I hope the parents of the affected kids get a million bucks apiece from the district,
Honestly, I hope that they get a lot more than that, that any elected officials who were aware of the situation and didn't work to prevent it are impeached and convicted (and given serious prison time as well as any government benefits including pensions revoked), and the school administration officials receive the same - and the district be blocked from "making up" for the "losses" through taxes. Tax increases should be outlawed in that district and if it means the schools must declare bankruptcy, it should be chalked up as a learning experience.
While I understand and agree with your anger at such a blatant violation of privacy laws, there are probably in excess of 10,000 other children in this school district, and such a course of action will screw them over pretty heavily. This isn't quite as drastic as the Roman discipline techinque of decimation, where they'd kill one out of every ten people in a community that was harboring criminals, but it's the same general mindset, and I don't think it's any more acceptable behavior for civilized people than spying on children in their own homes.
What we need to do is find out who authorized this, and who was using it, and make sure they're charged with felonies. The threat of federal jail time will get the attention of other people who are thinking about trying similar things.
If I knew a company was going to be releasing a new version of something I'd damaged, I might wait a bit before making a claim, so I could get the newer version of the replacement rather than the older version. A lot of technology can be coerced into sort of working for a little while longer by wiggling connectors or overlooking a cracked and flickering screen.
I can't find the artist, but I think it was Duchamp, who was commissioned for a piece of artwork that he finished, and the purchaser protested at the high price. It went to trial, and the judge looked at the painting and asked Duchamp if the few hours it had taken him to paint that was worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars he was charging, to which he replied that the hundreds of thousands of dollars were for a lifetime of practice and learning, not for the hours for that specific painting.
And *that* was pretty strongly influenced by Da Vinci, who, on being asked to submit a design for a massive painting for the Vatican but lacking time to put together a portfolio or sample, drew a perfect freehand circle and submitted that, winning the job.
Wow, that's terrifying. Y'all play harder than I'm used to: the only time I've seen people doing stuff like that was in mountain bike races and they're all completely insane. But I'm glad to know about it.
A ex-coworker of mine was in the second french cycling league.
He was very close to getting into the first league. So he informed himself. And the rules are:
1. Learn how to touch the wheel of the one in front of you in a way that makes him fall down, or at least slower.
In all the racing/training I've done, if you touch the wheel of the guy in front of you, *you* are the one who is likely to hit the ground. (I'm currently recovering from a separated shoulder from exactly this, actually.) Since there's lots of weight on the rear wheel, and since contact on the front wheel makes it turn, which throws off your center of mass and exacerbates the turn, leading to a positive feedback cycle, it's a really bad idea to touch someone else's wheel. While you can do it if the person is riding dead straight, it's clearly noticeable when someone touches your rear wheel, and if you want to screw someone who is consistently touching your wheel you do a quick sideways turn when they're in contact, and they'll be on the ground immediately, probably with a broken collarbone.
Besides, it slows you down as much as the person ahead of you, so it only helps if you're a domestique trying to help your team leader. People in that position tend to have nasty accidents if they misbehave in the peloton.
You're entirely right: movies are made for the profit not the story. That's fine and as it should be. But in that case, why bother calling your movie "Foundation"? Why not call it "Wham Blam Space Opera In 3D (with girls with big breasts but not too many to make it family-unfriendly)"?
There isn't any point in making Foundation as an action movie, because it *isn't* an action story. By the time they finish surgically removing an action movie from the dead corpse that was a good dialog-driven story, there's nothing left of the story.
The only reason to call it "Foundation" is to attract people who liked the book, and they're going to be pissed off, so it's just stupid.
I know how to film it. You take some ACTORS and you have them ACT and you point a camera at them, and then you have a movie. Asimov was a writer, not a zero-attention-span adrenaline junkie. Just about every scene in the first three Foundation books is people talking, and that's all it is, and more to the point, that's precisely why it's amazingly good. You could have the spaceships made out of cardboard cutouts being held by cute Asian girls and it would only marginally impact the flow of Asimov's story. GAH.
I can't give a perfect reply because I don't know enough about it, but what I do know, from talking to my friends who are working on related systems -- anti-missile missiles that intercept and ram the other missiles, and are currently being tested -- is that this is a cat-and-mouse game. There are lots of things that can be put into an ICBM to increase its survivability against defensive systems. Reducing the albedo of the missile is an obvious one, but difficult because it's hard to make a good mirror that can stand being left in a silo for years and then shot through the atmosphere while retaining its reflectivity. Another tactic, which one of my friends claims there's some evidence that designers of ICBM's intended to evade US antimissile systems are researching, is dumping gas out the front of the missile. This actually serves two purposes: a lot of targeting systems rely on the ICBM's heat, from air resistance, so shooting some opaque, cryogenic gas out the front of the missile both reduces its temperature signature and means an anti-missile laser would have some portion of its energy expended in vaporizing cold gas. If a laser system were just barely able to cut a hole in the missile, a highly reflective surface might be all that's needed. A combination of a high-reflectivity surface, a missile that rotates rapidly, and a gas screen, significantly increases the amount of laser power that's needed, or means the laser tracking system needs to hold on that target for longer, meaning another target might get through the anti-missile system. That, also, is another way of dealing with it: launch more. Lots of cheap missiles is a completely viable strategy.
Obviously I don't know either, but what he's claiming is that it's repeatable (and in another comment, he says he's tried it many times) and he's a bright hardware guy. I would hope that under those circumstances, he would have tried to make sure that he's nudging it the same way he nudged it to go from, say, 81 to 82. But, again, I don't know.
I know what you mean about provoking the car to downshift, which gives it much better acceleration, but if a cruise control dramatically overshoots its upper limit just because it has better acceleration, it's a really crappy cruise control. Which isn't to say that the Prius cruise control *isn't* crappy: I don't know. But, cruise controls in automatics, calibrated to handle the automatic shifting, have been around for at least 45 years, and it's hard for me to believe Toyota would screw that up as regards a primarily hardware implementation of the cruise control. That's what leads me to agree with Woz, that the problem is likely a firmware problem.
I doubt he doesn't understand how cruise control systems work. I'm quite sure he can build one out of paperclips.
He just may not have been aware(read:not read the manual) of how the "adaptive" cruise control works on his Prius since its new and probably way different from any cruise control system he has ever used.
But what is described in that article, isn't what Woz is saying happens. He says "Let's say that I'm in some place where the speed 85 mph is legal. I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit." That's not an adaptive speed controller winding up because someone is unknowingly giving it multiple 'accelerate' inputs. It gets one 'accelerate' signal and accelerates at least 15mph, according to Woz.
Does your company regularly buy your chips through end distributors? Even then, they could replace only every 1000th one with a doctored version.
I might not have made this clear: we design chips, we don't buy them. We make the masks and etch the chips (not here) and take the silicon wafers and test the individual pieces on the wafers, then send them out to be packaged, at which point they come back and we test the packaged chips.
There are points within this where people could pull shenanigans, but as I said previously, we send the masks to multiple factories, some of which are in the US and run entirely by US employees, and we have the first-run packaging done in the US by US employees. While it might be possible to substitute dies in the mass packaging, it'd be pretty difficult as we test a good portion of those, in gigantic random lots, and write the test programs (and do rigorous statistical analysis on the results) that the non-US groups who package the chips run on every chip produced, before it's sold.
So, presumably, the most obvious way to defeat this would be to set up a whole different line that produces chips which are labeled as if they're ours and then get them into the distribution stream. That is, apparently, what people are facing with fake Cisco routers. That's an entirely different class of problem, though.
I did it once on a motorcycle back in the mid-1980's and then a couple more times on a bicycle in the mid-90's. (Not that it's worth anything to anyone else but I managed to beat a bunch of pro racers in one of the bike races. The only way you can legally bike up PP is during the race, since it's closed to bicycles the rest of the year.)
It might not just be economics: there is an enormous amount of environmental damage done by maintaining a high-altitude, high-traffic dirt road. The city of Colorado Springs was complaining about debris, from the hundreds of tons of gravel and fill dumped on the road every year to try and keep it passable, getting into streams that feed into Colorado Springs. I don't think they were part of its water source, but they do flow down into the city.
I don't think Traction Control handles the problem I'm pointing out. It's one thing to actively control the torque going to the wheels to prevent them sliding. It's a completely different thing to be on a long straight, going fast, and decide that the approaching hairpin turn is filled with gravel and sand and you need to slow down *now*. I've seen people slide off curves with their ABS brakes on full because they misjudged the road conditions and went into a turn too fast. No amount of traction control can fix too much inertia for the available traction, so you have to make that judgment beforehand. *That* is the part that's hard to implement, because it requires a vision system that can recognize the visual patterns that indicate low-traction roadway.
You're entirely right. I'm making a presumption that by 'backdoor' we mean a hostile organization is altering a trusted design to include unintended functionality. But as with the security implications of physical access to a computer, if you're buying hardware from a potentially hostile organization, it's innately untrustworthy. (Is it a backdoor if the organization designs it in, intentionally, and only the end user doesn't know about it? If so, I'm misusing the word.)
There are some fantastic design houses in China. One of our best designers is Chinese, and he's a genius. I may be wrong about this, but it appears to me that it's easier to learn chip design than it is to learn how to build and run a fab efficiently, and China already knows how to do that, very very well.
Having raced up Pikes Peak myself, I think this is pretty impressive. The road surface varies from almost-pavement-quality treated packed dirt, to completely loose gravel on rut-filled rock, with (as I recall) an average 10% climb. It'd be a great test ground for offroad stuff at a slow speed with nobody else on the road, but doing it at full speed requires a *lot* more than just the ability to see where the roadway is: giving a robot the ability to keep a fast car from skidding/sliding on loose gravel on an off-camber turn appears to me to be a wholly different type of challenge than previous autonomous driving projects.
DoD is really worried about this. They're trying to develop ways to efficiently examine ICs to check for unexpected "features". Right now, it's necessary to open up the IC and put it under a scanning electron microscope, then use software that can extract the logic diagram from the scan.
One of the obvious places to put in a "back door" is in Ethernet controllers. Many used in servers already have logic for hardware "remote administration" (turn machine off, reboot, load code, etc.). It is supposed to be disabled by default, and work only when initialized with keys during hardware installation. Just build a set of default remote administration keys into the chip, and everyone using that chip is 0wned. Send the right UDP packets, and you can take over the machine. This would be completely invisible until activated.
Whenever this subject comes up, I post about it and either get a +5 insightful or get flamed to hell and told I don't know what I'm talking about, so let's see what happens this time. I work in semiconductor design. In a CPU or memory chip there are some sections of the chip that have duplicate/spare circuitry that can be brought into play if some of the main circuitry is defective. This is what people refer to when they talk about trimming memory chips. I don't do this sort of stuff so I don't actually know for sure, but people who post on slashdot claiming to know, say that it would be "easy" to jigger some of the spare circuitry to provide added/surreptitious functionality to the chip.
Thing is: I don't see that this is very useful since it's in ram or the cpu, and it seems to me to be possible, maybe even likely, to see surreptitious traffic from them heading outwards to the ethernet controller chip.
I think -- as apparently do you -- that the most likely places to try to put in backdoors are the I/O chips because it's hard for you to determine what they're doing. But then they have to include some serious functionality, to implement at least a little intelligence to decide what to send, unless they want to send everything, which again would be pretty obvious to someone looking at the hardware.
And since I work at a place that *does* design ethernet controller chips, although that's not what *I* do, I can say with at least some assurance that it's really, really, really unlikely that they could be backdoored.
Let me explain why: on analog and small digital chips, die size is *unbelievably* important because it is directly related to your profit margin. I've done chip layout. We will go to any lengths whatsoever to make the die smaller, even if it means completely relaying out the chip. There isn't any space for extra circuitry at all. Every square mil is loaded.
On top of that, we then run our prototype chips on planet runs, where a bunch of proto chips from various designers are all masked onto a chunk of silicon, in either our own local fab or our tiny owned fab in Europe, and then characterize the returned chip, and do metal changes and maybe a complete new mask set, and only *then* does it go out to the big fabs. And when we get *those* back, we spend months characterizing *them*, making sure that every individual pin has the same leakage current and ESD protection characteristics, as the ones we got back from our local fab, to ensure the chips will actually work in the field.
In order for a Chinese fab to put a backdoor into one of our designs they'd have to increase the die area, which would be really amazingly obvious, or remove existing circuitry, which would be really amazingly obvious. Even if they're so incredibly clever as to redesign the chip better than we can design it in the first place, giving them space to add their circuitry, it's very unlikely that the current draw on every pin during operation and when forced into test mode and pushed to failure, would be within 1% of the chips we got from fabs that we control.
With all that said, my company recently closed our Chinese fabs, an
We're not all evil, but the belief that 'we're all evil' is itself a primary motivation to act in a selfish fashion.
I would say instead that the belief that "we're all evil" is a primary *rationalization* to justify selfish behavior. The motivation is already there in a person who tends to act selfishly.
If you have some time, you should read "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright. He spends a lot of time talking about how the combination of kin selection and the non-zero-sum result of cumulative altruistic behavior can outcompete selfish behavior and result in the sort of societies we see in humans, wolf packs, and ant colonies.
My girlfriend, an eccentric ophthalmic technician, has an A4-size glossy photograph stuck on the refrigerator of a nice case of eye cancer. It's right beside the dinner table where everyone can see it. When people say "YEAAARGH WHAT IS THAT!" she says "that's what happens if you don't wear sunglasses." (She goes on to point out that the person in question lived, and it's one of the ways she gets through the day, thinking of people that can still see because of her efforts.)
Also, anecdotally, none of these geniuses I've ever seen discuss the issue have any understanding of history, and of the suffering the human race endured before vaccination existed. Whatever tiny increase in autism they think actually exists, even if it turned out against all reason and evidence to be true, wouldn't be worth going back to that.
I'm going to start off by saying I'm in complete agreement with you.
With that said: the people who are choosing to not vaccinate their kids are, even if they don't know it, making a rational choice with reasonably good odds: they observe that there are side-effects to vaccines, and observe that most other people have gotten their kids vaccinated, so they choose to not get their kids vaccinated to avoid those side-effects. They're essentially shifting the risk of side-effects onto other people's kids. As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
As a car analogy is always good, these people are running red lights, betting nobody else will. It's an immoral strategy, but it's a good one as long as the odds are on their side.
Re:But will it get you high when you snort it?
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Spray-On Liquid Glass
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While I agree with the intent of your post, Arches isn't a great example of wind erosion (aka Aeolian erosion). It's primarily been formed by sandstone being cracked vertically by uplift from an underlying salt dome, and the resultant fins eroding from water and freeze-spalling. If you want a fantastic example of primarily Aeolian erosion you drive straight west about 100km from Arches (mind the half-km drop into the Colorado river...) to Goblin Valley. Another close-up image.
Motorcycle racers use tear-off clear plastic strips on their helmets, maybe 20 layers deep. I've often thought that could be a possible solution to the divots-in-windshield problem. They're similar to the strip that people put over brand-new handheld electronics displays with pull-tabs on one edge.
For the record, condoms appear (from a quick websearch) to be about 0.001" to 0.008" thick. 30 molecules of glass would be about 0.00005" thick, if I've done my math right and we make some assumptions about what constitutes a "glass molecule". (I was surprised when I did the math: I'd thought 30 molecules would be *much* thinner.)
Can I now avoid costly windshield replacements by simply spraying this stuff on my windshield after a ding storm, or crack?
The problem with having a crack isn't the divot where the crack started, it's the leading end of the crack. When you apply stress to a material that has a crack, the force per unit area at the tip of the crack approaches infinity, so what you have to do to keep the crack from spreading is increase its area. That's why windshield repair people drill holes at the ends of the cracks and then fill them.
Even if your intent is just to fill the much smaller divots in the glass, 30 molecules thick isn't going to make much difference. What you need is a material that has roughly the same index of refraction as the glass, that you can spread over the divots like makeup.
The foam is made by filling a mold with hollow steel spheres and then filling the gaps with molten aluminum. VERY scalable.
I wonder how it would fair if, instead of using molten aluminum to fill the gaps, you coated the steel spheres with aluminum (or other binder that melts at a temp lower than the spheres would start to collapse at) and sintering it into a solid block. More air gaps means it's lighter, but still very uniform.
=Smidge=
I wonder if you'd even have to use sintering technology: you could probably solid eutectic bond it at room pressure and mild heating, and you might even be able to use (massive, massive) ultrasonic transducers to contact-weld them together the way they do with chip wire-bonding. Plus we're pretty good at physical vapor deposition for coating metal things with other metals. It might even be possible to just pour all the spheres into a plating line and plate a mil of zinc onto them, using that to bond everything together -- although I suspect plating way inside a mass is a problem. But we get stuff plated down in 10 mil holes that are 200 mils deep. I don't know enough about the limitations.
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This is why you don't want "free" computers from the government...
Um, I don't think you'd want "free" computers from a for-profit company either. Nothing is for free.
How about herpes?
Honestly, I hope that they get a lot more than that, that any elected officials who were aware of the situation and didn't work to prevent it are impeached and convicted (and given serious prison time as well as any government benefits including pensions revoked), and the school administration officials receive the same - and the district be blocked from "making up" for the "losses" through taxes. Tax increases should be outlawed in that district and if it means the schools must declare bankruptcy, it should be chalked up as a learning experience.
While I understand and agree with your anger at such a blatant violation of privacy laws, there are probably in excess of 10,000 other children in this school district, and such a course of action will screw them over pretty heavily. This isn't quite as drastic as the Roman discipline techinque of decimation, where they'd kill one out of every ten people in a community that was harboring criminals, but it's the same general mindset, and I don't think it's any more acceptable behavior for civilized people than spying on children in their own homes.
What we need to do is find out who authorized this, and who was using it, and make sure they're charged with felonies. The threat of federal jail time will get the attention of other people who are thinking about trying similar things.
If I knew a company was going to be releasing a new version of something I'd damaged, I might wait a bit before making a claim, so I could get the newer version of the replacement rather than the older version. A lot of technology can be coerced into sort of working for a little while longer by wiggling connectors or overlooking a cracked and flickering screen.
And *that* was pretty strongly influenced by Da Vinci, who, on being asked to submit a design for a massive painting for the Vatican but lacking time to put together a portfolio or sample, drew a perfect freehand circle and submitted that, winning the job.
Wow, that's terrifying. Y'all play harder than I'm used to: the only time I've seen people doing stuff like that was in mountain bike races and they're all completely insane. But I'm glad to know about it.
A ex-coworker of mine was in the second french cycling league. He was very close to getting into the first league. So he informed himself. And the rules are: 1. Learn how to touch the wheel of the one in front of you in a way that makes him fall down, or at least slower.
In all the racing/training I've done, if you touch the wheel of the guy in front of you, *you* are the one who is likely to hit the ground. (I'm currently recovering from a separated shoulder from exactly this, actually.) Since there's lots of weight on the rear wheel, and since contact on the front wheel makes it turn, which throws off your center of mass and exacerbates the turn, leading to a positive feedback cycle, it's a really bad idea to touch someone else's wheel. While you can do it if the person is riding dead straight, it's clearly noticeable when someone touches your rear wheel, and if you want to screw someone who is consistently touching your wheel you do a quick sideways turn when they're in contact, and they'll be on the ground immediately, probably with a broken collarbone.
Besides, it slows you down as much as the person ahead of you, so it only helps if you're a domestique trying to help your team leader. People in that position tend to have nasty accidents if they misbehave in the peloton.
There isn't any point in making Foundation as an action movie, because it *isn't* an action story. By the time they finish surgically removing an action movie from the dead corpse that was a good dialog-driven story, there's nothing left of the story.
The only reason to call it "Foundation" is to attract people who liked the book, and they're going to be pissed off, so it's just stupid.
I know how to film it. You take some ACTORS and you have them ACT and you point a camera at them, and then you have a movie. Asimov was a writer, not a zero-attention-span adrenaline junkie. Just about every scene in the first three Foundation books is people talking, and that's all it is, and more to the point, that's precisely why it's amazingly good. You could have the spaceships made out of cardboard cutouts being held by cute Asian girls and it would only marginally impact the flow of Asimov's story. GAH.
I can't give a perfect reply because I don't know enough about it, but what I do know, from talking to my friends who are working on related systems -- anti-missile missiles that intercept and ram the other missiles, and are currently being tested -- is that this is a cat-and-mouse game. There are lots of things that can be put into an ICBM to increase its survivability against defensive systems. Reducing the albedo of the missile is an obvious one, but difficult because it's hard to make a good mirror that can stand being left in a silo for years and then shot through the atmosphere while retaining its reflectivity. Another tactic, which one of my friends claims there's some evidence that designers of ICBM's intended to evade US antimissile systems are researching, is dumping gas out the front of the missile. This actually serves two purposes: a lot of targeting systems rely on the ICBM's heat, from air resistance, so shooting some opaque, cryogenic gas out the front of the missile both reduces its temperature signature and means an anti-missile laser would have some portion of its energy expended in vaporizing cold gas. If a laser system were just barely able to cut a hole in the missile, a highly reflective surface might be all that's needed. A combination of a high-reflectivity surface, a missile that rotates rapidly, and a gas screen, significantly increases the amount of laser power that's needed, or means the laser tracking system needs to hold on that target for longer, meaning another target might get through the anti-missile system. That, also, is another way of dealing with it: launch more. Lots of cheap missiles is a completely viable strategy.
I was going to say the same thing about Ashcroft but you beat me to it.
I know what you mean about provoking the car to downshift, which gives it much better acceleration, but if a cruise control dramatically overshoots its upper limit just because it has better acceleration, it's a really crappy cruise control. Which isn't to say that the Prius cruise control *isn't* crappy: I don't know. But, cruise controls in automatics, calibrated to handle the automatic shifting, have been around for at least 45 years, and it's hard for me to believe Toyota would screw that up as regards a primarily hardware implementation of the cruise control. That's what leads me to agree with Woz, that the problem is likely a firmware problem.
I doubt he doesn't understand how cruise control systems work. I'm quite sure he can build one out of paperclips. He just may not have been aware(read:not read the manual) of how the "adaptive" cruise control works on his Prius since its new and probably way different from any cruise control system he has ever used.
http://www.thecarconnection.com/marty-blog/1042251_is-wozs-prius-acceleration-just-toyotas-wacky-adaptive-cruise
But what is described in that article, isn't what Woz is saying happens. He says "Let's say that I'm in some place where the speed 85 mph is legal. I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit." That's not an adaptive speed controller winding up because someone is unknowingly giving it multiple 'accelerate' inputs. It gets one 'accelerate' signal and accelerates at least 15mph, according to Woz.
Does your company regularly buy your chips through end distributors? Even then, they could replace only every 1000th one with a doctored version.
I might not have made this clear: we design chips, we don't buy them. We make the masks and etch the chips (not here) and take the silicon wafers and test the individual pieces on the wafers, then send them out to be packaged, at which point they come back and we test the packaged chips.
There are points within this where people could pull shenanigans, but as I said previously, we send the masks to multiple factories, some of which are in the US and run entirely by US employees, and we have the first-run packaging done in the US by US employees. While it might be possible to substitute dies in the mass packaging, it'd be pretty difficult as we test a good portion of those, in gigantic random lots, and write the test programs (and do rigorous statistical analysis on the results) that the non-US groups who package the chips run on every chip produced, before it's sold.
So, presumably, the most obvious way to defeat this would be to set up a whole different line that produces chips which are labeled as if they're ours and then get them into the distribution stream. That is, apparently, what people are facing with fake Cisco routers. That's an entirely different class of problem, though.
It might not just be economics: there is an enormous amount of environmental damage done by maintaining a high-altitude, high-traffic dirt road. The city of Colorado Springs was complaining about debris, from the hundreds of tons of gravel and fill dumped on the road every year to try and keep it passable, getting into streams that feed into Colorado Springs. I don't think they were part of its water source, but they do flow down into the city.
I don't think Traction Control handles the problem I'm pointing out. It's one thing to actively control the torque going to the wheels to prevent them sliding. It's a completely different thing to be on a long straight, going fast, and decide that the approaching hairpin turn is filled with gravel and sand and you need to slow down *now*. I've seen people slide off curves with their ABS brakes on full because they misjudged the road conditions and went into a turn too fast. No amount of traction control can fix too much inertia for the available traction, so you have to make that judgment beforehand. *That* is the part that's hard to implement, because it requires a vision system that can recognize the visual patterns that indicate low-traction roadway.
There are some fantastic design houses in China. One of our best designers is Chinese, and he's a genius. I may be wrong about this, but it appears to me that it's easier to learn chip design than it is to learn how to build and run a fab efficiently, and China already knows how to do that, very very well.
Having raced up Pikes Peak myself, I think this is pretty impressive. The road surface varies from almost-pavement-quality treated packed dirt, to completely loose gravel on rut-filled rock, with (as I recall) an average 10% climb. It'd be a great test ground for offroad stuff at a slow speed with nobody else on the road, but doing it at full speed requires a *lot* more than just the ability to see where the roadway is: giving a robot the ability to keep a fast car from skidding/sliding on loose gravel on an off-camber turn appears to me to be a wholly different type of challenge than previous autonomous driving projects.
DoD is really worried about this. They're trying to develop ways to efficiently examine ICs to check for unexpected "features". Right now, it's necessary to open up the IC and put it under a scanning electron microscope, then use software that can extract the logic diagram from the scan.
One of the obvious places to put in a "back door" is in Ethernet controllers. Many used in servers already have logic for hardware "remote administration" (turn machine off, reboot, load code, etc.). It is supposed to be disabled by default, and work only when initialized with keys during hardware installation. Just build a set of default remote administration keys into the chip, and everyone using that chip is 0wned. Send the right UDP packets, and you can take over the machine. This would be completely invisible until activated.
Whenever this subject comes up, I post about it and either get a +5 insightful or get flamed to hell and told I don't know what I'm talking about, so let's see what happens this time. I work in semiconductor design. In a CPU or memory chip there are some sections of the chip that have duplicate/spare circuitry that can be brought into play if some of the main circuitry is defective. This is what people refer to when they talk about trimming memory chips. I don't do this sort of stuff so I don't actually know for sure, but people who post on slashdot claiming to know, say that it would be "easy" to jigger some of the spare circuitry to provide added/surreptitious functionality to the chip.
Thing is: I don't see that this is very useful since it's in ram or the cpu, and it seems to me to be possible, maybe even likely, to see surreptitious traffic from them heading outwards to the ethernet controller chip.
I think -- as apparently do you -- that the most likely places to try to put in backdoors are the I/O chips because it's hard for you to determine what they're doing. But then they have to include some serious functionality, to implement at least a little intelligence to decide what to send, unless they want to send everything, which again would be pretty obvious to someone looking at the hardware.
And since I work at a place that *does* design ethernet controller chips, although that's not what *I* do, I can say with at least some assurance that it's really, really, really unlikely that they could be backdoored.
Let me explain why: on analog and small digital chips, die size is *unbelievably* important because it is directly related to your profit margin. I've done chip layout. We will go to any lengths whatsoever to make the die smaller, even if it means completely relaying out the chip. There isn't any space for extra circuitry at all. Every square mil is loaded.
On top of that, we then run our prototype chips on planet runs, where a bunch of proto chips from various designers are all masked onto a chunk of silicon, in either our own local fab or our tiny owned fab in Europe, and then characterize the returned chip, and do metal changes and maybe a complete new mask set, and only *then* does it go out to the big fabs. And when we get *those* back, we spend months characterizing *them*, making sure that every individual pin has the same leakage current and ESD protection characteristics, as the ones we got back from our local fab, to ensure the chips will actually work in the field.
In order for a Chinese fab to put a backdoor into one of our designs they'd have to increase the die area, which would be really amazingly obvious, or remove existing circuitry, which would be really amazingly obvious. Even if they're so incredibly clever as to redesign the chip better than we can design it in the first place, giving them space to add their circuitry, it's very unlikely that the current draw on every pin during operation and when forced into test mode and pushed to failure, would be within 1% of the chips we got from fabs that we control.
With all that said, my company recently closed our Chinese fabs, an
We're not all evil, but the belief that 'we're all evil' is itself a primary motivation to act in a selfish fashion.
I would say instead that the belief that "we're all evil" is a primary *rationalization* to justify selfish behavior. The motivation is already there in a person who tends to act selfishly.
If you have some time, you should read "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright. He spends a lot of time talking about how the combination of kin selection and the non-zero-sum result of cumulative altruistic behavior can outcompete selfish behavior and result in the sort of societies we see in humans, wolf packs, and ant colonies.
YEARGH EYE CANCER!
My girlfriend, an eccentric ophthalmic technician, has an A4-size glossy photograph stuck on the refrigerator of a nice case of eye cancer. It's right beside the dinner table where everyone can see it. When people say "YEAAARGH WHAT IS THAT!" she says "that's what happens if you don't wear sunglasses." (She goes on to point out that the person in question lived, and it's one of the ways she gets through the day, thinking of people that can still see because of her efforts.)
Also, anecdotally, none of these geniuses I've ever seen discuss the issue have any understanding of history, and of the suffering the human race endured before vaccination existed. Whatever tiny increase in autism they think actually exists, even if it turned out against all reason and evidence to be true, wouldn't be worth going back to that.
I'm going to start off by saying I'm in complete agreement with you.
With that said: the people who are choosing to not vaccinate their kids are, even if they don't know it, making a rational choice with reasonably good odds: they observe that there are side-effects to vaccines, and observe that most other people have gotten their kids vaccinated, so they choose to not get their kids vaccinated to avoid those side-effects. They're essentially shifting the risk of side-effects onto other people's kids. As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
As a car analogy is always good, these people are running red lights, betting nobody else will. It's an immoral strategy, but it's a good one as long as the odds are on their side.
While I agree with the intent of your post, Arches isn't a great example of wind erosion (aka Aeolian erosion). It's primarily been formed by sandstone being cracked vertically by uplift from an underlying salt dome, and the resultant fins eroding from water and freeze-spalling. If you want a fantastic example of primarily Aeolian erosion you drive straight west about 100km from Arches (mind the half-km drop into the Colorado river...) to Goblin Valley. Another close-up image.
For the record, condoms appear (from a quick websearch) to be about 0.001" to 0.008" thick. 30 molecules of glass would be about 0.00005" thick, if I've done my math right and we make some assumptions about what constitutes a "glass molecule". (I was surprised when I did the math: I'd thought 30 molecules would be *much* thinner.)
Can I now avoid costly windshield replacements by simply spraying this stuff on my windshield after a ding storm, or crack?
The problem with having a crack isn't the divot where the crack started, it's the leading end of the crack. When you apply stress to a material that has a crack, the force per unit area at the tip of the crack approaches infinity, so what you have to do to keep the crack from spreading is increase its area. That's why windshield repair people drill holes at the ends of the cracks and then fill them.
Even if your intent is just to fill the much smaller divots in the glass, 30 molecules thick isn't going to make much difference. What you need is a material that has roughly the same index of refraction as the glass, that you can spread over the divots like makeup.
The foam is made by filling a mold with hollow steel spheres and then filling the gaps with molten aluminum. VERY scalable.
I wonder how it would fair if, instead of using molten aluminum to fill the gaps, you coated the steel spheres with aluminum (or other binder that melts at a temp lower than the spheres would start to collapse at) and sintering it into a solid block. More air gaps means it's lighter, but still very uniform. =Smidge=
I wonder if you'd even have to use sintering technology: you could probably solid eutectic bond it at room pressure and mild heating, and you might even be able to use (massive, massive) ultrasonic transducers to contact-weld them together the way they do with chip wire-bonding. Plus we're pretty good at physical vapor deposition for coating metal things with other metals. It might even be possible to just pour all the spheres into a plating line and plate a mil of zinc onto them, using that to bond everything together -- although I suspect plating way inside a mass is a problem. But we get stuff plated down in 10 mil holes that are 200 mils deep. I don't know enough about the limitations.