We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?
Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them. We've been listening for radio transmissions for a small number of decades; the fact that we haven't detected any alien transmissions just means that no transmissions which are strong enough for us to detect and are modulated in a way that we would notice have arrived at Earth during that very narrow window. Our entire recorded history is also very short compared to 10 billion years, and we'd be unlikely to know about any alien visits which could have occurred before we developed enough to pass on historical information to our children.
I just don't buy the premise that other civilizations are unlikely to exist simply because we haven't detected them yet. 10 billion years is a long time, but the universe (and even just this galaxy) is a big place, we haven't been around for very long, we've been actively looking for signs of other intelligent life for an extremely short amount of time, and it seems to me that even our ideas about what we should look for are tainted by the assumption that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be something like us and see the universe in a similar way.
...and so, spammer will turn to Identiry Theft and using other peoples credit cards to pay for their spam.
Not necessarily. If the barrier cost is set high enough, then anybody who's inclined to steal credit cards would be better off using their stolen money to buy things, rather than using it to pay for spam mailings. Identity theft and credit card theft are major problems, but they exist independently from spam, and require their own solutions (and I don't have any suggestions for them at this time). There's overlap and interaction between various kinds of theft and spam, but they're still fundamentally different problems with different root causes.
Spam is really a very old problem. Before email spam, there were postal spam and telemarketing. Before those, there were door-to-door salesman (both honest ones and con artists). Before those, there were beggars accosting people in the street and stall owners hawking their wares to passers-by. Fundamentally, spam is the result of unscrupulous people trying to get the attention of a large number of strangers for personal gain. That gain may be direct or indirect, depending on whether they're pushing their own scheme or spamming for hire. The gain may be in the form of profits from the goods or services being pushed, money resulting from a scam they're running, gains from insider trading in a pump and dump scheme, or even an intangible motivation such as a true believer evangelizing their chosen political party, religion, or other cause.
Modern email spam differs from postal spam, telemarketing and aggressive face-to-face marketing only in volume... a single email spammer can target millions of people in a short period of time, and a single person can be deluged with hundreds or even thousands of annoying and unwanted email messages during a short span. Other than that, email spam is fundamentally the same as things that have been going on throughout history. What all of those things share is that a small number of people annoy a large number of people by stealing their attention in order to realize some personal gain (most commonly an economic gain).
I guess that at its roots, spam is a problem of human nature (and thus practically impossible to solve at that level), but just above that it's an economic problem that demands an economic solution. The promising thing is that since this is an economic problem being exploited through a technological medium, there may be technical ways to implement that economic solution that were never available in previous incarnations of spam. While a purely technical solution that does not directly target the economy of spam (such as spam filtering) cannot eliminate spam for the reasons I explained above, and a legal solution will also be ineffective as I have explained, there's promise for a technical solution which directly passes a higher cost on to the spammers, to the point where they look for other ways to make their money, or at least other targets.
All current spam filtering methods that I know of act at the receiving end and try to block incoming spam messages from getting to their recipients. It's still easy and cheap enough for spammers to try sending spam that there's incentive for them to engage in what's effectively an arms race with the filter developers. What we need is an effective way to make the spammers stop trying in the first place, without breaking the communications channels for everybody else. We need to address the root cause of spam, because we'll never solve the problem by simply treating the symptoms.
There are 2 steps to stop this ( well 3, actually )
1 - death ( yes, death, not jail ) for conviced spammers ( oh, and make it painful and long too )
2 - any company caught knowingly using spam as a way to advertise is forced to shut down and they lose all thier assets ( including personal )
You're advocating a legislative solution to spam, and it won't work for the same reasons that outlawing certain drugs doesn't stop drug trafficking, outlawing certain kinds of guns doesn't stop violence with guns, etc.: The people who you're trying to control with those laws don't respect the law in the first place, and in any case enough of them aren't scared enough of getting caught and prosecuted to keep them from breaking those laws. Furthermore, spam is a global problem and you'll never get every single jurisdiction in the world to pass compatible anti-spam laws and then cooperate with each other to go after spammers. Sometimes I get frustrated by a surge of spam and briefly entertain a sick fantasy involving a spammer's shins and an aluminum baseball bat, but I know that would never solve the spam problem.
I'd argue that in the cases of the drug trade and the old U.S. alcohol prohibition, the anti-[whatever] laws just drove up end prices and made trafficking more profitable for the [whatever]-runners, though I don't think that a similar effect would apply to spam because the supply vs. demand structure is different.
Fundamentally, both email spam and physical mail spam exist because the incremental cost of sending a single message is low enough that an unscrupulous person can send a huge volume of messages with a very low response rate, and still turn a profit. As long as that is the case, spam will continue to exist, whether in its current forms or some unforeseen form which targets some future communications medium.
Botnets aren't the problem; they're a problem which happens to provide a convenient tool for spammers. Spam filters, whitelists, blacklists, etc. will not stop spam, because they target symptoms, not the root cause. The anonymity available in email and postal mail (i.e., the sender's ability to list any return address that they want without authentication) makes it harder to filter spam and/or track down the spammers, but it doesn't cause the problem in the first place.
The only way to permanently and thoroughly solve a problem like spam is to go after the root cause, and only divert as much time, money and attention to the symptoms as is necessary to get by until the root cause is eliminated. In the case of spam (both email and postal), the root cause is the very low cost of sending a single message to an arbitrary address (where cost includes time, effort and money), and any spam filtering just targets symptoms without addressing the root cause.
Any time and money spent on things like improving spam filtering actually diverts resources from solving the real problem. Some of that is necessary, because today's SMTP-based email would be thoroughly unusable without it, but we'll never solve the problem that way.
The only way to eliminate spam is to remove the financial incentive by making the incremental cost of sending a single message to an arbitrary address too high for spammers to turn a profit. That's a lot easier said than done; if it cost a sender, say, 100 US dollars to send a single message, the flow of spam would stop, but so would almost all non-spam use of that messaging medium. The hard part will be to find a way to raise the cost for spammers beyond profitability, while still allowing fast, cheap, electronic person-to-person messaging for all people who can afford to have a computer (or at least access to one) in the first place. Legislative approaches to spam try to do this by attaching a very high cost (high fines, jail time, aluminum baseball bats applied to shins with a wonderful meaty >tink< sound, etc.) to the few spammers caught, in hopes that [punishment cost]
The problem here is that people equate one 450 person aircraft with more value that of 40,000 fatalities due to automobile accidents.
That's an excellent point. I'd rather have defensive armaments on my truck to protect me from the nutcases I encounter on my daily commute.;-)
But seriously, this idea sounds like a thoroughly stupid waste of money to fix a non-problem. Which is not at all surprising coming from Barbara Boxer.
Why, well first is convenience. I am busy and would rather be able to go to one website, enter in my search (usually redhead, teen and anal) and get the movies they have right there without having to sift through the results to see what is good.
I really wish there was a "-1 Too Informative" mod.:-)
One point that I don't think the Wikipedia description made clear enough is that Assisted GPS allows significantly higher acquisition sensitivity than conventional GPS. An Assisted GPS receiver with proper aiding information from the cell network can acquire a fix at signal levels much weaker than what a normal GPS receiver would need for tracking, let alone acquisition (a GPS receiver can continue tracking satellites at lower signal levels than it needs for acquisition). This allows A-GPS equipped phones to get a fix indoors in conditions where conventional GPS receivers can't see any satellites. The position error may be a lot higher than it would be in clear sky (due to lower signal levels, multipath distortion, poor visible satellite geometry, etc.), but it can still be good enough to narrow the phone's location down to a single building. I've even seen an A-GPS receiver acquire a fix inside an elevator.
An A-GPS receiver starts out knowing roughly where it's located (based on cell site information), what satellites are visible, where they are and what their Doppler offsets are, precisely what time it is, and (at least in CDMA phones) it has a very accurate and stable frequency reference derived from the cell network, before it even starts listening for satellites. A conventional GPS receiver starts off with much less information, i.e. a much less accurate time value from a battery-backed clock, its last location (which may or may not be close to its current location), satellite information from the last time it operated (which may be out of date), and a local frequency reference which has most likely drifted since the last time it was used and doesn't benefit from being phase-locked to much more accurate frequency references present in the cell network. All of this stuff affects both acquisition sensitivity and time-to-first-fix.
Disclaimer: I'm not a GPS expert, but I am an engineer in the GPS industry and I design and build GPS hardware for a living.
No, those old power transformers just had lots of windings to make lots of different voltages needed by the circuits in the scope. Voltage regulators weren't nearly as easy to make back in the tube days as they are now, and power supply circuits tended to be very crude compared to what's commonplace today. Tube equipment like those old Tek scopes would commonly have a separate secondary winding for each voltage needed, with passive filtering and little or no regulation. If a power supply output was regulated, it was commonly done with a voltage regulator tube (basically just a calibrated neon light bulb) dumping current through a resistor (comparable to regulating voltage with a Zener diode and a resistor, which results in poor regulation and very poor efficiency), or in some cases a ballast tube (basically, a funky incandescent lightbulb designed such that it passes a roughly constant current over some range of operation) operating into a fixed load such as a string of tube filaments.
The power transformer doesn't clean anything up, it just multiplies/divides the AC line voltage. Any "cleaning" in such a set would be done with series chokes, shunt capacitors, etc.
I'm scratching that system off of my list of possible destinations if we manage to run our current ecosystem into the ground and need to send refugees off to a replacement.
Don't scratch it off the list... send the B-Ark there!
The other nice thing about smaller weapons is that they can assist you in getting bigger weapons. So while a pistol versus an M-16 in a straight-on fight is useless, if you are able to sneak up on the guy carrying the M-16 and shoot him with your pistol, you can take his M-16.
Right. In fact, a crude single-shot pistol called the "Liberator" was mass-produced during WW2 with the intention of dropping large quantities of them behind enemy lines in Europe, so that resistance fighters could then use them to liberate better weapons from Axis soldiers.
According to TFA, the infected Windows machine was used for compatibility testing. Do you work for Apple? How do you know what kind of machines they use in their iPod manufacturing process?
It literally is tactile - the sound is recorded in the physical groove/pits
On mass-produced CDs, the sound is recorded in physical pits arranged in a spiral, which are mechanically pressed into the metal layer of the disc in pretty much the same way that the groove is pressed onto a record blank. The pits are too small to feel (and they're coated with a layer of varnish, anyway), so the CD isn't as tactile, but it's still just as physical.
Not only do the cheap locks (which are known as "cam locks") commonly used on things like desk drawers, toilet paper dispensers, cheap filing cabinets, etc. have a small number of distinct keyings, but they're also usually very easy to pick because of their sloppy construction and very loose manufacturing tolerances. Any key that fits in the keyway can generally be used as a pick to open the lock, by simply wiggling the key and pulling it in and out of the lock while turning it with the right amount of pressure. For example, if you work in a cubicle farm and have the key to your desk, you could probably open 90% or more of the other desks in the building with your key after a little bit of practice.
Although the article didn't appear to identify the specific kind of lock used, it sounds like a common and cheap wafer tumbler cam lock to me. That kind of lock is generally trivially easy to open without leaving any obvious sign of entry, with a quick demonstration of the technique, a small amount of practice and no real skill.
I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that Diebold deliberataly made the machine easy to physically compromise. This could easily be a matter of ignorance and incompetence. I've found that most folks seem to be completely ignorant about how locks work, what makes a good one or a bad one, etc. When I show cow orkers how easy it is to open their desks with other keys, they're usually pretty stunned... even highly educated and technically skilled engineers, who simply were never curious enough about locks to play with them at all. Heck, I was opening those kinds of locks back in elementary school, because I was curious enough about them to check out a few books about locks and locksmithing at the public library.
You know the problem of voter fraud/rigging machines could be greatly simplified if we just did away with the ballot being secret.
No, that would be far worse. The whole point of having secret ballots is to help prevent outright buying of votes. If ballots are not secret, then person A can offer person B (and persons C, D, E...) money for them to vote a particular way (or alternately, threaten them if they don't do so), then easily verify that they voted as they were told to. With secret ballots, person A can't tell how their bribed or threatened voters voted, so they can't verify that their coerced voters earned their bribes or dodged their beatings.
Making ballots public would only open up another way to subvert the system, and do so in a way that's even harder to detect than any shenanigans with the voting machines or ballots.
Shads wrote:
You're 100% healthy, find a mythical 10 shot revolver, load 9 chambers with blanks and one with a real bullet, give the chamber a spin and put it to your head and pull the trigger.
Sigh. Following those directions would likely be fatal whether the live cartridge or one of the blanks landed under the hammer. For example, actor Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself by firing a blank against his head with a prop gun on the set of some crappy TV show in the 80's.
In fact, if my front door is WIDE-OPEN, It doesn't mean you can come in. The mosquitos, flies and other bugs come in, and you know what happends to them?
I'm rather familiar with the military HMMWV, as I own a USMC surplus one. The military HMMWV has a heavy steel frame and suspension, but the body is made from light sheet aluminum, with a fiberglass hood. The basic (and most common) models of the HMMWV have no armor at all, and the doors and top are vinyl-covered cloth (when they're even installed). Even many of the armored variants would be torn apart by a landmine or penetrated by direct hits from projectiles, as their armor is mainly intended to protect the occupants from shrapnel, or in the case of the TOW missile carriers from spall from the missile launcher. The hard doors used on some hard-top models with the visible "X" reinforcement are just fiberglass with no armor, and the next level of armor just adds a thin sheet of armor plate riveted on top of that... it'll help against schrapnel or spall, but a rifle bullet will still punch through. On the unarmored HMMWVs, there's nothing between the occupants and a landmine but a light sheet aluminum floor. In fact, it's common for older USMC trucks to have lots of extra holes in the floor to help drain out water after beach landings and so forth, punched in with axes, bayonets, bullets, or whatever else is handy. The floor/body wouldn't stop a stabbing, let alone a landmine!
The civilan Hummer H1 is built on the same chassis and body as the military HMMWV, with a lot of cosmetic stuff slapped on in the interior to make them a bit less uncomfortable to drive. The electrical and fuel systems are different, but most of the rest of the engine/drivetrain is pretty much the same in models with the GM diesel engine (the gasoline-powered models obviously had a different engine). The civilian hard doors have better side-impact protection if I'm not mistaken. It's basically the same as the military truck with most of the same capabilities, and has been prettied up a bit for the civilian market.
The H2 and H3 have nothing in common with the military HMMWV except the "Hummer" name. They're civilian trucks with some cosmetic crap to make them look boxier, meant to be sold to dumb yuppies who can't distinguish between form and function. I spit in their general direction.
I attended Caltech for one year (86-87), and was in Fleming Hovse, in fact. Was a social Mole, too. Lived in room pi (AKA the powder room). Flunked out most heinously.
At the time, our cannon was locked down with kryptonite locks at each wheel set into the concrete. The south hovse basement renovation was under way at the time. Nothing like being awakened at 7AM by a hammer drill in the concrete under your floor, or the sound of a fish tape running through a conduit inches from your head, after staying up until about 5:30 doing homework. Ah, the good ol' days! The Moles had been renovated, and one of the other houses, too (I don't remember whether it was the Scurvs or the Darbs; didn't spend much time in either hovse).
I never had any trouble talking myself out of anything with security, but as a naive frosh it took me a while to figure out that I was pretty safe as long as I was carrying my Caltech ID card and not setting anything on fire. Other comments here about the security being deliberately lax w.r.t Caltech students don't sound at all unlikely to me... the Caltech community has a strong honor code, and Caltech students are given a great deal of freedom and responsibility from day one (after indoctrination at Camp Fox, that is). It may be hard for folks who haven't spent time there to understand how different the environment there is from other schools.
The freedom and responsibility is a double-edged sword. It undoubtedly fosters creativity, but it's also a bit much for some folks to handle all of a sudden. I'd say that was a factor in my not passing enough classes to stay on, along with the difficulty of the work there. College can be a difficult adjustment to make after high school, anyway, and going from being near the top of the heap in high school to being a low-grade moron compared to my classmates at Caltech was rough! The experience was well worth it despite being a bit, er, shaken, for a while afterwards... where else can a frosh fab their own ICs in class by day, then help some random grad student they bumped into in the student machine shop install a new part on his gravity wave detector at night?
Good point. The bones that these synthetic muscles are attached to should be replaced with new ones made out of something interesting like carbon fiber or titanium. I'd think the skeletal replacement problem would be much easier to solve than figuring out how to splice the fake muscles into the nervous system in a useful manner.
Sometimes things come back from the grave, too. Now I can listen to those old radio shows, as well as newly-made radio shows in the same vein, on my fancy-schmancy satellite radio receiver while I'm driving home from work.
Actually a permanent magnet does have chemical energy [...] Extracting this energy would require something vastly different that just altering the flux flow. Probably would require chemical extraction.
There is a well-known method for extracting that chemical energy. We call it "burning".
Also, running a strong magnet over the hard drive would erase the password as it erased the files, keeping the files safe, but also allowing you to erase the whole drive, and use it again without knowing the password.
No, that would also erase the servo patterns, leaving the hard drive completely dead.
Unlike floppy disk drives, which position the read/write heads with a stepper motor and are capable of reformatting blank media in the field, hard drives use special patterns encoded onto the platters to locate tracks and position the read/write heads over them. These servo patterns are written in the factory using very specialized and expensive equipment (not like a PROM burner that can be built cheaply; servo writers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars IIRC), and they can't be rewritten in the field.
Once back when I had my WRX, I was waiting at a red light to turn left from a freeway off-ramp. When the light turned green, I checked that it was clear both ways and began my turn. Then I saw that there was a vehicle coming towards the intersection from my left side fast enough that it didn't look like the driver was planning to stop at their red light. This is in the USA (i.e., drive on the right side land), so I was already crossing his path. I judged that if I hit the brakes, there was a good chance that I'd get T-boned if the other car didn't stop. Since I had all of those little horsies under the hood, I down-shifted and floored it. My car's excellent acceleration and handling allowed me to clear the intersection safely. The other driver saw his red light too late (or maybe he didn't see it at all and was just reacting to my car being in the intersection), slammed on his brakes, and came to a stop well into the intersection.
I'm not sure if things would have turned out so well if I was driving a slower car which may not have been capable of accelerating enough to avoid the oncoming car or to make the turn safely at the speed that was necessary. I may have reacted differently if I was driving a different vehicle in the same situation. In that particular situation I was doing my best to drive safely and defensively beforehand, and at that instant I judged that accelerating would be the best option given the situation and my car's performance envelope.
Based on my driving experience, I'd agree that it's much more common to need to suddenly decelerate to avoid a collision than to suddenly accelerate. Still, situations where it's necessary to suddenly accelerate (even beyond the posted speed limit) to avoid a crash do arise sometimes, even when you're paying attention and driving in a safe and legal manner. A safe and defensive driver tries to avoid getting into situations where they need to take sudden evasive actions by anticipating the actions of other drivers and leaving enough room for nearby boneheads to do boneheaded things without hitting them. Still, sometimes you'll encounter another driver whose boneheadedness exceeds reasonable expectations.:-)
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They've had 10 billion years to visit us.
We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?
Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them. We've been listening for radio transmissions for a small number of decades; the fact that we haven't detected any alien transmissions just means that no transmissions which are strong enough for us to detect and are modulated in a way that we would notice have arrived at Earth during that very narrow window. Our entire recorded history is also very short compared to 10 billion years, and we'd be unlikely to know about any alien visits which could have occurred before we developed enough to pass on historical information to our children.
I just don't buy the premise that other civilizations are unlikely to exist simply because we haven't detected them yet. 10 billion years is a long time, but the universe (and even just this galaxy) is a big place, we haven't been around for very long, we've been actively looking for signs of other intelligent life for an extremely short amount of time, and it seems to me that even our ideas about what we should look for are tainted by the assumption that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be something like us and see the universe in a similar way.
...and so, spammer will turn to Identiry Theft and using other peoples credit cards to pay for their spam.Not necessarily. If the barrier cost is set high enough, then anybody who's inclined to steal credit cards would be better off using their stolen money to buy things, rather than using it to pay for spam mailings. Identity theft and credit card theft are major problems, but they exist independently from spam, and require their own solutions (and I don't have any suggestions for them at this time). There's overlap and interaction between various kinds of theft and spam, but they're still fundamentally different problems with different root causes.
Spam is really a very old problem. Before email spam, there were postal spam and telemarketing. Before those, there were door-to-door salesman (both honest ones and con artists). Before those, there were beggars accosting people in the street and stall owners hawking their wares to passers-by. Fundamentally, spam is the result of unscrupulous people trying to get the attention of a large number of strangers for personal gain. That gain may be direct or indirect, depending on whether they're pushing their own scheme or spamming for hire. The gain may be in the form of profits from the goods or services being pushed, money resulting from a scam they're running, gains from insider trading in a pump and dump scheme, or even an intangible motivation such as a true believer evangelizing their chosen political party, religion, or other cause.
Modern email spam differs from postal spam, telemarketing and aggressive face-to-face marketing only in volume... a single email spammer can target millions of people in a short period of time, and a single person can be deluged with hundreds or even thousands of annoying and unwanted email messages during a short span. Other than that, email spam is fundamentally the same as things that have been going on throughout history. What all of those things share is that a small number of people annoy a large number of people by stealing their attention in order to realize some personal gain (most commonly an economic gain).
I guess that at its roots, spam is a problem of human nature (and thus practically impossible to solve at that level), but just above that it's an economic problem that demands an economic solution. The promising thing is that since this is an economic problem being exploited through a technological medium, there may be technical ways to implement that economic solution that were never available in previous incarnations of spam. While a purely technical solution that does not directly target the economy of spam (such as spam filtering) cannot eliminate spam for the reasons I explained above, and a legal solution will also be ineffective as I have explained, there's promise for a technical solution which directly passes a higher cost on to the spammers, to the point where they look for other ways to make their money, or at least other targets.
All current spam filtering methods that I know of act at the receiving end and try to block incoming spam messages from getting to their recipients. It's still easy and cheap enough for spammers to try sending spam that there's incentive for them to engage in what's effectively an arms race with the filter developers. What we need is an effective way to make the spammers stop trying in the first place, without breaking the communications channels for everybody else. We need to address the root cause of spam, because we'll never solve the problem by simply treating the symptoms.
There are 2 steps to stop this ( well 3, actually )
1 - death ( yes, death, not jail ) for conviced spammers ( oh, and make it painful and long too )
2 - any company caught knowingly using spam as a way to advertise is forced to shut down and they lose all thier assets ( including personal )
You're advocating a legislative solution to spam, and it won't work for the same reasons that outlawing certain drugs doesn't stop drug trafficking, outlawing certain kinds of guns doesn't stop violence with guns, etc.: The people who you're trying to control with those laws don't respect the law in the first place, and in any case enough of them aren't scared enough of getting caught and prosecuted to keep them from breaking those laws. Furthermore, spam is a global problem and you'll never get every single jurisdiction in the world to pass compatible anti-spam laws and then cooperate with each other to go after spammers. Sometimes I get frustrated by a surge of spam and briefly entertain a sick fantasy involving a spammer's shins and an aluminum baseball bat, but I know that would never solve the spam problem.
I'd argue that in the cases of the drug trade and the old U.S. alcohol prohibition, the anti-[whatever] laws just drove up end prices and made trafficking more profitable for the [whatever]-runners, though I don't think that a similar effect would apply to spam because the supply vs. demand structure is different.
Fundamentally, both email spam and physical mail spam exist because the incremental cost of sending a single message is low enough that an unscrupulous person can send a huge volume of messages with a very low response rate, and still turn a profit. As long as that is the case, spam will continue to exist, whether in its current forms or some unforeseen form which targets some future communications medium.
Botnets aren't the problem; they're a problem which happens to provide a convenient tool for spammers. Spam filters, whitelists, blacklists, etc. will not stop spam, because they target symptoms, not the root cause. The anonymity available in email and postal mail (i.e., the sender's ability to list any return address that they want without authentication) makes it harder to filter spam and/or track down the spammers, but it doesn't cause the problem in the first place.
The only way to permanently and thoroughly solve a problem like spam is to go after the root cause, and only divert as much time, money and attention to the symptoms as is necessary to get by until the root cause is eliminated. In the case of spam (both email and postal), the root cause is the very low cost of sending a single message to an arbitrary address (where cost includes time, effort and money), and any spam filtering just targets symptoms without addressing the root cause.
Any time and money spent on things like improving spam filtering actually diverts resources from solving the real problem. Some of that is necessary, because today's SMTP-based email would be thoroughly unusable without it, but we'll never solve the problem that way.
The only way to eliminate spam is to remove the financial incentive by making the incremental cost of sending a single message to an arbitrary address too high for spammers to turn a profit. That's a lot easier said than done; if it cost a sender, say, 100 US dollars to send a single message, the flow of spam would stop, but so would almost all non-spam use of that messaging medium. The hard part will be to find a way to raise the cost for spammers beyond profitability, while still allowing fast, cheap, electronic person-to-person messaging for all people who can afford to have a computer (or at least access to one) in the first place. Legislative approaches to spam try to do this by attaching a very high cost (high fines, jail time, aluminum baseball bats applied to shins with a wonderful meaty >tink< sound, etc.) to the few spammers caught, in hopes that [punishment cost]
That's an excellent point. I'd rather have defensive armaments on my truck to protect me from the nutcases I encounter on my daily commute. ;-)
But seriously, this idea sounds like a thoroughly stupid waste of money to fix a non-problem. Which is not at all surprising coming from Barbara Boxer.
I really wish there was a "-1 Too Informative" mod. :-)
One point that I don't think the Wikipedia description made clear enough is that Assisted GPS allows significantly higher acquisition sensitivity than conventional GPS. An Assisted GPS receiver with proper aiding information from the cell network can acquire a fix at signal levels much weaker than what a normal GPS receiver would need for tracking, let alone acquisition (a GPS receiver can continue tracking satellites at lower signal levels than it needs for acquisition). This allows A-GPS equipped phones to get a fix indoors in conditions where conventional GPS receivers can't see any satellites. The position error may be a lot higher than it would be in clear sky (due to lower signal levels, multipath distortion, poor visible satellite geometry, etc.), but it can still be good enough to narrow the phone's location down to a single building. I've even seen an A-GPS receiver acquire a fix inside an elevator.
An A-GPS receiver starts out knowing roughly where it's located (based on cell site information), what satellites are visible, where they are and what their Doppler offsets are, precisely what time it is, and (at least in CDMA phones) it has a very accurate and stable frequency reference derived from the cell network, before it even starts listening for satellites. A conventional GPS receiver starts off with much less information, i.e. a much less accurate time value from a battery-backed clock, its last location (which may or may not be close to its current location), satellite information from the last time it operated (which may be out of date), and a local frequency reference which has most likely drifted since the last time it was used and doesn't benefit from being phase-locked to much more accurate frequency references present in the cell network. All of this stuff affects both acquisition sensitivity and time-to-first-fix.
Disclaimer: I'm not a GPS expert, but I am an engineer in the GPS industry and I design and build GPS hardware for a living.
No, those old power transformers just had lots of windings to make lots of different voltages needed by the circuits in the scope. Voltage regulators weren't nearly as easy to make back in the tube days as they are now, and power supply circuits tended to be very crude compared to what's commonplace today. Tube equipment like those old Tek scopes would commonly have a separate secondary winding for each voltage needed, with passive filtering and little or no regulation. If a power supply output was regulated, it was commonly done with a voltage regulator tube (basically just a calibrated neon light bulb) dumping current through a resistor (comparable to regulating voltage with a Zener diode and a resistor, which results in poor regulation and very poor efficiency), or in some cases a ballast tube (basically, a funky incandescent lightbulb designed such that it passes a roughly constant current over some range of operation) operating into a fixed load such as a string of tube filaments.
The power transformer doesn't clean anything up, it just multiplies/divides the AC line voltage. Any "cleaning" in such a set would be done with series chokes, shunt capacitors, etc.
Don't scratch it off the list... send the B-Ark there!
Right. In fact, a crude single-shot pistol called the "Liberator" was mass-produced during WW2 with the intention of dropping large quantities of them behind enemy lines in Europe, so that resistance fighters could then use them to liberate better weapons from Axis soldiers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator
According to TFA, the infected Windows machine was used for compatibility testing. Do you work for Apple? How do you know what kind of machines they use in their iPod manufacturing process?
It literally is tactile - the sound is recorded in the physical groove/pits
On mass-produced CDs, the sound is recorded in physical pits arranged in a spiral, which are mechanically pressed into the metal layer of the disc in pretty much the same way that the groove is pressed onto a record blank. The pits are too small to feel (and they're coated with a layer of varnish, anyway), so the CD isn't as tactile, but it's still just as physical.
Not only do the cheap locks (which are known as "cam locks") commonly used on things like desk drawers, toilet paper dispensers, cheap filing cabinets, etc. have a small number of distinct keyings, but they're also usually very easy to pick because of their sloppy construction and very loose manufacturing tolerances. Any key that fits in the keyway can generally be used as a pick to open the lock, by simply wiggling the key and pulling it in and out of the lock while turning it with the right amount of pressure. For example, if you work in a cubicle farm and have the key to your desk, you could probably open 90% or more of the other desks in the building with your key after a little bit of practice.
Although the article didn't appear to identify the specific kind of lock used, it sounds like a common and cheap wafer tumbler cam lock to me. That kind of lock is generally trivially easy to open without leaving any obvious sign of entry, with a quick demonstration of the technique, a small amount of practice and no real skill.
I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that Diebold deliberataly made the machine easy to physically compromise. This could easily be a matter of ignorance and incompetence. I've found that most folks seem to be completely ignorant about how locks work, what makes a good one or a bad one, etc. When I show cow orkers how easy it is to open their desks with other keys, they're usually pretty stunned... even highly educated and technically skilled engineers, who simply were never curious enough about locks to play with them at all. Heck, I was opening those kinds of locks back in elementary school, because I was curious enough about them to check out a few books about locks and locksmithing at the public library.
Ten minutes later:
homeless person: "Want a camera? Only $20."
random guy on street corner: "How about I give you this sixpack of beer instead?"
homeless person: "Sold."
;-)
No, that would be far worse. The whole point of having secret ballots is to help prevent outright buying of votes. If ballots are not secret, then person A can offer person B (and persons C, D, E...) money for them to vote a particular way (or alternately, threaten them if they don't do so), then easily verify that they voted as they were told to. With secret ballots, person A can't tell how their bribed or threatened voters voted, so they can't verify that their coerced voters earned their bribes or dodged their beatings.
Making ballots public would only open up another way to subvert the system, and do so in a way that's even harder to detect than any shenanigans with the voting machines or ballots.
Sigh. Following those directions would likely be fatal whether the live cartridge or one of the blanks landed under the hammer. For example, actor Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself by firing a blank against his head with a prop gun on the set of some crappy TV show in the 80's.
They drink your blood?
I'm rather familiar with the military HMMWV, as I own a USMC surplus one. The military HMMWV has a heavy steel frame and suspension, but the body is made from light sheet aluminum, with a fiberglass hood. The basic (and most common) models of the HMMWV have no armor at all, and the doors and top are vinyl-covered cloth (when they're even installed). Even many of the armored variants would be torn apart by a landmine or penetrated by direct hits from projectiles, as their armor is mainly intended to protect the occupants from shrapnel, or in the case of the TOW missile carriers from spall from the missile launcher. The hard doors used on some hard-top models with the visible "X" reinforcement are just fiberglass with no armor, and the next level of armor just adds a thin sheet of armor plate riveted on top of that... it'll help against schrapnel or spall, but a rifle bullet will still punch through. On the unarmored HMMWVs, there's nothing between the occupants and a landmine but a light sheet aluminum floor. In fact, it's common for older USMC trucks to have lots of extra holes in the floor to help drain out water after beach landings and so forth, punched in with axes, bayonets, bullets, or whatever else is handy. The floor/body wouldn't stop a stabbing, let alone a landmine!
The civilan Hummer H1 is built on the same chassis and body as the military HMMWV, with a lot of cosmetic stuff slapped on in the interior to make them a bit less uncomfortable to drive. The electrical and fuel systems are different, but most of the rest of the engine/drivetrain is pretty much the same in models with the GM diesel engine (the gasoline-powered models obviously had a different engine). The civilian hard doors have better side-impact protection if I'm not mistaken. It's basically the same as the military truck with most of the same capabilities, and has been prettied up a bit for the civilian market.
The H2 and H3 have nothing in common with the military HMMWV except the "Hummer" name. They're civilian trucks with some cosmetic crap to make them look boxier, meant to be sold to dumb yuppies who can't distinguish between form and function. I spit in their general direction.
Smooth, Mark. Way to not put in paragraph tags, then submit without previewing.
I attended Caltech for one year (86-87), and was in Fleming Hovse, in fact. Was a social Mole, too. Lived in room pi (AKA the powder room). Flunked out most heinously. At the time, our cannon was locked down with kryptonite locks at each wheel set into the concrete. The south hovse basement renovation was under way at the time. Nothing like being awakened at 7AM by a hammer drill in the concrete under your floor, or the sound of a fish tape running through a conduit inches from your head, after staying up until about 5:30 doing homework. Ah, the good ol' days! The Moles had been renovated, and one of the other houses, too (I don't remember whether it was the Scurvs or the Darbs; didn't spend much time in either hovse). I never had any trouble talking myself out of anything with security, but as a naive frosh it took me a while to figure out that I was pretty safe as long as I was carrying my Caltech ID card and not setting anything on fire. Other comments here about the security being deliberately lax w.r.t Caltech students don't sound at all unlikely to me... the Caltech community has a strong honor code, and Caltech students are given a great deal of freedom and responsibility from day one (after indoctrination at Camp Fox, that is). It may be hard for folks who haven't spent time there to understand how different the environment there is from other schools. The freedom and responsibility is a double-edged sword. It undoubtedly fosters creativity, but it's also a bit much for some folks to handle all of a sudden. I'd say that was a factor in my not passing enough classes to stay on, along with the difficulty of the work there. College can be a difficult adjustment to make after high school, anyway, and going from being near the top of the heap in high school to being a low-grade moron compared to my classmates at Caltech was rough! The experience was well worth it despite being a bit, er, shaken, for a while afterwards... where else can a frosh fab their own ICs in class by day, then help some random grad student they bumped into in the student machine shop install a new part on his gravity wave detector at night?
Good point. The bones that these synthetic muscles are attached to should be replaced with new ones made out of something interesting like carbon fiber or titanium. I'd think the skeletal replacement problem would be much easier to solve than figuring out how to splice the fake muscles into the nervous system in a useful manner.
Sometimes things come back from the grave, too. Now I can listen to those old radio shows, as well as newly-made radio shows in the same vein, on my fancy-schmancy satellite radio receiver while I'm driving home from work.
There is a well-known method for extracting that chemical energy. We call it "burning".
No, that would also erase the servo patterns, leaving the hard drive completely dead.
Unlike floppy disk drives, which position the read/write heads with a stepper motor and are capable of reformatting blank media in the field, hard drives use special patterns encoded onto the platters to locate tracks and position the read/write heads over them. These servo patterns are written in the factory using very specialized and expensive equipment (not like a PROM burner that can be built cheaply; servo writers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars IIRC), and they can't be rewritten in the field.
snot
I'm not sure if things would have turned out so well if I was driving a slower car which may not have been capable of accelerating enough to avoid the oncoming car or to make the turn safely at the speed that was necessary. I may have reacted differently if I was driving a different vehicle in the same situation. In that particular situation I was doing my best to drive safely and defensively beforehand, and at that instant I judged that accelerating would be the best option given the situation and my car's performance envelope.
Based on my driving experience, I'd agree that it's much more common to need to suddenly decelerate to avoid a collision than to suddenly accelerate. Still, situations where it's necessary to suddenly accelerate (even beyond the posted speed limit) to avoid a crash do arise sometimes, even when you're paying attention and driving in a safe and legal manner. A safe and defensive driver tries to avoid getting into situations where they need to take sudden evasive actions by anticipating the actions of other drivers and leaving enough room for nearby boneheads to do boneheaded things without hitting them. Still, sometimes you'll encounter another driver whose boneheadedness exceeds reasonable expectations. :-)