Its the RTL-SDR project. A Linux developer discovered that a digital TV receiver chip made by Realtek (used in $15 dongles) had the ability to receive the raw sampled RF data. The bandwidth is nearly 3Mhz so that means you can view a HUGE chunk of the RF spectrum at once and decode the signals via software.
Now if only it could transmit.
Or if it could also convert digital signals into I/Q and we could feed that into the Rx mixer of the block downconverter, run backward. Then two $11 - $15 dongles, one of them hacked slightly and with a small power amplifier added, would be a two-way software defined radio for very cheap.
... the Telco and Cable companies bringing you this commercial Internet, this bastion of free enterprise you are talking about, is about as heavily subsidized as an industry can get?
The public Internet wasn't developed by the Telco and Cable companies. It was developed by garage shops that started as small ISPs or equipment companies. Telcos fought it, while cable companies watched from the sidelines.
The "Mom and POPs" built the public net at first. Some of them were literally in people's bedrooms. (At least one I know used rack-mounted equipment but built its own 19" rack panels out of two-by-fours.)
Many of the equipment companies, too, started in garages. Cisco, for instance.
Once things were up and running the Telcos decided they were missing out on a good thing and tried to enter the marketplace. But at first they did it by trying to sell their own overpriced ATM-based services. Others continued to compete rings around them - though often leasing their copper wires for the last mile and various digital carriers for long-haul - or leasing those from the more competitive long-distance carriers.
DSL and cable modems were both developed, not by the Telco and Cable companies, but by private equipment manufacturers (including one spun out of Bell by the antitrust decision), trying to sell boxes at a profit. Some cable companies used this new stuff to leverage their installed base and get into the ISP game. Other ISPs, such as Covad, used DSL to push fat bandwidth through legacy Telco copper leased at regulated wholesale rates.
What finally happened is the FCC relaxed the access requirements on the legacy telcos - deciding two competitors was "competition" (when it takes three to four, minimum, to destabilize defacto price fixing and drive the price down towards cost). The tellcos immediately started squeezing their competition in the ISP market (for instance, Covad), eventually doing in or crippling pretty much everybody but the Cable companies (who also had legacy subsidized copper in place) and some rural little guys.
Telcos and cable companies, with their government subsidized infrastructure and rights-of-way, are the bulk of the ISPs NOW. But they AREN'T what "build the Internet". They're the big fish that ATE it.
... but it's abundantly clear that the GOP is not seriously opposed to government intervention in energy markets.
You make a big mistake when you think of the GOP as a uniform monolith. It's composed of about five major factions, and much of its recent behavior comes from the Neocons' iron grip on the party machinery (and the others' attempts to dislodge it).
Of particular interest is the Liberty Movement faction - with a primarily libertarian and/or constitutionalist ideology, but far better tactical savvy than the Libertarian Party's people. They're gaining power rapidly. On this issue they're bovernment-hands-off: Don't subsidize: It actually retards development and deployment. Don't interfere for entrenched interests: Ditto. They also want the people energy-independent, and thus better able to resist external control (both foreign and institutional).
It's ironic that you're posting this on the Internet which was invented by government funding.
This isn't about invention of the fundamental underpinnings. Plowsharing is a grand tradition.
This is about development and deployment in the public sector. Bringing the Internet to the masses wasn't government funded. It occurred when the government got out of the way and let commercial interests play with the new toy. (THAT's what Gore rightly claims substantial credit for.) Scaling it up and the burst of innovation in using it was done with private money in a largely free marketplace, not government subsidies.
In fact, government subsidies HURT this development-deployment phase. The picked winners have no incentive to innovate - they're paid to work on what is already there. The non-picked have no incentive to innovate, or even enter the market - they start at a big competitive disadvantage, and if the did succeed they can expect the government's cronies to get still more subsidies (unless, like Solyndra, they collapse so fast the pumping is ineffictive).
Solyndra failed because they spent the government money like water, ending up with a product that was slightly MORE expensive than the non-subsidized competition - when moving potential customers to a new variant of an existing technology requires a substantial improvement in price-performance - and about a factor of ten to obsolete the previous mainstream approach.
What's driving the current burst of innovation and deployment is the loss of government subsidies around the world. Now the playing field is closer to level. More companies are playing with private investment. The products must compete with existing grid systems, so innovation is occurring and price/performance is improving to where they ARE competitive in progressively more situations.
Indeed, panels are now available at less than a dollar per watt, which is about the point where solar starts beating grid costs in most places where there's enough sun, rather than just remote places or small loads where it's cheaper than running miles of new lines.
With antibiotics becoming less effective, and molecular biology making such advances, perhaps medicine will stop relying so exclusively on antibiotics (selective poisons) and increase the use and development of antiseurms (mixes of antibodies specific to small regions of the pathogen's surface).
Indeed: When antibiotics were the new "magic bullets", some diseases still responded far better to antiserum treatment than the antibiotics the doctors switched to treating with.
In those days making antiserums was a matter of injecting the pathogen into an animal (typically a horse), then (after a few days) extracting some antibodies (to EVERY pathogen the horse had experienced) and injecting the lot into the patients.
Now we can identify the "conserved regions" that the bug can't change without becoming non-pathogenic, making human antibodies to those regions, sorting out the most effective ones, transplanting the DNA into suitable cell cultures, and making exactly the desired antibody by the bucketload.
With a library of antibiodies to test against we have automated mechanisms - based on silicon chip technology - to assay a pathogen against thousands of them and identify the effective ones within minutes.
Antiseurm the body's own, very effective, way to prevent a recurrence of a disease or infection that one has already survived. But the body's own R&D and deployment takes about three days. Like doctors giving antibiotics, it relies on more general approaches to fight off the initial infection. Giving it assistance with the better-tuned countermeasure in the early stages should be at least as effective as antibiotics were before the development of resistance.
Antibodies can be made to just about any molecular shape the bug exposes to its surroundings. (The hard part is avoiding making one that also appears on normal tissue.) The antibody works, not just by jamming up some necessary machinery in the pathogen, but also by marking the pathogen for destruction by the rest of the patient's immune system. So this approach should work on just about any bug that isn't avoiding the immune system by hiding inside cells or other places it can't reach, or has already devastated the body's clean-up crew.
How about, before you put life changing drugs inside animal fodder, YOU prove that it's REALLY harmless.
Because proving a negative like that is a bitch. The number of subcases to prove is arbitrarily large and the political opponent can always claim (again without effort or proof) that there are more (unidentified) subcases that haven't been addressed.
There's also the comparison of risks: Does failing to knock back the parasite load of the food animals lead to more infections in humans that then get treated with antibiotics, potentially leading to the same, or higher, rates of resistance acquisition while also creating more human misery and death?
Also: Who funds this research? You're putting the financial burden on the food industry. Would you trust the research results of the people they hired? Especially given the example of the results we saw from the Tobacco industry?
Why should the burden of proof be upon me ?!?
Because you're the one who is trying to stop somebody else from doing something profitable with his own property, by claiming a risk to yourself or others. If you want to restrict someone else's behavior by a claim of involuntary harm or risk, it's up to you to present a compelling case for it.
(I, too, think routinely dosing the beasts risks breeding antibiotic-resistant human pathogens. I'm just addressing the political implications of your approach to regulation in general. Applying it would stop essentially all human progress, lead to technological stagnation, and ultimately to regression as, for instance, the bugs continued to breed resistance even if just the people were getting the drugs.)
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people [...] to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
People in companies have as much right to ask the government to do things differently, to make things better for their own interests, as everybody else does.
How would you make lobbying illegal? Throw people in jail for talking to their congressman?
At the time these were being designed the PHBs were TRYING to keep those secret, too.
After all, the card contains the key information you need to clone it. Cloning it is EXACTLY the what the crook needs to do and the design is trying to prevent. So they make getting into the card's "vault", without destroying its contents, as hard as possible.
Part of that, from their viewpoint, is keeping the details of the design closed in order to raise the bar on engineering ways to defeat it and extract the keys.
If these guys find a way to defeat the security and clone the card, expect the card manufacturers to immediately try to find ways to block their crack, before it's used by crooks. This, of course, will break it again for the "legitimate" card cloners.
The POV-Ray developers could still add an OpenCL raytracing engine, and as I understand etash's complaint, POV-Ray is becoming irrelevant by their not doing so.
Now that it's open, ANYONE can add an OpenCL rayrtacing engine, making it again (by your definition) relevant.
Don't expect it soon. The whole point of EMV is to be IMPOSSIBLE to clone. To the credit card chip designers, this thing is exactly the same as a clone-and-spoof attack.
They put a little computer on the card and run encrypted protocols with the store terminal.
The details of the computer are closely held. (I was once asked to work on hardware for one, but it would have required a major security clearance investigation and a contract that, IMHO, would have made it difficult to work on anything else cryptographic afterward.)
They also do their best to avoid designing in things that might make its operation or storage subject to tapping or observation by electrical or mechanical means.
1) Did they FIND any exceptional and useful photovoltaic behavior in the compounds tested?
The NSA certainly knows, and can tell any company they like.
Good point.
Government signals intelligence has a long track record of being used for industrial espionage, leaking both sales and tech info from foreign competitors to the country's own companies.
Examples include China's military leaking Cisco (and apparently other compaies') tech to Huawei, the US bugging Totyta and Nissan for the benefit of US auto companies and leaking intercepted info about competitors' bribery attempts that resulted in Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas getting big contracts that Thomson-Alcatel and Airbus had almost closed, to name just a few.
Even US companies have to worry about US government intercepts, since the US government has been playing favorites domestically as well. Some big examples, not involving signals intelligence, came out of the mortgage crisis, when some banks and other financial institutions were slaughtered (even those NOT in trouble), so their corpses could be absorbed by others with better political connections (and contribution records).
Now a 3rd option is in my area. Haven't noticed any throtteling on Netflix or Youtube. Even a test torrent worked just fine.
Part of the problem is that the government defines "competition" (especially in communication regulation, ever since the initial rollout of analog cellphone service) as starting with two competitors. It writes regulations that stop pushing for competition at two.
As I understand it, with two "competitors", rational pricing optmization algorithms actually drive them to splitting the customer base about equally with a high profit margin. No collusion is necessary - the price and market share transmit enough information to drive the effect.
With four or more you're virtually certain to get somebody squeezed into a small market share but still able to survive. His best strategy, near term, is to compete with a low price or better price:performance ratio and grab market share. This starts a price or price:performance war that drives the market price toward cost plus a livable profit margin and/or makes the better service necessary for market survival. By the time this settles out the little guy is usually a big enough guy that he doesn't get squeezed out.
With three competitors the high profit / low service level equilibrium is somewhat unstable, so it might go any of several ways (three gougers, squeeze out the little guy, or {usually} the price/service war).
1) Did they FIND any exceptional and useful photovoltaic behavior in the compounds tested?
2) How much will this sort of crunch make up of the revenue lost to the rest of the world's migration away from US-based cloud services, in the wake of Snowden's revelations?
Indeed this is ridiculous that the IA would retroactively remove stuff though as you say hopefully just disable access instead.
I think the archive actually does just suppress access rather than purge the actual data, so they can again display it once copyright runs out (if it ever does...).
I also think the point is that newbies may not know about robots.txt and that even an experienced webmaster might accidentally allow access to something private long enough for it to get archived, or receive and honor a takedown notice, so this allows the correction of the error.
It's an 'archive' and should reflect how stuff 'was' at the time; legalities of that obviously being quite murky and hard to defend against expensive lawsuits, but still.
That's why. They have limited funds and need them to buy more disks and stuff, not fight lawsuits. If the choice is not display some stuff or go broke and not display anything, the choice is also obvious.
I wish, though, that they were able to detect when a domain changed hands and not honor robots.txt requests retroactively past the boundary. IMHO a new owner is a new web site that happens to have the same name.
Especially: I wish domain name parking sites didn't put up robots.txt files that cause the archive to immediately purge/hide the previous owners' content. I've lost access to a lot of content from dead sites that way. (It also keeps the owners from rescuing their old content if they don't have personal backups.)
Radishes - both the bulbs and the greens - are just fine (though spicy) in salads.
Also: My chickens LOVE them, though they like grain, chard, bugs, and blueberries progressively better. (I'm not sure where mice and shrews fit into the hierarchy but I'm sure they'd be near the more-desirable end.)
A single large radish, tossed the flock, is the starting move in a game of chicken soccer. The radish quickly takes on the appearance of a soccer ball as they take enough bites to make it dotted red-and-white all over.
What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time.
Unleaded required car changes, too.
Earlier vehicles had valve stems in the engine - especially on the exhaust valve - which were lubricated by lead from the antiknock additive. I understand that valve slides had been changed far in advance of the requirement. But the lead additive was sold for a time for owners of older cars to add in order to protect their engines.
Similarly, some antismog oxygenates caused a lot of car fires in older cars, by rotting the rubber tubes in the parts of the fuel systems that had to flex. (This, of course, got a lot of older, high-pollution cars off the roads, reducing pollution (if you don't count the smoke of the burning car...). Thus the environmentalists didn't complain - or warn people.)
Similarly, ethanol stripped the coatings off the inside of older cars' fuel systems and attracted water, starting corrosion; dissolved some gasket sealents, creating manifold leaks, and dissolved plastic float valves from carburators, again causing major damage to (and retirement of) some older cars. (Sometimes some gasoline would have methanol in it, due to a mistake or a crooked supplier, and this would strip things almost immediately.) Many modern vehicles have different materials,and are rated for substantial percentages of ethanol in the gasoline.
Fukushima has an advantage as a site: Since it's depopulated due to the radiation hazard, there's nobody to complain about how "those ugly windmills are ruining my view".
One thing that has amused me, over the latter half of this year, is the strings of advertisements trying to get people to buy property in Belieze and move there, as a retirement home and/or tax haven.
Apparently the authorities chasing of MacAfee (allegedly on trupmed-up evidence in an effort by corrupt officials to seize his remaining wealth, or something of the sort) has caused others. seeking a comfy paradise and tax haven, decide this country is too risky and look elsewhere.
It would be interesting to find out how badly this has hurt the country's property values and economy.
Not everybody in the country. Just much of the capital city slum around the transmitting tower.
Notice that the field got so weak that, in part of the country, it was too weak to be adequately processed by a RADIO RECEIVER.
A country-covering station can easily transmit several hundred thousand watts. A fully illuminated fluorescent tube of the era is burning 10 watts per foot - at 4our or eight feet per lamp. Assuming ten thousand apartments, each with a four-foot lamp (with some wires arranged to get it to normal brightness), and you lose 400,000 watts from the radiated power.
This device will also interfere with the radio signals. It will both attenuate them and create harmonics due to the rectifiers.
"Raising ground resistance" by having radio-energy-utilizing devices pull power from the air is a non-trivial issue.
Example: A former colleague had, previously, been a plant manager for a factory in a small African country. The plant was in the country's capital, home to their "voice of the fearless leader" high-powered radio station.
One day, while touring the plant, he found a collection of burned-out fluorescent tubes, and had them hauled away. Shortly after he was contacted by his maintenance head, who asked him not to do it again. It seems there was a black market in burned out fluorescent tubes.
The radio station was so strong that, if you put three feet of wire on each end of a burned-out tube it would light up quite nicely from the radio power. A lot of people couldn't afford electricity and light fixtures. But a burned out tube and six feet of wire was readily available. So much of the town's houses were illuminated this way.
So many were, in fact, that the radio signal would no longer reach the edges of the country. So Fearless Leader would send his troops through town when the attenuation got to be a problem, and they'd confiscate and smash the tubes of all the improvised radio-powered lights they found. After each such raid, the people would be down at the plant to buy more "dead" tubes, creating a profitable side-business for the maintenance guy.
They told us about a similar case to this in EE school in the '60s. This is the story. (I have no footnotes to see if it's real...)
Power company ran high lines over a dairy farmer's land. But they would still charge him tens of thousands to run power to his site.
Farmer ran some wires under the high-tension lines and coupled well enough (B and/or E fields) to pull a bunch of power. Stepped it down with some transformers and ran his milking machines with it.
Power company noticed the drain on the high-line, looked for the source of leakage, found the farmer, and sued. Farmer said that "they should keep their power in their wires". Judge agreed and threw the suit out.
Power company, not to be stymied, analyzed how the farmer had designed his tap. Then they switched the power on the high lines in order to throw some destructive transients into his equipment (without bothering the regular grid, of course). Farmer's equipment didn't have adequate surge protection to handle this sort of thing. Result: His equipment was destroyed and his milking barn caught fire.
The lesson was about the dangers of transient on transmission lines and the fact that the energy is actually transmitted in the space AROUND the lines. But it had the subtext that trying to take advantage of the latter is really hazardous due to the former.
I stopped using Chrome because it's extensions were not up to par with Firefox addons. And now I feel less inclined to use Chrome at all.
Ditto. What does Google hope to accomplish with this? Switching to Firefox takes less than 5 minutes.
I stopped using Chrome because they kept forcing updates that changed the interface, without asking for permission or providing a reverse-compatibility option.
The last straw for me was when they deleted the ability to purge entries from the suggestion pop-down in the address bar without completely purging the browsing history, shortly before I typoed up a not-safe-for-work URL. I'm now back on Firefox evan at my desk, while the rest of the company is still on Chrome.
I'm with the FOSS people on this point: Reducing a user's control over his own computer - especially in job-threatening ways - is evil.
Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them.
Oops. Make that "loses 1600 times as much power". (Multiplied the 10s but forgot to multiply the 4s.)
When a board has several chips running at 10 or more watts apiece you can easily be dealing at currents where the heating of the board consumes more power than the heating of the chips. With a rack of electronics dissipating several KW you can pay for a LOT of tiny switching regulators to avoid more than doubling that.
Slashdot Mirror
Its the RTL-SDR project. A Linux developer discovered that a digital TV receiver chip made by Realtek (used in $15 dongles) had the ability to receive the raw sampled RF data. The bandwidth is nearly 3Mhz so that means you can view a HUGE chunk of the RF spectrum at once and decode the signals via software.
Now if only it could transmit.
Or if it could also convert digital signals into I/Q and we could feed that into the Rx mixer of the block downconverter, run backward. Then two $11 - $15 dongles, one of them hacked slightly and with a small power amplifier added, would be a two-way software defined radio for very cheap.
... the Telco and Cable companies bringing you this commercial Internet, this bastion of free enterprise you are talking about, is about as heavily subsidized as an industry can get?
The public Internet wasn't developed by the Telco and Cable companies. It was developed by garage shops that started as small ISPs or equipment companies. Telcos fought it, while cable companies watched from the sidelines.
The "Mom and POPs" built the public net at first. Some of them were literally in people's bedrooms. (At least one I know used rack-mounted equipment but built its own 19" rack panels out of two-by-fours.)
Many of the equipment companies, too, started in garages. Cisco, for instance.
Once things were up and running the Telcos decided they were missing out on a good thing and tried to enter the marketplace. But at first they did it by trying to sell their own overpriced ATM-based services. Others continued to compete rings around them - though often leasing their copper wires for the last mile and various digital carriers for long-haul - or leasing those from the more competitive long-distance carriers.
DSL and cable modems were both developed, not by the Telco and Cable companies, but by private equipment manufacturers (including one spun out of Bell by the antitrust decision), trying to sell boxes at a profit. Some cable companies used this new stuff to leverage their installed base and get into the ISP game. Other ISPs, such as Covad, used DSL to push fat bandwidth through legacy Telco copper leased at regulated wholesale rates.
What finally happened is the FCC relaxed the access requirements on the legacy telcos - deciding two competitors was "competition" (when it takes three to four, minimum, to destabilize defacto price fixing and drive the price down towards cost). The tellcos immediately started squeezing their competition in the ISP market (for instance, Covad), eventually doing in or crippling pretty much everybody but the Cable companies (who also had legacy subsidized copper in place) and some rural little guys.
Telcos and cable companies, with their government subsidized infrastructure and rights-of-way, are the bulk of the ISPs NOW. But they AREN'T what "build the Internet". They're the big fish that ATE it.
... but it's abundantly clear that the GOP is not seriously opposed to government intervention in energy markets.
You make a big mistake when you think of the GOP as a uniform monolith. It's composed of about five major factions, and much of its recent behavior comes from the Neocons' iron grip on the party machinery (and the others' attempts to dislodge it).
Of particular interest is the Liberty Movement faction - with a primarily libertarian and/or constitutionalist ideology, but far better tactical savvy than the Libertarian Party's people. They're gaining power rapidly. On this issue they're bovernment-hands-off: Don't subsidize: It actually retards development and deployment. Don't interfere for entrenched interests: Ditto. They also want the people energy-independent, and thus better able to resist external control (both foreign and institutional).
It's ironic that you're posting this on the Internet which was invented by government funding.
This isn't about invention of the fundamental underpinnings. Plowsharing is a grand tradition.
This is about development and deployment in the public sector. Bringing the Internet to the masses wasn't government funded. It occurred when the government got out of the way and let commercial interests play with the new toy. (THAT's what Gore rightly claims substantial credit for.) Scaling it up and the burst of innovation in using it was done with private money in a largely free marketplace, not government subsidies.
In fact, government subsidies HURT this development-deployment phase. The picked winners have no incentive to innovate - they're paid to work on what is already there. The non-picked have no incentive to innovate, or even enter the market - they start at a big competitive disadvantage, and if the did succeed they can expect the government's cronies to get still more subsidies (unless, like Solyndra, they collapse so fast the pumping is ineffictive).
Solyndra failed because they spent the government money like water, ending up with a product that was slightly MORE expensive than the non-subsidized competition - when moving potential customers to a new variant of an existing technology requires a substantial improvement in price-performance - and about a factor of ten to obsolete the previous mainstream approach.
What's driving the current burst of innovation and deployment is the loss of government subsidies around the world. Now the playing field is closer to level. More companies are playing with private investment. The products must compete with existing grid systems, so innovation is occurring and price/performance is improving to where they ARE competitive in progressively more situations.
Indeed, panels are now available at less than a dollar per watt, which is about the point where solar starts beating grid costs in most places where there's enough sun, rather than just remote places or small loads where it's cheaper than running miles of new lines.
With antibiotics becoming less effective, and molecular biology making such advances, perhaps medicine will stop relying so exclusively on antibiotics (selective poisons) and increase the use and development of antiseurms (mixes of antibodies specific to small regions of the pathogen's surface).
Indeed: When antibiotics were the new "magic bullets", some diseases still responded far better to antiserum treatment than the antibiotics the doctors switched to treating with.
In those days making antiserums was a matter of injecting the pathogen into an animal (typically a horse), then (after a few days) extracting some antibodies (to EVERY pathogen the horse had experienced) and injecting the lot into the patients.
Now we can identify the "conserved regions" that the bug can't change without becoming non-pathogenic, making human antibodies to those regions, sorting out the most effective ones, transplanting the DNA into suitable cell cultures, and making exactly the desired antibody by the bucketload.
With a library of antibiodies to test against we have automated mechanisms - based on silicon chip technology - to assay a pathogen against thousands of them and identify the effective ones within minutes.
Antiseurm the body's own, very effective, way to prevent a recurrence of a disease or infection that one has already survived. But the body's own R&D and deployment takes about three days. Like doctors giving antibiotics, it relies on more general approaches to fight off the initial infection. Giving it assistance with the better-tuned countermeasure in the early stages should be at least as effective as antibiotics were before the development of resistance.
Antibodies can be made to just about any molecular shape the bug exposes to its surroundings. (The hard part is avoiding making one that also appears on normal tissue.) The antibody works, not just by jamming up some necessary machinery in the pathogen, but also by marking the pathogen for destruction by the rest of the patient's immune system. So this approach should work on just about any bug that isn't avoiding the immune system by hiding inside cells or other places it can't reach, or has already devastated the body's clean-up crew.
How about, before you put life changing drugs inside animal fodder, YOU prove that it's REALLY harmless.
Because proving a negative like that is a bitch. The number of subcases to prove is arbitrarily large and the political opponent can always claim (again without effort or proof) that there are more (unidentified) subcases that haven't been addressed.
There's also the comparison of risks: Does failing to knock back the parasite load of the food animals lead to more infections in humans that then get treated with antibiotics, potentially leading to the same, or higher, rates of resistance acquisition while also creating more human misery and death?
Also: Who funds this research? You're putting the financial burden on the food industry. Would you trust the research results of the people they hired? Especially given the example of the results we saw from the Tobacco industry?
Why should the burden of proof be upon me ?!?
Because you're the one who is trying to stop somebody else from doing something profitable with his own property, by claiming a risk to yourself or others. If you want to restrict someone else's behavior by a claim of involuntary harm or risk, it's up to you to present a compelling case for it.
(I, too, think routinely dosing the beasts risks breeding antibiotic-resistant human pathogens. I'm just addressing the political implications of your approach to regulation in general. Applying it would stop essentially all human progress, lead to technological stagnation, and ultimately to regression as, for instance, the bugs continued to breed resistance even if just the people were getting the drugs.)
People in companies have as much right to ask the government to do things differently, to make things better for their own interests, as everybody else does.
How would you make lobbying illegal? Throw people in jail for talking to their congressman?
The details of the computer are not so secret.
At the time these were being designed the PHBs were TRYING to keep those secret, too.
After all, the card contains the key information you need to clone it. Cloning it is EXACTLY the what the crook needs to do and the design is trying to prevent. So they make getting into the card's "vault", without destroying its contents, as hard as possible.
Part of that, from their viewpoint, is keeping the details of the design closed in order to raise the bar on engineering ways to defeat it and extract the keys.
If these guys find a way to defeat the security and clone the card, expect the card manufacturers to immediately try to find ways to block their crack, before it's used by crooks. This, of course, will break it again for the "legitimate" card cloners.
The POV-Ray developers could still add an OpenCL raytracing engine, and as I understand etash's complaint, POV-Ray is becoming irrelevant by their not doing so.
Now that it's open, ANYONE can add an OpenCL rayrtacing engine, making it again (by your definition) relevant.
In fact, YOU could do it. What's the holdup? B-)
Pointless without EMV
Don't expect it soon. The whole point of EMV is to be IMPOSSIBLE to clone. To the credit card chip designers, this thing is exactly the same as a clone-and-spoof attack.
They put a little computer on the card and run encrypted protocols with the store terminal.
The details of the computer are closely held. (I was once asked to work on hardware for one, but it would have required a major security clearance investigation and a contract that, IMHO, would have made it difficult to work on anything else cryptographic afterward.)
They also do their best to avoid designing in things that might make its operation or storage subject to tapping or observation by electrical or mechanical means.
Good point.
Government signals intelligence has a long track record of being used for industrial espionage, leaking both sales and tech info from foreign competitors to the country's own companies.
Examples include China's military leaking Cisco (and apparently other compaies') tech to Huawei, the US bugging Totyta and Nissan for the benefit of US auto companies and leaking intercepted info about competitors' bribery attempts that resulted in Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas getting big contracts that Thomson-Alcatel and Airbus had almost closed, to name just a few.
Even US companies have to worry about US government intercepts, since the US government has been playing favorites domestically as well. Some big examples, not involving signals intelligence, came out of the mortgage crisis, when some banks and other financial institutions were slaughtered (even those NOT in trouble), so their corpses could be absorbed by others with better political connections (and contribution records).
Now a 3rd option is in my area. Haven't noticed any throtteling on Netflix or Youtube. Even a test torrent worked just fine.
Part of the problem is that the government defines "competition" (especially in communication regulation, ever since the initial rollout of analog cellphone service) as starting with two competitors. It writes regulations that stop pushing for competition at two.
As I understand it, with two "competitors", rational pricing optmization algorithms actually drive them to splitting the customer base about equally with a high profit margin. No collusion is necessary - the price and market share transmit enough information to drive the effect.
With four or more you're virtually certain to get somebody squeezed into a small market share but still able to survive. His best strategy, near term, is to compete with a low price or better price:performance ratio and grab market share. This starts a price or price:performance war that drives the market price toward cost plus a livable profit margin and/or makes the better service necessary for market survival. By the time this settles out the little guy is usually a big enough guy that he doesn't get squeezed out.
With three competitors the high profit / low service level equilibrium is somewhat unstable, so it might go any of several ways (three gougers, squeeze out the little guy, or {usually} the price/service war).
1) Did they FIND any exceptional and useful photovoltaic behavior in the compounds tested?
2) How much will this sort of crunch make up of the revenue lost to the rest of the world's migration away from US-based cloud services, in the wake of Snowden's revelations?
Indeed this is ridiculous that the IA would retroactively remove stuff though as you say hopefully just disable access instead.
I think the archive actually does just suppress access rather than purge the actual data, so they can again display it once copyright runs out (if it ever does...).
I also think the point is that newbies may not know about robots.txt and that even an experienced webmaster might accidentally allow access to something private long enough for it to get archived, or receive and honor a takedown notice, so this allows the correction of the error.
It's an 'archive' and should reflect how stuff 'was' at the time; legalities of that obviously being quite murky and hard to defend against expensive lawsuits, but still.
That's why. They have limited funds and need them to buy more disks and stuff, not fight lawsuits. If the choice is not display some stuff or go broke and not display anything, the choice is also obvious.
I wish, though, that they were able to detect when a domain changed hands and not honor robots.txt requests retroactively past the boundary. IMHO a new owner is a new web site that happens to have the same name.
Especially: I wish domain name parking sites didn't put up robots.txt files that cause the archive to immediately purge/hide the previous owners' content. I've lost access to a lot of content from dead sites that way. (It also keeps the owners from rescuing their old content if they don't have personal backups.)
Radishes - both the bulbs and the greens - are just fine (though spicy) in salads.
Also: My chickens LOVE them, though they like grain, chard, bugs, and blueberries progressively better. (I'm not sure where mice and shrews fit into the hierarchy but I'm sure they'd be near the more-desirable end.)
A single large radish, tossed the flock, is the starting move in a game of chicken soccer. The radish quickly takes on the appearance of a soccer ball as they take enough bites to make it dotted red-and-white all over.
And [favored banking companies] don't even have to pay large premiums upfront---dinners, jobs and lobbying is so much cheaper than premiums.
Don't forget major campaign contributions - to candidates and the party - and helping the campaign operations in other ways.
What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time.
Unleaded required car changes, too.
Earlier vehicles had valve stems in the engine - especially on the exhaust valve - which were lubricated by lead from the antiknock additive. I understand that valve slides had been changed far in advance of the requirement. But the lead additive was sold for a time for owners of older cars to add in order to protect their engines.
Similarly, some antismog oxygenates caused a lot of car fires in older cars, by rotting the rubber tubes in the parts of the fuel systems that had to flex. (This, of course, got a lot of older, high-pollution cars off the roads, reducing pollution (if you don't count the smoke of the burning car...). Thus the environmentalists didn't complain - or warn people.)
Similarly, ethanol stripped the coatings off the inside of older cars' fuel systems and attracted water, starting corrosion; dissolved some gasket sealents, creating manifold leaks, and dissolved plastic float valves from carburators, again causing major damage to (and retirement of) some older cars. (Sometimes some gasoline would have methanol in it, due to a mistake or a crooked supplier, and this would strip things almost immediately.) Many modern vehicles have different materials,and are rated for substantial percentages of ethanol in the gasoline.
Fukushima has an advantage as a site: Since it's depopulated due to the radiation hazard, there's nobody to complain about how "those ugly windmills are ruining my view".
One thing that has amused me, over the latter half of this year, is the strings of advertisements trying to get people to buy property in Belieze and move there, as a retirement home and/or tax haven.
Apparently the authorities chasing of MacAfee (allegedly on trupmed-up evidence in an effort by corrupt officials to seize his remaining wealth, or something of the sort) has caused others. seeking a comfy paradise and tax haven, decide this country is too risky and look elsewhere.
It would be interesting to find out how badly this has hurt the country's property values and economy.
Not everybody in the country. Just much of the capital city slum around the transmitting tower.
Notice that the field got so weak that, in part of the country, it was too weak to be adequately processed by a RADIO RECEIVER.
A country-covering station can easily transmit several hundred thousand watts. A fully illuminated fluorescent tube of the era is burning 10 watts per foot - at 4our or eight feet per lamp. Assuming ten thousand apartments, each with a four-foot lamp (with some wires arranged to get it to normal brightness), and you lose 400,000 watts from the radiated power.
This device will also interfere with the radio signals. It will both attenuate them and create harmonics due to the rectifiers.
"Raising ground resistance" by having radio-energy-utilizing devices pull power from the air is a non-trivial issue.
Example: A former colleague had, previously, been a plant manager for a factory in a small African country. The plant was in the country's capital, home to their "voice of the fearless leader" high-powered radio station.
One day, while touring the plant, he found a collection of burned-out fluorescent tubes, and had them hauled away. Shortly after he was contacted by his maintenance head, who asked him not to do it again. It seems there was a black market in burned out fluorescent tubes.
The radio station was so strong that, if you put three feet of wire on each end of a burned-out tube it would light up quite nicely from the radio power. A lot of people couldn't afford electricity and light fixtures. But a burned out tube and six feet of wire was readily available. So much of the town's houses were illuminated this way.
So many were, in fact, that the radio signal would no longer reach the edges of the country. So Fearless Leader would send his troops through town when the attenuation got to be a problem, and they'd confiscate and smash the tubes of all the improvised radio-powered lights they found. After each such raid, the people would be down at the plant to buy more "dead" tubes, creating a profitable side-business for the maintenance guy.
They told us about a similar case to this in EE school in the '60s. This is the story. (I have no footnotes to see if it's real...)
Power company ran high lines over a dairy farmer's land. But they would still charge him tens of thousands to run power to his site.
Farmer ran some wires under the high-tension lines and coupled well enough (B and/or E fields) to pull a bunch of power. Stepped it down with some transformers and ran his milking machines with it.
Power company noticed the drain on the high-line, looked for the source of leakage, found the farmer, and sued. Farmer said that "they should keep their power in their wires". Judge agreed and threw the suit out.
Power company, not to be stymied, analyzed how the farmer had designed his tap. Then they switched the power on the high lines in order to throw some destructive transients into his equipment (without bothering the regular grid, of course). Farmer's equipment didn't have adequate surge protection to handle this sort of thing. Result: His equipment was destroyed and his milking barn caught fire.
The lesson was about the dangers of transient on transmission lines and the fact that the energy is actually transmitted in the space AROUND the lines. But it had the subtext that trying to take advantage of the latter is really hazardous due to the former.
I stopped using Chrome because they kept forcing updates that changed the interface, without asking for permission or providing a reverse-compatibility option.
The last straw for me was when they deleted the ability to purge entries from the suggestion pop-down in the address bar without completely purging the browsing history, shortly before I typoed up a not-safe-for-work URL. I'm now back on Firefox evan at my desk, while the rest of the company is still on Chrome.
I'm with the FOSS people on this point: Reducing a user's control over his own computer - especially in job-threatening ways - is evil.
They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.
With drug users working on Doper Substandard Time? That would be a stretch.
Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them.
Oops. Make that "loses 1600 times as much power". (Multiplied the 10s but forgot to multiply the 4s.)
When a board has several chips running at 10 or more watts apiece you can easily be dealing at currents where the heating of the board consumes more power than the heating of the chips. With a rack of electronics dissipating several KW you can pay for a LOT of tiny switching regulators to avoid more than doubling that.