And just look at the engine room, err, I mean compartment. How dull and boring, inspiring no emotion or passion. Not awe-inspiring like when I was young, when the steam pistons and drive coupling shafts were hanging off the sides of locomotives, gleaming in the sunlight as they drove the massive drive wheels.
Excuse me, got a bit carried away there. And just listen to the exhaust note - no poorly muffled noise of explosive gas releases echoing off the surrounding buildings and waking the city while driving in the early morning. The sound of an EV is boring and passionless, inspiring no emotion.
They could do significant damage - but "reduce to rubble" is quite an overstatement. What do you think the expected lifetime is of an NK artillery battery wielding a gun big enough to hit Seoul, after their first shot? The US and South Korea have some very excellent counter-battery radar systems; I would guess that the artillery arrayed on the south side of the border would be most immediately tasked with placing rounds on the origination points of NK artillery rounds.
It's entirely possible the 25 million people in and around Seoul care. Just what do you think would happen when those Tomahawks show up on NK radar? Do you believe that NK doesn't have one or two nuclear warheads on top of short-range missiles with Prime minister Hwang Kyo-ahn's address on them? And hasn't let China, South Korea, and the US know? There's no doubt that, if the US decided to "Desert Storm" the country, they could land hundreds of missiles and destroy all or most of NK's fixed military. Whether or not that would lead to destruction of Seoul, or a nuclear exchange with China, within 72 hours of the first salvo is an exercise left for the reader.
It's bad that private medical information is being disseminated...
It's great, however, in being a window into the information about me that's available to, well, just about anyone with money.
Anyone with an interest in Healthcare (e.g. Health Insurance companies) probably had a copy of this data, acquired "somehow". There's no incentive for a company to only keep records on their customers - database storage is free, so keeping records on EVERYONE who might someday wish to become a customer is just good business sense.
Anyone who has such data would certainly market it to the "big boys". Even if these million records were only worth a thousand dollars to an Anthem or Cigna, there are dozens of health companies and hundreds of scammers who might pay that thousand dollars. And right now, there's no way for me find out what information Anthem or Cigna is keeping on me.
My information was in the Anthem leak - and when I asked Anthem to tell me what was taken, they said "No". So Anthem knows what was taken, and the bad guys know what was taken, and the government knows what was taken, and I'm the only one left in the dark. Leaks like this are the only way available to me to try to determine this information.
Hah, got you beat - still using my LaserJet 6P from the mid-90s. Prints great, toner cartridge is an easy refill, and has a low power standby (unusual for the era). Absolutely problem free, unlike the dozen inkjets I've had in the same timeframe, and the only issue is that some postscript printouts take minutes per page. Why would I bother replacing it?
Altavista was the precursor to Google, a search engine for the Web. Yahoo! was unique in being a homepage for the web - a collector of news and oddities that you could start your day on, and by the way had a search function that was never as good as Altavista or Google.
I live in Arizona, which doesn't observe DST, which eliminates me having to wander through the house and reset all the clocks, right? Wrong. You see, I like to have my clocks all reading the same time, so almost all the clocks in my house are atomic clocks and keep themselves sync'ed with WWV. And every spring and fall, they dutifully jump forward or backward an hour, so I still end up wandering through the house resetting clocks. Ugh.
The counties in Indiana switched over to DST ten years or so ago. They provided a unique opportunity to study whether or not DST saves energy, because they were located in and amongst counties that already used DST. As a result, you could correlate energy usage before and after the switch in both areas. That study showed a slight rise in annual energy usage with the switch to DST.
But you don't have to look to future software for this.
ASIC design languages create designs that are explicitly parallel, and they do it easily. Sure, there are synchronizations that have to happen, but that may not apply to much of the design. They are explictly event-oriented, and combinational (When this event occurs, do one of the following things depending on the state of these other two signal). I have sometimes been amazed at how quickly, and in how small a description. and with a full test suite, a good digital designer can implement some algorithms compared with an embedded 'C' programmer.
As someone who was affected by this breach, I'll tell you what I still don't know. I don't know what information about me and my family was disclosed. I don't know whether they got my name and account number, the list of payments they've made, the list of diagnostics codes for each of those payments. or what. When I called to find out, the answer was "our public statements are all the information that I have to give you". Basically, the bad guys know what they got, and Anthem won't tell me. It sucks feeling so powerless about control of personal information.
Why in god's name would I want a Pig's body with a Human brain? Instead, let me raise a Human body (Female for me please) with the brain of, say, a Bonobo monkey.
At least my computer and monitor, out of the box, go to sleep after a while.
Please, , let them turn their attention to Cable and Satellite TV boxes that when turned "off" with the remote still pull 20+ watts. Let them turn their attention to items like the Roku 3, which didn't even have the concept of "off" (and which kept a moving logo on the screen permanently to keep your TV from turning off). Let them turn their attention to all the IOT thingies, for whom implementing low-power states is an even lower priority than providing basic security.
I bought my reflow oven from the Goodwill store for $10. Can even match the standard heating profiles with reasonable attention. May not be big enough for a motherboard however. Toaster ovens are marvelous things.
Using an off-peak electic rate of $0.044 / kWh, it'll cost me about $2.64 to get roughly 215 miles of range. If I were to use the nationwide average rate of $0.12 / kWh, it'll cost me about $7.20.
Driving my 32 MPG Honda Civic will take about 6.72 gallons of gas to go 215 mile. At current, historically low, gas prices (say, $2.25), that's at least $15.
It's safe to say that electric vehicles are already obscenely cheaper than driving an economy car - anywhere from 1/2 to 1/5 the fuel cost per mile.
Let's talk about average people, not corner cases.
I drive a 70 mile commute every day. A couple of times a year I'd like to visit my family in SoCal from Phoenix. Half a dozen times a year, my son goes camping with the Boy Scouts.
So, for roughly 260 days a year, I get in my car in the morning with a full tank of electrons. I do my commute, get home and plug in. I won't visit a gas station the whole time. And I'll save about $120 / month using electricity instead of gas, even though gas is at historically cheap inflation-adjusted prices and I drive a 32 mpg gas car.
Roughly 6 times a year, I'll probably need a different vehicle to go camping, because the Boy Scouts like to camp a long way from Phoenix for some reason, and there's likely to be no superchargers on the route. That's a drawback.
Twice a year, I'll stop in Quartzsite (conveniently and purely coincidentally halfway between Phoenix and SoCal). It'll take an hour to charge, and my family and I will eat and pee. Then we'll drive into SoCal, and plug in to a probably 120 Volt outlet at my mother's place.
People will quickly figure out that, even driving an economy car using really cheap gas, electric cars are significantly cheaper to operate. Once neighbors and friends have electric cars and love them, most people will realize that they seldom have a need to travel more than 200 miles on backroads. If they're going to travel on highways, an appropriate choice of electric cars will mean that they get delayed (an hour on a 5 hour trip) but that's not such a big deal.
My prediction is that 10 years from now, the vast majority of new cars will be electric despite the minimal drawbacks we see today; the day-to-day utility will completely overshadow the relatively minor inconveniences.
So the only company with a charger with a high enough charge rate that its actually usable for highway travel, the only company with an existing charger infrastructure covering almost all highway routes across the nation, the only company that offers to license all of its patents on this technology to any and all manufacturers who would wish to use it as long as they share in the costs and the ethos of open access, isn't involved in this project?
I've got enough helicopters flying over my house at all hours of the day and night. I don't need another bunch of entitled rich bastards doing it because it's gotten easier.
I really wish that the FAA didn't have the duties to both regulate air traffic, and promote air traffic. The second duty tends to have a lot of impact on the first to the detriment of anyone on the ground (to whom they have no duty).
Learning about your diagnosed disease, including running what a doctor would call unnecessary tests in order to understand your personal response to treatment, isn't what I'd call "hypochondria" especially when the disease can be life threatening.
To be pedantic, I am certainly finding the data useful, as I am certainly using it. Whether the data is accurate/correct or not, I agree that I have no way to tell. I'm making the assumption that there is some reasonable level of accuracy to be expected from their testing (B12 doesn't use their Edison machines), and getting an expected smooth curve out of most of the independent trials implies some level of process control and precision, but the outliers suggest that individual measurements are suspect.
Of course, it's unclear how I'd get a "control" for this test. I could go to another blood analysis lab - but everytime I've had blood drawn in the last decade, the vials get drawn at a storefront "lab", then packaged up and processed at a backend lab somewhere else. It's not clear to me how to tell whether all the storefronts use a common backend lab, or which storefronts use which labs. A "control" could turn out to be verification of a lab's results by the same lab.
I loved being able to go to Walgreens, walk into the Theranos booth, and get a $10 B12 test without a prescription. Let me do all kinds of analysis that the standard physicians approach didn't.
But, with weekly B12 readings over the space of two months, there was 1 of the 8 readings that was obviously wrong. As an engineer, I'm used to noisy data so was still able to find the data useful.
Last month, went to Theranos (to one of their blood testing centers, as Walgreens had shut them down by then) and had another done. Another obviously, completely incorrect reading, confirmed by a doctor-ordered test at another lab.
So, even though I love the control they gave me (I could order any of a hundred tests on my own without having to convince my doctor to order it, or my insurance company to pay for it), I think it's best that they go away. Too much of modern medicine is conditioned on the results of a single, unverified test - the assumption is that the lab doesn't have an error rate. At least in my apocryphal case, Theranos grossly failed.
I'll go back to the fantasy land where the other, more traditional labs (that want to charge me $150 for the same B12 test) always have correct readings...
The amount you save on gasoline, even over the full life of the car, will not pay for the premium price.
Not for current cars, but that's where the Model 3 is so exciting. $35000 is the median car price for new cars in the US, and that's where the Model 3 is intended to hit. There certainly was a premium for the Model S, but the premium is no longer there for the Model 3. Heck, if Chevy is going to try to sell the compact-sized Bolt for 35000, you could say that the Model 3 will be selling at a discount being as it's a bigger car with more features (like, say, a charging infrastructure).
By my calculation, I'll save about $1000 / year on energy costs over my Honda Civic. I normally keep cars for 10 years or so, so I'll be about $10,000 ahead at the end of my ownership - which is about the premium I'd pay over buying a new Civic. That's assuming that gas stays at it's current low price - let it climb back up to $4 or $5, and I'll be way ahead.
The "chlorine" smell in pools is from Chloramines - a compound made of chorine and amines (ammonia). You get more of it from urine, but it'll build up anyway from other sources. The Chloramines are also what stings and irritates the eyes, nose, and lungs.
How do you get rid of it? Raise the free chlorine level in the pool to 10 ppm or so (normal range is 1 - 3 ppm). Presto, changeo, the pool stops smelling like chlorine.
Cryptosporidium is a difficult to remove parasite that can exist in pool water. How do you treat pool water that's been contaminated with crypto? Raise the chlorine level to 10 ppm for 24 hours (20 ppm if you use stabilized chlorine).
Me? I just keep my pool between 10-20 ppm chlorine all the time. Crystal clear water, no algae, no eye irritation, no chlorine smell, no nasties in the water, no side effects at all. My kids swim in it eyes wide open for hours at a time, friends come over and say "I'm glad you don't use too much chlorine; I can't even smell it".
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And just look at the engine room, err, I mean compartment. How dull and boring, inspiring no emotion or passion. Not awe-inspiring like when I was young, when the steam pistons and drive coupling shafts were hanging off the sides of locomotives, gleaming in the sunlight as they drove the massive drive wheels.
Excuse me, got a bit carried away there. And just listen to the exhaust note - no poorly muffled noise of explosive gas releases echoing off the surrounding buildings and waking the city while driving in the early morning. The sound of an EV is boring and passionless, inspiring no emotion.
Now, what were you saying again?
They could do significant damage - but "reduce to rubble" is quite an overstatement.
What do you think the expected lifetime is of an NK artillery battery wielding a gun big enough to hit Seoul, after their first shot? The US and South Korea have some very excellent counter-battery radar systems; I would guess that the artillery arrayed on the south side of the border would be most immediately tasked with placing rounds on the origination points of NK artillery rounds.
It's entirely possible the 25 million people in and around Seoul care.
Just what do you think would happen when those Tomahawks show up on NK radar? Do you believe that NK doesn't have one or two nuclear warheads on top of short-range missiles with Prime minister Hwang Kyo-ahn's address on them? And hasn't let China, South Korea, and the US know?
There's no doubt that, if the US decided to "Desert Storm" the country, they could land hundreds of missiles and destroy all or most of NK's fixed military. Whether or not that would lead to destruction of Seoul, or a nuclear exchange with China, within 72 hours of the first salvo is an exercise left for the reader.
It's bad that private medical information is being disseminated...
It's great, however, in being a window into the information about me that's available to, well, just about anyone with money.
Anyone with an interest in Healthcare (e.g. Health Insurance companies) probably had a copy of this data, acquired "somehow". There's no incentive for a company to only keep records on their customers - database storage is free, so keeping records on EVERYONE who might someday wish to become a customer is just good business sense.
Anyone who has such data would certainly market it to the "big boys". Even if these million records were only worth a thousand dollars to an Anthem or Cigna, there are dozens of health companies and hundreds of scammers who might pay that thousand dollars. And right now, there's no way for me find out what information Anthem or Cigna is keeping on me.
My information was in the Anthem leak - and when I asked Anthem to tell me what was taken, they said "No". So Anthem knows what was taken, and the bad guys know what was taken, and the government knows what was taken, and I'm the only one left in the dark. Leaks like this are the only way available to me to try to determine this information.
Hah, got you beat - still using my LaserJet 6P from the mid-90s. Prints great, toner cartridge is an easy refill, and has a low power standby (unusual for the era). Absolutely problem free, unlike the dozen inkjets I've had in the same timeframe, and the only issue is that some postscript printouts take minutes per page. Why would I bother replacing it?
Altavista was the precursor to Google, a search engine for the Web.
Yahoo! was unique in being a homepage for the web - a collector of news and oddities that you could start your day on, and by the way had a search function that was never as good as Altavista or Google.
I live in Arizona, which doesn't observe DST, which eliminates me having to wander through the house and reset all the clocks, right?
Wrong.
You see, I like to have my clocks all reading the same time, so almost all the clocks in my house are atomic clocks and keep themselves sync'ed with WWV. And every spring and fall, they dutifully jump forward or backward an hour, so I still end up wandering through the house resetting clocks. Ugh.
The counties in Indiana switched over to DST ten years or so ago. They provided a unique opportunity to study whether or not DST saves energy, because they were located in and amongst counties that already used DST. As a result, you could correlate energy usage before and after the switch in both areas. That study showed a slight rise in annual energy usage with the switch to DST.
But you don't have to look to future software for this.
ASIC design languages create designs that are explicitly parallel, and they do it easily. Sure, there are synchronizations that have to happen, but that may not apply to much of the design. They are explictly event-oriented, and combinational (When this event occurs, do one of the following things depending on the state of these other two signal). I have sometimes been amazed at how quickly, and in how small a description. and with a full test suite, a good digital designer can implement some algorithms compared with an embedded 'C' programmer.
As someone who was affected by this breach, I'll tell you what I still don't know.
I don't know what information about me and my family was disclosed. I don't know whether they got my name and account number, the list of payments they've made, the list of diagnostics codes for each of those payments. or what. When I called to find out, the answer was "our public statements are all the information that I have to give you". Basically, the bad guys know what they got, and Anthem won't tell me.
It sucks feeling so powerless about control of personal information.
Why in god's name would I want a Pig's body with a Human brain?
Instead, let me raise a Human body (Female for me please) with the brain of, say, a Bonobo monkey.
At least my computer and monitor, out of the box, go to sleep after a while.
Please, , let them turn their attention to Cable and Satellite TV boxes that when turned "off" with the remote still pull 20+ watts. Let them turn their attention to items like the Roku 3, which didn't even have the concept of "off" (and which kept a moving logo on the screen permanently to keep your TV from turning off). Let them turn their attention to all the IOT thingies, for whom implementing low-power states is an even lower priority than providing basic security.
I bought my reflow oven from the Goodwill store for $10. Can even match the standard heating profiles with reasonable attention.
May not be big enough for a motherboard however. Toaster ovens are marvelous things.
Using an off-peak electic rate of $0.044 / kWh, it'll cost me about $2.64 to get roughly 215 miles of range. If I were to use the nationwide average rate of $0.12 / kWh, it'll cost me about $7.20.
Driving my 32 MPG Honda Civic will take about 6.72 gallons of gas to go 215 mile. At current, historically low, gas prices (say, $2.25), that's at least $15.
It's safe to say that electric vehicles are already obscenely cheaper than driving an economy car - anywhere from 1/2 to 1/5 the fuel cost per mile.
Let's talk about average people, not corner cases.
I drive a 70 mile commute every day. A couple of times a year I'd like to visit my family in SoCal from Phoenix. Half a dozen times a year, my son goes camping with the Boy Scouts.
So, for roughly 260 days a year, I get in my car in the morning with a full tank of electrons. I do my commute, get home and plug in. I won't visit a gas station the whole time. And I'll save about $120 / month using electricity instead of gas, even though gas is at historically cheap inflation-adjusted prices and I drive a 32 mpg gas car.
Roughly 6 times a year, I'll probably need a different vehicle to go camping, because the Boy Scouts like to camp a long way from Phoenix for some reason, and there's likely to be no superchargers on the route. That's a drawback.
Twice a year, I'll stop in Quartzsite (conveniently and purely coincidentally halfway between Phoenix and SoCal). It'll take an hour to charge, and my family and I will eat and pee. Then we'll drive into SoCal, and plug in to a probably 120 Volt outlet at my mother's place.
People will quickly figure out that, even driving an economy car using really cheap gas, electric cars are significantly cheaper to operate. Once neighbors and friends have electric cars and love them, most people will realize that they seldom have a need to travel more than 200 miles on backroads. If they're going to travel on highways, an appropriate choice of electric cars will mean that they get delayed (an hour on a 5 hour trip) but that's not such a big deal.
My prediction is that 10 years from now, the vast majority of new cars will be electric despite the minimal drawbacks we see today; the day-to-day utility will completely overshadow the relatively minor inconveniences.
I can't wait for my Model 3 to be ready...
So the only company with a charger with a high enough charge rate that its actually usable for highway travel, the only company with an existing charger infrastructure covering almost all highway routes across the nation, the only company that offers to license all of its patents on this technology to any and all manufacturers who would wish to use it as long as they share in the costs and the ethos of open access, isn't involved in this project?
sigh.
I've got enough helicopters flying over my house at all hours of the day and night. I don't need another bunch of entitled rich bastards doing it because it's gotten easier.
I really wish that the FAA didn't have the duties to both regulate air traffic, and promote air traffic. The second duty tends to have a lot of impact on the first to the detriment of anyone on the ground (to whom they have no duty).
No, they mean "8 cameras", "12 ultrasonic sensors" and "forward looking radar",
Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?
Learning about your diagnosed disease, including running what a doctor would call unnecessary tests in order to understand your personal response to treatment, isn't what I'd call "hypochondria" especially when the disease can be life threatening.
To be pedantic, I am certainly finding the data useful, as I am certainly using it. Whether the data is accurate/correct or not, I agree that I have no way to tell. I'm making the assumption that there is some reasonable level of accuracy to be expected from their testing (B12 doesn't use their Edison machines), and getting an expected smooth curve out of most of the independent trials implies some level of process control and precision, but the outliers suggest that individual measurements are suspect.
Of course, it's unclear how I'd get a "control" for this test. I could go to another blood analysis lab - but everytime I've had blood drawn in the last decade, the vials get drawn at a storefront "lab", then packaged up and processed at a backend lab somewhere else. It's not clear to me how to tell whether all the storefronts use a common backend lab, or which storefronts use which labs. A "control" could turn out to be verification of a lab's results by the same lab.
I loved being able to go to Walgreens, walk into the Theranos booth, and get a $10 B12 test without a prescription. Let me do all kinds of analysis that the standard physicians approach didn't.
But, with weekly B12 readings over the space of two months, there was 1 of the 8 readings that was obviously wrong. As an engineer, I'm used to noisy data so was still able to find the data useful.
Last month, went to Theranos (to one of their blood testing centers, as Walgreens had shut them down by then) and had another done. Another obviously, completely incorrect reading, confirmed by a doctor-ordered test at another lab.
So, even though I love the control they gave me (I could order any of a hundred tests on my own without having to convince my doctor to order it, or my insurance company to pay for it), I think it's best that they go away. Too much of modern medicine is conditioned on the results of a single, unverified test - the assumption is that the lab doesn't have an error rate. At least in my apocryphal case, Theranos grossly failed.
I'll go back to the fantasy land where the other, more traditional labs (that want to charge me $150 for the same B12 test) always have correct readings...
Who do you think Verizon is going to send to small claims court to represent them? The CEO? Some random secretary? The entire company?
No, it'll be an attorney, or some other class of legal beagle.
Not for current cars, but that's where the Model 3 is so exciting. $35000 is the median car price for new cars in the US, and that's where the Model 3 is intended to hit. There certainly was a premium for the Model S, but the premium is no longer there for the Model 3. Heck, if Chevy is going to try to sell the compact-sized Bolt for 35000, you could say that the Model 3 will be selling at a discount being as it's a bigger car with more features (like, say, a charging infrastructure).
By my calculation, I'll save about $1000 / year on energy costs over my Honda Civic. I normally keep cars for 10 years or so, so I'll be about $10,000 ahead at the end of my ownership - which is about the premium I'd pay over buying a new Civic. That's assuming that gas stays at it's current low price - let it climb back up to $4 or $5, and I'll be way ahead.
Uh, actually, yes it is.
3300*1.5=4950, which falls into my category of "a tad under 5000 lbs".
Partly.
The "chlorine" smell in pools is from Chloramines - a compound made of chorine and amines (ammonia). You get more of it from urine, but it'll build up anyway from other sources. The Chloramines are also what stings and irritates the eyes, nose, and lungs.
How do you get rid of it? Raise the free chlorine level in the pool to 10 ppm or so (normal range is 1 - 3 ppm). Presto, changeo, the pool stops smelling like chlorine.
Cryptosporidium is a difficult to remove parasite that can exist in pool water. How do you treat pool water that's been contaminated with crypto? Raise the chlorine level to 10 ppm for 24 hours (20 ppm if you use stabilized chlorine).
Me? I just keep my pool between 10-20 ppm chlorine all the time. Crystal clear water, no algae, no eye irritation, no chlorine smell, no nasties in the water, no side effects at all. My kids swim in it eyes wide open for hours at a time, friends come over and say "I'm glad you don't use too much chlorine; I can't even smell it".