However, some of your transmit signal will always end up in the receiver for three reasons; (a) the circulator isn't perfect, (b) the antenna doesn't have a perfect match so some of the transmit energy sent to it bounces back again and (c) energy can reflect back from the immediate environment.
Combined with the many orders of magnitude strength difference between the transmitted and received signals in a typical communications application, even a miniscule imperfection in the circulator's cancellation of transmit power at the received signal port can result in the transmit signal swamping the received signal. So the circulator must be EXTREMELY GOOD to be useful in the described way.
Does deep packet inspection render https/ssl/ssh transparent to those with this technology or are my packets still keep private. I understand they can see src/dst, but can they see payload as well?
"Deep Packet Inspection" is a term of art in the design, manufacture, and sales of networking equipment. It refers to the ability of a networking device to parse, and make decisions on, more of the packet than the I.P. header.
The shallowest of "Deep Packet Inspection" would be to identify the protocol and/or service used (benignly: to adjust routing priorities: Fast but quick discard for streams, up to a limit, slower and lower priority but with more bandwidth available for file transfers, etc. Malevolently: to break file sharing protocols, especially when used by a customer who is consuming substantial capacity.)
But it can go as farther in from there as the capacity of the box allows. One use might be to recognize and filter out known spam or malware from email streams, as a service to the customer.
Routers are seas of risc processors with acceleration hardware, and Moore's law has applied to them as much as to silicon elsewhere in the computing infrastructure. Some of that has been applied to handling more packets. But much of it has been applied to being able to throw more general-purpose processor instructions at each packet.
You've seen what decades of following Moore's law has done for computing capability. Imagine what it has done for making routers - especially "edge routers", where are customer's packets come together and something useful can be done with them - smarter than the "dumb as rocks" hot-potato throwers of the backbone (and the original conception of the whole net).
Are modern engines as efficient at Mach 1.5 as they are at Mach 0.9?
You get to adjust the speed and pressure of the air in the engine - by a factor of several, if necessary - so the engine works well and makes good tradeoffs. That's much of what those cones, scoops, and funny-shaped housings are about, at least at the front. (Along the sides they're more about making room for the engine in the passing air without creating excessive drag.)
... right for refuse to board soldiers in your home,
Important point about the Third Amendment: The soldier didn't just eat your food and sleep on your couch. He served as a government spy. Listened in on your conversations, went through your papers and mail when you weren't looking, reported all to his superiors in the military and intelligence services.
He was the revolutionary-era meat version of spyware installed by the government on your computers.
I think hard-wired networks should be so robust that no set of user demand could ever saturate the possible bandwidth.
Unfortunately, the protocols don't work that way. In particular, things like file transfer over TCP and things like streaming over UDP, inherently break such scenarios.
TCP, used for file transfer (and other things that require reliable delivery of large amounts of data, where the delivery time is not critical but higher data rates are better), increases the bandwidth used until packets are saturating a bottleneck along the way - as detected by packet loss. Then they back off in a way that divides the bandwidth evenly among the streams passing through the tightest bottleneck, and constantly measures this by forcing packet drops on all traffic through the bottlenecked connection (and also keeps queues full, increasing latency unless the routers counter this with algorithms like "random early drop" (RED)).
Streams, on the other hand, require low latency and reliable delivery - but have a limited bandwidth and could care less if a packet delayed too much is discarded (and would PREFER it to be discarded, rather than delay ANOTHER packet later in the stream).
No matter how wide you make your backhaul and backbone pipes, as long as they're too small to carry ALL the traffic from ALL the last-mile drops (which would be prohibitively expensive), TCP will run up the consumption until links are saturated and packets are dropping. If you treat all the packets the same way, it will then break streaming media.
But if you treat the packets differently - giving streaming media connections, up to a bandwidth limit, priority routing but dropping delayed packets - they can play very well together.
Unfortunately, the same technology that enables this "traffic management" ALSO enables treating different company's packets differently. And that enables anticompetitive practices - both by ISPs that bundle internet service and services that are carried on it (giving them incentive to treat their OWN division's packets better than its competitors) and by ISP who want to use their gatekeeper position to make extra money by selling better treatment to packets from some services for extra money - and encouraging payment by making the default treatment too rotten for a service to be viable (in violation of what it means to sell "internet service" and perhaps common-carrier status in general).
The issue is not technical, but competitive: "Non-neutrality" can be good when applied equally to all packets of a set of packet and service types, regardless of source or destination, but becomes one or more of several kinds of improper business behavior (monopolistic, cartel-forming, tying, false advertising,...) when applied to packets of equivalent services from different companies or people.
FCC is good at, and empowered to, handle technical stuff. The FTC, on the other hand, is explicitly empowered to handle anticompetitive stuff, and (as that's their sole power) has historically been willing to exercise it.
The FTC uses its hammer rarely. But it's a BIG hammer. Must ISPs and "content providers" be separate companies, to avoid conflicts of interest leading to performance degradation? Can they co-exist, but are limits required preventing the ISP from favoring the company's content services? Look what the FTC did to AT&T over whether local and long distance services needed to be separate companies, Standard Oil on drilling, refining, wholesale, and retail distribution, Microsoft on bundling Internet Explorer with Windows vs. Netscape's browser, etc.
Imagine if your home gas and electricity was through the same company and that company also happened to be a natural gas producer.
I'm in California, in Silicon Valley. In my area (as with much of the state) the electric and gas utility are both PG&E. I get a single bill for both services, and the regulated rates are set by government approval of rate proposals generated by that company.
So it looks like exactly the doomsday market scenario you describe applies to me - and millions of others here on the Left Coast.
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
The practice of quartering troops in the homes in the occupied area wasn't just a matter of using up their resources to support the army. The troops served as spies against the citizens, hearing their conversations, going through their papers when they weren't looking, and so on, then reporting back to their superiors.
Imagine how having a live-in military spy would affect the ability of members of a family to participate in any activity in opposition to the desires of their current rulers - no matter how benign.
Spyware is exactly the same thing, at the electronic level: A software (rather than meatware) agent of the government, housed in the victim's premises, spying on all his activities, reading all his personal records and communications, reporting them all to its government controllers, and consuming his resources (disk space, RAM space, processor time, network bandwidth), to do so, and support his "life" in the process.
So it seems to me that a case could be made that the Third Amendment prohibits government installation of spyware on private-sector computers, except during war - and then only under terms explicitly and publicly set out in law - and in a manner visible an obvious to the target.
But what the hell are talking about "private property"? This land Bundy was grazing on - Gold Butte area -- is Public Property and has been since the Mexican-American war.
But (as you'd know if you'd followed the link I provided) the land he actually OWNS, on which his infrastructure for operation is sited, is a prerequisite for the grazing permits. Most of its market value is the result of this utility. Reducing their number from enough for it to be a viable business will crash that private property's price.
There's a further issue, however. Historically established licensures have value in themselves - and can amount to property. Some examples are commercial broadcast licenses and taxi medallions. (Prior to Uber the going price of a New York City taxi medallion hat hit a million bux, and it's still over 3/4ths of that.) Officials don't get to arbitrarily destroy or transfer that value on a whim. There are a number of laws, legal principles, and precedents which limit their options in such situations.
The fact that some piece of land is "public property" does NOT mean that members of the public, with a well-established pattern of making use of that land in some particular way, can be suddenly and arbitrarily limited by a bureaucrat's whim, or even a governmental organization's considered decision, without no regard for defraying the cost to the former user.
(And I won't even go into the issue of where property comes from in the first place - beyond mentioning it in this sentence. B-) )
This was apparently done due to environmentalist pressure to "protect the endangered desert tortoise". That's a pretty clear fifth-amendment "taking" of private property for public use without just compensation.
I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with how he handled this. But there's a lot of law and history in that can of worms. Reducing it to grazing cattle without a permit picks a side and shoves the other side's claims under a rug.
It's notable that the BLM has stopped attempting to enforce their position. Bundy has his cattle back - still grazing the land in question.
(It's also notable that cattle are actually an environmental benefit on western range land. Much of the environmental troubles there are from invasive European grasses crowding out native plants. Native animals tend to avoid these grasses and eat the native plants by preference, while cattle consider them a treat and prefer them to the native fodder, thus keeping them under control. Clearing off the cattle is a recipe for environmental disaster.)
wonder if they can create bullets with same metal foamd
No, that would just make it penetrate even less.
A fleschette in a discarding sabot (think "little metal arrow, sandwiched in a pair of pieces of wadding to provide a bullet-sized piston for getting it up to speed in the barrel before they fall off in flight") should cut through this pretty easily, and they're already available.
Downside is that it'll also go through the body behind it pretty easily, doing minimal damage unless it hits something like the heart or a major vessel or nerve trunk - unless you can get it to stay straight going through the armor and start tumbling once it gets to flesh. Part of the point of a bullet is to deliver a punch inside the target, not to just pass through and leave a small hole. The armor eats the punch early, and you need something that gets through it but then does something useful rather than just keep going.
After the medieval knight with full plate armor fell out of use because of cheap pikemen and the pistol,
I thought it was the crossbow, actually. The longbow could nail a knight to a tree, but required a lot of training and strength. The crossbow could do the same but could be learned quickly. Early firearms were about on a par with a crossbow both for handling accuracy and rate of fire (though they had other advantages - and far more room for technical improvement with time).
From second link; "The research group recorded 1,346 sales over the course of the last 18 months and found between 250 and 300 sales posts went up each month."
And how does that compare to, say, the classified section of (the somewhat misnamed) Shotgun News?
Wow: A whole 18 machine guns - man-portable ones from 1933 and 1938, and a vehicle-mounted version from 1949 (suitable for taking potshots at WW II aircraft, if you have a set of four working together, mounted on a trailer behind your Jeep).
There are collectors with far more than that many. I think typical shipments from nation-states to their anti-establishment proxies have more than that many per package.
Somehow I don't think they've found the underground arms market that's arming any major insurgency.
On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor).
Did anybody else have this effect?
It's yet another example of poorly-worded articles that assume the casual reader has deep background knowledge of the subject. I consider this to be an annoying property of Slashdot. It's not fatal.
But it would be nice if posters recognized that not everybody on/. is as deeply immersed in the subject as they are - and that the not-so-clued-in faction includes many who might be interested and perhaps have something to contribute.
Smart Meters are far more about saving money for the utility company. Unless you're outsourcing to the post office (which is designed for this), sending people out to read everyone's meter is expensive and time consuming when simple telemetry can provide what's needed. They only send people out when they think there might be a problem.
But as long as they were already replacing the meters to avoid truck-rolls for reading them, they also added other "value added features" to them - which they are using.
- Remote cut-off: Why roll a truck to turn off a load (and again to turn it back on) when they can program their payments database to automagically do it by remote control? And since it costs next to nothing and they can still bill the user as if they rolled trucks twice, it's profitable to reduce the grace period before a late payment cuts the power.
- Fine grained billing: Measure usage over small (like 15-minute) intervals - and archive it forever. This gives both the opportunity to do all sorts of variable-by-time-etc. billing schemes and for data mining, again nearly for free once the device is in place. (The power company at my Nevada vacation/retirement ranch, shortly after they installed a smartmeter, started providing me with a daily bar chart of usage - mapped against heating degree-days. So I know they are recording that data.)
In California, we've already been subject to rolling blackouts (infamously in the early 2000's; less-so recently). They've had the ability to exclude certain locations when they shut off a grid, but it's probably something that needs to be hard-coded.
California's rolling blackouts were before PG&E deployed smartmeters. They had to shut off "blocks" - sections of the grid that were downstream of a particular remote-controllable switch, and which would typically cover several neighborhoods. these are the same switches that cut off a section of the grid when a line is down. (They were cagey about publishing the boundaries of the blocks, to avoid terrorism or retaliatory attacks, or something, so you can't find a map of them.) If you happened to share such a final-level switch with some major emergency service (as my residence does, probably with the cop-shop of our town), you are in "block 50" and didn't get blacked out.
The smartmeters let them remotely shut down houses on a per-meter basis. If we ever get into rotating blackouts again (and they have enough command-and-control bandwidth), being in block 50 may no longer protect you.
The manufacturers of products are lazy and incompetent, and carry no liability for that;
It's worse than that.
The manufacturers are in a race to get new products and features to market. First through the window collects the customer base and market share. First three or so through the window slam it and everyone behind them crashes and burns. (For a startup that's IT. Go find more money and do another one - and have the same pathology.)
So doing things securely (which is hard and time consuming) means you miss the window. Thus only insecure stuff makes it to market. Maybe they fix it later, once they're established. Usually not, though. That's when you get the big breaches when somebody finds the holes.
The invisible hand has slapped down the players who tried to do it "right" - and thus did it too late.
... someone can hang a few thousand 56k modems on their phone systems and call in to their neighbors...Same goes for satellite, just bounce it around a few times and it can come from anywhere.
WiFi is good for a LONG way, and a lot of bandwidth, too, especially if you use an old big-ugly-dish satellite antenna reflector at one or both ends.
(Then there's OpenBTS and the like for bringing up cellphones - and bridging them to VoIP - when the government has spiked that network...)
ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages
During the evolution from those networks to the current, commercialized, information utility, much of that design was abandoned. We have migrated from an everything-is-redundantly-multiconnected, route around failures, survive a nuclear exchange system to a hierarchy, with a distinction between core and edge, where loss of certain boxes can shut down 10,000 to 100,000 end user sites.
(That's why those boxes are designed with internal reduncancy, like a telephone exchange. And I know them intimately, having spent over a decade designing parts of them.)
The core/backbone does retain some of the features of the Internet's cold-war-survival origin (though the transition to fiber and physical ring layouts made that more vulnerable to multipoint failures, as well.) So some of it still has part of the old robustness.
Then there are new services which added new dependencies (and sometimes new surprises when something goes down or goes away and a lot of stuff breaks).
And to top it off, the discussion is not about government actors managing to taking the net down, but identifying and surgically cutting off a designated portion of it.
So arguing from the characteristics of the robust-against-nukes network design we once had - and haven't had for decades - isn't particularly germaine.
Shouldn't our government do something real about this ?
Nah. They don't believe it themselves.
If they did they'd immediately abort, and try to reverse, their current policies where they are pro-natilist and/or encourage immigration of lower-income people and the raising of their standard of living - and thus their "carbon footprint".
Giving more people the opportunity to burn more fossil fuels, and raise more kids to do the same than they could where they came from, is obviously at odds with a dire need to reduce carbon emissions before global warming roasts us all.
the brunt of the harm is most likely to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, children, the poor, the elderly, minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities.
Republicans will just view that as a Benefit.
Yeah, yeah. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too.
Like short term memory jokes, gratuitous slams of Republicans, based on stereotypes of them, get really boring after a while. If someone did this to a left-wing in-group the thread would be buried in posts claiming "hate speech" and "microaggression".
Why don't you put a cork in it until you can come back with an intelligent flame that's evidence-based and you're willing to actually discuss the events in question?
There's a political party involved. I'm sure you can find SOMETHING real to talk about.
"Early smallpox vaccinations" would have been 1800 or so. Far too late to have had that effect on which groups maintained or increased their relative power.
And the Cherokee nation's eviction from lands east of the Mississippi and forced march to the Oklahoma territory - the particular forced migration for which "Trail of Tears" was coined - occurred in 1838-1839.
At the time of the Revolution the various Indian nations were still major powers. The revolutionaries expected some of them to eventually join the Republic as powerful States, and this was reflected in the Constitution (both in the procedures for admission of new States an.d the distinction "Indians not taxed" (those under Tribal jurisdiction vs. US/State citizens who happened to be of Indian ancestry). The major population and power shifts occurred later.
While Jennerization (vaccination) took off in 1799-1800 (and was quickly introduced in New England by Waterhouse with the gleeful support of Jefferson), it wasn't the first immunization for Smallpox. It was preceded by Variolation - deliberate infection by live smallpox virus in the skin (resulting in an infection that was usually survivable - though fully contagious meanwhile). Jenner's discovery that the distantly-related cowpox virus also produced smallpox immunity without producing the disease (just a few pock scars) enabled smallpox immunization (especially in tribal populations, who were particularly susceptible to smallpox) without the risk of creating a smallpox outbreak. It was adopted by several Indian groups (who later sent honors to Jenner).
Variolation had been performed for some time in (East) India, Turkey, and elsewhere. It was brought to the attention of England's Royal Society in 1714, and promoted generally in the 1720s:
Upon their return to London in April 1721, Lady Montague had Charles Maitland inoculate her 4-year-old daughter in the presence of physicians of the royal court.
Most vaccines are in the nineties when it comes to percent effectiveness, and some of them do near 100% effectiveness. I'd call even 90% effective "nearly all" because, with sufficient portions of the populated being vaccinated, an infection is not likely to get very far./ Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and call them 95% effective.
Now apply them to the population of the US - cal it 300 million. (Just the states were 308 as of the last census.) That's 5 million susceptible people due to vaccine failure.
Consider only the age 5-20 school-age cohort: Cut it to 20% of that (20.6% by the same census). You're still talking over a million susceptible individuals.
For epidemiology the NON-susceptible are background noise: A disease only spreads among those who can catch it, so only that population counts. Others might as well be furniture.
Even spread out among the whole country (but then re-concentrated in classrooms, school events, and schoolkid hangouts), that many human culture media are making the "herd immunity" thing a little iffy. Throw in another couple million unimmunized due to this health fraud, though, and it's a whole different ballgame.
I'm not going to shut up for fear that an anti-vaxxer might use excerpts from my (pseudonymous) rantings in their propaganda. The antidote for a lie is truth, and the main way these frauds succeed is by spreading faster than the truth can catch up with them - so shutting up makes it worse. If parts of the truth are inconvenient, that's tough.
Meanwhile, if they're fool enough to quote me, that just means more people will be led by search engines to my actual statements.
Slashdot Mirror
However, some of your transmit signal will always end up in the receiver for three reasons; (a) the circulator isn't perfect, (b) the antenna doesn't have a perfect match so some of the transmit energy sent to it bounces back again and (c) energy can reflect back from the immediate environment.
Combined with the many orders of magnitude strength difference between the transmitted and received signals in a typical communications application, even a miniscule imperfection in the circulator's cancellation of transmit power at the received signal port can result in the transmit signal swamping the received signal. So the circulator must be EXTREMELY GOOD to be useful in the described way.
Does deep packet inspection render https/ssl/ssh transparent to those with this technology or are my packets still keep private. I understand they can see src/dst, but can they see payload as well?
"Deep Packet Inspection" is a term of art in the design, manufacture, and sales of networking equipment. It refers to the ability of a networking device to parse, and make decisions on, more of the packet than the I.P. header.
The shallowest of "Deep Packet Inspection" would be to identify the protocol and/or service used (benignly: to adjust routing priorities: Fast but quick discard for streams, up to a limit, slower and lower priority but with more bandwidth available for file transfers, etc. Malevolently: to break file sharing protocols, especially when used by a customer who is consuming substantial capacity.)
But it can go as farther in from there as the capacity of the box allows. One use might be to recognize and filter out known spam or malware from email streams, as a service to the customer.
Routers are seas of risc processors with acceleration hardware, and Moore's law has applied to them as much as to silicon elsewhere in the computing infrastructure. Some of that has been applied to handling more packets. But much of it has been applied to being able to throw more general-purpose processor instructions at each packet.
You've seen what decades of following Moore's law has done for computing capability. Imagine what it has done for making routers - especially "edge routers", where are customer's packets come together and something useful can be done with them - smarter than the "dumb as rocks" hot-potato throwers of the backbone (and the original conception of the whole net).
Are modern engines as efficient at Mach 1.5 as they are at Mach 0.9?
You get to adjust the speed and pressure of the air in the engine - by a factor of several, if necessary - so the engine works well and makes good tradeoffs. That's much of what those cones, scoops, and funny-shaped housings are about, at least at the front. (Along the sides they're more about making room for the engine in the passing air without creating excessive drag.)
... right for refuse to board soldiers in your home,
Important point about the Third Amendment: The soldier didn't just eat your food and sleep on your couch. He served as a government spy. Listened in on your conversations, went through your papers and mail when you weren't looking, reported all to his superiors in the military and intelligence services.
He was the revolutionary-era meat version of spyware installed by the government on your computers.
I think hard-wired networks should be so robust that no set of user demand could ever saturate the possible bandwidth.
Unfortunately, the protocols don't work that way. In particular, things like file transfer over TCP and things like streaming over UDP, inherently break such scenarios.
TCP, used for file transfer (and other things that require reliable delivery of large amounts of data, where the delivery time is not critical but higher data rates are better), increases the bandwidth used until packets are saturating a bottleneck along the way - as detected by packet loss. Then they back off in a way that divides the bandwidth evenly among the streams passing through the tightest bottleneck, and constantly measures this by forcing packet drops on all traffic through the bottlenecked connection (and also keeps queues full, increasing latency unless the routers counter this with algorithms like "random early drop" (RED)).
Streams, on the other hand, require low latency and reliable delivery - but have a limited bandwidth and could care less if a packet delayed too much is discarded (and would PREFER it to be discarded, rather than delay ANOTHER packet later in the stream).
No matter how wide you make your backhaul and backbone pipes, as long as they're too small to carry ALL the traffic from ALL the last-mile drops (which would be prohibitively expensive), TCP will run up the consumption until links are saturated and packets are dropping. If you treat all the packets the same way, it will then break streaming media.
But if you treat the packets differently - giving streaming media connections, up to a bandwidth limit, priority routing but dropping delayed packets - they can play very well together.
Unfortunately, the same technology that enables this "traffic management" ALSO enables treating different company's packets differently. And that enables anticompetitive practices - both by ISPs that bundle internet service and services that are carried on it (giving them incentive to treat their OWN division's packets better than its competitors) and by ISP who want to use their gatekeeper position to make extra money by selling better treatment to packets from some services for extra money - and encouraging payment by making the default treatment too rotten for a service to be viable (in violation of what it means to sell "internet service" and perhaps common-carrier status in general).
The issue is not technical, but competitive: "Non-neutrality" can be good when applied equally to all packets of a set of packet and service types, regardless of source or destination, but becomes one or more of several kinds of improper business behavior (monopolistic, cartel-forming, tying, false advertising, ...) when applied to packets of equivalent services from different companies or people.
FCC is good at, and empowered to, handle technical stuff. The FTC, on the other hand, is explicitly empowered to handle anticompetitive stuff, and (as that's their sole power) has historically been willing to exercise it.
The FTC uses its hammer rarely. But it's a BIG hammer. Must ISPs and "content providers" be separate companies, to avoid conflicts of interest leading to performance degradation? Can they co-exist, but are limits required preventing the ISP from favoring the company's content services? Look what the FTC did to AT&T over whether local and long distance services needed to be separate companies, Standard Oil on drilling, refining, wholesale, and retail distribution, Microsoft on bundling Internet Explorer with Windows vs. Netscape's browser, etc.
Imagine if your home gas and electricity was through the same company and that company also happened to be a natural gas producer.
I'm in California, in Silicon Valley. In my area (as with much of the state) the electric and gas utility are both PG&E. I get a single bill for both services, and the regulated rates are set by government approval of rate proposals generated by that company.
So it looks like exactly the doomsday market scenario you describe applies to me - and millions of others here on the Left Coast.
The third amendment was about this:
The practice of quartering troops in the homes in the occupied area wasn't just a matter of using up their resources to support the army. The troops served as spies against the citizens, hearing their conversations, going through their papers when they weren't looking, and so on, then reporting back to their superiors.
Imagine how having a live-in military spy would affect the ability of members of a family to participate in any activity in opposition to the desires of their current rulers - no matter how benign.
Spyware is exactly the same thing, at the electronic level: A software (rather than meatware) agent of the government, housed in the victim's premises, spying on all his activities, reading all his personal records and communications, reporting them all to its government controllers, and consuming his resources (disk space, RAM space, processor time, network bandwidth), to do so, and support his "life" in the process.
So it seems to me that a case could be made that the Third Amendment prohibits government installation of spyware on private-sector computers, except during war - and then only under terms explicitly and publicly set out in law - and in a manner visible an obvious to the target.
But what the hell are talking about "private property"? This land Bundy was grazing on - Gold Butte area -- is Public Property and has been since the Mexican-American war.
But (as you'd know if you'd followed the link I provided) the land he actually OWNS, on which his infrastructure for operation is sited, is a prerequisite for the grazing permits. Most of its market value is the result of this utility. Reducing their number from enough for it to be a viable business will crash that private property's price.
There's a further issue, however. Historically established licensures have value in themselves - and can amount to property. Some examples are commercial broadcast licenses and taxi medallions. (Prior to Uber the going price of a New York City taxi medallion hat hit a million bux, and it's still over 3/4ths of that.) Officials don't get to arbitrarily destroy or transfer that value on a whim. There are a number of laws, legal principles, and precedents which limit their options in such situations.
The fact that some piece of land is "public property" does NOT mean that members of the public, with a well-established pattern of making use of that land in some particular way, can be suddenly and arbitrarily limited by a bureaucrat's whim, or even a governmental organization's considered decision, without no regard for defraying the cost to the former user.
(And I won't even go into the issue of where property comes from in the first place - beyond mentioning it in this sentence. B-) )
I use a square of the sticky part of a yellow sticky note.
... the citizen patriots ... graz[ing] cattle on land without paying grazing fees ...
You missed the step in 1993 where the BLM arbitrarily slashed the number of cattle Bundy was permitted to graze. If accepted, this would destroy his livelihood and most of the value of his property (which was mainly due to the grazing rights of the attached permits).
This was apparently done due to environmentalist pressure to "protect the endangered desert tortoise". That's a pretty clear fifth-amendment "taking" of private property for public use without just compensation.
I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with how he handled this. But there's a lot of law and history in that can of worms. Reducing it to grazing cattle without a permit picks a side and shoves the other side's claims under a rug.
It's notable that the BLM has stopped attempting to enforce their position. Bundy has his cattle back - still grazing the land in question.
(It's also notable that cattle are actually an environmental benefit on western range land. Much of the environmental troubles there are from invasive European grasses crowding out native plants. Native animals tend to avoid these grasses and eat the native plants by preference, while cattle consider them a treat and prefer them to the native fodder, thus keeping them under control. Clearing off the cattle is a recipe for environmental disaster.)
wonder if they can create bullets with same metal foamd
No, that would just make it penetrate even less.
A fleschette in a discarding sabot (think "little metal arrow, sandwiched in a pair of pieces of wadding to provide a bullet-sized piston for getting it up to speed in the barrel before they fall off in flight") should cut through this pretty easily, and they're already available.
Downside is that it'll also go through the body behind it pretty easily, doing minimal damage unless it hits something like the heart or a major vessel or nerve trunk - unless you can get it to stay straight going through the armor and start tumbling once it gets to flesh. Part of the point of a bullet is to deliver a punch inside the target, not to just pass through and leave a small hole. The armor eats the punch early, and you need something that gets through it but then does something useful rather than just keep going.
After the medieval knight with full plate armor fell out of use because of cheap pikemen and the pistol,
I thought it was the crossbow, actually. The longbow could nail a knight to a tree, but required a lot of training and strength. The crossbow could do the same but could be learned quickly. Early firearms were about on a par with a crossbow both for handling accuracy and rate of fire (though they had other advantages - and far more room for technical improvement with time).
Is my impression wrong?
From second link; "The research group recorded 1,346 sales over the course of the last 18 months and found between 250 and 300 sales posts went up each month."
And how does that compare to, say, the classified section of (the somewhat misnamed) Shotgun News?
Wow: A whole 18 machine guns - man-portable ones from 1933 and 1938, and a vehicle-mounted version from 1949 (suitable for taking potshots at WW II aircraft, if you have a set of four working together, mounted on a trailer behind your Jeep).
There are collectors with far more than that many. I think typical shipments from nation-states to their anti-establishment proxies have more than that many per package.
Somehow I don't think they've found the underground arms market that's arming any major insurgency.
On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor).
Did anybody else have this effect?
It's yet another example of poorly-worded articles that assume the casual reader has deep background knowledge of the subject. I consider this to be an annoying property of Slashdot. It's not fatal.
But it would be nice if posters recognized that not everybody on /. is as deeply immersed in the subject as they are - and that the not-so-clued-in faction includes many who might be interested and perhaps have something to contribute.
Smart Meters are far more about saving money for the utility company. Unless you're outsourcing to the post office (which is designed for this), sending people out to read everyone's meter is expensive and time consuming when simple telemetry can provide what's needed. They only send people out when they think there might be a problem.
But as long as they were already replacing the meters to avoid truck-rolls for reading them, they also added other "value added features" to them - which they are using.
- Remote cut-off: Why roll a truck to turn off a load (and again to turn it back on) when they can program their payments database to automagically do it by remote control? And since it costs next to nothing and they can still bill the user as if they rolled trucks twice, it's profitable to reduce the grace period before a late payment cuts the power.
- Fine grained billing: Measure usage over small (like 15-minute) intervals - and archive it forever. This gives both the opportunity to do all sorts of variable-by-time-etc. billing schemes and for data mining, again nearly for free once the device is in place. (The power company at my Nevada vacation/retirement ranch, shortly after they installed a smartmeter, started providing me with a daily bar chart of usage - mapped against heating degree-days. So I know they are recording that data.)
In California, we've already been subject to rolling blackouts (infamously in the early 2000's; less-so recently). They've had the ability to exclude certain locations when they shut off a grid, but it's probably something that needs to be hard-coded.
California's rolling blackouts were before PG&E deployed smartmeters. They had to shut off "blocks" - sections of the grid that were downstream of a particular remote-controllable switch, and which would typically cover several neighborhoods. these are the same switches that cut off a section of the grid when a line is down. (They were cagey about publishing the boundaries of the blocks, to avoid terrorism or retaliatory attacks, or something, so you can't find a map of them.) If you happened to share such a final-level switch with some major emergency service (as my residence does, probably with the cop-shop of our town), you are in "block 50" and didn't get blacked out.
The smartmeters let them remotely shut down houses on a per-meter basis. If we ever get into rotating blackouts again (and they have enough command-and-control bandwidth), being in block 50 may no longer protect you.
The manufacturers of products are lazy and incompetent, and carry no liability for that;
It's worse than that.
The manufacturers are in a race to get new products and features to market. First through the window collects the customer base and market share. First three or so through the window slam it and everyone behind them crashes and burns. (For a startup that's IT. Go find more money and do another one - and have the same pathology.)
So doing things securely (which is hard and time consuming) means you miss the window. Thus only insecure stuff makes it to market. Maybe they fix it later, once they're established. Usually not, though. That's when you get the big breaches when somebody finds the holes.
The invisible hand has slapped down the players who tried to do it "right" - and thus did it too late.
... someone can hang a few thousand 56k modems on their phone systems and call in to their neighbors ...Same goes for satellite, just bounce it around a few times and it can come from anywhere.
WiFi is good for a LONG way, and a lot of bandwidth, too, especially if you use an old big-ugly-dish satellite antenna reflector at one or both ends.
(Then there's OpenBTS and the like for bringing up cellphones - and bridging them to VoIP - when the government has spiked that network...)
ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages
During the evolution from those networks to the current, commercialized, information utility, much of that design was abandoned. We have migrated from an everything-is-redundantly-multiconnected, route around failures, survive a nuclear exchange system to a hierarchy, with a distinction between core and edge, where loss of certain boxes can shut down 10,000 to 100,000 end user sites.
(That's why those boxes are designed with internal reduncancy, like a telephone exchange. And I know them intimately, having spent over a decade designing parts of them.)
The core/backbone does retain some of the features of the Internet's cold-war-survival origin (though the transition to fiber and physical ring layouts made that more vulnerable to multipoint failures, as well.) So some of it still has part of the old robustness.
Then there are new services which added new dependencies (and sometimes new surprises when something goes down or goes away and a lot of stuff breaks).
And to top it off, the discussion is not about government actors managing to taking the net down, but identifying and surgically cutting off a designated portion of it.
So arguing from the characteristics of the robust-against-nukes network design we once had - and haven't had for decades - isn't particularly germaine.
Shouldn't our government do something real about this ?
Nah. They don't believe it themselves.
If they did they'd immediately abort, and try to reverse, their current policies where they are pro-natilist and/or encourage immigration of lower-income people and the raising of their standard of living - and thus their "carbon footprint".
Giving more people the opportunity to burn more fossil fuels, and raise more kids to do the same than they could where they came from, is obviously at odds with a dire need to reduce carbon emissions before global warming roasts us all.
Yeah, yeah. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too.
Like short term memory jokes, gratuitous slams of Republicans, based on stereotypes of them, get really boring after a while. If someone did this to a left-wing in-group the thread would be buried in posts claiming "hate speech" and "microaggression".
Why don't you put a cork in it until you can come back with an intelligent flame that's evidence-based and you're willing to actually discuss the events in question?
There's a political party involved. I'm sure you can find SOMETHING real to talk about.
The new equipment better be made in the US and carefully examined by the folks like NSA afterwards.
That's no help.
Modern processors generally have hardware-level "remote administration" back doors built in (and non-deconfigurable).
The chip vendors tout it as a feature.
"Early smallpox vaccinations" would have been 1800 or so. Far too late to have had that effect on which groups maintained or increased their relative power.
And the Cherokee nation's eviction from lands east of the Mississippi and forced march to the Oklahoma territory - the particular forced migration for which "Trail of Tears" was coined - occurred in 1838-1839.
At the time of the Revolution the various Indian nations were still major powers. The revolutionaries expected some of them to eventually join the Republic as powerful States, and this was reflected in the Constitution (both in the procedures for admission of new States an.d the distinction "Indians not taxed" (those under Tribal jurisdiction vs. US/State citizens who happened to be of Indian ancestry). The major population and power shifts occurred later.
While Jennerization (vaccination) took off in 1799-1800 (and was quickly introduced in New England by Waterhouse with the gleeful support of Jefferson), it wasn't the first immunization for Smallpox. It was preceded by Variolation - deliberate infection by live smallpox virus in the skin (resulting in an infection that was usually survivable - though fully contagious meanwhile). Jenner's discovery that the distantly-related cowpox virus also produced smallpox immunity without producing the disease (just a few pock scars) enabled smallpox immunization (especially in tribal populations, who were particularly susceptible to smallpox) without the risk of creating a smallpox outbreak. It was adopted by several Indian groups (who later sent honors to Jenner).
Variolation had been performed for some time in (East) India, Turkey, and elsewhere. It was brought to the attention of England's Royal Society in 1714, and promoted generally in the 1720s:
Most vaccines are in the nineties when it comes to percent effectiveness, and some of them do near 100% effectiveness. I'd call even 90% effective "nearly all" because, with sufficient portions of the populated being vaccinated, an infection is not likely to get very far./
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and call them 95% effective.
Now apply them to the population of the US - cal it 300 million. (Just the states were 308 as of the last census.) That's 5 million susceptible people due to vaccine failure.
Consider only the age 5-20 school-age cohort: Cut it to 20% of that (20.6% by the same census). You're still talking over a million susceptible individuals.
For epidemiology the NON-susceptible are background noise: A disease only spreads among those who can catch it, so only that population counts. Others might as well be furniture.
Even spread out among the whole country (but then re-concentrated in classrooms, school events, and schoolkid hangouts), that many human culture media are making the "herd immunity" thing a little iffy. Throw in another couple million unimmunized due to this health fraud, though, and it's a whole different ballgame.
I'm not going to shut up for fear that an anti-vaxxer might use excerpts from my (pseudonymous) rantings in their propaganda. The antidote for a lie is truth, and the main way these frauds succeed is by spreading faster than the truth can catch up with them - so shutting up makes it worse. If parts of the truth are inconvenient, that's tough.
Meanwhile, if they're fool enough to quote me, that just means more people will be led by search engines to my actual statements.