Amazingly enough, when I hang on long enough past recorded "Rachel" to get to live "Rachel", and ask her nicely to put me on their do-not-call list, she rudely and peremptorily hangs up!
Well, an interesting rant, but it starts out with a fallacy - the OP didn't profess ignorance in any way.
Being an Atheist certainly doesn't imply a lack of knowledge of religions. You certainly appear to think that's true ("they never actually look for...", "care so little for curing your ignorance".), and that seems to form the entire basis of your attack.
I think a few conversations with thoughtful atheists would do you good. That might be an education, and might help cure your ignorance, both things you argue strongly for.
Funny, but it's unlikely to be much of a contributor to a fire in a Lithium-Ion battery.
Re:The reason a "cyber Pearl Harbor" isn't imminen
on
The One Sided Cyber War
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Really? Someone shuts down the power grid and the entire world grinds to a halt? Maybe we should train someone who knows how to, well, turn the power grid back on?
I understand that the grid is a complex legacy systerm that isn't well understood. It's not clear, for example, how to cold-start the nationwide power grid if some catastrophe shut it all down, nor is it clear how long it would take to do so. But assuming that the economy comes to a catastrophic halt is simply fear-mongering. Every few years, winter storms shut down the Eastern seaboard for days with no lasting effects. The World Trade Center attacks shut down most of the financial industry for a week, and had severe repercussions on it for weeks thereafter; but we survived. The Sept 11, 2001 attacks shut down air traffic completely for a week - and yet, the world didn't stop.
Taking down the electrical grid would be more comprehensively catastrophic than the Sept 11 attacks, but it would still be no more than a minor blip on the Human History chart. A week later, it would be back up and running and those cunningly flexible and adaptable human beings would still be infesting this planet.
Please, for the sake of the United States and the world, get out of government service and take your paranoia with you.
So, China created an artificial monopoly by selling below cost and driving all other producers out of business...
Then raised prices and restricted supply to drive costs up....
And the free market responded with new suppliers entering the market...
So China will let them spend billions of dollars developing their new sources, and we'll all go back to step 1 before they make a dimes worth of profit.
In Volume/ Mass/ Weight, 1000sq/cm = 1 Litre = 1 kg of water.
So why in your textbook example do you have so many different prefixes in such a simple equation? If Metric were simple, it would be: 1 m^3 = 1 Liter = 1 gram. Arbitrary orders of magnitude aren't simple.
you'll find a half-gallon milk on a shelf next to a 16 oz cream, and comparing them natively is difficult.
Actually, I'm guessing it's easier in the US than in a metric country - a pint of cream (1/8 gallon) compared with 1/2 gallon of milk is essentially trivial. What are the equivalent sales units (that you could actually buy) in a Metric country?
There's nothing special about the meter. The "special" part is meter and liter are related, as are kg and liter, so everything is related. That and the relation for increasing and decreasing units or prefixes is the same base as our counting system. Not special about any particular unit, but better for large and small numbers being related. Or do you know how many inches in a furlong off the top of your head?
So, how many cubic meters in a liter (in your head, please, and quickly)? How many grams of water in a cubic meter of water? And why aren't either of these 1? Using arbitrary orders-of-magnitude for more-or-less fundamental measures sure doesn't make the system simpler...
Why is a gram something that is near the small limit of human perception, as is the second, but the meter is a length the size of my arm? Frankly, making the "meter" something the length of the current centimeter (near the small limit of human perception) would have made it much more consistent. The Liter would be a cubic meter, and a quart of milk would be a nice Kiloliter.
Metric is a crappy measuring system for everyday things. It's great for scientists (although the Physics textbook I used insisted on using MKS, while others used CGS, and I never figured out why nobody used MGS), because orders of magnitude were easily managed, but it sucks for the average housewife. Seldom does one need ten times as much of something; but 2 or 4 times is pretty common. When you go to the grocery store, is everything packaged in even Liter increments? I'll bet calculating cost/gram or cost/liter is as much of a challenge in Metric countries as cost/ounce is in the US.
That said, it's time for the US to join up, to trade a dozen crappy measurement systems for one, better but still crappy, measurement system. I see no likelihood of anyone creating a better system in the next 200 years, so let's all agree on how we measure things. That's a valuable goal, but don't feed me the "it's simpler and consistent" bullshit.
A company I used to work for lost a patent battle with Wacom about those self-powered pens. We ended up having to use powered pens to avoid their patent.
The whole field of digitizers - which grew up in the '70s and reached it's peak in the '80s and is used now in devices like the Smart board (http://smarttech.com/smartboard) - explored active stylii extensively. RF, Capacitive, and Resistive digitizers were all invented, explored, patented in those eras. It would be very surprising if this invention doesn't duplicate patents that issued thirty years ago.
I don't know about the GP's Powerbridge, but I had a pair of Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M5's providing bridge service between two of our offices that got real-world throughput of around 75 Mbps (Measured by transferring a 4GB file using Windows Explorer to another Windows box, and stopwatching the time). The offices were only a hundred yards apart, but I had the TX power cranked down to minimum.
I've measured similar on other wireless routers. Haven't tried on Gigabit connected routers. So on to the question: Yes, you can get 100 Mbit Ethernet speeds - but recognize that's only about 10 MBytes / sec.
If you don't have a felony conviction, or various other disqualifying issues, it takes anywhere from ten minutes to ten days, depending on the locality, to purchase a rifle or handgun.
I'll ask another question - how easy/difficult is it for an adult in your country to buy a knife/car/whatever that can be used to kill people?
These are horrific events, whether they happen in Connecticut or Scotland (http://news.yahoo.com/scottish-town-shares-agony-u-school-tragedy-182038462.html) with guns, or China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E2%80%932011)) with knives and hammers. But they pale in comparison with the number and tragedy of single deaths that occur daily. Children are killed in car accidents, playground accidents, by parents, caregivers, and other children, in horrific and tragic ways. But, because they happen one or two at a time, they're a footnote in a local newscast and quickly forgotten. Nothing is done about them.
Heck, even the events of Sept 11, 2001 here in the US were a statistical blip - the 3000 people killed in the attacks are roughly the number of people who die every month in car accidents in the US. And yet we treat it as a national day of mourning, and disassemble our freedoms, to prevent it from happening again.
We as Humans grossly overreact to the extraordinary, and become accustomed to the ordinary. 20 Children killed with a Gun? Time to ban all guns. 40000 infants born in the US every year with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (http://fasdcenter.samhsa.gov/documents/WYNK_Numbers.pdf), and we show a few public service announcements on the TV. Which is the greater tragedy?
Your HTPC server consumes 350W? What the hell do you have in that thing?
Mine consumes less than 65W running full blast, serves files and 1080p video. I'd say you'd save a hell of a lot more money by downsizing that HTPC rather than just getting a more efficient power supply.
I'm pretty sure Arizona would be fine under that scheme also - we have a nice large Nuke plant, which sends (IIRC) 50% of it's power to California, and our desert is littered with small natural gas fired power plants built in the last 20 years to supply peaking power to California, because they won't allow power plants to be built in their state.
It seems clear that 1 or more of 4 possibilities are the truth. 0. He is innocent. 1. He killed his neighbor, possibly in retaliation for his dogs being poisoned. 2. He is being persecuted by forces within the Belize government and police department. 3. He is having or has had a psychotic episode.
The problem with hydrogen, of course, is that it burns at a wide range of concentrations - from 4 to 75%, according to Wikipedia. Gasoline only burns at between 1.4 and 7.5% in air. So a hydrogen leak is far more likely to catch fire or explode than a gasoline leak.
Why, thank you, as a professional in the field of biometrics it has never occurred to us that someone might try to create a spoofed fingerprint. And it has never occurred to us to attempt to detect those, and reject them. By the way, do you happen to know the dielectric constant of common wood glue? Because I do. As well as gelatin (http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm), amongst other materials.
Well, by most generally accepted criteria I am an intelligent person, and I enjoy watching football. Of course, you don't know me so your statement may still be correct (though I doubt it). At a visceral level, there is a significant level of tension release watching people "beat the hell out of each other". (Actually, most of the guys on the field are pretty friendly to each other - guys on different teams talking and laughing between plays. Just don't go up for a reception over the middle on third and 5).
I don't particularly enjoy the fandom of football, and couldn't tell you what place in the standings my hometown team is (actually, for my hometown, that's pretty easy; even I know it). I can sit and enjoy a game, and walk away afterwards and not be able to tell you the score. I just don't care who wins or loses, but I do enjoy watching the strategy, the speed, the mistakes, and the raw athleticism on display./frank
Well, we didn't design in any features to deal with hookers and blow, but your TAP isn't going to get you anywhere considering the fingerprint sensor establishes an SSL session with the laptop.
I have a very nice HP enterprise laptop with a fingerprint sensor. The hard disk is fully encrypted, and doesn't even spin up until my fingerprint is verified. No passphrase needed. I'd love to put a camera in the room and watch the operative try to install anything on that machine./frank n.b. I also happen to work for the company that designed and built the fingerprint sensor.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE PLASTIC FROM LAST WEEK?
What happened is that you got trolled. Go look at the link in the original story - a photo of Mardi Gras beads badly photoshopped onto the martian surface, and an accompanying story written at about a 10th grade level.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that would also inhibit all the internet spying that everyone else is doing to the Chinese.
Amazingly enough, when I hang on long enough past recorded "Rachel" to get to live "Rachel", and ask her nicely to put me on their do-not-call list, she rudely and peremptorily hangs up!
Well, an interesting rant, but it starts out with a fallacy - the OP didn't profess ignorance in any way.
Being an Atheist certainly doesn't imply a lack of knowledge of religions. You certainly appear to think that's true ("they never actually look for...", "care so little for curing your ignorance".), and that seems to form the entire basis of your attack.
I think a few conversations with thoughtful atheists would do you good. That might be an education, and might help cure your ignorance, both things you argue strongly for.
Funny, but it's unlikely to be much of a contributor to a fire in a Lithium-Ion battery.
Really? Someone shuts down the power grid and the entire world grinds to a halt? Maybe we should train someone who knows how to, well, turn the power grid back on?
I understand that the grid is a complex legacy systerm that isn't well understood. It's not clear, for example, how to cold-start the nationwide power grid if some catastrophe shut it all down, nor is it clear how long it would take to do so. But assuming that the economy comes to a catastrophic halt is simply fear-mongering. Every few years, winter storms shut down the Eastern seaboard for days with no lasting effects. The World Trade Center attacks shut down most of the financial industry for a week, and had severe repercussions on it for weeks thereafter; but we survived. The Sept 11, 2001 attacks shut down air traffic completely for a week - and yet, the world didn't stop.
Taking down the electrical grid would be more comprehensively catastrophic than the Sept 11 attacks, but it would still be no more than a minor blip on the Human History chart. A week later, it would be back up and running and those cunningly flexible and adaptable human beings would still be infesting this planet.
Please, for the sake of the United States and the world, get out of government service and take your paranoia with you.
So, China created an artificial monopoly by selling below cost and driving all other producers out of business...
Then raised prices and restricted supply to drive costs up....
And the free market responded with new suppliers entering the market...
So China will let them spend billions of dollars developing their new sources, and we'll all go back to step 1 before they make a dimes worth of profit.
My dad got one of those when he broke his elbow. Was never able to get the hang of it - but we kids did (and drove him crazy with the noise).
That was 40 years ago.
In Volume/ Mass/ Weight, 1000sq/cm = 1 Litre = 1 kg of water.
So why in your textbook example do you have so many different prefixes in such a simple equation? If Metric were simple, it would be:
1 m^3 = 1 Liter = 1 gram.
Arbitrary orders of magnitude aren't simple.
you'll find a half-gallon milk on a shelf next to a 16 oz cream, and comparing them natively is difficult.
Actually, I'm guessing it's easier in the US than in a metric country - a pint of cream (1/8 gallon) compared with 1/2 gallon of milk is essentially trivial. What are the equivalent sales units (that you could actually buy) in a Metric country?
There's nothing special about the meter. The "special" part is meter and liter are related, as are kg and liter, so everything is related. That and the relation for increasing and decreasing units or prefixes is the same base as our counting system. Not special about any particular unit, but better for large and small numbers being related. Or do you know how many inches in a furlong off the top of your head?
So, how many cubic meters in a liter (in your head, please, and quickly)? How many grams of water in a cubic meter of water? And why aren't either of these 1? Using arbitrary orders-of-magnitude for more-or-less fundamental measures sure doesn't make the system simpler...
Why is a gram something that is near the small limit of human perception, as is the second, but the meter is a length the size of my arm? Frankly, making the "meter" something the length of the current centimeter (near the small limit of human perception) would have made it much more consistent. The Liter would be a cubic meter, and a quart of milk would be a nice Kiloliter.
Metric is a crappy measuring system for everyday things. It's great for scientists (although the Physics textbook I used insisted on using MKS, while others used CGS, and I never figured out why nobody used MGS), because orders of magnitude were easily managed, but it sucks for the average housewife. Seldom does one need ten times as much of something; but 2 or 4 times is pretty common. When you go to the grocery store, is everything packaged in even Liter increments? I'll bet calculating cost/gram or cost/liter is as much of a challenge in Metric countries as cost/ounce is in the US.
That said, it's time for the US to join up, to trade a dozen crappy measurement systems for one, better but still crappy, measurement system. I see no likelihood of anyone creating a better system in the next 200 years, so let's all agree on how we measure things. That's a valuable goal, but don't feed me the "it's simpler and consistent" bullshit.
A company I used to work for lost a patent battle with Wacom about those self-powered pens. We ended up having to use powered pens to avoid their patent.
The whole field of digitizers - which grew up in the '70s and reached it's peak in the '80s and is used now in devices like the Smart board (http://smarttech.com/smartboard) - explored active stylii extensively. RF, Capacitive, and Resistive digitizers were all invented, explored, patented in those eras. It would be very surprising if this invention doesn't duplicate patents that issued thirty years ago.
Innovation, indeed.
I don't know about the GP's Powerbridge, but I had a pair of Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M5's providing bridge service between two of our offices that got real-world throughput of around 75 Mbps (Measured by transferring a 4GB file using Windows Explorer to another Windows box, and stopwatching the time). The offices were only a hundred yards apart, but I had the TX power cranked down to minimum.
I've measured similar on other wireless routers. Haven't tried on Gigabit connected routers. So on to the question: Yes, you can get 100 Mbit Ethernet speeds - but recognize that's only about 10 MBytes / sec.
If you don't have a felony conviction, or various other disqualifying issues, it takes anywhere from ten minutes to ten days, depending on the locality, to purchase a rifle or handgun.
I'll ask another question - how easy/difficult is it for an adult in your country to buy a knife/car/whatever that can be used to kill people?
These are horrific events, whether they happen in Connecticut or Scotland (http://news.yahoo.com/scottish-town-shares-agony-u-school-tragedy-182038462.html) with guns, or China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E2%80%932011)) with knives and hammers. But they pale in comparison with the number and tragedy of single deaths that occur daily. Children are killed in car accidents, playground accidents, by parents, caregivers, and other children, in horrific and tragic ways. But, because they happen one or two at a time, they're a footnote in a local newscast and quickly forgotten. Nothing is done about them.
Heck, even the events of Sept 11, 2001 here in the US were a statistical blip - the 3000 people killed in the attacks are roughly the number of people who die every month in car accidents in the US. And yet we treat it as a national day of mourning, and disassemble our freedoms, to prevent it from happening again.
We as Humans grossly overreact to the extraordinary, and become accustomed to the ordinary. 20 Children killed with a Gun? Time to ban all guns. 40000 infants born in the US every year with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (http://fasdcenter.samhsa.gov/documents/WYNK_Numbers.pdf), and we show a few public service announcements on the TV. Which is the greater tragedy?
Your HTPC server consumes 350W? What the hell do you have in that thing?
Mine consumes less than 65W running full blast, serves files and 1080p video. I'd say you'd save a hell of a lot more money by downsizing that HTPC rather than just getting a more efficient power supply.
I'm pretty sure Arizona would be fine under that scheme also - we have a nice large Nuke plant, which sends (IIRC) 50% of it's power to California, and our desert is littered with small natural gas fired power plants built in the last 20 years to supply peaking power to California, because they won't allow power plants to be built in their state.
So rephrase #2 and add #0:
It seems clear that 1 or more of 4 possibilities are the truth.
0. He is innocent.
1. He killed his neighbor, possibly in retaliation for his dogs being poisoned.
2. He is being persecuted by forces within the Belize government and police department.
3. He is having or has had a psychotic episode.
The problem with hydrogen, of course, is that it burns at a wide range of concentrations - from 4 to 75%, according to Wikipedia. Gasoline only burns at between 1.4 and 7.5% in air. So a hydrogen leak is far more likely to catch fire or explode than a gasoline leak.
Why, thank you, as a professional in the field of biometrics it has never occurred to us that someone might try to create a spoofed fingerprint. And it has never occurred to us to attempt to detect those, and reject them.
By the way, do you happen to know the dielectric constant of common wood glue? Because I do. As well as gelatin (http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm), amongst other materials.
Well, by most generally accepted criteria I am an intelligent person, and I enjoy watching football. Of course, you don't know me so your statement may still be correct (though I doubt it). At a visceral level, there is a significant level of tension release watching people "beat the hell out of each other". (Actually, most of the guys on the field are pretty friendly to each other - guys on different teams talking and laughing between plays. Just don't go up for a reception over the middle on third and 5).
I don't particularly enjoy the fandom of football, and couldn't tell you what place in the standings my hometown team is (actually, for my hometown, that's pretty easy; even I know it). I can sit and enjoy a game, and walk away afterwards and not be able to tell you the score. I just don't care who wins or loses, but I do enjoy watching the strategy, the speed, the mistakes, and the raw athleticism on display. /frank
So, you watched Mythbusters once, and believe that it applies to all fingerprint sensors, everywhere, and that the state of the art never advances?
Well, we didn't design in any features to deal with hookers and blow, but your TAP isn't going to get you anywhere considering the fingerprint sensor establishes an SSL session with the laptop.
I have a very nice HP enterprise laptop with a fingerprint sensor. The hard disk is fully encrypted, and doesn't even spin up until my fingerprint is verified. No passphrase needed. I'd love to put a camera in the room and watch the operative try to install anything on that machine. /frank
n.b. I also happen to work for the company that designed and built the fingerprint sensor.
Wish I had some mod points for this post.
A third rate hack who pimps his blogs... that's all Phil Plait is.
Well, as a regular reader, I'd say he's more "A first-rate hack who pimps his informative, entertaining (though over-focussed on AGW zealotry) blogs."
If you don't learn anything from his blog, and aren't simply blown away by the galactic imagery he links to, then you're simply dead inside.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE PLASTIC FROM LAST WEEK?
What happened is that you got trolled. Go look at the link in the original story - a photo of Mardi Gras beads badly photoshopped onto the martian surface, and an accompanying story written at about a 10th grade level.