No, what you describe is safety: protecting against everything that can go unintentionally wrong.
Security is protection against someone intentionally wanting to do you harm.
Bad grammar and spelling mistakes are often signs that the person writing to you did not take the time to review his text.
For a simple and short email without much importance, this can be ok and therefore in such message, you can accept some mistakes, as long as it does not distract too much.
However, for a report on something important, I expect the writer to review the text, by preference on paper (given that some types of issues are less obvious on screen). He should reread it to see if he did not forget things, to check if his line of reasoning is clearly explained, if results are correctly represented, figures are printed as they should, etc,...
If he is doing that work, it is only a small additional step to also correct the spelling and grammar errors.
I never see reports which are excellent, apart from grammar and spelling. The reports with a lot of grammatical errors always also show other problems.
There is only one exception to the rule above: reports written in English by non-native speakers.
This might more or less work for degrees where you only need a computer to do practical work.
But what if you want to get a degree in -let's say- RF design? Sure you can do some simulations on your home computer, but how about building the stuff, measuring it with a high quality measurement equipment?
A lot of degrees require a well equiped lab if you want to get any experience in the hands-on aspects of your field or just to get better understanding of what you learned in your textbook/online training,....
I think online courses are great to get a better knowledge on a particular topic, but to replace a complete education program by it???
The openstreetmap project does provide a fantastic result, but for me it is lacking satellite imaging (as google does) or satellite imaging and aerial pictures (as bing/microsoft does)
Having the images can be very handy... I see very often people who need to determine the distance between two points and for that, the images are easier than the maps.
I once followed a course on safety in aviation, where the teacher suggested a technical measure to improve road safety: put a sharp rod on the steering wheel, pointing directly at the chest of the driver.
Simple, cheap and depending on your exact goal, probably very efficient....
Now, I do not know about missiles, but wind turbines are a NATO concern: see for instance times online
Note that there are a number of mechanisms by which a wind turbine can interfere with primary radar. It is not only the fact that the energy reflected back on the wind turbine can trick the radar into thinking that he is seeing a genuine target. Wind turbines can by the way also impact secondary radar. See for instance Eurocontrol for more information.
It's rather that radars, ATC centers,... verify that information is not to old for display/use. As such, all equipment verifies different time sources (e.g.g internal clock, external GPS reference, DCF clock, etc)
With the addition of a leap second, you run the risk that some alarms will go off, indicating that there is a potential timing issue. This might cause the shutdown of certain systems.
Using NTP is not always an option: older systems cannot always connect to an NTP server (what with a 20 year old radar?), you need additional secured datalines, etc
cheaper equipment: it would surprise me as you always need a mode S transponder for ADS-B.
FAA relaxing on standards: if ADS-B is the sole means of surveillance, they will require even more stringent testing and performance. In the past, if your transponder was not perfect, they had primary radar to see you. In the future, with only ADS-B, transmitting e.g. a wrong position is much more dangerous.
i read the title as "Slicing a Hard Drive Using Household Items"
Now, I can image a large number of household tools to cut up a hard drive, but whether they will fulfill the criterion "outperforms most commercially available devices"?
software is already used for similar activities, but in another way.
With medical images, it is often difficult to decide that something is not there. It is more easy to see e.g. a tumor than to decide that no tumor, even not a small one, is present.
So, in some laboratories, they use a computer to judge the images first. The computer will only flag the cases where he found a tumor and also indicates the place. As such the doctor only has to do a quick verification: he knows where to look and what to look for, because the computer has given him the required information. As such, the medical expert has more time to judge the difficult cases in more detail: all cases where the computer did not find anything.
Tests have shown that with that system, fewer experts can process more images with the same level of accuracy.
The rules for Mode S transponder carriage is currently not uniform in Europe and depends on the type of aircraft (balloon, glider,...) Airspace infrigment of these less visible airspace users are a problem for ATC.
Apart from that, some people are afraid that if every glider, microlight, etc. is transponder equipped, the radars and/or multiradar trackers can become overloaded. This is why in certain parts of airspace, users are explicitly asked to switch their transponder off.
Some companies (I think Kinetic (not the same as QinetiQ)) are developping a low weight transponder, but there are some issues with their products. (and they are not available for sale already)
However, as pointed out above, even a light trandponder of 250 gr is relatively heavy for a 27 kg plane.
Concerning the power budget: these type of aircraft are often solar powered. During night, they use stored energy and actually slowly dwirrel down. The next day, the climb again. Even at their lowest altitude, they stay well above commercial manned air traffic.
In order to keep flying for months (without refuelling!) on solar energy, they are very low weight structures (in the referenced article, they state 27 kg.) A traditional aircraft transponder can be a few kilograms on it own.
The problem with the ground cockpit lies also in the long endurance. It is not very interesting to require pilots on the ground. They would be doing nothing during many years, but they should be there 24h a day / 365 days, just in case of an emergency.
I'm sure that in the future, ATC systems will be able to deal with this type of aircraft, but currently they do not.
Note that I'm discussing a particular type of UAVs. Many of the military systems have relatively short missions (hours). There, it would be more easy to mimick a real pilot controlled aircraft with a "ground controller".
Some kind of UAVs are designed to fly for months, being controlled by a computer instead of being flown remotely by a pilot on the ground. (see e.g. http://www.qinetiq.com/home/newsroom/news_releases_homepage/2005/2nd_quarter/qinetiq_awarded_contract.html ) In normal operation, these aircraft fly high above normally used airspace. Taking off can be done in special locations under special rules. Landing is more difficult. The real problem is however what happens in case of a crash.
Those aircraft are very low weight composite aircraft with very thight energy budgets. Due to the composite parts, they are invisible to primary radar. Due to the energy budget, they cannot install an SSR transponder. In other words, they are completely invisble in case something goes wrong. (in which you cannot trust the transponder anyhow)
What you need in such case is a direct link to air traffic control to tell that your autonomious plane is lost so that they can clear a part of the airspace. Now, since your aircraft is no longer controlled by a "ground pilot", who is going to make the call?
One alternative is to let the ground station relay the aircraft position to ATC centers (air traffic control centers). However, current ATC systems are not built to accept this information, especially not when the number of users of UAVs increases.
a shame the cameras are placed so low. With more/other cameras, you might see a bike next to your car, a pedestrian behind your parked car... Especially useful for larger cars, vans, trucks,...
I'm currently tasked with buying primary and mode-S radars in Europe. So, let's add some points to the discussion.
- ADS-B is not Mode-S. For ads-B, you use the mode-S transponder on board of the aircraft to transmit the signals. Having a mode-S transponder with the broadcast capability is however not sufficient. You also need to connect the avionics to the mode-S transponder. This is not a simple task in older aircraft.
- Tests have shown that many ads-B transponders (at least in Europe) transmit incorrect or inaccurate information. (you might find the correct numbers on the airborne monitoring program website of Eurocontrol).
- Many readers present a list of surveillance systems (radar, Mode-S radar, ads-B) They however forget a very important one: multilateration. MLAT uses triangulation on signals transmitted by aircraft. The ADS-B signals are excellent for multilateration. However, MLAT determines the position of aircraft independently from the message content. So, if you place an incorrect GPS position into an ADS-B message, MLAT will not be tricked and still report the correct position. MLAT is used at many airports for local systems and is also deployed for larger areas all over the world. The disadvantage is that you need four times as many receivers as for ADS-B only.
- There are a lot of mechanisms to minimize the number of faulty transponders. In Australia for instance, the quality of the transponder is checked while the aircraft is flying in an area with radar coverage. If the quality is ok, it is allowed to fly ADS-B only routes.
- There is indeed a threat of people disabling on purpose the transponder. However, this is an attack on your country, so a military issue (they have primary radar) Furthermore, currently the controllers cannot see any aircraft, so it is currently also possible for someone to remain invisible.
- Failure of GPS is possible. However, in ADS-B only environments, separation between aircraft will probably remain larger than in areas with multiple radar coverage. This means that in case of global GPS failure (or more likely, failure of the FAA equipment), controllers switch back to the type of control (and separation) they now apply. Controllers are trained in these procedures.
I think it is a good idea that police forces share their ideas. Why shouldn't we know how speeding, murder, traffic jams, illegal music, etc are handled in other countries? It doesn't mean that you have to copy the discussed techniques and apply them without thinking or checking them against your own law system...
Typically slashdot: information should be free unless it can be used to check about pirated software or music.
smart thieving is not about not getting found. A smart theft is not even discovered.
Like stealing one cent from a lot of people and nobody relizes he is missing a cent.
Any large scale conversion is about references. During your life, you learn reference values: the typical size of a house, the price of car, etc. When you come across something new, you will reference it to what you already know. A car of 30.000 euros is expensive, because I know that a typical family car will cost around 15.000 euros. Driving 150km/h is fast, because I know that 120km/h is the speed limit on our highways. Now, a boat travelling at 80km/h, is that fast or not? Since I do not have a reference system for boats, I wouldn't know. I cannot compare the value of 80km/h to a typical value. Now, last week, there was a news paper about a high speed boat trip between the UK and Belgium, with boats going 80km/h. That paper allowed me to build up a reference system, so know I know that this is a high speed for a large passenger boat.
If you change measurement units, it becomes impossible to use your reference system. This is why people resist changing to metric.
The same thing happened in Europe with the conversion to Euros. At the beginning, you didn't automatically knew whether 10.000 was the price of a house or rather of a car. For things you come often across, it is fairly easy to build up a new reference system in the new measurement unit. However, for rare things, this is much more difficult. I notice many people use and think in Euros, unless they start thinking about buying a house. Then, they start out in their old currency. Once they have seen a few houses, they learn the relation between price in euros and property value and they start thinking in euro's.
As a sidenote: I used to work together with American scientists at NIST and they all used metric units (of course, it was NIST, so if even they didn't use it...)
There are two reasons why I don't trust an external HD (such as maxtor one touch)as a sole means of backup.
- If lighting strikes, electric systems can die. So both your pc and your backup can be dead.
- An external HD is a nice and shiny thing next to your computer: burglars will most certainly take it together with your computer, leaving you without hardware and data. They most probably will not take used DVDs stored in another room.
So, a HD is very useful for a fast and easy backup, but I would still backup de backup disk from time to time on DVD.
if you are designing software or websites on a contracting base, this should be specified in the contract. Support and lifetime are specifications who should be listed.
Things change if you edit your pictures. This take quite some time and after your work is done, you often like to verify what you did on paper. So you go to the shop with one picture and ask them to print it.
This will first of all cost you quite much: they often charge a start-up cost of eg 2$, independantly of the number of pictures you have taken. If you only bring one picture, this cost can not be neglected.
Then, you see that the colors are not exactly what you desired and you can go home, change your picture and go back to the shop... (you could of course buy a calibrated monitor, but that is not very cheap either)
Editing pictures can take quite some time. So if you wait until you have eg 20 edited pictures before going to the shop, you will have to wait quite long to actually see your results.
No, what you describe is safety: protecting against everything that can go unintentionally wrong.
Security is protection against someone intentionally wanting to do you harm.
recycling precious metals from e-waste is already done. see http://www.umicore.com/en/ourBusinesses/recycling/
For a simple and short email without much importance, this can be ok and therefore in such message, you can accept some mistakes, as long as it does not distract too much.
However, for a report on something important, I expect the writer to review the text, by preference on paper (given that some types of issues are less obvious on screen). He should reread it to see if he did not forget things, to check if his line of reasoning is clearly explained, if results are correctly represented, figures are printed as they should, etc, ...
If he is doing that work, it is only a small additional step to also correct the spelling and grammar errors. I never see reports which are excellent, apart from grammar and spelling. The reports with a lot of grammatical errors always also show other problems.
There is only one exception to the rule above: reports written in English by non-native speakers.
This might more or less work for degrees where you only need a computer to do practical work. But what if you want to get a degree in -let's say- RF design? Sure you can do some simulations on your home computer, but how about building the stuff, measuring it with a high quality measurement equipment? A lot of degrees require a well equiped lab if you want to get any experience in the hands-on aspects of your field or just to get better understanding of what you learned in your textbook/online training,.... I think online courses are great to get a better knowledge on a particular topic, but to replace a complete education program by it???
The openstreetmap project does provide a fantastic result, but for me it is lacking satellite imaging (as google does) or satellite imaging and aerial pictures (as bing/microsoft does) Having the images can be very handy... I see very often people who need to determine the distance between two points and for that, the images are easier than the maps.
I once followed a course on safety in aviation, where the teacher suggested a technical measure to improve road safety: put a sharp rod on the steering wheel, pointing directly at the chest of the driver. Simple, cheap and depending on your exact goal, probably very efficient....
Now, I do not know about missiles, but wind turbines are a NATO concern: see for instance times online
Note that there are a number of mechanisms by which a wind turbine can interfere with primary radar. It is not only the fact that the energy reflected back on the wind turbine can trick the radar into thinking that he is seeing a genuine target. Wind turbines can by the way also impact secondary radar. See for instance Eurocontrol for more information.
With the addition of a leap second, you run the risk that some alarms will go off, indicating that there is a potential timing issue. This might cause the shutdown of certain systems.
Using NTP is not always an option: older systems cannot always connect to an NTP server (what with a 20 year old radar?), you need additional secured datalines, etc
cheaper equipment: it would surprise me as you always need a mode S transponder for ADS-B. FAA relaxing on standards: if ADS-B is the sole means of surveillance, they will require even more stringent testing and performance. In the past, if your transponder was not perfect, they had primary radar to see you. In the future, with only ADS-B, transmitting e.g. a wrong position is much more dangerous.
Now, I can image a large number of household tools to cut up a hard drive, but whether they will fulfill the criterion "outperforms most commercially available devices"?
software is already used for similar activities, but in another way. With medical images, it is often difficult to decide that something is not there. It is more easy to see e.g. a tumor than to decide that no tumor, even not a small one, is present. So, in some laboratories, they use a computer to judge the images first. The computer will only flag the cases where he found a tumor and also indicates the place. As such the doctor only has to do a quick verification: he knows where to look and what to look for, because the computer has given him the required information. As such, the medical expert has more time to judge the difficult cases in more detail: all cases where the computer did not find anything. Tests have shown that with that system, fewer experts can process more images with the same level of accuracy.
Apart from that, some people are afraid that if every glider, microlight, etc. is transponder equipped, the radars and/or multiradar trackers can become overloaded. This is why in certain parts of airspace, users are explicitly asked to switch their transponder off.
Some companies (I think Kinetic (not the same as QinetiQ)) are developping a low weight transponder, but there are some issues with their products. (and they are not available for sale already)
However, as pointed out above, even a light trandponder of 250 gr is relatively heavy for a 27 kg plane.
Concerning the power budget: these type of aircraft are often solar powered. During night, they use stored energy and actually slowly dwirrel down. The next day, the climb again. Even at their lowest altitude, they stay well above commercial manned air traffic. In order to keep flying for months (without refuelling!) on solar energy, they are very low weight structures (in the referenced article, they state 27 kg.) A traditional aircraft transponder can be a few kilograms on it own. The problem with the ground cockpit lies also in the long endurance. It is not very interesting to require pilots on the ground. They would be doing nothing during many years, but they should be there 24h a day / 365 days, just in case of an emergency. I'm sure that in the future, ATC systems will be able to deal with this type of aircraft, but currently they do not. Note that I'm discussing a particular type of UAVs. Many of the military systems have relatively short missions (hours). There, it would be more easy to mimick a real pilot controlled aircraft with a "ground controller".
Those aircraft are very low weight composite aircraft with very thight energy budgets. Due to the composite parts, they are invisible to primary radar. Due to the energy budget, they cannot install an SSR transponder. In other words, they are completely invisble in case something goes wrong. (in which you cannot trust the transponder anyhow)
What you need in such case is a direct link to air traffic control to tell that your autonomious plane is lost so that they can clear a part of the airspace. Now, since your aircraft is no longer controlled by a "ground pilot", who is going to make the call?
One alternative is to let the ground station relay the aircraft position to ATC centers (air traffic control centers). However, current ATC systems are not built to accept this information, especially not when the number of users of UAVs increases.
a shame the cameras are placed so low. With more/other cameras, you might see a bike next to your car, a pedestrian behind your parked car... Especially useful for larger cars, vans, trucks,...
I'm currently tasked with buying primary and mode-S radars in Europe. So, let's add some points to the discussion. - ADS-B is not Mode-S. For ads-B, you use the mode-S transponder on board of the aircraft to transmit the signals. Having a mode-S transponder with the broadcast capability is however not sufficient. You also need to connect the avionics to the mode-S transponder. This is not a simple task in older aircraft. - Tests have shown that many ads-B transponders (at least in Europe) transmit incorrect or inaccurate information. (you might find the correct numbers on the airborne monitoring program website of Eurocontrol). - Many readers present a list of surveillance systems (radar, Mode-S radar, ads-B) They however forget a very important one: multilateration. MLAT uses triangulation on signals transmitted by aircraft. The ADS-B signals are excellent for multilateration. However, MLAT determines the position of aircraft independently from the message content. So, if you place an incorrect GPS position into an ADS-B message, MLAT will not be tricked and still report the correct position. MLAT is used at many airports for local systems and is also deployed for larger areas all over the world. The disadvantage is that you need four times as many receivers as for ADS-B only. - There are a lot of mechanisms to minimize the number of faulty transponders. In Australia for instance, the quality of the transponder is checked while the aircraft is flying in an area with radar coverage. If the quality is ok, it is allowed to fly ADS-B only routes. - There is indeed a threat of people disabling on purpose the transponder. However, this is an attack on your country, so a military issue (they have primary radar) Furthermore, currently the controllers cannot see any aircraft, so it is currently also possible for someone to remain invisible. - Failure of GPS is possible. However, in ADS-B only environments, separation between aircraft will probably remain larger than in areas with multiple radar coverage. This means that in case of global GPS failure (or more likely, failure of the FAA equipment), controllers switch back to the type of control (and separation) they now apply. Controllers are trained in these procedures.
I think it is a good idea that police forces share their ideas. Why shouldn't we know how speeding, murder, traffic jams, illegal music, etc are handled in other countries? It doesn't mean that you have to copy the discussed techniques and apply them without thinking or checking them against your own law system... Typically slashdot: information should be free unless it can be used to check about pirated software or music.
smart thieving is not about not getting found. A smart theft is not even discovered. Like stealing one cent from a lot of people and nobody relizes he is missing a cent.
If you change measurement units, it becomes impossible to use your reference system. This is why people resist changing to metric.
The same thing happened in Europe with the conversion to Euros. At the beginning, you didn't automatically knew whether 10.000 was the price of a house or rather of a car. For things you come often across, it is fairly easy to build up a new reference system in the new measurement unit. However, for rare things, this is much more difficult. I notice many people use and think in Euros, unless they start thinking about buying a house. Then, they start out in their old currency. Once they have seen a few houses, they learn the relation between price in euros and property value and they start thinking in euro's. As a sidenote: I used to work together with American scientists at NIST and they all used metric units (of course, it was NIST, so if even they didn't use it...)
So that's why Mercedes has a star on the hood of the car... It is a PAS.
As far as I know, only the driver is not allowed to make a phone call. Other people in the car are free to make a phone call/ watch a movie, etc.
There are two reasons why I don't trust an external HD (such as maxtor one touch)as a sole means of backup. - If lighting strikes, electric systems can die. So both your pc and your backup can be dead. - An external HD is a nice and shiny thing next to your computer: burglars will most certainly take it together with your computer, leaving you without hardware and data. They most probably will not take used DVDs stored in another room. So, a HD is very useful for a fast and easy backup, but I would still backup de backup disk from time to time on DVD.
if you are designing software or websites on a contracting base, this should be specified in the contract. Support and lifetime are specifications who should be listed.
There's a very simple way for looking through walls: it's called a window.
Things change if you edit your pictures. This take quite some time and after your work is done, you often like to verify what you did on paper. So you go to the shop with one picture and ask them to print it.
This will first of all cost you quite much: they often charge a start-up cost of eg 2$, independantly of the number of pictures you have taken. If you only bring one picture, this cost can not be neglected.
Then, you see that the colors are not exactly what you desired and you can go home, change your picture and go back to the shop... (you could of course buy a calibrated monitor, but that is not very cheap either)
Editing pictures can take quite some time. So if you wait until you have eg 20 edited pictures before going to the shop, you will have to wait quite long to actually see your results.