Cyrillic is an alphabet or script; it is not a language. The TLDs written in Cyrillic, when translated into Russian (the most abundant language to use the Cyrillic script) are "online" and "sale".
Take heart: the Adler Planetarium in Chicago invested in a new Zeiss Mark VI about five years ago. You may have heard about it: John McCain, either through ignorance or willful deception, referred to it as an overhead projector, a $3 mil earmark that (then-Senator) Obama had requested.
Then, too, the paper path in every laser printer is convoluted and passes over rollers and drums. This is fine for paper; but good luck doing that with a DVD.
I know that some routers nowadays have USB ports attached. Maybe it's possible to plug a usb printer into that
To whit: I've been using an Airport Express in this manner since the first 802.11g model came out nearly 10 years ago. Usually, the Express has been used to create the wireless network, but at times it has just been a node on the wired network (i.e., radios off) and used solely for printing and music streaming. I upgraded to an 802.11n model some years ago; my original finally died only last year after several years' service at a friend's house.
I choose my words carefully, so please don't mistake my meaning. I said "craft the outlines of a better, more secure system". I didn't say a foolproof, catch-all system that would solve everyone's problems with a sprinkling of magical unicorn farts. I said outlines, not a fully implemented solution. I also said a better, not the perfect be-all-end-all because, as you and I both recognize, there is no perfect system.
And, if it were not blazingly obvious from how I'd written it (I thought including "armchair thinkers" in my post would have been a giveaway), I was speaking of thought experiments and white papers. However, get enough intelligent people together with their ideas, and yes, absolutely, you could come up with a good replacement.
The reason "the banks" haven't done it themselves ought to be obvious - banking is just one of a dozen instances where SSNs are used. No single industry is going to tackle the problem on their own - why should they? Unless you change it all, you may as well change none, because SSNs would still be cross-referenced to the new system.
Blame the idiots in the 1930s for this. Why they didn't use strong cryptographic techniques is beyond me.
I don't blame the creators of the Social Security Administration for this; they provided a simple solution for what was a simple task. Strong cryptographic techniques - as we might understand them today - were either pretty obscure or hadn't been invented yet.
No, I blame every idiot that came afterwards and grafted new uses and requirements to the SSN - without updating or replacing the SSN to keep pace.
Oh, I can understand how it came about. But, really, there are any number of intelligent people - security analysts, IT professionals, bankers, human factors specialists, and armchair thinkers - that could probably craft the outlines of a better, more secure system with an afternoon's effort. Why hasn't such a system come around yet?
They say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But the way we use SSNs as a catch-all identifier has been broken at least since the introduction of online commerce - why hasn't anyone even proposed fixing it yet?
I have a general question: why does the Social Security Number endure as the primary key of, well, every kind of financial account or transaction in the United States. The SSN - how it's assigned, how it's revoked, the regulations regarding who can use it and for what, what necessary safeguards are in place to prevent theft or misuse, its anonymity or lack thereof - was never intended for the tasks that it is now burdened with. It's broken in so many ways that it would be hilarious - if the consequences were not so dire.
Is it just that this is the system that we in the US are stuck with, and that's that? How do other countries handle this? What are the potential alternatives? What are the true requirements for a "master identifier key", and how can they be realized in a way accessible to all people? How can we convince the business and banking community to stop using the SSN - not because they're forced to, but because it's such an awful liability?
Which politicians' identities need to be stolen in order to put such a system in place?
One of the fun kicks in such situations is to stare down the length of the train while it is making such a sharp turn, and see the train curving this way and that. Coupled with the acceleration due to turning, the banking of the track, and the fact that you can't see much outside the windows, it can be exciting in its disorientation. It is, I think, akin to what it would be like to be in an rotating spacecraft, a la 2001
Or, don't focus solely on computer science - i.e., being a code monkey. Instead, understand the underlying hardware and create tightly coupled hardware/software solutions - embedded software.
For instance, the video discusses GaNFETS, and the new power density they enable. Become a controls engineer and you can end up using these devices to make world-class power supplies (not to be confused with wall warts) that are used in electric vehicles, industrial robotics, and renewable power. There is still a ton of software that goes into those kinds of things, software development that can't easily be outsourced.
Start coding on microcontrollers. Master the ARM architecture. Understand embedded Linux and wireless networking. You can make (or at least start) an intellectually satisfying, remunerative career in this way.
It's a little unclear exactly what these guys are working on. The older article was talking about ultracapacitors that could operate in parallel with conventional batteries. Today's article talks about "nano structured batteries and super capacitors, and then researchers found a way to sandwich the energy storage systems in the carbon fiber", which is kinda vague. Which is it: a battery or a capacitor?
If you are working in academia, then you probably have access to Matlab. Matlab, as a language, has both scripting abilities and programming abilities. The scripting was born from Matlab's roots in Unix, which makes it handy for batch processing lots of files. It's programming functions started off as C, but has since incorporated features from C++, Python, and Java. The programming side of it has, in my opinion, more structure and formalism than Python, but makes certain things like file IO and data visualization (i.e., graphing) easier than straight up C/C++. The basics of using it can be picked up in an afternoon, and the sky's the limit from there. There are lots of well-written and documented functions built in; specialized toolboxes can be had for additional fees. There's a fair bit of user-generated code out there. Plus, I expect you can find a lot of people around you who know plenty about it.
Living in northern MN... it has to be -20C, -35C or colder.
Wait a minute, you claim to live in Minnesota, but you quote temperatures in Celcius? That ain't 'Merican! You must be one o' them commie Canadians! (Either that, or your an engineer like me.)
If you're in a crash or just dent a body panel with this crap in it how much is that going to cost
Increasingly, I think we are going to find body panels that are made of carbon fiber. While these may well end up being both lighter and more damage-resistant than their steel and aluminum predecessors, they won't be easy to repair. Carbon fiber doesn't dent when it get hit - it fractures. Therefore, you can't just have the guy in the body shop pound out a few dents, grind it down, and put on a new coat of paint.
Space-X is now able to provide much of the capability of the space shuttle at much lower prices. (Each Space Shuttle launch ended up costing about $600 million.) Once the Falcon Heavy launches, they'll have the capability for even more lift to LEO.
Space-X even offers transportation of humans to low earth orbit. So far, NASA is the only buyer, but Space-X advertises it as a commercial service.
I certainly hope that the Falcon Heavy and the (astronaut-rated) Dragon crew capsule come to fruition; I believe they will. But let us not lose sight of a simple fact: those haven't actually flown yet; it's still just advertisement.
The Shuttle was not merely a crew carrier nor a heavy lift vehicle. It was rather inefficient at both tasks. However, the ability to both do heavy lifting and a have crew with it was a unique capability - essential for certain missions - that no one is likely to replicate anytime soon. A Dragon capsule would not, for instance, have been an appropriate platform for performing a Hubble repair. I'm sure the Elon's got some bright engineer thinking about how to attach a CanadArm (or equivalent) onto a Dragon, but we haven't seen that yet. I suppose you could maybe have assembled the ISS without the Shuttle, but it would have been a lot harder.
This is not to say that the Shuttle paradigm would be an appropriate way to do that combination of crew+cargo+working platform in the future. (It is debatable whether the Shuttle ever was appropriate for it.) An operating platform in LEO, useful for construction or repair, with living space for several astronaut for weeks at a time, does not need to be a machine that returns to Earth. I suspect that in the future we'll have orbiting work platforms - small versions of the ISS - that never return to Earth and that crew and cargo arrive at separately. The crucial capability that must be included in such a plan is the ability to perform significant orbital maneuvers - altitude and inclination changes, or even leaving LEO altogether.
Fission reactors were essentially trivial: pile up enough moderately enriched uranium and it starts fissioning on its own.
Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments. If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.
I'm equally sure that they won't be developed by governments throwing money at people with a decades-long record of failure.
And I am equally sure that whoever does figure out commercially viable fusion will owe a great debt to the cost-overridden, government-funded nuclear and plasma research that preceded it. Whether it is actually acknowledged... well... I'll settle for being able to keep the lights on without melting the planet.
It would be like saying we'll get to the moon in a decade in 1960, and then proceeding to gut NASA of any resources. Then in 1970s bitching they are not much further along as they only had money for 1 sounding rocket and 3 slide rules
That just about sums up the history of manned space flight ever since we got to the Moon; certainly since the Shuttle.
Oh, and before you wound up completely out of action for a week except to grab the trash can near the bed when your stomach tries to turn itself inside out and escape your body via your throat, and you have spasms in abodmen muscles you never knew you had
Influenza is a respiratory illness, not a gastrointestinal one. Yes, it is possible for the flu to cause nausea and vomiting, but the overwhelming majority of cases involving GI distress you describe are caused by gastroenteritis, food poisoning (e.g., e. coli), and other stomach-related ailments. People who talk about having "stomach flu" are conflating two very different phenomena.
I agree that it was probably written in a that way to make for a better headline.
on the other hand, many (most?) people don't actually know that diamond is just a particular crystalline form of pure carbon, like graphite, etc. This is sad, yes, but so it goes. So in order to convey the liquid nature at certain depths, they may have said "liquid diamond" just to keep in line with what they were talking about earlier with diamond chunks floating around.
Yes, but now they are widely accepted as a necessary public good. If the present police force is not up to the task, the solution isn't for everyone to start hiring their own private guards, but rather to force the local government and police force to do better. If that means that it raises taxes on some or all, then so be it.
It used to be that most roads were toll roads, too, in some cases solely in private hands. Is the solution to poorly maintained roads for everyone to start laying their own pavement? No: public infrastructure (including social infrastructure like the police, and schools, etc.) should be publicly funded, publicly accountable, and available to all. I know it doesn't always work out so equitably, but that is what we should be striving for.
I don't know if there are any viable products that you can buy right now, but there are several outfits attempting to do so
[1]
[2].
A home-sized fuel cell, operated off of natural gas, could provide combined heat and power (i.e., co-generation) for a home at modest cost and reduced emissions compared to many conventional alternatives. The tough part is the upfront cost - $20k - 40k - which makes it hard to recoup the investment in a reasonable timeframe.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll just ship them off to a different planet, along with all the telephone sanitizers.
[obscure reference?]
Cyrillic is an alphabet or script; it is not a language. The TLDs written in Cyrillic, when translated into Russian (the most abundant language to use the Cyrillic script) are "online" and "sale".
Take heart: the Adler Planetarium in Chicago invested in a new Zeiss Mark VI about five years ago. You may have heard about it: John McCain, either through ignorance or willful deception, referred to it as an overhead projector, a $3 mil earmark that (then-Senator) Obama had requested.
Then, too, the paper path in every laser printer is convoluted and passes over rollers and drums. This is fine for paper; but good luck doing that with a DVD.
To whit: I've been using an Airport Express in this manner since the first 802.11g model came out nearly 10 years ago. Usually, the Express has been used to create the wireless network, but at times it has just been a node on the wired network (i.e., radios off) and used solely for printing and music streaming. I upgraded to an 802.11n model some years ago; my original finally died only last year after several years' service at a friend's house.
I choose my words carefully, so please don't mistake my meaning. I said "craft the outlines of a better, more secure system". I didn't say a foolproof, catch-all system that would solve everyone's problems with a sprinkling of magical unicorn farts. I said outlines, not a fully implemented solution. I also said a better, not the perfect be-all-end-all because, as you and I both recognize, there is no perfect system.
And, if it were not blazingly obvious from how I'd written it (I thought including "armchair thinkers" in my post would have been a giveaway), I was speaking of thought experiments and white papers. However, get enough intelligent people together with their ideas, and yes, absolutely, you could come up with a good replacement.
The reason "the banks" haven't done it themselves ought to be obvious - banking is just one of a dozen instances where SSNs are used. No single industry is going to tackle the problem on their own - why should they? Unless you change it all, you may as well change none, because SSNs would still be cross-referenced to the new system.
I don't blame the creators of the Social Security Administration for this; they provided a simple solution for what was a simple task. Strong cryptographic techniques - as we might understand them today - were either pretty obscure or hadn't been invented yet.
No, I blame every idiot that came afterwards and grafted new uses and requirements to the SSN - without updating or replacing the SSN to keep pace.
Oh, I can understand how it came about. But, really, there are any number of intelligent people - security analysts, IT professionals, bankers, human factors specialists, and armchair thinkers - that could probably craft the outlines of a better, more secure system with an afternoon's effort. Why hasn't such a system come around yet?
They say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But the way we use SSNs as a catch-all identifier has been broken at least since the introduction of online commerce - why hasn't anyone even proposed fixing it yet?
I have a general question: why does the Social Security Number endure as the primary key of, well, every kind of financial account or transaction in the United States. The SSN - how it's assigned, how it's revoked, the regulations regarding who can use it and for what, what necessary safeguards are in place to prevent theft or misuse, its anonymity or lack thereof - was never intended for the tasks that it is now burdened with. It's broken in so many ways that it would be hilarious - if the consequences were not so dire.
Is it just that this is the system that we in the US are stuck with, and that's that? How do other countries handle this? What are the potential alternatives? What are the true requirements for a "master identifier key", and how can they be realized in a way accessible to all people? How can we convince the business and banking community to stop using the SSN - not because they're forced to, but because it's such an awful liability?
Which politicians' identities need to be stolen in order to put such a system in place?
One of the fun kicks in such situations is to stare down the length of the train while it is making such a sharp turn, and see the train curving this way and that. Coupled with the acceleration due to turning, the banking of the track, and the fact that you can't see much outside the windows, it can be exciting in its disorientation. It is, I think, akin to what it would be like to be in an rotating spacecraft, a la 2001
Until the next Michael Bay film, in which case we'll lose half a dozen cities before reaching the third act. And it will be... still boring.
Or, don't focus solely on computer science - i.e., being a code monkey. Instead, understand the underlying hardware and create tightly coupled hardware/software solutions - embedded software.
For instance, the video discusses GaNFETS, and the new power density they enable. Become a controls engineer and you can end up using these devices to make world-class power supplies (not to be confused with wall warts) that are used in electric vehicles, industrial robotics, and renewable power. There is still a ton of software that goes into those kinds of things, software development that can't easily be outsourced.
Start coding on microcontrollers. Master the ARM architecture. Understand embedded Linux and wireless networking. You can make (or at least start) an intellectually satisfying, remunerative career in this way.
It's a little unclear exactly what these guys are working on. The older article was talking about ultracapacitors that could operate in parallel with conventional batteries. Today's article talks about "nano structured batteries and super capacitors, and then researchers found a way to sandwich the energy storage systems in the carbon fiber", which is kinda vague. Which is it: a battery or a capacitor?
If you are working in academia, then you probably have access to Matlab. Matlab, as a language, has both scripting abilities and programming abilities. The scripting was born from Matlab's roots in Unix, which makes it handy for batch processing lots of files. It's programming functions started off as C, but has since incorporated features from C++, Python, and Java. The programming side of it has, in my opinion, more structure and formalism than Python, but makes certain things like file IO and data visualization (i.e., graphing) easier than straight up C/C++. The basics of using it can be picked up in an afternoon, and the sky's the limit from there. There are lots of well-written and documented functions built in; specialized toolboxes can be had for additional fees. There's a fair bit of user-generated code out there. Plus, I expect you can find a lot of people around you who know plenty about it.
Wait a minute, you claim to live in Minnesota, but you quote temperatures in Celcius? That ain't 'Merican! You must be one o' them commie Canadians! (Either that, or your an engineer like me.)
These guys at Imperial College London have been working on this for a while now. Previous coverage on /. Integrating Capacitors Into Car Frames
Increasingly, I think we are going to find body panels that are made of carbon fiber. While these may well end up being both lighter and more damage-resistant than their steel and aluminum predecessors, they won't be easy to repair. Carbon fiber doesn't dent when it get hit - it fractures. Therefore, you can't just have the guy in the body shop pound out a few dents, grind it down, and put on a new coat of paint.
I certainly hope that the Falcon Heavy and the (astronaut-rated) Dragon crew capsule come to fruition; I believe they will. But let us not lose sight of a simple fact: those haven't actually flown yet; it's still just advertisement.
The Shuttle was not merely a crew carrier nor a heavy lift vehicle. It was rather inefficient at both tasks. However, the ability to both do heavy lifting and a have crew with it was a unique capability - essential for certain missions - that no one is likely to replicate anytime soon. A Dragon capsule would not, for instance, have been an appropriate platform for performing a Hubble repair. I'm sure the Elon's got some bright engineer thinking about how to attach a CanadArm (or equivalent) onto a Dragon, but we haven't seen that yet. I suppose you could maybe have assembled the ISS without the Shuttle, but it would have been a lot harder.
This is not to say that the Shuttle paradigm would be an appropriate way to do that combination of crew+cargo+working platform in the future. (It is debatable whether the Shuttle ever was appropriate for it.) An operating platform in LEO, useful for construction or repair, with living space for several astronaut for weeks at a time, does not need to be a machine that returns to Earth. I suspect that in the future we'll have orbiting work platforms - small versions of the ISS - that never return to Earth and that crew and cargo arrive at separately. The crucial capability that must be included in such a plan is the ability to perform significant orbital maneuvers - altitude and inclination changes, or even leaving LEO altogether.
Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments. If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.
And I am equally sure that whoever does figure out commercially viable fusion will owe a great debt to the cost-overridden, government-funded nuclear and plasma research that preceded it. Whether it is actually acknowledged ... well ... I'll settle for being able to keep the lights on without melting the planet.
That just about sums up the history of manned space flight ever since we got to the Moon; certainly since the Shuttle.
Influenza is a respiratory illness, not a gastrointestinal one. Yes, it is possible for the flu to cause nausea and vomiting, but the overwhelming majority of cases involving GI distress you describe are caused by gastroenteritis, food poisoning (e.g., e. coli), and other stomach-related ailments. People who talk about having "stomach flu" are conflating two very different phenomena.
I agree that it was probably written in a that way to make for a better headline.
on the other hand, many (most?) people don't actually know that diamond is just a particular crystalline form of pure carbon, like graphite, etc. This is sad, yes, but so it goes. So in order to convey the liquid nature at certain depths, they may have said "liquid diamond" just to keep in line with what they were talking about earlier with diamond chunks floating around.
Or, they could just be talking out of their ass.
Yes, but now they are widely accepted as a necessary public good. If the present police force is not up to the task, the solution isn't for everyone to start hiring their own private guards, but rather to force the local government and police force to do better. If that means that it raises taxes on some or all, then so be it.
It used to be that most roads were toll roads, too, in some cases solely in private hands. Is the solution to poorly maintained roads for everyone to start laying their own pavement? No: public infrastructure (including social infrastructure like the police, and schools, etc.) should be publicly funded, publicly accountable, and available to all. I know it doesn't always work out so equitably, but that is what we should be striving for.
I don't know if there are any viable products that you can buy right now, but there are several outfits attempting to do so [1] [2]. A home-sized fuel cell, operated off of natural gas, could provide combined heat and power (i.e., co-generation) for a home at modest cost and reduced emissions compared to many conventional alternatives. The tough part is the upfront cost - $20k - 40k - which makes it hard to recoup the investment in a reasonable timeframe.