This actually is an infrastructure aging problem. And the incidence of buss duct failure has been increasing in older buildings. Many bus ducts installed in industrial and commercial facilities are immediately downstream of the transformers, but upstream of the main overcurrent device. Thus, transformer protection devices often inadequately protect the buss conductor from being fried by a short. I've seen them vaporized.
Such shorts occur due to water infiltration, corrosion, and most importantly in the summer, overheating. All three effects accumulate over time. If money were no object, every building would have a dual-buss electrical system, just like aircraft (and data centers) do. Alas, money is an object.
I run an ISP. Is it kosher for me to block all IE browser traffic? After all, IE is one of the largest vectors of malware infections on earth. At least I'd be "out there doing some enforcement."
Microsoft enforcement policy: "Ready! Fire! Aim!"
BTW, I didn't see where Microsoft apologized for their actions to the Internet community.
I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.
You would lose that bet. Turbine aircraft can be disabled by stray metal bits as small as a single bolt. An entire drone, with many metal components, would undoubtedly render a turbine engine inoperable. For this reason, airport operators routinely inspect and pick up all debris on runways and taxiways. It's called FOD (foreign object damage), and is an ever-present risk to aircraft.
Techyimmigrant: It's unsafe because the drone operator could lose control due to fireworks damage, resulting in high-speed powered flight into the crowd. Small model rotorcraft have maimed and killed people, usually gruesomely. Also, it's illegal to fly a drone above 400', and outside the direct sight of the operator. This drone violated both of those restrictions.
As a helicopter pilot, I dread drones. I've seen them numerous times near events that I am legally and safely filming, and even around airports. Unless we get drone idiots to stop doing stupid, dangerous stunts like this, we will soon have a tragedy taking many lives.
You've been misled by the completely bogus headline to this piece, not to mention the pathetically inflammatory prose. TWTelecom has nothing at all to do with TimeWarner Cable. It's a completely separate publicly traded corporation with no staff, management or facilities in common with the "hated" TimeWarner Cable. This is like saying "Hated British Monarchy sells American Colonies to Canada" in the 20th century.
Hopefully some sleepy-headed slashdot editor will pick her head up off the table long enough to use the "hated" Google search engine, learn about the true history, value and structure of the "hated" telecom industry and correct the article headline and completely misleading content.
Or not. Slashdot might continue its slide to sloppiness and become one of the most "hated" pretend-nonprofits in history.
It's the Turing Test itself that is meaningless. In a possibly apocryphal account of an AI conference in the early 2000's, a learned panel of AI experts elaborated on the Turing test to explain that passing the test didn't just mean a minimal level of intelligence, but intelligence as advanced as humanity's itself, since it was able to fool a human. An undergraduate attendee asked the panel, "So, if I can write a program that can fool a dog into thinking it's interacting with another dog, the program is as intelligent as a dog?"
The room fell silent.
Since then, nobody has proposed a reasonable alternative for what Turing meant by "intelligence" as the target in his test.
Myself, I think AI is Computer Science's biggest Ponzi scheme. We are not one iota closer to actual artificial intelligence than we were in the 1950s. Yet the public's expectation, and the impression given by AI researchers, is that we've been making steady progress. So every new AI "advance" must be more spectacular than the last, with lots of hand waving explaining how this moves us closer to the goal of sentient computing. It started back in the 1960s with natural language processing, which was really just elaborate table lookup. Then it advanced to the 1970s, with Chess-playing machines -- also just elaborate table lookup. The 1980s brought expert systems and neural networks, otherwise known as elaborate table lookup. Today we have computer navigation, plain-language database queries, and speech processing such as Siri. AI? No. Table lookup, elaborate.
We can't even define what intelligence is or how it works in even the simplest organism, let alone explain it in humans. Until we can do that, we can't have an artificial version of it.
I'm not a medical expert, but work in computer forensics. I think it's wise to begin recording her facial movements immediately to establish a baseline of activity and determine when improvements or declines occur. This seems like something easily accomplished with today's off-the-shelf technology, such as GoPro style digital cameras.
All of the dire predictions in this new report come from computer simulations, not actual data. The simulations have proven to be worthless at predicting current climate (for example, no simulation predicted the current stalling of temperature increases). Simulations are not data. And the absence of data is not data. The truth is that we lack the computational ability to simulate climate change at all. Maybe someday, but we currently LACK EVEN THE DATA needed to identify all the variables and interactions that create climate. So even if computation capacity were to increase several orders of magnitude, we lack the foundation for the computations.
For what it's worth, current models do predict brief periods of cooling between increasing warmer periods.
My biochemist son has a phrase that I think fits here: "The absence of data is not data." Models are not data, and none of the models have done an even remotely viable job of predicting climate. But even if they had, simulation is not empirical science. Just because a model occasionally agrees with experiment in no way means the model is correct. There is plenty of mathematical research indicating that climate simulation is an intractable problem, due primarily to chaos.
You might want to shift gears and change the name of the game to "climate change", but the public policy debate is specifically over global warming caused my humans, hence AGW. And when you say "With enough data, that can be disproved", you beg the question. Neither the IPCC nor any scientist proponents of AGW will admit to any data that would falsify their theory. They won't even entertain the possibility. That's not science. That's religion, fanatical.
The conclusion that primordial heat is half the heat coming from the interior is pure speculation, since we don't have any workable models of planetary genesis. And no planetary scientist I talk to believes there is any way to account for the current heat of the core -- it's widely accepted that the current status contradicts the age of the earth. Hence the mystery.
Anon,
If AGW is falsifiable, please provide an example of data that you would consider falsifies it. I've discussed AGW with many of it's scientist proponents, and they always say AGW can result in any conceivable data, including an ice age.
By dead cold I mean that no lunar-thermal heat reaches the surface. Mere compression brings the moon's core to 2,000F or so, but that's much lower than the Earth's peak of about 10,000F. The lunar surface is dead cold at -300F in darkness.
Care to cite a source for your claim of "half the heat"? I have an observable example in the moon for my position, with many measurements, which is presumed younger than the earth if you accept the collision theory of the moon's formation. Why is the earth so much hotter internally than the moon? It's a fair question that has no obvious answer.
When you survey the literature on geothermal heating, you find that friction is indeed _the_ major component of core heat. Especially tidal friction due to lunar gravity, which is far more significant that even meteor strikes, because it's a continuously varying force. But the physics of friction are well understood, and basic calculations show that friction is still not nearly a large enough source for measured temperatures and theoretical time spans.
In fact, radioactive heating was originally postulated as a source to make up for the inadequacies of frictional heating. But the magnitude of radioactive heating is orders of magnitude less than even frictional. As mathematicians would say, it may be "necessary, but not sufficient."
But we don't have a reasonable window. We literally have no data supporting the radioactive sustenance of the Earth's core temperature. Simple calculations demonstrate that radioactive decay is not adequate for the current age of the earth. Something has to give in a major way: either the earth is far less than even a million years old, or there is some other engine heating the Earth's core. Hell, for example;)
When even scientists call it a mystery, that is pretty definitive that they don't know. Nobody calls solar fusion a mystery, because we can directly observe the process and there is no controverting data. It's a theory, to be sure, but valid until dis-proven.
But you can't say "scientists have a pretty good idea" about planetary formation. They have ideas. None has been shown to be even remotely "pretty good". In fact, they're all pretty bad, because they can be countered with mere calculation. A true scientist does due diligence on his own theories before publishing, but that process has gone by the wayside in recent years. Planetary accretion doesn't work because the kinetic energy of collisions is many times too great to permit particle coalescence as a function of gravitational attraction. That's undergraduate astronomy mathematics.
On the other hand, I could posit that planets are made on the Magrathea Factory Floor, and have as much evidence going for me as any other theory.
Bad example on your part. We can directly observe the Sun, and as you note, directly measure neutrinos. Still, solar fusion is just a theory, just one with no controverting data.
However, the planetary accretion processes cannot be directly observed. Yet the models do have controverting data, which I cited, in the form of reproducible calculations.
It's simply unreasonable to ever say we "know" a theory to be true when someone can demonstrate the impossibility or improbability of the theory, as has been done with all planetary evolution models to date.
"Scientists know' can be shorthand for 'the established scientific consensus allows us have a very high degree of confidence."
See, you're doing it right now! You don't want to say "We don't know." It sticks in your craw. Are you a scientist?;)
Other euphemisms scientists often use for "We don't know":
"It isn't clear..."
"The best evidence indicates..."
"The consensus is..."
One thing no true scientist can forget: science is not a consensus enterprise. If one million scientists hold to a theory, and one scientists -- or even a non-scientist -- can provide reproducible calculations or experiment contradicting the theory, then the theory as posited must be discarded.
Moreover, to even qualify as a scientific theory, the theory must be falsifiable. Planetary accretion theories are falsifiable, as I've cited, but many other so-called scientific theories are not. Such as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) .
"The origin of the heat generated inside the Earth is one of the great mysteries of geophysics. Researchers know..."
Researchers don't "know" squat. They have lots of theories, none of which have supporting data. That's what makes the heat of the Earth's core a mystery. By all rights it should not be this hot. It should be dead cold like the moon.
In the 1800s, famed physicist Lord Kelvin (for whom the absolute Kelvin temperature scale is named) was the first to calculate that even if the earth was born in an incandescent molten state (and there is no evidence for this), it would have cooled to its current temperature billions of years sooner than the 4.6 billion years accepted today. Even using generous assumptions about the thermal energy produced by radioactive decay (which also have no direct evidence), the earth would still cool to its current temperature much sooner than 4.6 billion years.
A related mystery is how planets form at all. The conventional theory is that they "clump up" from smaller particles, eventually achieving enough critical mass form an accretion disk that gains heat from compression, gradually acquiring a gravitationally-optimal spheroid shape. But that model has been shown to be inadequate:"Growth beyond
meter size via pairwise sticking is problematic, especially in a turbulent disk. Turbulence also prevents the direct formation of planetesimals in a gravitationally unstable dust layer."
So when someone says "scientists know", they are often flat out wrong, as is this story's author.
The three little words so many scientists are deathly afraid to say: "We don't know."
PRTG (paessler.com). This network management tool is not, strictly speaking, an IT appliance. But it might as well be, since it's trivial to install on a dedicated physical or virtual host, at which point it walks and quacks like any other IT widget. PRTG's interface makes extensive use of Ajax, real time charting, and sports an extremely logical organization that is both intuitive and powerful. It works equally well on desktop and mobile browsers, a rare treat for IT gear.
I think you missed something I noted earlier: the radar beam is directed energy, so it has a much stronger signal than the omni directional transponder response. Also, the radar station has immense amounts of power available to it, while the transponder is limited to the power available in the aircraft, which is notoriously limited. I don't have exact numbers right now, but the radar is putting out hundreds of watts, while the transponder is putting out perhaps five or ten watts maximum. The possibility that the omnidirectional, weaker transponder will be heard when the highly focused powerful radar isn't seems implausible. In my many years of aviation experience I've never seen it happen.
Everything electrical in the aircraft has to be under the control of the pilots in order to respond to emergencies. For example, an electrical fire might require shutting down the two busses carrying he redundant transponders. Or a generator failure might mean powering down non-critical equipment, which could easily be the transponder if the pilot is already near an airport and in radar contact. There is simply no practical way to protect most equipment from malicious onboard actors.
The ATC system would flag any transponder code change. That's been a security measure for decades, ever since the first hijackings back in the 1970s. In fact, there are special codes to indicate various emergencies that a pilot can dial in as a rudimentary alternate communications channel. Also, in addition to the code, all modern aircraft using Mode S also transmit a unique hard-coded aircraft serial number. That is difficult to change in flight, by design. Keep in mind that the airspace they were flying through was largely empty, so there is not a large chance of a controller mixing up flights. However, there is some chance, and there is always the possibility of conspiracy. But now you're talking tinfoil hat theories.
Slashdot Mirror
This actually is an infrastructure aging problem. And the incidence of buss duct failure has been increasing in older buildings. Many bus ducts installed in industrial and commercial facilities are immediately downstream of the transformers, but upstream of the main overcurrent device. Thus, transformer protection devices often inadequately protect the buss conductor from being fried by a short. I've seen them vaporized.
Such shorts occur due to water infiltration, corrosion, and most importantly in the summer, overheating. All three effects accumulate over time. If money were no object, every building would have a dual-buss electrical system, just like aircraft (and data centers) do. Alas, money is an object.
I run an ISP. Is it kosher for me to block all IE browser traffic? After all, IE is one of the largest vectors of malware infections on earth. At least I'd be "out there doing some enforcement."
Microsoft enforcement policy: "Ready! Fire! Aim!"
BTW, I didn't see where Microsoft apologized for their actions to the Internet community.
I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.
You would lose that bet. Turbine aircraft can be disabled by stray metal bits as small as a single bolt. An entire drone, with many metal components, would undoubtedly render a turbine engine inoperable. For this reason, airport operators routinely inspect and pick up all debris on runways and taxiways. It's called FOD (foreign object damage), and is an ever-present risk to aircraft.
Techyimmigrant: It's unsafe because the drone operator could lose control due to fireworks damage, resulting in high-speed powered flight into the crowd. Small model rotorcraft have maimed and killed people, usually gruesomely. Also, it's illegal to fly a drone above 400', and outside the direct sight of the operator. This drone violated both of those restrictions.
As a helicopter pilot, I dread drones. I've seen them numerous times near events that I am legally and safely filming, and even around airports. Unless we get drone idiots to stop doing stupid, dangerous stunts like this, we will soon have a tragedy taking many lives.
You've been misled by the completely bogus headline to this piece, not to mention the pathetically inflammatory prose. TWTelecom has nothing at all to do with TimeWarner Cable. It's a completely separate publicly traded corporation with no staff, management or facilities in common with the "hated" TimeWarner Cable. This is like saying "Hated British Monarchy sells American Colonies to Canada" in the 20th century.
Hopefully some sleepy-headed slashdot editor will pick her head up off the table long enough to use the "hated" Google search engine, learn about the true history, value and structure of the "hated" telecom industry and correct the article headline and completely misleading content.
Or not. Slashdot might continue its slide to sloppiness and become one of the most "hated" pretend-nonprofits in history.
The "Grow America Act"? Sheesh! That worse than the Patriot Act. I propose a bill entitled "Stop The Idiotically Forced Law Embellishments".
You must be a product of "are" education system, another good example of government spending money "ifishintly'
It's the Turing Test itself that is meaningless. In a possibly apocryphal account of an AI conference in the early 2000's, a learned panel of AI experts elaborated on the Turing test to explain that passing the test didn't just mean a minimal level of intelligence, but intelligence as advanced as humanity's itself, since it was able to fool a human. An undergraduate attendee asked the panel, "So, if I can write a program that can fool a dog into thinking it's interacting with another dog, the program is as intelligent as a dog?"
The room fell silent.
Since then, nobody has proposed a reasonable alternative for what Turing meant by "intelligence" as the target in his test.
Myself, I think AI is Computer Science's biggest Ponzi scheme. We are not one iota closer to actual artificial intelligence than we were in the 1950s. Yet the public's expectation, and the impression given by AI researchers, is that we've been making steady progress. So every new AI "advance" must be more spectacular than the last, with lots of hand waving explaining how this moves us closer to the goal of sentient computing. It started back in the 1960s with natural language processing, which was really just elaborate table lookup. Then it advanced to the 1970s, with Chess-playing machines -- also just elaborate table lookup. The 1980s brought expert systems and neural networks, otherwise known as elaborate table lookup. Today we have computer navigation, plain-language database queries, and speech processing such as Siri. AI? No. Table lookup, elaborate.
We can't even define what intelligence is or how it works in even the simplest organism, let alone explain it in humans. Until we can do that, we can't have an artificial version of it.
Turing was a con man.
I'm not a medical expert, but work in computer forensics. I think it's wise to begin recording her facial movements immediately to establish a baseline of activity and determine when improvements or declines occur. This seems like something easily accomplished with today's off-the-shelf technology, such as GoPro style digital cameras.
All of the dire predictions in this new report come from computer simulations, not actual data. The simulations have proven to be worthless at predicting current climate (for example, no simulation predicted the current stalling of temperature increases). Simulations are not data. And the absence of data is not data. The truth is that we lack the computational ability to simulate climate change at all. Maybe someday, but we currently LACK EVEN THE DATA needed to identify all the variables and interactions that create climate. So even if computation capacity were to increase several orders of magnitude, we lack the foundation for the computations.
It's the a Emperor all over again.
For what it's worth, current models do predict brief periods of cooling between increasing warmer periods.
My biochemist son has a phrase that I think fits here: "The absence of data is not data." Models are not data, and none of the models have done an even remotely viable job of predicting climate. But even if they had, simulation is not empirical science. Just because a model occasionally agrees with experiment in no way means the model is correct. There is plenty of mathematical research indicating that climate simulation is an intractable problem, due primarily to chaos.
You might want to shift gears and change the name of the game to "climate change", but the public policy debate is specifically over global warming caused my humans, hence AGW. And when you say "With enough data, that can be disproved", you beg the question. Neither the IPCC nor any scientist proponents of AGW will admit to any data that would falsify their theory. They won't even entertain the possibility. That's not science. That's religion, fanatical.
Amazingly, no AGW proponent considers that a falsifying data set!
The conclusion that primordial heat is half the heat coming from the interior is pure speculation, since we don't have any workable models of planetary genesis. And no planetary scientist I talk to believes there is any way to account for the current heat of the core -- it's widely accepted that the current status contradicts the age of the earth. Hence the mystery.
...they always say AGW can result in any conceivable data, including an ice age.
Citation:
http://curiosity.discovery.com...
Anon,
If AGW is falsifiable, please provide an example of data that you would consider falsifies it. I've discussed AGW with many of it's scientist proponents, and they always say AGW can result in any conceivable data, including an ice age.
By dead cold I mean that no lunar-thermal heat reaches the surface. Mere compression brings the moon's core to 2,000F or so, but that's much lower than the Earth's peak of about 10,000F. The lunar surface is dead cold at -300F in darkness.
Care to cite a source for your claim of "half the heat"? I have an observable example in the moon for my position, with many measurements, which is presumed younger than the earth if you accept the collision theory of the moon's formation. Why is the earth so much hotter internally than the moon? It's a fair question that has no obvious answer.
When you survey the literature on geothermal heating, you find that friction is indeed _the_ major component of core heat. Especially tidal friction due to lunar gravity, which is far more significant that even meteor strikes, because it's a continuously varying force. But the physics of friction are well understood, and basic calculations show that friction is still not nearly a large enough source for measured temperatures and theoretical time spans.
In fact, radioactive heating was originally postulated as a source to make up for the inadequacies of frictional heating. But the magnitude of radioactive heating is orders of magnitude less than even frictional. As mathematicians would say, it may be "necessary, but not sufficient."
But we don't have a reasonable window. We literally have no data supporting the radioactive sustenance of the Earth's core temperature. Simple calculations demonstrate that radioactive decay is not adequate for the current age of the earth. Something has to give in a major way: either the earth is far less than even a million years old, or there is some other engine heating the Earth's core. Hell, for example ;)
When even scientists call it a mystery, that is pretty definitive that they don't know. Nobody calls solar fusion a mystery, because we can directly observe the process and there is no controverting data. It's a theory, to be sure, but valid until dis-proven.
But you can't say "scientists have a pretty good idea" about planetary formation. They have ideas. None has been shown to be even remotely "pretty good". In fact, they're all pretty bad, because they can be countered with mere calculation. A true scientist does due diligence on his own theories before publishing, but that process has gone by the wayside in recent years. Planetary accretion doesn't work because the kinetic energy of collisions is many times too great to permit particle coalescence as a function of gravitational attraction. That's undergraduate astronomy mathematics.
On the other hand, I could posit that planets are made on the Magrathea Factory Floor, and have as much evidence going for me as any other theory.
Bad example on your part. We can directly observe the Sun, and as you note, directly measure neutrinos. Still, solar fusion is just a theory, just one with no controverting data.
;)
However, the planetary accretion processes cannot be directly observed. Yet the models do have controverting data, which I cited, in the form of reproducible calculations.
It's simply unreasonable to ever say we "know" a theory to be true when someone can demonstrate the impossibility or improbability of the theory, as has been done with all planetary evolution models to date.
"Scientists know' can be shorthand for 'the established scientific consensus allows us have a very high degree of confidence."
See, you're doing it right now! You don't want to say "We don't know." It sticks in your craw. Are you a scientist?
Other euphemisms scientists often use for "We don't know":
"It isn't clear..."
"The best evidence indicates..."
"The consensus is..."
One thing no true scientist can forget: science is not a consensus enterprise. If one million scientists hold to a theory, and one scientists -- or even a non-scientist -- can provide reproducible calculations or experiment contradicting the theory, then the theory as posited must be discarded.
Moreover, to even qualify as a scientific theory, the theory must be falsifiable. Planetary accretion theories are falsifiable, as I've cited, but many other so-called scientific theories are not. Such as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) .
"The origin of the heat generated inside the Earth is one of the great mysteries of geophysics. Researchers know..."
Researchers don't "know" squat. They have lots of theories, none of which have supporting data. That's what makes the heat of the Earth's core a mystery. By all rights it should not be this hot. It should be dead cold like the moon.
In the 1800s, famed physicist Lord Kelvin (for whom the absolute Kelvin temperature scale is named) was the first to calculate that even if the earth was born in an incandescent molten state (and there is no evidence for this), it would have cooled to its current temperature billions of years sooner than the 4.6 billion years accepted today. Even using generous assumptions about the thermal energy produced by radioactive decay (which also have no direct evidence), the earth would still cool to its current temperature much sooner than 4.6 billion years.
A related mystery is how planets form at all. The conventional theory is that they "clump up" from smaller particles, eventually achieving enough critical mass form an accretion disk that gains heat from compression, gradually acquiring a gravitationally-optimal spheroid shape. But that model has been shown to be inadequate: "Growth beyond meter size via pairwise sticking is problematic, especially in a turbulent disk. Turbulence also prevents the direct formation of planetesimals in a gravitationally unstable dust layer."
So when someone says "scientists know", they are often flat out wrong, as is this story's author.
The three little words so many scientists are deathly afraid to say: "We don't know."
PRTG (paessler.com). This network management tool is not, strictly speaking, an IT appliance. But it might as well be, since it's trivial to install on a dedicated physical or virtual host, at which point it walks and quacks like any other IT widget. PRTG's interface makes extensive use of Ajax, real time charting, and sports an extremely logical organization that is both intuitive and powerful. It works equally well on desktop and mobile browsers, a rare treat for IT gear.
I think you missed something I noted earlier: the radar beam is directed energy, so it has a much stronger signal than the omni directional transponder response. Also, the radar station has immense amounts of power available to it, while the transponder is limited to the power available in the aircraft, which is notoriously limited. I don't have exact numbers right now, but the radar is putting out hundreds of watts, while the transponder is putting out perhaps five or ten watts maximum. The possibility that the omnidirectional, weaker transponder will be heard when the highly focused powerful radar isn't seems implausible. In my many years of aviation experience I've never seen it happen.
Everything electrical in the aircraft has to be under the control of the pilots in order to respond to emergencies. For example, an electrical fire might require shutting down the two busses carrying he redundant transponders. Or a generator failure might mean powering down non-critical equipment, which could easily be the transponder if the pilot is already near an airport and in radar contact. There is simply no practical way to protect most equipment from malicious onboard actors.
The ATC system would flag any transponder code change. That's been a security measure for decades, ever since the first hijackings back in the 1970s. In fact, there are special codes to indicate various emergencies that a pilot can dial in as a rudimentary alternate communications channel. Also, in addition to the code, all modern aircraft using Mode S also transmit a unique hard-coded aircraft serial number. That is difficult to change in flight, by design. Keep in mind that the airspace they were flying through was largely empty, so there is not a large chance of a controller mixing up flights. However, there is some chance, and there is always the possibility of conspiracy. But now you're talking tinfoil hat theories.