Its a nice little toy, I'd like to see more on the build and less on the PR stunt it was used in, I can't make out what the payload is. Some shots of the damage would be nice too. It wasn't so damaged it couldn't come right back and land, and its unclear where the hunters were at, what they were shooting (sounded kinda small for a shotgun and one of the activists says 22 which would have done much more damage), and most importantly how it weathered the damage. The redundancy of a octacopter seems ideal for this, as they had to expect people out hunting birds would be tempted to shoot at flying stuff. I'm kind of assuming it was the hunters here without any evidence (you can't see them in the video), maybe it was a false flag or something, but a nice build in any case. They mention trying to send it into station holding, which implies an inertial system if not GPS and some sort of flight controls.
The GPS makers took advantage of the lack of adjacent channels to cheap out on the filters. The GPS industry has no license relating to the spectrum in question, they are listening on it by virtue of having poor filters. If the spectrum involved was adjacent to something less important like ISM band (wifi routers etc.) or ham radio, the FCC would probably have said "by better filters you idiots, you only bought the bit you are sitting on ". But this is a case where if you screw up big enough not only to affect yourself, but everyone else, everyone else has your back. To be completely fair though, enough power would overload any filter and designing for the environment is part of it, so the FCC puts quiet things next to sensitive things, and groups loud things together to give similar dynamic range. In short, the FCC is doing their job, the GPS folks kind of didn't but not in any criminal fashion.
The lavarnd.org folks have all the source you need and a reference implementation that literally is webcam stuffed in a dark can. When you can get such high quality entropy for less than US $30, it seems like anything else must just be for fun. Some opaque tape over the camera on many laptops should work fine too.
I like the analogy of fish moving to land. They didn't build water domes, they didn't wear water suits, and they most certainly didn't modify the land to be more like the sea. The fish themselves changed. I am not proposing we wait for random mutations to make us capable of living in hard vacuum off of nothing but radiation and interstellar gas. I am proposing that we divorce our idea of what defines us as humanity from the animal homo sapiens sapiens, and work on ways to modify ourselves to be more adapted to our environment(s). Hairless apes are never going to thrive in space, but humanity might.
I learn primarily by listening not reading, or writing. This is not that uncommon. The reading and writing helps though. Trying to teach the concept verbally to someone else is the final test and also a learning experience. This learning style means that watching a lecture online where I can pause and back up if my attention waivers or I can't keep up with the discussion, is even more valuable than a meatspace lecture, unless it is one-on-one instruction where I can be allowed to stop the discussion to ask questions and repeat what I think I've heard in different ways to verify my understanding. Specifically the Gilbert Strang lectures(MIT OCW) on linear algebra were great at refreshing my memory on a class that was poorly taught my first time around. If I had been learning the material for the first time I agree that performing the written work and readings that went with the lectures would have also been necessary. As for getting stuck, its amazing how helpful the internet community can be for that as well, though in my case coworkers would be sufficient, there really are few substitutes for being surrounded by brilliant people.
If we detected a neutrino pulse would we have a good enough estimate of direction to look for the light? Or even the notion that we *should* look for a pulse of light several years later in the same region of sky? If we did record both by happenstance, would anyone have correlated the two events? That is weird enough that I'm thinking they wouldn't.
The violence won't decrease unless the stakes of the game (price of drugs, and punishment for being caught) decrease. If the regulations and quality controls keep the current suppliers (the cartels) out of the new market, or if the price of meeting those controls added to the cost of the taxes, still creates a large incentive to smuggle, there will still be smuggling and violence. Great care would need to be taken to make sure that the effects of legalization include a dramatic price drop of the drugs in question so that no one will be willing to risk a murder charge for the profit involved in smuggling it.
As to those who stand to lose by legalization, we should look at what opium did to China's society and make sure we have a plan by which our whole society doesn't lose. Some drugs became illegal for a good reason.
Comparable equipment has traditionally cost in the 10s of thousands. Only in the last two or three years has it been in the home hobbyist range. Granted its not cheap, but its about the same as a good gaming rig. And its far less than car or shooting enthusiasts tend to spend. That said, the $1700 only includes the motherboard (fpga and ADC/DAC) and enclosure, not the receiver. The receivers range from a hundred to almost five hundred depending on what you need. Same API to control all of them though. If you want to mess with the fpga instead of doing it all on the PC you probably want the slightly cheaper motherboard so you can use the free xilinx webpack ise instead of the crazy expensive one.
Comblocks also has a nice SDR offering but getting it to the PC at a decent speed is still around $800 at least, and I don't know how clean the software interface is.
Slapping an fpga and highspeed ADC onto a custom PCB is easy enough, you can get such things from knjn prebuilt, but you really need gigabit ethernet or faster to do software processing on significant bandwidth and those sorts of interfaces tend to need five and six layer PCBs which aren't DIY and jack up the price. Perhaps the USB3 interfaces will be more hobby friendly. You still need a software controlled wideband receiver too, maybe heathkit will step up on that one.
All in all, the USRP is reasonable, though its been getting more expensive due to more features, and NI buying them might be involved too, NI doesn't tend to make cheap stuff.
I wondered about this, but I'm concerned that the rock types might not be very conductive, or even have a very high specific heat in the absence of water. Pumice for instance would make a terrible heat sink.
The lack of air means they are going to have trouble dumping heat. From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used. The temperature gradient will be much less than could be easily obtained on earth via water or even convective cooling. I am not a nuclear engineer but having had thermo I suspect that this difference in heat dumping ability would work its way back into the reactor design as well. I also remember from thermo that heat engines are always more efficient as they get bigger, so the size and weight constraints this design has would make for a very wasteful use of our resources here on earth.
I do however think that we need to have next-gen nuclear plants in our array of power sources.
I agree, if the best time to feed the animals is four hours after noon, then its wrong to say 4pm, as 4pm is more or less than 4h after noon depending on where in the time zone you are. Absolute time is absolutely better. I think I may switch, if I only provide times in UTC everyone is sure to jump on board, or kill me.
If it will take us a century to switch, it a reason to switch sooner not later. Best get the pain out of the way. It will make things easier and less arbitrary, what scientist/engineer could be against that? Hmm...
There are spreadsheets that contain data that the company needs to be kept secure. If the argument is that they should be in gnumeric or open office that's one thing, but even they have scripting languages in them. Furthermore there is source that needs to be written and compiled and tested in secure environments. Simply denying the user all access to executable languages is not an option for some secure systems. Even denying physical access is probably not possible in some test labs. What fits for NORAD doesn't fit for everyone. No easy answers just lots of diligence and mistakes and hard lessons.
It was an exaggeration, there are text editors for VMS that haven't required a bug fix in decades. There is almost no chance that between its maturity and simplicity that it still has security holes. However his point is that its not a black and white problem of executable or not executable. Writing a secure text editor is easier than writing a secure word processor, media codecs are not parsing executable files by intent, but there have been holes in them anyway. Its a continuum of increasing complexity and decreasing security from text editors to mp3 players, to sandboxed javascript to piping turing complete languages off the internet directly into your kernel space (webGL). The simple knee-jerk against scripting is misguided both in the sense that the value of adding scripting can in some situations outweigh the risks, and in the sense that a format that isn't intended to have executable content but can still be an avenue of attack.
My uncle had a small blind dog, and it fairly quickly learned the position of all the furniture in his house and would run around like it was sighted. Course, my uncle wasn't quite right and would move things so he could watch the dog run into them at full speed...
it talks about the *chemical* reactivity of gold when the explanation was referring to the nuclear reactivity of gold. It then talks about the radioactive decay of gold when normal gold (Au196) doesn't decay at all. Not that I'm proposing the explanation is right, just that the rebuttal is wonky. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gold+&a=*MC.gold+196-_*Isotope-
How long before some cult leader acquires a fission device or three and declares a tiny country inside some other country based on your second premise? Charles Stross describes a world where anyone has the tech to make one, so that bad hair days can turn into glass wastelands, but doesn't address what slightly more rational actors might do with the power to snuff out cities.
Meaning we can all chuckle at the impotence of the DMCA whilst we snag a copy of the i3_2_i7.tgz file that will exist in 3.. 2.. 1..
Used to be you had to do hardware mods to unlock the extra multipliers, if it was even possible at all without decasing the thing. This is a good thing for geeks in that prices for good hardware will be artificially lowered for those willing to do a bit of torrenting and twiddling. From a big picture though, Intel is destroying value it already created by limiting chips below their potential. The reason it works is that people who want the best are willing to pay a lot more, but there aren't that many of them. Its a way to get people to pay what they are willing to pay. Amazon talked about using past purchases to gauge how much a buyer would be willing to spend and then charge that price, so that different people payed different amounts for the same items. This is essentially the same thing, as the unlock software does not actually represent value added in the sense it took negligible effort to create.
If Motorola is targeting Android manufacturers that implies that it is something about Android that is infringing Motorola's patents. Since Android only consists of software, the patents it is infringing by definition must be software patents.
LA only has slightly more lax gun laws than London, and the shop the GP was talking about wasn't an isolated incident. Koreatown was isolated by the riots so that the police weren't there. The residents organized an armed resistance and survived the riots by carrying out a protracted gun battle against the rioters.
And our murder rate... I'm afraid that is down to our culture. In the U.S. you could outlaw pointy sticks and not affect our murder rate. We are just seriously violent people. Which means the U.S. really shouldn't be used as an argument for or against firearms controls in European nations. Better to look at examples like Czech Republic and Belgium to predict the effect of more lax gun laws in the UK would be. Switzerland's low murder rate with high gun ownership is likely also due to a unique culture (and high standard of living) and not replicable elsewhere.
I went and installed a little FFT python TKinter script I wrote at the local store to see if it would run and what it would look like. I just plugged in my thumb drive and dragged over the script then ran it, so perhaps "install" is a strong word. I was so impressed with how the TKinter looked native on OSX I bought a macbook pro. I think my actions were completely legitimate. They have them there to try things so I did.
I don't think computer crimes is the right thing to go after him for. The machines are there for you to use and they don't have any conditions of use that you agree to. Taking pictures of people for a (seemingly) commercial endeavor without their permission should be the charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a nice little toy, I'd like to see more on the build and less on the PR stunt it was used in, I can't make out what the payload is. Some shots of the damage would be nice too. It wasn't so damaged it couldn't come right back and land, and its unclear where the hunters were at, what they were shooting (sounded kinda small for a shotgun and one of the activists says 22 which would have done much more damage), and most importantly how it weathered the damage. The redundancy of a octacopter seems ideal for this, as they had to expect people out hunting birds would be tempted to shoot at flying stuff. I'm kind of assuming it was the hunters here without any evidence (you can't see them in the video), maybe it was a false flag or something, but a nice build in any case. They mention trying to send it into station holding, which implies an inertial system if not GPS and some sort of flight controls.
The GPS makers took advantage of the lack of adjacent channels to cheap out on the filters. The GPS industry has no license relating to the spectrum in question, they are listening on it by virtue of having poor filters. If the spectrum involved was adjacent to something less important like ISM band (wifi routers etc.) or ham radio, the FCC would probably have said "by better filters you idiots, you only bought the bit you are sitting on ". But this is a case where if you screw up big enough not only to affect yourself, but everyone else, everyone else has your back. To be completely fair though, enough power would overload any filter and designing for the environment is part of it, so the FCC puts quiet things next to sensitive things, and groups loud things together to give similar dynamic range. In short, the FCC is doing their job, the GPS folks kind of didn't but not in any criminal fashion.
The lavarnd.org folks have all the source you need and a reference implementation that literally is webcam stuffed in a dark can. When you can get such high quality entropy for less than US $30, it seems like anything else must just be for fun. Some opaque tape over the camera on many laptops should work fine too.
I like the analogy of fish moving to land. They didn't build water domes, they didn't wear water suits, and they most certainly didn't modify the land to be more like the sea. The fish themselves changed. I am not proposing we wait for random mutations to make us capable of living in hard vacuum off of nothing but radiation and interstellar gas. I am proposing that we divorce our idea of what defines us as humanity from the animal homo sapiens sapiens, and work on ways to modify ourselves to be more adapted to our environment(s). Hairless apes are never going to thrive in space, but humanity might.
I learn primarily by listening not reading, or writing. This is not that uncommon. The reading and writing helps though. Trying to teach the concept verbally to someone else is the final test and also a learning experience. This learning style means that watching a lecture online where I can pause and back up if my attention waivers or I can't keep up with the discussion, is even more valuable than a meatspace lecture, unless it is one-on-one instruction where I can be allowed to stop the discussion to ask questions and repeat what I think I've heard in different ways to verify my understanding. Specifically the Gilbert Strang lectures(MIT OCW) on linear algebra were great at refreshing my memory on a class that was poorly taught my first time around. If I had been learning the material for the first time I agree that performing the written work and readings that went with the lectures would have also been necessary. As for getting stuck, its amazing how helpful the internet community can be for that as well, though in my case coworkers would be sufficient, there really are few substitutes for being surrounded by brilliant people.
If we detected a neutrino pulse would we have a good enough estimate of direction to look for the light? Or even the notion that we *should* look for a pulse of light several years later in the same region of sky? If we did record both by happenstance, would anyone have correlated the two events? That is weird enough that I'm thinking they wouldn't.
The violence won't decrease unless the stakes of the game (price of drugs, and punishment for being caught) decrease. If the regulations and quality controls keep the current suppliers (the cartels) out of the new market, or if the price of meeting those controls added to the cost of the taxes, still creates a large incentive to smuggle, there will still be smuggling and violence. Great care would need to be taken to make sure that the effects of legalization include a dramatic price drop of the drugs in question so that no one will be willing to risk a murder charge for the profit involved in smuggling it.
As to those who stand to lose by legalization, we should look at what opium did to China's society and make sure we have a plan by which our whole society doesn't lose. Some drugs became illegal for a good reason.
Comparable equipment has traditionally cost in the 10s of thousands. Only in the last two or three years has it been in the home hobbyist range. Granted its not cheap, but its about the same as a good gaming rig. And its far less than car or shooting enthusiasts tend to spend. That said, the $1700 only includes the motherboard (fpga and ADC/DAC) and enclosure, not the receiver. The receivers range from a hundred to almost five hundred depending on what you need. Same API to control all of them though. If you want to mess with the fpga instead of doing it all on the PC you probably want the slightly cheaper motherboard so you can use the free xilinx webpack ise instead of the crazy expensive one.
Comblocks also has a nice SDR offering but getting it to the PC at a decent speed is still around $800 at least, and I don't know how clean the software interface is.
Slapping an fpga and highspeed ADC onto a custom PCB is easy enough, you can get such things from knjn prebuilt, but you really need gigabit ethernet or faster to do software processing on significant bandwidth and those sorts of interfaces tend to need five and six layer PCBs which aren't DIY and jack up the price. Perhaps the USB3 interfaces will be more hobby friendly. You still need a software controlled wideband receiver too, maybe heathkit will step up on that one.
All in all, the USRP is reasonable, though its been getting more expensive due to more features, and NI buying them might be involved too, NI doesn't tend to make cheap stuff.
I wondered about this, but I'm concerned that the rock types might not be very conductive, or even have a very high specific heat in the absence of water. Pumice for instance would make a terrible heat sink.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsCold
The lack of air means they are going to have trouble dumping heat. From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used. The temperature gradient will be much less than could be easily obtained on earth via water or even convective cooling. I am not a nuclear engineer but having had thermo I suspect that this difference in heat dumping ability would work its way back into the reactor design as well. I also remember from thermo that heat engines are always more efficient as they get bigger, so the size and weight constraints this design has would make for a very wasteful use of our resources here on earth.
I do however think that we need to have next-gen nuclear plants in our array of power sources.
this annoys me even with local time
I agree, if the best time to feed the animals is four hours after noon, then its wrong to say 4pm, as 4pm is more or less than 4h after noon depending on where in the time zone you are. Absolute time is absolutely better. I think I may switch, if I only provide times in UTC everyone is sure to jump on board, or kill me.
If it will take us a century to switch, it a reason to switch sooner not later. Best get the pain out of the way. It will make things easier and less arbitrary, what scientist/engineer could be against that? Hmm...
Zero longitude gets noon at noon, date line gets new day at noon. He said UTC which would make it thus.
There are spreadsheets that contain data that the company needs to be kept secure. If the argument is that they should be in gnumeric or open office that's one thing, but even they have scripting languages in them. Furthermore there is source that needs to be written and compiled and tested in secure environments. Simply denying the user all access to executable languages is not an option for some secure systems. Even denying physical access is probably not possible in some test labs. What fits for NORAD doesn't fit for everyone. No easy answers just lots of diligence and mistakes and hard lessons.
It was an exaggeration, there are text editors for VMS that haven't required a bug fix in decades. There is almost no chance that between its maturity and simplicity that it still has security holes. However his point is that its not a black and white problem of executable or not executable. Writing a secure text editor is easier than writing a secure word processor, media codecs are not parsing executable files by intent, but there have been holes in them anyway. Its a continuum of increasing complexity and decreasing security from text editors to mp3 players, to sandboxed javascript to piping turing complete languages off the internet directly into your kernel space (webGL). The simple knee-jerk against scripting is misguided both in the sense that the value of adding scripting can in some situations outweigh the risks, and in the sense that a format that isn't intended to have executable content but can still be an avenue of attack.
My uncle had a small blind dog, and it fairly quickly learned the position of all the furniture in his house and would run around like it was sighted. Course, my uncle wasn't quite right and would move things so he could watch the dog run into them at full speed...
it talks about the *chemical* reactivity of gold when the explanation was referring to the nuclear reactivity of gold. It then talks about the radioactive decay of gold when normal gold (Au196) doesn't decay at all. Not that I'm proposing the explanation is right, just that the rebuttal is wonky.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gold+&a=*MC.gold+196-_*Isotope-
How long before some cult leader acquires a fission device or three and declares a tiny country inside some other country based on your second premise? Charles Stross describes a world where anyone has the tech to make one, so that bad hair days can turn into glass wastelands, but doesn't address what slightly more rational actors might do with the power to snuff out cities.
Meaning we can all chuckle at the impotence of the DMCA whilst we snag a copy of the i3_2_i7.tgz file that will exist in 3.. 2.. 1..
Used to be you had to do hardware mods to unlock the extra multipliers, if it was even possible at all without decasing the thing. This is a good thing for geeks in that prices for good hardware will be artificially lowered for those willing to do a bit of torrenting and twiddling. From a big picture though, Intel is destroying value it already created by limiting chips below their potential. The reason it works is that people who want the best are willing to pay a lot more, but there aren't that many of them. Its a way to get people to pay what they are willing to pay. Amazon talked about using past purchases to gauge how much a buyer would be willing to spend and then charge that price, so that different people payed different amounts for the same items. This is essentially the same thing, as the unlock software does not actually represent value added in the sense it took negligible effort to create.
If Motorola is targeting Android manufacturers that implies that it is something about Android that is infringing Motorola's patents. Since Android only consists of software, the patents it is infringing by definition must be software patents.
LA only has slightly more lax gun laws than London, and the shop the GP was talking about wasn't an isolated incident. Koreatown was isolated by the riots so that the police weren't there. The residents organized an armed resistance and survived the riots by carrying out a protracted gun battle against the rioters.
And our murder rate... I'm afraid that is down to our culture. In the U.S. you could outlaw pointy sticks and not affect our murder rate. We are just seriously violent people. Which means the U.S. really shouldn't be used as an argument for or against firearms controls in European nations. Better to look at examples like Czech Republic and Belgium to predict the effect of more lax gun laws in the UK would be. Switzerland's low murder rate with high gun ownership is likely also due to a unique culture (and high standard of living) and not replicable elsewhere.
If any of your names are Hussein, you are being surveiled, no exceptions...
I went and installed a little FFT python TKinter script I wrote at the local store to see if it would run and what it would look like. I just plugged in my thumb drive and dragged over the script then ran it, so perhaps "install" is a strong word. I was so impressed with how the TKinter looked native on OSX I bought a macbook pro. I think my actions were completely legitimate. They have them there to try things so I did.
I don't think computer crimes is the right thing to go after him for. The machines are there for you to use and they don't have any conditions of use that you agree to. Taking pictures of people for a (seemingly) commercial endeavor without their permission should be the charge.