Still, the natural course would seem like this: - The money originate in California. They are the paying customers who want electricity. - The electric company maintaining the grid raises transmission fees. Either California customer pay more or windmill operators drop prices to keep retail price unchanged. - The raised fees are used to build new grid.
That's how capitalism is supposed to work: a final product (house electricity) is a compound of several factors (windmill production, windmill operation, power transmission etc). If one of these becomes scarce, the price of it rises and as result the final price of the product rises. Market adapts, price hike is spent on removing the choke point. Of course if price of the final product gets uncompetetive, this could mean death of the whole network, so other contributors should be willing to lower their prices as to adapt for the price rise at the choke point.
Sounds logical. Too bad not many things are logical in the business world.
Water is good analogy as flood water can become a problem in matter of a hour or two. Still, you can store water using a dam, so you can distribute transforming it into electricity over a longer period of time. You can't store wind like that.
So if they told you there's a terrorist in your city, you'd nuke the city?
We are not talking about shutting down one webpage or one blog or one virtual. We're talking about taking a site of 70,000 blogs offline due to one of them being a violator.
Wikipedia has articles that could be used as a guide in making bombs. Would you shut down the whole Wikimedia foundation (incl. wiktionary, wikiquotes, and so on) because of that? There are articles on bomb making in Google Cache. Would you shut down all of Google services (incl. docs, scholar, gmail, news and so on) because of that?
It's a matter of scale and collateral damage. The old mantra "if one man could be saved as result, we should implement this law" would result in us locked for life in a life-support optimal-conditions capsules in underground valuts, not allowed to breathe unfiltered air, and not allowed to ever wake up from artificially induced sleep, because that would make us safer.
You're missing the point. A driver who picks road according to road signs and general look of the road is fine when there's no turn.
A driver who is ordered to turn into nonexistent street gets confused and distracted. Yes, sure they will realize this is no way, there is no point going there, the GPS is wrong. But they take a second or two to realize this, evaluate the wrong road, pick a new choice of actions instead of the planned ones. This is a distraction of the class of a kid throwing a cup of cold drink on your lap. Not serious by itself, if the situation on the road demands your immediate attention, it may be lethal.
Also, an experienced driver will just shrug it off, but nobody is born experienced. You need it happen to you 3-4 times before you learn how to cope with it. They don't teach you that in driving lessons. And before you get the experience you are fully vulnerable.
And that's the essential difference. Linux had many flaws, and all were fixed in a timely manner, acknowledged and corrected. Correcting them might have been a pain in the ass but it was always possible. Which is not the case here. The flaw exists but it's rooted so deeply in the design that removing it without a major overhaul and breaking lots of compatibility is impossible. Insecure is not a system that has flaws, but one that has flaws that can't be fixed within current framework.
Change for good, affect in a controllable, stable pattern - difficult. Blow it up - hell yes. You'd need weeks worth of cobalt production to create a life-destroying doomsday device. You'd need somewhere like half the nuclear arsenal from times of its peak, applied in an organized and well-engineered way to fracture the Earth crust and sink most lands in lava. You'd need hours to have worst of biological weapons released and kill all life on Earth.
"You could use your sail to capture light reflected from a large planet (Venus would be ideal) to get an impulse towards the sun." - only when in shadow of -something-. Remember the sail has two sides and the light reflected off a planet will never be stronger than light incoming directly from the light source.
OTOH, unroll sail on earth, slingshot around Mars towards Sun, roll up sail, expand it in perihelion, repeat...
If the article is serious about the probe being 700 pounds, it's.0000035 m/s^2 That means it will take 3 years to gain 1 mach of speed, which is quite puny when it comes to spacecrafts. It will take it 10 years to travel 1AU at current acceleration... and as distance to Sun decreases, the acceleration will too!
The problem with the solar sail is that due to lack of immersion medium, it is impossible to use it for all the old sailing tricks like tacking - you can only fly away from Sun, at best at an angle away from the orbit. You can't propel yourself towards the Sun. So, any solar slingshots would require conventional propellant towards the Sun.
The problem is the criminals will be the last to be affected.
This is an old, known method. You find a homeless, a poor man, somebody deadly ill, a junkie and such. You pay them some reasonable money for their identity. Then you register the phone in their name, you get money from the skimmed credit cards, you use documents in their name when traveling, you make expensive purchases in their name. When they are caught, they know very little about you and they have little enough to lose and are desperate for money enough that they take the risk, and besides, it is pretty obvious it's not them who did all the things that were done in their name, so the penalties for selling your identity are very moderate.
I'm perfectly sure if you expose them to the fact that the continent of North America will evaporate if any secret agents attempt to enter your secret base will certainly not stop them from sending secret agents.
The saddest part of this story for us, nerds, is that our strongest weapon - our knowledge, superior understanding of facts, digging deeper into matters than cheap news stories, is in fact totally inefficient against "joe average". The more you argue your case the worse your chance to -really- win the argument, convince the other side. More often they will admit defeat to get you off their neck and keep believing their falsehood even stronger.
Guess what kind of processing power a standard optical mouse requires?
Image acquisition, recognition of microscopic features, comparing to previous image(s), calculating displacement by new locations of these features. Done thousands of times a second. This done by a CPU would pretty much bog down your system and slow it down to a crawl. So are optical mice not a viable idea?
No, they have a DSP that handles all that, the CPU gets clean displacement data.
As for breaking, a standard mouse is prone to damage due to falling, has sliders that tear off after some time of use, has mechanical keys that die after several hundred thousands clicks, have a wheel on friction bearings, and a cord that gets bent all the time, leading to breaking the cable over the lifetime of the mouse. This device would have no mechanical parts, no moving elements, and would stay fixed to one place. It seems like it would be much, much more durable than a standard mouse.
Lag issues were discussed in a different post, but yeah, don't expect to notice them.
Last but not least, if you really really want to keep using a physical mouse, you'll be able to use a dummy. A plastic shell from a broken mouse. A phone. A rock. It will be still fault-proof, not breaking like a normal mouse does, and providing you with all the tactile feedback you wish.
Free software is where you can take source and do mostly anything with it, including forking, releasing for free, incorporating in your commercial product and so on. (restrictions being often that it can't be made "not free", but little beyond that)
Open Source is where you have access to the source code. Little is guaranteed beyond that. It may be only so that you are allowed to audit the code and nothing else. It may be that it's expensive add-on to inexpensive binary, and you are not allowed to redistribute it. Nothing beyond "you get to see the code" is guaranteed.
Currently I am working with one open-source project by a 3rd party. We have the source code of a library they provide (and only source, and for free). We incorporate the library in our closed-source product (embedded device) and sell it, without ever providing sources to our customers. We have to pay a pretty high license fee for each item that contains that library we ship. Nobody ever claims it's Free Software.
You think the 40mpg-rated car is going at 10mpg when you switch AC on, a drop of efficiency by 400% but in fact it's an illusion, the drop is only by 10%, from 11mpg to 10mpg and the mistake is caused by faulty fuel guage that overheats without AC.
Yes, the drop seems drastic. Yes, it's minor. But yes, it's enough to lose coverage because the reception sucks in the first place, and in a location that any other phone gets honest 5 bars, iPhone gets "mistakenly 5 bars" while its reception is like 3 bars most.
As for -seeing- them, not easy. But there were implants into fingers that allowed you to sense electric current and magnetic fields with fingertips. I've even seen an easier, non-permanent less sensitive solution - magnetic needles implanted into upper surface of nails.
It is quite common with people who work a lot with renovation/construction - finding wires in walls before drilling.
Through *competent* government recruited from people with *proper education* (yes, politician is a job, and as every job requires training) chosen by people *with a clue* basing their choice on *merit* and *competence*. Not on looks, not on pretty face, not on slogans, not on promises. A choice of a competent craftsman in the craft of politics, not a skilled actor, master of speechcraft.
Of course considering the mindset of most human beings this will never happen. We're fucked.
If you want to hit with 150ms reaction latency, you lead the target -a little-. If you want to hit with 150ms input latency, you lead the target -a lot-. Approximately three times as much as with reaction latency. This is like 450ms lag.
Thing is: with input latency, you aim at a point, your client receives your mouse input (time zero) and displays crosshair at that point (time zero), click. Client sends signal to server (time 150ms) later the point is calculated and if the enemy got there, you hit them, you receive the reaction another 150ms later but it is just a report on what happened.
Now try the same with this toy. You aim your mouse at a point in the game. It is sent to the server (150ms), the server renders the image and sends it back to you (150ms) and you get the image displayed. You click and your shot is sent to the server for processing (150ms). Now if the point you pointed at 450ms ago (and saw 150ms ago as it looked 300ms ago) has an enemy on it -now-, it will count as hit. And you will see the hit in 150ms.
Also, with reaction lag you visually lead the crosshair ahead of the enemy in realtime. With input lag, you lead an abstract invisible point with your mouse, your crosshair reacts with a lag to that, and -then- you have to lead the lagged crosshair ahead of the enemy like that.
Network latency: You aim, almost immediately crosshair covers enemy head, you shoot, with bad lag the server will inform you you have missed, the enemy was not there.
Input latency: You aim. It takes 150ms for the crosshair to start following your aim. You finally get to aim at the enemy's head and click. The enemy moves, you move to follow, but since your reaction is delayed by 150ms it's now that your shot (and miss) and you will start following the enemy in 150ms.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, the natural course would seem like this:
- The money originate in California. They are the paying customers who want electricity.
- The electric company maintaining the grid raises transmission fees. Either California customer pay more or windmill operators drop prices to keep retail price unchanged.
- The raised fees are used to build new grid.
That's how capitalism is supposed to work: a final product (house electricity) is a compound of several factors (windmill production, windmill operation, power transmission etc). If one of these becomes scarce, the price of it rises and as result the final price of the product rises. Market adapts, price hike is spent on removing the choke point. Of course if price of the final product gets uncompetetive, this could mean death of the whole network, so other contributors should be willing to lower their prices as to adapt for the price rise at the choke point.
Sounds logical. Too bad not many things are logical in the business world.
Water is good analogy as flood water can become a problem in matter of a hour or two. Still, you can store water using a dam, so you can distribute transforming it into electricity over a longer period of time. You can't store wind like that.
So if they told you there's a terrorist in your city, you'd nuke the city?
We are not talking about shutting down one webpage or one blog or one virtual. We're talking about taking a site of 70,000 blogs offline due to one of them being a violator.
Wikipedia has articles that could be used as a guide in making bombs. Would you shut down the whole Wikimedia foundation (incl. wiktionary, wikiquotes, and so on) because of that? There are articles on bomb making in Google Cache. Would you shut down all of Google services (incl. docs, scholar, gmail, news and so on) because of that?
It's a matter of scale and collateral damage. The old mantra "if one man could be saved as result, we should implement this law" would result in us locked for life in a life-support optimal-conditions capsules in underground valuts, not allowed to breathe unfiltered air, and not allowed to ever wake up from artificially induced sleep, because that would make us safer.
You're missing the point.
A driver who picks road according to road signs and general look of the road is fine when there's no turn.
A driver who is ordered to turn into nonexistent street gets confused and distracted. Yes, sure they will realize this is no way, there is no point going there, the GPS is wrong. But they take a second or two to realize this, evaluate the wrong road, pick a new choice of actions instead of the planned ones. This is a distraction of the class of a kid throwing a cup of cold drink on your lap. Not serious by itself, if the situation on the road demands your immediate attention, it may be lethal.
Also, an experienced driver will just shrug it off, but nobody is born experienced. You need it happen to you 3-4 times before you learn how to cope with it. They don't teach you that in driving lessons. And before you get the experience you are fully vulnerable.
I thought the hole was for sinking money.
And that's the essential difference. Linux had many flaws, and all were fixed in a timely manner, acknowledged and corrected. Correcting them might have been a pain in the ass but it was always possible. Which is not the case here. The flaw exists but it's rooted so deeply in the design that removing it without a major overhaul and breaking lots of compatibility is impossible. Insecure is not a system that has flaws, but one that has flaws that can't be fixed within current framework.
Change for good, affect in a controllable, stable pattern - difficult.
Blow it up - hell yes.
You'd need weeks worth of cobalt production to create a life-destroying doomsday device.
You'd need somewhere like half the nuclear arsenal from times of its peak, applied in an organized and well-engineered way to fracture the Earth crust and sink most lands in lava.
You'd need hours to have worst of biological weapons released and kill all life on Earth.
"You could use your sail to capture light reflected from a large planet (Venus would be ideal) to get an impulse towards the sun." - only when in shadow of -something-.
Remember the sail has two sides and the light reflected off a planet will never be stronger than light incoming directly from the light source.
OTOH, unroll sail on earth, slingshot around Mars towards Sun, roll up sail, expand it in perihelion, repeat...
If the article is serious about the probe being 700 pounds, it's .0000035 m/s^2
That means it will take 3 years to gain 1 mach of speed, which is quite puny when it comes to spacecrafts. It will take it 10 years to travel 1AU at current acceleration... and as distance to Sun decreases, the acceleration will too!
The problem with the solar sail is that due to lack of immersion medium, it is impossible to use it for all the old sailing tricks like tacking - you can only fly away from Sun, at best at an angle away from the orbit. You can't propel yourself towards the Sun. So, any solar slingshots would require conventional propellant towards the Sun.
The problem is the criminals will be the last to be affected.
This is an old, known method. You find a homeless, a poor man, somebody deadly ill, a junkie and such. You pay them some reasonable money for their identity. Then you register the phone in their name, you get money from the skimmed credit cards, you use documents in their name when traveling, you make expensive purchases in their name. When they are caught, they know very little about you and they have little enough to lose and are desperate for money enough that they take the risk, and besides, it is pretty obvious it's not them who did all the things that were done in their name, so the penalties for selling your identity are very moderate.
The C is anarchy-run media. The blogosphere. The wikinews. The newsgroups.
The problem with consensus is that according to consensus, Pi is equal 3.070796....
I'm perfectly sure if you expose them to the fact that the continent of North America will evaporate if any secret agents attempt to enter your secret base will certainly not stop them from sending secret agents.
Note, it's not DISREGARD. It's CONTRADICT. The evidence isn't discarded, it's counted against the case it was intended to support.
The saddest part of this story for us, nerds, is that our strongest weapon - our knowledge, superior understanding of facts, digging deeper into matters than cheap news stories, is in fact totally inefficient against "joe average". The more you argue your case the worse your chance to -really- win the argument, convince the other side. More often they will admit defeat to get you off their neck and keep believing their falsehood even stronger.
Yep, but Open can be neither.
Guess what kind of processing power a standard optical mouse requires?
Image acquisition, recognition of microscopic features, comparing to previous image(s), calculating displacement by new locations of these features. Done thousands of times a second. This done by a CPU would pretty much bog down your system and slow it down to a crawl. So are optical mice not a viable idea?
No, they have a DSP that handles all that, the CPU gets clean displacement data.
As for breaking, a standard mouse is prone to damage due to falling, has sliders that tear off after some time of use, has mechanical keys that die after several hundred thousands clicks, have a wheel on friction bearings, and a cord that gets bent all the time, leading to breaking the cable over the lifetime of the mouse. This device would have no mechanical parts, no moving elements, and would stay fixed to one place. It seems like it would be much, much more durable than a standard mouse.
Lag issues were discussed in a different post, but yeah, don't expect to notice them.
Last but not least, if you really really want to keep using a physical mouse, you'll be able to use a dummy. A plastic shell from a broken mouse. A phone. A rock. It will be still fault-proof, not breaking like a normal mouse does, and providing you with all the tactile feedback you wish.
Free software is where you can take source and do mostly anything with it, including forking, releasing for free, incorporating in your commercial product and so on. (restrictions being often that it can't be made "not free", but little beyond that)
Open Source is where you have access to the source code. Little is guaranteed beyond that. It may be only so that you are allowed to audit the code and nothing else. It may be that it's expensive add-on to inexpensive binary, and you are not allowed to redistribute it. Nothing beyond "you get to see the code" is guaranteed.
Currently I am working with one open-source project by a 3rd party. We have the source code of a library they provide (and only source, and for free). We incorporate the library in our closed-source product (embedded device) and sell it, without ever providing sources to our customers. We have to pay a pretty high license fee for each item that contains that library we ship. Nobody ever claims it's Free Software.
To use a car analogy...
You think the 40mpg-rated car is going at 10mpg when you switch AC on, a drop of efficiency by 400% but in fact it's an illusion, the drop is only by 10%, from 11mpg to 10mpg and the mistake is caused by faulty fuel guage that overheats without AC.
Yes, the drop seems drastic. Yes, it's minor. But yes, it's enough to lose coverage because the reception sucks in the first place, and in a location that any other phone gets honest 5 bars, iPhone gets "mistakenly 5 bars" while its reception is like 3 bars most.
Just start a spam campaign of New Cheap Viagra, now with Extra Cyanide!
As for -seeing- them, not easy. But there were implants into fingers that allowed you to sense electric current and magnetic fields with fingertips. I've even seen an easier, non-permanent less sensitive solution - magnetic needles implanted into upper surface of nails.
It is quite common with people who work a lot with renovation/construction - finding wires in walls before drilling.
Through *competent* government recruited from people with *proper education* (yes, politician is a job, and as every job requires training) chosen by people *with a clue* basing their choice on *merit* and *competence*. Not on looks, not on pretty face, not on slogans, not on promises. A choice of a competent craftsman in the craft of politics, not a skilled actor, master of speechcraft.
Of course considering the mindset of most human beings this will never happen.
We're fucked.
If you want to hit with 150ms reaction latency, you lead the target -a little-.
If you want to hit with 150ms input latency, you lead the target -a lot-. Approximately three times as much as with reaction latency. This is like 450ms lag.
Thing is: with input latency, you aim at a point, your client receives your mouse input (time zero) and displays crosshair at that point (time zero), click. Client sends signal to server (time 150ms) later the point is calculated and if the enemy got there, you hit them, you receive the reaction another 150ms later but it is just a report on what happened.
Now try the same with this toy. You aim your mouse at a point in the game. It is sent to the server (150ms), the server renders the image and sends it back to you (150ms) and you get the image displayed. You click and your shot is sent to the server for processing (150ms). Now if the point you pointed at 450ms ago (and saw 150ms ago as it looked 300ms ago) has an enemy on it -now-, it will count as hit. And you will see the hit in 150ms.
Also, with reaction lag you visually lead the crosshair ahead of the enemy in realtime. With input lag, you lead an abstract invisible point with your mouse, your crosshair reacts with a lag to that, and -then- you have to lead the lagged crosshair ahead of the enemy like that.
yeah... that's an essential problem.
Network latency: You aim, almost immediately crosshair covers enemy head, you shoot, with bad lag the server will inform you you have missed, the enemy was not there.
Input latency: You aim. It takes 150ms for the crosshair to start following your aim. You finally get to aim at the enemy's head and click. The enemy moves, you move to follow, but since your reaction is delayed by 150ms it's now that your shot (and miss) and you will start following the enemy in 150ms.
ARGH. Totally unplayable.