... [unlikely to be successfully] ending up a successful vigilante peacekeeper after a few hours training.
If you'd taken the training, you wouldn't be misusing the term "vigilante". One big part of it is to NOT be one.
FYI: Self-defence, (and legitimate defence of others) occurs from the time the attack on you/others (or creditable threat) begins until the time there is no further creditable threat - usually when the attacker is incapacitated and under restraint, or on the run.
It's always vigilantism if you try to hunt down the attacker once he's out of sight. (Before that, jurisdictions vary on when self defense ends and whether you're allowed to use deadly force to accomplish a citizen's arrest. For instance: Oregon did, and may still, allow you to shoot at a housebreaker even if he's dropped his gun and is running to his car: Case law said it's reasonable to believe he may be trying to get another, bigger, weapon from his vehicle to resume the attack.)
Police are just formalized, professional, vigilantes. Citizens in most jurisdictions retain many of the same powers as a civil right.
So you have the attackers running around causing carnage. Then you have a bunch of citizens trying to "help" take out the attackers. How do the citizens know who is an attacker and who is another good guy?
Armed US civilians have a track record of getting it wrong less often then police officers. Like by a factor of 5 1/2.
I can see carrying be useful if...
We know all these things. And more. And the well-researched and legally-vetted (sometimes different) "correct" answers to a number of such questions.
Find an NRA-certified instructor. Take (first the "basic pistol" then) the "Personal Protection" classes. Then you'll know the answers, too.
I won't try to summarize the courses here. I'm not certified to give them (my wife is), and you're not paying me for them. They're inexpensive and only take a couple weekends or so.
I'm wondering, could the government simply buy both the guns and gun licenses back?
No.
Make it voluntary, and make it worth doing (ie buy the guns back for more than they are worth). Would that even work, or is it just a complete waste of money?
Waste of money. Gun "buy-backs" are mostly used to get rid of (and get more than scrap value for) worthless rusted-out scrap guns and untraceably dispose of stolen guns and guns used in murders or other crimes. (Then there was that bad divorce where the gun collector's disgruntled wife stole his multi-million-buck collection and handed it to the cops for pennies on the dollar, just to annoy, and cause trouble for, her estranged hubby.) Pay enough and you'll also get people buying (or making!) cheap guns to "sell back". But you'll never get any substantial number of privately owned decent guns - even if you paid the much higher price that they'd bring at a gun store, rather than the usual pittance. Armed people are generally armed because they WANT to be armed, not because it's cheap.
The whole 'cold dead hands' thing is troubling. I've never understood why people need so much fire power.
Look into the origin of the right: The people who wrote the Second Amendment had just OVERTHROWN their LEGITAMATE (but recently gone tyrannical) GOVERMENT. They were trying to set things up so that they would be able to do so if they needed to again while simultaneously deterring a repeat - both of tyranny and its needed overthrow.
The Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting. It's about revolutions and avoiding tyranny and genocide. It's about defending yourself against bad guys - at the retail and wholesale level - rather than depending on others to do it for you (and to put your interests ahead of their own). The "cold dead hands" crew believe it is, not just their right, but their DUTY, to be armed. Like fire insurance, being armed and competent to use arms is a price you pay to mitigate rare-but-costly disasters.
Is our society really that violent? Crime stats say otherwise.
Our society is not very violent, despite all the hype. People of European descent have substantially lower victimization (murder, robbery, etc.) rates than the same ethnic group in "The Old Country". People of African descent have substantially lower victimization rates than the same ethnic group THEIR old country. Ditto with Asia, South and Central America, etc.
When comparing rates, watch out for some gotchas:
- The US counts a murder when there's a body and signs of foul play. The UK counts a murder when there's a con viction.
- If daddy kills his three kids, his wife, and then himself (or makes an attempt to kill himself) the US counts four murders and a suicide, while Japan counts five suicides. ("Family Suicide") and so on.
- Count "crimes", not just "gun crimes". (You're just as dead if you're clubbed or cut to death as if you're shot, but the latter is a higher percentage where guns are available then where they're not. Also: You're more likely to survive a shooting, and if you survive you'll generally recover more quickly and completely from a shooting than a clubbing or stabbing.)
But while you're at it, don't forget to count the dead in wars, "ethnic clensing", and other organized and government/power-group sanctioned mayhem. Armed populations strongly deter such activities - compare the last 2 1/2 centuries in Eurasia (with their world wars and genocides) vs. the US (one revolution, one "Civil War", the frontier expansion conflicts, various civil rights movements. The rest is mostly getting dragged into stuff "over there" - often by "our" own "leaders" working in interests other than that of the general population.)
It has been observed that EVERY genocide has been preceded by the disarmament of the victim population. "Never again" includes "... will we be disarmed and powerless."
People who conceal carry tend to practice regularly, way more than cops
Also civilian gun owners in general. Private owners tend to practice a lot, until they're confident in their own skills. Police tend to practice the minimum required by their forces - which don't want to pay for copy time on the line when they could be paying them to write tickets. Police have a lot of other stuff to be trained in, too, and I hear that only one cop in two actually has to FIRE his gun even once per career in an actual confrontation.
Ever notice that police never practice at the range at the same time civilians are there? That's because they're ROTTEN by comparison, and it embarrasses them and their departments.
and are much less likely to act in a situation than a police officer, and there are records to prove it.
And when they do, and end up firing, they're MUCH less likely t shoot someone they shouldn't have. The last figures I saw (a few year ago) had the cops about 5 1/2 times more likely, when shooting, to shoot someone they shouldn't. It's not law of small numbers, either, since civilians good-shoot substantially more crookies than cops.
In fairness to cops, they generally arrive on the scene after things have gotten out of hand and have to figure out who's at fault, while civilians involved in defence shootings were usually there from the start and have a really good idea who's who. Civilians also usually get to bail out when things get out of hand, but cops usually have to stay there and get it under control, despite the poor information available at the time.
Guns are tech, and lots of "nerds" are "gun nuts" and vice-versa. Misuse of this tech, and moves to restrict or ban it, is very much "news for nerds". (Especially since finding legal workarounds for the protections on one constitutional right creates precedent that can be applied to others - like free speech and the press, in the form of an open internet.)
(The model rocket guys found out, a couple decades back, that model rockets are "weapons", too, as far as uncle sam is concerned.)
It's also "stuff that matters". (I notice that you didn't even bother to question that.)
(do you think that these guys would have been able to killed or wounded 14 in a crowd and then just DRIVE AWAY if any substantial number of the crowd had been armed?)
Make that "killed or wounded 28". Last number I saw was 14 of each.
... your solution might limit the number of people getting killed but won't eliminate the problem.
Didn't claim it would eliminate the problem. But a gun-free zone didn't, either, did it? Nothing will make the world safe against pre-planned attacks by organized gangs of armed thugs (official or otherwise).
But if you're trying to MINIMIZE the carnage - whether in general or just among the innocent - having armed good-guys sprinkled through the population is far more effective than disarming all the good-guys and presenting the bad-guys with a target-rich environment of helpless victims.
This can be expected to:
- reduce the number of incidents in the first place (because SOME of the bad guys are clueful enough to realize that making themselves the immediate target of an unknown number of self-appointed guardians is detrimental to their own interests, and will switch to softer targets or just find other things to do)
- mitigate the incidents that DO occur - stopping them sooner, or even aborting them as they're getting under way.
- stop future incidents perpetrated by the same people (do you think that these guys would have been able to killed or wounded 14 in a crowd and then just DRIVE AWAY if any substantial number of the crowd had been armed?)
Criminology research tells us this expectation is actually what happens. Or you can just observe that essentially all the mass shootings in the last decades have been in gun-free zones - and some attempts have been aborted rapidly by armed - or otherwise gun-trained - citizens.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." - no matter how much the anti-gun spin-meisters would try to convince you otherwise.
Thanks. I suspect some Chrome users will be interested, so this is News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters.
But I bailed on Chrome a couple years ago - installing and switching to Firefox on my account/machine at the consulting customer that used Chrome for their standard browser.
The precipitating incident: A typo had brought up a NSFW page, URL autocompletion kept suggesting it whenever its (common) first letter was typed, and both the documented and undocumented methods for removing such "helpful hints" weren't working in that version of Chrome.
But even before that they had broken several things I used in a "we know what you need better than you" interface change that couldn't be configured-away.
I'll stick to open stuff, even if it means I don't get the proprietary blazingly-fast rendering engine. Even when Netscape breaks things (like "delay image loading") I (or helpful netizens) have always been able to find a way to get it back, and in principle I could hack the code if it was REALLY important.
"Portable" and "needs to be grounded" are sort of conflicting constraints...
A Faraday cage doesn't need to be grounded unless you want to stop an outbound DC electric field. For AC and for inbound fields it's just fine floating.
On the other hand, armholes are over a quarter wavelength for even the 2.4 GHz WiFi low band. The product would need something like integrated chain-mail or knit-wire gloves.
New technology market deployments go in stages, including the following:
1) The underlying technology becomes available and financially viable. The window opens.
2) An explosion of companies introduce competing products and try to capture market share. They are in a race to jump through the window.
3) There is a shakeout: A handful become the dominant producers and the rest die off or move on to other things. The window has closed.
We've seen this over and over. (Two examples from a few decades back were the explosions of Unix boxes and PC graphics accelerator chips)
IoT applications recently passed stage 1), with the introduction of $1-ish priced, ultra-low-power (batteries last for years), systems-on-a-chip (computer, radio peripheral, miscellaneous sensor and other device interfaces) from TI, Nordic, Dialog, and others. It's in stage 2) now.
In stage 2) there's a race to get to market. Wait too long and your competitors eat your lunch and you die before deploying at all. So PBHs do things like deploy proof-of-concept lab prototypes as products, as soon as they work at all (or even BEFORE they do. B-b ) They figure that implementing a good security architecture up front will make them miss the window, and (if they think that far ahead at all) that they can fix it with upgrades later, after they're established, have financing, adequate staffing, and time to do it right - or at least well enough.
So right now you're seeing the IoT producucts that came out first - which means mostly the ones that either ignored security entirely or haven't gotten it set up right yet. Give it some time and you'll see better security - either from improvements among the early movers or new entrants who took the time to do it right and managed to survive long enough to get to market. Then you'll see a shakeout, as those who got SOMETHING wrong fail in competition with those who got it right.
If we're lucky, one of the "somethings" will be security. But Microsoft's example shows that's not necessarily a given.
In this case, though, the POINT of the product is security, so getting it wrong - visibly - may be a company killer. (I see that, in the wake of the exposure, the company is promising a field upgrade with this issue fixed in about a month. If it does happen, and comes out before the crooks develop and use an exploit, perhaps this company will become another example for the PHBs to point at when they push the engineers for fast schlock rather than slow solid-as-rocks.)
We can only assume they are too cheap, lazy or distracted with other things to keep frequent backups.
Or they think they ARE keeping backups, because they ARE - on a different part of the same disk, using automated processes provided and touted by the vendor - but the ransomware disables the tools and deletes the backups. Oops!
There's a difference between "backups" and "adequate, off-machine, backups".
Why would you need a random.png from the Internet? Can't they just keep whatever part they need (header?) as part of the binary?
I'd guess:
- The authors wrote the tool to use enough of the start of an encrypted/clear file pair to generate / sieve the key and deployed that.
- Some used discovered, after the tool was deployed, that the invariant header of a.png file was long enough that any.png file could function as the "clear" for any encrypted.png (or at least that many unrelated pairs could do that.)
I'd bet that, if the authors had thought there was a nearly-universally-present file type the ransomware would chose to encrypt, with a large enough header to pull off this trick, they'd have included a canned header and the option to use it in the tool.
The hell they can't. Industrial-scale Vanadium Redox flow batteries are doing that right now, in utility companies, and have been for a couple years. (In New Zeeland, if I recall correctly.)
I think the reason they're not more widely used already is that they're under patent protection, the company is small, and its owners don't want to license the technology or dilute their equity, so the supply is limited to their ramp-up and funding sources.
When the voltage across it is directly proportional to percentage of charge.
And they already did, many years ago. That's what "supercapacitors" are: Electrochemical cells where the charge is stored by migrating, but not ionization-state-changing, ions in a solution (rather than by migrating electrons within two conductors (one metal, the other metal or conductive liquid) separated by an insulator, as in a conventional or electrolytic capacitor, or ionization-state-changing ions in the cells of a conventional battery,where the voltage only changes slightly with state of charge until nearly full discharge.
What strikes me about that is he cites the government-subsidized, market-distorting, winner-picking, scam-promoting "renewable energy push" period, with the Solyndra scam held up as the poster child, as a TECHNOLOGICAL failure.
Details matter. You are looking to build a fusion reactor, and this reaction is far more difficult than the DT reaction that the fusion community is focusing on.
They're also working on the substantially harder p-B reaction (which only has a trace of neutron output due to impurities/side reactions). That's substantially harder (and worth it!) but still not in the ballpark.
Did anybody compare the lists of devices sharing these hardcoded SSL certs to the lists in the Snowden Revelations that various projects in NSA were willing to crack on a wholesale basis for other departments?
As mentioned previously, my mental model of semiconductors and the like is a fireman's water brigade, were either the majority of the line has buckets or empty hands.
It helps if, instead of a line, you think of a LOT them standing in a two-D array (like in the yard of the burning building, or a section of a parade that's stopped to do a little demo). It's really three-D, but we'll want to use up/down for something else in a bit...
For metallic electron conduction everybody has TWO buckets, one for each hand, and when a guy by the fire throws a buck of water on it (bucket and all) on the fire, a guy farther back immediately tosses him a bucket, the guy behind him essentially instantly throws HIM a bucket, andso on. Hands are effectively never empty.
For semiconductors, imagine two layers of these guys, the second standing on the firsts' shoulders or on a scaffold right above them, and about enough buckets for each of the guys on the ground to have two and the guys on the scaffold to have none. (There's actually many layers of scaffold, but the rest are so far up that it's hard to get a bucket to them, so they mostly just stand around.)
Usually nothing useful is happening. Everybody on the bottom layer has both hands full of buckets, and it's hard to hand a bucket up to the guys on the top.
- Electron-hole pair creation: Somebody comes up with the energy to heave a bucket up to the guys on the upper layer, leaving a guy with one hand empty in the lower layer. (Maybe somebody (a photon, for instance) comes along with a lacrosse stick and whacks a bucket up to a guy in the top row - dying or becoming exhausted and much weaker from the effort.) Now you've got one guy with a free hand in the lower layer (a hole) and one bucket on the top layer (a free electron).
- Electron conduction in a semiconductor is that bucket on the upper layer. The guys there can hand it around easily, or toss it along a diagonal until it would hit a guy - who catches it. They're all standing on accurately-spaced platforms so the bucket can go quite a way before somebody has to catch it. Suppose there's a slope to the yard, with the fire at the bottom. Then, if tossed too far, the bucket might pick up substantial speed and knock the guy who catches it out of place (electromigration), or fall down to the lower layer and knock another bucket out of somebody's hand and bounce, ending up with TWO buckets on the upper layer and an empty hand below (avalanche electron-hole creation).
- Hole conduction is when you've got an empty hand on the bottom layer: Now it's easy for a guy with two buckets to hand a bucket to a guy with only one, exchanging a bucket for an empty hand. But now the guy whose hand had been empty has two buckets and nobody in the downhill/toward-fire direction to hand a bucket to, while the guy who handed it off has an empty hand and can grab a bucket from somebody farther uphill / closer to the water source - or beside him, or diagonally. So "empty-handedness" (a hole) can move around as a persistent entity while the individual buckets gradually work their way in the general direction of the fire, only making a bit of progress "when a hole comes by". Though the water makes progress toward the fire, the action is all where the holes are making progress away from the fire.
- Electron-hole annihilation: Somebody has a bucket on the upper layer when a guy below him has an empty hand. So he drops the bucket. CLANG! Ouch! Now there's no "free bucket" on the upper layer, no free hand on the lower layer, and the energy of their separation went somewhere else (knocking the guy sideways so he bumps into his neighbor and generally making the guys vibrate, "creating a guy with a lacrosse stick who runs off to whack at buckets", etc.)
- P-type doping: A guy in the bottom layer had a sore hand and only brought one bucket to the fire, thus having a free hand from the start. He can take a bucket when a neighbor pushes it at him (the hole moves
Another vacuum tube technology with current applications and substantial advantages over semiconductor approaches to the same problems is the Thermionic Converter. This is a vacuum-tube technology heat engine that turns temperature differences into electric power - by boiling electrons off a hot electrode and collecting them, at a somewhat more negative voltage (like 0.5 to 1 volt), at a cooler electrode.
Semiconductor approaches such as the Peltier Cell tend to be limited in operating temperature due to the materials involved, and lose a major fraction of the available power to non-power-producing heat conduction from the hot to the cold side of the device. Thermionic converters, by contrast are vacuum devices, and inherently insulating (with the heat conducted almost entirely by the working electrons, where it is doing the generation, or parasitic infrared radiation, which can be reflected rater than absorbed at the cold side.) They work very well at temperatures of a couple thousand degrees, a good match to combustion, point-focused solar, and nuclear thermal sources.
Thermionic converters have been the subject to recent improvements, such as graphine electrodes. The power density limitation of space charge has been solved, by using a "control grid" to encourage to charge to move along from the emitter to the collector and magnetic fields to guide it (so it doesn't discharge the control grid and waste the power used to charge it).
Current thermionic technology can convert better than 30% of the available thermal energy to electrical power and achieves power densities in the ballpark of a kilowatt per 100 square cm (i.e. a disk about 4 1/2 inches in diameter). That's a reasonably respectable carnot engine. This makes it very useful for things like topping cycles in steam plants: You run it with the flame against the hot side so it is at the combustion temperature, and the "cold" side at the temperature of the superheated steam for your steam cycle. Rather than wasting the energy of that temperature drop (as you would with a pure steam cycle) you collect about a third of it as electricity.
It also beats the efficiency of currently available solar cell technology (and the 33.4% Shockleyâ"Queisser theoretical limit for single-junction cells), if you don't mind mounting it on a sun-tracker. Not only that, but you can capture the "waste heat" at a useful temperature without substantial impairment to the electrical generation or heat collection, and thus use the same surface area for both generation and solar heating. (Doing this with semiconductor solar cells doesn't work well, because they become far less efficient when running a couple tens of degrees above room temparature.)
... every schematic drawn by every semiconductor engineer got the arrow backwards.
As I heard it, The arrow is "backward" because Benjamin Franklin, when doing his work unifying "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity as surplus and deficit of a single charge carrier (and identifying the "electrical pressure" later named "voltage"), took a guess at which corresponded to a surplus of a movable charge carrier. He had a 50% chance to assign "positive" to the TYPICAL moving charge carrier in the situations being experimented with (charge transfer by friction between different substances, currents in metallic conductors, and high voltage discharges in air and water-in-air aerosols) and happened to guess "wrong".
Thus we say electrons have a negative charge, "classical current" corresponds to the sum of the flow of moving positive charge minus the flow of negative charge (i.e. the negative of the electron current, which is all there is in normal-matter metallic conductors), the arrowhead on diodes (and junction transistors) points in the direction of classical current across a junction, and so on.
But though it's the charge carrier in metallic conduction and (hard) vacuum tubes, the electron ISN'T the only charge carrier. Even in the above list of phenomena, positive ion flow is a substantial part of electrical discharge currents in air - static sparks and lightning. Positive moving charge carriers are substantial contributors to current as you get to other plasma phenomena and technologies - gas-filled "vacuum" tubes (such as thyratons), gas an LIQUID filled "vacuum" tubes (ignatrons), gas discharge lighting, arc lighting, arc welding, prototype nuclear fusion reactors,...
Move on to electrochemistry and ALL the charge carriers are ions - atoms or molecular groups with an unequal electron and proton count, and thus a net charge - which may be either positive or negative (and you're usually working wit a mix of both).
And then there's semiconductors, where you have both electrons and "holes" participating in metallic conduction. Yes, you can argue that hole propagation is actually electron movement. But holes act like a coherent physical entity in SO many ways that it's easier to treat them as charge carriers in their own right, with their own properties, than to drill down to the electron hops that underlie them. For starters, they're the only entity in "hole current" that maintains a long-term association with the movement of a bit of charge - any given electron is only involved in a single hop, while the hole exists from its creation (by an electron being ejected from a place in the semiconductor that an electron should be, by doping or excitation, leaving a hole) to their destruction (by a free electron falling into them and releasing the energy of electron-hole-pair separation). They move around - like a charge carrier with a very short (like usually just to the next atom of the solid material) mean free path.
For me the big tell is that they participate in the Hall Effect just as if they were a positive charge carrier being deflected by a magnetic field. The hall voltage tells you the difference between the fraction of the current carried by electrons excited into a conduction band and that carried by holes - whether you think of them as actual moving positive charge carriers or a coordinated hopping phenomenon among electrons that are still in a lower energy state. Further, much of interesting semiconductor behavior is mediated by whether electrons or holes are the "majority carrier" in a given region - exactly what the hall effect tells you about it.
So, as with many engineering phenomena, the sign for charge and current is arbitrary, and there are both real and virtual current carriers with positive charge. Saying "they got it wrong" when classical current is the reverse of electron current is just metallic/thermionic conduction chauvinism. B
"No point progressing since the bombs are gonna fall any day now. Then where will your fancy silicon highways and databases be?"
Given that the Internet Protocol and much of the rest of the networking technology that still underpins the Internet were developed as part of a cold-war program to create a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack that destroyed most of it, and still reorganize itself to pass messages quickly, efficiently, and automatically among any nodes that still had SOME path between them, your post seems to come from some alternate universe to the one I inhabit.
The US tax code. The US keeps its hooks in its citizens and companies, for decades, if they try to leave, even if they move out and renounce their citizenship.
The US does this to a far greater extent than other countries who generally don't tax their citizens if they're out of the country for more than half a year. (This is where "The Jet Set" came from: Citizens of various non-US countries who had found a way to earn a living that let them split their time among three or more countries every year and avoid enough income tax to live high-on-the-hog, even on an income that otherwise might be middle-class.)
Only really big companies, with armies of lawyers, can find loopholes that let them effectively move out of the US to a lower-taxing alternative. You'll note that TFA is a lament about how one managed to escape, and how the US might "close THIS loophole" to prevent others from using it.
Slashdot Mirror
... [unlikely to be successfully] ending up a successful vigilante peacekeeper after a few hours training.
If you'd taken the training, you wouldn't be misusing the term "vigilante". One big part of it is to NOT be one.
FYI: Self-defence, (and legitimate defence of others) occurs from the time the attack on you/others (or creditable threat) begins until the time there is no further creditable threat - usually when the attacker is incapacitated and under restraint, or on the run.
It's always vigilantism if you try to hunt down the attacker once he's out of sight. (Before that, jurisdictions vary on when self defense ends and whether you're allowed to use deadly force to accomplish a citizen's arrest. For instance: Oregon did, and may still, allow you to shoot at a housebreaker even if he's dropped his gun and is running to his car: Case law said it's reasonable to believe he may be trying to get another, bigger, weapon from his vehicle to resume the attack.)
Police are just formalized, professional, vigilantes. Citizens in most jurisdictions retain many of the same powers as a civil right.
So you have the attackers running around causing carnage. Then you have a bunch of citizens trying to "help" take out the attackers. How do the citizens know who is an attacker and who is another good guy?
Armed US civilians have a track record of getting it wrong less often then police officers. Like by a factor of 5 1/2.
I can see carrying be useful if ...
We know all these things. And more. And the well-researched and legally-vetted (sometimes different) "correct" answers to a number of such questions.
Find an NRA-certified instructor. Take (first the "basic pistol" then) the "Personal Protection" classes. Then you'll know the answers, too.
I won't try to summarize the courses here. I'm not certified to give them (my wife is), and you're not paying me for them. They're inexpensive and only take a couple weekends or so.
I'm wondering, could the government simply buy both the guns and gun licenses back?
No.
Make it voluntary, and make it worth doing (ie buy the guns back for more than they are worth). Would that even work, or is it just a complete waste of money?
Waste of money. Gun "buy-backs" are mostly used to get rid of (and get more than scrap value for) worthless rusted-out scrap guns and untraceably dispose of stolen guns and guns used in murders or other crimes. (Then there was that bad divorce where the gun collector's disgruntled wife stole his multi-million-buck collection and handed it to the cops for pennies on the dollar, just to annoy, and cause trouble for, her estranged hubby.) Pay enough and you'll also get people buying (or making!) cheap guns to "sell back". But you'll never get any substantial number of privately owned decent guns - even if you paid the much higher price that they'd bring at a gun store, rather than the usual pittance. Armed people are generally armed because they WANT to be armed, not because it's cheap.
The whole 'cold dead hands' thing is troubling. I've never understood why people need so much fire power.
Look into the origin of the right: The people who wrote the Second Amendment had just OVERTHROWN their LEGITAMATE (but recently gone tyrannical) GOVERMENT. They were trying to set things up so that they would be able to do so if they needed to again while simultaneously deterring a repeat - both of tyranny and its needed overthrow.
The Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting. It's about revolutions and avoiding tyranny and genocide. It's about defending yourself against bad guys - at the retail and wholesale level - rather than depending on others to do it for you (and to put your interests ahead of their own). The "cold dead hands" crew believe it is, not just their right, but their DUTY, to be armed. Like fire insurance, being armed and competent to use arms is a price you pay to mitigate rare-but-costly disasters.
Is our society really that violent? Crime stats say otherwise.
Our society is not very violent, despite all the hype. People of European descent have substantially lower victimization (murder, robbery, etc.) rates than the same ethnic group in "The Old Country". People of African descent have substantially lower victimization rates than the same ethnic group THEIR old country. Ditto with Asia, South and Central America, etc.
When comparing rates, watch out for some gotchas:
- The US counts a murder when there's a body and signs of foul play. The UK counts a murder when there's a con viction.
- If daddy kills his three kids, his wife, and then himself (or makes an attempt to kill himself) the US counts four murders and a suicide, while Japan counts five suicides. ("Family Suicide")
and so on.
- Count "crimes", not just "gun crimes". (You're just as dead if you're clubbed or cut to death as if you're shot, but the latter is a higher percentage where guns are available then where they're not. Also: You're more likely to survive a shooting, and if you survive you'll generally recover more quickly and completely from a shooting than a clubbing or stabbing.)
But while you're at it, don't forget to count the dead in wars, "ethnic clensing", and other organized and government/power-group sanctioned mayhem. Armed populations strongly deter such activities - compare the last 2 1/2 centuries in Eurasia (with their world wars and genocides) vs. the US (one revolution, one "Civil War", the frontier expansion conflicts, various civil rights movements. The rest is mostly getting dragged into stuff "over there" - often by "our" own "leaders" working in interests other than that of the general population.)
It has been observed that EVERY genocide has been preceded by the disarmament of the victim population. "Never again" includes "... will we be disarmed and powerless."
People who conceal carry tend to practice regularly, way more than cops
Also civilian gun owners in general. Private owners tend to practice a lot, until they're confident in their own skills. Police tend to practice the minimum required by their forces - which don't want to pay for copy time on the line when they could be paying them to write tickets. Police have a lot of other stuff to be trained in, too, and I hear that only one cop in two actually has to FIRE his gun even once per career in an actual confrontation.
Ever notice that police never practice at the range at the same time civilians are there? That's because they're ROTTEN by comparison, and it embarrasses them and their departments.
and are much less likely to act in a situation than a police officer, and there are records to prove it.
And when they do, and end up firing, they're MUCH less likely t shoot someone they shouldn't have. The last figures I saw (a few year ago) had the cops about 5 1/2 times more likely, when shooting, to shoot someone they shouldn't. It's not law of small numbers, either, since civilians good-shoot substantially more crookies than cops.
In fairness to cops, they generally arrive on the scene after things have gotten out of hand and have to figure out who's at fault, while civilians involved in defence shootings were usually there from the start and have a really good idea who's who. Civilians also usually get to bail out when things get out of hand, but cops usually have to stay there and get it under control, despite the poor information available at the time.
This isn't tech news/news for nerds.''
Sure it is.
Guns are tech, and lots of "nerds" are "gun nuts" and vice-versa. Misuse of this tech, and moves to restrict or ban it, is very much "news for nerds". (Especially since finding legal workarounds for the protections on one constitutional right creates precedent that can be applied to others - like free speech and the press, in the form of an open internet.)
(The model rocket guys found out, a couple decades back, that model rockets are "weapons", too, as far as uncle sam is concerned.)
It's also "stuff that matters". (I notice that you didn't even bother to question that.)
(do you think that these guys would have been able to killed or wounded 14 in a crowd and then just DRIVE AWAY if any substantial number of the crowd had been armed?)
Make that "killed or wounded 28". Last number I saw was 14 of each.
... your solution might limit the number of people getting killed but won't eliminate the problem.
Didn't claim it would eliminate the problem. But a gun-free zone didn't, either, did it? Nothing will make the world safe against pre-planned attacks by organized gangs of armed thugs (official or otherwise).
But if you're trying to MINIMIZE the carnage - whether in general or just among the innocent - having armed good-guys sprinkled through the population is far more effective than disarming all the good-guys and presenting the bad-guys with a target-rich environment of helpless victims.
This can be expected to:
- reduce the number of incidents in the first place (because SOME of the bad guys are clueful enough to realize that making themselves the immediate target of an unknown number of self-appointed guardians is detrimental to their own interests, and will switch to softer targets or just find other things to do)
- mitigate the incidents that DO occur - stopping them sooner, or even aborting them as they're getting under way.
- stop future incidents perpetrated by the same people (do you think that these guys would have been able to killed or wounded 14 in a crowd and then just DRIVE AWAY if any substantial number of the crowd had been armed?)
Criminology research tells us this expectation is actually what happens. Or you can just observe that essentially all the mass shootings in the last decades have been in gun-free zones - and some attempts have been aborted rapidly by armed - or otherwise gun-trained - citizens.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." - no matter how much the anti-gun spin-meisters would try to convince you otherwise.
I guess we need to make sure everyone is armed and ready to fire at all times in the whole country. That way we'll have fewer shootings.
Going to the gym? Wear an ankle holster. Going to Starbucks? Pack your trusty 12-gauge.
Naw. About one in ten carrying concealed would do it.
Line from a friend who was a union official: "We're a poor union. We only have one pistol. But you never know who has it checked out."
Thanks. I suspect some Chrome users will be interested, so this is News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters.
But I bailed on Chrome a couple years ago - installing and switching to Firefox on my account/machine at the consulting customer that used Chrome for their standard browser.
The precipitating incident: A typo had brought up a NSFW page, URL autocompletion kept suggesting it whenever its (common) first letter was typed, and both the documented and undocumented methods for removing such "helpful hints" weren't working in that version of Chrome.
But even before that they had broken several things I used in a "we know what you need better than you" interface change that couldn't be configured-away.
I'll stick to open stuff, even if it means I don't get the proprietary blazingly-fast rendering engine. Even when Netscape breaks things (like "delay image loading") I (or helpful netizens) have always been able to find a way to get it back, and in principle I could hack the code if it was REALLY important.
"Portable" and "needs to be grounded" are sort of conflicting constraints...
A Faraday cage doesn't need to be grounded unless you want to stop an outbound DC electric field. For AC and for inbound fields it's just fine floating.
On the other hand, armholes are over a quarter wavelength for even the 2.4 GHz WiFi low band. The product would need something like integrated chain-mail or knit-wire gloves.
New technology market deployments go in stages, including the following:
1) The underlying technology becomes available and financially viable. The window opens.
2) An explosion of companies introduce competing products and try to capture market share. They are in a race to jump through the window.
3) There is a shakeout: A handful become the dominant producers and the rest die off or move on to other things. The window has closed.
We've seen this over and over. (Two examples from a few decades back were the explosions of Unix boxes and PC graphics accelerator chips)
IoT applications recently passed stage 1), with the introduction of $1-ish priced, ultra-low-power (batteries last for years), systems-on-a-chip (computer, radio peripheral, miscellaneous sensor and other device interfaces) from TI, Nordic, Dialog, and others. It's in stage 2) now.
In stage 2) there's a race to get to market. Wait too long and your competitors eat your lunch and you die before deploying at all. So PBHs do things like deploy proof-of-concept lab prototypes as products, as soon as they work at all (or even BEFORE they do. B-b ) They figure that implementing a good security architecture up front will make them miss the window, and (if they think that far ahead at all) that they can fix it with upgrades later, after they're established, have financing, adequate staffing, and time to do it right - or at least well enough.
So right now you're seeing the IoT producucts that came out first - which means mostly the ones that either ignored security entirely or haven't gotten it set up right yet. Give it some time and you'll see better security - either from improvements among the early movers or new entrants who took the time to do it right and managed to survive long enough to get to market. Then you'll see a shakeout, as those who got SOMETHING wrong fail in competition with those who got it right.
If we're lucky, one of the "somethings" will be security. But Microsoft's example shows that's not necessarily a given.
In this case, though, the POINT of the product is security, so getting it wrong - visibly - may be a company killer. (I see that, in the wake of the exposure, the company is promising a field upgrade with this issue fixed in about a month. If it does happen, and comes out before the crooks develop and use an exploit, perhaps this company will become another example for the PHBs to point at when they push the engineers for fast schlock rather than slow solid-as-rocks.)
Being in the industry, the reason I was given was (1) the electrolyte is very expensive right now
Vanadium pentoxide (98% pure was about $6/lb and falling as of early Oct and hasn't been above $14 in years) and sulphuric acid?
and (2) investors need a demonstration of return.
Always the bottom line. B-)
The ransomware gets its name from the fact that the "DecryptorMax" string is found in multiple places inside its source code.
They distributed the source code with the ransomware?
Or the strings in the source code ended up generating strings in the object code and something like the "strings" tool found them.
We can only assume they are too cheap, lazy or distracted with other things to keep frequent backups.
Or they think they ARE keeping backups, because they ARE - on a different part of the same disk, using automated processes provided and touted by the vendor - but the ransomware disables the tools and deletes the backups. Oops!
There's a difference between "backups" and "adequate, off-machine, backups".
Why would you need a random .png from the Internet? Can't they just keep whatever part they need (header?) as part of the binary?
I'd guess: .png file was long enough that any .png file could function as the "clear" for any encrypted .png (or at least that many unrelated pairs could do that.)
- The authors wrote the tool to use enough of the start of an encrypted/clear file pair to generate / sieve the key and deployed that.
- Some used discovered, after the tool was deployed, that the invariant header of a
I'd bet that, if the authors had thought there was a nearly-universally-present file type the ransomware would chose to encrypt, with a large enough header to pull off this trick, they'd have included a canned header and the option to use it in the tool.
That's something conventional flow batteries can't do.hat's something conventional flow batteries can't do.
The hell they can't. Industrial-scale Vanadium Redox flow batteries are doing that right now, in utility companies, and have been for a couple years. (In New Zeeland, if I recall correctly.)
I think the reason they're not more widely used already is that they're under patent protection, the company is small, and its owners don't want to license the technology or dilute their equity, so the supply is limited to their ramp-up and funding sources.
When does the battery become capacitor?
When the voltage across it is directly proportional to percentage of charge.
And they already did, many years ago. That's what "supercapacitors" are: Electrochemical cells where the charge is stored by migrating, but not ionization-state-changing, ions in a solution (rather than by migrating electrons within two conductors (one metal, the other metal or conductive liquid) separated by an insulator, as in a conventional or electrolytic capacitor, or ionization-state-changing ions in the cells of a conventional battery,where the voltage only changes slightly with state of charge until nearly full discharge.
"Failed" push for renewables? [citation needed]
Indeed.
What strikes me about that is he cites the government-subsidized, market-distorting, winner-picking, scam-promoting "renewable energy push" period, with the Solyndra scam held up as the poster child, as a TECHNOLOGICAL failure.
Details matter. You are looking to build a fusion reactor, and this reaction is far more difficult than the DT reaction that the fusion community is focusing on.
They're also working on the substantially harder p-B reaction (which only has a trace of neutron output due to impurities/side reactions). That's substantially harder (and worth it!) but still not in the ballpark.
Did anybody compare the lists of devices sharing these hardcoded SSL certs to the lists in the Snowden Revelations that various projects in NSA were willing to crack on a wholesale basis for other departments?
As mentioned previously, my mental model of semiconductors and the like is a fireman's water brigade, were either the majority of the line has buckets or empty hands.
It helps if, instead of a line, you think of a LOT them standing in a two-D array (like in the yard of the burning building, or a section of a parade that's stopped to do a little demo). It's really three-D, but we'll want to use up/down for something else in a bit...
For metallic electron conduction everybody has TWO buckets, one for each hand, and when a guy by the fire throws a buck of water on it (bucket and all) on the fire, a guy farther back immediately tosses him a bucket, the guy behind him essentially instantly throws HIM a bucket, andso on. Hands are effectively never empty.
For semiconductors, imagine two layers of these guys, the second standing on the firsts' shoulders or on a scaffold right above them, and about enough buckets for each of the guys on the ground to have two and the guys on the scaffold to have none. (There's actually many layers of scaffold, but the rest are so far up that it's hard to get a bucket to them, so they mostly just stand around.)
Usually nothing useful is happening. Everybody on the bottom layer has both hands full of buckets, and it's hard to hand a bucket up to the guys on the top.
- Electron-hole pair creation: Somebody comes up with the energy to heave a bucket up to the guys on the upper layer, leaving a guy with one hand empty in the lower layer. (Maybe somebody (a photon, for instance) comes along with a lacrosse stick and whacks a bucket up to a guy in the top row - dying or becoming exhausted and much weaker from the effort.) Now you've got one guy with a free hand in the lower layer (a hole) and one bucket on the top layer (a free electron).
- Electron conduction in a semiconductor is that bucket on the upper layer. The guys there can hand it around easily, or toss it along a diagonal until it would hit a guy - who catches it. They're all standing on accurately-spaced platforms so the bucket can go quite a way before somebody has to catch it. Suppose there's a slope to the yard, with the fire at the bottom. Then, if tossed too far, the bucket might pick up substantial speed and knock the guy who catches it out of place (electromigration), or fall down to the lower layer and knock another bucket out of somebody's hand and bounce, ending up with TWO buckets on the upper layer and an empty hand below (avalanche electron-hole creation).
- Hole conduction is when you've got an empty hand on the bottom layer: Now it's easy for a guy with two buckets to hand a bucket to a guy with only one, exchanging a bucket for an empty hand. But now the guy whose hand had been empty has two buckets and nobody in the downhill/toward-fire direction to hand a bucket to, while the guy who handed it off has an empty hand and can grab a bucket from somebody farther uphill / closer to the water source - or beside him, or diagonally. So "empty-handedness" (a hole) can move around as a persistent entity while the individual buckets gradually work their way in the general direction of the fire, only making a bit of progress "when a hole comes by". Though the water makes progress toward the fire, the action is all where the holes are making progress away from the fire.
- Electron-hole annihilation: Somebody has a bucket on the upper layer when a guy below him has an empty hand. So he drops the bucket. CLANG! Ouch! Now there's no "free bucket" on the upper layer, no free hand on the lower layer, and the energy of their separation went somewhere else (knocking the guy sideways so he bumps into his neighbor and generally making the guys vibrate, "creating a guy with a lacrosse stick who runs off to whack at buckets", etc.)
- P-type doping: A guy in the bottom layer had a sore hand and only brought one bucket to the fire, thus having a free hand from the start. He can take a bucket when a neighbor pushes it at him (the hole moves
Another vacuum tube technology with current applications and substantial advantages over semiconductor approaches to the same problems is the Thermionic Converter. This is a vacuum-tube technology heat engine that turns temperature differences into electric power - by boiling electrons off a hot electrode and collecting them, at a somewhat more negative voltage (like 0.5 to 1 volt), at a cooler electrode.
Semiconductor approaches such as the Peltier Cell tend to be limited in operating temperature due to the materials involved, and lose a major fraction of the available power to non-power-producing heat conduction from the hot to the cold side of the device. Thermionic converters, by contrast are vacuum devices, and inherently insulating (with the heat conducted almost entirely by the working electrons, where it is doing the generation, or parasitic infrared radiation, which can be reflected rater than absorbed at the cold side.) They work very well at temperatures of a couple thousand degrees, a good match to combustion, point-focused solar, and nuclear thermal sources.
Thermionic converters have been the subject to recent improvements, such as graphine electrodes. The power density limitation of space charge has been solved, by using a "control grid" to encourage to charge to move along from the emitter to the collector and magnetic fields to guide it (so it doesn't discharge the control grid and waste the power used to charge it).
Current thermionic technology can convert better than 30% of the available thermal energy to electrical power and achieves power densities in the ballpark of a kilowatt per 100 square cm (i.e. a disk about 4 1/2 inches in diameter). That's a reasonably respectable carnot engine. This makes it very useful for things like topping cycles in steam plants: You run it with the flame against the hot side so it is at the combustion temperature, and the "cold" side at the temperature of the superheated steam for your steam cycle. Rather than wasting the energy of that temperature drop (as you would with a pure steam cycle) you collect about a third of it as electricity.
It also beats the efficiency of currently available solar cell technology (and the 33.4% Shockleyâ"Queisser theoretical limit for single-junction cells), if you don't mind mounting it on a sun-tracker. Not only that, but you can capture the "waste heat" at a useful temperature without substantial impairment to the electrical generation or heat collection, and thus use the same surface area for both generation and solar heating. (Doing this with semiconductor solar cells doesn't work well, because they become far less efficient when running a couple tens of degrees above room temparature.)
... every schematic drawn by every semiconductor engineer got the arrow backwards.
As I heard it, The arrow is "backward" because Benjamin Franklin, when doing his work unifying "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity as surplus and deficit of a single charge carrier (and identifying the "electrical pressure" later named "voltage"), took a guess at which corresponded to a surplus of a movable charge carrier. He had a 50% chance to assign "positive" to the TYPICAL moving charge carrier in the situations being experimented with (charge transfer by friction between different substances, currents in metallic conductors, and high voltage discharges in air and water-in-air aerosols) and happened to guess "wrong".
Thus we say electrons have a negative charge, "classical current" corresponds to the sum of the flow of moving positive charge minus the flow of negative charge (i.e. the negative of the electron current, which is all there is in normal-matter metallic conductors), the arrowhead on diodes (and junction transistors) points in the direction of classical current across a junction, and so on.
But though it's the charge carrier in metallic conduction and (hard) vacuum tubes, the electron ISN'T the only charge carrier. Even in the above list of phenomena, positive ion flow is a substantial part of electrical discharge currents in air - static sparks and lightning. Positive moving charge carriers are substantial contributors to current as you get to other plasma phenomena and technologies - gas-filled "vacuum" tubes (such as thyratons), gas an LIQUID filled "vacuum" tubes (ignatrons), gas discharge lighting, arc lighting, arc welding, prototype nuclear fusion reactors, ...
Move on to electrochemistry and ALL the charge carriers are ions - atoms or molecular groups with an unequal electron and proton count, and thus a net charge - which may be either positive or negative (and you're usually working wit a mix of both).
And then there's semiconductors, where you have both electrons and "holes" participating in metallic conduction. Yes, you can argue that hole propagation is actually electron movement. But holes act like a coherent physical entity in SO many ways that it's easier to treat them as charge carriers in their own right, with their own properties, than to drill down to the electron hops that underlie them. For starters, they're the only entity in "hole current" that maintains a long-term association with the movement of a bit of charge - any given electron is only involved in a single hop, while the hole exists from its creation (by an electron being ejected from a place in the semiconductor that an electron should be, by doping or excitation, leaving a hole) to their destruction (by a free electron falling into them and releasing the energy of electron-hole-pair separation). They move around - like a charge carrier with a very short (like usually just to the next atom of the solid material) mean free path.
For me the big tell is that they participate in the Hall Effect just as if they were a positive charge carrier being deflected by a magnetic field. The hall voltage tells you the difference between the fraction of the current carried by electrons excited into a conduction band and that carried by holes - whether you think of them as actual moving positive charge carriers or a coordinated hopping phenomenon among electrons that are still in a lower energy state. Further, much of interesting semiconductor behavior is mediated by whether electrons or holes are the "majority carrier" in a given region - exactly what the hall effect tells you about it.
So, as with many engineering phenomena, the sign for charge and current is arbitrary, and there are both real and virtual current carriers with positive charge. Saying "they got it wrong" when classical current is the reverse of electron current is just metallic/thermionic conduction chauvinism. B
"No point progressing since the bombs are gonna fall any day now. Then where will your fancy silicon highways and databases be?"
Given that the Internet Protocol and much of the rest of the networking technology that still underpins the Internet were developed as part of a cold-war program to create a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack that destroyed most of it, and still reorganize itself to pass messages quickly, efficiently, and automatically among any nodes that still had SOME path between them, your post seems to come from some alternate universe to the one I inhabit.
I'd also move my operation to Ireland if I could.
What's stopping you?
The US tax code. The US keeps its hooks in its citizens and companies, for decades, if they try to leave, even if they move out and renounce their citizenship.
The US does this to a far greater extent than other countries who generally don't tax their citizens if they're out of the country for more than half a year. (This is where "The Jet Set" came from: Citizens of various non-US countries who had found a way to earn a living that let them split their time among three or more countries every year and avoid enough income tax to live high-on-the-hog, even on an income that otherwise might be middle-class.)
Only really big companies, with armies of lawyers, can find loopholes that let them effectively move out of the US to a lower-taxing alternative. You'll note that TFA is a lament about how one managed to escape, and how the US might "close THIS loophole" to prevent others from using it.