Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Yes - by running fiber along their rights-of-way along with the tranport tube.
Which is exactly how SPRINT got started.
The name is an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, and dates from the time they upgraded their own along-track communication from microwave to fiber and took advantage of the recent demonopolization of long distance telephone, driven by MCI, to enter the long-distance phone service. But they were already selling other messaging service along their microwave network, as Railroads have been doing since the initial deployment of the telegraph.
Power companies occasionally do this, too.
When you already have a right-of-way and your own communication along it, adding more bandwidth to sell is FAR less expensive than setting up a communications-only standalone company by buying signal-line right-of-way and installing equipment from scratch.
It was thought that the pneumatic tubes could be used for large scale postal delivery,...
There were plans to do this. But the US Postal Service (then a government department with a legal monopoly on delivering sealed "first class" mail) blocked them, as it had shut down other competing private-enterprise postal services in the past.
Under the current legal regime it might once again be possible. But given the expense of building the infrastructure in the midst of built-up cities (without existing steam tunnels and the like) and the relative cheapness of electronic communication, it seems unlikely to be profitable.
Another flaw is that Jam Secure isn't either in the audio or the hypothesized radio implementation.
A signal being jammed by another of comparable strength and nontrivial spacial separation can be received by TWO or more microphones, or antennas, also with nontrivial separation, and the signals sorted out in postprocessing (at "line speed").
This is how MIMO works: Two (or more) transmitting antennas send different signals, two or more receiving antennas receive sums of them - which differ because each antenna "hears" different time (phase) offsets due to the slightly different delays in the paths to each antenna (or microphone). The receiving end sorts out the signals. In MIMO this is used to send, on the same bandwidth, up to N times the bandwidth of a single antenna pair (where N is the number of antennas on the fewer-antenna device). But it can also be used to sort out a particular transmitter from spacially separated devices.
When a cell tower does it, using N antennas to sort out a desired cell phone from N-1 interfering transmitters (and maybe doing it N times to hear N cellphones at once) it's called things like "steerable null". When a human does it, to sort out one speaker in a crowd, it's called "The Coctail Party Factor".
It should not be difficult at all to do the same with a pair or more of microphones and a good DSP or a fast processor. For audio, where wavelengths are measured in one to two digits of inches, the separation of a pair of handheld devices (even if nearly on top of each other) should be more than adequate to do MIMO tricks successfully and without obvious eavesdropping equipment rigs.
But the heavy-handed irony of a guardian of British cultural heritage censoring the greatest work of British literature is just too blatant to be ignored.
So, we got the story about Hamlet, then they start talking about censoring Blackadder and provide no link.
I'd bet they just "adjusted" the nannyware to pass Shakespeare. So The Bard's work will be seen, but any new talent whose work's quality might approach or surpass his will not.
(Not to say that Blackadder and Hamlet are even in the same league. But that IS something to be decided by tens of generations of readers and viewers, not a piece of software written by a handfull of people from this one.)
But if you tried to predict the last election based on Twitter, you would either be thinking there was massive fraud or there somehow was a huge amount of the US population that never heard of the Internet.
In the 2012 election there WAS enormous fraud in the Republican primary/caucus process, most of it perpetrated by Romney's supporters against Ron Paul's. Some of it was violent. Much of it was transparent.
You don't hear about it in the mainstream media, left and right, which was blacking out anything related to Ron Paul. Look at archives of www.dailypaul.com, or any of several other campaign-related sites, for info on such events, and links to both online reportage and the few places they were reported in mainstream - usually local - media outlets. They also changed the party rules (in a process that also involved massive cheating - including diverting several buses of delegates) to make it virtually impossible for future non-mainstream primary candidates to win the nomination.
The result was that a lot of Ron Paul supporters - along with other Republicans appalled by the behavior of Romney's supporters, stayed away from the general election in droves. (One opinion was that, if THIS is how they handled rule enforcement within the party, they couldn't be trusted to hold the reins of governmental power.) There are five states, with a total electoral vote that would have swung the election, where Romney lost by a margin substantially less than the number of primary votes for Ron Paul.
Romney's people could probably have won the nomination honestly (especially given the media blackout on Ron Paul). Had they done so, Romney would probably have been president now.
On the other hand, had Ron Paul won the nomination, he almost certainly would have defeated Obama.
What's really sad about this is that the act of frisking anyone without any fact-based suspicion is not considered a violation of the constitution.
What's DOUBLY sad about this is that a court found it unconstitutional and LET IT CONTINUE!
The Supreme Court has said that unconstitutional laws are void from the start and do not authorize anything. Government functionaries claiming to operate under such laws and interpretations have no special standing - they'reperforming the act as a private citizen.
If *I* stopped and frisked somebody it would be several felonies - which means it is if the cops do it, too.
... [on the] wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. [...] the videos you have to watch [when going through authorization/configuration steps] are all dog slow...
Which got me thinking...
Lately (at work with a company-IT-mandated Chrome browser and thus no flashblock/noscript/...) I've noticed that advertisers on many services I look at (typically due to following news links from Slashdot) are feeding multiple, self-starting, full-motion videos per page.
Videos require ENORMOUSLY more traffic than text, or even fancy (but non-moving) graphics. This trend ENORMOUSLY multiplies the bandwidth requirements to browse such pages.
Combine that with the fact that WiFi is essentially a collision-based protocol, which means it goes 'WAY inefficient when approaching its "theoretical" bandwidth maximum.
Perhaps this, rather than more users or decaying infrastructure, is the (or a major) explanation for the deteriorating service in Mountain View.
There are several other inner ear problems that produce vertigo. What you've described sounds to me like one of the more transient ones. (Meniere's is the major progressive one.)
Even with Meniere's they're very reluctant to disable the inner ear - which also destroys the hearing. (In fact they're reluctant even to install the artificial pressure-relief valve until the hearing in the affected ear has been destroyed - because the surgery will usually damage or destroy it as a side-effect.)
As I understand balance you have three systems:
- Inner ear "rate gyros and accellerometers" - which also sense gravity.
- Visual modeling of your location/motion/environment.
- Proprioception - muscle/tendon tension, joint position,... You need any two of the three to walk upright. Disasgeement between the set of three triggers vertigo / motion sickness / car/sea/airsickness, etc. (The system generally learns that disagreement is normal in a vehicle, which is why vertigo-producing diseases usually don't trigger during driving.)
A good authoritative source on this is the California Ear Institute in East Palo Alto.
You must also assess the likelihood of someone finding/using that hole.
You must also take into account that fixing the hole means the "someone" will just MOVE ON TO THE NEXT HOLE, raising its probability of being found.
Unless you fix enough that a substantial fraction of the attackers give up and move on to different targets or a different line of work, you've engaged in a futile effort.
This "fix the big, findable problems" approach is an obfuscated form of a familiar system design pathology: Pushing the problems around from component to component, rather than solving them.
The author is assuming that the opposition is dumb. It used to be, back when it was a kid in their parents' basement.
Actually, the "kid in the basement" usually wasn't dumb. Typically they'd be far above the average for their school.
Callow, yes.
Further, they had an advantage over the professionals: They could spend a LOT of time, in long, unbroken, sessions, pursuing a problem of their choosing down to the nitty-gritty-bits, until it fell before their persistence. Not having to earn a living, meet a schedule, build something they're not interested in to support a company's work (and do security on the side), commute to a work place (and having the tools available 24/7), having food, housing, and what-have-you provided by the parents, and (during the school vacation) having no distractions whatsoever, let them learn more, faster, and try more things.
Spell that "Meniere's". (Slashdot didn't render the cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, where the original spelling has two different diacriticals above the two "e"s.)
This is a horrible condition where failure of a pressure relief valve in the inner ear results in the progressive destruction of the inner ear's membranes, including those in the"rate gyros" and "linear accelerometers". This repeatedly changes the errors in the ear's balance signals, resulting in repeated and extreme triggering of a reflex apparently intended to eject neurotoxic poisons: Extreme "seasickness", fall down, projectile vomiting and diarrhea, can't even crawl, let alone stand, for several hours. After a couple days the new error is "mapped out" - then another tear in a membrane creates a new error, and repeat.
Meanwhile the loss of the balance signals means additional dependence on vision - and thus bone-breaking falls and additional nausea attacks and headaches (it's related to migraine) from flickering lights and confusing background images. (Even flickers far faster than the fusion rate causes attacks, apparently by delaying and distorting visual location cues during motion.)
It is so debilitating that a substantial fraction of the victims commit suicide.
Biocompatible MEMS systems could be used to create an implantable prosthetic replacement for the balance sensors. (We already know the signal can be coupled to the nerves in question magnetically.) This could result in restoration of the balance function and thus an effective treatment.
Transmission efficiency is an impressive 85% thanks to the âoeshapedâ part of the technology, which targets the electromagnetic field at the vehicle, so that less energy is lost to the environment.
A tad low for a transformer, but with inches of air gap and moist dirt in the magnetic path you can expect less than ideal efficiency. It's better than many electric motors and most battery charge/discharge cycle losses. It's entirely adequate.
In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.
And in terms even a psychopath would understand:
A dead soldier takes one soldier out of action. A wounded solder takes two, plus a medic's time and a drain on the supply lines to provide food, medical attention, and transportation away from the front.
Fewer dead soldiers and wounds with better recovery means fewer vendettas and broken families. This makes it easier to make peace and interact peacefully with a former enemy in the years after the war, and for the warring parties' economies to recover once peace breaks out.
Expanding bullets, on the other hand, are the ammo of choice for personal protection - whether civilian or police. They are more likely to incapacitate an attacker (when fired, as is typical, from a moderate-powered handgun rather than a rifle) and less likely to penetrate an attacker or wall and continue on to injure an innocent bystander. (Generally, deadly force is only justifiable in self-defense until the attack is stopped. Even with expanding bullets it's only about one in five that a person shot until incapacitated actually dies.)
Steel is banned at many ranges because it can be more damaging to metallic target stands and steel targets.
It's also hell on barrels and chokes, especially in antique shotguns.
But for hunting it's a problem because it's less dense than lead (about 70%), causing it to decelerate more rapidly, reducing both accuracy and range. (At 40 yards #4 steel shot has about half the momentum of the same size lead that left the barrel at the same velocity.) Further, the lower density means you can't load as much mass into a shell of the same length while its higher strength means it doesn't deform and thus doesn't transfer as much momentum to the target. Both of these reduce the "stopping power" further.
They discovered that lining their wine storage containers made bad or old wine turn sweet, rather than sour. This is because the acetic acid of the vinegar reacted with the metallic lead of the lining, becoming and extremely sweet - and extremely soluble, bioavailable, and toxic - compound (nicknamed "sugar of lead"). This, far more than the metallic lead in the pipes, is currently believed to be the main source of lead-related poisoning in the Romans (especially among the upper classes, who could afford the wines in the fancy containers).
The NRA's point is that metallic lead is enormously less of a toxicity issue than water-soluble lead compounds, and that anti-gunners and anti-hunters are (in its opinion) using "junk science" claims to push for yet another piece of legislation restricting guns, ammunition, and hunting.
The obvious counter would be to bring up NON-junk-science research establishing that metallic lead from shot actually is a significant problem and quantifying the problem. That only works, of course, if such non-junk-science results exist.
That doesn't say poisoning from lead shot is NOT a problem (or not a significant one). But given the number of scientists looking for such an effect, I'd consider a lack of such papers (if, indeed, there is such a lack) would be an indicator that toxicity from shot is so low as to be buried in the noise, rather than that nobody has gotten around to documenting it.
(Now its lack in the POLITICAL DEBATE, of course, could just be a matter of the anti-lead-shot faction going with the most lurid claims as a political tactic.)
... it wouldn't take a high school education to understand how to sap power from the road for free for powering your cell phone, laptop, or for the real inventive some parts of your house
A horsepower is 3/4 kW. Braking down from 50 MPH turns enough energy into heat to heat a snowbound house with only moderate insulation, in the dead of temperate-zone winter, for half an hour.
Running your laptop or charging your cellphone, like the incandescent lights in cars, is a very tiny drop in a very large lake.
Running about ten households on it is comparable to running an extra car continuously. (Cruising at highway speed takes high teens of HP - it's getting up to speed in a reasonable time that requires those big engines.) But it would also require enough of a pickup to constitute a traffic hazard, which would bring you to the attention of authorities.
Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road
Note that they are talking about powering patches of the road (5% to 15%), not the whole thing. The car stores the power for the stretches between the patches. Such patches can be on straight sections where vehicles don't do things that cause extra wear. Also: A few dead patches don't kill the road - they just mean the car pulls a little more out of the battery before the road brings it back to full charge.
As another poster mentioned: Repaving a road with a concrete slab base only tweaks the top inch or two. The slabs can last a half-century or more. If the coils, cores, and local wiring can be embedded in or below the slab, with a couple inches of extra gap between the top of the core and the surface of the road, it can last a very long time.
With the "hot" sections of reasonable size and modular, I imagine a dead one could be replaced, slab and all, in an overnight or over-weekend operation, scheduled for when the road is not too busy and lane closures or detours are available.
Back in the days of netnews, store-and-forward email, private dialup BBSes, and a far lower proportion of script kiddies in cracker circles, there was concern that the government would be able to monitor (or already was monitoring) a larightrge amount of the Internet - netnews, mail, BBSes, etc., - and handle the volume by using keyword-searching software. (Snowden's recent revelations show their concerns were correct - through PERHAPS a bit early.) So some among the computer underground began obfuscating their text communications to try to stymie that approach to surveillance.
In addition to using slang (which, of course, would quickly be figured out), the approach was to distort the spelling of words in ways that (with a little effort) would be recognizable by a human eye but not by a straightforward word matcher. Misspellings (common, adjacent-key, adjacent-character substitution, etc.), homonyms, substitution of letters that looked similar, digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters (such as 3 for E, dyslexic style), building typewriter pictures of letters, etc. were typical. The idea was to pile distortion upon distortion until it was somewhat difficult to read, and constantly mutate the distortions, perhaps settling on a style but NOT on something that could be easily built into a pattern-matching.
Thus was born leet-speak (always, of course, spelled in its own form, such as "133t" or "I334".) Of course the constant-mutation was quickly lost in favor of more stable use of certain attractive forms, thus turning it into an ordinary slang and defeating the purpose.
At the time "owned" was already a slang term applied to systems which were cracked and controlled by a tacker, or the owner/operator of such systems. "pwned" falls right into the pattern on two rules: adjacent-key misspelling and "little p looks like little o" visual pattern matching. So I assumed, at the time, that it was just another instance of the form.
Now that does not say that it DIDN'T originate as an in-game typo that grew into an in-joke. But gaming and cracking circles have overlapped substantially since the breaking of early attempts at computer-game copy protection. So the two explanations are not in conflict:. A typo that fit right into the form would be immediately seized and used.
People are the most expensive cost to most businesses these days. So the marketing battle between languages focuses less on performance and more on how experienced and expensive your developers need to be. What I see being missed with this marketing is that by lowering the people quality and marginalizing your language and code quality, you are setting yourself up for maintenance, improvement, and performance costs down the road.
Also for catastrophic failures, when a relatively inexperienced programmer does something that someone more seasoned would know to avoid and it makes it through QA to deployment before being triggered.
At the end of the day with C/C++ you have to deal with memory management and that's just one additional piece of work that you don't have to be so concerned with with Java.
You're funny.
I think we have about a dozen calls to new and free in a few hundred thousand lines of code in our server. The vast majority of memory allocation in C++ is hidden in libraries like STL, which we presume have been debugged.
It usually turns out that there's an obvious place to free the memory algorithmically. C++ has helpful tools to let you build your memory management into the objects themselves, so it happens automagically.
It's only when you have to generate persistent mutating structures that things get complicated
C++'s paradigm is that the programmer, who understands the algorithm, is usually more clueful about when the memory should be freed (or examined to see if it should be freed) than a general purpose component which, while it always gets it right, has to look at EVERYTHING rather than just the problem objects.
Having said that, it's quite possible to build garbage collection into into C++ objects. (The Xanadu project was able to do it in the late 1980s, when C++ was still in diapers.)
But a bit of personal sour grapes: It would be a LOT easier if the standards committee would fix the member object constructor timing issue (as I asked them to do in each of the first two rounds of standardization.) Then heap-allocated, garbage-collected, classes could be as general as other types, including all their related components in a single block of allocated memory, rather than being limited to not having full-blown object members with error-throwing or garbage collector triggering constructors, leading to the necessity of replacing such members with pointers to another heap-allocated class instance.
Most automobiles these days have their wiring harnesses drastically simplified by replacing enormous numbers of point-to-point wires with a digital bus, conforming to one of a small handfull of standards. These control everything from the engine to the seat adjustments to the outside rear-view mirror angles, to the door locks.
If you can inject your own packets on such a bus, you can command the car to open the doors and start the engine.
Now it may be possible to inject commands directly by using strong electromagnetic fields near where the bus, or a component on it, is not well shielded.
But there are a number of devices on the bus that are also radio receivers, with control computers which both parse radio inputs and interact with other parts of the car's electronics over this digital bus. If you can compromise them you can get them to inject commands for you.
Of course the key radio-fob receiver is the most obvious target. A protocol stack escape might get you directly into the code that unlocks the door. Another obvious target is a remote accident-assistance/monitoring system, such as OnStar. This is essentially a cellphone that deliberately issues such commands. (One thing they do as a service is open your car doors if you lock your keys inside.)
But there are a number of others where it may be possible to inject malformed packets and exploit a flaw in the radio-side network stack to take over enough control to issue automotive bus commands and achieve the same effect, even if the device wasn't intended to unlock the door. Candidates include:
- Entertainment systems.
- Bluetooth "hands free phone" features.
- GPS navigation systems.
- Tire-pressure monitoring systems. and I could go on.
You can find such flaws by purely software-driven probes, using stock techniques like "fuzzing" to find a bug that crashes the device, then working up from the known flaw (and perhaps a general knowledge of the processor involved in the component and its typical development environments) into an exploit.
I have seen a proof-of-concept where one of the above HAS been exploited in this way by a security research team.
I have also heard news reports of security-camera recordings of carjackers using a box that causes the passenger side door lock of the victim car to unlock itself. So SOME such exploit is already in the wild.
Any bets on whether Garcia, or the carjackers, got in this way, rather than by electron microscopy?
Any bets on whether, even if they both DID "do it the hard(ware) way", there is, or will be within the year, an exploit that didn't involve either such pricey techniques (or a data leak from a manufacturer)?
Given that, to be a threat to Earth, such asteroids would have an orbit that almost intersects Earth's at Earth's position at the near-intersection, and risks being perturbed onto a collision course, I hope they're really careful when "carving off a chunk".
It would be ironic if, in the process of trying to avoid a potential "rifle shot" of the whole asteroid, they perturbed the rest in exactly that way, or broke it up into several large "shotgun pellets" and ended up hitting the Earth with one or more of them when the original would have missed.
It would be a good idea, as well, to be sure the towing orbit of the sample, had no points where (if the tow vehicle lost power or the load broke up) it was on a collision course.
Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap,...
The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.
In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.
Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Yes - by running fiber along their rights-of-way along with the tranport tube.
Which is exactly how SPRINT got started.
The name is an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, and dates from the time they upgraded their own along-track communication from microwave to fiber and took advantage of the recent demonopolization of long distance telephone, driven by MCI, to enter the long-distance phone service. But they were already selling other messaging service along their microwave network, as Railroads have been doing since the initial deployment of the telegraph.
Power companies occasionally do this, too.
When you already have a right-of-way and your own communication along it, adding more bandwidth to sell is FAR less expensive than setting up a communications-only standalone company by buying signal-line right-of-way and installing equipment from scratch.
It was thought that the pneumatic tubes could be used for large scale postal delivery, ...
There were plans to do this. But the US Postal Service (then a government department with a legal monopoly on delivering sealed "first class" mail) blocked them, as it had shut down other competing private-enterprise postal services in the past.
Under the current legal regime it might once again be possible. But given the expense of building the infrastructure in the midst of built-up cities (without existing steam tunnels and the like) and the relative cheapness of electronic communication, it seems unlikely to be profitable.
Another flaw is that Jam Secure isn't either in the audio or the hypothesized radio implementation.
A signal being jammed by another of comparable strength and nontrivial spacial separation can be received by TWO or more microphones, or antennas, also with nontrivial separation, and the signals sorted out in postprocessing (at "line speed").
This is how MIMO works: Two (or more) transmitting antennas send different signals, two or more receiving antennas receive sums of them - which differ because each antenna "hears" different time (phase) offsets due to the slightly different delays in the paths to each antenna (or microphone). The receiving end sorts out the signals. In MIMO this is used to send, on the same bandwidth, up to N times the bandwidth of a single antenna pair (where N is the number of antennas on the fewer-antenna device). But it can also be used to sort out a particular transmitter from spacially separated devices.
When a cell tower does it, using N antennas to sort out a desired cell phone from N-1 interfering transmitters (and maybe doing it N times to hear N cellphones at once) it's called things like "steerable null". When a human does it, to sort out one speaker in a crowd, it's called "The Coctail Party Factor".
It should not be difficult at all to do the same with a pair or more of microphones and a good DSP or a fast processor. For audio, where wavelengths are measured in one to two digits of inches, the separation of a pair of handheld devices (even if nearly on top of each other) should be more than adequate to do MIMO tricks successfully and without obvious eavesdropping equipment rigs.
I'd bet they just "adjusted" the nannyware to pass Shakespeare. So The Bard's work will be seen, but any new talent whose work's quality might approach or surpass his will not.
(Not to say that Blackadder and Hamlet are even in the same league. But that IS something to be decided by tens of generations of readers and viewers, not a piece of software written by a handfull of people from this one.)
But if you tried to predict the last election based on Twitter, you would either be thinking there was massive fraud or there somehow was a huge amount of the US population that never heard of the Internet.
In the 2012 election there WAS enormous fraud in the Republican primary/caucus process, most of it perpetrated by Romney's supporters against Ron Paul's. Some of it was violent. Much of it was transparent.
You don't hear about it in the mainstream media, left and right, which was blacking out anything related to Ron Paul. Look at archives of www.dailypaul.com, or any of several other campaign-related sites, for info on such events, and links to both online reportage and the few places they were reported in mainstream - usually local - media outlets. They also changed the party rules (in a process that also involved massive cheating - including diverting several buses of delegates) to make it virtually impossible for future non-mainstream primary candidates to win the nomination.
The result was that a lot of Ron Paul supporters - along with other Republicans appalled by the behavior of Romney's supporters, stayed away from the general election in droves. (One opinion was that, if THIS is how they handled rule enforcement within the party, they couldn't be trusted to hold the reins of governmental power.) There are five states, with a total electoral vote that would have swung the election, where Romney lost by a margin substantially less than the number of primary votes for Ron Paul.
Romney's people could probably have won the nomination honestly (especially given the media blackout on Ron Paul). Had they done so, Romney would probably have been president now.
On the other hand, had Ron Paul won the nomination, he almost certainly would have defeated Obama.
What's really sad about this is that the act of frisking anyone without any fact-based suspicion is not considered a violation of the constitution.
What's DOUBLY sad about this is that a court found it unconstitutional and LET IT CONTINUE!
The Supreme Court has said that unconstitutional laws are void from the start and do not authorize anything. Government functionaries claiming to operate under such laws and interpretations have no special standing - they'reperforming the act as a private citizen.
If *I* stopped and frisked somebody it would be several felonies - which means it is if the cops do it, too.
What's worse is that they are AND they aren't susceptible to Schrodinger's-cat-in-the-middle attacks.
... [on the] wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. [...] the videos you have to watch [when going through authorization/configuration steps] are all dog slow ...
Which got me thinking...
Lately (at work with a company-IT-mandated Chrome browser and thus no flashblock/noscript/...) I've noticed that advertisers on many services I look at (typically due to following news links from Slashdot) are feeding multiple, self-starting, full-motion videos per page.
Videos require ENORMOUSLY more traffic than text, or even fancy (but non-moving) graphics. This trend ENORMOUSLY multiplies the bandwidth requirements to browse such pages.
Combine that with the fact that WiFi is essentially a collision-based protocol, which means it goes 'WAY inefficient when approaching its "theoretical" bandwidth maximum.
Perhaps this, rather than more users or decaying infrastructure, is the (or a major) explanation for the deteriorating service in Mountain View.
As I understand it (I'm NOT a doctor):
There are several other inner ear problems that produce vertigo.
What you've described sounds to me like one of the more transient ones. (Meniere's is the major progressive one.)
Even with Meniere's they're very reluctant to disable the inner ear - which also destroys the hearing. (In fact they're reluctant even to install the artificial pressure-relief valve until the hearing in the affected ear has been destroyed - because the surgery will usually damage or destroy it as a side-effect.)
As I understand balance you have three systems: ...
- Inner ear "rate gyros and accellerometers" - which also sense gravity.
- Visual modeling of your location/motion/environment.
- Proprioception - muscle/tendon tension, joint position,
You need any two of the three to walk upright. Disasgeement between the set of three triggers vertigo / motion sickness / car/sea/airsickness, etc. (The system generally learns that disagreement is normal in a vehicle, which is why vertigo-producing diseases usually don't trigger during driving.)
A good authoritative source on this is the California Ear Institute in East Palo Alto.
You must also assess the likelihood of someone finding/using that hole.
You must also take into account that fixing the hole means the "someone" will just MOVE ON TO THE NEXT HOLE, raising its probability of being found.
Unless you fix enough that a substantial fraction of the attackers give up and move on to different targets or a different line of work, you've engaged in a futile effort.
This "fix the big, findable problems" approach is an obfuscated form of a familiar system design pathology: Pushing the problems around from component to component, rather than solving them.
The author is assuming that the opposition is dumb. It used to be, back when it was a kid in their parents' basement.
Actually, the "kid in the basement" usually wasn't dumb. Typically they'd be far above the average for their school.
Callow, yes.
Further, they had an advantage over the professionals: They could spend a LOT of time, in long, unbroken, sessions, pursuing a problem of their choosing down to the nitty-gritty-bits, until it fell before their persistence. Not having to earn a living, meet a schedule, build something they're not interested in to support a company's work (and do security on the side), commute to a work place (and having the tools available 24/7), having food, housing, and what-have-you provided by the parents, and (during the school vacation) having no distractions whatsoever, let them learn more, faster, and try more things.
A close relative of mine has MÃf©niÃfre's disease and resulting debilitating vertigo.
Spell that "Meniere's". (Slashdot didn't render the cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, where the original spelling has two different diacriticals above the two "e"s.)
A close relative of mine has MéniÃre's disease and resulting debilitating vertigo.
This is a horrible condition where failure of a pressure relief valve in the inner ear results in the progressive destruction of the inner ear's membranes, including those in the"rate gyros" and "linear accelerometers". This repeatedly changes the errors in the ear's balance signals, resulting in repeated and extreme triggering of a reflex apparently intended to eject neurotoxic poisons: Extreme "seasickness", fall down, projectile vomiting and diarrhea, can't even crawl, let alone stand, for several hours. After a couple days the new error is "mapped out" - then another tear in a membrane creates a new error, and repeat.
Meanwhile the loss of the balance signals means additional dependence on vision - and thus bone-breaking falls and additional nausea attacks and headaches (it's related to migraine) from flickering lights and confusing background images. (Even flickers far faster than the fusion rate causes attacks, apparently by delaying and distorting visual location cues during motion.)
It is so debilitating that a substantial fraction of the victims commit suicide.
Biocompatible MEMS systems could be used to create an implantable prosthetic replacement for the balance sensors. (We already know the signal can be coupled to the nerves in question magnetically.) This could result in restoration of the balance function and thus an effective treatment.
From another article about it:
A tad low for a transformer, but with inches of air gap and moist dirt in the magnetic path you can expect less than ideal efficiency. It's better than many electric motors and most battery charge/discharge cycle losses. It's entirely adequate.
In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.
And in terms even a psychopath would understand:
A dead soldier takes one soldier out of action. A wounded solder takes two, plus a medic's time and a drain on the supply lines to provide food, medical attention, and transportation away from the front.
Fewer dead soldiers and wounds with better recovery means fewer vendettas and broken families. This makes it easier to make peace and interact peacefully with a former enemy in the years after the war, and for the warring parties' economies to recover once peace breaks out.
Expanding bullets, on the other hand, are the ammo of choice for personal protection - whether civilian or police. They are more likely to incapacitate an attacker (when fired, as is typical, from a moderate-powered handgun rather than a rifle) and less likely to penetrate an attacker or wall and continue on to injure an innocent bystander. (Generally, deadly force is only justifiable in self-defense until the attack is stopped. Even with expanding bullets it's only about one in five that a person shot until incapacitated actually dies.)
Steel is banned at many ranges because it can be more damaging to metallic target stands and steel targets.
It's also hell on barrels and chokes, especially in antique shotguns.
But for hunting it's a problem because it's less dense than lead (about 70%), causing it to decelerate more rapidly, reducing both accuracy and range. (At 40 yards #4 steel shot has about half the momentum of the same size lead that left the barrel at the same velocity.) Further, the lower density means you can't load as much mass into a shell of the same length while its higher strength means it doesn't deform and thus doesn't transfer as much momentum to the target. Both of these reduce the "stopping power" further.
What the Romans found out about was lead acetate.
They discovered that lining their wine storage containers made bad or old wine turn sweet, rather than sour. This is because the acetic acid of the vinegar reacted with the metallic lead of the lining, becoming and extremely sweet - and extremely soluble, bioavailable, and toxic - compound (nicknamed "sugar of lead"). This, far more than the metallic lead in the pipes, is currently believed to be the main source of lead-related poisoning in the Romans (especially among the upper classes, who could afford the wines in the fancy containers).
The NRA's point is that metallic lead is enormously less of a toxicity issue than water-soluble lead compounds, and that anti-gunners and anti-hunters are (in its opinion) using "junk science" claims to push for yet another piece of legislation restricting guns, ammunition, and hunting.
The obvious counter would be to bring up NON-junk-science research establishing that metallic lead from shot actually is a significant problem and quantifying the problem. That only works, of course, if such non-junk-science results exist.
That doesn't say poisoning from lead shot is NOT a problem (or not a significant one). But given the number of scientists looking for such an effect, I'd consider a lack of such papers (if, indeed, there is such a lack) would be an indicator that toxicity from shot is so low as to be buried in the noise, rather than that nobody has gotten around to documenting it.
(Now its lack in the POLITICAL DEBATE, of course, could just be a matter of the anti-lead-shot faction going with the most lurid claims as a political tactic.)
I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.
RTFA - or at least look at the pictures (it's in the caption of one): Feed to the coils in the road is 20 kHz, 200A.
... it wouldn't take a high school education to understand how to sap power from the road for free for powering your cell phone, laptop, or for the real inventive some parts of your house
A horsepower is 3/4 kW. Braking down from 50 MPH turns enough energy into heat to heat a snowbound house with only moderate insulation, in the dead of temperate-zone winter, for half an hour.
Running your laptop or charging your cellphone, like the incandescent lights in cars, is a very tiny drop in a very large lake.
Running about ten households on it is comparable to running an extra car continuously. (Cruising at highway speed takes high teens of HP - it's getting up to speed in a reasonable time that requires those big engines.) But it would also require enough of a pickup to constitute a traffic hazard, which would bring you to the attention of authorities.
Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road
Note that they are talking about powering patches of the road (5% to 15%), not the whole thing. The car stores the power for the stretches between the patches. Such patches can be on straight sections where vehicles don't do things that cause extra wear. Also: A few dead patches don't kill the road - they just mean the car pulls a little more out of the battery before the road brings it back to full charge.
As another poster mentioned: Repaving a road with a concrete slab base only tweaks the top inch or two. The slabs can last a half-century or more. If the coils, cores, and local wiring can be embedded in or below the slab, with a couple inches of extra gap between the top of the core and the surface of the road, it can last a very long time.
With the "hot" sections of reasonable size and modular, I imagine a dead one could be replaced, slab and all, in an overnight or over-weekend operation, scheduled for when the road is not too busy and lane closures or detours are available.
Back in the days of netnews, store-and-forward email, private dialup BBSes, and a far lower proportion of script kiddies in cracker circles, there was concern that the government would be able to monitor (or already was monitoring) a larightrge amount of the Internet - netnews, mail, BBSes, etc., - and handle the volume by using keyword-searching software. (Snowden's recent revelations show their concerns were correct - through PERHAPS a bit early.) So some among the computer underground began obfuscating their text communications to try to stymie that approach to surveillance.
In addition to using slang (which, of course, would quickly be figured out), the approach was to distort the spelling of words in ways that (with a little effort) would be recognizable by a human eye but not by a straightforward word matcher. Misspellings (common, adjacent-key, adjacent-character substitution, etc.), homonyms, substitution of letters that looked similar, digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters (such as 3 for E, dyslexic style), building typewriter pictures of letters, etc. were typical. The idea was to pile distortion upon distortion until it was somewhat difficult to read, and constantly mutate the distortions, perhaps settling on a style but NOT on something that could be easily built into a pattern-matching.
Thus was born leet-speak (always, of course, spelled in its own form, such as "133t" or "I334".) Of course the constant-mutation was quickly lost in favor of more stable use of certain attractive forms, thus turning it into an ordinary slang and defeating the purpose.
At the time "owned" was already a slang term applied to systems which were cracked and controlled by a tacker, or the owner/operator of such systems. "pwned" falls right into the pattern on two rules: adjacent-key misspelling and "little p looks like little o" visual pattern matching. So I assumed, at the time, that it was just another instance of the form.
Now that does not say that it DIDN'T originate as an in-game typo that grew into an in-joke. But gaming and cracking circles have overlapped substantially since the breaking of early attempts at computer-game copy protection. So the two explanations are not in conflict:. A typo that fit right into the form would be immediately seized and used.
People are the most expensive cost to most businesses these days. So the marketing battle between languages focuses less on performance and more on how experienced and expensive your developers need to be. What I see being missed with this marketing is that by lowering the people quality and marginalizing your language and code quality, you are setting yourself up for maintenance, improvement, and performance costs down the road.
Also for catastrophic failures, when a relatively inexperienced programmer does something that someone more seasoned would know to avoid and it makes it through QA to deployment before being triggered.
It usually turns out that there's an obvious place to free the memory algorithmically. C++ has helpful tools to let you build your memory management into the objects themselves, so it happens automagically.
It's only when you have to generate persistent mutating structures that things get complicated
C++'s paradigm is that the programmer, who understands the algorithm, is usually more clueful about when the memory should be freed (or examined to see if it should be freed) than a general purpose component which, while it always gets it right, has to look at EVERYTHING rather than just the problem objects.
Having said that, it's quite possible to build garbage collection into into C++ objects. (The Xanadu project was able to do it in the late 1980s, when C++ was still in diapers.)
But a bit of personal sour grapes: It would be a LOT easier if the standards committee would fix the member object constructor timing issue (as I asked them to do in each of the first two rounds of standardization.) Then heap-allocated, garbage-collected, classes could be as general as other types, including all their related components in a single block of allocated memory, rather than being limited to not having full-blown object members with error-throwing or garbage collector triggering constructors, leading to the necessity of replacing such members with pointers to another heap-allocated class instance.
What if it's a software bug?
Most automobiles these days have their wiring harnesses drastically simplified by replacing enormous numbers of point-to-point wires with a digital bus, conforming to one of a small handfull of standards. These control everything from the engine to the seat adjustments to the outside rear-view mirror angles, to the door locks.
If you can inject your own packets on such a bus, you can command the car to open the doors and start the engine.
Now it may be possible to inject commands directly by using strong electromagnetic fields near where the bus, or a component on it, is not well shielded.
But there are a number of devices on the bus that are also radio receivers, with control computers which both parse radio inputs and interact with other parts of the car's electronics over this digital bus. If you can compromise them you can get them to inject commands for you.
Of course the key radio-fob receiver is the most obvious target. A protocol stack escape might get you directly into the code that unlocks the door. Another obvious target is a remote accident-assistance/monitoring system, such as OnStar. This is essentially a cellphone that deliberately issues such commands. (One thing they do as a service is open your car doors if you lock your keys inside.)
But there are a number of others where it may be possible to inject malformed packets and exploit a flaw in the radio-side network stack to take over enough control to issue automotive bus commands and achieve the same effect, even if the device wasn't intended to unlock the door. Candidates include:
- Entertainment systems.
- Bluetooth "hands free phone" features.
- GPS navigation systems.
- Tire-pressure monitoring systems.
and I could go on.
You can find such flaws by purely software-driven probes, using stock techniques like "fuzzing" to find a bug that crashes the device, then working up from the known flaw (and perhaps a general knowledge of the processor involved in the component and its typical development environments) into an exploit.
I have seen a proof-of-concept where one of the above HAS been exploited in this way by a security research team.
I have also heard news reports of security-camera recordings of carjackers using a box that causes the passenger side door lock of the victim car to unlock itself. So SOME such exploit is already in the wild.
Any bets on whether Garcia, or the carjackers, got in this way, rather than by electron microscopy?
Any bets on whether, even if they both DID "do it the hard(ware) way", there is, or will be within the year, an exploit that didn't involve either such pricey techniques (or a data leak from a manufacturer)?
Given that, to be a threat to Earth, such asteroids would have an orbit that almost intersects Earth's at Earth's position at the near-intersection, and risks being perturbed onto a collision course, I hope they're really careful when "carving off a chunk".
It would be ironic if, in the process of trying to avoid a potential "rifle shot" of the whole asteroid, they perturbed the rest in exactly that way, or broke it up into several large "shotgun pellets" and ended up hitting the Earth with one or more of them when the original would have missed.
It would be a good idea, as well, to be sure the towing orbit of the sample, had no points where (if the tow vehicle lost power or the load broke up) it was on a collision course.
Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, ...
The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.
In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.
Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.