Drat, for some reason it deleted the link to the second quote.
"Speeding affects not only people in cars but also pedestrians and motorcyclists, who are especially vulnerable. The faster a car goes, the greater the likelihood of a pedestrian death. (Death of car occupants is 20 times more likely in a crash with an impact speed of 50 miles an hour than with an impact speed of 20 miles an hour.)"
>Sorry, but it is quite obvious that if you come to a sudden stop that the speed you were travelling at will have an adverse effect on the amount of damage you are likely to sustain, but that doesn't mean that it was the speed that was dangerous.
I literally don't understand what you're claiming here. Kinetic energy rises with speed. Kinetic energy is, indeed, inherently dangerous. If you are moving, you are in more danger than if you're not moving. The faster you're moving, the more danger you're in. Kinetic energy is an axiom of physics. I can't argue to convince you of this any more than I can argue to convince you that parallel lines don't intersect.
As a pilot I can tell you some interesting things about flying. Light Aircraft Crash: A Case History Of Injuries Table 2: "Factors Influencing Severity Of Crash". #1: Aircraft Speed. Direct ratio.
The faster you're going, the more likely you are to die.
Or, back to cars, Speeding affects not only people in cars but also pedestrians and motorcyclists, who are especially vulnerable. The faster a car goes, the greater the likelihood of a pedestrian death. (Death of car occupants is 20 times more likely in a crash with an impact speed of 50 miles an hour than with an impact speed of 20 miles an hour.).
So, physics theory says higher speed is more dangerous. Experimental evidence says higher speed is more dangerous. My own personal experience from bike racing says higher speed crashes have hurt me worse.
By the way, back to airplanes again -- from the same table as the first link, flying 10 feet off the ground would, indeed, be safer. Item #2 is impact angle, and that again they claim is a direct ratio: the higher the angle, the worse the crash. I think they're linearizing inappropriately and it's probably closer to sin(angle), but the general idea is certainly true: if you hit flat and fast you're much better off than hitting vertical and slow, but hitting flat and slow is by far the best way of all to crash -- because it's basically a landing. I can tell you from personal experience that flat fast landings *suck*.
The problem is complicated. 1. Being right doesn't necessarily mean you'll win the argument. If people don't understand the argument, don't understand the basic ideas being discussed, or more to the point don't *want* to understand the underlying ideas, you can talk until you're blue in the face and they won't get it. Try to explain to a three year old why you can't afford to buy the $200 LEGO toy by discussing mortgage payments and your salary some time. If you expect to win on logic alone, you're misunderstanding the whole basis of rhetoric.
2. Science and advertising don't mesh well because science isn't constant. Consequently, scientists aren't comfortable making absolute statements. Doctors often are, and that's one reason doctors as a group are often mistrusted for what individual doctors have said -- when a doctor says "carbohydrates are responsible for weight gain" and other doctors say "no, fat is!" it reduces trust by the public in all doctors. Research that indicates one thing today, might be reversed by something that indicates a contradictory thing tomorrow. That's how science works: it changes. It's never Right, but always the best description of what we know at any moment, subject to what we find tomorrow. Well, that's not what most people are looking for. They're looking for a mechanistic, deterministic way to live their lives: do this procedure, and this will be the result. The idea of an open-ended, changing target is not something people are comfortable with. If given a choice between a non-deterministic view of the world and a deterministic one, people will choose the deterministic one because it gives them a feeling of control over their lives and everyone wants that. Religion gives people a feeling of determinism: you do these things, say these things, and you'll be a Good Person.
The point being: the best we can hope for is to not be ignored by most people, and probably the best way to do that is use the techniques that psychology and business have found are most effective for convincing people to take an interest in a subject: marketing. That sucks, because it feels like a sham way to convince people of stuff that should be obvious. But that's just how most people are, and we need to accept it.
KE = 1/2*M*V*V: kinetic energy rises as the square of the speed. Claiming that speed isn't inherently dangerous is like claiming jumping off buildings isn't inherently dangerous. While it might be possible, though skill and safety equipment, to minimize that danger, it still clearly rises with speed. Add to that, that while well-trained drivers with excellent reflexes might be capable of driving at high speeds safely, many inexperienced drivers with below-average skills or reflexes cannot, and they may not be aware that they cannot. Most people think they're excellent drivers, even people who clearly aren't.
I'd love to see driver tests done like pilot tests: every two years (or more often for professional drivers) complete retest, and loss of driving privileges until the driver takes classes and passes the retest.
Other Banks books
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Matter
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· Score: 4, Informative
"The Wasp Factory" is very close to the most messed-up, disturbing book I've ever read. I personally think it's his best work. However, if you can find it, "Raw Spirit" is a non-fiction book about him touring Scotch factories and talking about how Scotch is made and why it taste like bog and how, despite that, people keep buying every bit the little distilleries can produce. It's a good book.
Fantastic book about uses for dead bodies
on
The Real Body Snatchers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Stiff" by Mary Roach. Goes into extensive detail about just how many uses dead bodies have. A few: forensics (letting them decay and recording what sorts of insects colonize them and when, which gives immense amounts of data to people who are trying to analyze time-of-death, also covered extensively in "A Fly For The Prosecution" by Madison Goff, and other books. Safety testing: putting corpses in cars and crashing them gives much better results on skull fractures and such than Buster The Dummy. Likewise, dropping corpses in elevators or off buildings into safety nets, or measuring the protective qualities of bullet-proof jackets. It's hard to get good results using pigs.
(I saw Mary Roach read from this book one time, and it was creepy, not because of her and the book, but because just about everyone in the audience ended up asking really detailed, scary questions about treatment of dead bodies, since apparently most of them had experience in the subject.)
One of my mom's cousins was an anti-aircraft gunner on a WWII carrier. He said he was 3 stories above waterline, 2 stories below deck, in a room that was basically sealed, running the guns by remote control. He also said that in heavy seas, the room he was in would be waist-deep in seawater. The wave impacts would cause the circuit boards on the firecontrol computers to rattle and break the tubes, and they'd have to replace them, on live circuitry, fishing out broken pieces of glass, waist-deep in sea water. At one point they were in a serious storm somewhere, with two escort destroyers, and the storm went for so long that they couldn't refuel the destroyers, and when they ran out of fuel they went sideways to the waves and were broken into pieces before they sunk. Destroyers weren't quite as beefy as the battleships, but still were big, big ships.
I wasn't doing the water laser stuff: I was using big excimers. The water guys were using carbon dioxide lasers, so that'd be, what, 10,600nm? as I recall. If I remember right, the problem they were having was with the water boiling at the ablation site and that was really disrupting the energy transfer efficiency, but they were still making progress when I left.
Thanks a lot for the link -- that's better than anything I'd found.
A friend of mine worked as outsourced IT for a place that did explosive bonding: every Tuesday he'd come in to do whatever they needed and the whole building would shake every half hour or so. He also did outsourced IT for a place that made MRI's. Talk about early adopters of LCD monitors... They'd run everyone through a metal detector at the front door and confiscate anything metallic, and if your pants had steel rivets you didn't get to come in whilst wearing them.
I know you don't *have* to do EBW in hard vacuum, but the electron dispersion from collision is so bad, it was my understanding that anything over a couple inches was ineffective if it wasn't in a vacuum. I wonder if you could do some sort of charged getter to attract all the ionized welding debris. For laser drilling, we've used air streams to keep the debris off the lens, and even water streams that serve as a sort of fiber optic cable to conduct the laser down into the workpiece while washing away the cutting debris.
The caission idea is good. I haven't ever gotten to work with stuff that big so I don't know the problems and solutions that are generally accepted.
In other places I've read people who claim that the US no longer has the capacity to weld up battleships of the WWII variety, and other people have claimed that the original welds were done by somehow heating up these massive, massive sheets of metal and forge-welding them together. I find that very hard to believe -- how would you heat up something 20" thick by dozens of feet wide and high to welding temp? But at one point they did know how to attach massive, massive chunks of metal. I'm betting they just had tapered edges and laid down a zillion arc-weld beads, one over the other, but I haven't ever found any good references.
The point being (to me at least) that there isn't a set time for a revolution -- it happens when a critical mass of people are upset. So when you run out into the street, if there aren't other people out there with guns, there isn't enough critical mass, so you go back inside and wait a while before running out again.
In a broader sense, that's exactly what we're doing with this article: we're all discussing it and coming to some sort of consensus, and some people are advocating that it's time NOW -- they've run out into the street, verbally speaking -- while most other people either haven't yet run out or aren't going to, for whatever reasons they've chosen.
My friend has like a PhD in philosopy or something crazy, so it's not like his jokes are *funny*. Or at least not ha-ha funny.
One of my friends tells a joke. It goes like this: "you know when it's time for the revolution? Well, you run out of your house with your guns in your hands. If there isn't anyone else out there with guns, it's not time yet." Then he sighs and says, "I remember when that joke was *funny*."
Wouldn't the thickness of the pressure vessel mean you'd have to do your EBW in vacuum? Meaning you have to make a... pressure vessel large enough to stand up to vacuum, that's larger than the pressure vessel you're trying to weld up? So how do you build that? EBW was my first thought, too: I just don't see how they could do it. Maybe a building-sized PV that can stand 1 bar is much easier to make than this thing and they could just weld it up normally, and then put the EBW inside it. But that's still an enormous project. I worked with a vacuum system the size of a semi trailer, and the pressure vessel was made of I-beams welded side-to-side along its entire length. It weighed far more than the building it was in. Not a trivial design in its own right.
I wonder if laser welding might work better, especially if they had a thin clearance for the beam and were adding filler material.
>so epoxy potting removal is incredibly easy to me.
Out of curiosity, how do you do it? I've used a combination of soaking in acetone and physically chipping/milling the stuff away, but I'd love to know better techniques.
>The ONLY way to make these toys secure is custom chipsets. power up chipset and then only decrypt the contents of the flash after the 12 digit key was entered on the little pin pad. But nobody is going to make that.
Read about the Maxim DS3600 family of chips some time. Keys stored encrypted on-chip, chip's a microSMD so you can't get to the pins, has massive on-chip detection facilities for eg. case tampering, power glitches, and temperature changes, all of which trigger it to wipe all its stored keys and optionally wipe other things to which it's attached, and uses weird repeated XOR writes of the encrypted keys so they don't build up oxide charges that'd allow you to read the memory once you've torn it apart. That chip's going to be hard to fool.
We need about 6.8 billion of those. Although if someone could recreate the "camera" that Oliver Wendell Jones first built, that'd be good for some laughs, too.
I'd settle for a teleporter, if worse came to worse.
Anyone who reads this summary (without realizing that this is just a way to keep whaling under the guise of research) and thinks "dude, that's messed-up: I wonder what other shenanigans scientsts get up to?" should go read Elephants On Acid (and other bizarre experiments). It's a seriously strange book just chock-full of "they did WHAT? Dear Lord, *WHY*?" experiments. I thought it was interesting as a book because some of the experiments, I was like "cool, I've always wondered about that" when other people (my girlfriend, brother, best friend) were all "they did WHAT??!?" and likewise, they found meaning in other experiments that I thought were completely delusional. (Yeah, I'm saying the validity of experiments is relative.) There are some really truly gruesome experiments discussed in here, though, truly Frankenstein nightmare experiments done in the USSR, so it's not for the weak of stomach. But it's a great read.
You're joking, but this is perfectly easy to do. You just barely listen to what the questioner is saying, while simultaneously thinking hard -- the way actors do, method acting, trying to *live* your thoughts -- about calming or embarrassing things from your past. You can teach yourself to drive e-meters. They're a little more complicated than just a Wheatstone, but that's basically what they are. When I was a kid I made one as a science project and taught myself to push the needle from the bottom to the top and back again while talking to people (I grew up without a TV and had a lot of time on my hands, okay?) and later ended up dating a Scientologist (she was hot and I *still* didn't have a TV, okay?) and she and her family did *not* appreciate my ability to push an e-meter around. I don't think carrying a charge could break one: the ones I've gotten to look at didn't have much vulnerable electronics. They used a transistor to drive the meter itself, based on the differential voltage across the bridge.
I can do a so-so job of telling you the carbon percentage of a sample by putting it on a grinder. I can not, however, tell you anything about the heat treatment the steel has received, or any cold forging or shot peening, and that has a *tremendous* effect on the steel's ultimate tensile strength. Grinder tests identify, they don't really characterize well. For characterization you need mechanical testing.
Likewise, you can build your own airplane using very similar skills. The KR2 can be built for under $15,000 USD. It uses a VW engine and eats about 3 gallons of car gas per hour, while doing 180 knots. You can't say it has much baggage room, though. But it does have a 1000 mile range. If you want to step up several notches, the Stallion is a six place plane you can build for about $120K. It's fast and the original Stallion has been modified so the designer and his wife can roll their Honda Goldwing motorcycle into the back, fly somewhere, and motorcycle wherever they want.
Our chips do that -- we're designing analog stuff, and they all have undocumented test modes, where you put in wildly non-standard inputs and the chip goes into a test mode where you can turn on/off specific parts. The thing is: wildly non-standard inputs are hard to get to a chip in a standard use design. There is no functional circuit design that could get anything we're building into its test mode. Of course, we're not building for surreptitious access.
I should break this down a little: we can assume two general ways of providing surreptitious access to a chip. 1. One or several non-standard inputs. Ruled out as above by adjacent circuit design, which the nogoodnik chip designer has no control over. 2. Standard inputs that are encoded -- a serial datastream, like portknocking. This is totally doable and probably difficl tto crack because it's basically encapsulating a secure communications channel on the chip, and that's a well-characterized situation. But it requires dedicated silicon. If the chip is anything seriously complex like a microcontroller, it's quite possible a clever designer could hide that silicon in the design. But those are the most crucial chips and will get the most scrutiny. The other chips, the level translators and power management chips and hardware codec chips, are just too small and simple, internally, to hide that kind of hardware.
In the early 1980's, the US produced intermittently buggy chips which we sold to the USSR in full knowledge that they'd disrupt production facilities. It worked very well. Why, then, wouldn't China do the same thing?
As someone who works in chip verification, I can tell you it's very difficult with most chips to do this, as long as the chips are designed in the US -- which is still largely the case, that they're designed here and produced in fabs in China (because labor's cheap and they don't care if their workers are exposed to HF and silane as long as money's coming in.) You know *exactly* what size your chip die is. If the silicon comes back from the fab with a different-sized die, it will be very obvious. So nobody can put extra stuff onto an existing die. Die size is the single most critical aspect of most designs, because of the cost, so existing designs are jammed just as tightly as they can possibly be. You can't put more functionality into an existing die size. The problem, then, is letting your design out. (And even then, a competent chip designer could probably spot strange material on a smaller die because they're familiar with how the layout is supposed to look.) There are some amazing military-grade chips out there. I was reading about the Maxim DS3600 the other day -- on-chip encryption and tamper-sensing, including detecting temperature changes and reacting by blanking all the on-board memory and stored encryption keys in nanoseconds, far faster than dumping liquid helium onto the chip would be able to freeze the memory for decoding. (They use some whack process for continually load-levelling and rewriting the keys so you can't use stored oxide charge to read what was there before it got blanked, either.) That kind of stuff is on the common market, available for anyone to buy. I assume the military has better stuff yet, and espionage people even better. At the end of the day you have to be able to trust someone or you'll just crouch in your basement. But there are ways to verify a chip's functionality and look for clearly bogus interactions. Our chip test systems make it easy to distinguish chips from different silicon lots, much less from different fabs. As always, if you buy the cheap stuff you don't know what you're getting, but if you spend the money to do some research, you'll have a much, much better idea of what you're getting. In this case, money in the millions of dollars, granted, but if you're designing military-grade stuff, well, that's why you buy from companies with a track record of producing trustworthy stuff.
Of course it would be struck down because it's stupid. You know that, I know that, and he probably knows that. He also knows that by proposing this stupid law he can go tell his stupid constituents "look at this great law I tried to get put in place to make your children safer!" and when it gets struck down he'll say "look at all these horrible liberal activist judges who are trying to make your children less safe! I think someone should do something about it, and I'm willing to be that person!" This is campaign-advertising-by-alternate-means: a free (to him) way to get his name in papers, associated with something that sounds, to stupid people, vaguely appealing. This is, in other words, advertising.
There aren't many reputable Christian theology types who claim that God is trying to fool us, because the idea of a tricky, misleading God is problematic on a number of levels. However, the Biblical Book of Job does establish the idea of just such a God, so the argument by the people who DO subscribe to the Tricky God concept is that God is testing our faith by sending tornadoes and gay prostitutes and hiding fake dinosaur bones under all the rocks. Those who Truly Believe ignore the temptations. Another faction claim that all the temptations are sent by Satan (or whatever they're going to call God's adversary.) The problem with that is that the Bible says God created the Earth, so anything like dinosaur bones trickily hidden to mess with our heads is God's doing. The question of "well, if God screws with us like that, what ELSE does God do?" rapidly reduces to a solipsistic one: the whole Universe was created by God 15 minutes ago, and me with my memories of my life, and Jesus never existed, and everything I see is just created by God to mess with my head, including the memories of the creation/evolution argument. Most young-earthers, when faced with that, get very, very, very crabby, and I've never had a conversation go more than a minute or so after they realize that my vision of history is exactly as correct as theirs, if we both assume that God is sneaky and is willing to distort apparent history to test our faith.
If I read the original article correctly: If someone gets the chip design and is copying it to be built in another fab, it'd be possible (difficult, but much less difficult than a complete chip redesign or re-engineering) to remove this part of the chip (and increase the profit margin, since A: no investment on research and B: more die per unit silicon.)
What this is going to affect is people who run a fab making legitimate parts, but also run the same parts from the same masks but keep them off the books and sell them independently of the company that owns the design -- OEM ripoffs.
That's why I'm thinking at least a partial solution would be a continuous lane, from the on-ramp along the highway. Although, around here where we have a lot of room, our merge lanes following the freeway meter are often over 1km long. But yeah, having driven in other places, I agree with the general critique -- it's a good idea, poorly implemented.
>"Freeway Meters" on an onramp actually make this problem worse on a freeway that is still flowing at a reasonable speed because they reduce the distance that a car has to accelerate insuring that they enter the roadway at a reduced speed causing traffic to slow down for them.
It depends on the flow dynamics of the intersection. If you have a stoplight somewhere near the road that feeds onto the onramp -- not an unusual situation these days, when cloverleaf-type intersections are being replaced with ramps that feed into stoplights -- you get non-uniform traffic on the ramps, and a burst of traffic on the ramp being injected into a limited-access road can serve to drive it temporarily over its capacity and slow down several lanes, leading to a jam. Intelligent freeway meters actually analyze the rate of traffic on the limited-access road and allow cars through at a rate designed to minimize the disruption by making it a steady-state addition. I've seen it work and sometimes it works very well.
I'd be interested in seeing what would happen if limited-access roads had one lane at the far right that exited at every interchange, and then entered again after the interchange, so there was a continuous accelleration/deceleration lane. Unfortunately, many people are very uncomfortable with merging into fast traffic and stop and wait for an opening, which would probably make my suggestion not work.
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Drat, for some reason it deleted the link to the second quote.
"Speeding affects not only people in cars but also pedestrians and motorcyclists, who are especially vulnerable. The faster a car goes, the greater the likelihood of a pedestrian death. (Death of car occupants is 20 times more likely in a crash with an impact speed of 50 miles an hour than with an impact speed of 20 miles an hour.)"
>Sorry, but it is quite obvious that if you come to a sudden stop that the speed you were travelling at will have an adverse effect on the amount of damage you are likely to sustain, but that doesn't mean that it was the speed that was dangerous.
I literally don't understand what you're claiming here.
Kinetic energy rises with speed. Kinetic energy is, indeed, inherently dangerous. If you are moving, you are in more danger than if you're not moving. The faster you're moving, the more danger you're in. Kinetic energy is an axiom of physics. I can't argue to convince you of this any more than I can argue to convince you that parallel lines don't intersect.
As a pilot I can tell you some interesting things about flying.
Light Aircraft Crash: A Case History Of Injuries
Table 2: "Factors Influencing Severity Of Crash". #1: Aircraft Speed. Direct ratio.
The faster you're going, the more likely you are to die.
Or, back to cars,
Speeding affects not only people in cars but also pedestrians and motorcyclists, who are especially vulnerable. The faster a car goes, the greater the likelihood of a pedestrian death. (Death of car occupants is 20 times more likely in a crash with an impact speed of 50 miles an hour than with an impact speed of 20 miles an hour.).
So, physics theory says higher speed is more dangerous. Experimental evidence says higher speed is more dangerous. My own personal experience from bike racing says higher speed crashes have hurt me worse.
By the way, back to airplanes again -- from the same table as the first link, flying 10 feet off the ground would, indeed, be safer. Item #2 is impact angle, and that again they claim is a direct ratio: the higher the angle, the worse the crash. I think they're linearizing inappropriately and it's probably closer to sin(angle), but the general idea is certainly true: if you hit flat and fast you're much better off than hitting vertical and slow, but hitting flat and slow is by far the best way of all to crash -- because it's basically a landing. I can tell you from personal experience that flat fast landings *suck*.
The problem is complicated.
1. Being right doesn't necessarily mean you'll win the argument. If people don't understand the argument, don't understand the basic ideas being discussed, or more to the point don't *want* to understand the underlying ideas, you can talk until you're blue in the face and they won't get it. Try to explain to a three year old why you can't afford to buy the $200 LEGO toy by discussing mortgage payments and your salary some time. If you expect to win on logic alone, you're misunderstanding the whole basis of rhetoric.
2. Science and advertising don't mesh well because science isn't constant. Consequently, scientists aren't comfortable making absolute statements. Doctors often are, and that's one reason doctors as a group are often mistrusted for what individual doctors have said -- when a doctor says "carbohydrates are responsible for weight gain" and other doctors say "no, fat is!" it reduces trust by the public in all doctors. Research that indicates one thing today, might be reversed by something that indicates a contradictory thing tomorrow. That's how science works: it changes. It's never Right, but always the best description of what we know at any moment, subject to what we find tomorrow.
Well, that's not what most people are looking for. They're looking for a mechanistic, deterministic way to live their lives: do this procedure, and this will be the result. The idea of an open-ended, changing target is not something people are comfortable with. If given a choice between a non-deterministic view of the world and a deterministic one, people will choose the deterministic one because it gives them a feeling of control over their lives and everyone wants that.
Religion gives people a feeling of determinism: you do these things, say these things, and you'll be a Good Person.
The point being: the best we can hope for is to not be ignored by most people, and probably the best way to do that is use the techniques that psychology and business have found are most effective for convincing people to take an interest in a subject: marketing. That sucks, because it feels like a sham way to convince people of stuff that should be obvious. But that's just how most people are, and we need to accept it.
Sure wish I had mod points today.
KE = 1/2*M*V*V: kinetic energy rises as the square of the speed. Claiming that speed isn't inherently dangerous is like claiming jumping off buildings isn't inherently dangerous. While it might be possible, though skill and safety equipment, to minimize that danger, it still clearly rises with speed.
Add to that, that while well-trained drivers with excellent reflexes might be capable of driving at high speeds safely, many inexperienced drivers with below-average skills or reflexes cannot, and they may not be aware that they cannot. Most people think they're excellent drivers, even people who clearly aren't.
I'd love to see driver tests done like pilot tests: every two years (or more often for professional drivers) complete retest, and loss of driving privileges until the driver takes classes and passes the retest.
"The Wasp Factory" is very close to the most messed-up, disturbing book I've ever read. I personally think it's his best work.
However, if you can find it, "Raw Spirit" is a non-fiction book about him touring Scotch factories and talking about how Scotch is made and why it taste like bog and how, despite that, people keep buying every bit the little distilleries can produce. It's a good book.
"Stiff" by Mary Roach. Goes into extensive detail about just how many uses dead bodies have. A few: forensics (letting them decay and recording what sorts of insects colonize them and when, which gives immense amounts of data to people who are trying to analyze time-of-death, also covered extensively in "A Fly For The Prosecution" by Madison Goff, and other books.
Safety testing: putting corpses in cars and crashing them gives much better results on skull fractures and such than Buster The Dummy. Likewise, dropping corpses in elevators or off buildings into safety nets, or measuring the protective qualities of bullet-proof jackets. It's hard to get good results using pigs.
(I saw Mary Roach read from this book one time, and it was creepy, not because of her and the book, but because just about everyone in the audience ended up asking really detailed, scary questions about treatment of dead bodies, since apparently most of them had experience in the subject.)
One of my mom's cousins was an anti-aircraft gunner on a WWII carrier. He said he was 3 stories above waterline, 2 stories below deck, in a room that was basically sealed, running the guns by remote control. He also said that in heavy seas, the room he was in would be waist-deep in seawater. The wave impacts would cause the circuit boards on the firecontrol computers to rattle and break the tubes, and they'd have to replace them, on live circuitry, fishing out broken pieces of glass, waist-deep in sea water. At one point they were in a serious storm somewhere, with two escort destroyers, and the storm went for so long that they couldn't refuel the destroyers, and when they ran out of fuel they went sideways to the waves and were broken into pieces before they sunk. Destroyers weren't quite as beefy as the battleships, but still were big, big ships.
I wasn't doing the water laser stuff: I was using big excimers. The water guys were using carbon dioxide lasers, so that'd be, what, 10,600nm? as I recall. If I remember right, the problem they were having was with the water boiling at the ablation site and that was really disrupting the energy transfer efficiency, but they were still making progress when I left.
Thanks a lot for the link -- that's better than anything I'd found.
A friend of mine worked as outsourced IT for a place that did explosive bonding: every Tuesday he'd come in to do whatever they needed and the whole building would shake every half hour or so. He also did outsourced IT for a place that made MRI's. Talk about early adopters of LCD monitors... They'd run everyone through a metal detector at the front door and confiscate anything metallic, and if your pants had steel rivets you didn't get to come in whilst wearing them.
I know you don't *have* to do EBW in hard vacuum, but the electron dispersion from collision is so bad, it was my understanding that anything over a couple inches was ineffective if it wasn't in a vacuum. I wonder if you could do some sort of charged getter to attract all the ionized welding debris. For laser drilling, we've used air streams to keep the debris off the lens, and even water streams that serve as a sort of fiber optic cable to conduct the laser down into the workpiece while washing away the cutting debris.
The caission idea is good. I haven't ever gotten to work with stuff that big so I don't know the problems and solutions that are generally accepted.
In other places I've read people who claim that the US no longer has the capacity to weld up battleships of the WWII variety, and other people have claimed that the original welds were done by somehow heating up these massive, massive sheets of metal and forge-welding them together. I find that very hard to believe -- how would you heat up something 20" thick by dozens of feet wide and high to welding temp? But at one point they did know how to attach massive, massive chunks of metal. I'm betting they just had tapered edges and laid down a zillion arc-weld beads, one over the other, but I haven't ever found any good references.
The point being (to me at least) that there isn't a set time for a revolution -- it happens when a critical mass of people are upset. So when you run out into the street, if there aren't other people out there with guns, there isn't enough critical mass, so you go back inside and wait a while before running out again.
In a broader sense, that's exactly what we're doing with this article: we're all discussing it and coming to some sort of consensus, and some people are advocating that it's time NOW -- they've run out into the street, verbally speaking -- while most other people either haven't yet run out or aren't going to, for whatever reasons they've chosen.
My friend has like a PhD in philosopy or something crazy, so it's not like his jokes are *funny*. Or at least not ha-ha funny.
One of my friends tells a joke. It goes like this:
"you know when it's time for the revolution? Well, you run out of your house with your guns in your hands. If there isn't anyone else out there with guns, it's not time yet."
Then he sighs and says, "I remember when that joke was *funny*."
Wouldn't the thickness of the pressure vessel mean you'd have to do your EBW in vacuum? Meaning you have to make a ... pressure vessel large enough to stand up to vacuum, that's larger than the pressure vessel you're trying to weld up? So how do you build that?
EBW was my first thought, too: I just don't see how they could do it. Maybe a building-sized PV that can stand 1 bar is much easier to make than this thing and they could just weld it up normally, and then put the EBW inside it. But that's still an enormous project. I worked with a vacuum system the size of a semi trailer, and the pressure vessel was made of I-beams welded side-to-side along its entire length. It weighed far more than the building it was in. Not a trivial design in its own right.
I wonder if laser welding might work better, especially if they had a thin clearance for the beam and were adding filler material.
>so epoxy potting removal is incredibly easy to me.
Out of curiosity, how do you do it? I've used a combination of soaking in acetone and physically chipping/milling the stuff away, but I'd love to know better techniques.
>The ONLY way to make these toys secure is custom chipsets. power up chipset and then only decrypt the contents of the flash after the 12 digit key was entered on the little pin pad. But nobody is going to make that.
Read about the Maxim DS3600 family of chips some time. Keys stored encrypted on-chip, chip's a microSMD so you can't get to the pins, has massive on-chip detection facilities for eg. case tampering, power glitches, and temperature changes, all of which trigger it to wipe all its stored keys and optionally wipe other things to which it's attached, and uses weird repeated XOR writes of the encrypted keys so they don't build up oxide charges that'd allow you to read the memory once you've torn it apart.
That chip's going to be hard to fool.
That's a fantastic idea, although instead of a gun I recommend shoes.
We need about 6.8 billion of those.
Although if someone could recreate the "camera" that Oliver Wendell Jones first built, that'd be good for some laughs, too.
I'd settle for a teleporter, if worse came to worse.
Anyone who reads this summary (without realizing that this is just a way to keep whaling under the guise of research) and thinks "dude, that's messed-up: I wonder what other shenanigans scientsts get up to?" should go read Elephants On Acid (and other bizarre experiments). It's a seriously strange book just chock-full of "they did WHAT? Dear Lord, *WHY*?" experiments. I thought it was interesting as a book because some of the experiments, I was like "cool, I've always wondered about that" when other people (my girlfriend, brother, best friend) were all "they did WHAT??!?" and likewise, they found meaning in other experiments that I thought were completely delusional. (Yeah, I'm saying the validity of experiments is relative.) There are some really truly gruesome experiments discussed in here, though, truly Frankenstein nightmare experiments done in the USSR, so it's not for the weak of stomach. But it's a great read.
You're joking, but this is perfectly easy to do. You just barely listen to what the questioner is saying, while simultaneously thinking hard -- the way actors do, method acting, trying to *live* your thoughts -- about calming or embarrassing things from your past. You can teach yourself to drive e-meters. They're a little more complicated than just a Wheatstone, but that's basically what they are. When I was a kid I made one as a science project and taught myself to push the needle from the bottom to the top and back again while talking to people (I grew up without a TV and had a lot of time on my hands, okay?) and later ended up dating a Scientologist (she was hot and I *still* didn't have a TV, okay?) and she and her family did *not* appreciate my ability to push an e-meter around.
I don't think carrying a charge could break one: the ones I've gotten to look at didn't have much vulnerable electronics. They used a transistor to drive the meter itself, based on the differential voltage across the bridge.
I can do a so-so job of telling you the carbon percentage of a sample by putting it on a grinder. I can not, however, tell you anything about the heat treatment the steel has received, or any cold forging or shot peening, and that has a *tremendous* effect on the steel's ultimate tensile strength. Grinder tests identify, they don't really characterize well. For characterization you need mechanical testing.
Likewise, you can build your own airplane using very similar skills.
The KR2 can be built for under $15,000 USD. It uses a VW engine and eats about 3 gallons of car gas per hour, while doing 180 knots. You can't say it has much baggage room, though. But it does have a 1000 mile range.
If you want to step up several notches, the Stallion is a six place plane you can build for about $120K. It's fast and the original Stallion has been modified so the designer and his wife can roll their Honda Goldwing motorcycle into the back, fly somewhere, and motorcycle wherever they want.
Our chips do that -- we're designing analog stuff, and they all have undocumented test modes, where you put in wildly non-standard inputs and the chip goes into a test mode where you can turn on/off specific parts. The thing is: wildly non-standard inputs are hard to get to a chip in a standard use design. There is no functional circuit design that could get anything we're building into its test mode. Of course, we're not building for surreptitious access.
I should break this down a little: we can assume two general ways of providing surreptitious access to a chip.
1. One or several non-standard inputs. Ruled out as above by adjacent circuit design, which the nogoodnik chip designer has no control over.
2. Standard inputs that are encoded -- a serial datastream, like portknocking. This is totally doable and probably difficl tto crack because it's basically encapsulating a secure communications channel on the chip, and that's a well-characterized situation. But it requires dedicated silicon. If the chip is anything seriously complex like a microcontroller, it's quite possible a clever designer could hide that silicon in the design. But those are the most crucial chips and will get the most scrutiny. The other chips, the level translators and power management chips and hardware codec chips, are just too small and simple, internally, to hide that kind of hardware.
In the early 1980's, the US produced intermittently buggy chips which we sold to the USSR in full knowledge that they'd disrupt production facilities. It worked very well. Why, then, wouldn't China do the same thing?
As someone who works in chip verification, I can tell you it's very difficult with most chips to do this, as long as the chips are designed in the US -- which is still largely the case, that they're designed here and produced in fabs in China (because labor's cheap and they don't care if their workers are exposed to HF and silane as long as money's coming in.)
You know *exactly* what size your chip die is. If the silicon comes back from the fab with a different-sized die, it will be very obvious. So nobody can put extra stuff onto an existing die. Die size is the single most critical aspect of most designs, because of the cost, so existing designs are jammed just as tightly as they can possibly be. You can't put more functionality into an existing die size. The problem, then, is letting your design out. (And even then, a competent chip designer could probably spot strange material on a smaller die because they're familiar with how the layout is supposed to look.)
There are some amazing military-grade chips out there. I was reading about the Maxim DS3600 the other day -- on-chip encryption and tamper-sensing, including detecting temperature changes and reacting by blanking all the on-board memory and stored encryption keys in nanoseconds, far faster than dumping liquid helium onto the chip would be able to freeze the memory for decoding. (They use some whack process for continually load-levelling and rewriting the keys so you can't use stored oxide charge to read what was there before it got blanked, either.) That kind of stuff is on the common market, available for anyone to buy. I assume the military has better stuff yet, and espionage people even better.
At the end of the day you have to be able to trust someone or you'll just crouch in your basement. But there are ways to verify a chip's functionality and look for clearly bogus interactions. Our chip test systems make it easy to distinguish chips from different silicon lots, much less from different fabs. As always, if you buy the cheap stuff you don't know what you're getting, but if you spend the money to do some research, you'll have a much, much better idea of what you're getting. In this case, money in the millions of dollars, granted, but if you're designing military-grade stuff, well, that's why you buy from companies with a track record of producing trustworthy stuff.
Of course it would be struck down because it's stupid. You know that, I know that, and he probably knows that. He also knows that by proposing this stupid law he can go tell his stupid constituents "look at this great law I tried to get put in place to make your children safer!" and when it gets struck down he'll say "look at all these horrible liberal activist judges who are trying to make your children less safe! I think someone should do something about it, and I'm willing to be that person!" This is campaign-advertising-by-alternate-means: a free (to him) way to get his name in papers, associated with something that sounds, to stupid people, vaguely appealing. This is, in other words, advertising.
There aren't many reputable Christian theology types who claim that God is trying to fool us, because the idea of a tricky, misleading God is problematic on a number of levels.
However, the Biblical Book of Job does establish the idea of just such a God, so the argument by the people who DO subscribe to the Tricky God concept is that God is testing our faith by sending tornadoes and gay prostitutes and hiding fake dinosaur bones under all the rocks. Those who Truly Believe ignore the temptations.
Another faction claim that all the temptations are sent by Satan (or whatever they're going to call God's adversary.) The problem with that is that the Bible says God created the Earth, so anything like dinosaur bones trickily hidden to mess with our heads is God's doing.
The question of "well, if God screws with us like that, what ELSE does God do?" rapidly reduces to a solipsistic one: the whole Universe was created by God 15 minutes ago, and me with my memories of my life, and Jesus never existed, and everything I see is just created by God to mess with my head, including the memories of the creation/evolution argument.
Most young-earthers, when faced with that, get very, very, very crabby, and I've never had a conversation go more than a minute or so after they realize that my vision of history is exactly as correct as theirs, if we both assume that God is sneaky and is willing to distort apparent history to test our faith.
If I read the original article correctly:
If someone gets the chip design and is copying it to be built in another fab, it'd be possible (difficult, but much less difficult than a complete chip redesign or re-engineering) to remove this part of the chip (and increase the profit margin, since A: no investment on research and B: more die per unit silicon.)
What this is going to affect is people who run a fab making legitimate parts, but also run the same parts from the same masks but keep them off the books and sell them independently of the company that owns the design -- OEM ripoffs.
That's why I'm thinking at least a partial solution would be a continuous lane, from the on-ramp along the highway. Although, around here where we have a lot of room, our merge lanes following the freeway meter are often over 1km long. But yeah, having driven in other places, I agree with the general critique -- it's a good idea, poorly implemented.
>"Freeway Meters" on an onramp actually make this problem worse on a freeway that is still flowing at a reasonable speed because they reduce the distance that a car has to accelerate insuring that they enter the roadway at a reduced speed causing traffic to slow down for them.
It depends on the flow dynamics of the intersection. If you have a stoplight somewhere near the road that feeds onto the onramp -- not an unusual situation these days, when cloverleaf-type intersections are being replaced with ramps that feed into stoplights -- you get non-uniform traffic on the ramps, and a burst of traffic on the ramp being injected into a limited-access road can serve to drive it temporarily over its capacity and slow down several lanes, leading to a jam. Intelligent freeway meters actually analyze the rate of traffic on the limited-access road and allow cars through at a rate designed to minimize the disruption by making it a steady-state addition. I've seen it work and sometimes it works very well.
I'd be interested in seeing what would happen if limited-access roads had one lane at the far right that exited at every interchange, and then entered again after the interchange, so there was a continuous accelleration/deceleration lane. Unfortunately, many people are very uncomfortable with merging into fast traffic and stop and wait for an opening, which would probably make my suggestion not work.