In the spirit of advocacy for the Devil, one of the issues that I had with my 1985 Ford Escort was the throttle position sensor. Luckily applying 100% torque to a 1.6L, 70 HP engine only produces 119 Nm of torque (vs. over 900 Nm for the Tesla). Hmmm... weight, about 1000 kg vs about 2200 kg, still a pretty big difference. I'd rather have the bad TPS in a 1985 Escort than at 2016 Model S.
Certainly in 1985 the TPS position probably wasn't logged. Mass market fuel injection for cheap cars was still in its infancy, and the signal probably went directly to the throttle body, maybe via detour to the ECM (if there was one). The Tesla, though, is obviously logging, but I wonder at what frequency? If the frequency is fast enough, then we can observe the curve of the TPS as the driver engaged it, i.e., how fast was it pressed. If it's just a flaky TPS, then we might see an instantaneous change. If the sampling frequency is too low, though, we won't be able to distinguish them.
It's been a long time since I was involved with Army radar and encrypted communications (in my case, merely humble air traffic control equipment), but the article intrigued me enough to do a very quick lookup. This article isn't very technical, but I can see how it's not simple spread-spectrum radio.
Remember that the information conveyed by radar microwaves is limited; we're primarily interested in reflections (this is "primary radar"; "secondary" radar actually does transmit information; IFF is a type of secondary radar). For a simple radar we know the radar echoes are ours because they come back to our own dish, and match the frequency that we transmitted. They're also incredibly easy to jam.
Frequency hopping on its own makes things harder to jam because the frequencies change in a cryptographic pattern. They can still be jammed if your broadcast a lot of noise over the entire spectrum, but then you limit your own communications. If you can detect the point source, though, you can broadcast a point source over the entire spectrum and still jam them.
What I think I understand about this is that it’s not merely frequency hopping, but the signal modulation is encrypted in a way to evade detection. With a receiver I can detect a typical radar’s 3.4 Ghz signal at -200db (numbers are made up), even if spread across the spectrum, because I know what a 3.4 GHz square wave looks like against the background noise, even if it only appears intermittently on the narrow frequency I’m scanning.
I could try to modulate the signal a different way; maybe a sawtooth, maybe a sine, but a repeating, predictable signal is observable, even with frequency hopping. However if I broadcast noise (and my receiver knows the noise’ pattern), then any listening equipment shouldn’t be able to pick out my microwave pattern from the background.
Hotels will usually give me an extra keycard when I ask, just so I can leave the room powered up when I'm not there. If I forget, a business card usually works well, too. Most of them don't have sensors; I'm assuming its a simple microswitch.
View source. You'll see a single line of Javascript when this bullshit happens. So far in all cases, reloading the page fixes it.
This is especially infuriating, though, when trying to use a search engine. When I'm not using a VPN I usually use Bing because it actually works. When these ads pop up they actually make Bing unusable. Their shitty Javascript interferes.
China Unicom on my phone is pretty good at not making it obvious that they're tampering with my traffic. They're also pretty friendly to VPNs running on my phone.
China Telecom, though, provides my home fiber service, and I've been getting their ads for years and years, including on my own sites! Calling and complaining about it has never had any effect. Unfortunately China Telecom is getting better and better at detecting and taking down VPNs, meaning that I can't leave my router-based VPN running all the time.
The fact that these ads are served over Bing makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn't get involved...
And, yeah, Bing is crap (for what I search for), but at least it works when the VPN isn't connecting.
My company solicits PAC donations, too. I never really thought it was a big deal and assumed that all large companies did the same.
Companies aren't allowed to contribute to PACs, after all, and those of use that work in companies are all kind of in the same boat. In my case maybe I want my company to hire lobbyist to oppose the required use of some type of 1200 MPa material in, say, mirror mounting brackets where there's no engineering justification.
If my company's PAC were evil, then I'd think twice. Barring that, though, when my industry succeeds, I succeed.
I love their candor, and as a result I own a lot of Blue Jeans' cables. They're good cables, but I regret it now. They run from a 4x4 matrix in my basement to every room in the house, and work flawlessly, but now it's cheaper just to add an Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick to every TV rather than run HDMI from a central HTPC.
How's the weldability compared to, say, DP600, or boron? Resistance welding in particular. We test "super materials" from time to time, and they're often challenging in mass production. One of the linked articles mentioned good weldability but presented no data, and of course if the material is highly dependent on the heat treating method, I'm curious what affect introducing welding heat has on the interface and the heat affected zone. Do we introduce weakness every time we weld? (Of course good body design accounts for welding surfaces, even when weakened.)
(Auto welding manufacturing engineer here, but I've not been asked to assess this stuff yet.)
I glanced through one of the linked articles, and according to one of the labels on the TEM there's bainite content. I'm not a metallurgist though and the image was quite low quality, so I only saw the label and didn't recognize any structure. Since you've actually touched the stuff, I'll take your word for it, though.
We can't be too cheap, though. There are certain markets with a mandatory 10 year corrosion warranty requirement, for example. And there are other areas that are pretty much desert all year long. Depending on the particular destination market, we absolutely do build cars differently. In the vast majority of cases the processes are identical (e.g., ecoating, sealing, paint), but we'll use different coating weights (maybe bare for the Middle East, and 50g/cm^2 for Europe) on particular parts (e.g., the roof panel). Coatings (hot dipped, electro-galvanized, etc.) are really just an insurance policy. Sealing and ecoat are obviously the biggest contributors to sheet metal life, as well as drainage.
This latter is something people don't think about often. Your modern car has all sorts of intentional drainage areas that stop your car from rusting. Unless they get plugged up. Then dirty water accumulates, and it's not pure, clean water. It's stuff that will eat through paint and start causing premature corrosion problems.
We don't have to be vain about washing our cars, but washing our cars (especially in winter if snowy/salty environment) is just as much about making sure all of these drains stay free as it is about making the car look nice. And I mean a full, spray wash, not just a bucket wash on the exterior surfaces.
Our company policy (written by management) is to move your car as soon as possible after charging it. Charging is free, but if you exceed a threshold time then you are automatically charged a penalty. We are salaried workers who are expected to manage our own time properly, and so moving a car isn't as catastrophic as one might think.
Hyundai was already a huge conglomerate with auto experience, though. Heck, Hyundai still builds assembly processes in other manufacturers' plants. Magna International could probably build a car, and Kuka (who currently builds some Chrysler bodies-in-white) could probably build a car, if these companies threw resources at it.
My home ISP -- China Telecom -- does this to me, for the service that I pay for. And no, I can't use a VPN 100% of the time because China is getting pretty good at killing VPN connections. It doesn't even matter if I use a non-ISP DNS server, because it's standard in China to poison DNS results (I've not tried experimenting with DNSSEC yet).
In my case I'll try to load Bing (which isn't blocked by Golden Shield), and the only content will be a meta reload instruction. The rest of the "real" page will have been served via an injected javascript with a shitty Chinese ad at the bottom. Reloading will fetch the real page, as the ads aren't injected 100% of the time, but only seemingly randomly.
It's kind of the same issue with open source software, as far as the "most people don't care" aspect, but at an even greater disadvantage that open source software. I don't have a chip fab (at least I could compile open source software), and so even if I were capable of understanding the chip design, there's not much of a guarantee that the physical chip I purchase doesn't have some proprietary back door built into it.
Like most people, I'm even lazy about the open source software I use. While I try to download from trusted sources, there's no guarantee that what I actually install matches the current stable version in the repo. I'm taking a leap of faith.
In both cases (including the former where I indicated my ignorare about chip design), presumably I am counting on other experts to understand the chip or understand the source code for me, but only in the latter case could I actually assemble the product myself in order to guarantee matching the reviewed, stable code.
By incubator I meant having 20 computer nerds living in my house while I foster their startup ideas. I would certainly give more thought to internal security controls in this or similar situations. On the other hand with physical access to the network hardware, there's probably not much I could do if they wanted to be malicious.
I don't run an incubator in my house, so usually it's just friends' kids that want to connect their iPhones to my network, thus I have no reason to run a separate guest network, although Tomato on my AP's would make this trivial. The networked computers have passwords for VNC and keys for ssh, and I'm not overly concerned that my friends' kids will have compromised iPhones that want to brute-force anything.
I think the threshold for unreimbursed business expenses is still 2% (don't remember if it's AGI or taxable, whatever). Let's use an easy, $100,000 per year income. The first $2000 of unreimbursed expenses aren't deductible. So, say, business class internet is $2000 per year, that's only the starting point for deductibility. I'm not sure of his situation, but reputable companies pay GSA/IRS rates for car use ("reimbursed"), and not sure what other business expenses an IT pro might have; let's imagine it's another $1000 per year. If he's single, that comes out of the 28% rate so he could save $280 a year.
If he had Comcast at $900 a year instead, then total unreimbursed expenses would be $1900, which isn't enough to get a tax break. On the other hand, he would have spent (3000 - 280 ) - (1900) = $820 less per year regardless of the write-off.
Granted, this is assuming that he's not the business, but only an employee of a business, and of course I don't know what he pays for his business class internet. In my example, it's an extra $69 per month, so it may very well be worth it to him regardless of the write off myth.
American cars are not failing to sell in china because of lack of metric adoption.
American cars are selling less well because the Chinese are making better cars domestically.
Um, I work for an American car company in China. We’re 100% metric here. We’re 100% metric globally, too. And globally includes the United States. We’ve been metric for nearly 20 years, with a few exceptions here and there for legacy products (think 20 year old platforms).
We’re also indeed not failing to sell in China. We can’t build enough cars – literally. We do get a huge premium in what we sell though, because Chinese cars are dirt cheap, and those dirt cheap cars really are pieces of junk in objective measurement we can make. The Chinese are getting better, though, because in addition to 50% of our Chinese profits, our joint venture partners get to learn how to design and build cars.
I remember driving on I10 and/or I19 between Phoenix and Nogales having had dual signage. I'm not sure there's ever been an all metric marked highway in the US.
Why "troll"? I live in Nanjing. It's west of the cities mentioned in the article, and in the same province as many of them. I have a Chinese driver's license.
Yeah, not a bad idea, and much more economical than upgrading service. I would only have to free up two slots for the new 220 circuit, so a couple of tandems would do it. If my panel supports them. And if my township enforces the right version of NEC. I could hire an electrician, but it seems silly for such a simple change if I can verify the requirements myself.
(Dear electricians, I have the utmost respect for your profession, and yes, I know when to let you do the work instead of doing it myself!)
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Actually, all manufacturers have post warranty goodwill programs. It's not an automatic entitlement, but they do exist.
In the spirit of advocacy for the Devil, one of the issues that I had with my 1985 Ford Escort was the throttle position sensor. Luckily applying 100% torque to a 1.6L, 70 HP engine only produces 119 Nm of torque (vs. over 900 Nm for the Tesla). Hmmm... weight, about 1000 kg vs about 2200 kg, still a pretty big difference. I'd rather have the bad TPS in a 1985 Escort than at 2016 Model S.
Certainly in 1985 the TPS position probably wasn't logged. Mass market fuel injection for cheap cars was still in its infancy, and the signal probably went directly to the throttle body, maybe via detour to the ECM (if there was one). The Tesla, though, is obviously logging, but I wonder at what frequency? If the frequency is fast enough, then we can observe the curve of the TPS as the driver engaged it, i.e., how fast was it pressed. If it's just a flaky TPS, then we might see an instantaneous change. If the sampling frequency is too low, though, we won't be able to distinguish them.
you will need some little box to convert the existing cable into a slimmer one which in turn would end with a slimmer connector.
So, kind of like my MacBook Pro. RJ45 to a cable with a small, thin, Lightning connector (USB on pre-Lightning Macs).
I'm happy with this solution for the laptop, but this would just be stupid for all of the HTPC's (Minis) and my iMacs.
It's been a long time since I was involved with Army radar and encrypted communications (in my case, merely humble air traffic control equipment), but the article intrigued me enough to do a very quick lookup. This article isn't very technical, but I can see how it's not simple spread-spectrum radio.
Remember that the information conveyed by radar microwaves is limited; we're primarily interested in reflections (this is "primary radar"; "secondary" radar actually does transmit information; IFF is a type of secondary radar). For a simple radar we know the radar echoes are ours because they come back to our own dish, and match the frequency that we transmitted. They're also incredibly easy to jam.
Frequency hopping on its own makes things harder to jam because the frequencies change in a cryptographic pattern. They can still be jammed if your broadcast a lot of noise over the entire spectrum, but then you limit your own communications. If you can detect the point source, though, you can broadcast a point source over the entire spectrum and still jam them.
What I think I understand about this is that it’s not merely frequency hopping, but the signal modulation is encrypted in a way to evade detection. With a receiver I can detect a typical radar’s 3.4 Ghz signal at -200db (numbers are made up), even if spread across the spectrum, because I know what a 3.4 GHz square wave looks like against the background noise, even if it only appears intermittently on the narrow frequency I’m scanning.
I could try to modulate the signal a different way; maybe a sawtooth, maybe a sine, but a repeating, predictable signal is observable, even with frequency hopping. However if I broadcast noise (and my receiver knows the noise’ pattern), then any listening equipment shouldn’t be able to pick out my microwave pattern from the background.
Hotels will usually give me an extra keycard when I ask, just so I can leave the room powered up when I'm not there. If I forget, a business card usually works well, too. Most of them don't have sensors; I'm assuming its a simple microswitch.
View source. You'll see a single line of Javascript when this bullshit happens. So far in all cases, reloading the page fixes it.
This is especially infuriating, though, when trying to use a search engine. When I'm not using a VPN I usually use Bing because it actually works. When these ads pop up they actually make Bing unusable. Their shitty Javascript interferes.
China Unicom on my phone is pretty good at not making it obvious that they're tampering with my traffic. They're also pretty friendly to VPNs running on my phone.
China Telecom, though, provides my home fiber service, and I've been getting their ads for years and years, including on my own sites! Calling and complaining about it has never had any effect. Unfortunately China Telecom is getting better and better at detecting and taking down VPNs, meaning that I can't leave my router-based VPN running all the time.
The fact that these ads are served over Bing makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn't get involved...
And, yeah, Bing is crap (for what I search for), but at least it works when the VPN isn't connecting.
My company solicits PAC donations, too. I never really thought it was a big deal and assumed that all large companies did the same.
Companies aren't allowed to contribute to PACs, after all, and those of use that work in companies are all kind of in the same boat. In my case maybe I want my company to hire lobbyist to oppose the required use of some type of 1200 MPa material in, say, mirror mounting brackets where there's no engineering justification.
If my company's PAC were evil, then I'd think twice. Barring that, though, when my industry succeeds, I succeed.
In this case, though, the customers were safe. This guy attacked non-customers (or rather, people who weren't currently customers).
I love their candor, and as a result I own a lot of Blue Jeans' cables. They're good cables, but I regret it now. They run from a 4x4 matrix in my basement to every room in the house, and work flawlessly, but now it's cheaper just to add an Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick to every TV rather than run HDMI from a central HTPC.
How's the weldability compared to, say, DP600, or boron? Resistance welding in particular. We test "super materials" from time to time, and they're often challenging in mass production. One of the linked articles mentioned good weldability but presented no data, and of course if the material is highly dependent on the heat treating method, I'm curious what affect introducing welding heat has on the interface and the heat affected zone. Do we introduce weakness every time we weld? (Of course good body design accounts for welding surfaces, even when weakened.)
(Auto welding manufacturing engineer here, but I've not been asked to assess this stuff yet.)
I glanced through one of the linked articles, and according to one of the labels on the TEM there's bainite content. I'm not a metallurgist though and the image was quite low quality, so I only saw the label and didn't recognize any structure. Since you've actually touched the stuff, I'll take your word for it, though.
We can't be too cheap, though. There are certain markets with a mandatory 10 year corrosion warranty requirement, for example. And there are other areas that are pretty much desert all year long. Depending on the particular destination market, we absolutely do build cars differently. In the vast majority of cases the processes are identical (e.g., ecoating, sealing, paint), but we'll use different coating weights (maybe bare for the Middle East, and 50g/cm^2 for Europe) on particular parts (e.g., the roof panel). Coatings (hot dipped, electro-galvanized, etc.) are really just an insurance policy. Sealing and ecoat are obviously the biggest contributors to sheet metal life, as well as drainage.
This latter is something people don't think about often. Your modern car has all sorts of intentional drainage areas that stop your car from rusting. Unless they get plugged up. Then dirty water accumulates, and it's not pure, clean water. It's stuff that will eat through paint and start causing premature corrosion problems.
We don't have to be vain about washing our cars, but washing our cars (especially in winter if snowy/salty environment) is just as much about making sure all of these drains stay free as it is about making the car look nice. And I mean a full, spray wash, not just a bucket wash on the exterior surfaces.
Our company policy (written by management) is to move your car as soon as possible after charging it. Charging is free, but if you exceed a threshold time then you are automatically charged a penalty. We are salaried workers who are expected to manage our own time properly, and so moving a car isn't as catastrophic as one might think.
He said condo, not apartment complex, so presumably the cost of power is shared by all of the residents.
Hyundai was already a huge conglomerate with auto experience, though. Heck, Hyundai still builds assembly processes in other manufacturers' plants. Magna International could probably build a car, and Kuka (who currently builds some Chrysler bodies-in-white) could probably build a car, if these companies threw resources at it.
My home ISP -- China Telecom -- does this to me, for the service that I pay for. And no, I can't use a VPN 100% of the time because China is getting pretty good at killing VPN connections. It doesn't even matter if I use a non-ISP DNS server, because it's standard in China to poison DNS results (I've not tried experimenting with DNSSEC yet).
In my case I'll try to load Bing (which isn't blocked by Golden Shield), and the only content will be a meta reload instruction. The rest of the "real" page will have been served via an injected javascript with a shitty Chinese ad at the bottom. Reloading will fetch the real page, as the ads aren't injected 100% of the time, but only seemingly randomly.
It's kind of the same issue with open source software, as far as the "most people don't care" aspect, but at an even greater disadvantage that open source software. I don't have a chip fab (at least I could compile open source software), and so even if I were capable of understanding the chip design, there's not much of a guarantee that the physical chip I purchase doesn't have some proprietary back door built into it.
Like most people, I'm even lazy about the open source software I use. While I try to download from trusted sources, there's no guarantee that what I actually install matches the current stable version in the repo. I'm taking a leap of faith.
In both cases (including the former where I indicated my ignorare about chip design), presumably I am counting on other experts to understand the chip or understand the source code for me, but only in the latter case could I actually assemble the product myself in order to guarantee matching the reviewed, stable code.
By incubator I meant having 20 computer nerds living in my house while I foster their startup ideas. I would certainly give more thought to internal security controls in this or similar situations. On the other hand with physical access to the network hardware, there's probably not much I could do if they wanted to be malicious.
I don't run an incubator in my house, so usually it's just friends' kids that want to connect their iPhones to my network, thus I have no reason to run a separate guest network, although Tomato on my AP's would make this trivial. The networked computers have passwords for VNC and keys for ssh, and I'm not overly concerned that my friends' kids will have compromised iPhones that want to brute-force anything.
I think the threshold for unreimbursed business expenses is still 2% (don't remember if it's AGI or taxable, whatever). Let's use an easy, $100,000 per year income. The first $2000 of unreimbursed expenses aren't deductible. So, say, business class internet is $2000 per year, that's only the starting point for deductibility. I'm not sure of his situation, but reputable companies pay GSA/IRS rates for car use ("reimbursed"), and not sure what other business expenses an IT pro might have; let's imagine it's another $1000 per year. If he's single, that comes out of the 28% rate so he could save $280 a year.
If he had Comcast at $900 a year instead, then total unreimbursed expenses would be $1900, which isn't enough to get a tax break. On the other hand, he would have spent (3000 - 280 ) - (1900) = $820 less per year regardless of the write-off.
Granted, this is assuming that he's not the business, but only an employee of a business, and of course I don't know what he pays for his business class internet. In my example, it's an extra $69 per month, so it may very well be worth it to him regardless of the write off myth.
Um, I work for an American car company in China. We’re 100% metric here. We’re 100% metric globally, too. And globally includes the United States. We’ve been metric for nearly 20 years, with a few exceptions here and there for legacy products (think 20 year old platforms).
We’re also indeed not failing to sell in China. We can’t build enough cars – literally. We do get a huge premium in what we sell though, because Chinese cars are dirt cheap, and those dirt cheap cars really are pieces of junk in objective measurement we can make. The Chinese are getting better, though, because in addition to 50% of our Chinese profits, our joint venture partners get to learn how to design and build cars.
I remember driving on I10 and/or I19 between Phoenix and Nogales having had dual signage. I'm not sure there's ever been an all metric marked highway in the US.
Why "troll"? I live in Nanjing. It's west of the cities mentioned in the article, and in the same province as many of them. I have a Chinese driver's license.
I'll reiterate: "Would try in Nanjing."
Would try in Nanjing.
Yeah, not a bad idea, and much more economical than upgrading service. I would only have to free up two slots for the new 220 circuit, so a couple of tandems would do it. If my panel supports them. And if my township enforces the right version of NEC. I could hire an electrician, but it seems silly for such a simple change if I can verify the requirements myself.
(Dear electricians, I have the utmost respect for your profession, and yes, I know when to let you do the work instead of doing it myself!)