You forgot to factor in that the sun is only up for half the day (on average). So only 12 hours a day will have usable light.
But then there's cosine error from the light not hitting the surface straight on. (At a solar-farm level it applies even to tracking systems, since you're really interested in the amount of ground surface area involved.)
Then there's things like non-noon light taking a longer path through the admosphere (especially near sunrise and sunset) latitude, weather, season, altitude, near-horizon obstructions, etc.
It all gets combined into a "solar hours" number: That's the equivalent number of hours of noonday sun collected by a panel pointed south and tilted to the latitude - as if the sun appeared at its noontime position, stayed around for that long, and disappeared.
For a usually-cloudless site around the middle latitudes of the middle of the continental us (i.e. northern CA, Nevada's high desert, etc.) figure it averages out over a year to about 5 solar hours per day.
The correct agency for handling Net Neutrality issues is not the FCC. FCC is welcome to set standards on technological issues. But it's subject to regulatory capture and neither empowered, nor competent to handle, issues related to monopolization, bundling, throttling, fast-lane-service, preferential treatment of partners' content, and on and on and on.
It's the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), under antitrust, unfair competition, consumer fraud, and similar doctrines, that has the mandate, cluefullness, and track record to do this job.
Remember that it's FTC, not FCC, the broke up Bell (as it broke up Standard Oil) and forced "foreign attachments" onto IBM.
The FTC doesn't strike often. But when it does it has a DAMN big hammer.
... this is neither "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters" (unless you are one of the vanishingly few that happens to work in higher education).
Huh?
Are you saying nerds don't go to college and pay tuition? That they don't pay taxes that fund public colleges? That they don't work in corporations? That they don't hold stock in corporations? That they don't buy products of corporations? That they don't design things that require buying parts from corporations? That they don't vote? That they don't have children that will go to college or interact with corporations? (I could go on.)
My nerd credentials are impeccable and I consider this to be news for me and stuff that matters. And I get SO tired of having my reading interrupted by postings claiming otherwise.
Maybe we need a new down moderation, or other filterable label, for "Gripes about relevance to nerds."
Are they just talking salary? As far as I know university presidents don't have stock options.
You called it. Stock, bonuses, and golden-handshakes are where the money is. The salary is just covering "base load", to keep the wolf away from the Yacht's dock gate while the company isn't doing well enough that the big bucks aren't flowing adequately.
That's why turnaround CEOs can do the "dollar a year salary" thing for P.R. without hurting themselves financially.
As I understand it, the biblical "eye for an eye" was intended as a limit: ~no MORE than an eye for an eye~
This was to substitute for a common practice of the time, of taking disproportionate revenge, leading to escalation: You poke out my eye, I poke out both of yours, your brother cuts off my hand, my brother kills your brother, your brother's son kills my brother, my brother's son kills your brother's son and wounds HIS brother, and so on.
An eye for an eye was to limit that - by asking the community to consider a crime paid for, and for the punishment to stop, when the miscreant has been punished to the extent of his harm to others. If working as intended, it STOPS the WORLD from becoming blind as the result of the first bad guy poking out someone's eye. It makes the MISCREANT half-blind (and makes any escalated revenge on him a new crime, but also suitable for only the same, limited, retaliation).
This seems like a good idea to many. Unfortunately, there are practical problems with it. It leads to (it IS!) the doctrine of "Proportional Response". As applied in warfare (and perhaps in any group setting), limiting the response to the level of the attack leaves the leader of the opposition in no position to stop the attack. To be seen as surrendering to a weak opponent would reduce his stature, possibly even getting him deposed and a more militant replacement installed. So a hawk has to respond to Proportionate Response with escalation. We've seen this over and over. (The Vietnam adventure is perhaps the most explicit example of this, but there are plenty of others.)
In international politics, at least, once you're in a war, you're past "tit for tat" and into the section of the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma where modifications work better. The way to minimize casualties on your own side (which also mitigates them on the opponent's) is to go in whole-hog, but constantly leave open the option for the opponent to capitualte. By presenting overwhelming force, you allow your opponent to stop fighting without excessive loss of face.
This is why Democrats tend to fan up minor disputes into major wars, and Republicans tend to bring the resulting major wars to a close.
Of course asymmetric, ideology-driven, guerrilla+terrorism warfare is yet another category. Neither Proportional Response nor Boots To The Head works against the likes of "The Old Man of the Mountain", and neither major party has a proven-workable solution.
We're just about to discover a cure for aging. Didn't you get the memo?
Four million years will take a bit more than just a cure for ageing.
A couple decades back a Cryonics organization ran the numbers on expected lifespan if ageing and disease were eliminated, but other causes of death remained about like the then-current catastrophic accident rate of people in the prime years of life. As I recall that came out to something like 850 years.
Of course trauma repair is also subject to (and has been experiencing) rapid technological improvement. But even so, some accidents (like getting crushed to a pulp or burned to a crips) will no doublt remain unsurvivable. Meanwhile, diseases keep evolving to evade the currently deployed treatments. And then there's "enemy action" - like wars, assaults with a suitably deadly weapon, designer personalized diseases, etc.
So I expect that, even with a perfect cure for ageing, being still active to take advantage to the earth's rotation averaging out to an integer multiple of turns per orbit, is a "solution" only available to a lucky few.
Also not all that practical - because day duration s an AVERAGE. Like a spinning skater pulling arms in to speed up the spin,, the Earth's rotational rate varies with the amount the atmosphere is expanded or contracted by weather. It's enough to measure, and it adds up over time.
Take a look at the graph for time-domain signals in OFDM and rogue wave plots. They look almost identical.
That's because OFDM approaches the full use of the available bandwidth for information transport. The closer you get to that, the more your signal looks like random noise.
This is the part that I don't get: How is this algorithm supposed to "Protect" the ship. Sounds like only thing it can do is predict that one will be forming.
If so, how can a ship possibly survive such a gigantic wave even if it knows it is coming?
There are several candidates for rogue wave generation. In most of them (such as multi-wave focus and in-phase combination of several wave components of different frequencies) the rogue wave is very limited, especially in duration. (A possible exception is a non-linear long-duration soliton, such as the sech() envelope solution for water waves.)
In particular (at least while the amplitude is low enough that the waves' behavior is approximately linear), even if all the wave energy is going in the same direction, each sinusoidial component of the wave propagates at a different speed, proportional to the square root of its length. If they add up to something like an impulse at one point, a bit farther along their travel (and also a bit farther back in it) they aren't in phase any more. The nasty spike is gone. Things quickly get back to the sort of behavior you usually see.
If you know long enough in advance (maybe a minute or two) that one of these is going to exist in its full glory where and when you will be on your current course and speed, you can just alter them: Rudder hard over and cut the engine (or let out the sail), for starters. Be in a different place where/when the wave will not have formed, will have dissipated, or will at least be lower and more diffuse - and pointed in a direction to handle what you do encounter.
Would this algorithm even predict what direction it is coming from?
Almost certainly - if it involves processing data from more than one spatially-separated sensor, or even a single sensor on a moving platform.
Surely we have slashdoters that have great knowledge of seafaring.
Or some knowledge of both seafaring and surface wave mechanics.
What would be the best course that a ship can take to survive such a sudden mountain of water?
If there is some aspect I missed then, by all means, please explain.
For starters there are now "administrative tools", touted as a "feature", built right into the chips. These allow complete powning of a machine by any major networking pathway, including WiFI even if the machine is turned off or the network not supported in the OS. It isn't enough to "air gap" a "secure" LAN - or even not HAVE a LAN and rely on sneakernet. You have to physically rip the stock networking devices out of the box to block this path.
Even if you do amputate, there ARE sneakernet attacks (which are as old as computer viruses). Stuxnet, for instance, breached Iran's air gap firewall quite effectively.
... in a recent speech suggested that the way to end terrorism is to dip bullets in pig blood so muslims will believe getting shot sends them to hell.
Variations on that have been proposed repeatedly. They just show the person proposing them is ignorant of actual Islam.
I'm not all THAT familiar with it myself, but I AM familiar enough to know the major madhhabs agree that being exposed to pig blood by an enemy as a tactic in war is not a problem for getting to heaven (while being killed in such a way is a free first-class ticket).
Choosing to expose one's SELF to it as an act furthering even a holy war is more controversial - which is why, back in the muzzle-loading era, waterproofing a pre-assembled powder/wad/bullet charge (for quicker reloading by biting it open and pouring the contents into the barrel) by dipping it in bacon fat, was an issue for Britain's Islamic soldiers. (Also for Hindus, by the way.)
Another news related only to the US citizens. Give me a break.
Get a clue.
Slashdot is a US site, created by US nerds to talk about things of interest to them, and initially populated primarily by US nerds as well.
If you come to the US, even electronically, you shouldn't be surprised to hear a lot of things interesting more to US people than to people from wherever you came from.
Attendance is voluntary. If enough of the stories are also interesting to you, fine. But don't expect the rest of the population to stop talking about things interesting to THEM, just because YOU'RE now here.
If you're bored, be an adult and skip the article, like the rest of us do for things that bore US.
Running fiber in a handful of high population cities is not 'all over the country'. This is like a half dozen cities at best. And they only cover the highest density areas.
They have to start SOMEwhere.
Google came to Austin last year and my address isn't covered even though I'm less than 25 minutes from downtown.
Tell me about it.
My ranch in Nevada has slow dialup - like 32kbps. (Options: Satellite. The local WISP stopped beaming my area.)
My Silicon Valley townhouse has legacy half-MEGAbit DSL that flakes out in wet weather, due to underground copper about a half century old.
it sure is a neat way of getting rid of the evidence...
All that stuff about matching the round to the gun is about handguns. High-speed rifle projectiles tend to come apart beyond matching whenever they hit anything.
Also: Run a hundred rounds or so through a barrel and the marks change substantially. For a pistol that's pretty extreme and hard on the hand. For a rifle it's a typical afternoon at the range.
It sounds like the reacting coating causes the bullet to start tumbling in the air, and the increased drag is what stops the bullet.
Bullets spin VERY fast. In long range shooting, where they are going extra fast, to have a flatter trajectory and less sensitivity to wind, and also spin faster as a result (presuming a similar barrel twist) the battle is to keep them from coming apart. If the jacket ruptures, such bullets go "poof" into a cloud of dust and vapor - which stops almost like it hit a wall. "Varmint hunters" who snipe pest animals at extreme ranges with custom firearms and loads, may find a fraction of their rounds turning into smoke-puffs part way to the target.
It sounds to me like they're deliberately causing this phenomenon at a particular distance by using a timed pyrotechnic charge to create an initial rupture in the jacket of a rapidly spinning projectile.
I think it is well established the Exxon is not "neutral" in any sense of the word on climate change. They directly fund deniers and have been doing this for years. Their financial interest is in continuing to burn more fossil fuels.
As opposed to, say, nation-states, whose incentive is to use a catastrophe-scare to vastly increase their control over businesses and populations (and have spent tens - maybe hundreds - of billions on "climate research"), or politically-connected financial types (such as Al Gore) whose incentive is to create an artificial, rent-seeking, gate-keeping, market in "carbon credits" to skim billions off the energy market.
Seems to me that there ARE no "neutral" funding sources. In order to avoid an appearance (if not an actuality) of bias, the AGU may need to accept funding from all "sides" of the issue. To refuse "tainted" money from an interested party is to publicly sign on with its opposition.
The major vendors each built hardware security protocol acceleration into their chips and each supply a dev kit which includes stack and library support and sample code for using their security implementation in typical scenarios.
With a standards organization already on the job, only three or so major chip vendors, trying to sell their products with the bulk of the market already in their pockets, necessarily shipping their customers the dev kits that must support whatever standard arises, and with a need for their products to interact (because the central and peripheral end of a connection may be different vendors' chips), it seems to me that THESE are the players who are likely to come up with a usable standard. A consortium of pre-IoT giants who missed the boat and are trying to take it over mid-ocean may find it well defended.
The problem is that there are a lot of things on Kickstarter, but each project, be it a BT enabled padlock or some iPhone accessory are built with zero thought other than getting the project out the door.
It would be nice to have some IoT security guidelines, dev kits, and such which automatically have a standard of security ready to go.
The Bluetooth SIG already defines BLE security protocols and sample pairing strategies in their (3000+ page!) standards document.
The major vendors each built hardware security protocol acceleration into their chips and each supply a dev kit which includes stack and library support and sample code for using their security implementation in typical scenarios.
Granted a typical development cycle is: 1. Engineering gets the baseline functionality working first, intending it as a proof-of-concept demonstration and to turn on the security features when they do the good-enough-to-ship version. 2. Management and marketing is in a race to beat the competition through the window-of-opportunity (and slam it behind them). They show the just-got-it-limping proof-of-concept to potential customers (industrial) or sales channels (consumer), and investors (both). 3. If they like it, industrial customers do a trial deployment of the prototype, to see how it integrates into their process. Management (which will usually either be totally clueless of the engineering chasm between prototype and ready-for-prime-time, or optimistically underestimate it) makes scheduling promises to the customers and pushes engineering to meet them. Typically only the functionality is upgraded and debugged at this stage. Security is not on the timetable. 4. If they decide it works for them, the industrial customer brings in their I.T. department, which gives them their security requirements and prepares for a security audit. Now getting the security right (or at least right enough to satisfy some big customer) becomes a hotbutton item.
But for consumer, goods, replace 3. with "Get the prototype looking flashy enough for a trade show, show it, and sell it." and 4. with "After it's out there somebody finds several ways to break into it." B-b
Also: There's an FCC approval process just before the trade show, which tends to make any later upgrades to the firmware difficult and expensive. Maybe you get a "permissive change", maybe you have to pay the lab for $ome rete$ting.
The lineup includes ARRIS, CableLabs, Cisco, Electrolux, GE Digital, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Samsung, which will all work closely with one another to set rules and specifications to guarantee a singular advancement in the field.
I read that as "pool patents and close the technology against the garage-shop upstarts".
Maybe something like what happened with WiMax. Some friends and I tried to do a garage shop startup with it, but couldn't get chips or timely standards drafts because we weren't one of the large companies that formed the coalition.
Fortunately the three major vendors of IoT systems-on-a-chip (TI, Nordic, and Dialog) are being clueful about getting devices and development kits into any hands reaching for them, at prices a kid in his mom's basement can afford. (TI's first generation had a mandatory tie-in with a $3,000/seat development system from another vendor, but that's not a problem for the others or, I think, TI's latest gen.)
The garage shops (some of whom have customers with products in trial or production) have already stolen a march on the big guys when it comes to IoT. So this looks like, not an attempt to head off, but to co-opt or FUD-out, the horde of independents. A frantic move by the big companies, before they are nibbled to death by ducks.
What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments? That if we don't want to gain weight, we should all move to Florida?
How about: "The mouse gut bacteria that flourish in cold weather conditions signal the mouse to take more nutrition from the gut. They're throwing more of their own potential food supply to the mouse than the summer-time bugs, in order to keep their house intact and warm (rather than starved to death) over the winter months."
Yet another instance of life forms involved in a symbiosis evolving better mutual-survival strategies.
Also, no averaging of noise will happen if you try to produce images with similar pixel count to the number of detectors.
I agree completely there. (I'd say there is averaging but you're averaging in as much extra noise from other pixels as you're averaging out from multiple samples of the target pixel - and even if the noise were merely proportional the pixel brightness, rather than disproportionate as they get brighter, the bright ones would noise up the dim ones.)
They're not averaging together a bunch of pixels, but applying an inverse matrix , which will weigh pixels differently, and quite frequently can involve very high weights assigned to noisier signals. This can result in an emphasis that amplifies noise.
And that sounds reasonable so I'll defer to your expertise.
If you have to solve a big giant matrix inversion to do the job of a collimating lens, you're composing each pixel as a sum of many others instead of just itself, some of them being way brighter than the reconstructed image, meaning your reconstructed pixel is always noisier.
Not really.
When you average a large number of samples the noise tends to partially cancel out while the signal keeps adding up. Though the noise goes up with more samples, the signal goes up more, improving the signal to noise ratio. Even if you end up adding in some bright signals, with extra noise, that's still stomped by signal when you have enough samples.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to factor in that the sun is only up for half the day (on average). So only 12 hours a day will have usable light.
But then there's cosine error from the light not hitting the surface straight on. (At a solar-farm level it applies even to tracking systems, since you're really interested in the amount of ground surface area involved.)
Then there's things like non-noon light taking a longer path through the admosphere (especially near sunrise and sunset) latitude, weather, season, altitude, near-horizon obstructions, etc.
It all gets combined into a "solar hours" number: That's the equivalent number of hours of noonday sun collected by a panel pointed south and tilted to the latitude - as if the sun appeared at its noontime position, stayed around for that long, and disappeared.
For a usually-cloudless site around the middle latitudes of the middle of the continental us (i.e. northern CA, Nevada's high desert, etc.) figure it averages out over a year to about 5 solar hours per day.
The correct agency for handling Net Neutrality issues is not the FCC. FCC is welcome to set standards on technological issues. But it's subject to regulatory capture and neither empowered, nor competent to handle, issues related to monopolization, bundling, throttling, fast-lane-service, preferential treatment of partners' content, and on and on and on.
It's the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), under antitrust, unfair competition, consumer fraud, and similar doctrines, that has the mandate, cluefullness, and track record to do this job.
Remember that it's FTC, not FCC, the broke up Bell (as it broke up Standard Oil) and forced "foreign attachments" onto IBM.
The FTC doesn't strike often. But when it does it has a DAMN big hammer.
... this is neither "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters" (unless you are one of the vanishingly few that happens to work in higher education).
Huh?
Are you saying nerds don't go to college and pay tuition? That they don't pay taxes that fund public colleges? That they don't work in corporations? That they don't hold stock in corporations? That they don't buy products of corporations? That they don't design things that require buying parts from corporations? That they don't vote? That they don't have children that will go to college or interact with corporations? (I could go on.)
My nerd credentials are impeccable and I consider this to be news for me and stuff that matters. And I get SO tired of having my reading interrupted by postings claiming otherwise.
Maybe we need a new down moderation, or other filterable label, for "Gripes about relevance to nerds."
Are they just talking salary? As far as I know university presidents don't have stock options.
You called it. Stock, bonuses, and golden-handshakes are where the money is. The salary is just covering "base load", to keep the wolf away from the Yacht's dock gate while the company isn't doing well enough that the big bucks aren't flowing adequately.
That's why turnaround CEOs can do the "dollar a year salary" thing for P.R. without hurting themselves financially.
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
As I understand it, the biblical "eye for an eye" was intended as a limit: ~no MORE than an eye for an eye~
This was to substitute for a common practice of the time, of taking disproportionate revenge, leading to escalation: You poke out my eye, I poke out both of yours, your brother cuts off my hand, my brother kills your brother, your brother's son kills my brother, my brother's son kills your brother's son and wounds HIS brother, and so on.
An eye for an eye was to limit that - by asking the community to consider a crime paid for, and for the punishment to stop, when the miscreant has been punished to the extent of his harm to others. If working as intended, it STOPS the WORLD from becoming blind as the result of the first bad guy poking out someone's eye. It makes the MISCREANT half-blind (and makes any escalated revenge on him a new crime, but also suitable for only the same, limited, retaliation).
This seems like a good idea to many. Unfortunately, there are practical problems with it. It leads to (it IS!) the doctrine of "Proportional Response". As applied in warfare (and perhaps in any group setting), limiting the response to the level of the attack leaves the leader of the opposition in no position to stop the attack. To be seen as surrendering to a weak opponent would reduce his stature, possibly even getting him deposed and a more militant replacement installed. So a hawk has to respond to Proportionate Response with escalation. We've seen this over and over. (The Vietnam adventure is perhaps the most explicit example of this, but there are plenty of others.)
In international politics, at least, once you're in a war, you're past "tit for tat" and into the section of the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma where modifications work better. The way to minimize casualties on your own side (which also mitigates them on the opponent's) is to go in whole-hog, but constantly leave open the option for the opponent to capitualte. By presenting overwhelming force, you allow your opponent to stop fighting without excessive loss of face.
This is why Democrats tend to fan up minor disputes into major wars, and Republicans tend to bring the resulting major wars to a close.
Of course asymmetric, ideology-driven, guerrilla+terrorism warfare is yet another category. Neither Proportional Response nor Boots To The Head works against the likes of "The Old Man of the Mountain", and neither major party has a proven-workable solution.
We're just about to discover a cure for aging. Didn't you get the memo?
Four million years will take a bit more than just a cure for ageing.
A couple decades back a Cryonics organization ran the numbers on expected lifespan if ageing and disease were eliminated, but other causes of death remained about like the then-current catastrophic accident rate of people in the prime years of life. As I recall that came out to something like 850 years.
Of course trauma repair is also subject to (and has been experiencing) rapid technological improvement. But even so, some accidents (like getting crushed to a pulp or burned to a crips) will no doublt remain unsurvivable. Meanwhile, diseases keep evolving to evade the currently deployed treatments. And then there's "enemy action" - like wars, assaults with a suitably deadly weapon, designer personalized diseases, etc.
So I expect that, even with a perfect cure for ageing, being still active to take advantage to the earth's rotation averaging out to an integer multiple of turns per orbit, is a "solution" only available to a lucky few.
Also not all that practical - because day duration s an AVERAGE. Like a spinning skater pulling arms in to speed up the spin,, the Earth's rotational rate varies with the amount the atmosphere is expanded or contracted by weather. It's enough to measure, and it adds up over time.
Water waves don't have solitons
Sure they do. The second figure in the Wikipedia article on solitons is a water-wave soliton: a sine wave with a sech() envelope.
That's just a solution with mild nonlinearity. As the waves become more extreme there is more nonlinearity, and thus more opportunity for such
Take a look at the graph for time-domain signals in OFDM and rogue wave plots. They look almost identical.
That's because OFDM approaches the full use of the available bandwidth for information transport. The closer you get to that, the more your signal looks like random noise.
This is the part that I don't get: How is this algorithm supposed to "Protect" the ship. Sounds like only thing it can do is predict that one will be forming.
If so, how can a ship possibly survive such a gigantic wave even if it knows it is coming?
There are several candidates for rogue wave generation. In most of them (such as multi-wave focus and in-phase combination of several wave components of different frequencies) the rogue wave is very limited, especially in duration. (A possible exception is a non-linear long-duration soliton, such as the sech() envelope solution for water waves.)
In particular (at least while the amplitude is low enough that the waves' behavior is approximately linear), even if all the wave energy is going in the same direction, each sinusoidial component of the wave propagates at a different speed, proportional to the square root of its length. If they add up to something like an impulse at one point, a bit farther along their travel (and also a bit farther back in it) they aren't in phase any more. The nasty spike is gone. Things quickly get back to the sort of behavior you usually see.
If you know long enough in advance (maybe a minute or two) that one of these is going to exist in its full glory where and when you will be on your current course and speed, you can just alter them: Rudder hard over and cut the engine (or let out the sail), for starters. Be in a different place where/when the wave will not have formed, will have dissipated, or will at least be lower and more diffuse - and pointed in a direction to handle what you do encounter.
Would this algorithm even predict what direction it is coming from?
Almost certainly - if it involves processing data from more than one spatially-separated sensor, or even a single sensor on a moving platform.
Surely we have slashdoters that have great knowledge of seafaring.
Or some knowledge of both seafaring and surface wave mechanics.
What would be the best course that a ship can take to survive such a sudden mountain of water?
Be somewhere else. B-)
It would be SO refreshing if they'd just say that. B-)
If there is some aspect I missed then, by all means, please explain.
For starters there are now "administrative tools", touted as a "feature", built right into the chips. These allow complete powning of a machine by any major networking pathway, including WiFI even if the machine is turned off or the network not supported in the OS. It isn't enough to "air gap" a "secure" LAN - or even not HAVE a LAN and rely on sneakernet. You have to physically rip the stock networking devices out of the box to block this path.
Even if you do amputate, there ARE sneakernet attacks (which are as old as computer viruses). Stuxnet, for instance, breached Iran's air gap firewall quite effectively.
... in a recent speech suggested that the way to end terrorism is to dip bullets in pig blood so muslims will believe getting shot sends them to hell.
Variations on that have been proposed repeatedly. They just show the person proposing them is ignorant of actual Islam.
I'm not all THAT familiar with it myself, but I AM familiar enough to know the major madhhabs agree that being exposed to pig blood by an enemy as a tactic in war is not a problem for getting to heaven (while being killed in such a way is a free first-class ticket).
Choosing to expose one's SELF to it as an act furthering even a holy war is more controversial - which is why, back in the muzzle-loading era, waterproofing a pre-assembled powder/wad/bullet charge (for quicker reloading by biting it open and pouring the contents into the barrel) by dipping it in bacon fat, was an issue for Britain's Islamic soldiers. (Also for Hindus, by the way.)
Another news related only to the US citizens. Give me a break.
Get a clue.
Slashdot is a US site, created by US nerds to talk about things of interest to them, and initially populated primarily by US nerds as well.
If you come to the US, even electronically, you shouldn't be surprised to hear a lot of things interesting more to US people than to people from wherever you came from.
Attendance is voluntary. If enough of the stories are also interesting to you, fine. But don't expect the rest of the population to stop talking about things interesting to THEM, just because YOU'RE now here.
If you're bored, be an adult and skip the article, like the rest of us do for things that bore US.
Paul Zellerbach, who instituted the wiretapping is a Republican.
But Mike Hestrin, who ousted him and is currently cleaning up his legacy, including the move to slash the wiretapping, is also a Republican.
So it looks to me like at least some Republicans give some sort of damn about the law.
(Not that I have any love of Republicans. Both major parties attract psychopaths - just different types.)
Running fiber in a handful of high population cities is not 'all over the country'. This is like a half dozen cities at best. And they only cover the highest density areas.
They have to start SOMEwhere.
Google came to Austin last year and my address isn't covered even though I'm less than 25 minutes from downtown.
Tell me about it.
My ranch in Nevada has slow dialup - like 32kbps. (Options: Satellite. The local WISP stopped beaming my area.)
My Silicon Valley townhouse has legacy half-MEGAbit DSL that flakes out in wet weather, due to underground copper about a half century old.
it sure is a neat way of getting rid of the evidence...
All that stuff about matching the round to the gun is about handguns. High-speed rifle projectiles tend to come apart beyond matching whenever they hit anything.
Also: Run a hundred rounds or so through a barrel and the marks change substantially. For a pistol that's pretty extreme and hard on the hand. For a rifle it's a typical afternoon at the range.
It sounds like the reacting coating causes the bullet to start tumbling in the air, and the increased drag is what stops the bullet.
Bullets spin VERY fast. In long range shooting, where they are going extra fast, to have a flatter trajectory and less sensitivity to wind, and also spin faster as a result (presuming a similar barrel twist) the battle is to keep them from coming apart. If the jacket ruptures, such bullets go "poof" into a cloud of dust and vapor - which stops almost like it hit a wall. "Varmint hunters" who snipe pest animals at extreme ranges with custom firearms and loads, may find a fraction of their rounds turning into smoke-puffs part way to the target.
It sounds to me like they're deliberately causing this phenomenon at a particular distance by using a timed pyrotechnic charge to create an initial rupture in the jacket of a rapidly spinning projectile.
Will it run Replicant (or another fully-open set of code)?
I want a phone where all the code, even the radio and other driver code, is open, to minimize hiding places for spy- and other malware.
Down with binary blobs. (Especially things like radio binary blobs which are later found to have access to the file system.)
I think it is well established the Exxon is not "neutral" in any sense of the word on climate change. They directly fund deniers and have been doing this for years. Their financial interest is in continuing to burn more fossil fuels.
As opposed to, say, nation-states, whose incentive is to use a catastrophe-scare to vastly increase their control over businesses and populations (and have spent tens - maybe hundreds - of billions on "climate research"), or politically-connected financial types (such as Al Gore) whose incentive is to create an artificial, rent-seeking, gate-keeping, market in "carbon credits" to skim billions off the energy market.
Seems to me that there ARE no "neutral" funding sources. In order to avoid an appearance (if not an actuality) of bias, the AGU may need to accept funding from all "sides" of the issue. To refuse "tainted" money from an interested party is to publicly sign on with its opposition.
Drifted away from my point there...
The major vendors each built hardware security protocol acceleration into their chips and each supply a dev kit which includes stack and library support and sample code for using their security implementation in typical scenarios.
With a standards organization already on the job, only three or so major chip vendors, trying to sell their products with the bulk of the market already in their pockets, necessarily shipping their customers the dev kits that must support whatever standard arises, and with a need for their products to interact (because the central and peripheral end of a connection may be different vendors' chips), it seems to me that THESE are the players who are likely to come up with a usable standard. A consortium of pre-IoT giants who missed the boat and are trying to take it over mid-ocean may find it well defended.
The problem is that there are a lot of things on Kickstarter, but each project, be it a BT enabled padlock or some iPhone accessory are built with zero thought other than getting the project out the door.
It would be nice to have some IoT security guidelines, dev kits, and such which automatically have a standard of security ready to go.
The Bluetooth SIG already defines BLE security protocols and sample pairing strategies in their (3000+ page!) standards document.
The major vendors each built hardware security protocol acceleration into their chips and each supply a dev kit which includes stack and library support and sample code for using their security implementation in typical scenarios.
Granted a typical development cycle is:
1. Engineering gets the baseline functionality working first, intending it as a proof-of-concept demonstration and to turn on the security features when they do the good-enough-to-ship version.
2. Management and marketing is in a race to beat the competition through the window-of-opportunity (and slam it behind them). They show the just-got-it-limping proof-of-concept to potential customers (industrial) or sales channels (consumer), and investors (both).
3. If they like it, industrial customers do a trial deployment of the prototype, to see how it integrates into their process. Management (which will usually either be totally clueless of the engineering chasm between prototype and ready-for-prime-time, or optimistically underestimate it) makes scheduling promises to the customers and pushes engineering to meet them. Typically only the functionality is upgraded and debugged at this stage. Security is not on the timetable.
4. If they decide it works for them, the industrial customer brings in their I.T. department, which gives them their security requirements and prepares for a security audit. Now getting the security right (or at least right enough to satisfy some big customer) becomes a hotbutton item.
But for consumer, goods, replace 3. with "Get the prototype looking flashy enough for a trade show, show it, and sell it." and 4. with "After it's out there somebody finds several ways to break into it." B-b
Also: There's an FCC approval process just before the trade show, which tends to make any later upgrades to the firmware difficult and expensive. Maybe you get a "permissive change", maybe you have to pay the lab for $ome rete$ting.
The lineup includes ARRIS, CableLabs, Cisco, Electrolux, GE Digital, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Samsung, which will all work closely with one another to set rules and specifications to guarantee a singular advancement in the field.
I read that as "pool patents and close the technology against the garage-shop upstarts".
Maybe something like what happened with WiMax. Some friends and I tried to do a garage shop startup with it, but couldn't get chips or timely standards drafts because we weren't one of the large companies that formed the coalition.
Fortunately the three major vendors of IoT systems-on-a-chip (TI, Nordic, and Dialog) are being clueful about getting devices and development kits into any hands reaching for them, at prices a kid in his mom's basement can afford. (TI's first generation had a mandatory tie-in with a $3,000/seat development system from another vendor, but that's not a problem for the others or, I think, TI's latest gen.)
The garage shops (some of whom have customers with products in trial or production) have already stolen a march on the big guys when it comes to IoT. So this looks like, not an attempt to head off, but to co-opt or FUD-out, the horde of independents. A frantic move by the big companies, before they are nibbled to death by ducks.
What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments? That if we don't want to gain weight, we should all move to Florida?
How about: "The mouse gut bacteria that flourish in cold weather conditions signal the mouse to take more nutrition from the gut. They're throwing more of their own potential food supply to the mouse than the summer-time bugs, in order to keep their house intact and warm (rather than starved to death) over the winter months."
Yet another instance of life forms involved in a symbiosis evolving better mutual-survival strategies.
Also, no averaging of noise will happen if you try to produce images with similar pixel count to the number of detectors.
I agree completely there. (I'd say there is averaging but you're averaging in as much extra noise from other pixels as you're averaging out from multiple samples of the target pixel - and even if the noise were merely proportional the pixel brightness, rather than disproportionate as they get brighter, the bright ones would noise up the dim ones.)
They're not averaging together a bunch of pixels, but applying an inverse matrix , which will weigh pixels differently, and quite frequently can involve very high weights assigned to noisier signals. This can result in an emphasis that amplifies noise.
And that sounds reasonable so I'll defer to your expertise.
If you have to solve a big giant matrix inversion to do the job of a collimating lens, you're composing each pixel as a sum of many others instead of just itself, some of them being way brighter than the reconstructed image, meaning your reconstructed pixel is always noisier.
Not really.
When you average a large number of samples the noise tends to partially cancel out while the signal keeps adding up. Though the noise goes up with more samples, the signal goes up more, improving the signal to noise ratio. Even if you end up adding in some bright signals, with extra noise, that's still stomped by signal when you have enough samples.