Well, even painting our housetops in white would have some effect.
Second, using only pure CO2, obtained strictlly from atmosphere, to fill our vehicles' pneumatics would help, too. It will get back out in air eventually, but meanwhile, it doesn't add to the greenhouse effect.
Third, paradoxically, non-biodegradable plastic may prove our friend after all - it is proof that we can chain down carbon, pull it out of the natural cycle after all. We just need way to produce it out of biomass, that is produced from atmospheric CO2.
Fourth, we will need industrial facilities for intensive production of huge amount of sea algae biomass in non-desalinized, aired water tanks. Now, there's a task for GMO engineering!
Draw yourself a trigonometric circle. Now, the unit vector is c and it is constant in magnitude, but has different projections on x and y axia for every different point on circle. Note that x-projection is time component of the speed, while y-projection is spatial or "ordinary" speed. (In reality, there are three instead of one x but for the sake of easy drawing...).
You see, in first quadrant of the circle, when at rest, an object observed from our reference frame travels to our future (it and we age together...) at maximum speed, c.
If we accelerate it toward v == c point, time speed it has (aging) deaccelearates according to Lorenz transforms (substitute v/c = cos(G), letter G picked for no particular reason, then note that:
cos(G)^2 + sin(G)^2 = 1, therefore
sin(G) = sqrt(1-cos(G)^2) and
sin(G) = sqrt( 1 - ((v^2)/(c^2)) ), which I am sure must be familiar to you. ).
If, by any chance, an object would pop up with own speed positioned in the second quadrant, acceleration (which obviously is "own speed vector" rotation counterclockwise) would bring it to the point where it would have 180 degrees angle with our own speed vector, effectivelly "at rest" (spatialy, v==0) but with own "time arrow" pointing exactly reverse.
So, you see, some tachyions just MAY be here around us and even very familiar under any other particle name (such as anti-something-on), having "nice", easy-to-handle (spatial) speeds and all we need to do is recognize the time-backward pattern in their behaviour.
I believe that "nuclear winter" should be mostly contained on single hemisphere, due to trade winds' patterns. On the other hand, the difference in average temperature of the air between the hemispheres would probably push the climate zones toward "clear skies" pole. Specifically, the impact in the tropical belt (Yucatan, right?) would have had two important consequences: first, it would spread cover almost evenly in both hemispheres and second, promptly lift small debris up to troposphere ceiling, causing formation of high-altitude clouds, which as from recently is perceived as greenhouse boosters (so much for nuclear "winter"). Besides, all the moisture in the air (and some of it caused by evaporation due to the impact), would condensate around the debris particles and fall back to the earth as biblical flood (...even worse, as "mud rain"...). In matter of weeks or months, the air would have been clear, washed down, except for the high-altitude clouds which would remain much longer and cause additional warming.
So, the conclusion would be: no long winter, but very harsh stormy weather, lots of mud, torrents, flushing and flood. Some regions would had been devastated, and some others would have been, at least temporarily, turned from deserts into fertile grounds. Large and heavy animals would suffer much greater losses then small ones, first from impact shockwave, then from weather and at end from beeing stuck and drowning in the mud.
A "slide" would mean that you have the force of gravity perpendicular to the sheet, which is absurd.
This elastic sheet analogy is used only to ilustrate how linear non-accelerated movement suffers inclination in vicinity of a massive body (roll smaller spheres in trajectories passing near more massive/more sheet-twisting bodies, and see how they change their path).
To understand the observed attracting force to objects apparently "at rest", one should also take into account movement of said objects along the time axis.
I am OK with SMT parts (at least with low pin count, SO and PLCC, but alas, they are fading away, too!), but I hate to have to make PCB's for any weekend project I hack. Back in the world of xIP packages, having several 100 mils raster PCBs was (almost) all I needed. I hope someone will start producing next generation universal protoboards, or at least that some packaging standardization allowing pad-array protoPCBs, in the spirit of late '.1" raster' will occur. Right now, there is no spatial quanta, no universal step. Rant over.
As of the "DIY" topic, of course it is insane doing yourself anything you can buy cheaper, but hacking is not about building from ground up (unless it is something nonexistent at the time), it is about modifying that cheap ready made product, or using them as components of something else you are building. i.e. great DIY projects of the past were MP3 players, when there were no comercial ones.
Because LEDs and OLEDs in particular, grow dim during their worklife. Fluorescent backlight tubes in LCDs do, too, but you can replace them eventually. Here, the pixels are the very source of the light
Nevertheless, this is good news, for compared to both CRTs and backlighted LCDs this technology is: - less power hungry (especially when you use command prompt only, or gothic desktop settings:-) ) - inexpensive (much simpler construction, basic material cheaper then silicon), - hopefully, environment-friendly (more then GaAs LEDs, anyway), so it can be expected that we will buy new displays because of the new improved resolution, before the wearout shows.
Even CRTs could be revamped (well, sort of "digitized") using this technology: The screen could be an matrix of little OLED displays and electron beam could be used to address the small area of the screen spatially, and carry enaugh current to light one or more pixels, but the information it carries wouldn't be analog luminosity of a single pixel. Instead it would consist of an address of the pixel (or block of pixels) and digitaly encoded information of luminosity(luminosities) and colour(s).
Well, why the fuss with electron beams when we can just make displays without them? The answer would be to avoid too much wiring and decoding circuitry and therefore accomplish better resolution of the display. Even today we have better resolution on top class CRTs than on top class flat panel displays, and now we can further improve it, by making even smaller pixels, lower the radiation (no need for superfast electrons any more), make truly flat screens (geometry becomes virtually nonissue). Second, feeding power and data to screen by CR instead of circuits is IMHO more reliable and production yield should be better.
Every TV comercial starts with: "TV, max volume!":-)
I am sure that in the long run:
1) All the "little languages" (mine too) will die, as everyone would be speaking to household devices in english (well, sorta'...), starting at very young age.
2) All people of this planet's technosphere will speak english, BUT, they will also develop funny accents and diction, especially when "value" products get to be developed in some of the "cheap white-collar paradises". I can see (hear) today, from speaking toys, what will our future generations sound like tomorrow.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-03c.html contains some interesting data that may be a clue:
"The location of the heliopause, which marks the outermost edge of the solar system, is a subject of scientific speculation. In two papers recently published in the journal Nature, scientists debated whether Voyager 1 has already reached the termination shock, a sign that the heliopause may be near. The termination shock is caused by a reduction in the speed of the solar wind as it slams into cooler plasma at the edge of the solar system and is similar to the sonic boom that occurs on Earth when an airplane crosses the sound barrier."
So my guess (IANAAP) is they have lost their (solar) wind in the back they had and hence the decceleration. It may not be so simple, though. Perhaps the space on the inside of the heliopause sphere is constantly "sweeped" by solar wind and therefore might have lower density then surroundings (picture: we are in a kind of a solar bubble!:-) ). There is a way to put my hypotesis to test: check the temperature readings for signs of friction, or perhaps even cooling.
OK, so it seems no el cheapo RFIDSs any more. This means either harder programming (more energy needed to change the contents, but then, poor little tags will have to dissipate it somehow during the initial programming) or(and) more processing power/memory for better cryptography, maybe even authentiction of scanner to tag (makes investigation of the protocol hard). Or, dump the whole flexibility idea and stick with PROM variant (or some kind of lock-the-programming feature, but it boils down to no-reuse either way).
On the bright side, if things stay this way, all of the sudden I feel like this could be the beginning of the beautiful friendship with RFIDs:-).
Hope to see blank ones soon in my local electronic parts store.
...Remembering music in your memories and listnening to it? If music industry only could force you to forget, or to detect that you are at the moment "listening" inside... they would squeze money out of you.
I suggest people who are sick and tired of this make organised "silent listening" parties in protest of stupid note counting: Get together, mention the title, no, title could be a trademark, run a chain of asociations to the part, untill everybody say "I got it" (don't bring clueless friends with you), then someone makes the "start" gesture (whatever it may be) and everybody "listen to the music together" (some very sync people could even dance to it) in ridicule of conduct of music industry and demonstration of the fact that hearing music once is owning it forever.
Where this heads, soon you would be required to use headphones (with real head detection) to stop accidental leaking of their music to someone who did not pay. Loudspeakers would be illegal, unless all precautions are met to keep all the sound inside the room, and everyone in the room payed the playprice. (Not so bad after all... then none would bug you with loud music any more or they would be sued by RIAA for unauthorised handing out of their property).
The point is that information can only be sold the way secrets are sold (remember, by definition something is information for you only if you haven't already knew it). That goes for all new (software, video) and old (written stuff, music, even patents) flavours of information. Any other attempt to price and deal it in material kind of way is like trying to hold the water in the basket, plow the sea, or heard the snails.
Information is precious and should be priced very high accordingly, but any attempt to steer it afterwards is pointless, doomed, expensive, troublesome and, as most of us feel, tiranic. Get your money now and keep your nose out of my business! The problem they (information producers and dealers) have with this natural state of affairs is twofold: 1) they wish to sell directly to great number of people who hasn't got that kind of money, but as there are so many of us, 'en masse' ('the market') we have huge amount of it (and they think they shold get all of it and more) and 2) they are huge machinery wich pays its own record manufacturing. The solution is so obvious and natural but, hidden behind the long rooted law system, information industry doesn't want to change and subsidize itself:
First, the information carrier imprinting (record production) industry should be separated from information producing industry.
Second, there should be information exchange market, like there is stock exchange market. The information brokers would buy brand new (and expensive!) information (music, software, films,...) from producers, with agreement that producers won't cut their buyers' (brokers') prices by selling bellow them, or even that they would not make another sell at all, for some fixed, agreed upon, period. That clause is, of course, voluntary and seller's fail to comply, treachery, would hurt seller's bussiness credibility and future prices hard (I am sure that, in case of traceability of trust breach, there could even be a court case).
Of course, the buyers will have to be very cautios who they get into business with. Maybe some of their co-buyers can make fast sell into their target market and close them out (think "first newspaper to publish the news"). But, going large scale may be too expensive. New owners of information can choose to sell several copies to other interested parties, at more affordable (medium or small businesses affordable) price covering their expenses plus profit in sum.
At some pont, record producing industry will buy the information and publish it at very affordable price (i.e. like Linux or BSD distros of today), but of course they will compete and try to get it sooner then competition do. Still, somewhere, very soon, you will be able to get it for smaller price, home
No, of course not, but, you know, when we are toddlers, we don't start walking upright led by instinct, but because we identify with our elders and imitate them. Please note that illness did not change this monkey's constitution in any way, she was capable of going biped-only before it, too.
Human constitution changed over generations, due to advantages of upright stand (perhaps, the hight was percieved as "greatness" and gave intraspecial social competitive edge, not much different then today), so now it would be too hard for our present body shape to walk on all four, because our lower hands' bones grew too large (unless we could learn rabbits' hops:-) ).
Why don't we use wheel as "depth" (zoom) command for 3D navigation in "world behind the screen"? That seems so obvious...
Those devices from TFA are more like "make your computer read your hand's 3d motion", which is IMHO too anti-ergonomic to be useful (except maybe for some kind of workout).
IANA American, but IMHO this isn't about preventing terrorists to kill civilians, it is about preventing them from planning sabotages against informational infrastructure.
You see, to keep the costs sustainable, in most countries many crucial public and government organizations use the commercial facilities in some kind of protected and privileged (top priority/reserved BW) mode (Thats why i.e. your AF bombs out primary civilian communication towers and centers when your country attacks some country).
Terrorists may MAP the networks by matching reports on simultaneous outages and plan their sabotages accordingly. The consequences would be paralisys of low priority public services and overload of emergency backup govt comms (wireless, satelite, all bandwidth-constrained or expensive, or wulnerable).
Furthermore, this sabotages could temporarily blind the "terrorist-catching net" accross the country because, beeing so waste, with so many terminals at security and law-enforcment units, it MUST relay on existing commercial networks. That would allow time window for terrorists to make the move while the net is down and relocate their manpower and material in the area.
Of course, true solution would be to have parallel goverment communication network, but that would be too expensive to build and maintain, all expenses, no return, a lot of empoyees, a lot of paychecks from your tax money, a lot of security clearance for them...
There is a doctrine that agrees with both: Taoism. Things simply are what they are and that IS the "great plan". We get what we're due, neither more, nor less. Our anticipation is irrelevant. But I digress.
More there is of us on one spot, more susceptible we are to epidemic "forest fires". You may say it is Gaia rage, or you may see that we are simply endangering oureself with our own choices (or lack of ones). The point is that there is always a reason for any stationary state of any nonlinear system (a strange attractor?) and we need to understand why the things were the way they were in our environment before we changed them. That's how we can "see it coming", Gaia or no Gaia.
Giving anyone this invisible man superpower is too tempting and spoiling to leave it without control. People are not toys.
First, every such database should have strong (biometric) access control and provide query log with info that can lead to every person who accessed your personal data, when and with what reason and authority.
Second, anyone who stores personal information about you, should be required by law to inform you that they keep some personal data about you, even if your dont ask them if they do (because you may be unaware of it).
Third, everyone should have right to read their own personal data records and record access history. I dont think that reading accessors personal records (that would be considered fair) is nescesary. It suffices that they are personaly traceable, their position and authority are known and they can be sued or accused if any misuse of it surfaces.
Sharing someones personal information with others, even collegues and boss, should be treated as a form of circumvention of access policy and should be criminal offense for both informer and informant.
Changing incorrect data should be possible by trial in the court of law (You should not dictate the record data content, but you should be able to object, argument and demand rectification of inacurate or false data)
The magnetoresistive cell can change the way ANY sequential logic circuit operates. It can make much denser CPUs, ASICs and FPGAs, because now you can make the clock input be THE power supply line.
It can also make your timepiece battery last... well, longer.
You just need to look at it in a different view then Yet Another Non-PowerCycle-Erasable Storage.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? So does Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy,...
Maybe that could be used as the part of the process to pull the carbon out of natural circulation and reduce CO2 level in atmosphere?
Well, even painting our housetops in white would have some effect.
Second, using only pure CO2, obtained strictlly from atmosphere, to fill our vehicles' pneumatics would help, too. It will get back out in air eventually, but meanwhile, it doesn't add to the greenhouse effect.
Third, paradoxically, non-biodegradable plastic may prove our friend after all - it is proof that we can chain down carbon, pull it out of the natural cycle after all. We just need way to produce it out of biomass, that is produced from atmospheric CO2.
Fourth, we will need industrial facilities for intensive production of huge amount of sea algae biomass in non-desalinized, aired water tanks.
Now, there's a task for GMO engineering!
You forgot about virtually all of the land-based oil wells... all gone underwater! Not lost forever, although much more expensive to exploit.
Draw yourself a trigonometric circle. Now, the unit vector is c and it is constant in magnitude, but has different projections on x and y axia for every different point on circle. Note that x-projection is time component of the speed, while y-projection is spatial or "ordinary" speed. (In reality, there are three instead of one x but for the sake of easy drawing...).
You see, in first quadrant of the circle, when at rest, an object observed from our reference frame travels to our future (it and we age together...) at maximum speed, c.
If we accelerate it toward v == c point, time speed it has (aging) deaccelearates according to Lorenz transforms
(substitute v/c = cos(G), letter G picked for no particular reason, then note that:
cos(G)^2 + sin(G)^2 = 1, therefore
sin(G) = sqrt(1-cos(G)^2) and
sin(G) = sqrt( 1 - ((v^2)/(c^2)) ), which I am sure must be familiar to you. ).
If, by any chance, an object would pop up with own speed positioned in the second quadrant, acceleration (which obviously is "own speed vector" rotation counterclockwise) would bring it to the point where it would have 180 degrees angle with our own speed vector, effectivelly "at rest" (spatialy, v==0) but with own "time arrow" pointing exactly reverse.
So, you see, some tachyions just MAY be here around us and even very familiar under any other particle name (such as anti-something-on), having "nice", easy-to-handle (spatial) speeds and all we need to do is recognize the time-backward pattern in their behaviour.
I believe that "nuclear winter" should be mostly contained on single hemisphere, due to trade winds' patterns. On the other hand, the difference in average temperature of the air between the hemispheres would probably push the climate zones toward "clear skies" pole. Specifically, the impact in the tropical belt (Yucatan, right?) would have had two important consequences: first, it would spread cover almost evenly in both hemispheres and second, promptly lift small debris up to troposphere ceiling, causing formation of high-altitude clouds, which as from recently is perceived as greenhouse boosters (so much for nuclear "winter"). Besides, all the moisture in the air (and some of it caused by evaporation due to the impact), would condensate around the debris particles and fall back to the earth as biblical flood (...even worse, as "mud rain"...). In matter of weeks or months, the air would have been clear, washed down, except for the high-altitude clouds which would remain much longer and cause additional warming. So, the conclusion would be: no long winter, but very harsh stormy weather, lots of mud, torrents, flushing and flood. Some regions would had been devastated, and some others would have been, at least temporarily, turned from deserts into fertile grounds. Large and heavy animals would suffer much greater losses then small ones, first from impact shockwave, then from weather and at end from beeing stuck and drowning in the mud.
A "slide" would mean that you have the force of gravity perpendicular to the sheet, which is absurd.
This elastic sheet analogy is used only to ilustrate how linear non-accelerated movement suffers inclination in vicinity of a massive body (roll smaller spheres in trajectories passing near more massive/more sheet-twisting bodies, and see how they change their path).
To understand the observed attracting force to objects apparently "at rest", one should also take into account movement of said objects along the time axis.
I am OK with SMT parts (at least with low pin count, SO and PLCC, but alas, they are fading away, too!), but I hate to have to make PCB's for any weekend project I hack. Back in the world of xIP packages, having several 100 mils raster PCBs was (almost) all I needed. I hope someone will start producing next generation universal protoboards, or at least that some packaging standardization allowing pad-array protoPCBs, in the spirit of late '.1" raster' will occur. Right now, there is no spatial quanta, no universal step. Rant over.
As of the "DIY" topic, of course it is insane doing yourself anything you can buy cheaper, but hacking is not about building from ground up (unless it is something nonexistent at the time), it is about modifying that cheap ready made product, or using them as components of something else you are building. i.e. great DIY projects of the past were MP3 players, when there were no comercial ones.
Because LEDs and OLEDs in particular, grow dim during their worklife. Fluorescent backlight tubes in LCDs do, too, but you can replace them eventually. Here, the pixels are the very source of the light
:-) )
Nevertheless, this is good news, for compared to both CRTs and backlighted LCDs this technology is:
- less power hungry (especially when you use command prompt only, or gothic desktop settings
- inexpensive (much simpler construction, basic material cheaper then silicon),
- hopefully, environment-friendly (more then GaAs LEDs, anyway),
so it can be expected that we will buy new displays because of the new improved resolution, before the wearout shows.
Even CRTs could be revamped (well, sort of "digitized") using this technology: The screen could be an matrix of little OLED displays and electron beam could be used to address the small area of the screen spatially, and carry enaugh current to light one or more pixels, but the information it carries wouldn't be analog luminosity of a single pixel. Instead it would consist of an address of the pixel (or block of pixels) and digitaly encoded information of luminosity(luminosities) and colour(s).
Well, why the fuss with electron beams when we can just make displays without them? The answer would be to avoid too much wiring and decoding circuitry and therefore accomplish better resolution of the display. Even today we have better resolution on top class CRTs than on top class flat panel displays, and now we can further improve it, by making even smaller pixels, lower the radiation (no need for superfast electrons any more), make truly flat screens (geometry becomes virtually nonissue). Second, feeding power and data to screen by CR instead of circuits is IMHO more reliable and production yield should be better.
Every TV comercial starts with: "TV, max volume!" :-)
I am sure that in the long run:
1) All the "little languages" (mine too) will die, as everyone would be speaking to household devices in english (well, sorta'...), starting at very young age.
2) All people of this planet's technosphere will speak english, BUT, they will also develop funny accents and diction, especially when "value" products get to be developed in some of the "cheap white-collar paradises". I can see (hear) today, from speaking toys, what will our future generations sound like tomorrow.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-03c.html contains some interesting data that may be a clue:
:-) ).
"The location of the heliopause, which marks the outermost edge of the solar system, is a subject of scientific speculation. In two papers recently published in the journal Nature, scientists debated whether Voyager 1 has already reached the termination shock, a sign that the heliopause may be near. The termination shock is caused by a reduction in the speed of the solar wind as it slams into cooler plasma at the edge of the solar system and is similar to the sonic boom that occurs on Earth when an airplane crosses the sound barrier."
So my guess (IANAAP) is they have lost their (solar) wind in the back they had and hence the decceleration. It may not be so simple, though. Perhaps the space on the inside of the heliopause sphere is constantly "sweeped" by solar wind and therefore might have lower density then surroundings (picture: we are in a kind of a solar bubble!
There is a way to put my hypotesis to test: check the temperature readings for signs of friction, or perhaps even cooling.
OK, so it seems no el cheapo RFIDSs any more. This means either harder programming (more energy needed to change the contents, but then, poor little tags will have to dissipate it somehow during the initial programming) or(and) more processing power/memory for better cryptography, maybe even authentiction of scanner to tag (makes investigation of the protocol hard). Or, dump the whole flexibility idea and stick with PROM variant (or some kind of lock-the-programming feature, but it boils down to no-reuse either way).
:-).
On the bright side, if things stay this way, all of the sudden I feel like this could be the beginning of the beautiful friendship with RFIDs
Hope to see blank ones soon in my local electronic parts store.
...Remembering music in your memories and listnening to it? If music industry only could force you to forget, or to detect that you are at the moment "listening" inside... they would squeze money out of you.
...) from producers, with agreement that producers won't cut their buyers' (brokers') prices by selling bellow them, or even that they would not make another sell at all, for some fixed, agreed upon, period. That clause is, of course, voluntary and seller's fail to comply, treachery, would hurt seller's bussiness credibility and future prices hard (I am sure that, in case of traceability of trust breach, there could even be a court case).
I suggest people who are sick and tired of this make organised "silent listening" parties in protest of stupid note counting: Get together, mention the title, no, title could be a trademark, run a chain of asociations to the part, untill everybody say "I got it" (don't bring clueless friends with you), then someone makes the "start" gesture (whatever it may be) and everybody "listen to the music together" (some very sync people could even dance to it) in ridicule of conduct of music industry and demonstration of the fact that hearing music once is owning it forever.
Where this heads, soon you would be required to use headphones (with real head detection) to stop accidental leaking of their music to someone who did not pay. Loudspeakers would be illegal, unless all precautions are met to keep all the sound inside the room, and everyone in the room payed the playprice. (Not so bad after all... then none would bug you with loud music any more or they would be sued by RIAA for unauthorised handing out of their property).
The point is that information can only be sold the way secrets are sold (remember, by definition something is information for you only if you haven't already knew it). That goes for all new (software, video) and old (written stuff, music, even patents) flavours of information. Any other attempt to price and deal it in material kind of way is like trying to hold the water in the basket, plow the sea, or heard the snails.
Information is precious and should be priced very high accordingly, but any attempt to steer it afterwards is pointless, doomed, expensive, troublesome and, as most of us feel, tiranic. Get your money now and keep your nose out of my business! The problem they (information producers and dealers) have with this natural state of affairs is twofold: 1) they wish to sell directly to great number of people who hasn't got that kind of money, but as there are so many of us, 'en masse' ('the market') we have huge amount of it (and they think they shold get all of it and more) and 2) they are huge machinery wich pays its own record manufacturing. The solution is so obvious and natural but, hidden behind the long rooted law system, information industry doesn't want to change and subsidize itself:
First, the information carrier imprinting (record production) industry should be separated from information producing industry.
Second, there should be information exchange market, like there is stock exchange market. The information brokers would buy brand new (and expensive!) information (music, software, films,
Of course, the buyers will have to be very cautios who they get into business with. Maybe some of their co-buyers can make fast sell into their target market and close them out (think "first newspaper to publish the news"). But, going large scale may be too expensive. New owners of information can choose to sell several copies to other interested parties, at more affordable (medium or small businesses affordable) price covering their expenses plus profit in sum.
At some pont, record producing industry will buy the information and publish it at very affordable price (i.e. like Linux or BSD distros of today), but of course they will compete and try to get it sooner then competition do. Still, somewhere, very soon, you will be able to get it for smaller price, home
No, of course not, but, you know, when we are toddlers, we don't start walking upright led by instinct, but because we identify with our elders and imitate them. Please note that illness did not change this monkey's constitution in any way, she was capable of going biped-only before it, too.
:-) ).
Human constitution changed over generations, due to advantages of upright stand (perhaps, the hight was percieved as "greatness" and gave intraspecial social competitive edge, not much different then today), so now it would be too hard for our present body shape to walk on all four, because our lower hands' bones grew too large (unless we could learn rabbits' hops
Oh, nooo, damn you, Google! That was some other review, for vandal-proof switches...
Thank you, Google!
M J: modasylum.com/reviews.php%3Freview%3D37+modasylum+ review%3D37&hl=en&start=1
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:0m1IZm2UR8
Why don't we use wheel as "depth" (zoom) command for 3D navigation in "world behind the screen"? That seems so obvious...
Those devices from TFA are more like "make your computer read your hand's 3d motion", which is IMHO too anti-ergonomic to be useful (except maybe for some kind of workout).
IANA American, but IMHO this isn't about preventing terrorists to kill civilians, it is about preventing them from planning sabotages against informational infrastructure.
You see, to keep the costs sustainable, in most countries many crucial public and government organizations use the commercial facilities in some kind of protected and privileged (top priority/reserved BW) mode (Thats why i.e. your AF bombs out primary civilian communication towers and centers when your country attacks some country).
Terrorists may MAP the networks by matching reports on simultaneous outages and plan their sabotages accordingly. The consequences would be paralisys of low priority public services and overload of emergency backup govt comms (wireless, satelite, all bandwidth-constrained or expensive, or wulnerable).
Furthermore, this sabotages could temporarily blind the "terrorist-catching net" accross the country because, beeing so waste, with so many terminals at security and law-enforcment units, it MUST relay on existing commercial networks. That would allow time window for terrorists to make the move while the net is down and relocate their manpower and material in the area.
Of course, true solution would be to have parallel goverment communication network, but that would be too expensive to build and maintain, all expenses, no return, a lot of empoyees, a lot of paychecks from your tax money, a lot of security clearance for them...
There is a doctrine that agrees with both: Taoism. Things simply are what they are and that IS the "great plan". We get what we're due, neither more, nor less. Our anticipation is irrelevant. But I digress.
More there is of us on one spot, more susceptible we are to epidemic "forest fires". You may say it is Gaia rage, or you may see that we are simply endangering oureself with our own choices (or lack of ones).
The point is that there is always a reason for any stationary state of any nonlinear system (a strange attractor?) and we need to understand why the things were the way they were in our environment before we changed them. That's how we can "see it coming", Gaia or no Gaia.
Giving anyone this invisible man superpower is too tempting and spoiling to leave it without control. People are not toys.
First, every such database should have strong (biometric) access control and provide query log with info that can lead to every person who accessed your personal data, when and with what reason and authority.
Second, anyone who stores personal information about you, should be required by law to inform you that they keep some personal data about you, even if your dont ask them if they do (because you may be unaware of it).
Third, everyone should have right to read their own personal data records and record access history. I dont think that reading accessors personal records (that would be considered fair) is nescesary. It suffices that they are personaly traceable, their position and authority are known and they can be sued or accused if any misuse of it surfaces.
Sharing someones personal information with others, even collegues and boss, should be treated as a form of circumvention of access policy and should be criminal offense for both informer and informant.
Changing incorrect data should be possible by trial in the court of law (You should not dictate the record data content, but you should be able to object, argument and demand rectification of inacurate or false data)
Well, then, there it is: a new(?) method to complement Bayesian spam filters.
Paragraph of random dictonary words will be easily recognised as dump me tag.
The magnetoresistive cell can change the way ANY sequential logic circuit operates. It can make much denser CPUs, ASICs and FPGAs, because now you can make the clock input be THE power supply line.
... well, longer.
It can also make your timepiece battery last
You just need to look at it in a different view then Yet Another Non-PowerCycle-Erasable Storage.