If someone wants to do something really interesting for the third world, make an adsorbtion freezer using solar concentrators for the heat source.
And while you're at it, a solar concentrating mirror (or foil arrangement), without a greenhouse-forming glass layer, pointed at a cloudless night sky, makes ice REALLY well.
The night sky (absent clouds and above the atmosphere) is four degrees absolute - and it's not THAT much warmer from ground level even with the mostly sub-zero greenhouse gas layers floating above. With mirrors or foil to redirect the light/infrared so that the container of water (or coolant) "sees" night sky on all (or most) directions and reasonable shelter from air currents, a container's black-body equilibrium temperature is far below freezing. It heads for that temperature quite quickly if it is painted a dark color.
People have been making ice on calm desert nights using this principle for centuries.
Hmm...I tested this myself, and with the User Agent Switcher set to IE, there's no problems at all. Seems to me that the problem with non-IE browsers is a purely manufactured one...one that could be fixed by editing one lne of code.
And some QA testing on other browsers.
You REALLY don't want to lead somebody through the forms process and have it abort near the end, or (worse) tell the user he's completed the form and then fail to file it for him. (That could actually KILL people.)
So the thing to do, given the results of our volunteer probes showing that the problem is PROBABLY just arbitrary denial) is for
- FEMA to put up an internal web site
- with code hacked to accept a list of other browsers
- test that each browser on the list actually processes the forms correctyly, and
- add browsers to the list on the live form as they're checked out. Then
- upgrade the forms to add support for any that fail. (Perhaps have the detection code redirect browsers needing special support to a new form so as not to break the existing stuff.)
They can probably have several modern browsers checked out within hours. Older ones will take longer.
But for FUTURE disasters they should, as a background job, construct a new form using NO fancy features - something that will work even on really old browsers that only support HTML and need CGI scripts for anything fancy. Then they can just clone it and fill in the text, URL addressing, and database selection for the particular disaster and have it up in hours.
(In the case of Katrina they had days of notice AND a presidential emergency declaration two days in advance. If this had been ready then they could have had it deployed while the storm was still on its way.)
Can you stick one under New Orleans, it's a bit damp at the moment and we'd like to dry it out.
Also: 10 cm is a pretty wimpy bump. Could you maybe jack it up about 25 feet so we can get rid of those darn fragle levies and avoid this problem in the future?
In Michigan people use the palm of their hand to reference where a place is.
How true.
I used to joke that you could tell people from Michigan because they always carried their maps with them.
Figured out how to do the U.P, Traverse Bay, and Ontario (both in scale with the other' hand's L.P. map using thumb and folded in index finger, or full size using a "thumbs down".)
Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner?
Oh, *hell* yes. For weight-limited applications like air-travel, hydrogen walks all *over* dead dinosaurs. It's volumetric density is piss-poor, [...]
In fact, virtually all of the energy of dead-dinosaur fuels comes from burning the hydrogen. The carbon serves mainly as a holder for it - a cheaper, stabler, sometimes lighter, alternative to pressure tanks. B-)
In 1968 Mayor Daily tried to suppress a crowd protesting the war and what they perceived as the theft of the primary elections and Democratic presidential nomination by the party elite.
He did this by ordering his police to smash the newsies' cameras.
This had always worked before.
He also has his pet union bosses block the stringing of much of the TV cabling into the convention center, hotels, and surrounds that would have carried the pictures. That was expected to work, too.
But the newsies were trying out a new technology: The "minicam". This was enormous. A "miniatureized" TV camera about as big as your torso, shoulder mounted. Hooked to a backpack full of electronics and batteries, with a big antenna sticking out. About all a strong man could carry. But just barely enough to get the signal to the next stage: A semitruck full of electronics, located within a block, terminating in a microwave dish to pipe the signal to a nearby studio.
And this was Chicago. Where all three major networks had a studio there, along with the major facilities for their cross-country video landline.
What was brand new about it the "mini"cam: It was real-time. By the time the billyclub smashed the lens the image of the billyclub had come zooming at the faces of a country full of TV watchers.
Oops!
For the next three days the crowd chants "The Whole World Is Watching" as the process repeats. The country is treated to video of the National Guard and the 101st Airborne shoving crowds around with assault rifles, jeeps mounting machine guns and others mounting barbed-wire barriers, and enough teargas to fog the center of a city, plus enough repeats of police people bashing that instant replay is redundant.
And a once-well-liked Democratic party functionary's nomination is totally discredited. And the Republican wins the race.
Fast forward to near the end of the century. Video cameras that record on tape are now a consumer item. And a citizen tapes the interaction between the LA Police and Rodney King. Regardless of whether the cops were acting rightly or out of control, the scene makes for riots once it hits the news - and again when the cops are acquitted.
So is the reaction of the California governments to clean up the LA cops? Of course not! (Their gang task forces are left to run wild until their pattern of evidence-faking and perjury leads to legal challenges of their previous cases and the release nearly everybody they ever busted.) Instead they pass a law to BAN recording government functionaries (such as police) performing their functions. And the police use this to sieze any videotape made of their actions.
Videocams are in the same position that film cameras were BEFORE the Democratic Convention of '68.
Until now.
Cellphone cameras were a start. But this looks like a system that will put publication-quality radio-linked realtime news photography in the hands of the general population.
Granted it's just stills so far. But it looks to me like John Q Public just got his hands on the class of technological tool that only the network newsies have had for the last 35 years.
Just in time for the next step in the replacement of the the news establishment with the Internet-based open media. B-)
What I find totally astonishing is that the USA is unable to air drop 200,000 MREs a day into New Orleans and surrounding area.
Airdropping MREs is problematic in a flooded area: You have to get it to the people. Dropping it in the and mud 20 feet away where they can't get it is useless. But the places they CAN stand are already covered with PEOPLE. Dropping a payload on them could kill more than letting them starve.
They'll have to do it more carefully - and that means helicopters and the like, which have shorter range.
As of this morning news reports say they had already done it at the convention center - one of the two major refuges (though the superdome gets all the press).
What I don't understand is why they don't have multi-tun sandbags already set up to mount in bomb bay facilities and drop into the dike breachs. THAT's a job for precision bombing.
I'm quite aware of free radicals / molecules ions / etc.
Note that when the chlorine was attached to the rest of the freon it wasn't a free radical either. It became one after the freon molecule hung around in the sea of oxygen, ozone, superoxide, ultraviolet light, and so on in the stratospheric ozone layer.
Guess what happens to the chlorine that rode up there as part of other things - like salt crystals, halides, or the like?
Chlorofluorocarbons have no monopoly on losing a chlorine as a radical once they make it into that low-density chemical hell.
Basically, CFCs long life allows them to reach the stratosphere. There, they slowly break down, releasing a constant supply of chlorine ions.
And how does this differ from the chlorine ions that reach the stratosphere from volcanic eruptions and a host of other mechanisms?
We're on a planet 3/4 covered with a salt-water ocean. The bulk of the salt is chlorides. The air is FILLED with small crystals of salt, loose ions from it, traces of diatomic chlorine, and a host of other chlorine compounds, due to the evaporation of salt-water spray from wind and wave action. Two things save the ozone layer from total destruction.
One is that the upper atmosphere is stratified. But that stratification is not absolute. A number of processes project chlorine ions, radicals, and compounds into the upper atmosphere, where they participate in ozone destruction as above, regardless of their source. Freon happens to be one of the ways it gets there. But though it's a new thing it's hardly the only thing.
The other is that the ozone layer is also full of oxygen and ultraviolet light. While the chlorine is busy breaking the ozone down, the ultraviolet light is busy making more.
Except at the south pole just now: It's the dead of winter there. That means the sun has SET and will be DOWN FOR MONTHS. Oops: No ultraviolet! Once the ozone breaks down, no more is made - near the pole. The only way for it to get there is by upper-air circulation and diffusion, and part of the point of the stratosphere is that there isn't much wind there.
So there's no ozone to block ultraviolet light from getting farther down. But there's also no ultraviolet light to block. Go a bit farther north, to where there's some light, and you fine ozone again. Golly! Guess it's not the end of the world after all.
We wouldn't even know the hole was THERE if it hadn't been for satelite sensors noticing it. Any bets on whether it was there when the dinosaurs were abroad?
Sure the size of the hole varies somewhat from year to year. (It's a weather phenomenon - which has only been observed for a few years so it's too soon to extrapolate annual differences into trends.) More chlorine (from freon, volcanos, forest fires, etc.) moves the edge out a bit further into the dim light where the sun is on the horizon. Different upper-atmosphere winds move the cholrine and ozone about differently from year to year. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the ozone layer to disappear worldwide.
For starters, removing the layer lets UV down further, to where it finds more oxygen. So you get ozone a little lower. It's a long way down to the tropopause and the salt spray below it in the weather-busy troposphere.
Meanwhile, isn't it just an amazing coincidence that the study that claimed to find a connection between Freon and Ozone was funded by Dow Chemical, just as their patent on Freon was about to expire (making it possible for everybody in the world to make this cash-cow cheap)?
So suddenly Freon is banned worldwide just before it would get cheap and everybody has to build new refrigerators (or recharge old ones) with a NEW, patented, compound.
And it costs more. So lots of people in poorer regions can't afford refrigeration. And a bunch of them die from food poisoning.
Not as bad as the malaria death rate increase from the DDT ban (which appears to have been based on totally bogus pseudo-science claims rather than bogus conclusions hyped from an apparently real phenomenon). But still no fun.
[if the "black cloud" over movie piracy is organized crime] Why are [groups like the MPAA] suing bitorrent users then?
Because it would be hard to sue themselves. B-)
Seriously: Whether they're CURRENTLY organized crime or not, the movie industry was built on systematic for-profit violation of IP law (Edison's patents for starters) while the recorded music distribution industry was controlled by organized crime for the bulk of its formative years.
Expect their business methods to run more toward extortion than persuasion.
With the help of the number one extortion racket in town: the federal government. (The Hurtz of extortion - though the Mafia DOES try harder...)
The story is by Heinlein, and it's called "The Roads Must Roll". It's a story of the power in unions and the danger in letting a small group of people control a ubiquitous service.
And of the falacy of assuming that being necessary to the smooth operation of some piece of critcal infrastructure makes you special and gives you overriding political power: (In a large, complicated infrastructure virtually EVERYBODY is in a position to screw SOMETHING up.)
Interestingly the scenario Heinlein postulated was played out (minus the sabotage and violence) quite closely under Reagan: The Air Traffic Controller strike (and the total and permanent replacement of the union controllers with new hires.)
I can't help but wonder if the joy of driving will be entirely lost in 20-50 years.
IMHO the joy of driving took a big dive 'WAY back in the Nixon era, when the 55 MPH speed limit was imposed.
The relaxation to 65 and 70 in limited locations is a far cry from the "no limit - basic law" (i.e. pick a speed you consider safe) regime that preceeded it.
I hear concern that it MIGHT happen is why they stopped calling it "cruise control" and started calling it the more accurate "(automatic) speed control".
The networks are not designed for theoretical maximum capacity, they are designed for average peak observed capacity.
Actually they're designed for "five nines" - a.00001 percent or lower probability of certain types of failures. (I don't recall if that includes the probability of a particular call failing to go thorugh, but they try to keep that low, too. A bigger concern is to keep calls that went through from dropping off...)
They do plan to have enough extra capacity to handle peaks - like MINOR disasters, traffic jams, and various events that both knock out some of their equipment and get lots of people calling at the same time.
But trying to put in enough stuff to handle the sinking of a city the size of New Orleans by a hurricaine, which also knocks down towers, floods equipment rooms, curbside boxes, and other infrastructure, breaks cables and fibers in many places simultaneously, smashes buildings - including switching centers, drops ALL power so ALL equipment is running on backup for weeks, etc., while simultaneously putting EVERYBODY on the phone, is beyond the pale.
As with California earthquakes, the surviving equipment tries to meter the remaining capacity by such measures as "slow dialtone". But some people are going to get cut off completely, and some may be delayed fatally. Can't be helped.
But it has always been this way, or even more so: Kennedy assassination took out the phone service country-wide as EVERYBODY tried to call someone to talk about it. (Main thing I remember about the assasination was the phone failure.) Storms - even a small tornado - would short enough wires to make enough phones look "off-hook" to tie up all the line-finders, and with the calls handled by relays rather than computers the line-finders would STAY on the shorted lines until a human arrived to intervene, hours later. So nobody real got a dialtone. And so on.
And imagine what it was like when calls were placed by operators - with several parties on most linse and a limited number of cables in the switchboard to connect lines - when everybody wanted to call at once.
As has already been pointed out cell sites on wheels do exist. The problem is cell sites still need landlines hooked up to them to provide service.
Actually they are already set up to use microwave T carriers. A T1 can carry 24 calls (or 23 plus control info) and several can go over one antenna. A T3 can carry 28 T1s, about 45 Mbps of data, or any mix, and you can pipe that over a microwave dish, too.
Cell towers in remote locations already hook into the rest of the net via microwave links rather than landlines. Of course the existing cell-sites-on-wheels have the antennas too.
Any bets on whether they also carry a kit for installing the other end of the link at a suitable live landline office location when there isn't already an antenna pointed at a dead site that can be re-aimed?
So our communications infrastructure and other technologies DO HELP. Of course, we have had television and radio and the like for a while, an evacuation and warning like this would have been possible probably even 40 years ago.
40 years ago propagating the warning would have been possible. But the accurate prediction of the size and path of the hurricaine would not.
Over that period satellites and supercomputers have produced a ramp-up in the accuracy of weather forcasting and a significant extension of the time into the future that it retains some accuracy - along with a good measure of HOW far into the future it will hold in any given situation.
Forty years back it was really fuzzy. We're bumping up against the chaos limit now, where the accuracy and length of predictions is limited mainly by the density and accuracy of the measurements and the stability of the underlying weather systems in the face of small perturbations. With the current sensors that's good for maybe three to seven days depending on the situation - and it was nearly right on several days in advance on this one.
That means people can have several days of RELIABLE warnings via that 40-year-old communication infrastructure. B-) No more concern that wolf is being cried, or that a threat is being underplayed because authorities fear creating more damage by overblowing the warning than the actual threat would cause.
It is the job of the actuaries to determine the break-even point of having killed someone versus the financial impact on the current quarter's bottom line.
Of course life is priceless (if nothing else because you can't buy more). So the bean-counters have to come up with a number (if nothing else to keep from spending so much saving one person that they run out of resources and don't do something else that costs hundreds of other lives).
How many people do you risk letting die to build a bridge that takes a half-hour off a commute every work day for a hundred thousand people? (How many lifetimes worth of time are wasted sitting in a car if the bridge isn't built?)
You want to know why compensated psychopaths hold an enormously disproport share of government officces, corporate management positions, and the like? It's because they can think rationally, not emotionally, about questions like that.
Governmental project rule-of-thumb price for a life is the lifetime disposable income, i.e. how much he makes in a lifetime minus the minimum cost for food, shelter, and clothing, and minimal infrastructure. (This is also the way to compute the number of "life slaves" a government program costs: How many people would be enslaved totally to fund the program if the cost were concentrated on them rather than distributed in small slices over the lives of a large population? Answer: About three per million dollars as of about a decade ago.)
In essence, if you invest in a company (personally, or through a mutual fund which invests in them), then you are party to the companies' collected crimes, since you own part of that company,
Bull. You're only responsible if you had a chance to affect the decision. Minority stockholders do not.
(You might make an argument that you had some responsibility if you buy something that increases demand for their products, production, and risk.)
and they will claim they did it to make you more wealthy.
No. They will claim that they did it because they must to fulfill their government-mandated duties as corporate officers.
The job of corporate officers is to make money for the stockholders. The job of government is to arrange the rules so that doing it by doing more harm makes less money than doing it by doing less harm.
Example:
Accident in a steel plant about a century ago trapped a worker with his legs under a crane. They could take the crane apart or roll it over his legs, amputating them. Taking the crane apart to get him out would cost a shift's production. Cutting off his legs would cost the workman's comp for two legs lost in an industrial accident.
They rolled the crane over his legs.
These days a liability judge would award him damages greater than the money saved by keeping the crane in production. (Precedent: Award to a Pinto gas-tank burn victim in the amount saved by the conscious decision to build it in the more dangerous way.)
THAT's one place where big liability judgements come from, and why capping puntative damages is arguably a bad idea.
I suspect that the majority of people who buy a wi-fi router in the next five years will still not bother to even change the default admin password.
I hope you're right! All those open WAPs are so convenient.
Won't matter. They'll ship 'em with the limit turned on. The clueless will leave it that way, only the clueful who WANT to allow open access will turn it on.
APs are shipped with open default configs so users can get them up and running without making an expensive service call. Limiting the range won't keep them from getting things running initially, so vendors may chose (or be pushed into) making limited range the default.
Upside, for people looking for open APs, is that new APs will only have expanded range if the user INTENDED it to be open. This will help head off the current legal attack on people who use open APs as "service thieves".
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
What's wrong with having an adjustable range limit? It makes perfect sense to me.
In particular: Permissions-based configurations lead to most home users having wide-open APs. The incentive on the manufacturers is to ship a default configuration with the door wide open, so the user doesn't have trouble getting connected on instalation. Of course most users stop once it's up and running, so most home access points stay wide open.
But with reliable range-limiting that works across vendors, the AP can be shipped with the limit set to something that will cover a house but not reach the street or the neighbors - with a configuration option to extend the allowable range. Then up-and-running is effectively closed - perhaps except for the next-door or nearby-apartment neighbors. The appliance-users will simply think that the AP can't reach the back yard, while those that read the manual can try tuning it for more range.
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
If it means accepting connections from people in the building and rejecting those from people in the parking lot, across the street, or in the competitor's facility next door, I bet it will go over big with enterprise users.
Measuring with multiple receivers can also pinpoint the client location, not just distance, even in the presence of unceartainty in turnaround time. Also: Turnaround time uncertainty can be small if you're dealing with packets that generate a response from the adapter's firmware rather than the driver/kernel's protocol stack.
What I'm trying to figure out is what's NEW about this.
Several vendors have had such options built into their lightweight-access-point configurations for some time now. These are devices where the bulk of the access points' brains are in a central box and the multiple access points themselves are dumb radios with minimal networking capability, using the net to talk solely to the central box. With multiple, widely-scattered, radios having details of their packet scheduling handled by the same central device that also handles their connection to the net, it's moderately trivial to add an orchestration function to do location-finding, then another to use the output of that for authentication and firewalling. (It also helps hunt down rogue access points installed on the wired LAN, and active rogue clients.)
From the article it looks like Intel wants to augment the standard to insure some particular response comes from the firmware (or even the hardware) of the adpater itself, in a short and perhaps defined time - possibly something new or with a minor tweak on something existing that would thus identify conforming implementations. That would make it possible for a single AP to get an accurate range measure without having to identify the adapter, firmware version, and perhaps the underlying OS on every client. It would also require firmware tweaks for a hostile interface to disguise its distance, and greatly limit the amount it could appear to be closer (though it could masquerade as being farther without trouble).
what will be interesting is if someone can figure out not only the speed, but also the direction of the spin. There's no guarantee that the inner core is actually spinning along the same axis as the mantle/crust.
Sure there is: Fluid Friction. Only convection (like atmospheric or oceanic weather phenomena but at geologic time scales) and forces from the dynamo are likely to have any non-straightforward effect, and those will be minor deltas.
The basic mechanism is obvious: The planet is spinning. The core is molten while the crust is essentially solid. There is a massive moon, orbiting above synchronous orbit and creating tidal drag. The tidal drag slows the rotation and raises the moon's orbit. The tidal braking force is strongest at or near the surface of the planet and vanishes at the center.
With braking at the outer layers the core spins a tad faster, but in the same direction and (with the braking very small compared to the fluid fricton) ALMOST exactly at the same rate - the difference is about one turn in 300,000 (assuming the middle of the article's range).
Is it ignorant to believe an IT manager should be a knowledgeable in technology as a whole?
Short answer: Yes Long answer: Hell yes.
Seriously: You misunderstand his job.
His job is NOT to drive the tech. (If he's knowlegable it's a bonus, but it's not required.)
His job is:
- to keep upper management (and himself!) off your back
- to get you the resources you need to do YOUR job
- to set policy for the department
- to evaluate your performance and assist you in improving it
- to settle disputes and allocate resources and tasks among the department's members
Many of these are helped somewhat by technical knowlege. Some are actually hindered.
In particular, if he knows too much or rose from the ranks, he is likely to try to do some of the work himself (and neglect his other, more important functions) or worse yet try to micro-manage YOUR work, making decisions for you and otherwise getting in the way.
In a VERY small company or a startup he might also "wear the hat" of an individual contributor and spend part (ONLY part) of his time as a member of the team. But this is dangerous for a number of reasons (starting with you judging his managerial competence by his individual-contributor competence). And in even a moderately-sized department it's impossible: If he's doing it, he should be out hiring another hand (or fighting for a req to enable that).
Don't think of him as a more-expert team member: That's the Tech Lead's job. Don't even think of him as Captain Kirk to your team's Spock, Sulu, Scotty, Uhura, Checkov, and Bones (though that's much closer.)
Think of him as your stereotypical congressman - out doing political battle and deal-wheeling to bring home some pork and change the laws in your town's favor.
Meanwhile: His job is not to BE a star: His job is to make it possible for MORE THAN ONE of you to be stars. Your job is to make him, you, and your co-workers look good to those above him, by keeping his promises to them and feeding him good information.
Indeed. Did you notice they didn't bust him for SPAMMING? They busted him for running an illegal enterprise that he happened to be advertising via spam. If he'd been doing something purely legal (however shady) this bust wouldn't have come down.
Granted people who spam tend to be the sort of psychopath who will break other rules, and thus are likely to have something else you can bust them on. But you can't count on any given spammer doing that.
Meanwhile this appears to be a bust that was driven by a department investigating the PARTICULAR form of illegal activity on which his business was based. So this bust gives me no warm-fuzzies that there will be a coordinated attack on other spammers who are pushing other illegal activities that would be handled by other departments - even departments within the same agency. Yes it's nice that this one got shut down. But don't hold your breath waiting for spam to taper off to a dull roar of newbies as the offenders are frogmarched off to prison.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone wants to do something really interesting for the third world, make an adsorbtion freezer using solar concentrators for the heat source.
And while you're at it, a solar concentrating mirror (or foil arrangement), without a greenhouse-forming glass layer, pointed at a cloudless night sky, makes ice REALLY well.
The night sky (absent clouds and above the atmosphere) is four degrees absolute - and it's not THAT much warmer from ground level even with the mostly sub-zero greenhouse gas layers floating above. With mirrors or foil to redirect the light/infrared so that the container of water (or coolant) "sees" night sky on all (or most) directions and reasonable shelter from air currents, a container's black-body equilibrium temperature is far below freezing. It heads for that temperature quite quickly if it is painted a dark color.
People have been making ice on calm desert nights using this principle for centuries.
Hmm...I tested this myself, and with the User Agent Switcher set to IE, there's no problems at all. Seems to me that the problem with non-IE browsers is a purely manufactured one...one that could be fixed by editing one lne of code.
And some QA testing on other browsers.
You REALLY don't want to lead somebody through the forms process and have it abort near the end, or (worse) tell the user he's completed the form and then fail to file it for him. (That could actually KILL people.)
So the thing to do, given the results of our volunteer probes showing that the problem is PROBABLY just arbitrary denial) is for
- FEMA to put up an internal web site
- with code hacked to accept a list of other browsers
- test that each browser on the list actually processes the forms correctyly, and
- add browsers to the list on the live form as they're checked out. Then
- upgrade the forms to add support for any that fail. (Perhaps have the detection code redirect browsers needing special support to a new form so as not to break the existing stuff.)
They can probably have several modern browsers checked out within hours. Older ones will take longer.
But for FUTURE disasters they should, as a background job, construct a new form using NO fancy features - something that will work even on really old browsers that only support HTML and need CGI scripts for anything fancy. Then they can just clone it and fill in the text, URL addressing, and database selection for the particular disaster and have it up in hours.
(In the case of Katrina they had days of notice AND a presidential emergency declaration two days in advance. If this had been ready then they could have had it deployed while the storm was still on its way.)
Can you stick one under New Orleans, it's a bit damp at the moment and we'd like to dry it out.
Also: 10 cm is a pretty wimpy bump. Could you maybe jack it up about 25 feet so we can get rid of those darn fragle levies and avoid this problem in the future?
Thanks.
In Michigan people use the palm of their hand to reference where a place is.
How true.
I used to joke that you could tell people from Michigan because they always carried their maps with them.
Figured out how to do the U.P, Traverse Bay, and Ontario (both in scale with the other' hand's L.P. map using thumb and folded in index finger, or full size using a "thumbs down".)
Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner?
Oh, *hell* yes. For weight-limited applications like air-travel, hydrogen walks all *over* dead dinosaurs. It's volumetric density is piss-poor, [...]
In fact, virtually all of the energy of dead-dinosaur fuels comes from burning the hydrogen. The carbon serves mainly as a holder for it - a cheaper, stabler, sometimes lighter, alternative to pressure tanks. B-)
In 1968 Mayor Daily tried to suppress a crowd protesting the war and what they perceived as the theft of the primary elections and Democratic presidential nomination by the party elite.
He did this by ordering his police to smash the newsies' cameras.
This had always worked before.
He also has his pet union bosses block the stringing of much of the TV cabling into the convention center, hotels, and surrounds that would have carried the pictures. That was expected to work, too.
But the newsies were trying out a new technology: The "minicam". This was enormous. A "miniatureized" TV camera about as big as your torso, shoulder mounted. Hooked to a backpack full of electronics and batteries, with a big antenna sticking out. About all a strong man could carry. But just barely enough to get the signal to the next stage: A semitruck full of electronics, located within a block, terminating in a microwave dish to pipe the signal to a nearby studio.
And this was Chicago. Where all three major networks had a studio there, along with the major facilities for their cross-country video landline.
What was brand new about it the "mini"cam: It was real-time. By the time the billyclub smashed the lens the image of the billyclub had come zooming at the faces of a country full of TV watchers.
Oops!
For the next three days the crowd chants "The Whole World Is Watching" as the process repeats. The country is treated to video of the National Guard and the 101st Airborne shoving crowds around with assault rifles, jeeps mounting machine guns and others mounting barbed-wire barriers, and enough teargas to fog the center of a city, plus enough repeats of police people bashing that instant replay is redundant.
And a once-well-liked Democratic party functionary's nomination is totally discredited. And the Republican wins the race.
Fast forward to near the end of the century. Video cameras that record on tape are now a consumer item. And a citizen tapes the interaction between the LA Police and Rodney King. Regardless of whether the cops were acting rightly or out of control, the scene makes for riots once it hits the news - and again when the cops are acquitted.
So is the reaction of the California governments to clean up the LA cops? Of course not! (Their gang task forces are left to run wild until their pattern of evidence-faking and perjury leads to legal challenges of their previous cases and the release nearly everybody they ever busted.) Instead they pass a law to BAN recording government functionaries (such as police) performing their functions. And the police use this to sieze any videotape made of their actions.
Videocams are in the same position that film cameras were BEFORE the Democratic Convention of '68.
Until now.
Cellphone cameras were a start. But this looks like a system that will put publication-quality radio-linked realtime news photography in the hands of the general population.
Granted it's just stills so far. But it looks to me like John Q Public just got his hands on the class of technological tool that only the network newsies have had for the last 35 years.
Just in time for the next step in the replacement of the the news establishment with the Internet-based open media. B-)
They are still here... ... in management. A Dilbert comic has come true.
Also a Geico commercial.
"I'm sorry. We didn't know you guys were still around..."
What I find totally astonishing is that the USA is unable to air drop 200,000 MREs a day into New Orleans and surrounding area.
Airdropping MREs is problematic in a flooded area: You have to get it to the people. Dropping it in the and mud 20 feet away where they can't get it is useless. But the places they CAN stand are already covered with PEOPLE. Dropping a payload on them could kill more than letting them starve.
They'll have to do it more carefully - and that means helicopters and the like, which have shorter range.
As of this morning news reports say they had already done it at the convention center - one of the two major refuges (though the superdome gets all the press).
What I don't understand is why they don't have multi-tun sandbags already set up to mount in bomb bay facilities and drop into the dike breachs. THAT's a job for precision bombing.
I'm quite aware of free radicals / molecules ions / etc.
Note that when the chlorine was attached to the rest of the freon it wasn't a free radical either. It became one after the freon molecule hung around in the sea of oxygen, ozone, superoxide, ultraviolet light, and so on in the stratospheric ozone layer.
Guess what happens to the chlorine that rode up there as part of other things - like salt crystals, halides, or the like?
Chlorofluorocarbons have no monopoly on losing a chlorine as a radical once they make it into that low-density chemical hell.
Basically, CFCs long life allows them to reach the stratosphere. There, they slowly break down, releasing a constant supply of chlorine ions.
And how does this differ from the chlorine ions that reach the stratosphere from volcanic eruptions and a host of other mechanisms?
We're on a planet 3/4 covered with a salt-water ocean. The bulk of the salt is chlorides. The air is FILLED with small crystals of salt, loose ions from it, traces of diatomic chlorine, and a host of other chlorine compounds, due to the evaporation of salt-water spray from wind and wave action. Two things save the ozone layer from total destruction.
One is that the upper atmosphere is stratified. But that stratification is not absolute. A number of processes project chlorine ions, radicals, and compounds into the upper atmosphere, where they participate in ozone destruction as above, regardless of their source. Freon happens to be one of the ways it gets there. But though it's a new thing it's hardly the only thing.
The other is that the ozone layer is also full of oxygen and ultraviolet light. While the chlorine is busy breaking the ozone down, the ultraviolet light is busy making more.
Except at the south pole just now: It's the dead of winter there. That means the sun has SET and will be DOWN FOR MONTHS. Oops: No ultraviolet! Once the ozone breaks down, no more is made - near the pole. The only way for it to get there is by upper-air circulation and diffusion, and part of the point of the stratosphere is that there isn't much wind there.
So there's no ozone to block ultraviolet light from getting farther down. But there's also no ultraviolet light to block. Go a bit farther north, to where there's some light, and you fine ozone again. Golly! Guess it's not the end of the world after all.
We wouldn't even know the hole was THERE if it hadn't been for satelite sensors noticing it. Any bets on whether it was there when the dinosaurs were abroad?
Sure the size of the hole varies somewhat from year to year. (It's a weather phenomenon - which has only been observed for a few years so it's too soon to extrapolate annual differences into trends.) More chlorine (from freon, volcanos, forest fires, etc.) moves the edge out a bit further into the dim light where the sun is on the horizon. Different upper-atmosphere winds move the cholrine and ozone about differently from year to year. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the ozone layer to disappear worldwide.
For starters, removing the layer lets UV down further, to where it finds more oxygen. So you get ozone a little lower. It's a long way down to the tropopause and the salt spray below it in the weather-busy troposphere.
Meanwhile, isn't it just an amazing coincidence that the study that claimed to find a connection between Freon and Ozone was funded by Dow Chemical, just as their patent on Freon was about to expire (making it possible for everybody in the world to make this cash-cow cheap)?
So suddenly Freon is banned worldwide just before it would get cheap and everybody has to build new refrigerators (or recharge old ones) with a NEW, patented, compound.
And it costs more. So lots of people in poorer regions can't afford refrigeration. And a bunch of them die from food poisoning.
Not as bad as the malaria death rate increase from the DDT ban (which appears to have been based on totally bogus pseudo-science claims rather than bogus conclusions hyped from an apparently real phenomenon). But still no fun.
[if the "black cloud" over movie piracy is organized crime] Why are [groups like the MPAA] suing bitorrent users then?
Because it would be hard to sue themselves. B-)
Seriously: Whether they're CURRENTLY organized crime or not, the movie industry was built on systematic for-profit violation of IP law (Edison's patents for starters) while the recorded music distribution industry was controlled by organized crime for the bulk of its formative years.
Expect their business methods to run more toward extortion than persuasion.
With the help of the number one extortion racket in town: the federal government. (The Hurtz of extortion - though the Mafia DOES try harder...)
The story is by Heinlein, and it's called "The Roads Must Roll". It's a story of the power in unions and the danger in letting a small group of people control a ubiquitous service.
And of the falacy of assuming that being necessary to the smooth operation of some piece of critcal infrastructure makes you special and gives you overriding political power: (In a large, complicated infrastructure virtually EVERYBODY is in a position to screw SOMETHING up.)
Interestingly the scenario Heinlein postulated was played out (minus the sabotage and violence) quite closely under Reagan: The Air Traffic Controller strike (and the total and permanent replacement of the union controllers with new hires.)
I can't help but wonder if the joy of driving will be entirely lost in 20-50 years.
IMHO the joy of driving took a big dive 'WAY back in the Nixon era, when the 55 MPH speed limit was imposed.
The relaxation to 65 and 70 in limited locations is a far cry from the "no limit - basic law" (i.e. pick a speed you consider safe) regime that preceeded it.
I hear concern that it MIGHT happen is why they stopped calling it "cruise control" and started calling it the more accurate "(automatic) speed control".
Actually they're designed for "five nines" - a .00001 percent or lower probability ...
.00001 or lower probability..." or "A 0.001 percent or lower probabilitiy..."
Oops. Meant: A
The networks are not designed for theoretical maximum capacity, they are designed for average peak observed capacity.
.00001 percent or lower probability of certain types of failures. (I don't recall if that includes the probability of a particular call failing to go thorugh, but they try to keep that low, too. A bigger concern is to keep calls that went through from dropping off...)
Actually they're designed for "five nines" - a
They do plan to have enough extra capacity to handle peaks - like MINOR disasters, traffic jams, and various events that both knock out some of their equipment and get lots of people calling at the same time.
But trying to put in enough stuff to handle the sinking of a city the size of New Orleans by a hurricaine, which also knocks down towers, floods equipment rooms, curbside boxes, and other infrastructure, breaks cables and fibers in many places simultaneously, smashes buildings - including switching centers, drops ALL power so ALL equipment is running on backup for weeks, etc., while simultaneously putting EVERYBODY on the phone, is beyond the pale.
As with California earthquakes, the surviving equipment tries to meter the remaining capacity by such measures as "slow dialtone". But some people are going to get cut off completely, and some may be delayed fatally. Can't be helped.
But it has always been this way, or even more so: Kennedy assassination took out the phone service country-wide as EVERYBODY tried to call someone to talk about it. (Main thing I remember about the assasination was the phone failure.) Storms - even a small tornado - would short enough wires to make enough phones look "off-hook" to tie up all the line-finders, and with the calls handled by relays rather than computers the line-finders would STAY on the shorted lines until a human arrived to intervene, hours later. So nobody real got a dialtone. And so on.
And imagine what it was like when calls were placed by operators - with several parties on most linse and a limited number of cables in the switchboard to connect lines - when everybody wanted to call at once.
Or before phones...
Trust me, it's a LOT better now than ever before.
As has already been pointed out cell sites on wheels do exist. The problem is cell sites still need landlines hooked up to them to provide service.
Actually they are already set up to use microwave T carriers. A T1 can carry 24 calls (or 23 plus control info) and several can go over one antenna. A T3 can carry 28 T1s, about 45 Mbps of data, or any mix, and you can pipe that over a microwave dish, too.
Cell towers in remote locations already hook into the rest of the net via microwave links rather than landlines. Of course the existing cell-sites-on-wheels have the antennas too.
Any bets on whether they also carry a kit for installing the other end of the link at a suitable live landline office location when there isn't already an antenna pointed at a dead site that can be re-aimed?
So our communications infrastructure and other technologies DO HELP. Of course, we have had television and radio and the like for a while, an evacuation and warning like this would have been possible probably even 40 years ago.
40 years ago propagating the warning would have been possible. But the accurate prediction of the size and path of the hurricaine would not.
Over that period satellites and supercomputers have produced a ramp-up in the accuracy of weather forcasting and a significant extension of the time into the future that it retains some accuracy - along with a good measure of HOW far into the future it will hold in any given situation.
Forty years back it was really fuzzy. We're bumping up against the chaos limit now, where the accuracy and length of predictions is limited mainly by the density and accuracy of the measurements and the stability of the underlying weather systems in the face of small perturbations. With the current sensors that's good for maybe three to seven days depending on the situation - and it was nearly right on several days in advance on this one.
That means people can have several days of RELIABLE warnings via that 40-year-old communication infrastructure. B-) No more concern that wolf is being cried, or that a threat is being underplayed because authorities fear creating more damage by overblowing the warning than the actual threat would cause.
It is the job of the actuaries to determine the break-even point of having killed someone versus the financial impact on the current quarter's bottom line.
Of course life is priceless (if nothing else because you can't buy more). So the bean-counters have to come up with a number (if nothing else to keep from spending so much saving one person that they run out of resources and don't do something else that costs hundreds of other lives).
How many people do you risk letting die to build a bridge that takes a half-hour off a commute every work day for a hundred thousand people? (How many lifetimes worth of time are wasted sitting in a car if the bridge isn't built?)
You want to know why compensated psychopaths hold an enormously disproport share of government officces, corporate management positions, and the like? It's because they can think rationally, not emotionally, about questions like that.
Governmental project rule-of-thumb price for a life is the lifetime disposable income, i.e. how much he makes in a lifetime minus the minimum cost for food, shelter, and clothing, and minimal infrastructure. (This is also the way to compute the number of "life slaves" a government program costs: How many people would be enslaved totally to fund the program if the cost were concentrated on them rather than distributed in small slices over the lives of a large population? Answer: About three per million dollars as of about a decade ago.)
In essence, if you invest in a company (personally, or through a mutual fund which invests in them), then you are party to the companies' collected crimes, since you own part of that company,
Bull. You're only responsible if you had a chance to affect the decision. Minority stockholders do not.
(You might make an argument that you had some responsibility if you buy something that increases demand for their products, production, and risk.)
and they will claim they did it to make you more wealthy.
No. They will claim that they did it because they must to fulfill their government-mandated duties as corporate officers.
The job of corporate officers is to make money for the stockholders. The job of government is to arrange the rules so that doing it by doing more harm makes less money than doing it by doing less harm.
Example:
Accident in a steel plant about a century ago trapped a worker with his legs under a crane. They could take the crane apart or roll it over his legs, amputating them. Taking the crane apart to get him out would cost a shift's production. Cutting off his legs would cost the workman's comp for two legs lost in an industrial accident.
They rolled the crane over his legs.
These days a liability judge would award him damages greater than the money saved by keeping the crane in production. (Precedent: Award to a Pinto gas-tank burn victim in the amount saved by the conscious decision to build it in the more dangerous way.)
THAT's one place where big liability judgements come from, and why capping puntative damages is arguably a bad idea.
I suspect that the majority of people who buy a wi-fi router in the next five years will still not bother to even change the default admin password.
I hope you're right! All those open WAPs are so convenient.
Won't matter. They'll ship 'em with the limit turned on. The clueless will leave it that way, only the clueful who WANT to allow open access will turn it on.
APs are shipped with open default configs so users can get them up and running without making an expensive service call. Limiting the range won't keep them from getting things running initially, so vendors may chose (or be pushed into) making limited range the default.
Upside, for people looking for open APs, is that new APs will only have expanded range if the user INTENDED it to be open. This will help head off the current legal attack on people who use open APs as "service thieves".
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
What's wrong with having an adjustable range limit? It makes perfect sense to me.
In particular: Permissions-based configurations lead to most home users having wide-open APs. The incentive on the manufacturers is to ship a default configuration with the door wide open, so the user doesn't have trouble getting connected on instalation. Of course most users stop once it's up and running, so most home access points stay wide open.
But with reliable range-limiting that works across vendors, the AP can be shipped with the limit set to something that will cover a house but not reach the street or the neighbors - with a configuration option to extend the allowable range. Then up-and-running is effectively closed - perhaps except for the next-door or nearby-apartment neighbors. The appliance-users will simply think that the AP can't reach the back yard, while those that read the manual can try tuning it for more range.
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
If it means accepting connections from people in the building and rejecting those from people in the parking lot, across the street, or in the competitor's facility next door, I bet it will go over big with enterprise users.
Measuring with multiple receivers can also pinpoint the client location, not just distance, even in the presence of unceartainty in turnaround time. Also: Turnaround time uncertainty can be small if you're dealing with packets that generate a response from the adapter's firmware rather than the driver/kernel's protocol stack.
What I'm trying to figure out is what's NEW about this.
Several vendors have had such options built into their lightweight-access-point configurations for some time now. These are devices where the bulk of the access points' brains are in a central box and the multiple access points themselves are dumb radios with minimal networking capability, using the net to talk solely to the central box. With multiple, widely-scattered, radios having details of their packet scheduling handled by the same central device that also handles their connection to the net, it's moderately trivial to add an orchestration function to do location-finding, then another to use the output of that for authentication and firewalling. (It also helps hunt down rogue access points installed on the wired LAN, and active rogue clients.)
From the article it looks like Intel wants to augment the standard to insure some particular response comes from the firmware (or even the hardware) of the adpater itself, in a short and perhaps defined time - possibly something new or with a minor tweak on something existing that would thus identify conforming implementations. That would make it possible for a single AP to get an accurate range measure without having to identify the adapter, firmware version, and perhaps the underlying OS on every client. It would also require firmware tweaks for a hostile interface to disguise its distance, and greatly limit the amount it could appear to be closer (though it could masquerade as being farther without trouble).
what will be interesting is if someone can figure out not only the speed, but also the direction of the spin. There's no guarantee that the inner core is actually spinning along the same axis as the mantle/crust.
Sure there is: Fluid Friction. Only convection (like atmospheric or oceanic weather phenomena but at geologic time scales) and forces from the dynamo are likely to have any non-straightforward effect, and those will be minor deltas.
The basic mechanism is obvious: The planet is spinning. The core is molten while the crust is essentially solid. There is a massive moon, orbiting above synchronous orbit and creating tidal drag. The tidal drag slows the rotation and raises the moon's orbit. The tidal braking force is strongest at or near the surface of the planet and vanishes at the center.
With braking at the outer layers the core spins a tad faster, but in the same direction and (with the braking very small compared to the fluid fricton) ALMOST exactly at the same rate - the difference is about one turn in 300,000 (assuming the middle of the article's range).
Is it ignorant to believe an IT manager should be a knowledgeable in technology as a whole?
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Hell yes.
Seriously: You misunderstand his job.
His job is NOT to drive the tech. (If he's knowlegable it's a bonus, but it's not required.)
His job is:
- to keep upper management (and himself!) off your back
- to get you the resources you need to do YOUR job
- to set policy for the department
- to evaluate your performance and assist you in improving it
- to settle disputes and allocate resources and tasks among the department's members
Many of these are helped somewhat by technical knowlege. Some are actually hindered.
In particular, if he knows too much or rose from the ranks, he is likely to try to do some of the work himself (and neglect his other, more important functions) or worse yet try to micro-manage YOUR work, making decisions for you and otherwise getting in the way.
In a VERY small company or a startup he might also "wear the hat" of an individual contributor and spend part (ONLY part) of his time as a member of the team. But this is dangerous for a number of reasons (starting with you judging his managerial competence by his individual-contributor competence). And in even a moderately-sized department it's impossible: If he's doing it, he should be out hiring another hand (or fighting for a req to enable that).
Don't think of him as a more-expert team member: That's the Tech Lead's job. Don't even think of him as Captain Kirk to your team's Spock, Sulu, Scotty, Uhura, Checkov, and Bones (though that's much closer.)
Think of him as your stereotypical congressman - out doing political battle and deal-wheeling to bring home some pork and change the laws in your town's favor.
Meanwhile: His job is not to BE a star: His job is to make it possible for MORE THAN ONE of you to be stars. Your job is to make him, you, and your co-workers look good to those above him, by keeping his promises to them and feeding him good information.
Too much vertical integration.
If he'd just stuck to the marketing side..
Indeed. Did you notice they didn't bust him for SPAMMING? They busted him for running an illegal enterprise that he happened to be advertising via spam. If he'd been doing something purely legal (however shady) this bust wouldn't have come down.
Granted people who spam tend to be the sort of psychopath who will break other rules, and thus are likely to have something else you can bust them on. But you can't count on any given spammer doing that.
Meanwhile this appears to be a bust that was driven by a department investigating the PARTICULAR form of illegal activity on which his business was based. So this bust gives me no warm-fuzzies that there will be a coordinated attack on other spammers who are pushing other illegal activities that would be handled by other departments - even departments within the same agency. Yes it's nice that this one got shut down. But don't hold your breath waiting for spam to taper off to a dull roar of newbies as the offenders are frogmarched off to prison.