if you have any sense whatsoever, you'll have a suite of regression tests to run on your software already. You can use that to validate the new environment when you compile a baseline. I've been involved with several projects that migrated from one platform to another.
Such tests might convince YOU (the developer). But would they convince REGULATORS? If not, you have to go through a whole, horribly-expensive, regulatory approval every time you migrate tool versions.
Regulators don't get dinged for insisting on more costly work by the regulated and withholding their approval. They DO get dinged if they approve something that then does harm.
That's why the FDA caused something like 400,000 extra deaths by delaying the approval of beta blockers for prevention of secondary heart attacks until the European research had been repeated in the US under US rules, rather than accepting the data and allowing the use. After the Thalidomide mess they're not going to approve ANYTHING quickly or easily. The same principle applies to other fields.
[Spys] won't blackmail you to the intelligence companies, they will blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife, or creditors, etc.
Your reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired. That's exactly what I was talking about.
1) To get the clearance you need to tell the US government everything the foreign spooks could use to blackmail you - by threatening to tell wife, creditors, media, etc. Then you need to convince the US spooks you don't care - even if you do. 2) If you left anything out, the US is likely to revoke your clearance. So your confession form has all the juicy stuff about you. 3) Now ALL the confession forms were stolen by the foreign spies. Oops! 4) Next step: The foreign spies get to test ANY of the people with clearances they want to test, to see if they REALLY don't care whether these things are revealed to their wife, creditors,...
The clearance process includes finding out if you're blackmailable into turning over secrets. So of course they question you about everything enemy spies may use as blackmail material. They're often willing to approve you if you confess all your sins to them - because the spies can no longer use the threat of revealing them to the intelligence agencies to pressure you.
It behoves you to confess ALL of it, because if you leave anything out they'll pull your clearance when they discover it. On the other hand, if YOU don't care if its revealed, THEY don't care either. So to get the clearance you tell them everything and claim you don't care.
Of course that means the intelligence agency files includes pretty much all the juicy blackmail material there IS on you. So if there's something you really DO care about, and you were bluffing the agencies, you ARE subject to blackmail threats.
Of course you also expose your life history, to prove you're not a mole. And THAT is everything an identity thief needs to completely replace you. SS number and mother's maiden name are a drop in the bathtub compared to this info.
The agencies should have guarded this MORE TIGHTLY than they do nuclear secrets. It's the key to ALL the people who know ALL the secrets.
Highly evolved animals such as humans have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to seeing into the future. The problem does exist that some if not all of us have evolved enough to plan adequately into the long term.
Highly evolved animals such as humans ALSO have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to constructing money- and power-grabbing scams, and detecting such scams when they're being perpetrated upon them.
Unfortunately, the Global Warming Solution Advocates, regardless of the merits of their concerns, used something that has the form of a gigantic scam when promoting their proposals, and promoted proposals that involve massive transfers of wealth, increases in government intervention in private lives and businesses, and reductions in standards of living. This has created substantial skepticism (which moneyed interests that would be harmed by the proposed actions have, of course, gleefully promoted). The failure of the climate to follow their predictions and discoveries of their fudging of the data doesn't help their cause, either.
There are a number of steps between "I think the weather is getting warmer, and people are causing it." to "We must drive the developed world's population down to third world standards RIGHT NOW, to prevent a couple degrees increase in world average temperature, or we're ALL going to DIE!"
Because it looks like a scam, about all they've gotten any substantial traction on is that the temperature is changing a bit (as it has for all of geological time - we ARE coming out of an ice age, after all - and whether the change is actually human-caused is immaterial beyond indicating that we could change it the other way if we tried). But they haven't convinced the population that they have a correct model.
And they haven't even STARTED on the NEXT of several steps: Is global warming, bad, indifferent, or even good? (The geological and historical record seems to indicate that substantially warmer than what we have now - by more than the amount they're concerned about - is actually better for both civilization and life in general.)
With the population unconvinced that there IS a "Grave Threat To Humanity", it's premature to assume that "Our Brains Can't Process" it.
But speaking as if the thing to be proven is already proven IS another technique of scammers. And making such a claim is an obvious prelude to a move by governmental people, who believe "their brains ARE capable of processing it", to go ahead and impose wealth-transferring, power-grabbing, population-impoverishing solutions, "for their own good", whether the populations want to be reduced to serfdom (rather than be killed by what they perceive as the allegedly falling sky) or not.
They can isolate and concentrate it, maybe stimulate production, but full synthesis? I don't see that happening yet.
Huh?
Human monoclonal antibodies have been grown by culturing gene-engineered mouse cells since at least 1988. They're already in use treating a number of diseases and more are in the approval pipeline.
In 1988, Greg Winter and his team pioneered the techniques to humanize monoclonal antibodies,[3] removing the reactions that many monoclonal antibodies caused in some patients.
Monoclonal antibodies have been generated and approved to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory diseases, macular degeneration, transplant rejection, multiple sclerosis, and viral infection (see monoclonal antibody therapy).
In August 2006 the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America reported that U.S. companies had 160 different monoclonal antibodies in clinical trials or awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
This disease process looks like suitable candidate for this approach, as well.
A few antibody PRODUCING cells, harvested from the same donor(s) as the antibodies, would be an ideal starting point: The antibodies have already been proven to cure the disease, so only a production mechanism is needed. Once a suitable cell line has been constructed, tested, and its product approved, the donor can retire, secure in the knowledge that his genetic material will continue to save mothers' and babies' lives, even long after his death.
Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?
In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.
If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.
With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.
how could such an advanced culture (as Rome) have staged such bloody spectacles?
How could such an advanced culture (as ours) have prominent media people who confuse "advanced" with "non-bloody" (or "squeamish")?
Answer: Freedom of speech and of the press. Even the clueless can be read and heard by millions.
Meanwhile, our culture seems to be decaying in much the pattern of Rome's. Let's hope that, if we can't fix it, it takes as many centuries to fall, rather than going down "in internet time" or "as we approach the singularity".
Fundamentally, not all communications are speech, because some communications have explicit direct non-speech results.
According to the Supreme Court, not all communications are PROTECTED speech. (They're still speech. They just don't enjoy the First Amendment protections because they're ALSO parts of crimes for which one can be punished - and in some cases (such as threats or criminal conspiracy) the speech is all it takes to commit or be a participant in the crime.)
Because speech is explicitly mentioned as protected in the First Amendment (and anti-government speech is also specifically a necessary part of another protected right - petitioning the government for redress of grievances), the court sets a very high standard for laws making some kind of speech a crime: Such laws may be overturned just because they have "a chilling effect" on protected speech, by making people avoid such protected speech out of concern that it might be prosecuted.
Regardless, Congress doesn't get to pass laws that preemptively muzzle people or block publication. They just get to pass laws to punish them AFTER they speak (or print,...) some explicitly illegal content.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater isn't speech.
Funny you should mention that. The phrase "FALSELY shouting fire in a crowded theatre" originated in a WWI Supreme Court decision declaring that distributing anti-draft leaflets to people of draft age was not protected speech.
My favorite approach to "Fire in a Crowded Theatre" was Abbie Hoffman's (when being interviewed in a crowded theatre):
Interviewer: "But surely you don't advocate shouting fire in a crowded theatre?"
Abbie: "FIRE!"
Malware authors try to be anonymous, leaving minimal personal signature in the malware. Malware authors also share code and reverse-engineer each other's code and use the result, so even style may be misleading. So even experts would have difficulty attributing it to any particular person,
That means any attempt to identify the author - as a real person, an alias, or a label under which to group multiple products of the same author, will be very error prone. With law-enforcement and other security types attempting to defend against and/or apprehend the authors, and the authors trying to hamper the anti-malware people and companies some of these errors would come to light. This would reduce the reputation of the anti-malware workers and companies, without regard to their success at malware defence.
So it is no surprise to me that andi-malware people and companies don't publish the results of any attempts they may make to identify the authors in the course of their work. Why should they take a risk like that for no perceivable gain? The risk/benefit ratio says don't even speculate.
Respondents in this case do not dispute that passage of the CSA, as part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, was well within Congress' commerce power
In my opinion, by the way, Wickard v. Filburn, the New Deal era decision that says making something for yourself (i.e. growing wheat to feed your own chickens, or growing marijuana to use yourself) affects interstate commerce (because you otherwise might have bought it instead, affecting the price) and can thus be regulated, is a travesty that is long overdue for the Supremes to revisit and reverse, as they sometimes do when a previous court broke something substantial.
But even if you agree that feeding your own wheat to your own chickens is a suitable subject for federal regulation under the commerce clause, don't you think it's a stretch to say that affecting the price of a banned substance by NOT buying it on the illegal market is a legitimate reason for the Federal Government to ban your growing and consuming your own plants? Either way you don't buy in interstate commerce, so how can the difference in your behavior affect it? (Or was it Congress' intent for you to buy illegal drugs?)
Sometimes more than half the Supreme Court justices follow some argument to a point beyond sanity.
Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished. Propz to GNAA
Let's devil's advocate a bit...
The Second Amendment clearly (to anyone who understands how English was used at the time) forbids the Federal Government from interfering, in any way, with obtaining and carrying weapons. (infringe ~ "even meddle with the fringes of") That includes gun trafficing, because stopping gun sales makes it harder to exercise the right.
The Tenth Amendment explicitly, and the Ninth Amendment implicitly, ban the Federal Government from use of any power not explicitly specified in the Constitution as amended. I don't see anything in there that explicitly gives the Federal Government to ban any drugs or traffic in them, or in any way regulate such traffic (beyond forbidding false advertising claims, setting standards for labeling, and the like). (Do YOU find any such power in there? If so, please point it out to us.)
So it could be argued that, by the Federal Government's own basic laws, these were NOT crimes and the "Dread Pirate" was a freedom fighter.
(I won't even get into the issue of the Anarchist claims that ANY government is necessarily illegitimate, coercively imposing its will on people who did not pre-approve this and are not attempting, themselves, to coerce others. The people who promulgated the Constitution were doing their best to get governments off people's backs.)
The store doesn't need these people. Why not just fix the policies to ban them without affecting regular coupon users?
Because the coupons are legitimate offers of a reduced price on a limited number of purchases of an item. An "extreme couponer" just happens to be accepting a larger number of them than a more typical shopper.
To reject a person who uses "too many" of them (while not rejecting ALL coupon use by ALL customers) may constitute consumer fraud on the store's part and get them into serious hot water.
Everything from your wall switches to your wires will cause you never ending problems.
Mechanical wall switches are still rated for DC. Houses USED to be wired for DC a lot. You only have to replace the stuff that was designed after AC was pervasive and wasn't engineered to handle DC.
(I forgot to mention that you'll also have to replace the light dimmers, too, along with most other electronic, rather than mechanical, switches. They usually use a current-zero-crossing turnoff device, and DC won't cross zero unless you force it to do so.)
Even if you replace your wall switches and outlets, your wires will degrade over time and develop holes and other blemishes that will cause a fire.
No they won't - unless they're wet (in which case you have bigger problems than galvanic corrosion). Electromigration at the current densities involved in house wiring is not an issue, nor is insulation breakdown. The wires and fittings will be just fine.
An "inverter", by definition, actually has alternating voltage as a substantial output, or at least somewhere in the circuitry. A switching regulator has a cycling voltage, but it isn't an AC output, or even an AC intermediate.
But they're very similar.
(Also: I was going to mention, above, that the current supplied through the pull-down (or clamp-at-ground) switch is where the extra output current comes from, compensating for the lowered voltage with higher current for similar amounts of power. If the switches, inductors, capacitors, and wiring were all ideal, the driver and sensor circuitry didn't eat any power, and no energy was radiated away as radio noise, efficiency would be 100%.)
A down-stepping DC-DC converter is not an inverter?
Nope. But the pieces of the implementations are similar enough in function that it's close.
A typical DC/DC down converter involves two switches, an inductor, and both input and output filter capacitors, plus control circuitry to sense the output voltage and time the switches. (There may also be a VERY small resistor in series with the inductor to sample the output current if current regulation is necessary, but it's omitted for high efficiency if that's not an issue.) One end of the inductor is hooked to the output cap, the other through the switches to the input cap and to ground.
The pull-up switch is always active (typically a transistor). The control circuitry turns it on and the current in the inductor ramps up, charging the output capacitor at an increasing rate. After a while the pull-up switch is turned off and the pull down switch is turned on. The current through the inductor ramps down, but before it goes through a stop and reverses the pull-up switch is turned back on and the pull-down turned off. The pull-down switch may be a diode, which switches on as needed automatically, but for high efficiency it's usually another transistor, because it has a lower voltage drop and thus is more efficient.
The control circuitry varies the percent of pull-up versus pull-down time to keep the average output voltage at the desired level. The frequency may be controlled or may be allowed to vary somewhat.
So the waveform in the inductor is a sawtooth, and the current never reverses. An "inverter" by definition,
(Continuing after brushing the touchpad posted it for me. B-b)... equipment at that voltage. (Small systems are often 12V due to the availability of 12V appliances.)
But back to inverters:
Current inverter and switching regulator (they're pretty much the same stuff) technology is SO efficient that large PC boards in computing and networking equipment may run the power through as many as THREE DC-DC converters, because you lose less power to heat as losses in the inverters than you would to resistance running it a few inches through a printed circuit board power plane.
So the '"20-40% loss" number seems to me to be utterly bogus.
(Consider this: A Tesla automobile IS AC motors driven by inverters from batteries. A horsepower is almost exactly 750 watts. If they had 20-40% losses in the inverters, how do you keep the car from being on fire after a jackrabbit start? Let alone recover enough power on braking to reuse on acceleration to make a substantial difference?) If ANYBODY knows how to handle inverters it's Tesla. B-) )
This is strange. "20 to 40% power loss" seems to be an awfully poor inverter; existing inverters are 4-8 % loss.
Rather than rewire every house in America, wouldn't it make more sense to just design better inverters?
Or just run at 120V DC, as renewable energy systems did (and occasionally still do) before so many appliances were AC-only that it made sense to use an inverter.
Dropping voltage means you have to replace the copper wiring with MUCH HEAVIER wiring - by a square law - to carry a given amount of power with the same loss - and thus wiring heating inside the walls, where it can set the house of fire.
Switching to 120V just means using DC-capable appliances and replacing the breakers (DC is harder to interrupt) and must-be-GFCI outlets (normal GFCI devices use a transformer to sense unbalanced load).
The 48V standard was about having a voltage that was low enough that touching it was typically survivable, so working on or near it is (relatively) safe. The boundary between the hard part and the easy, "low-voltage", part of the electrical code is 50V (BECAUSE of phone companies B-) ). Medium power (>1KW) home Renewable Energy systems tend to be at 48V so much of the wiring falls under the easier part of the code, and because of the availability of
If this works, the monied and in-power will make this as illegal as LSD and heroin.
Not necessarily.
If the anti-aging drug(s) make people healthier, reducing the drain on the government pensions and enabling the government to push the retirement age out over the horizon, so the people will be working and taxed, they might prefer to have the drugs put into use.
Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.
In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.
That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.
(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)
It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.
(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)
So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)
I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:
- Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
- Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
- Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
- When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.
Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.
But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.
So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
- If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
- If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.
The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.
With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.
Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.
With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)
The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.
What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.
It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.
What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.
Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)
Slashdot Mirror
if you have any sense whatsoever, you'll have a suite of regression tests to run on your software already. You can use that to validate the new environment when you compile a baseline. I've been involved with several projects that migrated from one platform to another.
Such tests might convince YOU (the developer). But would they convince REGULATORS? If not, you have to go through a whole, horribly-expensive, regulatory approval every time you migrate tool versions.
Regulators don't get dinged for insisting on more costly work by the regulated and withholding their approval. They DO get dinged if they approve something that then does harm.
That's why the FDA caused something like 400,000 extra deaths by delaying the approval of beta blockers for prevention of secondary heart attacks until the European research had been repeated in the US under US rules, rather than accepting the data and allowing the use. After the Thalidomide mess they're not going to approve ANYTHING quickly or easily. The same principle applies to other fields.
[Spys] won't blackmail you to the intelligence companies, they will blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife, or creditors, etc.
Your reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired. That's exactly what I was talking about.
1) To get the clearance you need to tell the US government everything the foreign spooks could use to blackmail you - by threatening to tell wife, creditors, media, etc. Then you need to convince the US spooks you don't care - even if you do. ...
2) If you left anything out, the US is likely to revoke your clearance. So your confession form has all the juicy stuff about you.
3) Now ALL the confession forms were stolen by the foreign spies. Oops!
4) Next step: The foreign spies get to test ANY of the people with clearances they want to test, to see if they REALLY don't care whether these things are revealed to their wife, creditors,
The clearance process includes finding out if you're blackmailable into turning over secrets. So of course they question you about everything enemy spies may use as blackmail material. They're often willing to approve you if you confess all your sins to them - because the spies can no longer use the threat of revealing them to the intelligence agencies to pressure you.
It behoves you to confess ALL of it, because if you leave anything out they'll pull your clearance when they discover it. On the other hand, if YOU don't care if its revealed, THEY don't care either. So to get the clearance you tell them everything and claim you don't care.
Of course that means the intelligence agency files includes pretty much all the juicy blackmail material there IS on you. So if there's something you really DO care about, and you were bluffing the agencies, you ARE subject to blackmail threats.
Of course you also expose your life history, to prove you're not a mole. And THAT is everything an identity thief needs to completely replace you. SS number and mother's maiden name are a drop in the bathtub compared to this info.
The agencies should have guarded this MORE TIGHTLY than they do nuclear secrets. It's the key to ALL the people who know ALL the secrets.
Highly evolved animals such as humans have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to seeing into the future. The problem does exist that some if not all of us have evolved enough to plan adequately into the long term.
Highly evolved animals such as humans ALSO have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to constructing money- and power-grabbing scams, and detecting such scams when they're being perpetrated upon them.
Unfortunately, the Global Warming Solution Advocates, regardless of the merits of their concerns, used something that has the form of a gigantic scam when promoting their proposals, and promoted proposals that involve massive transfers of wealth, increases in government intervention in private lives and businesses, and reductions in standards of living. This has created substantial skepticism (which moneyed interests that would be harmed by the proposed actions have, of course, gleefully promoted). The failure of the climate to follow their predictions and discoveries of their fudging of the data doesn't help their cause, either.
There are a number of steps between "I think the weather is getting warmer, and people are causing it." to "We must drive the developed world's population down to third world standards RIGHT NOW, to prevent a couple degrees increase in world average temperature, or we're ALL going to DIE!"
Because it looks like a scam, about all they've gotten any substantial traction on is that the temperature is changing a bit (as it has for all of geological time - we ARE coming out of an ice age, after all - and whether the change is actually human-caused is immaterial beyond indicating that we could change it the other way if we tried). But they haven't convinced the population that they have a correct model.
And they haven't even STARTED on the NEXT of several steps: Is global warming, bad, indifferent, or even good? (The geological and historical record seems to indicate that substantially warmer than what we have now - by more than the amount they're concerned about - is actually better for both civilization and life in general.)
With the population unconvinced that there IS a "Grave Threat To Humanity", it's premature to assume that "Our Brains Can't Process" it.
But speaking as if the thing to be proven is already proven IS another technique of scammers. And making such a claim is an obvious prelude to a move by governmental people, who believe "their brains ARE capable of processing it", to go ahead and impose wealth-transferring, power-grabbing, population-impoverishing solutions, "for their own good", whether the populations want to be reduced to serfdom (rather than be killed by what they perceive as the allegedly falling sky) or not.
They can isolate and concentrate it, maybe stimulate production, but full synthesis? I don't see that happening yet.
Huh?
Human monoclonal antibodies have been grown by culturing gene-engineered mouse cells since at least 1988. They're already in use treating a number of diseases and more are in the approval pipeline.
From Wikipedia:
This disease process looks like suitable candidate for this approach, as well.
A few antibody PRODUCING cells, harvested from the same donor(s) as the antibodies, would be an ideal starting point: The antibodies have already been proven to cure the disease, so only a production mechanism is needed. Once a suitable cell line has been constructed, tested, and its product approved, the donor can retire, secure in the knowledge that his genetic material will continue to save mothers' and babies' lives, even long after his death.
Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?
In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.
If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.
With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.
how could such an advanced culture (as Rome) have staged such bloody spectacles?
How could such an advanced culture (as ours) have prominent media people who confuse "advanced" with "non-bloody" (or "squeamish")?
Answer: Freedom of speech and of the press. Even the clueless can be read and heard by millions.
Meanwhile, our culture seems to be decaying in much the pattern of Rome's. Let's hope that, if we can't fix it, it takes as many centuries to fall, rather than going down "in internet time" or "as we approach the singularity".
... not letting me delete my account.
Slashdot is like the Mafia, CIA, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society: Once a member, ALWAYS a member.
As LASFS says: "Death Will Not Release You."
Fundamentally, not all communications are speech, because some communications have explicit direct non-speech results.
According to the Supreme Court, not all communications are PROTECTED speech. (They're still speech. They just don't enjoy the First Amendment protections because they're ALSO parts of crimes for which one can be punished - and in some cases (such as threats or criminal conspiracy) the speech is all it takes to commit or be a participant in the crime.)
Because speech is explicitly mentioned as protected in the First Amendment (and anti-government speech is also specifically a necessary part of another protected right - petitioning the government for redress of grievances), the court sets a very high standard for laws making some kind of speech a crime: Such laws may be overturned just because they have "a chilling effect" on protected speech, by making people avoid such protected speech out of concern that it might be prosecuted.
Regardless, Congress doesn't get to pass laws that preemptively muzzle people or block publication. They just get to pass laws to punish them AFTER they speak (or print, ...) some explicitly illegal content.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater isn't speech.
Funny you should mention that. The phrase "FALSELY shouting fire in a crowded theatre" originated in a WWI Supreme Court decision declaring that distributing anti-draft leaflets to people of draft age was not protected speech.
My favorite approach to "Fire in a Crowded Theatre" was Abbie Hoffman's (when being interviewed in a crowded theatre):
Interviewer: "But surely you don't advocate shouting fire in a crowded theatre?"
Abbie: "FIRE!"
Anti-malware companies try to appear as experts.
Malware authors try to be anonymous, leaving minimal personal signature in the malware. Malware authors also share code and reverse-engineer each other's code and use the result, so even style may be misleading. So even experts would have difficulty attributing it to any particular person,
That means any attempt to identify the author - as a real person, an alias, or a label under which to group multiple products of the same author, will be very error prone. With law-enforcement and other security types attempting to defend against and/or apprehend the authors, and the authors trying to hamper the anti-malware people and companies some of these errors would come to light. This would reduce the reputation of the anti-malware workers and companies, without regard to their success at malware defence.
So it is no surprise to me that andi-malware people and companies don't publish the results of any attempts they may make to identify the authors in the course of their work. Why should they take a risk like that for no perceivable gain? The risk/benefit ratio says don't even speculate.
Yes it can. [Gonzales v. Raich]
The issue was not in dispute in that case:
In my opinion, by the way, Wickard v. Filburn, the New Deal era decision that says making something for yourself (i.e. growing wheat to feed your own chickens, or growing marijuana to use yourself) affects interstate commerce (because you otherwise might have bought it instead, affecting the price) and can thus be regulated, is a travesty that is long overdue for the Supremes to revisit and reverse, as they sometimes do when a previous court broke something substantial.
But even if you agree that feeding your own wheat to your own chickens is a suitable subject for federal regulation under the commerce clause, don't you think it's a stretch to say that affecting the price of a banned substance by NOT buying it on the illegal market is a legitimate reason for the Federal Government to ban your growing and consuming your own plants? Either way you don't buy in interstate commerce, so how can the difference in your behavior affect it? (Or was it Congress' intent for you to buy illegal drugs?)
Sometimes more than half the Supreme Court justices follow some argument to a point beyond sanity.
The Commerce Clause?
Nope. (The powers it DOES confer were already alluded to in my posting.)
"Regulating" = making regular, setting standards, etc. It does NOT include banning whole classes of trade entirely.
If they want to PROMOTE drug and gun sales, that's fine. B-)
Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished. Propz to GNAA
Let's devil's advocate a bit...
The Second Amendment clearly (to anyone who understands how English was used at the time) forbids the Federal Government from interfering, in any way, with obtaining and carrying weapons. (infringe ~ "even meddle with the fringes of") That includes gun trafficing, because stopping gun sales makes it harder to exercise the right.
The Tenth Amendment explicitly, and the Ninth Amendment implicitly, ban the Federal Government from use of any power not explicitly specified in the Constitution as amended. I don't see anything in there that explicitly gives the Federal Government to ban any drugs or traffic in them, or in any way regulate such traffic (beyond forbidding false advertising claims, setting standards for labeling, and the like). (Do YOU find any such power in there? If so, please point it out to us.)
So it could be argued that, by the Federal Government's own basic laws, these were NOT crimes and the "Dread Pirate" was a freedom fighter.
(I won't even get into the issue of the Anarchist claims that ANY government is necessarily illegitimate, coercively imposing its will on people who did not pre-approve this and are not attempting, themselves, to coerce others. The people who promulgated the Constitution were doing their best to get governments off people's backs.)
... and the authorities will question you.
The store doesn't need these people. Why not just fix the policies to ban them without affecting regular coupon users?
Because the coupons are legitimate offers of a reduced price on a limited number of purchases of an item. An "extreme couponer" just happens to be accepting a larger number of them than a more typical shopper.
To reject a person who uses "too many" of them (while not rejecting ALL coupon use by ALL customers) may constitute consumer fraud on the store's part and get them into serious hot water.
Everything from your wall switches to your wires will cause you never ending problems.
Mechanical wall switches are still rated for DC. Houses USED to be wired for DC a lot. You only have to replace the stuff that was designed after AC was pervasive and wasn't engineered to handle DC.
(I forgot to mention that you'll also have to replace the light dimmers, too, along with most other electronic, rather than mechanical, switches. They usually use a current-zero-crossing turnoff device, and DC won't cross zero unless you force it to do so.)
Even if you replace your wall switches and outlets, your wires will degrade over time and develop holes and other blemishes that will cause a fire.
No they won't - unless they're wet (in which case you have bigger problems than galvanic corrosion). Electromigration at the current densities involved in house wiring is not an issue, nor is insulation breakdown. The wires and fittings will be just fine.
(DANG this stupid touchpad... )
An "inverter", by definition, actually has alternating voltage as a substantial output, or at least somewhere in the circuitry. A switching regulator has a cycling voltage, but it isn't an AC output, or even an AC intermediate.
But they're very similar.
(Also: I was going to mention, above, that the current supplied through the pull-down (or clamp-at-ground) switch is where the extra output current comes from, compensating for the lowered voltage with higher current for similar amounts of power. If the switches, inductors, capacitors, and wiring were all ideal, the driver and sensor circuitry didn't eat any power, and no energy was radiated away as radio noise, efficiency would be 100%.)
A down-stepping DC-DC converter is not an inverter?
Nope. But the pieces of the implementations are similar enough in function that it's close.
A typical DC/DC down converter involves two switches, an inductor, and both input and output filter capacitors, plus control circuitry to sense the output voltage and time the switches. (There may also be a VERY small resistor in series with the inductor to sample the output current if current regulation is necessary, but it's omitted for high efficiency if that's not an issue.) One end of the inductor is hooked to the output cap, the other through the switches to the input cap and to ground.
The pull-up switch is always active (typically a transistor). The control circuitry turns it on and the current in the inductor ramps up, charging the output capacitor at an increasing rate. After a while the pull-up switch is turned off and the pull down switch is turned on. The current through the inductor ramps down, but before it goes through a stop and reverses the pull-up switch is turned back on and the pull-down turned off. The pull-down switch may be a diode, which switches on as needed automatically, but for high efficiency it's usually another transistor, because it has a lower voltage drop and thus is more efficient.
The control circuitry varies the percent of pull-up versus pull-down time to keep the average output voltage at the desired level. The frequency may be controlled or may be allowed to vary somewhat.
So the waveform in the inductor is a sawtooth, and the current never reverses. An "inverter" by definition,
(Continuing after brushing the touchpad posted it for me. B-b) ... equipment at that voltage. (Small systems are often 12V due to the availability of 12V appliances.)
But back to inverters:
Current inverter and switching regulator (they're pretty much the same stuff) technology is SO efficient that large PC boards in computing and networking equipment may run the power through as many as THREE DC-DC converters, because you lose less power to heat as losses in the inverters than you would to resistance running it a few inches through a printed circuit board power plane.
So the '"20-40% loss" number seems to me to be utterly bogus.
(Consider this: A Tesla automobile IS AC motors driven by inverters from batteries. A horsepower is almost exactly 750 watts. If they had 20-40% losses in the inverters, how do you keep the car from being on fire after a jackrabbit start? Let alone recover enough power on braking to reuse on acceleration to make a substantial difference?) If ANYBODY knows how to handle inverters it's Tesla. B-) )
This is strange. "20 to 40% power loss" seems to be an awfully poor inverter; existing inverters are 4-8 % loss.
Rather than rewire every house in America, wouldn't it make more sense to just design better inverters?
Or just run at 120V DC, as renewable energy systems did (and occasionally still do) before so many appliances were AC-only that it made sense to use an inverter.
Dropping voltage means you have to replace the copper wiring with MUCH HEAVIER wiring - by a square law - to carry a given amount of power with the same loss - and thus wiring heating inside the walls, where it can set the house of fire.
Switching to 120V just means using DC-capable appliances and replacing the breakers (DC is harder to interrupt) and must-be-GFCI outlets (normal GFCI devices use a transformer to sense unbalanced load).
The 48V standard was about having a voltage that was low enough that touching it was typically survivable, so working on or near it is (relatively) safe. The boundary between the hard part and the easy, "low-voltage", part of the electrical code is 50V (BECAUSE of phone companies B-) ). Medium power (>1KW) home Renewable Energy systems tend to be at 48V so much of the wiring falls under the easier part of the code, and because of the availability of
If this works, the monied and in-power will make this as illegal as LSD and heroin.
Not necessarily.
If the anti-aging drug(s) make people healthier, reducing the drain on the government pensions and enabling the government to push the retirement age out over the horizon, so the people will be working and taxed, they might prefer to have the drugs put into use.
Heck, they'd probably add them to the water.
Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.
In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.
That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.
(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)
It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.
(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)
So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)
I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:
- Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
- Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
- Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
- When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.
Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.
But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.
So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
- If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
- If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.
The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.
With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.
Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.
With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)
It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.
What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.
Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)