What's shameful is that I didn't even notice how blatant it was until it was pointed out on another TV show.
I've seen it even worse in Burn Notice-- something like "If you're going to ditch someone chasing you in a pursuit, you need a car with a lot of acceleration, quick handling, and great braking. That means something like the [make][model] is ideal". Followed by what amounts to a car commercial of a chase, with lots of logo shots.
The universe probably finds some convenient way to force things to reasonable values. The density going to zero was just an example of a particular case. And quantum gravitation? Show me before you tell me where it kicks in. The universe is going to do what it's going to do, and it's generally well behaved, despite what happens where theories break down.
And how much of that is due to the elevation difference between SLC (~1288 m) and Sochi (near sea level). I'm too lazy to do the math for all of them, but based on my experience in cycling at sea level vs. 1500 m, those look like substantially attributable to the elevation. Add in differences in ice quality, and you might have all the difference. A more appropriate comparison is to look at how they've been doing against all their international competition over the past year, looking at performances at the same venue on the same day, and extrapolating.
This article: why higher elevation is better even points out that the final training for the US team was done at elevation. Training at sea level and using hypoxic tents at night might have been a better idea.
For instance, in cycling one major decision is which gears you put on your bike for a given race. Some people are better with bigger gears, and some smaller gears. Forcing everyone to use the same ones would put people at a disadvantage.
This isn't a problem: just give them all a multi-speed bike that has ALL the gears. The only reason you'd only put some gears on a bike for a given race is because you're trying to eliminate extra weight and streamline the bike for the conditions it'll see in that race (you're trying to optimize it). If everyone has the exact same bike, this isn't necessary. No, this bike won't be as optimal for any one person as a custom-built (and -geared) bike, but it'll have all the gearings that any of the athletes might want, and eliminate the machinery as a competitive advantage
And the machines still make it unfair- if you homogenize the machines to that extent then you end up homogenizing the people who can be competitive, as well. Staying with your example, small cyclists tend to have high power to weight, but low overall power, so it makes them more suited to climbing. Putting them on bikes with "all the possible gears" at the expense of weight means that the machine is a larger fraction of the rider+weight than for larger cyclists, thus using the machine to take away some of their real physical advantage. Even racing in a very controlled environment (i.e. a velodrome, where it's essentially dead flat), where riders are allowed to choose any gear they want (but only one gear), riders in a given race will choose different gears depending on their riding and racing style (spin vs mash, breakaway for laps vs. sit in and sprint). Sticking everyone in the same gear will likely put some of them at a disadvantage (which is intentionally done in junior racing, for both physical and fairness reasons).
AFAIK it is however conjectured that naked singularities cannot actually form (what is AFAIR definitely proved is that you cannot turn a black hole into a naked singularity).
There are singularities all over physics, even in something as simple as the velocity field of a classical vortex (v ~ 1/r). The world doesn't go all goofy at them-- the universe tends to take care of them in relatively convenient and pedestrian ways, like by sending the density to zero where the velocity goes to infinity. It's all fun to be a theorist talking about naked singularities (probably as close to naked anything as many of them get...) but if someone figures out a way to actually observe what's going on there, it will probably be interesting but probably won't be anything particularly magical.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
Most POD systems are capable of producing all standard sizes up to 8.5x11 as a normal part of the process. It's on the order of a penny per page, plus a little under a buck for the cover, depending on who does your POD. A good deal of backlist titles are produced via POD in order to avoid large print runs while still keeping titles in print. Commercial POD is actually at a point where it's cheaper to print and ship a galley of a book to use for editing or review than it is to print it as a "manuscript" with a desktop laser printer.
The 1366 W/m^2 (plus or minus a bit) is the instantaneous incoming radiant power density on a surface at 1 AU, not the insolation. There's no accounting for day/night in it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant )
The insolation is the time integral of that, and does account for the day night cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation )
If you drive to work in LA where it takes more than an hour to get to or from work, you'd want to plug in.
Why would you need to charge if after driving 2 miles?
You think you're joking...
I have to drive to work (about 35 miles each way) temporarily in LA, and it's about 1.5 hours there, 1.5 to 2 hours home. I just got a Cmax hybrid (with the little battery, not the Energi) and because I live in the San Gabriel Valley I can almost EV all the way to DTLA (it's all downhill) and get there with a full charge. It can easily take 45 minutes to an hour to do the ~10 miles or so to get to and through DTLA. After that it's much quicker. The gas motor runs on the way home though.
My regular commute, when I get back to it, is 4.5 miles each way on a bike.
Most people who buy hybrids do it so they can drive solo in the commuter lane, so I expect this car will spend its entire life running off its gasoline backup engine.
That expired in California a few years ago. Now you have to have a full electric to drive solo in the carpool lane, or pay a few bucks via transponder if you're on one of the roads that allows that.
Other than the no-plug aspect, why even bother with this? Instead, make a carport or pole barn, plop some solar panels on that, connect those to an inverter or charge controller, and plug that into the vehicle. It would gain more electricity overall that can be used for the vehicle compared to a Frenel lens series, and it won't fry the cat when he or she plops down by the car for an afternoon nap and the sunbeam shifts, or the vehicle moves back and Pirelli processes Fluffy.
I have a colleague who has two electric cars (a Leaf and a RAV 4) and does this with the solar panels on his roof. The Fresnel lens saves a little conversion loss, but at a reduction of system availability for power production as well.
It could easily be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
In the Reynolds case that established the state secrets privilege of the executive branch, the government fought hard to not disclose the accident reports that the widows of civilian contractors were trying to obtain to show that the government had been negligent in maintenance of the aircraft and that they should therefore receive substantial awards. The case started in 1949, and ran into 1953 before it was finally closed by the supreme court in favor of the government.
In the meantime, a routine review in 1950 declassified the disputed reports from "secret" to "restricted", which is the equivalent of FOUO, which would have allowed the use of the reports in the case. Everyone involved in the case, from the plaintiffs up to the supreme court, and including all witnesses, was unaware of the declassification, which wasn't discovered until the 2000's. The case ran to its conclusion with everyone involved continuing to believe that the documents were classified. The case went on to be the legal basis for all future claims of state secrets privilege by the executive branch.
I imagine you realize this, but sometimes these are needed for good driving too. Around here, many freeway on-ramps are on the short side, at which point aggressive acceleration is needed to merge at freeway speed (alas I rarely see drivers do this). Then there are short off-ramps where heavy braking allows one to avoid braking until fully out of the flow of traffic (again few drivers do this).
There are some really impressively short ones on the 110 freeway in LA. Basically a stop sign that feeds into a freeway lane, and the exit ramp is the same.
He broke his collarbone twice while racing and had two crashes on a mountain bike
Okay, you get the win on this one. Slashdot description is deceptive; thanks for the clarification these injuries were not in the street use the article is about.
Clarifying the conditions of his crashes is very important. A former clubmate of mine did a study of non-reported bicycle crashes some 5-6 years ago. He surveyed the entire club (a few hundred riders ranging from recreational to frequent racers) to list and describe the conditions of and injuries resulting from all the crashes they'd ever had. Unfortunately I can't find a link or a reference, but will keep digging. When I listed mine I discovered something interesting: I crash about once per year, and only under two types of conditions: racing or extreme weather. Both types of crashes are easily avoidable by avoiding the conditions. The racing crashes mostly were solo crashes from either getting a front wheel taken out, or in later years from racing madison (look it up). The bad weather crashes were all solo slides from riding in snow/ice, or in a few cases heavy rain that caused me to slide out on the paint in crosswalks. None of the crashes involved motor vehicles, despite at that point ~15 years of bike commuting in traffic in 3 states. None required more than treatment for road rash, either.
My general position is that if you ride predictably and reasonably defensively following the rules of the road and basic rules for group cycling (if you roll that way), you really shouldn't ever crash on a bicycle.
Well said. Hydrogen is really no more dangerous than gasoline, which is quite flammable and in vapor form is quite explosive. The Hindenburg really gave it a bad rap, but that was due as much or more to the coating on the envelope as to the hydrogen.
Your point B really is the key though, and as you say, it's an issue with all cars, largely due to what one might call "parasitics". The object of transportation is to move a masses of stuff from one place to another. For personal transportation we seem to have decided that it makes sense to move an additional few thousand pounds of vehicle in moving each few hundred pounds of person. That's a lot of mass to be accelerating and decelerating, and it tends to have a large cross section in the wind.
Even more recently, military satellites make up a large portion of their launches and any craft capable of bringing a launch to LEO must be considered capable of military payloads.
Those "craft capable of bringing a launch to LEO" are paid for by other agencies (e.g. NRO, USAF) and built by private contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital). Recon satellites are generally built by private contractors with little or no NASA involvement (a few people on review panels maybe), except where NASA has particular technology capabilities that aren't available commercially. The launch market is pretty much all private industry at this point.
Seriously. They are trying to restrict anybody from entering federal lands at all. This includes the national forests and BLM land that constitute 80% plus of the western states land area. There is seldom ever a federal employee on those lands.
I live about 100 yards from a national forest, and it remained open until we had a red flag warning (hot, high winds, extremely low humidity, high fire danger). It's still open for many uses-- major roads are open, and the few privately run concessions (a restaurant and a snack bar) are open. A few of the minor, primarily recreational roads are closed, but they also close them for fire danger when the government is open (people pull off the road and their cars start fires). I'm free to hike or mtb on the fire roads and singletrack. I haven't been up the main road, but it sounds like gated picnic/parking areas are closed.
Humidity of the storage environment matters, too. IIRC, the worst of the bad binders took up a lot of water and expanded as it went bad.
There are probably still a fair number of people with decks and baking setups that are already built and debugged who will do it for a reasonable price. I had mine done about 10 years ago, and the guy doing it turned out to be an Otari rep who had a house full of old machines and every conceivable head block, as well as a baking setup he'd debugged. I think it was about $50/hour then, which was fine because I didn't have that many tapes to do, and they came out great.
Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years. Magnetization starts to print through and creates pre and post 'echos.' As the magnetic signal weakens, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades. To be archived, you have to bake the tape (in an oven) and then you get one playback on your analog deck, so it can be digitized for archive.
If instead you record it onto another magnetic tape, you've just added more tape hiss and distortion that wasn't there in the original.
If you want true 'analog,' go to a live concert with no amplification. If you want fidelity: record, mix and deliver digitally.
You're already modded up to +5, but I was looking for someone to say all this or I was going to. Allegedly the binder problem has been improved substantially, and that the binder breakdown was associated with a particular (rather long) period of time (I'm too lazy to look it up right now). Cassettes from the same era used a different binder that didn't break down as fast. But despite the claims that the binders are now better, I don't really trust analog as an archival medium. I had all my old analog 1/4" live-to-two-track reels digitized 10+ years ago and am still glad I did. Most of my tapes had only been through a deck a few times, and all had been stored very dry and at reasonable temperatures, so they digitized very nicely, but I know other people who haven't had theirs come out as clean.
Good analog tape at 15 ips or faster can sound as clean and quiet as digital when it's new, but it loses quality every time through the deck, and loses quality as the binder breaks down, and loses quality with every backup copy. The benefit of digital for archives is that every copy can be perfect, and all you have to do is back up often enough that you are within the window of the formats still being readable. The other advantage is that storage gets cheaper and cheaper with time-- as the archive gets bigger, it doesn't cost you any more to back up the whole thing (probably less).
Identity theft in the US basically boils down to knowing someones name and SSN. The problem is EVERYONE NEEDS YOUR SSN. Hell, a Social Security card can be used in conjunction with a drivers license to prove US citizenship. I kid you not, since most people in the US don't have passports that's what they use.
And fortunately everyone pretty has pretty much accepted that the SSN as ID is compromised and acts more or less accordingly. You need to at least go down to MacArthur Park and get a fake driver's license or green card in addition.
I still laugh at people when they as for the SS card-- when I got mine decades ago it was a cheap piece of heavy paper, not difficult to forge even then, with a number and a place for my signature. It said explicitly on it something like "this is not identification". As you point out, it doesn't have any of the characteristics of a piece of identification-- there's no way to verify that the person using it is the person it was issued to, and it was easily faked. It also either had printed on it or came with a piece of paper that said something like "this card is useless for pretty much anything. remember the number and stick the card in a safe place in case you forget". I stuck it somewhere safe and no longer remember where it is, though I think it's intact. Colleges used SSN as your ID number up until at least the 80's (my undergrad ID number was my SSN plus an extra check digit, I think my grad school switched when I was in grad school in the 90's). It's a relatively recent phenomenon that people started treated knowledge of SSN as verification that you're the person it belonged with, and accelerated with the post 9/11 ID craze.
Who the hell eats a pound of strawberries in a sitting?
Me.
I probably eat 2-3 lbs of strawberries a week on average. It's one of the nice side effects of living in California-- I eat a ton of fruit year round, some of it even from my yard.
i disagree entirely. identity verification should be done entirely in the private sector explicitly not tied to government whatsoever
That puts your identity data in the hands of a bunch of security amateurs who have an incentive to sell it for profit, and who are weak enough that the government can just take it from them when they want. Is that actually better?
It is better-- they have something to lose (money, their company, their future ability to work) if they screw up. If they do it right then it's very difficult for the government to take without it at least being very obvious. The government is like the phone company- they don't care because they don't have to. And there are a whole lot of people in government (and especially the security side) who get into it because they want control over what other people can do.
then use the SS#, birthdate, mother's maiden name and address info the bank was storing to compromise your
The federal government already lost control of that information, and more, for me and tens of thousands of others when a laptop (that should have never had that information on it) was stolen from a car in DC. I don't expect them to do a whole lot better with authentication keys.
And what's included in that annoyingly thorough identity test at the post office? SSN, birthdate, mothers maiden name, last 3 addresses, etc. All the information that gets stolen already anyway-- so the TFA is a convenience, but it's subject to the same sort of attacks that ID is already subject to. You can go on a two month european vacation and I can go to the post office, pretend to be you with all the information I stole, get your key revoked (leaving you kind of SOL when it comes to paying for your hotel and food, and making your re-entry into the country really fun), and get a new token and clean out your accounts. You can mitigate it to some extent with biometrics like fingerprints on the token, but I could limit my attacks to people like potters and bricklayers who wear theirs off and go in with the same blank fingers they have. And if I'm a mugger taking your token and know you need prints for authentication to revoke it, I just have to mangle your fingers. That gives me more time to clean you out while you try to prove you're really you.
These are just a few random attacks that took a few seconds to think of- someone clever with a lot of time can do much better. Things like this always seem to work great when you plan them out, but there are always exceptional cases that you have to deal with that nobody anticipated. An example of another hole in many of the ID systems is the US Passport-- when it comes down to it, all you need is another US citizen to vouch for you to get one. I know someone who grew up in NYC, never had a drivers license, no birth certificate, parents dead, had very little paper trail despite being a visible small business owner for decades, and he ended up having to get someone who'd known him for most of those decades to vouch for him when he finally needed a passport in his 40's. At the end of the day, any system comes down to the weakest link, and it will likely end up being some gaping hole like that.
And suppose I build a quantum computer and start factoring big numbers easily? Now we have your national emergency because we put all our eggs in one basket and created an awesome single point failure for authentication.
This is getting a little existential, but I don't see the difference. The bank needs to verify that the person standing before them is the same as the person who deposited $500 yesterday, Visa needs to verify that the person buying these new shoes is the same as the person who's faithfully paid their bill every month. And when it comes down to it, that's *all* they need to know.
Which is fine when it's just your bank trying to validate that you're the person that gave them the $500. They give you an ID, you show them the ID when you give them the money, then when you show them the ID again you get the money back. I prefer to have my bank supply the ID there.
But the federal government has already been trying to go way beyond that with ID. HSPD-12 was a directive signed by Bush II to issue a common secure ID to all gov't employees and contractors. If you read it that's all it says. By the time it was implemented it included significant background investigations - for employees in "low risk" positions it's about the same as a confidential clearance, but for many people (many of whom are not gov't employees, and had already been checked by their own employers to reasoable standards) it amounts to a secret clearance. When first imposed, the background check could look at things like sexual orientation, medical history, and all sorts of other things irrelevant to determining ID. One thing it *didn't* do effectively is verify that the person whose background was being investigated was the person getting the ID-- it isn't that hard to spoof. There were some cases that got a lot of publicity a few years before it was imposed where some people in Detroit spoofed the system and got a Top Secret clearance for someone who had fraudulantly become a citizen and based on a whole bunch of scam. That's an example of bad people with good papers. And no matter how good your system is, you'll still get them. But the more complicated and obfuscated it is, the more the bureaucrats will think the system is infallible.
Good lord, that's not my goal. I just want to reduce the number of people who can access, collate, and steal my identity data by giving the keys to it to an institution with the power and expertise to keep them safe, and powerful enough that it could take my information from anyone else anyway. If you've got to lend your lunch money to somebody, give it to the biggest bully in school: maybe he'll return it, maybe not, but nobody else is going to take it from him.
That's not *your* goal, but it is the goal of many of the people pushing for a universal federally issued ID. It's a means of controlling access, not in the sense that you want of "verify me so only I can get into my things", but in the sense of "we can track you anywhere and deny you anything we want by invalidating your ID". And giving your money to the biggest bully isn't a good idea-- you want to set up a system where whoever you gave your money to has just as much (or more) to lose by losing your money or visibly refusing to give it back to you as you do by losing the money.
The best you can ever really do with a piece of ID is verify that the person carrying it is the person you gave it to. That's not the same thing at all as confirmation that "you are who you say you are".
People go on these kicks over ID thinking "if only we know who everyone is, nothing bad can happen, and we can trace it if it does". There will always be ways around the system where people can end up with multiple IDs, or where people's ID can be corrupted. Then you end up with good people with bad papers, bad people with good papers, and a bureaucracy in denial that such things can happen. Thinking national ID that you have to use for everything will fix anything is about like demanding that malicious software set the evil bit on malicious packets.
Letting government be responsible for all ID verification and proliferating it nearly universally is a bad thing. Anonymity is a good thing for democracy, despite its many down sides.
Slashdot Mirror
What's shameful is that I didn't even notice how blatant it was until it was pointed out on another TV show.
I've seen it even worse in Burn Notice-- something like "If you're going to ditch someone chasing you in a pursuit, you need a car with a lot of acceleration, quick handling, and great braking. That means something like the [make][model] is ideal". Followed by what amounts to a car commercial of a chase, with lots of logo shots.
The universe probably finds some convenient way to force things to reasonable values. The density going to zero was just an example of a particular case. And quantum gravitation? Show me before you tell me where it kicks in. The universe is going to do what it's going to do, and it's generally well behaved, despite what happens where theories break down.
And how much of that is due to the elevation difference between SLC (~1288 m) and Sochi (near sea level). I'm too lazy to do the math for all of them, but based on my experience in cycling at sea level vs. 1500 m, those look like substantially attributable to the elevation. Add in differences in ice quality, and you might have all the difference. A more appropriate comparison is to look at how they've been doing against all their international competition over the past year, looking at performances at the same venue on the same day, and extrapolating.
This article: why higher elevation is better even points out that the final training for the US team was done at elevation. Training at sea level and using hypoxic tents at night might have been a better idea.
For instance, in cycling one major decision is which gears you put on your bike for a given race. Some people are better with bigger gears, and some smaller gears. Forcing everyone to use the same ones would put people at a disadvantage.
This isn't a problem: just give them all a multi-speed bike that has ALL the gears. The only reason you'd only put some gears on a bike for a given race is because you're trying to eliminate extra weight and streamline the bike for the conditions it'll see in that race (you're trying to optimize it). If everyone has the exact same bike, this isn't necessary. No, this bike won't be as optimal for any one person as a custom-built (and -geared) bike, but it'll have all the gearings that any of the athletes might want, and eliminate the machinery as a competitive advantage
And the machines still make it unfair- if you homogenize the machines to that extent then you end up homogenizing the people who can be competitive, as well. Staying with your example, small cyclists tend to have high power to weight, but low overall power, so it makes them more suited to climbing. Putting them on bikes with "all the possible gears" at the expense of weight means that the machine is a larger fraction of the rider+weight than for larger cyclists, thus using the machine to take away some of their real physical advantage. Even racing in a very controlled environment (i.e. a velodrome, where it's essentially dead flat), where riders are allowed to choose any gear they want (but only one gear), riders in a given race will choose different gears depending on their riding and racing style (spin vs mash, breakaway for laps vs. sit in and sprint). Sticking everyone in the same gear will likely put some of them at a disadvantage (which is intentionally done in junior racing, for both physical and fairness reasons).
AFAIK it is however conjectured that naked singularities cannot actually form (what is AFAIR definitely proved is that you cannot turn a black hole into a naked singularity).
There are singularities all over physics, even in something as simple as the velocity field of a classical vortex (v ~ 1/r). The world doesn't go all goofy at them-- the universe tends to take care of them in relatively convenient and pedestrian ways, like by sending the density to zero where the velocity goes to infinity. It's all fun to be a theorist talking about naked singularities (probably as close to naked anything as many of them get...) but if someone figures out a way to actually observe what's going on there, it will probably be interesting but probably won't be anything particularly magical.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
Most POD systems are capable of producing all standard sizes up to 8.5x11 as a normal part of the process. It's on the order of a penny per page, plus a little under a buck for the cover, depending on who does your POD. A good deal of backlist titles are produced via POD in order to avoid large print runs while still keeping titles in print. Commercial POD is actually at a point where it's cheaper to print and ship a galley of a book to use for editing or review than it is to print it as a "manuscript" with a desktop laser printer.
The 1366 W/m^2 (plus or minus a bit) is the instantaneous incoming radiant power density on a surface at 1 AU, not the insolation. There's no accounting for day/night in it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant )
The insolation is the time integral of that, and does account for the day night cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation )
If you drive to work in LA where it takes more than an hour to get to or from work, you'd want to plug in.
Why would you need to charge if after driving 2 miles?
You think you're joking...
I have to drive to work (about 35 miles each way) temporarily in LA, and it's about 1.5 hours there, 1.5 to 2 hours home. I just got a Cmax hybrid (with the little battery, not the Energi) and because I live in the San Gabriel Valley I can almost EV all the way to DTLA (it's all downhill) and get there with a full charge. It can easily take 45 minutes to an hour to do the ~10 miles or so to get to and through DTLA. After that it's much quicker. The gas motor runs on the way home though.
My regular commute, when I get back to it, is 4.5 miles each way on a bike.
Most people who buy hybrids do it so they can drive solo in the commuter lane, so I expect this car will spend its entire life running off its gasoline backup engine.
That expired in California a few years ago. Now you have to have a full electric to drive solo in the carpool lane, or pay a few bucks via transponder if you're on one of the roads that allows that.
Other than the no-plug aspect, why even bother with this? Instead, make a carport or pole barn, plop some solar panels on that, connect those to an inverter or charge controller, and plug that into the vehicle. It would gain more electricity overall that can be used for the vehicle compared to a Frenel lens series, and it won't fry the cat when he or she plops down by the car for an afternoon nap and the sunbeam shifts, or the vehicle moves back and Pirelli processes Fluffy.
I have a colleague who has two electric cars (a Leaf and a RAV 4) and does this with the solar panels on his roof. The Fresnel lens saves a little conversion loss, but at a reduction of system availability for power production as well.
It could easily be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
In the Reynolds case that established the state secrets privilege of the executive branch, the government fought hard to not disclose the accident reports that the widows of civilian contractors were trying to obtain to show that the government had been negligent in maintenance of the aircraft and that they should therefore receive substantial awards. The case started in 1949, and ran into 1953 before it was finally closed by the supreme court in favor of the government.
In the meantime, a routine review in 1950 declassified the disputed reports from "secret" to "restricted", which is the equivalent of FOUO, which would have allowed the use of the reports in the case. Everyone involved in the case, from the plaintiffs up to the supreme court, and including all witnesses, was unaware of the declassification, which wasn't discovered until the 2000's. The case ran to its conclusion with everyone involved continuing to believe that the documents were classified. The case went on to be the legal basis for all future claims of state secrets privilege by the executive branch.
ref:http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?civilliberties_patriot_act=civilliberties_state_secrets&timeline=civilliberties
I imagine you realize this, but sometimes these are needed for good driving too. Around here, many freeway on-ramps are on the short side, at which point aggressive acceleration is needed to merge at freeway speed (alas I rarely see drivers do this). Then there are short off-ramps where heavy braking allows one to avoid braking until fully out of the flow of traffic (again few drivers do this).
There are some really impressively short ones on the 110 freeway in LA. Basically a stop sign that feeds into a freeway lane, and the exit ramp is the same.
He broke his collarbone twice while racing and had two crashes on a mountain bike
Okay, you get the win on this one. Slashdot description is deceptive; thanks for the clarification these injuries were not in the street use the article is about.
Clarifying the conditions of his crashes is very important. A former clubmate of mine did a study of non-reported bicycle crashes some 5-6 years ago. He surveyed the entire club (a few hundred riders ranging from recreational to frequent racers) to list and describe the conditions of and injuries resulting from all the crashes they'd ever had. Unfortunately I can't find a link or a reference, but will keep digging. When I listed mine I discovered something interesting: I crash about once per year, and only under two types of conditions: racing or extreme weather. Both types of crashes are easily avoidable by avoiding the conditions. The racing crashes mostly were solo crashes from either getting a front wheel taken out, or in later years from racing madison (look it up). The bad weather crashes were all solo slides from riding in snow/ice, or in a few cases heavy rain that caused me to slide out on the paint in crosswalks. None of the crashes involved motor vehicles, despite at that point ~15 years of bike commuting in traffic in 3 states. None required more than treatment for road rash, either.
My general position is that if you ride predictably and reasonably defensively following the rules of the road and basic rules for group cycling (if you roll that way), you really shouldn't ever crash on a bicycle.
Well said. Hydrogen is really no more dangerous than gasoline, which is quite flammable and in vapor form is quite explosive. The Hindenburg really gave it a bad rap, but that was due as much or more to the coating on the envelope as to the hydrogen.
Your point B really is the key though, and as you say, it's an issue with all cars, largely due to what one might call "parasitics". The object of transportation is to move a masses of stuff from one place to another. For personal transportation we seem to have decided that it makes sense to move an additional few thousand pounds of vehicle in moving each few hundred pounds of person. That's a lot of mass to be accelerating and decelerating, and it tends to have a large cross section in the wind.
Even more recently, military satellites make up a large portion of their launches and any craft capable of bringing a launch to LEO must be considered capable of military payloads.
Those "craft capable of bringing a launch to LEO" are paid for by other agencies (e.g. NRO, USAF) and built by private contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital). Recon satellites are generally built by private contractors with little or no NASA involvement (a few people on review panels maybe), except where NASA has particular technology capabilities that aren't available commercially. The launch market is pretty much all private industry at this point.
Seriously. They are trying to restrict anybody from entering federal lands at all. This includes the national forests and BLM land that constitute 80% plus of the western states land area. There is seldom ever a federal employee on those lands.
I live about 100 yards from a national forest, and it remained open until we had a red flag warning (hot, high winds, extremely low humidity, high fire danger). It's still open for many uses-- major roads are open, and the few privately run concessions (a restaurant and a snack bar) are open. A few of the minor, primarily recreational roads are closed, but they also close them for fire danger when the government is open (people pull off the road and their cars start fires). I'm free to hike or mtb on the fire roads and singletrack. I haven't been up the main road, but it sounds like gated picnic/parking areas are closed.
The "captains chair" has no controls or screens of its own, so whomever sits there cannot do anything except shout orders.
And if you look at it from behind, it looks like it's armored, like he's expected to get shot at by the people in the back row...
Humidity of the storage environment matters, too. IIRC, the worst of the bad binders took up a lot of water and expanded as it went bad.
There are probably still a fair number of people with decks and baking setups that are already built and debugged who will do it for a reasonable price. I had mine done about 10 years ago, and the guy doing it turned out to be an Otari rep who had a house full of old machines and every conceivable head block, as well as a baking setup he'd debugged. I think it was about $50/hour then, which was fine because I didn't have that many tapes to do, and they came out great.
Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years.
Magnetization starts to print through and creates pre and post 'echos.'
As the magnetic signal weakens, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades.
To be archived, you have to bake the tape (in an oven) and then you get one playback on your analog deck, so it can be digitized for archive.
If instead you record it onto another magnetic tape, you've just added more tape hiss and distortion that wasn't there in the original.
If you want true 'analog,' go to a live concert with no amplification.
If you want fidelity: record, mix and deliver digitally.
You're already modded up to +5, but I was looking for someone to say all this or I was going to. Allegedly the binder problem has been improved substantially, and that the binder breakdown was associated with a particular (rather long) period of time (I'm too lazy to look it up right now). Cassettes from the same era used a different binder that didn't break down as fast. But despite the claims that the binders are now better, I don't really trust analog as an archival medium. I had all my old analog 1/4" live-to-two-track reels digitized 10+ years ago and am still glad I did. Most of my tapes had only been through a deck a few times, and all had been stored very dry and at reasonable temperatures, so they digitized very nicely, but I know other people who haven't had theirs come out as clean.
Good analog tape at 15 ips or faster can sound as clean and quiet as digital when it's new, but it loses quality every time through the deck, and loses quality as the binder breaks down, and loses quality with every backup copy. The benefit of digital for archives is that every copy can be perfect, and all you have to do is back up often enough that you are within the window of the formats still being readable. The other advantage is that storage gets cheaper and cheaper with time-- as the archive gets bigger, it doesn't cost you any more to back up the whole thing (probably less).
Identity theft in the US basically boils down to knowing someones name and SSN. The problem is EVERYONE NEEDS YOUR SSN. Hell, a Social Security card can be used in conjunction with a drivers license to prove US citizenship. I kid you not, since most people in the US don't have passports that's what they use.
And fortunately everyone pretty has pretty much accepted that the SSN as ID is compromised and acts more or less accordingly. You need to at least go down to MacArthur Park and get a fake driver's license or green card in addition.
I still laugh at people when they as for the SS card-- when I got mine decades ago it was a cheap piece of heavy paper, not difficult to forge even then, with a number and a place for my signature. It said explicitly on it something like "this is not identification". As you point out, it doesn't have any of the characteristics of a piece of identification-- there's no way to verify that the person using it is the person it was issued to, and it was easily faked. It also either had printed on it or came with a piece of paper that said something like "this card is useless for pretty much anything. remember the number and stick the card in a safe place in case you forget". I stuck it somewhere safe and no longer remember where it is, though I think it's intact. Colleges used SSN as your ID number up until at least the 80's (my undergrad ID number was my SSN plus an extra check digit, I think my grad school switched when I was in grad school in the 90's). It's a relatively recent phenomenon that people started treated knowledge of SSN as verification that you're the person it belonged with, and accelerated with the post 9/11 ID craze.
Who the hell eats a pound of strawberries in a sitting?
Me.
I probably eat 2-3 lbs of strawberries a week on average. It's one of the nice side effects of living in California-- I eat a ton of fruit year round, some of it even from my yard.
That puts your identity data in the hands of a bunch of security amateurs who have an incentive to sell it for profit, and who are weak enough that the government can just take it from them when they want. Is that actually better?
It is better-- they have something to lose (money, their company, their future ability to work) if they screw up. If they do it right then it's very difficult for the government to take without it at least being very obvious. The government is like the phone company- they don't care because they don't have to. And there are a whole lot of people in government (and especially the security side) who get into it because they want control over what other people can do.
then use the SS#, birthdate, mother's maiden name and address info the bank was storing to compromise your
The federal government already lost control of that information, and more, for me and tens of thousands of others when a laptop (that should have never had that information on it) was stolen from a car in DC. I don't expect them to do a whole lot better with authentication keys.
And what's included in that annoyingly thorough identity test at the post office? SSN, birthdate, mothers maiden name, last 3 addresses, etc. All the information that gets stolen already anyway-- so the TFA is a convenience, but it's subject to the same sort of attacks that ID is already subject to. You can go on a two month european vacation and I can go to the post office, pretend to be you with all the information I stole, get your key revoked (leaving you kind of SOL when it comes to paying for your hotel and food, and making your re-entry into the country really fun), and get a new token and clean out your accounts. You can mitigate it to some extent with biometrics like fingerprints on the token, but I could limit my attacks to people like potters and bricklayers who wear theirs off and go in with the same blank fingers they have. And if I'm a mugger taking your token and know you need prints for authentication to revoke it, I just have to mangle your fingers. That gives me more time to clean you out while you try to prove you're really you.
These are just a few random attacks that took a few seconds to think of- someone clever with a lot of time can do much better. Things like this always seem to work great when you plan them out, but there are always exceptional cases that you have to deal with that nobody anticipated. An example of another hole in many of the ID systems is the US Passport-- when it comes down to it, all you need is another US citizen to vouch for you to get one. I know someone who grew up in NYC, never had a drivers license, no birth certificate, parents dead, had very little paper trail despite being a visible small business owner for decades, and he ended up having to get someone who'd known him for most of those decades to vouch for him when he finally needed a passport in his 40's. At the end of the day, any system comes down to the weakest link, and it will likely end up being some gaping hole like that.
And suppose I build a quantum computer and start factoring big numbers easily? Now we have your national emergency because we put all our eggs in one basket and created an awesome single point failure for authentication.
This is getting a little existential, but I don't see the difference. The bank needs to verify that the person standing before them is the same as the person who deposited $500 yesterday, Visa needs to verify that the person buying these new shoes is the same as the person who's faithfully paid their bill every month. And when it comes down to it, that's *all* they need to know.
Which is fine when it's just your bank trying to validate that you're the person that gave them the $500. They give you an ID, you show them the ID when you give them the money, then when you show them the ID again you get the money back. I prefer to have my bank supply the ID there.
But the federal government has already been trying to go way beyond that with ID. HSPD-12 was a directive signed by Bush II to issue a common secure ID to all gov't employees and contractors. If you read it that's all it says. By the time it was implemented it included significant background investigations - for employees in "low risk" positions it's about the same as a confidential clearance, but for many people (many of whom are not gov't employees, and had already been checked by their own employers to reasoable standards) it amounts to a secret clearance. When first imposed, the background check could look at things like sexual orientation, medical history, and all sorts of other things irrelevant to determining ID. One thing it *didn't* do effectively is verify that the person whose background was being investigated was the person getting the ID-- it isn't that hard to spoof. There were some cases that got a lot of publicity a few years before it was imposed where some people in Detroit spoofed the system and got a Top Secret clearance for someone who had fraudulantly become a citizen and based on a whole bunch of scam. That's an example of bad people with good papers. And no matter how good your system is, you'll still get them. But the more complicated and obfuscated it is, the more the bureaucrats will think the system is infallible.
Good lord, that's not my goal. I just want to reduce the number of people who can access, collate, and steal my identity data by giving the keys to it to an institution with the power and expertise to keep them safe, and powerful enough that it could take my information from anyone else anyway. If you've got to lend your lunch money to somebody, give it to the biggest bully in school: maybe he'll return it, maybe not, but nobody else is going to take it from him.
That's not *your* goal, but it is the goal of many of the people pushing for a universal federally issued ID. It's a means of controlling access, not in the sense that you want of "verify me so only I can get into my things", but in the sense of "we can track you anywhere and deny you anything we want by invalidating your ID". And giving your money to the biggest bully isn't a good idea-- you want to set up a system where whoever you gave your money to has just as much (or more) to lose by losing your money or visibly refusing to give it back to you as you do by losing the money.
The best you can ever really do with a piece of ID is verify that the person carrying it is the person you gave it to. That's not the same thing at all as confirmation that "you are who you say you are".
People go on these kicks over ID thinking "if only we know who everyone is, nothing bad can happen, and we can trace it if it does". There will always be ways around the system where people can end up with multiple IDs, or where people's ID can be corrupted. Then you end up with good people with bad papers, bad people with good papers, and a bureaucracy in denial that such things can happen. Thinking national ID that you have to use for everything will fix anything is about like demanding that malicious software set the evil bit on malicious packets.
Letting government be responsible for all ID verification and proliferating it nearly universally is a bad thing. Anonymity is a good thing for democracy, despite its many down sides.