Maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding of Sendai / Fukushima disaster is that, at the time of building, only the centennial tsunami record was available, while afterwards the continental drift theory (then in its infancy) developed enough to calculate, and predict, new water levels.
These levels, that caused the accident.
Aren't we close to such a scenario here?
(disclaimer: I'm not a new yorker, I'm in France, the country with so many nuclear plants that we voluntarily blind ourselves rather than analysing new geo data. Lucky you...)
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ "Private Garmin", yes, but quite the opposit attitude as concerns Openstreetmap. And it works: My dezl does drive me, turn by turn, with this. Too bad the dezl is so buggy that at the present time I just cannot manage to get the speech back:(
GoogleMaps images are obsolete because Google doesn't *buy* recent images, that are for sale and not for free. But indeed they are available... (In some countries the national geographic agency indeed provides them; for instance in France you generally can get more accurate images through the national geographic institute's portal than through Google, but this is national alone...)
Well, if I dare say, SA was turned off not at all because of its ineffectiveness, but in a last, desperate move to try preventing Europe deciding for their own positioning system, aka Galileo.
Clinton turned SA off mere months before Europe voted Galileo funding, and this after an anti-Galileo campaign that was so gross that indeed it was vastly counter-effective for the decision-makers here.
The only other campaign that was as laughable as that was when we voted on the Euro: I still keep some actual paper newspaper full-page ads that were tremendous...
Yes, NK state radio is delivered to each home by wire. And each home has a "radio" set which of course is geared to only connect to this wire, and does not receive any RF signal indeed. In NK not only you aren't supposed to listed other countries' radios, but you technically can't.
And incidentally, this "wire radio" is by design unjammable...
If you look at the article photos, you'll see the filtering is by means of a printed conductive ink in patterns that are quite complex, visibly featuring capacitors at specific frequencies etc. To me it is obvious this is not a simple Faraday cage but a frequency-specific damper. So there is nothing lile "if a GSM fits the hole then..." If the damper is well designed it'll kill a specific Wifi frequency, and it alone.
In their last report to Congress last month, the DOD very specifically detailed how they wished to *relax* the ITAR constraints: see http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15198 who just points the report itself. From the exec. summary: "In summary, the Departments agree that maintaining non-critical satellites and related components on the USML and monitoring low-risk launch activities provide limited national security benefits. Moreover, this practice places the U.S. space industrial base at a distinct competitive disadvantage when bidding against companies from other advanced satellite-exporting countries that have less stringent export control policies and practices. Transferring select items from the USML to the CCL would allow for controls consistent with other technologies and would help enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. space industrial base, while continuing to protect U.S. national security needs."
My suggestion: install Little Snitch, a (non free but brilliant) system that'll alert you whenever *anything* on your mac wants to connect outside. Of course you'll immediately allow browsers, mail etc. connect to html port 80 or pop servers. But any other surprising attempt to join any unnatural place will be interrupted, with an alert to you, where you can allow or not (just once, up to quit, or forever) with extreme fine grain on destinations (aanywhere/just this port/just this port and address...) Little Snitch is so efficient that I read an analysis of the last virus, who just deletes itself when detecting a "Little Snitch" folder on the mac! H.
Here in France, we've had 'smart' counters for more than 20 years. I have one: indeed, it is capable to announce when peak electricity will cost you more, in advance, and with appropriate settings will also cancel non-immediately-necessary appliances such as the washing machine or whatever. This has perfectly worked for 20 years.
Last year, the counter broke. Within days the monopoly, national company came and changed it with a more recent model, that only announces peak tariffs but doesn't allow anymore to adjust appliances (lack of relay command). I wrote the company, saying this was a breach of contract. The case lasted *one year and a half*. They only replied to legal, costly mails (any phone discussion clearly was only targeted to calm me without any action, including promises in the most clear and convincing way that were just trashed). As reactions I successively received the manual of my *previous* counter, then the manual of the currently existing non-peak capable counter (that I never had), then a letter from a director announcing she was aware of pissing me off and gave me a €20 rebate on my next bill -some 10% of what cancelling the automation capability has already costed me in one single year. I never got back the capacity to control appliances as stated in my contract (which incidentally was unilaterally updated in the meanwhile). In the end I wrote the CO, congratulating him for his shareholder efficiency (I received a neutral, secretary-written bland reply). All in all, I renounced.
Summary: even with a partly state-controlled company that once was ordered to do it, building a smart grid will eventually be considered wasting shareholder money, and the minuscule end-user will be just plainly ignored when this smart-but-costly activity will be abandoned. Yes: abandoned, in France.
Thank you AC! Having been a happy user of Little Snitch for years, I see apparently I don't even need to wait for it to warn me as the malware just suicides when seeing it:-) Too bad LS doesn"t exist (yet?) on Ubuntu... (the latter is no pun indended, but hope instead!)
This information is tremendously interesting for non-US countries because it shows the US are going to split their development effort between distinct technologies for military (nuclear) and civilian applications, which will be a catastrophy for them and a boon for the others.
I don't explain you why nobody will want to invest into a civilian "your Wifi in the sky" system that's just radioactive.
I may need to explain why it is so difficult for eternal flight not to go nuclear. There has been a huge lot of US developments, with the most advanced, lightest materials and equipments, like NASA/Aerovironment HELIOS devices: just by seeing their progressive increase in wingspan "as nothing else available" it comes quickly to mind that they reached their asymptotic capacity before turning entierely autonomous, I mean: eternal flight. (for details check for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder ) A quick word on lighter-than-air: just because high-altitude winds are typically in the range of hundred mph, a lighter-than-air balloon will never harvest enough sun energy to maintain itself against the wind. Really, this would require an awful lot of power: the balloon is large, you know.
In a word: no eternal flight available from vehicles that are just solar-powered, the military think. Thus, let's go nuclear with small Radioisotopic Thermal Generators, the same techno perfectly qualified ages ago since the Voyager mission. And civilian applications, well, they'll wait, OK?
Nothing technical in the above is wrong. The flaw is, they are just missing another source of energy: jet streams. The 100mph winds I mentioned earlier can bring an enormous amount of energy to devices that would bracket them, e. g. by sitting one aircraft within the stream and another one 2 km below. While the mass and drag of the linking is important, simple budgeting, there, shows it works. Many patents were applied around this idea, more or less efficiently; knowing most here don't like patenting I voluntarily propose an old one, WO2007/107018, and leave you searching more recent, which contain one from myself in a previous company;-)
Still, developing jet-stream-powered drones won't be easy: in general the detailed analyses have been performed, either by single individuals (with no financial nor real technical resources), or by industries that would be severely harmed by such a development: as a defensive reaction (I work in the space industry: eternal-flight drones would kill half of our satellite market!) So, currently no large industry is really willing / capable to start it up.
This is where "going nuclear" is bad for the US: by separating military investments from civilian potential ones, they'll just halt non-nuclear developments. At least in the US.
Here in France we have FDN, the ten-years-old "French Data Network" association, which among others proposes ADSL links with just the maximum available throughput they get to your home (typ. 18Mb/s) for €29/month (roughly $39). Of course they don't add fancy services around this -it's a pure internet line, with one fixed IP, full stop... But they are also intensely engaged into net neutrality, etc. These recent years they have started "swarming" into more regional ISPs while none exists yet in my region (so I'm attached to the national level) You don't really need a lot to start this -only motivated people, some of them with plenty of time... site in french: http://www.fdn.fr/
To some extent, this kind of bias may also be an actual self-fulfilling prophecy, exactly like a pessimistic financial prediction would be in the mouth of a country's minister of finances, but in another, more intellectual (??) domain;-)
Indeed you are perfectly right. I work in the space industry, and clearly here we are already using this "detect changes" strategy for everything that we can check regularly, from design to assembly to actual lifetime use. Of course within the technical field this is easier to perform than on the human body, but definitely you can set warnings not only on levels but on trends, etc. and indeed we now predict not only when a system will fail, but also when its situation will only become "difficult to handle". A very efficient strategy that I hope my sons will see applied to themselves...
Indeed during the Fukushima earthquake, my son was just there (in his university room) and security people had to chase him away from continueing to chat, unaware of the criticity... He admittedly was a foreigner, more unaware than others maybe...
I was all for Canada in the beginning, but in OS1.0 I understood the security stuff meant no single app, nor of course any user, could tweak with the information flux 'system wide' to stripe ads for instance -- this would have to be integrated straight into a browser. Anyone around having checked that in the v2.0 browser?
So, in addition to quickly installing his own version of Wordpress, all he needs is an european shared hosting, presumably in the form of a non-profit, cooperative association, in Europe.
There are not really many of them, but indeed a reasonable lot, of which for instance:
in Belgium, All2All, http://all2all.com/en , large and reliable in France , ouvaton.coop , http://ouvaton.coop/ , with completely free 1-month testing in France, lautre.net, http://www.lautre.net/ smallest of the three (and possibly with only a french-language interface!)
My concern, long-term, is quite the contrary. If this kind of interface works, we'll rapidly be obliged to think *everything* in words, painfully.
The situation will be back to the medieval times where reading meant reading aloud -indeed the writing was intended to be read aloud. There is a very interesting moment around that time when very scarce educated people start considering reading without talking, for instance, and this is documented (in writing!;-) by witnesses from the time, who are baffled.
Liberating our reading from the necessity of reading aloud has been something extremely important for our thinking, an importance now almost forgotten.
if we switch to a world where every thought has to be almost vocalized to be interpreted by surrounding machinery, we'll lose our "fast reading" capacity, and I fear we may lose too the capacity to think fast. Really, back to early Middle Ages...
I couldn't agree more with the post above. If I really have to add something, for me, in order to be instantly useable by anyone for work (not development), the current Ubuntu only needs to add some extra repositories in its default list, so that the end-user finds any application he heards of is easily installable. That's just the only thing missing for instant everyday use -and instant installation.
Indeed I just moved from Mandriva to Ubuntu because the last Mandriva update crashed everything on my machine. And I was almost shocked to find Ubuntu *easier* than OSX on a couple of point (e. g. capable to run an external 3G modem without extra sw install, and share immediately this connection via wifi straight from a permanently visible system menu).
So probably yes I'm among those non-geek users that have been driven to Ubuntu just because of its fame. But it works.
Whenever I have some time I'll try a couple of other distros among those you advocate for here -but indeed this requires time. And Mandriva borking its upgrade didn't overmotivate me...
Maybe the OP was sensitive to Google blatantly copying OSM ways of entering data, specially in Africa. I must say I indeed was shocked when reading, for instance, this relation: http://brainoff.com/weblog/2011/04/11/1635
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding of Sendai / Fukushima disaster is that, at the time of building, only the centennial tsunami record was available, while afterwards the continental drift theory (then in its infancy) developed enough to calculate, and predict, new water levels.
These levels, that caused the accident.
Aren't we close to such a scenario here?
(disclaimer: I'm not a new yorker, I'm in France, the country with so many nuclear plants that we voluntarily blind ourselves rather than analysing new geo data. Lucky you...)
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ :(
"Private Garmin", yes, but quite the opposit attitude as concerns Openstreetmap.
And it works: My dezl does drive me, turn by turn, with this.
Too bad the dezl is so buggy that at the present time I just cannot manage to get the speech back
GoogleMaps images are obsolete because Google doesn't *buy* recent images, that are for sale and not for free. But indeed they are available...
(In some countries the national geographic agency indeed provides them; for instance in France you generally can get more accurate images through the national geographic institute's portal than through Google, but this is national alone...)
Well, if I dare say, SA was turned off not at all because of its ineffectiveness, but in a last, desperate move to try preventing Europe deciding for their own positioning system, aka Galileo.
Clinton turned SA off mere months before Europe voted Galileo funding, and this after an anti-Galileo campaign that was so gross that indeed it was vastly counter-effective for the decision-makers here.
The only other campaign that was as laughable as that was when we voted on the Euro: I still keep some actual paper newspaper full-page ads that were tremendous...
Yes, NK state radio is delivered to each home by wire. And each home has a "radio" set which of course is geared to only connect to this wire, and does not receive any RF signal indeed. In NK not only you aren't supposed to listed other countries' radios, but you technically can't.
And incidentally, this "wire radio" is by design unjammable...
If you look at the article photos, you'll see the filtering is by means of a printed conductive ink in patterns that are quite complex, visibly featuring capacitors at specific frequencies etc.
To me it is obvious this is not a simple Faraday cage but a frequency-specific damper.
So there is nothing lile "if a GSM fits the hole then..."
If the damper is well designed it'll kill a specific Wifi frequency, and it alone.
All airport tickets in the world, and most train ones at least in Europe, are still exactly based on the punch-card system sizes...
In their last report to Congress last month, the DOD very specifically detailed how they wished to *relax* the ITAR constraints: see
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15198
who just points the report itself.
From the exec. summary:
"In summary, the Departments agree that maintaining non-critical satellites and related components on the USML and monitoring low-risk launch activities provide limited national security benefits. Moreover, this practice places the U.S. space industrial base at a distinct competitive disadvantage when bidding against companies from other advanced satellite-exporting countries that have less stringent export control policies and practices. Transferring select items from the USML to the CCL would allow for controls consistent with other technologies and would help enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. space industrial base, while continuing to protect U.S. national security needs."
Arrgh!
I had mod points up to apparently ONE SECOND ago. I clicked on the menu and it just disappeared straight away!
Sorry...
H.
My suggestion: install Little Snitch, a (non free but brilliant) system that'll alert you whenever *anything* on your mac wants to connect outside.
Of course you'll immediately allow browsers, mail etc. connect to html port 80 or pop servers.
But any other surprising attempt to join any unnatural place will be interrupted, with an alert to you, where you can allow or not (just once, up to quit, or forever) with extreme fine grain on destinations (aanywhere/just this port/just this port and address...)
Little Snitch is so efficient that I read an analysis of the last virus, who just deletes itself when detecting a "Little Snitch" folder on the mac!
H.
Here in France, we've had 'smart' counters for more than 20 years. I have one: indeed, it is capable to announce when peak electricity will cost you more, in advance, and with appropriate settings will also cancel non-immediately-necessary appliances such as the washing machine or whatever.
This has perfectly worked for 20 years.
Last year, the counter broke. Within days the monopoly, national company came and changed it with a more recent model, that only announces peak tariffs but doesn't allow anymore to adjust appliances (lack of relay command).
I wrote the company, saying this was a breach of contract. The case lasted *one year and a half*. They only replied to legal, costly mails (any phone discussion clearly was only targeted to calm me without any action, including promises in the most clear and convincing way that were just trashed).
As reactions I successively received the manual of my *previous* counter, then the manual of the currently existing non-peak capable counter (that I never had), then a letter from a director announcing she was aware of pissing me off and gave me a €20 rebate on my next bill -some 10% of what cancelling the automation capability has already costed me in one single year.
I never got back the capacity to control appliances as stated in my contract (which incidentally was unilaterally updated in the meanwhile).
In the end I wrote the CO, congratulating him for his shareholder efficiency (I received a neutral, secretary-written bland reply).
All in all, I renounced.
Summary: even with a partly state-controlled company that once was ordered to do it, building a smart grid will eventually be considered wasting shareholder money, and the minuscule end-user will be just plainly ignored when this smart-but-costly activity will be abandoned.
Yes: abandoned, in France.
Thank you AC! :-)
Having been a happy user of Little Snitch for years, I see apparently I don't even need to wait for it to warn me as the malware just suicides when seeing it
Too bad LS doesn"t exist (yet?) on Ubuntu...
(the latter is no pun indended, but hope instead!)
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1669.html
and it was *last month* !
This information is tremendously interesting for non-US countries because it shows the US are going to split their development effort between distinct technologies for military (nuclear) and civilian applications, which will be a catastrophy for them and a boon for the others.
I don't explain you why nobody will want to invest into a civilian "your Wifi in the sky" system that's just radioactive.
I may need to explain why it is so difficult for eternal flight not to go nuclear.
There has been a huge lot of US developments, with the most advanced, lightest materials and equipments, like NASA/Aerovironment HELIOS devices: just by seeing their progressive increase in wingspan "as nothing else available" it comes quickly to mind that they reached their asymptotic capacity before turning entierely autonomous, I mean: eternal flight.
(for details check for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder )
A quick word on lighter-than-air: just because high-altitude winds are typically in the range of hundred mph, a lighter-than-air balloon will never harvest enough sun energy to maintain itself against the wind. Really, this would require an awful lot of power: the balloon is large, you know.
In a word: no eternal flight available from vehicles that are just solar-powered, the military think. Thus, let's go nuclear with small Radioisotopic Thermal Generators, the same techno perfectly qualified ages ago since the Voyager mission.
And civilian applications, well, they'll wait, OK?
Nothing technical in the above is wrong. The flaw is, they are just missing another source of energy: jet streams. ;-)
The 100mph winds I mentioned earlier can bring an enormous amount of energy to devices that would bracket them, e. g. by sitting one aircraft within the stream and another one 2 km below.
While the mass and drag of the linking is important, simple budgeting, there, shows it works.
Many patents were applied around this idea, more or less efficiently; knowing most here don't like patenting I voluntarily propose an old one, WO2007/107018, and leave you searching more recent, which contain one from myself in a previous company
Still, developing jet-stream-powered drones won't be easy: in general the detailed analyses have been performed, either by single individuals (with no financial nor real technical resources), or by industries that would be severely harmed by such a development: as a defensive reaction (I work in the space industry: eternal-flight drones would kill half of our satellite market!)
So, currently no large industry is really willing / capable to start it up.
This is where "going nuclear" is bad for the US: by separating military investments from civilian potential ones, they'll just halt non-nuclear developments. At least in the US.
Here in France we have FDN, the ten-years-old "French Data Network" association, which among others proposes ADSL links with just the maximum available throughput they get to your home (typ. 18Mb/s) for €29/month (roughly $39).
Of course they don't add fancy services around this -it's a pure internet line, with one fixed IP, full stop...
But they are also intensely engaged into net neutrality, etc.
These recent years they have started "swarming" into more regional ISPs while none exists yet in my region (so I'm attached to the national level)
You don't really need a lot to start this -only motivated people, some of them with plenty of time...
site in french: http://www.fdn.fr/
To some extent, this kind of bias may also be an actual self-fulfilling prophecy, exactly like a pessimistic financial prediction would be in the mouth of a country's minister of finances, but in another, more intellectual (??) domain ;-)
Indeed you are perfectly right.
I work in the space industry, and clearly here we are already using this "detect changes" strategy for everything that we can check regularly, from design to assembly to actual lifetime use.
Of course within the technical field this is easier to perform than on the human body, but definitely you can set warnings not only on levels but on trends, etc. and indeed we now predict not only when a system will fail, but also when its situation will only become "difficult to handle".
A very efficient strategy that I hope my sons will see applied to themselves...
Indeed during the Fukushima earthquake, my son was just there (in his university room) and security people had to chase him away from continueing to chat, unaware of the criticity... He admittedly was a foreigner, more unaware than others maybe...
I was all for Canada in the beginning, but in OS1.0 I understood the security stuff meant no single app, nor of course any user, could tweak with the information flux 'system wide' to stripe ads for instance -- this would have to be integrated straight into a browser.
Anyone around having checked that in the v2.0 browser?
So, in addition to quickly installing his own version of Wordpress, all he needs is an european shared hosting, presumably in the form of a non-profit, cooperative association, in Europe.
There are not really many of them, but indeed a reasonable lot, of which for instance:
in Belgium, All2All, http://all2all.com/en , large and reliable
in France , ouvaton.coop , http://ouvaton.coop/ , with completely free 1-month testing
in France, lautre.net, http://www.lautre.net/ smallest of the three (and possibly with only a french-language interface!)
My concern, long-term, is quite the contrary.
If this kind of interface works, we'll rapidly be obliged to think *everything* in words, painfully.
The situation will be back to the medieval times where reading meant reading aloud -indeed the writing was intended to be read aloud. There is a very interesting moment around that time when very scarce educated people start considering reading without talking, for instance, and this is documented (in writing! ;-) by witnesses from the time, who are baffled.
Liberating our reading from the necessity of reading aloud has been something extremely important for our thinking, an importance now almost forgotten.
if we switch to a world where every thought has to be almost vocalized to be interpreted by surrounding machinery, we'll lose our "fast reading" capacity, and I fear we may lose too the capacity to think fast. Really, back to early Middle Ages...
I couldn't agree more with the post above.
If I really have to add something, for me, in order to be instantly useable by anyone for work (not development), the current Ubuntu only needs to add some extra repositories in its default list, so that the end-user finds any application he heards of is easily installable.
That's just the only thing missing for instant everyday use -and instant installation.
Indeed I just moved from Mandriva to Ubuntu because the last Mandriva update crashed everything on my machine. And I was almost shocked to find Ubuntu *easier* than OSX on a couple of point (e. g. capable to run an external 3G modem without extra sw install, and share immediately this connection via wifi straight from a permanently visible system menu).
So probably yes I'm among those non-geek users that have been driven to Ubuntu just because of its fame. But it works.
Whenever I have some time I'll try a couple of other distros among those you advocate for here -but indeed this requires time. And Mandriva borking its upgrade didn't overmotivate me...
Maybe the OP was sensitive to Google blatantly copying OSM ways of entering data, specially in Africa.
I must say I indeed was shocked when reading, for instance, this relation:
http://brainoff.com/weblog/2011/04/11/1635
I can't really get how changing a modding interval from [-1, +1] to [0, +2] will change anything. Not trolling, maybe I didn't understand you...