Perth SmartRider does indeed use MiFare Classic, and the cards are indeed insecure. But there's some server-side smarts which will (eventually) notice a cloned card, and deactivate it. I expect it also (eventually) notices if you top up your card yourself for free.
The idea is that although the system can be exploited at a small scale, it isn't worth the hassle. Provided their server-side stuff prevents exploits going commercial and becoming widespread, it's good enough.
Yep; that's why I said "oil dug up out of the ground". I agree that there's a very good chance we will continue to use gasoline/petrol and diesel in applications like transport for quite some time, by manufacturing them from something other than fossil oil. That something else might be coal, or bioreactor algae, or some other option.
Liquid hydrocarbons have a fabulously high energy density and are easy to transport, internal combustion engines have a lot of desirable properties, and we've got all this existing infrastructure.
But the stuff dug out of the ground? Gone in a century.
I'm hoping for a very slow slide down the oil production graph instead of a sudden drop to nothing
Typically production of a limited resource is approximately symmetric, so you can expect production of oil to tail off over about the same time period that it ramped up. There's no point at which we "finish" the "last" of it, but expect us to be mostly done with oil dug up out of the ground somewhere in the 22nd century.
If I were emperor, I'd promote all second-level.com's to top level, except where there were clashes. So example.com becomes example. (But uk.com doesn't become uk, because that would clash with an existing top-level domain.) The existing.com domain would continue to exist, so typing "example.com" would still work.
But this scheme would, of course, not net ICANN millions of dollars.
The summary (mostly) included one of the two key facts:
each year approximately 50,000–100,000 people die in America because of [...] medical errors
But not the other:
implementation of e-prescription systems resulted in an approximately 60 percent reduction in total medication-error rates, and a 44 percent decrease in serious medical errors
So the expected improvement is 22k to 44k less deaths per year in America.
It's amazing, for a company only created in the 1990's, how quickly Optus turned into a clumsy inefficient monopolist. (Well, duopolist, really.) You'd think they'd have designed new systems from the ground up, but you can sure feel their back end creaking like it's written in COBOL. Telstra were (and are) so big and slow and expensive that you'd think a new player would run rings around them. But they didn't.
Bring on the day when the phone network is obsolete, and all phone companies can do is sell data connections.
I can tell you the World Solar Challenge rules. (The SunSwift car depicted looks like it follows WSC Challenge class rules.) There are safety requirements for roll cage, braking, steering, wiring, circuit breakers. The driver's eye-line must be at least 70cm above the road. There's a maximum angle the driver is allowed to lay back at. There's a max of 6 square meters of solar cells. The battery is a max of 5kW.h. (This is a trivial amount of energy compared to the energy budget over the whole challenge, but is tactically useful for hill climbing, clouds, etc.)
It looks like the only change they made for this Guinness challenge was to remove the battery pack.
Yes, it looks like the 2003, 2005, 2009 WSC challenge winners (Nuna, Nuna, Tokai) could have knocked this record over, just by removing the battery pack and getting Guinness certification. Doing some rough maths, UNSW's pace is still pretty competitive: the speeds you see listed for WSC course competition do not figure in the time the cars spent charging their batteries each dawn and dusk, after racing ends at 5pm for the day and before it begins at 8am the next day.
A third-party app used to die and shit Paradox.lck files, which would then prevent it working when you restarted it. So I wrote an app which would clean them up, but it was important that the third-party app not be running when you cleared the locks.
So often customers would call me, I'd recognise that the problem was bogus.lcks, and I'd tell them to start up my.lck-clearer. Normally on a tech call you have to keep asking them, "What are you seeing now?" or, "Do you see such-and-such?". But with this app, as soon as they got it running, they'd see the page explaining to them why they should only press the button to clear.lcks when the third party app was not running, with the aforementioned text emblazoned across the top in 36-point bold, and they'd say, "Danger Will Robinson". And I'd know they were looking at the right screen.
It turns out that you can measure Planck's constant, one of the fundamental numbers that define the universe, with a few LEDs and resistors and a small voltage source.
Here's a one-off suggestion for some moonlighting cash: work in your country's elections. You don't mention what country you're from, which suggests you're from the US, and the US is in desperate need of poll workers who are competent with information systems.
Why bring spares, just use a tire that doesn't get flats. Because t[iy]res that go flat are more efficient. The majority of solar car teams spurn even regular tyres as too inefficient, and run special solar car racing tyres. These are thin, because less rubber means less to deform as the rubber meets the road, and deformation absorbs energy. They are often low in carbon black, which reduces their life but again decreases the amount of energy absorbed by deformation. And we pump them up really really hard.
In 2003, Aurora and MIT Tesseract were less than a minute apart for much of the race, until Tesseract hit an amber traffic light in Port Augusta, slammed on the brakes, and popped two tyres. (Aurora had studied rolling resistance versus tyre pressure, and discovered that the last bit of extra inflation caused almost no change in rolling resistance, and thus ran their tyres at a saner pressure.) Blown tyres are quite common, which considering that these are mostly three wheeled vehicles, and that the top cars often go in excess of 100km/h, is terrifying.
I'm Australian. I used to work in the US for a tech company. My self-selected job title: Wizard From Oz.
But the guy around the other side of the office, who had a similarly diverse and hard-to-describe job was Mayor For Life Of Happyville.
(And has anyone else noticed that the presence of the word "Architect" in an IT job title usually translates as "Person who wanted the word 'Architect' in their job title"?)
Microsoft have never recommended Win ME for business use, though they did at one point recommend it for home use. So the options they are offering you are consistent with their historical position: the extra stuff that was in ME wasn't aimed at businesses; it was aimed at home users, mostly gamers. The fact that it sucked for gamers is a separate issue.
"I wonder how easy it would be to associate any particular activity with 'terrorism.'"
You may recall that in 1990, the U.S. secret service raided Steve Jackson Games with an unsigned search warrant, and took the then-unpublished GURPS Cyberpunk, along with some computers and laser printers, claiming that the game was a "manual for computer crime". SJ Games sued the Secret Service and won; but if the event were repeated today, with broader anti-terrorism powers, that part might not happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Perth SmartRider does indeed use MiFare Classic, and the cards are indeed insecure. But there's some server-side smarts which will (eventually) notice a cloned card, and deactivate it. I expect it also (eventually) notices if you top up your card yourself for free.
The idea is that although the system can be exploited at a small scale, it isn't worth the hassle. Provided their server-side stuff prevents exploits going commercial and becoming widespread, it's good enough.
TFA neglects to mention whether this Hondo chip is x86 or ARM. Since Windows 8 runs on both, it's a legit question.
(I'm guessing x86, but that's just a guess.)
Is this related to Bill Gates' plan to re-invent the toilet?
But in the case where they're suing many different people, it might not be cheaper for any one party to pay for the hit.
What we need is a way to crowdfund assassination of patent trolls.
Hitstarter.
Yeah, the Office of Strategic Services was replaced with the Central Intelligence Agency over a period of a couple of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services#Dissolution_into_other_agencies
Yep; that's why I said "oil dug up out of the ground". I agree that there's a very good chance we will continue to use gasoline/petrol and diesel in applications like transport for quite some time, by manufacturing them from something other than fossil oil. That something else might be coal, or bioreactor algae, or some other option.
Liquid hydrocarbons have a fabulously high energy density and are easy to transport, internal combustion engines have a lot of desirable properties, and we've got all this existing infrastructure.
But the stuff dug out of the ground? Gone in a century.
I'm hoping for a very slow slide down the oil production graph instead of a sudden drop to nothing
Typically production of a limited resource is approximately symmetric, so you can expect production of oil to tail off over about the same time period that it ramped up. There's no point at which we "finish" the "last" of it, but expect us to be mostly done with oil dug up out of the ground somewhere in the 22nd century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
And here I expected a story about changes in the price of something over time would include a chart.
To remedy the lack of charts: http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/02/27/how-high-have-gas-prices-risen-over-the-years/
(This is a good link because it includes an inflation-adjusted chart.)
If I were emperor, I'd promote all second-level .com's to top level, except where there were clashes. So example.com becomes example. (But uk.com doesn't become uk, because that would clash with an existing top-level domain.) The existing .com domain would continue to exist, so typing "example.com" would still work.
But this scheme would, of course, not net ICANN millions of dollars.
The summary (mostly) included one of the two key facts:
But not the other:
So the expected improvement is 22k to 44k less deaths per year in America.
Lots of these are quite specialised. For a broad intro to physics (up to general relativity and quantum theory), try Motion Mountain:
http://motionmountain.net/
It's amazing, for a company only created in the 1990's, how quickly Optus turned into a clumsy inefficient monopolist. (Well, duopolist, really.) You'd think they'd have designed new systems from the ground up, but you can sure feel their back end creaking like it's written in COBOL. Telstra were (and are) so big and slow and expensive that you'd think a new player would run rings around them. But they didn't.
Bring on the day when the phone network is obsolete, and all phone companies can do is sell data connections.
I can tell you the World Solar Challenge rules. (The SunSwift car depicted looks like it follows WSC Challenge class rules.) There are safety requirements for roll cage, braking, steering, wiring, circuit breakers. The driver's eye-line must be at least 70cm above the road. There's a maximum angle the driver is allowed to lay back at. There's a max of 6 square meters of solar cells. The battery is a max of 5kW.h. (This is a trivial amount of energy compared to the energy budget over the whole challenge, but is tactically useful for hill climbing, clouds, etc.)
It looks like the only change they made for this Guinness challenge was to remove the battery pack.
Yes, it looks like the 2003, 2005, 2009 WSC challenge winners (Nuna, Nuna, Tokai) could have knocked this record over, just by removing the battery pack and getting Guinness certification. Doing some rough maths, UNSW's pace is still pretty competitive: the speeds you see listed for WSC course competition do not figure in the time the cars spent charging their batteries each dawn and dusk, after racing ends at 5pm for the day and before it begins at 8am the next day.
Dude. In a post about being pedantic, you misspelled "pedantic".
I've done this.
The "Danger Will Robinson!" bit, I mean.
A third-party app used to die and shit Paradox .lck files, which would then prevent it working when you restarted it. So I wrote an app which would clean them up, but it was important that the third-party app not be running when you cleared the locks.
So often customers would call me, I'd recognise that the problem was bogus .lcks, and I'd tell them to start up my .lck-clearer. Normally on a tech call you have to keep asking them, "What are you seeing now?" or, "Do you see such-and-such?". But with this app, as soon as they got it running, they'd see the page explaining to them why they should only press the button to clear .lcks when the third party app was not running, with the aforementioned text emblazoned across the top in 36-point bold, and they'd say, "Danger Will Robinson". And I'd know they were looking at the right screen.
It turns out that you can measure Planck's constant, one of the fundamental numbers that define the universe, with a few LEDs and resistors and a small voltage source.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=led+planck's+constant
(Although the physics is really a little tough for 9th graders. :-)
Here's a one-off suggestion for some moonlighting cash: work in your country's elections. You don't mention what country you're from, which suggests you're from the US, and the US is in desperate need of poll workers who are competent with information systems.
Dude, you're not exactly hurting for karma.
There's an excellent summary on Risks.
In 2003, Aurora and MIT Tesseract were less than a minute apart for much of the race, until Tesseract hit an amber traffic light in Port Augusta, slammed on the brakes, and popped two tyres. (Aurora had studied rolling resistance versus tyre pressure, and discovered that the last bit of extra inflation caused almost no change in rolling resistance, and thus ran their tyres at a saner pressure.) Blown tyres are quite common, which considering that these are mostly three wheeled vehicles, and that the top cars often go in excess of 100km/h, is terrifying.
I'm Australian. I used to work in the US for a tech company. My self-selected job title: Wizard From Oz.
But the guy around the other side of the office, who had a similarly diverse and hard-to-describe job was Mayor For Life Of Happyville.
(And has anyone else noticed that the presence of the word "Architect" in an IT job title usually translates as "Person who wanted the word 'Architect' in their job title"?)
So assuming that New Scientist fail to noticeably pull their socks up, what should I replace my New Scientist subscription with when it expires?
Scientific American? Annals of Irreproducible Research?
Incidentally, John Howard's blog is still up. (Satire? This? Never!)
Microsoft have never recommended Win ME for business use, though they did at one point recommend it for home use. So the options they are offering you are consistent with their historical position: the extra stuff that was in ME wasn't aimed at businesses; it was aimed at home users, mostly gamers. The fact that it sucked for gamers is a separate issue.
You may recall that in 1990, the U.S. secret service raided Steve Jackson Games with an unsigned search warrant, and took the then-unpublished GURPS Cyberpunk, along with some computers and laser printers, claiming that the game was a "manual for computer crime". SJ Games sued the Secret Service and won; but if the event were repeated today, with broader anti-terrorism powers, that part might not happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk