do worse than that. B-)
Jabbar Gibson for New Orleans Mayor!
Jar-Jar Binks for New Orleans Mayor!
B-)
But while Jar-Jar saved more people, Jabbar evacuated non-fictional people from a non-fictional disaster. And did it in New Orleans rather than long ago in a galaxy far away.
Also: Jar-Jar has already been raised to high office for his heroism. Last I heard Jabar is still a random-citizen refugee who has received only his 15 seconds of fame.
Since Jabbar did what the mayor SHOULD have done, did it decicively, in a timely fashion, and got it right, Mayor of New Orleans seems like a good office for him. B-)
Did Clear Logic:
1) just reverse engineer the masks of the FPGA to figure out how to decode the programming stream and automatically make an ASIC with the same functionality, or
2) actually clone significant sections of one or more of the FPGA masks themselves into the mask geometry generation step for the automatic ASIC design process, so that the geometry of the FPGA mask is reproduced (perhaps with edits, such as jumpers where programmable transistors would be) in the masks for the ASIC?
If 1), IMHO they were blameless. If 2), IMHO the jury called it correctly.
Sure you *can* get it unbundled, but you would loose out on the special $100 per month discount for having both services... and who wants $140 per month DSL just so it can be unbundled??
Removing cross-subsidies from the built-under-monopoly-subsidies local phone copper to the unregulated information services was the quid-pro-quo for letting the local phone companies play in the information business unregulated in the first place.
I'm surprised it's taking this long.
I wonder if:
- the management already sold "their" windows emulator to somebody,
- has finally figured out that "their" windows emulator is a thinly-disguised, nearly verbatim copy of wine, in violation of the license terms,
- they need to deliver Real Soon Now,
- have very little money, and
- are trying very hard to bail themselves out before the delivery date.
I think that it would be more responsible to first try this procedure on animals, like monkeys or pigs. For instance, maybe they could transplant a pig's face to a monkey.
Read The Fine Article.
They already did: Transplanted chunks of brown rats' faces onto white rats, giving them an appearance described as somewhat like a negative of a photograph of a raccoon.
Who would trade burn scars for 50% chance of death, likelyhood of chronic pain, likelyhood of further disfigurement, and no immune system for the rest of their lives?
Actually an impaired immune system - the drugs just suppress part of it. Still no fun though. (That part goes after cancers and virus-infested-but-functioning tissues, too, among other things...)
What I don't see is why they're replacing the whole skin. Why not take off the scar tissue and replace it with a collagen mask seeded with skin cells? This is done with many burn victims (along with at least one person who lost her whole dermis due to a rare drug reaction).
Perhaps it's because the damage is too deep and they need to replace the nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and other plumbing?
Does it fit.... under the windshield of a car?
And does it still work if it's moving let's say... really fast (basically well above the reglementary 65mph)?
There are already laser speed-trap jammers. And they don't have to be this fancy: "Laser Radar" equipment emits easy-to-detect light signatures already.
And, of course, the eyes of some animals (cats, alligators) are strong and precise retroreflectors.
People, too.
That's why you get "red eye" in the picture if the flash is too close to the lens.
For people it's probably a vestigial remmanant.
For animals it's a night-vision adaptation. The retro-reflector is behind the light-sensitive part of the retina. Any light that makes it through the sensors is sent back (nearly) the way it came in, giving the retina a second chance to catch it and thus a tad under a 3db increase in sensitivity - at a slight cost to focus. The shine you see is what made two passes without being caught.
You're forgetting Samsung, which I believe is Korean.
And Korea these days is doing to Japan what Japan did to the US in the '60s. (Complete with riots of threatened Japanese workers...)
Ericsson is Sweeden. They make mainly central office equipment and the like and make their handsets in a joint ventur with Sony: "Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications". (Gee, where's Sony? B-) )
Nokia is Finland.
Motorola is US - and (like Nokia) is currently rolling out a bare-bones $40 cost handset, sans camera and the like. (They want to sell a billion of 'em - fast nickels being better than slow dimes.)
However: The crack in my original post implying the inclusion of cameras and text scanners might be a conspiracy by businesses in "places like Japan" to set up another opportunity for plausibly-deniable industrial espionage was intended as humor. (That's why the "tinfoil hat" preface. Besides: If it WERE serious you'd expect it from elsewhere anyhow. Japan already used that trick and is now a leader rather than a bootstrapper.)
The observation that Japan's corporations got away with major industrial espionage once with a camera fad, and lots of people could do it again with the current cellphone camera/text scanner features, is the meat of the post.
By the way: In case it wasn't clear from my previous post I agree that Demming-style management was indeed a major factor in the rise of Japanese industry. I've even brought that up myself in past postings.
However, corporate espionage was also a significant factor (and this is well documented).
IMHO the largest factor in the loss of US heavy industry is neither, however. It's a bunch of regulations and selective enforcement that together make it far cheaper to use foreign labor and sometimes foreign sites than documented US workers (subject to labor laws, wage minimums, and union contracts) and law-conforming US sites.
Weirdly enough, it was an American (don't recall the name) labor theorist that went to Japan and impressed them with the Theory Y style of management -- teams, listening to the line workers and giving them credit, and most especially treating them like a valued member of the company instead of a liability that needed to be cost controlled at all times.
...
Demming.
Workers at Japanese plants worked there for life. They received regular raises. They had good morale. They contributed to their companies much like they would their families, and the companies boomed.
Yep.
Now, remember that the US tried the same theories out
They didn't try them at the time, however. The McCarthy era was in full swing and management was in a panic. Demming's idea of paying attention to the workers sounded enough like socialism that they wouldn't have any of it. They deliberately cut the upward information path - with predictable results.
It wasn't until the Japanese car companies started eating Detroit's lunch that they even started to come around - and then it was only partially, specifically on quality issues.
, but since the Reagan era
I'll stop here. I have a lot to say on that but it's too far off topic for this thread.
Meanwhile: If you want feel free to blame Nixon, Bush I, Clinton, neocons, short-term management incentives leading to corporate looting, outsourcing (and tax breaks encouraging it), NAFTA, or certain liberal programs (notably environmental regulations, the encouragement of illegal immigration, and the retargeting of industrial labor unions from supporting their members to laundering political slush funds - virtually destroying them). But I suggest you check your facts before laying this one entirely on the Gipper's desk.
The next globular cluster discovered gets named "Beowulf".
This sounds like those 60s spy movies where they would use the miniature tie-camera to take spy photos
Or the "serious" ones where they used the Minox with the focus-string to copy documents - just like the real spys did.
After WWII japanese industry at first was synonymous with cheap, shoddy, stamped-metal goods. This went on for a decade or more. But as they got their industry built back up they began to make some quality goods. One of the first things to be made in production were inexpensive cameras with high-quality optics.
Back in the '60s there was a stereotype: The crowd of Japanese tourists with cameras, photographing everything: Stop signs, park benches, flowers, door knockers, etc. The impression was that photography was a fad in Japan, fueled by the availability of the good cameras and film.
In those days industries gave tours of their facilities as a PR thing, letting anybody who wanted see how things were made: Cars, steel, plastic parts, electronic devices, cerial, you name it. Of course the ubiquitous half-busload of vacationing Japanese would take the tours.
Shortly thereafter a host of japanese industries - auto, plastic, electronic, cerial, you name it - upgraded their processes. You might think it was just the inevitable "convergent evolution" of good engineering. But an exact clone of the Rice Crispies shot tower?
Turns out that, regardless of whether the fad itself was a put-on or an honest social phenomenon, Japanese industrial spys had taken advantage of it for corporate espionage.
And very effective corporate espionage: Japan went from a producer of cheap stamped-metal toys and cheap quality cameras to an industrial powerhouse. They became the dominant producer of automobiles and consumer electronics, to name just two major industries where the US HAD been the leader. The US steel industry and much of the manufacturing that used its output, meanwhile, became the "Rust Belt".
And US companies (such as Kellogs) stopped giving the plant tours that HAD been major tourist attractions for their localities. (With the result that a couple generations in the US have now grown up with negligible understanding of the internals of industrial mass production, one factor contributing to a their profound distrust of corporations.)
Now we have had cellphones with a built-in camera as a standard component for several years (until they're deployed ubiquitously), and news of document scanner software for the cameras. Sounds to me like a similar fad and a similar opportunity.
Ok, so it makes a noise. And YOU can't disable the noise. But I'm sure that there will soon appear a hack that will disable the noise. (If nothing else, the "cute" ones that use a recorded camera shutter for pictures and whatever they pick for a scanner function will play them from a table. So make a modified firmware load with an empty table, or a hidden extra menu option to select an table entry containing silence for the prefered sound.)
But if I take off my tinfoil hat I start to wonder: WHY do cellphones have cameras? Did YOU ask for your cellphone to have a camera? Did you WANT your cellphone to have a camera? Did you have a USE for your cellphone to have a camera?
Or did it suddenly appear, despite the added expense, on a consumer item in a cost-sensitve, highly competitive, industry?
Dominated by manufacturers in places like Japan... B-)
The problem with digg is that it presumes that the people voting are half way intelligent.
Isn't that the problem *anytime* *anything* is decided by letting everyone vote?
No.
In the case of the elections in republics (and to some extent in other democratic governmental forms) the purpose of elections is NOT to "tap the wisdom" of the population. It makes NO assumptions that the people are smart.
The purpose of the election is to find out how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it.
It doesn't have to be perfect - and can call an election wrong if it is close (provided it also calls the election as close). But if it does a good enough job, and it is BELIEVED to have done so, it stabilizes the country's governance and reduces or elimintaes internal warfare. The losing side realizes that it can't reverse the elction by violence (which would bring a bunch of people out who don't care about the issue but DO care about not reversing elections by warfare.)
Regardless of his intelligence level you can assume one thing about a voter: Nobody else in the world has a stronger incentive to vote in his interest.
What are the privacy implications if the study only uses anonymized location data, i.e. "in this field of 100m x 100m", there is a cell phone which now moves to this field etc.?
...) and initiate action - like a search to find out more.
There are considerable privacy implications.
For example: Law enforcement might notice cellphone activity in an area where none is expected - and go see what's going on there. Result: The uncover SOMEthing (a rave, a tresspass, a hermit, a criminal enterpirse, a fugitive, a meeting of political dissenters,
Search without probable cause. Tainted.
Search based on telephone call traffic analysis. (In the US, at least, law enforcement is NOT supposed to have any call connection information unless they have obtained it pursuant to a limited-time authorization which must be obtained only when there is probable cause to believe a crime is committed BEFORE the information is released to the police.
Annoyance - or even busting - of innocents. (I.e. somebody out camping uses his cellphone a lot - like he's verbose or is reading email - and the cops are looking for drug farmers in that park and come by to search his campsite. And perhaps looking bad because they've now done this twenty times without finding anything and/or because the guy "looks guilty" they decide to plant something on him. Or the poor sap happened to set up camp twenty feet from a pot grower's garden...)
The very existance of that map may be an invasion of the privacy of the cellphone users in the area.
Another poster asked: "What the hell are MIT researchers doing at Austria?!?" Perhaps they were there because they couldn't get the data HERE due to our privacy laws.
I can only assume you mean with MIMO clients as it doesn't matter what your AP is capable of if it is talking to an 802.11b client. The client cannot push more than the 802.11b standard, period.
Right.
However a MIMO box at one end can still do better talking to a single-antenna box. It can phase the multiple antennas: to focus a higher fraction of the limited energy of a single 802.11b channel on the client, and to collect and combine the limited energy comming from the client over a larger area and thus catch more of it without catching more noise in proportion.
This improves the signal-to-noise raito in both directions. Even an ordinary 802.11b client can take advantage of this by working closer to the high end of the single standard channel's capacity.
Actually they're parallel processing the channel using arrays of virtual directional antennas, rather than multithreading (which has some degree of time-slicing implied, even with multiple instruction processors sharing data operation execution units).
Based on what the release says, I think it uses as many as four or five different channels. MIMO really only provides increased signal to noise and helps manage and utilize multipath. In and of itself, it doesn't provide a speed boost.
Yes the article is confusing. But I'm afraid you're wrong on two counts.
First: Even if all it did was improve the signal-to-noise ratio it would boost the speed - because you can trade away better signal-to-noise ratio for more bits - tightening modulation constelations to send more bits in the first place and/or lowering the overhead for error correction.
But MIMO also uses "spatial diversity" to get additional genuine bandwidth between the transmitter and receiver. Signals from different antennas add and cancel differently at different locations. So generating a set of several signals coherently (using a common clocking source so they maintain a stable phase relationship) and distributing them differently over several spatially separated transmitting antennas - then receiving them by several spacially separated receiving antennas, your receiver can sort them out again. If you have M transmitting and N receiving antennas you can end up multiplying the amount of data you can send by the smaller of M or N.
It's like sending morse with a flashlight and receiving it with a photocell. You can only modulate the flashlight so fast. But if you have an array of flashlights each sending separate morse streams, and an array of photocells at the image plane of a telescope, you can send as many times that much data as you have flashlights/photocells.
You're doing coherent-wave hacks to make your telescope imaging mechanism out of the antennas themselves - generating virtual antennas pointed differently and virtual "light sources" spread out and overlapping in varied (but sort-out-able) ways. But the effect is the same.
So unless you are going to argue that dropping a nuke on another country as a first strike is not a declaration of war, it is clear that the president does not have the authority to do so
But I'm doing exactly that.
The president does not have the power to declare war. That is reserved to congress.
The president has the POWER to MAKE war - including make preemptive nuclear strikes - without a declaration.
See the distinction?
And in case you didn't notice: The last time we had a DECLARED war, according to the constitutional definition (2/3 vote of the Senate to declare war), was WW II. Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Iraq I, "The Asprin Plant", Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq II, and a host of others have not been declared wars.
The president has been MAKING war, with various levels of support from the congress but NO declarations from the Senate and NO impeachment for misuse of the war power, for my (and probably your) entire lifetime.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. My point was that the president doesn't have authority to grant himself (or the Pentagon) the power to launch a preemptive nuclear strike.
You are incorrect.
The president has the power to do just about anything with the military that hasn't been specifically prohibited by legislation. (And if he DOES do something that IS prohibited the sole remedy is impeachment.)
Over a couple centuries there has been significant legislation to limit the president's powers. The two main items are the War Powers act and the Posse Comitatus act.
War Powers limits the time the president can make war without explicit congressional authorization. (He has to report on things no less often than every six months, and stop hostilities if the congress, if it's able to meet, hasn't voted him an extension within 60 days after a report.) Since a thermonuclear war takes maybe 90 MINUTES from ICBM launch to completion that's plenty of time for a large number of independent preemptive strikes.
The Posse Comitatus act limits the president's ability to use the military within the US, especially for law enforcement, except in certain circumstances authorized by legislation (such as the Insurrection act, the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials act (mainly drug war), or the Patriot act). None of this blocks a preemptive nuclear strike OUTSIDE the US.
(Posse Comitatus was the main reason for the allegedly "slow" federal response in New Orleans. The president couldn't order the military or FEMA in without authorization from the governor, which wasn't forthcoming for a couple days, and couldn't do anything to suppress the sniping at rescue workers without a declaration of martial law from the governor or mayor, ditto. So instead, while begging for the declarations, he pre-positioned the resources outside the area of expected devastation in the hands of the independent, civilian, Red Cross and Salvation Army organizations. After the hurricane those groups were blocked from the scene, again by state and local officials.)
I don't see how they think they have the authority to let the president authorize a first strike.
The article has it backward.
This is not the pentagon giving the president authority he didn't already have.
This is the pentagon, under the president's authority (and likely at his direction) preparing a document describing the president's current policy and the procedures for implementing it.
When they get it phrased to his liking he'll sign it, at which point it becomes an order to the military from the president.
The authority always was the president's. This is the military setting up the machinery and getting all the ducks aligned. Then if the president decides to "push the button" the mill grinds the enemy exceedingly fine with no further micromanagement required from the oval office.
For the last half of the twentieth century such procedures were in place for the cold-war scenarios: Nuclear war with certain superpowers, retaliation for chemical or biologic attacks by less-super powers, retaliation for nuclear/chemical/biological attack on non-nuclear signatories of the non-proliferation agreements, and so on.
Now the other superpowers aren't so super (though China is getting back into the game). But some lesser powers are joining the nuclear club: North Korea, maybe Iran. And other potential enemies are showing willingness to use nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks. Some of them are directly targetable. Others get major support from targetable sources.
As a result the use-of-nukes doctrine is due for an update. Looks like this is it.
And if you heat your telescope or its parts or housing you create convection currents that distort the viewing and distort the structure, fouling its alignment. B-(
Optical astronomy is a career for eskimos - and people dressed like them. B-)
Of course, the large temperature difference between the day and night in the desert it what drives it.
The linked article misstates what's going on at night. Actually it's not the low desert air nighttime temperature (though that helps), but the extremely low radiation temperature of the night sky, that cools the pit - to an equilibrium temperature far below that of the night air.
The pit shelters the conainer of water from air circulation, radiant heat from features at low angles (such as trees, mountains, and the rising/setting sun), and most conduction (dry dirt conducts poorly and holds temperature moderately well - after a day or two the pit, too, is very cold). And in a desert you don't get "warm" clouds between you and space - just a thin layer of "greenhouse gas", mostly at temperatures far below freezing.
The result is that the equilibrium temperature for the pit walls, floor, and the container of water is far below freezing - though not quite as low as the four degrees absolute of the night sky (excluding the sun) above the atmosphere.
Keep the sunlight (and moving air, warm, cold, or otherwise) out in the daytime with the reflective shields and you can make a lot of ice.