Cheap, high-MPG used cars listed in order from model years 1995-1990. Average blue book price under $4k. My 1984 Nissan Sentra got 38 mpg. If you find a diesel one it got 50mpg. I bought my last Sentra in 1996 for $1700: I assume it'd be lower now. My 1971 Datsun 1200 got 39 mpg. I bought it for $200 in 1989.
>>Exaggerate uncommon risks -- for example, air travel is safer than cars but because car accidents are common they are seen as less risky
>Maybe because everyone involved in an air plane crash usually dies. Automobile deaths are much less. There's this idea of risk = probability * impact. In the case of automobiles, probability is high but the impact is low. It's the other way around in aircraft failures.
That's actually exactly what he's talking about: risk = probability * impact. The problem is if the probability is 0.2 and the impact is 0.2, people unconsciously assume that it's not as bad as something where the probability is 0.000000001 but the impact is 1.0 -- because they're primarily basing their decision on the perceived value of the impact, not on the probability*impact product. As Schneier has said elsewhere, if you read about it in newspapers it probably isn't dangerous. It's the things that are so common they aren't news, that are the dangers you need to worry about, because those are the ones you're very likely to face.
By the way, most airplane crashes aren't fatal. Go to the NTSB aviation accident database and do some lookups on any year you care to choose. Most big commercial jet crashes have high fatality rates but the majority of crashes are small planes carrying 1-4 people and the majority survive. Like the people who are only looking at impact but think they're looking at risk, you're talking with your heart and not your mind when you say that most airplane crashes are fatal. They're not. The public perceives that they are. That's because the public is lousy at risk assessment.
Oh, man, you're going to be all serious about my dumb post. But you're bringing up a lot of interesting points. There is pressure to standardize skillsets, to make them trackable, manageable, and accountable -- which results in what we see where jobs are rearranged so that any (educatable) person can do them, and then people become cogs, just another piece of machinery to be redistributed and reallocated. (Which, by the way, is hardly a Gen Y feeling: see Charlie Chaplin's film "Modern Times" from WWI, or the Randall Jarell poem The Ball Turret Gunner from WWII.) This isn't by any means unique to IT -- manufacturing went through this in the '70's, or earlier (the reason there's a high-tech industry in Colorado is because Hewlett Packard outsourced from California to Colorado in 1964 because skilled labor was cheaper and less apt to be nomadic.) Likewise, a major reason doctors now use Caesarian section delivery rather than manually-assisted/forceps-assisted delivery is because the latter takes artistry and skill, while the former can be taught by rote, lowering the skill required.
When a process becomes routine, there's very strong pressure to standardize it, so that the people paying don't have to pay for skilled practitioners. The process and the skilled people lose, while the bean-counters win.
But, yeah, people have been saying the same thing about the next generation since at least Greek times. It's just getting faster. I do wonder what'll happen when technologic advance gets too rapid for people of the learning generation to keep up with. Probably we'll just stop buying as much new stuff.
Antiknock sensors and variable valve timing are part of it, and availability of reasonable octane -- premium grades -- helps a lot, too. There are also games some engine designers play with stratified charge engines, where there's a non-uniform distribution of fuel/air in the engine, using fuel injection into the port during/after air moves into the engine.
Of course, if you run low-octane fuel in an engine with all these additions it'll run, but it won't run well: significantly reduced power. It'd be cooler if more engines ran like some diesels, with opposed pistons in a single cylinder and, as a result, variable compression ratios, so it could adapt for the optimal compression ratio for any given octane fuel.
Taking a very quick look around, the highest-compression old engine I could find was the Ford 406: 12.1:1. There are current ZL&/Z28 cars that have 12.5:1, that can run (not well) on 93 octane. Here's a claim that the highest you can run on 93 octane is 10.5:1, without doing tricks like water injection or dumping xylene in the tank.
Depending on what's going on, 'near miss' can be from inches out to three miles. When two commercial airliners under air traffic control are flying in airways at higher elevations they're supposed to be 1000 feet apart, vertically. If something were to happen so they were a bit less than that, that could be a near miss. There's a much larger separation when you're landing after another airplane, and if the other airplane does something unexpected, like come to a full stop on the runway briefly before pulling off onto a taxiway, and by some mischance you end up landing behind them rather than getting routed into a holding pattern -- even though the other plane is off the runway well before you're down, that's still a near-miss, even though the runway might be two miles out by the time they're clear of it. Near miss is about as precise, and dangerous, as near accident would be when talking about automobiles.
Note that I'm only a private pilot flying little airplanes rarely if ever in the conditions/airports that big jets fly in, so my landing-distance-separation data might not be completely accurate. All we have to do is not hit the pavement until the other plane's off the runway and onto a taxiway. But the landing distance stuff for big planes is based on what I've read/heard from professional pilots.
All things considered, I think I'd rather have a compass than an airspeed indicator. I think if I just had to choose a single instrument, it'd be a compass. (Stall onset, in the planes I fly, is hard to miss.) I'm reviewing to try and get my biennial flight review back, so minimum-required-instruments is on my mind a bit lately. Sailplanes are beautiful and something I'd love to get some time in, one of these days.
The minimum required instrument list differs a little between different airplanes (the manufacturer decides.) Here's what the FAA requires: A - Airspeed indicator. B - Altimeter. C - Magnetic direction indicator. (read: compass.) D - Tachometer. E - Oil pressure gauge. F - Oil temperature gauge for each air-cooled engine. G - Fuel gauge indicating the quantity of fuel in each tank. H - For small civil airplanes certificated after 1996, an approved aviation red or aviation white anticollision light system. I - An approved safety belt with an approved metal-to-metal latching device for each occupant 2 years of age or older. J - For small civil airplanes manufactured after 1978, an approved shoulder harness for each front seat. (other req'mts R.S. 1986) K - An emergency locator transmitter, (excepts - sing. place ++)
Now, if you're flying an ultralight -- under 250 pounds -- you can do any fool thing you want, but in the US, if you have an airplane with an airworthiness certificate, you have to take along some stuff. (The above list from an Experimental Aviation website quiz.)
For the record, if you dump enough short-wave radiation into almost anything non-metallic, it'll phosphoresce. (quick terminology: if a molecule absorbs short-wavelength radiation and immediately re-emits longer-wave radiation, that's fluorescence. If it absorbs radiation by kicking electrons up into orbits that are higher-energy but the electron has the same spin as a lower-energy electron in an unoccupied orbital, the activated electron can't simply drop back down, so it hangs out for a while until quantum mechanics effects allow it to drop down into a lower orbital and emit an electron: that's phosphorescence. Things that "glow in the dark" are phosphorescence, the time-delay version of fluorescence.) Anyway. I worked with a megawatt-level deep UV laser that would fire for about a millisecond every second when we were analyzing the beam cross-section, to try and see if any of the optics were dying. If they were, spots in that lens would glow after it fired. If paper was in the beam, it'd glow yellow (and be yellow after a shot. After the second it'd be brown and after the third it'd be gone.) So would cloth. Or skin. Kind of cool, in a painful way.
>Hanford is not contaminated to the point that it's dangerous to just be there.
Maybe it isn't now, but I had friends working for Bechtel, who were doing radiochemical testing of natural ponds to try and figure out which one was going to go critical *first*. I'm not joking or exaggerating: there was so much leaked radioactive material on/in the ground that they expected it to concentrate through natural drainage to above critical mass. One friend told me about several of the criticality incidents they had, where waste plutonium had accumulated in oil-filled coolant ducts and started thermal runaway reactions (that boiled all the oil, displacing all the plutonium chips, which then settled back down to start the cycle again...) So while Hanford might be okay now, I wouldn't go there unless I was with someone who had worked there a long, long time. That's the only place I've ever visited where they gave me a heavy steel tag with a number stamped on it, for rugged identification, along with the film badge.
Re:I quit voting
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes and no. You're right, but you haven't gone far enough. At least in the Democratic party, the place things get started is in the precinct caucus, where everyone gets together and submits suggestions, that get collated into party statements. (I understand it works differently on the Republican side...) When I was running caucuses, a lot of the time a grand total of a dozen people would show up, out of 2000 people who were nominally political enough to have registered and been kept on the voter registration rolls. If a handful of single-issue cranks showed up, they would absolutely swamp the caucus. If an organization encouraged its members to do this across a county or part of the state, it absolutely affected the result, in terms of who was running, what the party planks were, you name it. It's really no different than the Microsoft/OOXML thing: if you can mobilize a very few people in a large number of places, you can have an *enormous* effect on the entire system.
back to the subject at hand: want to have a part in how things are running? Spend 4 hours, once every two years, at your precinct caucus. Get two friends to do the same, and you can make a difference. Heck, get four friends to show up and vote you as the precinct representative, and take your message to the county level. My mom was a state caucus representative a bunch of times, because she knew a lot of people locally, and she took her pro-abortion, pro-civil-liberties, pro-free-speech message to the state Republicans and made a lot of unwelcome noise. More power to people like that, I say. If the people running this train don't hear dissent, they push the throttle down further, and the entire country is tied to the tracks.
Absolutely. But as it stands, can't they be held liable if their network is used for criminal behavior, even if they don't know about it, merely because they didn't make an attempt to find/halt such behavior? That's part of negligence, after all. My understanding was that the reason carriers didn't have to read, analyze, understand, and sometimes censor everything they carry was precisely because they had common carrier immunity, and that lacking that, they were liable for failing to detect and halt illegal behavior using the service they're providing. I may be wrong, but I think I've read that in several places, which is why I'm asking.
I'm replying to your post because it's informative and brings up a question I've never heard answered directly. So ISP's don't have common carrier status. Doesn't that make them potentially liable for criminal behavior transmitted via their network? Isn't that the main point of common carrier: that it's your get-out-of-jail-free card if someone uses your media distribution channel to plan/conduct crimes? So if nogoodnik1 emails nogoodnik2 with "Let's go do some crimes! Let's go eat sushi and not pay!" via Comcast, and they do that, couldn't Comcast be considered an accessory to the crime?
When people with a story like that die, it's an enormous loss. That sucks, beyond just missing the person. My family spent tens of hours recording some of my grandparents' stories on audio cassette tape (that I probably need to digitize some time soonish) because they had all this great stuff like what you're talking about -- my one grandfather riding his Indian motorcycle from Iowa to NYC in the '20's, both of my grandfathers talking about hitching rides on freight trains to get from the Midwest down to Texas on a rumor that the Army was recruiting at one specific base (imagine that level of desperation for a job: that you'd train-hop four days across half the US on the *rumor* that you could volunteer for infantry...) It'd be sure neat to find the rest of your grandmother's story. You could try and see if any of her old papers said anything: maybe she had a journal/diary.
>My father was born in 1925, So I'm suspecting this was around 1920 or so. High quality 20's vehicles such as Cords and Auburns could still comfortably do 70 or 80mph so I suspect the pickup method has merit.
The problem, in the '20's, wasn't the cars' top speed, it was the roads. There were *very* few paved or concrete roads, and the dirt ones weren't either straight or flat, especially if there was any moisture at all, when they'd turn into mudpits full of ruts. The road past the house where I grew up was nearly impassable for most of the spring and fall because when it was made, in the 1890's, it was 'paved' with something called corduroy, where they cut down and debranched pine trees and laid the trees side-by-side along the road over the mud, which worked well for about twenty years, maybe, but then turned into a maze of broken logs, so they put down another layer, and the cycle continued. Imagine trying to drive anything other than a high-clearance 4wd with very large tires through something like that. Now imagine doing that across the entire United States.
The Interstate road system was put in place primarily because Dwight Eisenhower became president and got a chance to fix a problem he'd personally experienced when the US was trying to move soldiers across the nation during WWI -- it took seventy days to transport a platoon of soldiers from the East to the West coast, and that was using high-clearance Army vehicles.
We take our road systems for granted these days. Moving materials between states was enormously difficult until the US government spent the time and money to make the road systems we don't even think about. *Any* land vehicle would've had trouble averaging 15mph across the US in the 1920's, and many current cars couldn't've done it at all for lack of ground clearance. (And complete inavailability of suitable gasoline, because until fuel research done during WWII for aircraft, American gasoline was crap, as was gasoline everywhere. High-octane, high-compression gasoline was developed for long-range bombers.)
I think the question, then, is what we mean when we say 'nadir' -- do we mean the lowest point it's ever been (which could be now, although the American Civil War and parts of WWII were close as regards blatant violations of civil liberties) or the lowest it can possibly go? I think of 'nadir' as being the latter, but if you think of it as just being the lowest ebb we've ever seen, and don't imply that it couldn't go lower yet, then you might be right.
Oh, the US is nowhere near its nadir. I think this phase is technically known as Brennschluss. We will be closer to the nadir when people, on reading this, think "well, why wouldn't the corporations help the government in any way they can?" and closer yet when the media no longer reports on such things.
I *love* it that everyone -- you, and even coworkers who don't know much about music -- use Zune as the de-facto example of the worst possible player, that "even ZUNE will do it!" That makes my black, bitter heart just a little warmer. Sure, Zune won't play Microsoft's own Plays-For-Sure, but even it will play AAC's.
By the way, wrt your.sig, you should look into Nokian tires. My brother hasn't missed a day riding into work in four or five years, in winter Colorado, and although my commute distance is a bit far for daily riding, a pair of Nokians gets me in when it's too icy for cars. IRC Blizzards are okay, but steel studs wear out quickly. The carbide ones on the Nokians and Schwalbes will outlast the tires.
It's only broken if you consider it an end product. If it's research, well, the most productive research is when you come up with unexpected results. Seeing which tags come up, mapping the rise/fall, getting some idea of how quickly a tag becomes visible through repeated, autonomous additions, then seeing what happens after it becomes visible and people can either reinforce or fight it, is all valuable data for a replacement or update to the tag system. Things that don't break don't get improved. I'm reminded of a story about fighter aircraft development. When looking at a list of all the parts of the aircraft that were breaking, some people suggested making all those parts stronger, but other people suggested that all the parts that weren't on the list were overdesigned and needed to be rebuilt lighter to get better performance out of the fighter. It depends on what you need from the process.
Oh really? If I take a TIFF of Angelina Jolie and another of Laura Bush, and run them both through a lossy transformation algorithm known as gif, I can sure tell from the result which starting file yielded the final file. If I take a WAV of JS Bach and another of Metallica and mp3 them both, I can clearly identify the starting file from the result. When I was younger I spent a lot of time logging onto systems that had/etc/passwd visible, downloading it, then running dictionaries through crypt to find matches. The basis of all hashing is that reduction in data volume does not equal irrevocable loss of data->hash identity.
Are you saying that a Photoshop swirl is somehow magically different than all these cases? Would you care to support that assertion with, y'know, *anything*?
Re:Yeah, mutual geeking out is awesome
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
That's neat, and a great reason to talk to everyone: you never know who you're talking to and who they might know. The basis of networking, in a way.
I've had a couple other interactions of this sort, and they're fun. This one stands out (to me) because of my extraordinarily dorky cluenessness.
Re:Yeah, mutual geeking out is awesome
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
Sort of... if I were to use 'voce' I would've done it in italics, but 'sotto voice' is used often enough as an english phrase I just went with it. Dragging down the language, one post at a time.
I was thinking about turbocompounding, too. Also the B-36 with a mix of jet and prop engines. Or, in my own field, switching power regulators that are complex IC's, some of which have the switching FET internal to the chip and some of which use external FET's -- basically the same thing as the tube->transistor evolution, one more step along, as we go from discrete components to a mix of discrete and IC. Likewise, there are lots of cars out there with incandescent-glowing-wire lightbulbs inside the car, halogen-arc-discharge headlights, and LED taillights. We're pretty clearly moving to all-LED lighting, but we're not there yet. Or lasers, which traditionally used flashlamps or arcs to power them, but are slowly moving to using laser diodes for pumping, and presumably will end up being just laser diodes.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheap, high-MPG used cars listed in order from model years 1995-1990. Average blue book price under $4k.
My 1984 Nissan Sentra got 38 mpg. If you find a diesel one it got 50mpg. I bought my last Sentra in 1996 for $1700: I assume it'd be lower now. My 1971 Datsun 1200 got 39 mpg. I bought it for $200 in 1989.
>>Exaggerate uncommon risks -- for example, air travel is safer than cars but because car accidents are common they are seen as less risky
>Maybe because everyone involved in an air plane crash usually dies. Automobile deaths are much less. There's this idea of risk = probability * impact. In the case of automobiles, probability is high but the impact is low. It's the other way around in aircraft failures.
That's actually exactly what he's talking about: risk = probability * impact. The problem is if the probability is 0.2 and the impact is 0.2, people unconsciously assume that it's not as bad as something where the probability is 0.000000001 but the impact is 1.0 -- because they're primarily basing their decision on the perceived value of the impact, not on the probability*impact product. As Schneier has said elsewhere, if you read about it in newspapers it probably isn't dangerous. It's the things that are so common they aren't news, that are the dangers you need to worry about, because those are the ones you're very likely to face.
By the way, most airplane crashes aren't fatal. Go to the NTSB aviation accident database and do some lookups on any year you care to choose. Most big commercial jet crashes have high fatality rates but the majority of crashes are small planes carrying 1-4 people and the majority survive. Like the people who are only looking at impact but think they're looking at risk, you're talking with your heart and not your mind when you say that most airplane crashes are fatal. They're not. The public perceives that they are. That's because the public is lousy at risk assessment.
Oh, man, you're going to be all serious about my dumb post.
But you're bringing up a lot of interesting points.
There is pressure to standardize skillsets, to make them trackable, manageable, and accountable -- which results in what we see where jobs are rearranged so that any (educatable) person can do them, and then people become cogs, just another piece of machinery to be redistributed and reallocated.
(Which, by the way, is hardly a Gen Y feeling: see Charlie Chaplin's film "Modern Times" from WWI, or the Randall Jarell poem The Ball Turret Gunner from WWII.)
This isn't by any means unique to IT -- manufacturing went through this in the '70's, or earlier (the reason there's a high-tech industry in Colorado is because Hewlett Packard outsourced from California to Colorado in 1964 because skilled labor was cheaper and less apt to be nomadic.) Likewise, a major reason doctors now use Caesarian section delivery rather than manually-assisted/forceps-assisted delivery is because the latter takes artistry and skill, while the former can be taught by rote, lowering the skill required.
When a process becomes routine, there's very strong pressure to standardize it, so that the people paying don't have to pay for skilled practitioners. The process and the skilled people lose, while the bean-counters win.
But, yeah, people have been saying the same thing about the next generation since at least Greek times. It's just getting faster. I do wonder what'll happen when technologic advance gets too rapid for people of the learning generation to keep up with. Probably we'll just stop buying as much new stuff.
>what he charges me when I fix his computer.
He charges you to fix his computer?
That job *sucks*.
Antiknock sensors and variable valve timing are part of it, and availability of reasonable octane -- premium grades -- helps a lot, too. There are also games some engine designers play with stratified charge engines, where there's a non-uniform distribution of fuel/air in the engine, using fuel injection into the port during/after air moves into the engine.
Of course, if you run low-octane fuel in an engine with all these additions it'll run, but it won't run well: significantly reduced power. It'd be cooler if more engines ran like some diesels, with opposed pistons in a single cylinder and, as a result, variable compression ratios, so it could adapt for the optimal compression ratio for any given octane fuel.
Taking a very quick look around, the highest-compression old engine I could find was the Ford 406: 12.1:1. There are current ZL&/Z28 cars that have 12.5:1, that can run (not well) on 93 octane. Here's a claim that the highest you can run on 93 octane is 10.5:1, without doing tricks like water injection or dumping xylene in the tank.
Depending on what's going on, 'near miss' can be from inches out to three miles. When two commercial airliners under air traffic control are flying in airways at higher elevations they're supposed to be 1000 feet apart, vertically. If something were to happen so they were a bit less than that, that could be a near miss. There's a much larger separation when you're landing after another airplane, and if the other airplane does something unexpected, like come to a full stop on the runway briefly before pulling off onto a taxiway, and by some mischance you end up landing behind them rather than getting routed into a holding pattern -- even though the other plane is off the runway well before you're down, that's still a near-miss, even though the runway might be two miles out by the time they're clear of it. Near miss is about as precise, and dangerous, as near accident would be when talking about automobiles.
Note that I'm only a private pilot flying little airplanes rarely if ever in the conditions/airports that big jets fly in, so my landing-distance-separation data might not be completely accurate. All we have to do is not hit the pavement until the other plane's off the runway and onto a taxiway. But the landing distance stuff for big planes is based on what I've read/heard from professional pilots.
All things considered, I think I'd rather have a compass than an airspeed indicator. I think if I just had to choose a single instrument, it'd be a compass. (Stall onset, in the planes I fly, is hard to miss.) I'm reviewing to try and get my biennial flight review back, so minimum-required-instruments is on my mind a bit lately. Sailplanes are beautiful and something I'd love to get some time in, one of these days.
For the record, it's a swashplate not a squash plate. It's right near the Jesus Nut. (heh.)
The minimum required instrument list differs a little between different airplanes (the manufacturer decides.)
Here's what the FAA requires:
A - Airspeed indicator.
B - Altimeter.
C - Magnetic direction indicator. (read: compass.)
D - Tachometer.
E - Oil pressure gauge.
F - Oil temperature gauge for each air-cooled engine.
G - Fuel gauge indicating the quantity of fuel in each tank.
H - For small civil airplanes certificated after 1996, an approved aviation red or aviation white anticollision light system.
I - An approved safety belt with an approved metal-to-metal latching device for each occupant 2 years of age or older.
J - For small civil airplanes manufactured after 1978, an approved shoulder harness for each front seat. (other req'mts R.S. 1986)
K - An emergency locator transmitter, (excepts - sing. place ++)
Now, if you're flying an ultralight -- under 250 pounds -- you can do any fool thing you want, but in the US, if you have an airplane with an airworthiness certificate, you have to take along some stuff.
(The above list from an Experimental Aviation website quiz.)
For the record, if you dump enough short-wave radiation into almost anything non-metallic, it'll phosphoresce. (quick terminology: if a molecule absorbs short-wavelength radiation and immediately re-emits longer-wave radiation, that's fluorescence. If it absorbs radiation by kicking electrons up into orbits that are higher-energy but the electron has the same spin as a lower-energy electron in an unoccupied orbital, the activated electron can't simply drop back down, so it hangs out for a while until quantum mechanics effects allow it to drop down into a lower orbital and emit an electron: that's phosphorescence. Things that "glow in the dark" are phosphorescence, the time-delay version of fluorescence.) Anyway. I worked with a megawatt-level deep UV laser that would fire for about a millisecond every second when we were analyzing the beam cross-section, to try and see if any of the optics were dying. If they were, spots in that lens would glow after it fired. If paper was in the beam, it'd glow yellow (and be yellow after a shot. After the second it'd be brown and after the third it'd be gone.) So would cloth. Or skin. Kind of cool, in a painful way.
>Hanford is not contaminated to the point that it's dangerous to just be there.
Maybe it isn't now, but I had friends working for Bechtel, who were doing radiochemical testing of natural ponds to try and figure out which one was going to go critical *first*. I'm not joking or exaggerating: there was so much leaked radioactive material on/in the ground that they expected it to concentrate through natural drainage to above critical mass. One friend told me about several of the criticality incidents they had, where waste plutonium had accumulated in oil-filled coolant ducts and started thermal runaway reactions (that boiled all the oil, displacing all the plutonium chips, which then settled back down to start the cycle again...) So while Hanford might be okay now, I wouldn't go there unless I was with someone who had worked there a long, long time. That's the only place I've ever visited where they gave me a heavy steel tag with a number stamped on it, for rugged identification, along with the film badge.
Yes and no. You're right, but you haven't gone far enough. At least in the Democratic party, the place things get started is in the precinct caucus, where everyone gets together and submits suggestions, that get collated into party statements. (I understand it works differently on the Republican side...) When I was running caucuses, a lot of the time a grand total of a dozen people would show up, out of 2000 people who were nominally political enough to have registered and been kept on the voter registration rolls. If a handful of single-issue cranks showed up, they would absolutely swamp the caucus. If an organization encouraged its members to do this across a county or part of the state, it absolutely affected the result, in terms of who was running, what the party planks were, you name it. It's really no different than the Microsoft/OOXML thing: if you can mobilize a very few people in a large number of places, you can have an *enormous* effect on the entire system.
back to the subject at hand: want to have a part in how things are running? Spend 4 hours, once every two years, at your precinct caucus. Get two friends to do the same, and you can make a difference. Heck, get four friends to show up and vote you as the precinct representative, and take your message to the county level. My mom was a state caucus representative a bunch of times, because she knew a lot of people locally, and she took her pro-abortion, pro-civil-liberties, pro-free-speech message to the state Republicans and made a lot of unwelcome noise. More power to people like that, I say. If the people running this train don't hear dissent, they push the throttle down further, and the entire country is tied to the tracks.
Absolutely.
But as it stands, can't they be held liable if their network is used for criminal behavior, even if they don't know about it, merely because they didn't make an attempt to find/halt such behavior? That's part of negligence, after all. My understanding was that the reason carriers didn't have to read, analyze, understand, and sometimes censor everything they carry was precisely because they had common carrier immunity, and that lacking that, they were liable for failing to detect and halt illegal behavior using the service they're providing. I may be wrong, but I think I've read that in several places, which is why I'm asking.
I'm replying to your post because it's informative and brings up a question I've never heard answered directly.
So ISP's don't have common carrier status.
Doesn't that make them potentially liable for criminal behavior transmitted via their network? Isn't that the main point of common carrier: that it's your get-out-of-jail-free card if someone uses your media distribution channel to plan/conduct crimes?
So if nogoodnik1 emails nogoodnik2 with "Let's go do some crimes! Let's go eat sushi and not pay!" via Comcast, and they do that, couldn't Comcast be considered an accessory to the crime?
When people with a story like that die, it's an enormous loss. That sucks, beyond just missing the person. My family spent tens of hours recording some of my grandparents' stories on audio cassette tape (that I probably need to digitize some time soonish) because they had all this great stuff like what you're talking about -- my one grandfather riding his Indian motorcycle from Iowa to NYC in the '20's, both of my grandfathers talking about hitching rides on freight trains to get from the Midwest down to Texas on a rumor that the Army was recruiting at one specific base (imagine that level of desperation for a job: that you'd train-hop four days across half the US on the *rumor* that you could volunteer for infantry...)
It'd be sure neat to find the rest of your grandmother's story. You could try and see if any of her old papers said anything: maybe she had a journal/diary.
>My father was born in 1925, So I'm suspecting this was around 1920 or so. High quality 20's vehicles such as Cords and Auburns could still comfortably do 70 or 80mph so I suspect the pickup method has merit.
The problem, in the '20's, wasn't the cars' top speed, it was the roads. There were *very* few paved or concrete roads, and the dirt ones weren't either straight or flat, especially if there was any moisture at all, when they'd turn into mudpits full of ruts. The road past the house where I grew up was nearly impassable for most of the spring and fall because when it was made, in the 1890's, it was 'paved' with something called corduroy, where they cut down and debranched pine trees and laid the trees side-by-side along the road over the mud, which worked well for about twenty years, maybe, but then turned into a maze of broken logs, so they put down another layer, and the cycle continued. Imagine trying to drive anything other than a high-clearance 4wd with very large tires through something like that. Now imagine doing that across the entire United States.
The Interstate road system was put in place primarily because Dwight Eisenhower became president and got a chance to fix a problem he'd personally experienced when the US was trying to move soldiers across the nation during WWI -- it took seventy days to transport a platoon of soldiers from the East to the West coast, and that was using high-clearance Army vehicles.
We take our road systems for granted these days. Moving materials between states was enormously difficult until the US government spent the time and money to make the road systems we don't even think about. *Any* land vehicle would've had trouble averaging 15mph across the US in the 1920's, and many current cars couldn't've done it at all for lack of ground clearance. (And complete inavailability of suitable gasoline, because until fuel research done during WWII for aircraft, American gasoline was crap, as was gasoline everywhere. High-octane, high-compression gasoline was developed for long-range bombers.)
I think the question, then, is what we mean when we say 'nadir' -- do we mean the lowest point it's ever been (which could be now, although the American Civil War and parts of WWII were close as regards blatant violations of civil liberties) or the lowest it can possibly go? I think of 'nadir' as being the latter, but if you think of it as just being the lowest ebb we've ever seen, and don't imply that it couldn't go lower yet, then you might be right.
Oh, the US is nowhere near its nadir. I think this phase is technically known as Brennschluss. We will be closer to the nadir when people, on reading this, think "well, why wouldn't the corporations help the government in any way they can?" and closer yet when the media no longer reports on such things.
I *love* it that everyone -- you, and even coworkers who don't know much about music -- use Zune as the de-facto example of the worst possible player, that "even ZUNE will do it!" That makes my black, bitter heart just a little warmer. Sure, Zune won't play Microsoft's own Plays-For-Sure, but even it will play AAC's.
.sig, you should look into Nokian tires. My brother hasn't missed a day riding into work in four or five years, in winter Colorado, and although my commute distance is a bit far for daily riding, a pair of Nokians gets me in when it's too icy for cars. IRC Blizzards are okay, but steel studs wear out quickly. The carbide ones on the Nokians and Schwalbes will outlast the tires.
By the way, wrt your
It's only broken if you consider it an end product. If it's research, well, the most productive research is when you come up with unexpected results. Seeing which tags come up, mapping the rise/fall, getting some idea of how quickly a tag becomes visible through repeated, autonomous additions, then seeing what happens after it becomes visible and people can either reinforce or fight it, is all valuable data for a replacement or update to the tag system. Things that don't break don't get improved.
I'm reminded of a story about fighter aircraft development. When looking at a list of all the parts of the aircraft that were breaking, some people suggested making all those parts stronger, but other people suggested that all the parts that weren't on the list were overdesigned and needed to be rebuilt lighter to get better performance out of the fighter. It depends on what you need from the process.
For what it's worth, I first heard that joke over 20 years ago.
Oh really? /etc/passwd visible, downloading it, then running dictionaries through crypt to find matches. The basis of all hashing is that reduction in data volume does not equal irrevocable loss of data->hash identity.
If I take a TIFF of Angelina Jolie and another of Laura Bush, and run them both through a lossy transformation algorithm known as gif, I can sure tell from the result which starting file yielded the final file. If I take a WAV of JS Bach and another of Metallica and mp3 them both, I can clearly identify the starting file from the result. When I was younger I spent a lot of time logging onto systems that had
Are you saying that a Photoshop swirl is somehow magically different than all these cases? Would you care to support that assertion with, y'know, *anything*?
That's neat, and a great reason to talk to everyone: you never know who you're talking to and who they might know. The basis of networking, in a way.
I've had a couple other interactions of this sort, and they're fun. This one stands out (to me) because of my extraordinarily dorky cluenessness.
Sort of... if I were to use 'voce' I would've done it in italics, but 'sotto voice' is used often enough as an english phrase I just went with it. Dragging down the language, one post at a time.
I was thinking about turbocompounding, too.
Also the B-36 with a mix of jet and prop engines.
Or, in my own field, switching power regulators that are complex IC's, some of which have the switching FET internal to the chip and some of which use external FET's -- basically the same thing as the tube->transistor evolution, one more step along, as we go from discrete components to a mix of discrete and IC.
Likewise, there are lots of cars out there with incandescent-glowing-wire lightbulbs inside the car, halogen-arc-discharge headlights, and LED taillights. We're pretty clearly moving to all-LED lighting, but we're not there yet. Or lasers, which traditionally used flashlamps or arcs to power them, but are slowly moving to using laser diodes for pumping, and presumably will end up being just laser diodes.