... at a larger level (states), [fraud] is *very* significant. Why? Because you don't really vote for President. And since two given states may not have the same number of electoral votes, a fix in one state that is balanced in another state does not wash out.
Which is part of why there IS an Electoral College, rather than direct election of the president.
If the president were elected by popular vote, systematic corruption in ONE large state could overwhelm 49 states worth of honest elections. With the electoral college, the fruit of the corruption is limited to that state's votes. (Which the side in question probably would have gotten anyhow, since it's the one that was able to come to power in that state.)
Interestingly, this is somewhat related to the designed purpose of the E.C. - to prevent one or a few large states from steamrollering the little states (and thus give the little states the confidence they needed to join the union).
Easter eggs? Thats the best you could come up with? Oh brother.
Ridicule, eh? So you have no answer for my showing that a malware-loaded voting machine could easily get past the certification tests you claim make closed-source voting machine software safe.
I win. B-)
But as to your question about whether it was the best I could come up with: Nope. It was just the quickest, and easiest to understand proof-of-concept.
Another: Magic vote/unvote sequences or other magic input sequences.
Akin to the cheat codes on games or magic phone numbers that get you into configuration modes on your cell phone. Everything works normally until you "dial" #3001*12345* or say "xyzzy", then you get extra menus and options.
Similarly, do the magic sequence and you trigger the voting machine to do the same sort of thing described in the "easter egg" example.
I could go on. But I won't. Regardless of whether they're doing it or not, the people who program these things already know too many ways to corrupt the process without having me design some more for them.
So I won't post my "best" ideas, just to win a debate I've already won.
You now have two proofs-of-principle that certification of closed voting software is not an effective safeguard, because it can easily be passed by malicious software.
The incentive structure is to corrupt the elections. (You can win FAR more that way then you lose if you get caught, even if it takes the company down.) The prize is control of the country with the largest economy in the world, or a subdivision of it - along with a potential rakeoff of much of that economy (a third of which is already distributed by government hands). The cost is other people's freedom - which millions have died to acquire and defend.
I think we can afford a little printer paper. Don't you?
The liquid is deuterated acetone. AFAIK, this is essentially nail polish remover doped with deuterium. Probably as brain-rotting as normal nail polish remover, only a bit more dense.
As a separate point, I don't entirely buy the "less radioactive waste" argument [...] In order for fusion to be commercially viable, ultimately the reaction has to turn a generator somehow, probably via heat generated by fast neutrons. He couldn't see how fast neutrons from a fusion reaction could be any less nasty than fast neutrons generated by a conventional fission reaction.
They aren't. But the energy also comes out as fast helium, which has a charge and is easy to decellerate, liberating heat.
The point is that, for a given amount of heat energy produced, there's a LOT less radioactive crud produced with fusion than with fission.
= = = =
However:
Let's stuff in some boric acid instead of heavy acetone and see if THAT works. It's a LOT harder to light off. But B-11 + H-1 -> 3 He-4 + LOTS of free energy and NO neutrons.
You do get a small amount of neutrons from other reactions that might take place in an environment that could light that reaction, such as B-11 + He-4 -> N14 + slow neutron, but those are very few and (at least in this case) very low energy.
= = = =
Now I'd prefer to run that reaction in a near-vacuum, excited with pulses at a microwave rate. The three He neuclei come off at very well-defined energies (and thus velocities). So you can design a decellerator in the form of a klystron and extract the power as microwaves - some of which you can recycle to pump the ignition reaction directly, the rest to rectify into more convenient electrical power. NOT a heat engine and VERY efficient.
Some of your particles will hit the structure, so from those you mostly get heat (though you might also scavenge some electricity by taking advantage of the current from the particles themselves and the secondary emission produced by the collision and the resulting x-rays).
What makes you think that there is no way for us to check if Diebold's machines really are clean? There are over 2 dozen security procedures built into their voting machines that cover the entire election process. These measures are easily verified by independant third parties and that can guarantee the process has not been rigged.
Easter eggs.
Example: Code to move 10% of the votes from "no" to "yes", or the D to the R, (or vice-versa), but only on election day, only in certain precincts, and only on candidates in particular ballot slots.
Code with such zingers would pass JUST FINE on the tests - and maybe get by even if you tested it with some extra machines during the election itself.
(Interestingly, though, one of the things that came to light is that these tests you speak so highly of usually aren't actually performed. Another is that, even in a state where an approval process was in place, voting machines were discovered (after the election) to have been running UNapproved versions of the software.)
So next time I suggest you don't talk about things that you clearly have no clue about.
Yo! Bucko! I've WRITTEN similar zingers myself. (Though only to play a practical joke, not to corrupt an election.) They work just FINE. And are damed hard to figure out even if you KNOW they're happening.
All of which begs the issue.
The point is not to make it accurate.
The point is to make it PROVABLE, even to a technical illiterate, that it IS accurate.
"Trust me, I'm an expert." isn't going to cut it when the issue is how Adolf Eichmann III became mayor of Chicago when he was polling 0.5% on the day before the election.
When you fill in your voting form you get a receipt with a record of your voting and a unique number (generated on the spot). At any time you could visit a validation web site, where you would type in the number you were given and check whether the entry matches what you have.
That doesn't slove the problem. The issue is not whether YOUR vote is in the database correctly. The issue is whether the difference in the TOTALS for the various candidates or proposition yea/nays, is correct.
But it DOES create another problem: Such a reciept would let you prove to someone ELSE how you voted. Which lets him buy your vote.
(It's laws against vote-buying that keep us from getting access to the raw ballot output - which we could analyze to check the accuracy of vote totaling systems (even with paper and punched-card balloting) and look for voting patterns indicative of other means of vote corruption (such as runs of identical ballots from stuffing operations).
Such suggestions as yours come from a misunderstanding of the purpose of an election, and of checking its results.
It is not to see that your vote is counted.
It is not to see that the most popular candidate wins because that's "right" or "nice".
It's to convince the LOSER that he REALLY DOESN'T HAVE SUPPORT. So he doesn't go out and start a war to overturn the election.
THAT is why republics are stable - and why corruption in voting, or even the PERCEPTION of such corruption - leads to "political instability" (a politically-correct term for riots, vigilantism, and civil war).
1. The person must be able to select the name of the person they want to vote for. (check) 2. Now count which person received the most votes. (check) 3. Announce a winner. (check)
You missed a step:
4. Prove the system counted the votes correctly. (Oops!)
To do this you need:
1a) The machine must make a hardcopy record of how the voter voted. 1b) The voter must be able to check that the hardcopy is accurate. 1c) The hardcopy must be preserved (along with the hardcopies of the other voters' votes), until the recount opportunities have expired.
4) When the loser says "I don't believe it!", the hardcopies must be manually counted, under the eyes of the loser's teammates, to prove that the loser really lost.
1a, 1b, 1c, and 4 are all missing from the Diebold system (along with most of the others).
Instead they have:
1d) Fiddle with the database to move votes from one candidate to another.
What's really quite disturbing is that the unreliability of these voting systems has been well covered in the mainstream press,... yet the voting officials still have no clue or interest in considering the liabilities of using these systems. It just defies reason,and makes me lean ever closer to my paranoia / tinfoil hat and wonder about payola.
Why are you worried about payola?
Worry about ballot boxes stuffed by corrupt election officials working for political machines.
That requires NO paranoia to be concerned about. When the enormous power of government is handed over to the winners of elections, the historical NORM is for the election process to be corrupted.
The battle is to keep it clean. The ONLY way to do that is to ASSUME it's dirty unless you can PROVE it's clean - in a way that's believable by every non-tech-savvy member of every losing faction.
When somebody can say, of an election, "Trust me, it's clean." - and you have to believe him because you can't check, it's almost CERTAINLY dirty. (The only thing that might keep it from being hacked is that the political machines haven't got their hacks finished in time.)
And when the election officials ignore mainstream press coverage about how it can be cheated and how simple it is to fix, you shouldn't be wondering if you're hearing a little alarm bell tinkling. You should be hearing air raid sirens and artillery bombardments.
I mean really, why all the fancy computers with touch screen monitors, why complicated software? Grab the vote in from a keyboard, encrypt it, save it, done.
Which doesn't address the problem with the voting machines at all.
The issue is not the fancy interface. (So changing to a keyboard would just add the problem of how you are supposed to collect votes from people who don't grok keyboards.)
The issue is: How do you KNOW the software that grabbed the vote (from the keyboard, touch screen, or what have you), encrypted it or not, and stored it in the database, ACTUALLY STORED THE VOTE THE VOTER CAST, rather than making up its own vote?
And how do you KNOW that the database ACTUALLY SAVED THE VOTES THE VOTING MACHINES FED IT and ADDED THEM UP CORRECTLY, rather than making up different values or being altered by some human intervention?
The MAIN problem with computer voting machines is that, along with hanging chads and dimpled ballots, they've eliminated any paper trail (actually checked by the voters themselves) of how each voter actually voted.
If the software is broken or corrupt, how do you do a recount? Ask it to give you the corrupted numbers a second time?
(Interestingly enough, that's EXACTLY how Diebold proposes to do a recount: Have the database print out the corrupted values as separate printed paper ballots for people to hand-count. B-) )
The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce. So we learned in Business Law.
Actually, what's illegal is attempting to use it in commerce after defacing it in a way that would let it be passed as currency of higher value.
You're entirely welcome to deface it in a way that doesn't promote fraud. In particular, some defacements are legitimate political speech and protected by the first amendment as interpreted by the courts.
My favorite defacement is to give the portrat of Hamilton on the (old) $10 a Hitler moustache and hair. Hamilton is the founding father who was the ideological head of the Federalists - the group that promoted the changes to the US central government that eventually led it to become the powerful and often oppressive machine it is today.
Not so much deliberately, of course. For instance, his opposition to the Bill of Rights was predicated on the idea that explicitly acklowledging certain rights would create the expectation that the government could stamp out any others. The proponents of the Bill claimed that, absent an explicit list of those that are particluarly important, the government would have no guideline and would stop 'em all. (Of course they were both right.)
But you know what they say about good intensions and paving.
There were no such laws passed in the US. There were a whole lot of "Buy American" calls from workers and some politicians but there were no laws passed because it is illegal under the WTO and it anti-competitive behaviour and most people who understand the free-market knows that it would be counterproductive.
Rent a clue, dude.
This was a half-century ago. We were in the middle of the "cold war". Trade wars built on puntitive tarrifs were a way of life, and the Libertarian Party was just starting to split off from the Republicans and the Society for Individual Liberty.
Free trade was as often viewed as a right-wing nutcase idea as a sane foreign policy. And while the US government sometimes called for it, it passed puntitive tarrifs right along with the rest of them.
AFTER the Soviet Union fell there was a major realignment of international trade, in accordance with free market principles (now that they had shown their worth by out-competing a major superpower into bankruptcy). The WTO and GATT are an outgrowth of that success.
And don't bother looking up half-century-old, since-repealed, laws and regulations on the web. This is behind the horizon on most of the web-based data banks on US law. That body of law is ENORMOUS, and the databanks tend to either stick to just the current stuff and/or the history since they first came online.
And most of 'em only came online AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union. The web was just starting as the the SU was just finishing. (It was one of the final straws.) US law databases were nearly nonexistent when Thomas first started up as the first official US free-access online legislation information site. And THAT came out of Gingrich's "Contract with America", implemented by the 104th congress in 1995.
(Now I remember it as an actual puntitive tarrif against imported cars that weren't built with at least 70% US components. I'm prepared to consider the possibility that, as one poster has suggested, my memory is faulty and it was only a requirement for that percentage of content to label it as domestic production. But given that the Japanese car company's brand names were recognizable and they didn't change them, and they actually BUILT ASSEMBLY PLANTS in the US to get around the regulations, at ENORMOUS expense, I'm inclined to trust my memory.)
Japanese auto-makers opened American plants because during much it was much cheaper to produce the vehicles and sell them locally rather than import them from Japan (or elsewhere) where you are subject to import duties [...]
Bingo! You just made my point. "Import duties" = "Tarrifs". "Free Trade" = "No tarrifs/no import duties". Given that shipping by ocean freighter is dirt cheap and (at the time) Japanese labor was WAY cheaper per hour than US, the only reason for a Japanese car company to invest a couple billion to open an assembly plant in the US is that they'd make it back on the import duty savings.
It's the usual story. Companies demand experience on all posts, and then whine about lack of "qualified" applicants. While ignoring the fact that they themselves are creating a qualification that's impossible to get.
Reminds me of the ads I used to see when Unix was first catching on. Entry-level pay jobs requiring 5 or 10 years of Unix experience, obviously written by HR people with no clue.
I guess Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Bourne, and Plauger weren't tempted into leaving Bell Labs by the pay scale. B-)
Back during the "Japanese Invasion" of the auto industry (when the Japanese got their quality up and held their price low, resulting in a major market shift among consumers) the US passed similar legislation, requiring a percentage of "US content" in any company's cars sold in the US. I think the number was also 70%.
Interestingly, the Japanese did this by opening assembly plants in the US. And employed US auto workers.
The US auto companies had claimed that there was a cultural gap, that the reason US car manufacturing had such a hard time with product quality was the US union auto workers. (Union reps said it was management techniques.)
The Japanese hired UAW members. And got better quality than in Japan. B-)
A friend of mine, a union organizer, put it this way:
"The US auto workers will give you what you ask. If you ask for quantity they'll give you quantity. If you ask for quality they'll give you quality. And if you ask for trouble they'll give you trouble."
B-)
What had ACTUALLY happened is that the Japanese had wholeheartedly adopted a management style promoted by a US theoritician, with major worker involvement and worker-to-management information and idea flow. Meanwhile, spured by the McCarthy-era anti-Communism witch hunts, the US executives eliminated anything that looked socialist or communist ideas from their own workflow, cutting themselves off from information and ideas from their blue-collar workers - who knew the actual processes and factory goings-on the best.
"same reason why people press the elevator button more than once.
And the same reason people press the reload or submit button more than once... When things don't show any evidence that they're doing what they're supposed to do.
Some elevator call buttons actually do help.
On many elevators (especially Otis), especially older ones, holding down a button in the car shortens or ends the delay before closing the door to move on to another floor. This was apparently done so that once people had entered the car and selected a floor the elevator wouldn't hang around uselessly.
Older elevators often saved on hardware by wiring the floor call buttons in parallel with the car buttons. So holding down a call button did speed up the car, by making it spend less time at other floors.
Newer, computer-driven, elevators don't usually do the door algorithm properly, even with respect to the buttons in the car. (Apparently the people who wrote some of the programs didn't research the older designs, but wrote it from scratch based on what they thought an elevator should do. Thus the elevators' algorithms are often less effective and more annoying than the older, relay-driven devices.)
I've actually found a similar trick that does work. Sometimes a connection will stall and hold up the whole works. Refesh will unlock that and redraw the screen, sometimes is seconds (after waiting minutes). The problem is, that if it stalled because the server is slow, reload drops the cache and can make things worse. I just click on the URL window and hit enter. That closes all the connections and restarts with whatever didn't complete. It works.
It will also select a server randomly on a load-balancing system. If you were on one that had gotten hung or slowed by large downloads, you're likely to hit a different one the next time.
just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
The followup poster has exposed an error in the above, (though not the one he thought.)
Actually, as long as you compress and expand gas adiabatically, then the Carnot cycle is irrelevant.
Actually, adiabatic expansion and compression are two of the four cycles of a carnot engine. (The others are adding heat to the compressed gas at constant volume and removing it at constant volume.)
My carnot cycle argument applies to the case of the mid-20th-century airships where the bouyancy was adjusted by heating the gas. It IS irrelivant when you're adjusting the bouyancy by, say, using an electric motor to compress it into a tank. (Though other heat engine arguments do apply. See below.)
The conservation of energy argument also applies. I'll show you where the detailed physics of the process make it show up when we get a little further along.
Obviously you cannot make an engine that works in this way [losslessly], because the point of an engine is (1) to do net work or (2) to cause a heat transfer. So the efficiency of any engine cycle has a Carnot limit.
Right.
But the process you have described need not be an engine. In fact, this should be completely obvious. Since there is no net work being done, and no heat transfer, how on earth can you even define an thermodynamic efficiency for the cycle?
Even the process of compressing and expanding the gas makes this into a heat engine. Compressing the gas heats it. The heat must be dumped. Expanding the gas cools it, and heat must be applied from an external source to bring it back to temperature.
This doesn't make carnot apply, though. But it DOES lead to additional losses if you don't do your compression and expansion adiabatically.
You must compress slowly, and dump the resulting heat without forcing it across a significant temparature difference. Similarly you must scavange the energy when it expands by running it through an airmotor to extract the energy and recharge your energy storage. (Otherwise the energy gets dumped.)
But the temperature change takes place in the compressor/airmotor. This makes it very hard to add or dump the heat across negligible temperature gradient in order to perform the operation adibatically.
(You also get losses in the generator/motor/battery system, or whatever you're using to store the energy for reuse. The total of these losses is so high you're probably ahead to do the bouyancy adjustments with heat in the first place. But then you ARE a carnot cycle heat engine.)
All of the above are efficiency issues, however. They represent precentage losses of useful energy as it it transferred from one form to another (gas pressure, temperature, height of mass in gravity field, momentum, etc.)
You ARE an engine, by the way, because you're doing work: Lifting and lowering the mass of the vehicle, driving the vehicle against air resistance.
And you don't even need to get this complicated. (Slow) compression and expansion of an isolated volume of a gas is reversible and adiabatic. Hence it is isentropic.
Right.
But that doesn't mean the total cycle is reversible.
In the airship case, the compression occurs when the ambient pressure is low, and the expansion when the ambient pressure is high. Even if your compressor/airmotor was perfect, the difference represents a loss of energy - specifically, the energy necessary to raise and lower the vehicle, which is lost to air friction from the vehicle's motion. (Thus conservation of energy is not violated.)
So why not just use a propeller?
If you're heating the gas to adjust the bouyancy, on the other hand, you ARE a heat engine. So you don't beat carnot, (and have to input maybe three or more times as
a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
Bzzt. Wrong.
Potential Energy = Mass * g * Height
How an object gets to 10,000 feet is irrelevant. Whether an object is neutrally bouyant, negatively buoyant, or positively buoyant is irrelevant.
"Bzzt. Wrong." yourself.
You neglected the potential energy of the displaced air.
If the object is at 10,000 feet, there's a chunk of air missing from 10,000 feet and present at ground level.
The total potential energy change is (M[vehicle] - M[air]) * g * h.
If the vehicle is neutrally-bouyant, M[vehicle] = M[air]. So the added potential energy of the vehicle/air system with the vehicle at 10,000 feet is 0 * g * 10,000 = 0.
If the vehicle weighs LESS than the air you have MORE potential energy when it's on the ground than when it's at 10,000 feet. (Which is why it goes up when you untie it.)
The bouyancy pumps on a sub are one of the smallest power loads. Most WWII subs had hand pumps connected to the ballast pumps.
True.
But they also used their diving planes mostly to convert forward motion (from those BIG engines) to vertical motion, rather than the other way around. They did most of their diving that way, and used the bouyancy adjustment mostly to hold themselves at a particular depth or the surface.
Except for coming up suddenly, of course. In that case they discharged an ENORMOUS blast of energy in the form of compressed air into the bouyancy adjustment. (It takes a LOT of power to compress air.) They could make that up slowly over a significant period of time, so the load on the diesel was small compared to cruising friction.
But if they had propelled the boat by running it up and down repeatedly and converting that to forward motion via diving planes, like the "submarines" described in the original post, and intended to make significant progress that way, they'd have needed an amount of energy similar to that needed for the electric motor driving the prop when submerged to achieve the same speed.
Bouyancy adjustment drive has the advantage that it doesn't require external rotating parts, to leak, become fouled or corroded, etc. (You can even do away with diving plane adjustments by flipping the craft, accomplishing this by redistributing internal weight.) This is very handy for long-term, great-depth devices which aren't in a hurry to be somewhere else.
The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel
So far so good.
The new hybrid "gravity-powered aircraft"
Starting to get bogus.
is formed by merging the capabilities of the following devices into a single new aircraft apparatus:
(1) an aircraft capable of aerostatic (lighter-than-air) lift to gain altitude; and,
Still OK.
(2) a glider aircraft capable of aerodynamic lift, having a high glide ratio to accomplish long range gliding; and,
Starting to get bogus.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
(3) a (patented, new design of Robert D Hunt) wind turbine that is capable of harnessing the force of wind to generate power as the aircraft glides downward. This cycle can be repeated indefinitely to allow the craft to stay aloft virtually forever.
Bingo! Perpetual motion.
You CAN get a lot of forward motion out of lift-driven vertical motion. But it takes ENERGY to adjust the lift. The submarines described in the original Slashdot posting are one example. Zepplins with diving planes that achieved speeds in excess of 200 MPH by this mechanism also existed in the mid 20th century.
But the Zepplins BURNED FUEL to change their bouyancy (by heating some of their bouyancy gas), just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
This craft proposes to use a turbine to collect energy from the wind of its passage and use that to adjust its bouyancy, use the bouyancy to produce forward motion, creating the wind to drive the turbine. Like a generator with its shaft connected to a motor which is also wired to its output, the energy goes around and around, with some being lost in every pass.
This is not to say it won't fly at all. But to the extent that it DOES fly it's getting its basic power from vertical air currents, just like any other glider. By being nearly neutrally bouyant it sacrificed the ability to store energy in the gravitational potential of its own weight at altitude, and it's replacing that by being able to convert the wind of its passage to stored electricity, then feed that back into forward motion via bouyancy adjustments rather than propulsive fans.
But I expect this to be more expensive and less efficient than other alternatives - such as an equivalent modification to the original 200-MPH zepplins WITHOUT the fixed wings.
When I have kids, I'll expect updates on all their cars' data at regular intervals.
So will the stalkers, rapists, sexual predators, and serial killers.
Is this what you REALLY want for, say, your teenage girl?
How about for your teenage boy - the one with the really cute butt?
How about for your cousin, who just bailed out of the abusive marriage and is trying to duck the ex-husband? You know - the one who broke her nose, blackened her eyes about once a week, and wants to continue the practice?
How about the crook who knows your car is worth fifty grand and you just spent ten minutes in a bank parking lot?
I'm not saying that it isn't good to be cautious, but just because a technology can be used in a "Big Brother" way doesn't mean it will.
Yes it does, It's only a matter of time before the fed/state/local authorities start to supoena onstar.
As a matter of fact, they already DID subpoena OnStar or one of its clones. And not just to track the vehicle, but to use the phone function to BUG it. This came to light in the news media as a result of a suit by the service provider.
It seems the device is basically a cellphone (without a ringer and with a fixed number to call, and WITH a data connection to the car's computer). Inbound calls are silently accepted (the better to track stolen cars without alerting the thief and to unlock the door for customers who lock the keys in). Of course this makes bugging the occupants trivial.
The emergency signal is sent by transmitting a tone in the upbound voice channel. With a call permanently set up between the car and the FBI's tape recorder, the emergency service the company was being paid for couldn't be provided. (The tone would go to the tape recorder, rather than a call being made to the emergency service proder.)
When the FBI wanted to continue the tap after a month, the company sued to get them to release it.
(The news item carefully didn't mention which OnStar-or-clone company was involved.)
The Internet is designed such that any single network node can be obliterated and the network will continue to function by rerouting itself around the problem. Whole networks can be destroyed or otherwise cut off from the main network and the main network will still continue to function (as well, the cut off network will continue to function within itself).
And the core still works that way. But it's different at the edge.
You buy a connection to an ISP. Unless you're a commercial customer paying the big bucks for a redundant feed you get one wire to one box. If something goes wrong with that wire or that box, you're cut off. If something goes wrong with that ISP you're cut off. If that ISP decides not to route the packet stream associated with some service it wishes to deny you, you're cut off (at least from the STANDARD way of using or providing that service).
If you have a second feed from a different internet provider the two feeds will have different IP addresses, and the routing information that lets the rest of the net know they're both you won't be propagated. No automatic failover for you.
Meanwhile your feed first tunnels to a subscriber management box, which exists to automatically configure and meter your connection. They were originally deployed to simplify and speed up configuring your connection. But to do that job they had to be the automated packet traffic cop. They amount to a reverse-firewall, protecting the network against your use or more service than you paid for, use of services that the ISP doesn't want to provide, and monitoring what uses you DO make of your connection.
So you can see why ownership of the internet utilities by major entertainment content-provider conglomerates has implications for internet freedom - especially where it potentially trashes the content-providers' business model.
The manufacturers of subscriber management promote them as giving the ISPs the opportunity to provide "added-value services" at the edge, on the model of telephone extra-cost options like call forwarding, 3-way calling, etc. But most added-value services can be provided anywhere on the network. The services that can only be added on the edge are limited. Typical examples:
- Quality of Service (QoS): Policing your packets and allowing through only as many marked for high-reliability, low-latency, low-jitter transport as you've paid a premium price for, so you and others like you don't swamp the common backbone, or overuse the high-quality bandwidth the ISP paid its backbone connection for.)
- Broadcast content (a limited number of very popular high-bandwidth channels transported once at high QoS over the ISPbone and exploded out to multiple users).
- Video-on-demand: A high-bandwidth high QoS personal channel from a content provider's server - at an extra fee.
- Parental control: Limiting and monitoring the internet usage of particular hosts on the home network - with the control implemented beyond the reach of machines the victim can reconfigure.
- Law-enforcement monitoring and network wiretapping.
The commercial internet is a very different design from the original concept of a robust network of endpoint peers.
Yesterday on Slashdot we had Microsoft adding anti-viral features into the next generation of Windows and today the anti-malware industry comes up with a lobbist group. Somehow, I think this has more to do of the security of their businesses from Microsoft's strengths than the security of any computers from Microsoft's weaknesses.
I agree, but for a different reason.
The entire business model of the anti-malware industry (or at least the named companies) depends on widespread deployment of insecure networks and servers to create a demand for their products.
So one can expect them to advise and pressure congress and other government officials to keep the deployed base as insecure as possible, to maintain and expand their market and thus their bottom line.
Government pressure on the dominant software vendor to improve its own security, government support for (or removal of roadblocks against) secure software alternatives and development models, and government conversion to secure software, are all a threat to their bottom line.
So expect them to advise the government to take action that would inhibit all of the above.
I'm rusty on this stuff, but I just pulled my old electromagnetics text. The magnetic field for a dipole contains 1/r^2 and 1/r terms. The electric field contains 1/r^3, 1/r^2 and 1/r terms.
We're talking a different "dipole"s here.
The one you're describing is an antenna driven element, which has magnetic fields from the current in the conductor as well as electric fields from the charge distributed along the conductor. You need a cubic function to approximate the electric field and a quadratic for the magnetic field. If you were just talking about a pair of static charges at a fixed distance from each other you'd only need to deal with an electric field and only have the 1/r3 term. But you can't vary the electric field without creating a current between the two "poles" of the dipole. The current creates a magnetic field, the motion of the charges puts distributed charge along the wire, and things get comples.
The one I'm talking about is the hot ends of an electromagnet - which is just about a pure magnetic dipole, driven by the current through a closed winding. The winding is multi-turn, so there's essentially no electric field leakage from the voltage accellerating the current through it. And there's no magnetic current (flow of magnetic monopoles) between the poles of the electromagnet. So treating it as a variable-strength dipole (rather than a chunk of improperly-terminated transmission line) is a nearly exact approximation.
Unless I'm confused, of course. My electrodynamics courses were several decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
... at a larger level (states), [fraud] is *very* significant. Why? Because you don't really vote for President. And since two given states may not have the same number of electoral votes, a fix in one state that is balanced in another state does not wash out.
Which is part of why there IS an Electoral College, rather than direct election of the president.
If the president were elected by popular vote, systematic corruption in ONE large state could overwhelm 49 states worth of honest elections. With the electoral college, the fruit of the corruption is limited to that state's votes. (Which the side in question probably would have gotten anyhow, since it's the one that was able to come to power in that state.)
Interestingly, this is somewhat related to the designed purpose of the E.C. - to prevent one or a few large states from steamrollering the little states (and thus give the little states the confidence they needed to join the union).
Easter eggs? Thats the best you could come up with? Oh brother.
Ridicule, eh? So you have no answer for my showing that a malware-loaded voting machine could easily get past the certification tests you claim make closed-source voting machine software safe.
I win. B-)
But as to your question about whether it was the best I could come up with: Nope. It was just the quickest, and easiest to understand proof-of-concept.
Another: Magic vote/unvote sequences or other magic input sequences.
Akin to the cheat codes on games or magic phone numbers that get you into configuration modes on your cell phone. Everything works normally until you "dial" #3001*12345* or say "xyzzy", then you get extra menus and options.
Similarly, do the magic sequence and you trigger the voting machine to do the same sort of thing described in the "easter egg" example.
I could go on. But I won't. Regardless of whether they're doing it or not, the people who program these things already know too many ways to corrupt the process without having me design some more for them.
So I won't post my "best" ideas, just to win a debate I've already won.
You now have two proofs-of-principle that certification of closed voting software is not an effective safeguard, because it can easily be passed by malicious software.
The incentive structure is to corrupt the elections. (You can win FAR more that way then you lose if you get caught, even if it takes the company down.) The prize is control of the country with the largest economy in the world, or a subdivision of it - along with a potential rakeoff of much of that economy (a third of which is already distributed by government hands). The cost is other people's freedom - which millions have died to acquire and defend.
I think we can afford a little printer paper. Don't you?
The liquid is deuterated acetone. AFAIK, this is essentially nail polish remover doped with deuterium. Probably as brain-rotting as normal nail polish remover, only a bit more dense.
As a separate point, I don't entirely buy the "less radioactive waste" argument [...] In order for fusion to be commercially viable, ultimately the reaction has to turn a generator somehow, probably via heat generated by fast neutrons. He couldn't see how fast neutrons from a fusion reaction could be any less nasty than fast neutrons generated by a conventional fission reaction.
They aren't. But the energy also comes out as fast helium, which has a charge and is easy to decellerate, liberating heat.
The point is that, for a given amount of heat energy produced, there's a LOT less radioactive crud produced with fusion than with fission.
= = = =
However:
Let's stuff in some boric acid instead of heavy acetone and see if THAT works. It's a LOT harder to light off. But B-11 + H-1 -> 3 He-4 + LOTS of free energy and NO neutrons.
You do get a small amount of neutrons from other reactions that might take place in an environment that could light that reaction, such as B-11 + He-4 -> N14 + slow neutron, but those are very few and (at least in this case) very low energy.
= = = =
Now I'd prefer to run that reaction in a near-vacuum, excited with pulses at a microwave rate. The three He neuclei come off at very well-defined energies (and thus velocities). So you can design a decellerator in the form of a klystron and extract the power as microwaves - some of which you can recycle to pump the ignition reaction directly, the rest to rectify into more convenient electrical power. NOT a heat engine and VERY efficient.
Some of your particles will hit the structure, so from those you mostly get heat (though you might also scavenge some electricity by taking advantage of the current from the particles themselves and the secondary emission produced by the collision and the resulting x-rays).
Look at the RIAA: suing Joe Teenager, to try and
offset the fact that their profits are dropping
like a lead balloon.
Lead balloon, that sounds like a good name for a band.
Don't try it. You might find yourself on the wrong end of a trademark dilution suit vs. Led Zepplin. B-)
What makes you think that there is no way for us to check if Diebold's machines really are clean? There are over 2 dozen security procedures built into their voting machines that cover the entire election process. These measures are easily verified by independant third parties and that can guarantee the process has not been rigged.
Easter eggs.
Example: Code to move 10% of the votes from "no" to "yes", or the D to the R, (or vice-versa), but only on election day, only in certain precincts, and only on candidates in particular ballot slots.
Code with such zingers would pass JUST FINE on the tests - and maybe get by even if you tested it with some extra machines during the election itself.
(Interestingly, though, one of the things that came to light is that these tests you speak so highly of usually aren't actually performed. Another is that, even in a state where an approval process was in place, voting machines were discovered (after the election) to have been running UNapproved versions of the software.)
So next time I suggest you don't talk about things that you clearly have no clue about.
Yo! Bucko! I've WRITTEN similar zingers myself. (Though only to play a practical joke, not to corrupt an election.) They work just FINE. And are damed hard to figure out even if you KNOW they're happening.
All of which begs the issue.
The point is not to make it accurate.
The point is to make it PROVABLE, even to a technical illiterate, that it IS accurate.
"Trust me, I'm an expert." isn't going to cut it when the issue is how Adolf Eichmann III became mayor of Chicago when he was polling 0.5% on the day before the election.
When you fill in your voting form you get a receipt with a record of your voting and a unique number (generated on the spot). At any time you could visit a validation web site, where you would type in the number you were given and check whether the entry matches what you have.
That doesn't slove the problem. The issue is not whether YOUR vote is in the database correctly. The issue is whether the difference in the TOTALS for the various candidates or proposition yea/nays, is correct.
But it DOES create another problem: Such a reciept would let you prove to someone ELSE how you voted. Which lets him buy your vote.
(It's laws against vote-buying that keep us from getting access to the raw ballot output - which we could analyze to check the accuracy of vote totaling systems (even with paper and punched-card balloting) and look for voting patterns indicative of other means of vote corruption (such as runs of identical ballots from stuffing operations).
Such suggestions as yours come from a misunderstanding of the purpose of an election, and of checking its results.
It is not to see that your vote is counted.
It is not to see that the most popular candidate wins because that's "right" or "nice".
It's to convince the LOSER that he REALLY DOESN'T HAVE SUPPORT. So he doesn't go out and start a war to overturn the election.
THAT is why republics are stable - and why corruption in voting, or even the PERCEPTION of such corruption - leads to "political instability" (a politically-correct term for riots, vigilantism, and civil war).
1. The person must be able to select the name of the person they want to vote for. (check)
2. Now count which person received the most votes. (check)
3. Announce a winner. (check)
You missed a step:
4. Prove the system counted the votes correctly. (Oops!)
To do this you need:
1a) The machine must make a hardcopy record of how the voter voted.
1b) The voter must be able to check that the hardcopy is accurate.
1c) The hardcopy must be preserved (along with the hardcopies of the other voters' votes), until the recount opportunities have expired.
4) When the loser says "I don't believe it!", the hardcopies must be manually counted, under the eyes of the loser's teammates, to prove that the loser really lost.
1a, 1b, 1c, and 4 are all missing from the Diebold system (along with most of the others).
Instead they have:
1d) Fiddle with the database to move votes from one candidate to another.
along with other possible problems.
What's really quite disturbing is that the unreliability of these voting systems has been well covered in the mainstream press, ... yet the voting officials still have no clue or interest in considering the liabilities of using these systems. It just defies reason,and makes me lean ever closer to my paranoia / tinfoil hat and wonder about payola.
Why are you worried about payola?
Worry about ballot boxes stuffed by corrupt election officials working for political machines.
That requires NO paranoia to be concerned about. When the enormous power of government is handed over to the winners of elections, the historical NORM is for the election process to be corrupted.
The battle is to keep it clean. The ONLY way to do that is to ASSUME it's dirty unless you can PROVE it's clean - in a way that's believable by every non-tech-savvy member of every losing faction.
When somebody can say, of an election, "Trust me, it's clean." - and you have to believe him because you can't check, it's almost CERTAINLY dirty. (The only thing that might keep it from being hacked is that the political machines haven't got their hacks finished in time.)
And when the election officials ignore mainstream press coverage about how it can be cheated and how simple it is to fix, you shouldn't be wondering if you're hearing a little alarm bell tinkling. You should be hearing air raid sirens and artillery bombardments.
I mean really, why all the fancy computers with touch screen monitors, why complicated software? Grab the vote in from a keyboard, encrypt it, save it, done.
Which doesn't address the problem with the voting machines at all.
The issue is not the fancy interface. (So changing to a keyboard would just add the problem of how you are supposed to collect votes from people who don't grok keyboards.)
The issue is: How do you KNOW the software that grabbed the vote (from the keyboard, touch screen, or what have you), encrypted it or not, and stored it in the database, ACTUALLY STORED THE VOTE THE VOTER CAST, rather than making up its own vote?
And how do you KNOW that the database ACTUALLY SAVED THE VOTES THE VOTING MACHINES FED IT and ADDED THEM UP CORRECTLY, rather than making up different values or being altered by some human intervention?
The MAIN problem with computer voting machines is that, along with hanging chads and dimpled ballots, they've eliminated any paper trail (actually checked by the voters themselves) of how each voter actually voted.
If the software is broken or corrupt, how do you do a recount? Ask it to give you the corrupted numbers a second time?
(Interestingly enough, that's EXACTLY how Diebold proposes to do a recount: Have the database print out the corrupted values as separate printed paper ballots for people to hand-count. B-) )
The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce. So we learned in Business Law.
Actually, what's illegal is attempting to use it in commerce after defacing it in a way that would let it be passed as currency of higher value.
You're entirely welcome to deface it in a way that doesn't promote fraud. In particular, some defacements are legitimate political speech and protected by the first amendment as interpreted by the courts.
My favorite defacement is to give the portrat of Hamilton on the (old) $10 a Hitler moustache and hair. Hamilton is the founding father who was the ideological head of the Federalists - the group that promoted the changes to the US central government that eventually led it to become the powerful and often oppressive machine it is today.
Not so much deliberately, of course. For instance, his opposition to the Bill of Rights was predicated on the idea that explicitly acklowledging certain rights would create the expectation that the government could stamp out any others. The proponents of the Bill claimed that, absent an explicit list of those that are particluarly important, the government would have no guideline and would stop 'em all. (Of course they were both right.)
But you know what they say about good intensions and paving.
Bullshit.
There were no such laws passed in the US. There were a whole lot of "Buy American" calls from workers and some politicians but there were no laws passed because it is illegal under the WTO and it anti-competitive behaviour and most people who understand the free-market knows that it would be counterproductive.
Rent a clue, dude.
This was a half-century ago. We were in the middle of the "cold war". Trade wars built on puntitive tarrifs were a way of life, and the Libertarian Party was just starting to split off from the Republicans and the Society for Individual Liberty.
Free trade was as often viewed as a right-wing nutcase idea as a sane foreign policy. And while the US government sometimes called for it, it passed puntitive tarrifs right along with the rest of them.
AFTER the Soviet Union fell there was a major realignment of international trade, in accordance with free market principles (now that they had shown their worth by out-competing a major superpower into bankruptcy). The WTO and GATT are an outgrowth of that success.
And don't bother looking up half-century-old, since-repealed, laws and regulations on the web. This is behind the horizon on most of the web-based data banks on US law. That body of law is ENORMOUS, and the databanks tend to either stick to just the current stuff and/or the history since they first came online.
And most of 'em only came online AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union. The web was just starting as the the SU was just finishing. (It was one of the final straws.) US law databases were nearly nonexistent when Thomas first started up as the first official US free-access online legislation information site. And THAT came out of Gingrich's "Contract with America", implemented by the 104th congress in 1995.
(Now I remember it as an actual puntitive tarrif against imported cars that weren't built with at least 70% US components. I'm prepared to consider the possibility that, as one poster has suggested, my memory is faulty and it was only a requirement for that percentage of content to label it as domestic production. But given that the Japanese car company's brand names were recognizable and they didn't change them, and they actually BUILT ASSEMBLY PLANTS in the US to get around the regulations, at ENORMOUS expense, I'm inclined to trust my memory.)
Japanese auto-makers opened American plants because during much it was much cheaper to produce the vehicles and sell them locally rather than import them from Japan (or elsewhere) where you are subject to import duties [...]
Bingo! You just made my point. "Import duties" = "Tarrifs". "Free Trade" = "No tarrifs/no import duties". Given that shipping by ocean freighter is dirt cheap and (at the time) Japanese labor was WAY cheaper per hour than US, the only reason for a Japanese car company to invest a couple billion to open an assembly plant in the US is that they'd make it back on the import duty savings.
I notice that the linked NY Times article did NOT ask for registration. And it doesn't seem to have any "affiliate" or other workaround tag either.
Have they dropped the registration requirement?
If so, did they do it because they actually READ their own article and take it to heart? (If not, it's still a nice coincidence. B-) )
It's the usual story. Companies demand experience on all posts, and then whine about lack of "qualified" applicants. While ignoring the fact that they themselves are creating a qualification that's impossible to get.
Reminds me of the ads I used to see when Unix was first catching on. Entry-level pay jobs requiring 5 or 10 years of Unix experience, obviously written by HR people with no clue.
I guess Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Bourne, and Plauger weren't tempted into leaving Bell Labs by the pay scale. B-)
Back during the "Japanese Invasion" of the auto industry (when the Japanese got their quality up and held their price low, resulting in a major market shift among consumers) the US passed similar legislation, requiring a percentage of "US content" in any company's cars sold in the US. I think the number was also 70%.
Interestingly, the Japanese did this by opening assembly plants in the US. And employed US auto workers.
The US auto companies had claimed that there was a cultural gap, that the reason US car manufacturing had such a hard time with product quality was the US union auto workers. (Union reps said it was management techniques.)
The Japanese hired UAW members. And got better quality than in Japan. B-)
A friend of mine, a union organizer, put it this way:
"The US auto workers will give you what you ask. If you ask for quantity they'll give you quantity. If you ask for quality they'll give you quality. And if you ask for trouble they'll give you trouble."
B-)
What had ACTUALLY happened is that the Japanese had wholeheartedly adopted a management style promoted by a US theoritician, with major worker involvement and worker-to-management information and idea flow. Meanwhile, spured by the McCarthy-era anti-Communism witch hunts, the US executives eliminated anything that looked socialist or communist ideas from their own workflow, cutting themselves off from information and ideas from their blue-collar workers - who knew the actual processes and factory goings-on the best.
"same reason why people press the elevator button more than once.
And the same reason people press the reload or submit button more than once... When things don't show any evidence that they're doing what they're supposed to do.
Some elevator call buttons actually do help.
On many elevators (especially Otis), especially older ones, holding down a button in the car shortens or ends the delay before closing the door to move on to another floor. This was apparently done so that once people had entered the car and selected a floor the elevator wouldn't hang around uselessly.
Older elevators often saved on hardware by wiring the floor call buttons in parallel with the car buttons. So holding down a call button did speed up the car, by making it spend less time at other floors.
Newer, computer-driven, elevators don't usually do the door algorithm properly, even with respect to the buttons in the car. (Apparently the people who wrote some of the programs didn't research the older designs, but wrote it from scratch based on what they thought an elevator should do. Thus the elevators' algorithms are often less effective and more annoying than the older, relay-driven devices.)
Something like BART's railroad car designs. B-)
I've actually found a similar trick that does work. Sometimes a connection will stall and hold up the whole works. Refesh will unlock that and redraw the screen, sometimes is seconds (after waiting minutes). The problem is, that if it stalled because the server is slow, reload drops the cache and can make things worse. I just click on the URL window and hit enter. That closes all the connections and restarts with whatever didn't complete. It works.
It will also select a server randomly on a load-balancing system. If you were on one that had gotten hung or slowed by large downloads, you're likely to hit a different one the next time.
just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
The followup poster has exposed an error in the above, (though not the one he thought.)
Actually, as long as you compress and expand gas adiabatically, then the Carnot cycle is irrelevant.
Actually, adiabatic expansion and compression are two of the four cycles of a carnot engine. (The others are adding heat to the compressed gas at constant volume and removing it at constant volume.)
My carnot cycle argument applies to the case of the mid-20th-century airships where the bouyancy was adjusted by heating the gas. It IS irrelivant when you're adjusting the bouyancy by, say, using an electric motor to compress it into a tank. (Though other heat engine arguments do apply. See below.)
The conservation of energy argument also applies. I'll show you where the detailed physics of the process make it show up when we get a little further along.
Obviously you cannot make an engine that works in this way [losslessly], because the point of an engine is (1) to do net work or (2) to cause a heat transfer. So the efficiency of any engine cycle has a Carnot limit.
Right.
But the process you have described need not be an engine. In fact, this should be completely obvious. Since there is no net work being done, and no heat transfer, how on earth can you even define an thermodynamic efficiency for the cycle?
Even the process of compressing and expanding the gas makes this into a heat engine. Compressing the gas heats it. The heat must be dumped. Expanding the gas cools it, and heat must be applied from an external source to bring it back to temperature.
This doesn't make carnot apply, though. But it DOES lead to additional losses if you don't do your compression and expansion adiabatically.
You must compress slowly, and dump the resulting heat without forcing it across a significant temparature difference. Similarly you must scavange the energy when it expands by running it through an airmotor to extract the energy and recharge your energy storage. (Otherwise the energy gets dumped.)
But the temperature change takes place in the compressor/airmotor. This makes it very hard to add or dump the heat across negligible temperature gradient in order to perform the operation adibatically.
(You also get losses in the generator/motor/battery system, or whatever you're using to store the energy for reuse. The total of these losses is so high you're probably ahead to do the bouyancy adjustments with heat in the first place. But then you ARE a carnot cycle heat engine.)
All of the above are efficiency issues, however. They represent precentage losses of useful energy as it it transferred from one form to another (gas pressure, temperature, height of mass in gravity field, momentum, etc.)
You ARE an engine, by the way, because you're doing work: Lifting and lowering the mass of the vehicle, driving the vehicle against air resistance.
And you don't even need to get this complicated. (Slow) compression and expansion of an isolated volume of a gas is reversible and adiabatic. Hence it is isentropic.
Right.
But that doesn't mean the total cycle is reversible.
In the airship case, the compression occurs when the ambient pressure is low, and the expansion when the ambient pressure is high. Even if your compressor/airmotor was perfect, the difference represents a loss of energy - specifically, the energy necessary to raise and lower the vehicle, which is lost to air friction from the vehicle's motion. (Thus conservation of energy is not violated.)
So why not just use a propeller?
If you're heating the gas to adjust the bouyancy, on the other hand, you ARE a heat engine. So you don't beat carnot, (and have to input maybe three or more times as
a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
Bzzt. Wrong.
Potential Energy = Mass * g * Height
How an object gets to 10,000 feet is irrelevant. Whether an object is neutrally bouyant, negatively buoyant, or positively buoyant is irrelevant.
"Bzzt. Wrong." yourself.
You neglected the potential energy of the displaced air.
If the object is at 10,000 feet, there's a chunk of air missing from 10,000 feet and present at ground level.
The total potential energy change is (M[vehicle] - M[air]) * g * h.
If the vehicle is neutrally-bouyant, M[vehicle] = M[air]. So the added potential energy of the vehicle/air system with the vehicle at 10,000 feet is 0 * g * 10,000 = 0.
If the vehicle weighs LESS than the air you have MORE potential energy when it's on the ground than when it's at 10,000 feet. (Which is why it goes up when you untie it.)
The bouyancy pumps on a sub are one of the smallest power loads. Most WWII subs had hand pumps connected to the ballast pumps.
True.
But they also used their diving planes mostly to convert forward motion (from those BIG engines) to vertical motion, rather than the other way around. They did most of their diving that way, and used the bouyancy adjustment mostly to hold themselves at a particular depth or the surface.
Except for coming up suddenly, of course. In that case they discharged an ENORMOUS blast of energy in the form of compressed air into the bouyancy adjustment. (It takes a LOT of power to compress air.) They could make that up slowly over a significant period of time, so the load on the diesel was small compared to cruising friction.
But if they had propelled the boat by running it up and down repeatedly and converting that to forward motion via diving planes, like the "submarines" described in the original post, and intended to make significant progress that way, they'd have needed an amount of energy similar to that needed for the electric motor driving the prop when submerged to achieve the same speed.
Bouyancy adjustment drive has the advantage that it doesn't require external rotating parts, to leak, become fouled or corroded, etc. (You can even do away with diving plane adjustments by flipping the craft, accomplishing this by redistributing internal weight.) This is very handy for long-term, great-depth devices which aren't in a hurry to be somewhere else.
The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel
So far so good.
The new hybrid "gravity-powered aircraft"
Starting to get bogus.
is formed by merging the capabilities of the following devices into a single new aircraft apparatus:
(1) an aircraft capable of aerostatic (lighter-than-air) lift to gain altitude; and,
Still OK.
(2) a glider aircraft capable of aerodynamic lift, having a high glide ratio to accomplish long range gliding; and,
Starting to get bogus.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
(3) a (patented, new design of Robert D Hunt) wind turbine that is capable of harnessing the force of wind to generate power as the aircraft glides downward. This cycle can be repeated indefinitely to allow the craft to stay aloft virtually forever.
Bingo! Perpetual motion.
You CAN get a lot of forward motion out of lift-driven vertical motion. But it takes ENERGY to adjust the lift. The submarines described in the original Slashdot posting are one example. Zepplins with diving planes that achieved speeds in excess of 200 MPH by this mechanism also existed in the mid 20th century.
But the Zepplins BURNED FUEL to change their bouyancy (by heating some of their bouyancy gas), just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
This craft proposes to use a turbine to collect energy from the wind of its passage and use that to adjust its bouyancy, use the bouyancy to produce forward motion, creating the wind to drive the turbine. Like a generator with its shaft connected to a motor which is also wired to its output, the energy goes around and around, with some being lost in every pass.
This is not to say it won't fly at all. But to the extent that it DOES fly it's getting its basic power from vertical air currents, just like any other glider. By being nearly neutrally bouyant it sacrificed the ability to store energy in the gravitational potential of its own weight at altitude, and it's replacing that by being able to convert the wind of its passage to stored electricity, then feed that back into forward motion via bouyancy adjustments rather than propulsive fans.
But I expect this to be more expensive and less efficient than other alternatives - such as an equivalent modification to the original 200-MPH zepplins WITHOUT the fixed wings.
When I have kids, I'll expect updates on all their cars' data at regular intervals.
So will the stalkers, rapists, sexual predators, and serial killers.
Is this what you REALLY want for, say, your teenage girl?
How about for your teenage boy - the one with the really cute butt?
How about for your cousin, who just bailed out of the abusive marriage and is trying to duck the ex-husband? You know - the one who broke her nose, blackened her eyes about once a week, and wants to continue the practice?
How about the crook who knows your car is worth fifty grand and you just spent ten minutes in a bank parking lot?
I'm not saying that it isn't good to be cautious, but just because a technology can be used in a "Big Brother" way doesn't mean it will.
Yes it does, It's only a matter of time before the fed/state/local authorities start to supoena onstar.
As a matter of fact, they already DID subpoena OnStar or one of its clones. And not just to track the vehicle, but to use the phone function to BUG it. This came to light in the news media as a result of a suit by the service provider.
It seems the device is basically a cellphone (without a ringer and with a fixed number to call, and WITH a data connection to the car's computer). Inbound calls are silently accepted (the better to track stolen cars without alerting the thief and to unlock the door for customers who lock the keys in). Of course this makes bugging the occupants trivial.
The emergency signal is sent by transmitting a tone in the upbound voice channel. With a call permanently set up between the car and the FBI's tape recorder, the emergency service the company was being paid for couldn't be provided. (The tone would go to the tape recorder, rather than a call being made to the emergency service proder.)
When the FBI wanted to continue the tap after a month, the company sued to get them to release it.
(The news item carefully didn't mention which OnStar-or-clone company was involved.)
The Internet is designed such that any single network node can be obliterated and the network will continue to function by rerouting itself around the problem. Whole networks can be destroyed or otherwise cut off from the main network and the main network will still continue to function (as well, the cut off network will continue to function within itself).
And the core still works that way. But it's different at the edge.
You buy a connection to an ISP. Unless you're a commercial customer paying the big bucks for a redundant feed you get one wire to one box. If something goes wrong with that wire or that box, you're cut off. If something goes wrong with that ISP you're cut off. If that ISP decides not to route the packet stream associated with some service it wishes to deny you, you're cut off (at least from the STANDARD way of using or providing that service).
If you have a second feed from a different internet provider the two feeds will have different IP addresses, and the routing information that lets the rest of the net know they're both you won't be propagated. No automatic failover for you.
Meanwhile your feed first tunnels to a subscriber management box, which exists to automatically configure and meter your connection. They were originally deployed to simplify and speed up configuring your connection. But to do that job they had to be the automated packet traffic cop. They amount to a reverse-firewall, protecting the network against your use or more service than you paid for, use of services that the ISP doesn't want to provide, and monitoring what uses you DO make of your connection.
So you can see why ownership of the internet utilities by major entertainment content-provider conglomerates has implications for internet freedom - especially where it potentially trashes the content-providers' business model.
The manufacturers of subscriber management promote them as giving the ISPs the opportunity to provide "added-value services" at the edge, on the model of telephone extra-cost options like call forwarding, 3-way calling, etc. But most added-value services can be provided anywhere on the network. The services that can only be added on the edge are limited. Typical examples:
- Quality of Service (QoS): Policing your packets and allowing through only as many marked for high-reliability, low-latency, low-jitter transport as you've paid a premium price for, so you and others like you don't swamp the common backbone, or overuse the high-quality bandwidth the ISP paid its backbone connection for.)
- Broadcast content (a limited number of very popular high-bandwidth channels transported once at high QoS over the ISPbone and exploded out to multiple users).
- Video-on-demand: A high-bandwidth high QoS personal channel from a content provider's server - at an extra fee.
- Parental control: Limiting and monitoring the internet usage of particular hosts on the home network - with the control implemented beyond the reach of machines the victim can reconfigure.
- Law-enforcement monitoring and network wiretapping.
The commercial internet is a very different design from the original concept of a robust network of endpoint peers.
Yesterday on Slashdot we had Microsoft adding anti-viral features into the next generation of Windows and today the anti-malware industry comes up with a lobbist group. Somehow, I think this has more to do of the security of their businesses from Microsoft's strengths than the security of any computers from Microsoft's weaknesses.
I agree, but for a different reason.
The entire business model of the anti-malware industry (or at least the named companies) depends on widespread deployment of insecure networks and servers to create a demand for their products.
So one can expect them to advise and pressure congress and other government officials to keep the deployed base as insecure as possible, to maintain and expand their market and thus their bottom line.
Government pressure on the dominant software vendor to improve its own security, government support for (or removal of roadblocks against) secure software alternatives and development models, and government conversion to secure software, are all a threat to their bottom line.
So expect them to advise the government to take action that would inhibit all of the above.
I'm rusty on this stuff, but I just pulled my old electromagnetics text. The magnetic field for a dipole contains 1/r^2 and 1/r terms. The electric field contains 1/r^3, 1/r^2 and 1/r terms.
We're talking a different "dipole"s here.
The one you're describing is an antenna driven element, which has magnetic fields from the current in the conductor as well as electric fields from the charge distributed along the conductor. You need a cubic function to approximate the electric field and a quadratic for the magnetic field. If you were just talking about a pair of static charges at a fixed distance from each other you'd only need to deal with an electric field and only have the 1/r3 term. But you can't vary the electric field without creating a current between the two "poles" of the dipole. The current creates a magnetic field, the motion of the charges puts distributed charge along the wire, and things get comples.
The one I'm talking about is the hot ends of an electromagnet - which is just about a pure magnetic dipole, driven by the current through a closed winding. The winding is multi-turn, so there's essentially no electric field leakage from the voltage accellerating the current through it. And there's no magnetic current (flow of magnetic monopoles) between the poles of the electromagnet. So treating it as a variable-strength dipole (rather than a chunk of improperly-terminated transmission line) is a nearly exact approximation.
Unless I'm confused, of course. My electrodynamics courses were several decades ago.