Too many people are living in an alternate reality put in their heads by hate-radio, and other right-wing media. They're angry, totally-misinformed, and they're eager to tell you [...]
There may be no way to deprogram the people we've lost to media designed to drive the Conservatives mad. [...] Cults used to be small, local dysfunction, but thanks to 24hr propaganda on TV and radio, a massive media-driven cult has been created, and these idiots vote for scoundrels like Trump and Cruz.
Sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
Back in the '60s the "establishment" media was a very narrow bottleneck, (just 3 TV networks, for starters) and quite in the pockets of government and "the 1%". (I recall one Vietnam Conflict protest march in Cleveland OH: Solid people from curb to curb on the main drag, for several blocks. The national TV camera crews were on one sidewalk, in a tight half-circle around about a dozen members of a vocally communist splinter group, cameras facing away from the giant march. Watch the evening news and you'd think the whole protest WAS that tiny splinter group.)
Trying to get the word out was a major problem for a whole generation's anti-establishment contingent - which consisted of virtually all of the boomer generation, thanks to the draft and the Vietnam escalations, along with the start of the "drug war", the ("McCarthy Era") Cold War anti-communist oppressions, and a number of other government intrusions.
One reaction was "The Underground Press". But that was pretty niche. Another, far more effective, was self-organization among the students of the journalism school programs. They were (literally) planning to infiltrate the media and use it to get their (now solidly left-wing) message out.
Don't tell me that's a fantasy - because I was there. I (and some of my politically-active friends) hung out in places where such planning went on. As the decades passed, I watched as EXACTLY what was planned gradually took hold. The new generation of establishment media personnel were these students, some of whom who worked their way into positions of editorial control, and gradually changed the media culture. First they got some of their ideas out. Then they evolved the outlets into a NEW establishment media, becoming a pervasive left-wing propaganda operation. This operated for decades (and still does), becoming the "new normal".
Newspapers could do what they wanted. But in the electronic media the "Fairness Doctrine" blocked any attempt to bring a substantial amount of anti-establishment ideological challenge to the airwaves, by requiring giving "equal time" to its direct opposition. This hobbled explicitly political analysis shows. Meanwhile, the new establishment newsies got a pass on this - they were able to slant things as they wanted, and got very good at doing it without triggering effective equal-time demands.
Until 1987 - when (thanks to falling electronic prices leading to a glut of AM stations in search of something to broadcast) access to media became cheap enough that it wasn't a bottleneck, and the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the interest of promoting free speech.
So now explicitly and admittedly political shows could operate. There was a sucking demand for non-left-wing political analysis, which made such shows profitable. A former disk jockey named Limbaugh broke the ice, and soon the AM dial was full of (the now anti-establishment) "conservative talk radio".
Are some of the listeners "mindless robots"? Maybe so. But the left had this field to itself for decades, and had built an enormus mass of socially-pressured cultists. It amuses me no end to hear them squawk when someone outside their politically-correct groupthink cluster files the serial numbers off their machine. B-)
Meanwhile the rise of computer networking has given outlets to other reporting and fact-checking, so neither the establishment nor the anti-establishment media is a bottleneck to the free flow of idea
To be fair, a single 5g BB going about 36% the speed of light would also have the equivalent of 7 kT of TNT. Maybe they just invented the world's best Daisy Model 25...
If they've got that (and can get it high enough that they don't have to fire through the Earth's land masses or oceans), they don't need the (non-BB) missiles. B-)
They only have a stunted A-bomb that they don't have a delivery system for. So, they're still not really a serious threat.
They tried the A-bomb three times:
- The first one had yield that was way low (about 1 kiloton). Probably a "fizzle" (extreme shortfall of output, typically from blowing apart too soon, though it may still be far more powerful than a conventional explosive). EVERY country developing nuclear explosives has had one or more fizzles.
- The second did considerably better (about 4 kilotons), though probably still below their design intent.
- The third was better yet (about 7 kilotons). This is right in the ballpark of other countries' first bomb models, a tad more than half the yeild of the "Little Boy" bomb (about 13 kilotons) dropped on Hiroshima.
So it looks to me like they've got a competent design crew and a working design. At this point they may have their A-bomb robust enough, as well, to fit onto a missile and survive the trip to a target.
This was allegedly their first try to test an H-bomb, and had a similar yeild to the third A bomb. Maybe they had an ignition failure on the second (H) stage on their first try. Any bets on whether they do on their second or third?
The Teller-Ulam configuration is a bit complicated. But it's not all that hard to understand or to build. (With the amount of secrecy and misdirection published on nuclear weapons I would expect that first try by a new player would, more likely than not, either fail to ignite or have significant shortfalls in yield. But I'd also expect an army of physicists and engineers to figure it out and get it right pretty quiclkly. People might try to keep secrets, but physics doesn't.)
Meanwhile: A Nagasaki-sized bomb might be small by Cold War standards, but it's quite adequate to ruin a city.
However, they are much closer to taking that crappy payload and putting it on a missile that could hit Japan.
They have been making, and selling, their successful knockoff of the SCUD for three decades now. They have tested a number of long-range missiles. That's apparently part of the same program, so I would expect it to have a payload weight and volume adequate to carry the bombs.
And they could probably already trundle that device into an underground tunnel that goes right into Seoul.
With those missiles no tunnel is required. But they could also put it in a container, put that on a cargo ship, and sail it into pretty much any seaport in the world. If the coast guard doesn't catch it far enough out, blammo!
It's mostly a joke because they're waving around a BB gun and calling it an assault rifle. You could still put someone's eye out with that thing, though.
7 kilotons of TNT equivalent is the energy of metric s**t load of BBs.
I'll bet my life on a smart gun working as soon as law enforcement (and, for that matter, the Secret Service) is confident enough in them to use them too.
But think how convenient smart gun technology would be - if carried by cops, federal agents, and military:
- You could make a cop detector, which would detect the signals between the gun and the token (or for any working on other than radio, there would still likely to be tempest-style signals to detect or ways to provoke it into betraying itself).
- You could make a gun jammer, so the cop, agent, or soldier's gun would fail to fire.
I have a Ford F-150 with Microsoft software in it and it really sucks. In fact, Ford motor company ditched Microsoft in favour if QNX in 2014.
Me, too.
I used to think that Microsoft had finally done something halfway right. Then I found out that the parts that were "right" were Ford applications running on top of the parts that were "wrong", which were the Microsoft platform (which still screws up in some of the usual ways, just not quite as often, and doesn't kill the whole car when it fails). Oh, well...
Unfortunately, Ford not only didn't provide it as a retrofit for older models, they switched hardware (to a TI chipset) at the same time, so a backport - from them or elsewhere - is not in the cards. This is a behavior I'll bear in mind when I eventually replace the (otherwise fantastic) vehicle.
Of course 900 MHz has better range, if one is using dipole antennas. The point is, the apparent difference in range is due to the antennas used, not some intrisic property of the propagation medium.
Not just the antennas, but the medium as well - because the medium is not vacuum or free air - it includes obstacles.
(Free air, below the ionosphere, DOES selectively attenuate SOME frequencies, but all those we're talking about are in a "window" of transparency, so that's not the issue.)
A tree screws up 5G but not 900M? Scale it (including the size and thickness of its leaves and the lengths of its molecules) up by a factor of 6 and it will be a problem at lower frequencies as well. 900M goes through a wall better than 5G? Make the wall 6 times as thick and what happens to the 900M signal? 5G bounces off a building like a mirror while 900M bends around? Scale the building up and see how 900M handles it. Similarly with the curvature of the earth and the "ground resistance" attenuation and scattering of vegetation and other surface structure.
But in the real world you have the same sized trees, buildings, and geometries, not sizes in proportion to each wavelength. So there are differences in the propagation, not just the fraction of the "celestial sphere" intercepted by the antenna structure of the far end of the link, to affect the link's behavior.
Which is good if you live in a forest but won't this increase congestion problems in densely populated areas?
No. The only thing that would increase congestion would be if they removed old bands. This will actually reduce congestion in densely populated since one ore two users can move over to this band. It will be marginal but at least not worse.
But the added band WILL be more prone to congestion if lots of people start using it (which I think is what the grandfather poster meant.)
Wouldn't spread spectrum on all devices solve alot of congestion?
Some. But then it would turn things into a shouting match as the noise floor rises.
The issue with IoT, though, is power. The devices, including their batteries, are necessarily small in many applications, yet must last for years. So the devices are extremely low power, low LEAKAGE, and spend most of their time asleep.
Spread spectrum requires additional crunch, which requires power, to scatter the data on the Tx end, gather and sort it out on the Rx end, and sort out and correct (or request retransmission) the inevitable errors.
This is particularly acute with OFDM, which requires a FFT (or inverse FFT, virtually the same thing) on each end just to operate at all. (That's why Bluetooth Low Energy is NOT based on OFDM: The devices can't afford either the power to operate, or the silicon area and power leakage when asleep, to perform the necessary computations.)
Squeezing more out of the bandwidth requires more smarts on each end of the link, and smarts cost power.
It is a relief that at most I'll live to be about 100, because human beings are about to fuck everything up in a big way.
What makes you think that biological technology won't extend your lifespan until you have to live through at least a couple centuries of "fuck up"? B-)
But look at the bright side. Even if such technology is developed, the FDA will block deployment until it's determined to be "safe and effective". How long will THAT take with an anti-aging treatment? So you'll probably get to die early anyway.
Hybrid trucks might make sense but batteries are not even energy dense enough and cost effective or last long enough to make a difference to anyone but the wealthy and those who have no need to drive more than 30 or 40 miles a day with easy access to a place to charge.
Actually, some improved battery technologies are finally being deployed which could eliminate that problem. High energy density, high efficiency, ultra-fast recharge.
Let's see if electric or hybrid delivery trucks start to appear in a couple years, once the production ramp-up of operations like Tesla's "gigafactory" battery plant are far enough along to provide batteries to more than the luxury/early-adopter-premium automobiles.
Of course it received little support from Keynsians.
One reason Keynsian economics is pushed in academia (dispite a century-long track record of failure that has earned economics the title "the dismal science") and the Austrian school is ridiculed, is that the Federal Reserve financially backs teaching, and journals, of Keynsian economics.
A combination of misguided public policy, captured regulators, and crony capitalism created the conditions that made it inevitable. Those conditions included poor underwriting practices, over-extended borrowers, and complex financial derivitives used to intentionally hide the dangers.
And especially they involved the mistaken use (against his advice) of a mathematician's observation that interest rates correlated with risk to try to predict risk from interest rates, and create a way to evaluate the risk of a basket-of-mortgages-backed investment bond. (Of course it worked because the interest rates were set by canny analysts who made their investment decisions, setting interest rates on particular loans, based on a lot of difficult, individualized, analysis.) This disconnected the input of human analysis of the risk of the component mortgages and substituted a positive feedback loop - which said "they're great" until a sufficiently sharp market spike kicked them over into saying "they're awful".
This mistake imported a disguised-by-mathematical-handwaving "chartism" (vs. "value investment") from the stock market into the otherwise staid and conservative bond market, and subjected them to a classic bubble-and-crash. Then the bond market operators' cronies in government and the Federal Reserve bailed out their buddies with government and printing-press money (and the seized s of the bond market operators who were NOT their cronies).
With the libertarian / Heyekian economists, political figures, and commentators arguing against this process every step of the way. to So the central screwup was an ACCIDENT, which Keynsian analysis agreed with and Heyekian analysis spotted and predicted would fail exacty as it did (though they were unable to put a time on the predicted crash - and said so.)
The horrible thing about it is that, once people stop using it to make business decisions big enough to swing the market, the flawed technique starts working again, and continues to work until enough of the money is swung by it, and not intelligent input, for the feedback loop to overtake the signal once again. So expect this to repeat, and the bond market to become as volatile as the stock market. B-b (I've already heard radio ads for mortgage backed securities - with the devalued buzzword replaced by a description...)
Using that definition my hand is a computer also...
When Alan Turing did his seminal work on computing and computability, he used "computer" to mean both a human with a pencil and paper and abstract mechanical devices generalizing and simplifying what this human computer did.
I'm with Turning on this. A "computer" is any system that computes, whether it is entirely made out of live meat, made out of meat plus mechanical, electrical, and/or electronic aids, or made purely of such aids. The term may also be applied to aids that require a made-of-meat operator (or mechanical simulation of one) in the absence of the operator.
By this definition, both slide rule s and nomogaphs qualify as "computers".
(Specifically I put in a line on every single element indicating how the majority of that element is believed to have been created - which stage of a star's life cycle creates each element. One sentence per element and all those changes were deleted by idiots refusing to add a tiny bit more information that is known and accepted science).
If I ever saw a set of edits that rated, at a minimum, "citation needed", that's it.
Each of those assertions should, imho, be supported by a reference to the research, or at least published and academically well-respected theorizing, that generated it.
You got that list from somewhere. Tell the reader where. (Then other editors can check it out and, if there is a better reference, add or change it, and if a claim is bogus, correct it.)
Suddenly paranoia, delusions and conspiracy theories start to become sensible, rational and logical.
Being a "conspiracy theory" doesn't automatically disqualify a theory, despite the (convenient for conspirators) meme that such theories are always false and a symptom of madness.
People organize to advance their own interests. When in conflict with others, or when their plans are otherwise likely to provoke opposition (for instance, if what they're doing is illegal and/or oppressive), and often when it is not, they keep this organizational communication to themselves. This is the very definition of a conspiracy.
People in government, throughout the world and throughout history, have a track record - up until recently - of such conspiracies, which usually come to light only after some time has passed. Is it reasonable to believe we are living in a new golden age of absence of actual conspiracies? Or is is reasonable to believe that the current conspiracies just haven't come to light?
If the latter, what form might these current conspiracies take? Some benign non-interesting form, or the same forms seen throughout history: spying, covert harm to perceived opponents, acquisition and use of broader power over others?
The problem, of course, is that because such conspiracies are necessarily secret, it's hard to determine what (if anything) is actually going on. So many theories about current conspiracies are wrong, sometimes on details, sometimes about the actual existence of such a conspiracy. (Further, those whose business is such conspiracies help to keep the average down by spreading their own, false, and often ludicrous, theories. See the "second cover" technique I've described previously.)
So I generally assume (and have for decades) that many in government are engaged in such conspiracies - to improve their own circumstances at the expense of others - and that we just don't know the details of what's going on currently (until some of it leaks, and not necessarily even then).
Government seems to be an institution that promotes, and runs on, such conspiracies, deriving great benefit for itself from them. So I am never surprised when those in it misbehave. Whether you view it as a weed or a fruit tree, as long as it exist it seems to need regular trimming back.
Generally speaking, heads of companies have a big shield against facing personal criminal charges. Little things like oil spills, financial meltdowns, etc, no one from a corporation goes to jail.
Generally speaking the laws under which corporations are created deliberately generate a "corporate veil" that makes the corporation, as a corporation, liable for its actions, but the people who invested in and operate it are shielded from this - UNLESS they DELIBERATELY engage in CRIMINAL behavior (at which point the corporate veil may be "pierced" by the justice system and the lawbreakers penalized).
This is to encourage investment and enterprise, while still deterring criminality: As long as the investors, execs, and workers stay within the law, they may lose their investments and/or jobs, but no more. The corporation, on the other hand, may go bankrupt and "die", with all its assets distributed to those it harmed.
Everybody who voluntarily interacts with the corporation knows this up front, and being forced to INvoluntarily interact with the corporation is generally on the same legal basis with being required to interact with a person: Either it's something within that person's rights (or corporate pseduo-person's rights - essentially the same rights as those of its constituent members) or it's criminal - and you're in "pierce the corporate veil" territory.
I honestly wanted to follow those links and read what you were talking about and then... oh, YouTube.
The full text of the second one, Cybersecurity as Realpolitik, Dan Geer's hour-long speech, is on his web site as a text file.
He skipped over a couple items during the speech, as unnecessary for that particular audience (given the limited time) and said they'd be in this posting, so it may be more complete and useful. (I haven't read it through yet, having just watched the youtube...)
I found it extremely insightful and highly recommend it. I won't attempt to characterize it because it covered several related aspects and tied them together brilliantly.
(The first was an {also insightful} analysis of the be-a-better-citizen game the Chinese are deploying as we speak.)
if they all have to do something in return for welfare we just don't have the people to see to that. It costs too much.
How about if they have to be the people who see to that. Seems obvious to me.
This reminds me of the incident where the giant rock concert hired the Hells Angels to do security. The resulting violence, and the death of a concert goer, essentially marked the end of the hippie era.
Some (far from all) people on public assistance are crooks and/or cheats. The primary job of administrators of public assistance is to make sure the recipients are qualified to receive the benefits, getting what the program says they should be getting, not getting more, and not on the rolls more than once. Hiring administrators from among their number is a recipie for getting enough bad apples to create a horde of imaginary recipients and bankrupt the program, along with the citizens of the polity that sponsored it.
It's a pity, too. Much of the point of a "Basic Income" program is to reduce the horde of bureaucrats needed to administer the other programs it replaces. It similarly seems reasonable to just let them go right off the bat - they could survive on the program until they find more lucrative work (if they still desire to work). They'd have (or SHOULD have had) the skill set necessary to do the adminstration, so there'd be no shortage of skilled workers among the program recipients.
But if you want them to do a good job, you'll have to pay them something like what other bureaucrats are getting. Otherwise you have a similar recipe for worker dissatisfaction and poor performance. And now you're bak to just another "workfare" program. Oops!
So to achieve the point of the program - minimize the overhead by not making it contingent on a set of qualifications and behaviors that require a highly-paid staff of experts to micromanage the recipients - you have to limit the administrative function to just sending the checks out and making sure everybody who receives them is real, still alive, and only on the list once.
disband the TSA... and execute everyone in charge of it for treason.
Can't convict 'em of treason - you need a declared war for that. (That's why Jane Fonda got to marry Tom Hayden, and later Ted Turner, rather than twist in the wind at the end of a rope. The Vietnam conflict was not a declared war.)
There's lots of other things you CAN hang on them, though.
It's a "wobbler": Misdemeanor (fine and/or no more than a year) if no physical injury, 10 year felony if injury, use or threat of use of weapons, explosives, or fire, up to life or death penalty if death results, an attempt is made to kill, attempted or actual kidnapping, attempted or actual aggravated sexual abuse.
It's just a violation of the 4th and 8th Amendments. After all, the Constitution doesn't mean anything, we can have a Federal Government willfully trample all over it whenever it likes...
That's the trouble with "living documents". Like any other lifeform, they have to eat. Apparently, what the "living constitution" eats is rights.
= = = =
(Or you could argue that it's really a problem with government schools. As far back as the '50s, when I was subjected to them, the section of the civics book on the constitution actually claimed it could be amended by "customs and usage".)
you're supposed to remove/scrape off any large pieces of food before putting dishes into the dishwasher. Doing that should prevent any clogging. No "pre-washing" is generally necessary, though many dishwashers will have trouble with certain gunky stuff (solidified eggs, peanut butter, etc.), and rinsing them may be helpful.
Yes: Some kinds of stuck-on food may not come off in one cycle - after which heated drying may bake it on sufficiently that additional cycles won't touch it. You pretty much have to scrape it off anyhow, with more difficulty than if you had hand-washed in the first place.
Also: Pre-loading hot-rinsing off any large clot of solidified of grease, reducing the total amount on the dishes, prevents said grease from using up all the dish soap in suspending (some of) it, leaving none to lift off grease-bound particles. (Some of the better machines will do this for you, but the new water-limiting regulations are driving manufacturers to drop that cycle.)
I use what I call the "Star Trek" method: Knock off the bigger cling-ons, then let the automation handle the details.
(I have personal experience with one brand, from the vendor side, as of the turn of the millennium.)
It was cheaper to install all the processors and only enable the number that were paid for than to actually have boards with missing CPUs etc.
The extras doubled as replacements for potential failed devices (with flaked-out devices disabled and their replacement enabled and configured to appear to be the failed unit) unless/until more were paid for and activated. Then it ran with fewer spares (and thus a higher probability of eventually requiring a board swap or device replacement in the field - which, in mainframe applications, can be a major disaster.)
Why do organizations think this is a magical phrase that makes everyone turn their brains off?
If it's optional, the victims can try to argue the front line workers out of it, which slows things down. They can also threaten the workers with personal suits and other difficulties, which the workers may not be sure the organization will defend them against.
If it's policy, the front line worker gets to just refuse to do things any other way than the policy. The victim knows that the worker won't be exercising discretion and can chose to go along, create a useless scene (and maybe get busted but not get a change), or just not come to play. Any legal attack will pretty much have to go up against the organization. (Sure the line worker may still have some responsibility, Neuremberg style. But short of mass murder or an obvious (to the worker) continuing criminal enterprise, it's hard to get much attention to that line of reasoning in a court.)
Slashdot Mirror
Too many people are living in an alternate reality put in their heads by hate-radio, and other right-wing media. They're angry, totally-misinformed, and they're eager to tell you [...]
There may be no way to deprogram the people we've lost to media designed to drive the Conservatives mad. [...]
Cults used to be small, local dysfunction, but thanks to 24hr propaganda on TV and radio, a massive media-driven cult has been created, and these idiots vote for scoundrels like Trump and Cruz.
Sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
Back in the '60s the "establishment" media was a very narrow bottleneck, (just 3 TV networks, for starters) and quite in the pockets of government and "the 1%". (I recall one Vietnam Conflict protest march in Cleveland OH: Solid people from curb to curb on the main drag, for several blocks. The national TV camera crews were on one sidewalk, in a tight half-circle around about a dozen members of a vocally communist splinter group, cameras facing away from the giant march. Watch the evening news and you'd think the whole protest WAS that tiny splinter group.)
Trying to get the word out was a major problem for a whole generation's anti-establishment contingent - which consisted of virtually all of the boomer generation, thanks to the draft and the Vietnam escalations, along with the start of the "drug war", the ("McCarthy Era") Cold War anti-communist oppressions, and a number of other government intrusions.
One reaction was "The Underground Press". But that was pretty niche. Another, far more effective, was self-organization among the students of the journalism school programs. They were (literally) planning to infiltrate the media and use it to get their (now solidly left-wing) message out.
Don't tell me that's a fantasy - because I was there. I (and some of my politically-active friends) hung out in places where such planning went on. As the decades passed, I watched as EXACTLY what was planned gradually took hold. The new generation of establishment media personnel were these students, some of whom who worked their way into positions of editorial control, and gradually changed the media culture. First they got some of their ideas out. Then they evolved the outlets into a NEW establishment media, becoming a pervasive left-wing propaganda operation. This operated for decades (and still does), becoming the "new normal".
Newspapers could do what they wanted. But in the electronic media the "Fairness Doctrine" blocked any attempt to bring a substantial amount of anti-establishment ideological challenge to the airwaves, by requiring giving "equal time" to its direct opposition. This hobbled explicitly political analysis shows. Meanwhile, the new establishment newsies got a pass on this - they were able to slant things as they wanted, and got very good at doing it without triggering effective equal-time demands.
Until 1987 - when (thanks to falling electronic prices leading to a glut of AM stations in search of something to broadcast) access to media became cheap enough that it wasn't a bottleneck, and the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the interest of promoting free speech.
So now explicitly and admittedly political shows could operate. There was a sucking demand for non-left-wing political analysis, which made such shows profitable. A former disk jockey named Limbaugh broke the ice, and soon the AM dial was full of (the now anti-establishment) "conservative talk radio".
Are some of the listeners "mindless robots"? Maybe so. But the left had this field to itself for decades, and had built an enormus mass of socially-pressured cultists. It amuses me no end to hear them squawk when someone outside their politically-correct groupthink cluster files the serial numbers off their machine. B-)
Meanwhile the rise of computer networking has given outlets to other reporting and fact-checking, so neither the establishment nor the anti-establishment media is a bottleneck to the free flow of idea
To be fair, a single 5g BB going about 36% the speed of light would also have the equivalent of 7 kT of TNT. Maybe they just invented the world's best Daisy Model 25...
If they've got that (and can get it high enough that they don't have to fire through the Earth's land masses or oceans), they don't need the (non-BB) missiles. B-)
They only have a stunted A-bomb that they don't have a delivery system for. So, they're still not really a serious threat.
They tried the A-bomb three times:
- The first one had yield that was way low (about 1 kiloton). Probably a "fizzle" (extreme shortfall of output, typically from blowing apart too soon, though it may still be far more powerful than a conventional explosive). EVERY country developing nuclear explosives has had one or more fizzles.
- The second did considerably better (about 4 kilotons), though probably still below their design intent.
- The third was better yet (about 7 kilotons). This is right in the ballpark of other countries' first bomb models, a tad more than half the yeild of the "Little Boy" bomb (about 13 kilotons) dropped on Hiroshima.
So it looks to me like they've got a competent design crew and a working design. At this point they may have their A-bomb robust enough, as well, to fit onto a missile and survive the trip to a target.
This was allegedly their first try to test an H-bomb, and had a similar yeild to the third A bomb. Maybe they had an ignition failure on the second (H) stage on their first try. Any bets on whether they do on their second or third?
The Teller-Ulam configuration is a bit complicated. But it's not all that hard to understand or to build. (With the amount of secrecy and misdirection published on nuclear weapons I would expect that first try by a new player would, more likely than not, either fail to ignite or have significant shortfalls in yield. But I'd also expect an army of physicists and engineers to figure it out and get it right pretty quiclkly. People might try to keep secrets, but physics doesn't.)
Meanwhile: A Nagasaki-sized bomb might be small by Cold War standards, but it's quite adequate to ruin a city.
However, they are much closer to taking that crappy payload and putting it on a missile that could hit Japan.
They have been making, and selling, their successful knockoff of the SCUD for three decades now. They have tested a number of long-range missiles. That's apparently part of the same program, so I would expect it to have a payload weight and volume adequate to carry the bombs.
And they could probably already trundle that device into an underground tunnel that goes right into Seoul.
With those missiles no tunnel is required. But they could also put it in a container, put that on a cargo ship, and sail it into pretty much any seaport in the world. If the coast guard doesn't catch it far enough out, blammo!
It's mostly a joke because they're waving around a BB gun and calling it an assault rifle. You could still put someone's eye out with that thing, though.
7 kilotons of TNT equivalent is the energy of metric s**t load of BBs.
I'll bet my life on a smart gun working as soon as law enforcement (and, for that matter, the Secret Service) is confident enough in them to use them too.
But think how convenient smart gun technology would be - if carried by cops, federal agents, and military:
- You could make a cop detector, which would detect the signals between the gun and the token (or for any working on other than radio, there would still likely to be tempest-style signals to detect or ways to provoke it into betraying itself).
- You could make a gun jammer, so the cop, agent, or soldier's gun would fail to fire.
I have a Ford F-150 with Microsoft software in it and it really sucks. In fact, Ford motor company ditched Microsoft in favour if QNX in 2014.
Me, too.
I used to think that Microsoft had finally done something halfway right. Then I found out that the parts that were "right" were Ford applications running on top of the parts that were "wrong", which were the Microsoft platform (which still screws up in some of the usual ways, just not quite as often, and doesn't kill the whole car when it fails). Oh, well...
Unfortunately, Ford not only didn't provide it as a retrofit for older models, they switched hardware (to a TI chipset) at the same time, so a backport - from them or elsewhere - is not in the cards. This is a behavior I'll bear in mind when I eventually replace the (otherwise fantastic) vehicle.
Of course 900 MHz has better range, if one is using dipole antennas. The point is, the apparent difference in range is due to the antennas used, not some intrisic property of the propagation medium.
Not just the antennas, but the medium as well - because the medium is not vacuum or free air - it includes obstacles.
(Free air, below the ionosphere, DOES selectively attenuate SOME frequencies, but all those we're talking about are in a "window" of transparency, so that's not the issue.)
A tree screws up 5G but not 900M? Scale it (including the size and thickness of its leaves and the lengths of its molecules) up by a factor of 6 and it will be a problem at lower frequencies as well. 900M goes through a wall better than 5G? Make the wall 6 times as thick and what happens to the 900M signal? 5G bounces off a building like a mirror while 900M bends around? Scale the building up and see how 900M handles it. Similarly with the curvature of the earth and the "ground resistance" attenuation and scattering of vegetation and other surface structure.
But in the real world you have the same sized trees, buildings, and geometries, not sizes in proportion to each wavelength. So there are differences in the propagation, not just the fraction of the "celestial sphere" intercepted by the antenna structure of the far end of the link, to affect the link's behavior.
But the added band WILL be more prone to congestion if lots of people start using it (which I think is what the grandfather poster meant.)
Wouldn't spread spectrum on all devices solve alot of congestion?
Some. But then it would turn things into a shouting match as the noise floor rises.
The issue with IoT, though, is power. The devices, including their batteries, are necessarily small in many applications, yet must last for years. So the devices are extremely low power, low LEAKAGE, and spend most of their time asleep.
Spread spectrum requires additional crunch, which requires power, to scatter the data on the Tx end, gather and sort it out on the Rx end, and sort out and correct (or request retransmission) the inevitable errors.
This is particularly acute with OFDM, which requires a FFT (or inverse FFT, virtually the same thing) on each end just to operate at all. (That's why Bluetooth Low Energy is NOT based on OFDM: The devices can't afford either the power to operate, or the silicon area and power leakage when asleep, to perform the necessary computations.)
Squeezing more out of the bandwidth requires more smarts on each end of the link, and smarts cost power.
It is a relief that at most I'll live to be about 100, because human beings are about to fuck everything up in a big way.
What makes you think that biological technology won't extend your lifespan until you have to live through at least a couple centuries of "fuck up"? B-)
But look at the bright side. Even if such technology is developed, the FDA will block deployment until it's determined to be "safe and effective". How long will THAT take with an anti-aging treatment? So you'll probably get to die early anyway.
Hybrid trucks might make sense but batteries are not even energy dense enough and cost effective or last long enough to make a difference to anyone but the wealthy and those who have no need to drive more than 30 or 40 miles a day with easy access to a place to charge.
Actually, some improved battery technologies are finally being deployed which could eliminate that problem. High energy density, high efficiency, ultra-fast recharge.
Let's see if electric or hybrid delivery trucks start to appear in a couple years, once the production ramp-up of operations like Tesla's "gigafactory" battery plant are far enough along to provide batteries to more than the luxury/early-adopter-premium automobiles.
Of course it received little support from Keynsians.
One reason Keynsian economics is pushed in academia (dispite a century-long track record of failure that has earned economics the title "the dismal science") and the Austrian school is ridiculed, is that the Federal Reserve financially backs teaching, and journals, of Keynsian economics.
How convenient for them.
A combination of misguided public policy, captured regulators, and crony capitalism created the conditions that made it inevitable. Those conditions included poor underwriting practices, over-extended borrowers, and complex financial derivitives used to intentionally hide the dangers.
And especially they involved the mistaken use (against his advice) of a mathematician's observation that interest rates correlated with risk to try to predict risk from interest rates, and create a way to evaluate the risk of a basket-of-mortgages-backed investment bond. (Of course it worked because the interest rates were set by canny analysts who made their investment decisions, setting interest rates on particular loans, based on a lot of difficult, individualized, analysis.) This disconnected the input of human analysis of the risk of the component mortgages and substituted a positive feedback loop - which said "they're great" until a sufficiently sharp market spike kicked them over into saying "they're awful".
This mistake imported a disguised-by-mathematical-handwaving "chartism" (vs. "value investment") from the stock market into the otherwise staid and conservative bond market, and subjected them to a classic bubble-and-crash. Then the bond market operators' cronies in government and the Federal Reserve bailed out their buddies with government and printing-press money (and the seized s of the bond market operators who were NOT their cronies).
With the libertarian / Heyekian economists, political figures, and commentators arguing against this process every step of the way.
to
So the central screwup was an ACCIDENT, which Keynsian analysis agreed with and Heyekian analysis spotted and predicted would fail exacty as it did (though they were unable to put a time on the predicted crash - and said so.)
The horrible thing about it is that, once people stop using it to make business decisions big enough to swing the market, the flawed technique starts working again, and continues to work until enough of the money is swung by it, and not intelligent input, for the feedback loop to overtake the signal once again. So expect this to repeat, and the bond market to become as volatile as the stock market. B-b (I've already heard radio ads for mortgage backed securities - with the devalued buzzword replaced by a description...)
Rand had about the same relation to libertarians (both big-L and small-l) that the Puritans did to the Separatists.
A computer is a device that can compute...
Using that definition my hand is a computer also...
When Alan Turing did his seminal work on computing and computability, he used "computer" to mean both a human with a pencil and paper and abstract mechanical devices generalizing and simplifying what this human computer did.
I'm with Turning on this. A "computer" is any system that computes, whether it is entirely made out of live meat, made out of meat plus mechanical, electrical, and/or electronic aids, or made purely of such aids. The term may also be applied to aids that require a made-of-meat operator (or mechanical simulation of one) in the absence of the operator.
By this definition, both slide rule s and nomogaphs qualify as "computers".
(Specifically I put in a line on every single element indicating how the majority of that element is believed to have been created - which stage of a star's life cycle creates each element. One sentence per element and all those changes were deleted by idiots refusing to add a tiny bit more information that is known and accepted science).
If I ever saw a set of edits that rated, at a minimum, "citation needed", that's it.
Each of those assertions should, imho, be supported by a reference to the research, or at least published and academically well-respected theorizing, that generated it.
You got that list from somewhere. Tell the reader where. (Then other editors can check it out and, if there is a better reference, add or change it, and if a claim is bogus, correct it.)
Suddenly paranoia, delusions and conspiracy theories start to become sensible, rational and logical.
Being a "conspiracy theory" doesn't automatically disqualify a theory, despite the (convenient for conspirators) meme that such theories are always false and a symptom of madness.
People organize to advance their own interests. When in conflict with others, or when their plans are otherwise likely to provoke opposition (for instance, if what they're doing is illegal and/or oppressive), and often when it is not, they keep this organizational communication to themselves. This is the very definition of a conspiracy.
People in government, throughout the world and throughout history, have a track record - up until recently - of such conspiracies, which usually come to light only after some time has passed. Is it reasonable to believe we are living in a new golden age of absence of actual conspiracies? Or is is reasonable to believe that the current conspiracies just haven't come to light?
If the latter, what form might these current conspiracies take? Some benign non-interesting form, or the same forms seen throughout history: spying, covert harm to perceived opponents, acquisition and use of broader power over others?
The problem, of course, is that because such conspiracies are necessarily secret, it's hard to determine what (if anything) is actually going on. So many theories about current conspiracies are wrong, sometimes on details, sometimes about the actual existence of such a conspiracy. (Further, those whose business is such conspiracies help to keep the average down by spreading their own, false, and often ludicrous, theories. See the "second cover" technique I've described previously.)
So I generally assume (and have for decades) that many in government are engaged in such conspiracies - to improve their own circumstances at the expense of others - and that we just don't know the details of what's going on currently (until some of it leaks, and not necessarily even then).
Government seems to be an institution that promotes, and runs on, such conspiracies, deriving great benefit for itself from them. So I am never surprised when those in it misbehave. Whether you view it as a weed or a fruit tree, as long as it exist it seems to need regular trimming back.
Generally speaking, heads of companies have a big shield against facing personal criminal charges. Little things like oil spills, financial meltdowns, etc, no one from a corporation goes to jail.
Generally speaking the laws under which corporations are created deliberately generate a "corporate veil" that makes the corporation, as a corporation, liable for its actions, but the people who invested in and operate it are shielded from this - UNLESS they DELIBERATELY engage in CRIMINAL behavior (at which point the corporate veil may be "pierced" by the justice system and the lawbreakers penalized).
This is to encourage investment and enterprise, while still deterring criminality: As long as the investors, execs, and workers stay within the law, they may lose their investments and/or jobs, but no more. The corporation, on the other hand, may go bankrupt and "die", with all its assets distributed to those it harmed.
Everybody who voluntarily interacts with the corporation knows this up front, and being forced to INvoluntarily interact with the corporation is generally on the same legal basis with being required to interact with a person: Either it's something within that person's rights (or corporate pseduo-person's rights - essentially the same rights as those of its constituent members) or it's criminal - and you're in "pierce the corporate veil" territory.
Threaten to tell someone they're being spied on. CEO gets locked up for two years.
This sounds like a strong motivator for CEOs to move their operations out of the UK, as a risk mitigation measure.
I honestly wanted to follow those links and read what you were talking about and then... oh, YouTube.
The full text of the second one, Cybersecurity as Realpolitik, Dan Geer's hour-long speech, is on his web site as a text file.
He skipped over a couple items during the speech, as unnecessary for that particular audience (given the limited time) and said they'd be in this posting, so it may be more complete and useful. (I haven't read it through yet, having just watched the youtube...)
I found it extremely insightful and highly recommend it. I won't attempt to characterize it because it covered several related aspects and tied them together brilliantly.
(The first was an {also insightful} analysis of the be-a-better-citizen game the Chinese are deploying as we speak.)
This reminds me of the incident where the giant rock concert hired the Hells Angels to do security. The resulting violence, and the death of a concert goer, essentially marked the end of the hippie era.
Some (far from all) people on public assistance are crooks and/or cheats. The primary job of administrators of public assistance is to make sure the recipients are qualified to receive the benefits, getting what the program says they should be getting, not getting more, and not on the rolls more than once. Hiring administrators from among their number is a recipie for getting enough bad apples to create a horde of imaginary recipients and bankrupt the program, along with the citizens of the polity that sponsored it.
It's a pity, too. Much of the point of a "Basic Income" program is to reduce the horde of bureaucrats needed to administer the other programs it replaces. It similarly seems reasonable to just let them go right off the bat - they could survive on the program until they find more lucrative work (if they still desire to work). They'd have (or SHOULD have had) the skill set necessary to do the adminstration, so there'd be no shortage of skilled workers among the program recipients.
But if you want them to do a good job, you'll have to pay them something like what other bureaucrats are getting. Otherwise you have a similar recipe for worker dissatisfaction and poor performance. And now you're bak to just another "workfare" program. Oops!
So to achieve the point of the program - minimize the overhead by not making it contingent on a set of qualifications and behaviors that require a highly-paid staff of experts to micromanage the recipients - you have to limit the administrative function to just sending the checks out and making sure everybody who receives them is real, still alive, and only on the list once.
disband the TSA ... and execute everyone in charge of it for treason.
Can't convict 'em of treason - you need a declared war for that. (That's why Jane Fonda got to marry Tom Hayden, and later Ted Turner, rather than twist in the wind at the end of a rope. The Vietnam conflict was not a declared war.)
There's lots of other things you CAN hang on them, though.
I'd start with 18 U.S. Code  242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law, which seems to be right on the mark.
It's a "wobbler": Misdemeanor (fine and/or no more than a year) if no physical injury, 10 year felony if injury, use or threat of use of weapons, explosives, or fire, up to life or death penalty if death results, an attempt is made to kill, attempted or actual kidnapping, attempted or actual aggravated sexual abuse.
It's just a violation of the 4th and 8th Amendments. After all, the Constitution doesn't mean anything, we can have a Federal Government willfully trample all over it whenever it likes...
That's the trouble with "living documents". Like any other lifeform, they have to eat. Apparently, what the "living constitution" eats is rights.
= = = =
(Or you could argue that it's really a problem with government schools. As far back as the '50s, when I was subjected to them, the section of the civics book on the constitution actually claimed it could be amended by "customs and usage".)
you're supposed to remove/scrape off any large pieces of food before putting dishes into the dishwasher. Doing that should prevent any clogging. No "pre-washing" is generally necessary, though many dishwashers will have trouble with certain gunky stuff (solidified eggs, peanut butter, etc.), and rinsing them may be helpful.
Yes: Some kinds of stuck-on food may not come off in one cycle - after which heated drying may bake it on sufficiently that additional cycles won't touch it. You pretty much have to scrape it off anyhow, with more difficulty than if you had hand-washed in the first place.
Also: Pre-loading hot-rinsing off any large clot of solidified of grease, reducing the total amount on the dishes, prevents said grease from using up all the dish soap in suspending (some of) it, leaving none to lift off grease-bound particles. (Some of the better machines will do this for you, but the new water-limiting regulations are driving manufacturers to drop that cycle.)
I use what I call the "Star Trek" method: Knock off the bigger cling-ons, then let the automation handle the details.
(I have personal experience with one brand, from the vendor side, as of the turn of the millennium.)
It was cheaper to install all the processors and only enable the number that were paid for than to actually have boards with missing CPUs etc.
The extras doubled as replacements for potential failed devices (with flaked-out devices disabled and their replacement enabled and configured to appear to be the failed unit) unless/until more were paid for and activated. Then it ran with fewer spares (and thus a higher probability of eventually requiring a board swap or device replacement in the field - which, in mainframe applications, can be a major disaster.)
Why do organizations think this is a magical phrase that makes everyone turn their brains off?
If it's optional, the victims can try to argue the front line workers out of it, which slows things down. They can also threaten the workers with personal suits and other difficulties, which the workers may not be sure the organization will defend them against.
If it's policy, the front line worker gets to just refuse to do things any other way than the policy. The victim knows that the worker won't be exercising discretion and can chose to go along, create a useless scene (and maybe get busted but not get a change), or just not come to play. Any legal attack will pretty much have to go up against the organization. (Sure the line worker may still have some responsibility, Neuremberg style. But short of mass murder or an obvious (to the worker) continuing criminal enterprise, it's hard to get much attention to that line of reasoning in a court.)