The only difference between a standard-sized SIM and microSIM is the amount of plastic put around the actual chip. It is straightforward to slice and dice a standard SIM down to micro-SIM. It's not like the carrier is going to ask for it back. Maybe I would find it a pain in the ass if I were doing it every time I went on a business trip, but in that case I would probably have a multiple-SIM world phone (probably a blackberry) anyway.
he would have been king of the geeks for at least a day
No. He would have been a complete dumbass and suitably derided as such. Presently, upper limb prostheses can be replacements for lost or damaged limbs; they are not upgrades. Amputees can do quite well with their prostheses, and there are continual improvements coming along. But no one would claim that there's a prosthesis out there that matches, let alone exceeds, the human hand in more than one or two of a few dozen measures.
HP's latest breakthrough was to use highly focused X-rays to pinpoint a channel, just 100 nanometers wide, where the resistance switching takes place. A nanometer is about a millionth of a centimeter.
[smacks forehead and groans]
If by "about" you mean "about ten times smaller than".
Both USB and HDMI standards carry some power across. The HDMI port on a TV is likely (though not guaranteed) to have power, whereas most USB peripherals are unpowered. On the other hand, if you plug a powered USB port into the thing to be able to have multiple peripherals, then you could likely get power from the hub.
The likely use case is to have a USB hub plugging into the thing, rather than a single peripheral. And while USB hubs are not found with Type-A female to Type-B male cables, you would only have to do one gender change to get many peripherals plugged in.
I agree, though, a female connector would have been more appropriate.
This is like the bridges built in the '60s that were supposed to last over a hundred years, but need to be replaced now.
Part of the reason some of those bridges need to be replaced now is that they are handling much more traffic than expected, in some cases an order of magnitude higher.
Another reason is that the bridges were built with an intended maintenance and inspection schedule. The designers and builders never said "we'll built it this way and it'll never need to be touched for 100 years." State and local governments in subsequent decades thought they could skimp on maintenance as a way to reduce budgets, or divert federal highway dollars to non-transportation budget items. But, guess what, things break when not maintained.
What an asinine statement! It may be true, but the offhand way you make it implies that being arrested is no big deal.
In reality, being arrested for child porn, or getting sued by the MPAA, is a very serious and unpleasant matter. Even if the evidence is in your favor, it can require significant time, money, headaches, and effort to clear up. Being arrested will subject you to fingerprinting and, increasingly, DNA sampling, both of which are likely to remain on file forever. Arrests are public records, and while they can be expunged after-the-fact, this does not always happen. Expunging an arrest record does not in any way expunge it from local newspapers or the never-forgetting-Internet. An arrest, even if later expunged, will permanently and negatively affect your job prospects, political aspirations, even your dating prospects.
In short, being arrested, even if you are not ultimately convicted, is a world of hurt, and not something to be blase about.
They can go to Mexico and dig wells to accomplish that
Any knucklehead can dig a well. But looking around the world, people do not lack for water because some pampered Westerner hasn't shown up to dig them a well yet. Getting water to the world's population is genuinely hard and it takes genuinely novel thinking tackle it. And it doesn't take deep knowledge of one abstruse topic to solve these kinds of problems - it takes lots of very intelligent people working together and sharing their collective knowledge. There once was a place where that could happen. There was a time when some clever young people could become clever-er, or learn how best to use their talents, by getting a PhD. But most universities don't put their efforts that way: I haven't heard of many schools that have cross-disciplinary PhDs in sustainable development.
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
That's what it means now, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, which is the whole point of the article. It used to be that some people pursued a (science/engineering) PhD because they had a driving passion and curiosity about a subject. In the process, they would 1) learn a whole lot about a big field of knowledge, 2) contribute meaningful new information to that field by a diligent research and application of the scientific method, 3) learn how to communicate that information, or any other kind of information, to their colleagues and the world at large, 4) work in a self-directed fashion, 5) work in a collaborative environment with their peers and people with different skill sets, and 6) learn to help guide the activities of more junior colleagues. In other words, you would be intensely focused on one thing for a period of time, but you would gain a skillset that would be useful outside of a purely academic setting.
A lot of PhDs now seem to be the result of endless solitary toil on an abstruse topic, usually at the direction (and discretion) of an overbearing advisor. Academia itself isn't solely to blame for this: the general knowledge in many fields has all been worked out; only the abstruse details remain. Casual inquiry doesn't usually contribute something new. In order to delve deeper into those finer topics, you need more time to develop the more specialized skills. It used to be that to do meaningful particle physics research all you needed was a chunk of some alpha-emitting radioisotope. Now it seems the price of entry is a multi-billion dollar accelerator. Performing genetic analyses ("running gels" as they say) used to be the sole province of graduate students. Today undergrads do it on their own cheek swabs and gain some insight. But to do genetics properly today requires fantastically expensive equipment that takes months or years to learn and a sample set of hundreds or thousands.
But while academia isn't solely to blame for the situation it finds itself in, it can be faulted for not noticing it happening sooner or, having noticed, not doing something about it.
Feel free to take this up the chain of command. Both you and IT probably have valid arguments, and you should have a chance to duke it out to higher-ups. But at the end of the day, both sides will need to abide by whatever decision. To do otherwise would risk firing. If you don't like the decision that comes down ("Yes, IT must be given login access if you have this server"), you can simply tell your clients (the docs and allied health staff you serve) that you can't provide the calendar feature they asked for, and tell them to take it up the chain if they don't like it.
In other words: be the advocate for yourself and your clients, but don't try to be the judge as well, because you're likely to get stomped on by those who are the judges, deserved or not.
Probably the Iranians have bigger targets than the SCADA network for a privately-owned wind farm in New Mexico. Stuxnet was targeted at a key facility of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure: a non-overt attack on the Iranian military and government. I would expect if the Iranians were pissed at us over that they would attempt to retaliate in kind.
what would the effect be of ungrounded conductive sheets
Large ungrounded sheets can still have a significant effect on RF. At the higher frequencies such as 2.4 GHz, any substantial piece of metal can, in effect, be a virtual ground and, as you mention, significantly attenuate the signal. More likely it will reflect signals (more on that below). Taken to an extreme, a house wrapped head to toe in a metal would become a sort of Faraday cage, with no RF passing in or out. In practice, this isn't going to happen, because gaps in the foil will let some signal out. There is also the matter of those big holes called windows and doors, which will still let plenty of energy pass. It tends to be very difficult to build a room that is completely shielded, unless that has been designed into it from the beginning. This is one reason why RF test labs are so expensive.
A more likely effect of all that foil would be that signals inside the house bounce around a lot more than normal. All those internal reflections and multiple paths from transmitter to receiver can problematic for Wifi, just like it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation from opposite ends of a very echo-y room. Turning up your broadcast strength, akin to shouting, only makes matters worse.
Another counter-point to their thesis: the development and imminent introduction of commercial space travel. Sure, it'll start off merely as suborbital flops for rich thrill seekers, but they will be (at least briefly) hypersonic thrill seekers.
Looking at this rendering of the design, my first reaction is: how the hell can it see anything with that enormous chunk in the middle? Is that the secondary reflector? Or is that where the curved CCD will be housed (obviating the need for a secondary: it would be the secondary). And there's an awful lot of superstructure to hold that thing in place: won't that also obscure the field of view?
Yes, the voters of California, New York, Florida, and DC are being rewarded for going for Barack Obama, while Texas is being punished for going to McCain.
Are you nuts?
This is an imbecilic notion if for no other reason than the simple fact that politicians are much more concerned with the elections still to come than the ones in the past. Politicians are in the game of making promises for the future, not delivering on the past. In other words, if politics was the big motivating factor, why was the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, in Ohio, a key battleground for 2012, not chosen?
Orders of magnitude more tourists are going to see the shuttles in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and New York City than they are in Houston. and while mission control is in Houston, the shuttle was assembled, launched from, and usually returned to the Cape. I don't need to search around for nefarious reasons why the shuttles are being allocated this way: these choices make sense.
By "streaming music" I mean that it has an audio-out port: you can plug it directly into a stereo and play the music from your computer (or other wireless device on the local network) to your stereo. Most wireless routers don't do that: you usually need some additional piece of equipment to bridge from the network to your audio gear (e.g. a Sonos player). Also, the bit about wireless printing also isn't facile: the Airport Express has a built-in print server and a USB port for connecting printers to it. There are other wireless routers with that feature, but it is hardly universal. So in addition to being a fine wireless router for slinging bits around the aether it also has some very useful network-to-real-world features that make it more useful than a commodity router. And, when the Airport Express first came out 5-6 six years ago, this combination of features was unique in a wireless router, particularly at that price point.
He was specifically referring to the Airport Express, which retails for $99. [link]
And for that pricetag, you get the ability to stream music from basically any device on the network (server, laptop, iPhone, etc.) to wherever the Airport is. You also get wireless printing.
I shouldn't be surprised that a guy, when confronted with a broken Airport Express, would go through all the effort of breaking it open, dumping the ROM, and reverse engineering the private key. People get curious, people like to tinker, and the human race is better for it. But, on the other hand, you can pick up an Airport Express for $25-$50 on craiglist or ebay and saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.
While electrically active suspensions use power, the best-designed ones can be regenerative: when the wheel gets pushed upwards by a bump in the road, electrical power can be extracted from that stroke. Another consideration is the overall efficiency of the vehicle: keeping the wheels in better contact with the ground and the car at a constant elevation over the road leads to increased overall efficiency. In any car, vibration through the wheels and noise is wasted power. Even considering the power involved to run the suspension, smoothing the ride could act as a net gain.
Well, duh! Some of us did not receive Algebra II in high school. Others among us did. I bet most of us didn't take statistics! And I can be pretty sure that no one took a course in the design of experiments.
One person mentioned redundancy, and that's the primary reason. Imagine this scenario: the GPS and NTP systems go offline (solar flare, alien invasion, whatever). This would obviously cause many problems, but clock synchronization is unlikely to be one of them. And so, in this hypothetical situation, we could see someone mention on Slashdot:
Good thing there is still atomic-clock synchronization over radio
The other reason why this radio-based synchronization signal is good to keep around is because it is ubiquitous and very cheap to utilize. To get synchronization from GPS you need a GPS transponder in whatever it is you are building. To use NTP you need a network connection to the wide world. To use this radio-based synchronization signal you only need a crude radio receiver tuned to the right frequency and a phase-locked loop circuit, all of which can be packaged in a $0.25 chip.
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference between a standard-sized SIM and microSIM is the amount of plastic put around the actual chip. It is straightforward to slice and dice a standard SIM down to micro-SIM. It's not like the carrier is going to ask for it back. Maybe I would find it a pain in the ass if I were doing it every time I went on a business trip, but in that case I would probably have a multiple-SIM world phone (probably a blackberry) anyway.
No. He would have been a complete dumbass and suitably derided as such. Presently, upper limb prostheses can be replacements for lost or damaged limbs; they are not upgrades. Amputees can do quite well with their prostheses, and there are continual improvements coming along. But no one would claim that there's a prosthesis out there that matches, let alone exceeds, the human hand in more than one or two of a few dozen measures.
If he'd just watched Good Will Hunting, he could have seen this coming.
[smacks forehead and groans]
If by "about" you mean "about ten times smaller than".
Harry Potter did that, like, five years ago!
Both USB and HDMI standards carry some power across. The HDMI port on a TV is likely (though not guaranteed) to have power, whereas most USB peripherals are unpowered. On the other hand, if you plug a powered USB port into the thing to be able to have multiple peripherals, then you could likely get power from the hub.
cheaper and lower profile?
The likely use case is to have a USB hub plugging into the thing, rather than a single peripheral. And while USB hubs are not found with Type-A female to Type-B male cables, you would only have to do one gender change to get many peripherals plugged in.
I agree, though, a female connector would have been more appropriate.
I wonder how long that paint job on the underside of the wings will last? Will the desert sand-blast it away? Or will it be burned on first re-entry?
Part of the reason some of those bridges need to be replaced now is that they are handling much more traffic than expected, in some cases an order of magnitude higher.
Another reason is that the bridges were built with an intended maintenance and inspection schedule. The designers and builders never said "we'll built it this way and it'll never need to be touched for 100 years." State and local governments in subsequent decades thought they could skimp on maintenance as a way to reduce budgets, or divert federal highway dollars to non-transportation budget items. But, guess what, things break when not maintained.
What an asinine statement! It may be true, but the offhand way you make it implies that being arrested is no big deal.
In reality, being arrested for child porn, or getting sued by the MPAA, is a very serious and unpleasant matter. Even if the evidence is in your favor, it can require significant time, money, headaches, and effort to clear up. Being arrested will subject you to fingerprinting and, increasingly, DNA sampling, both of which are likely to remain on file forever. Arrests are public records, and while they can be expunged after-the-fact, this does not always happen. Expunging an arrest record does not in any way expunge it from local newspapers or the never-forgetting-Internet. An arrest, even if later expunged, will permanently and negatively affect your job prospects, political aspirations, even your dating prospects.
In short, being arrested, even if you are not ultimately convicted, is a world of hurt, and not something to be blase about.
Any knucklehead can dig a well. But looking around the world, people do not lack for water because some pampered Westerner hasn't shown up to dig them a well yet. Getting water to the world's population is genuinely hard and it takes genuinely novel thinking tackle it. And it doesn't take deep knowledge of one abstruse topic to solve these kinds of problems - it takes lots of very intelligent people working together and sharing their collective knowledge. There once was a place where that could happen. There was a time when some clever young people could become clever-er, or learn how best to use their talents, by getting a PhD. But most universities don't put their efforts that way: I haven't heard of many schools that have cross-disciplinary PhDs in sustainable development.
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
That's what it means now, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, which is the whole point of the article. It used to be that some people pursued a (science/engineering) PhD because they had a driving passion and curiosity about a subject. In the process, they would 1) learn a whole lot about a big field of knowledge, 2) contribute meaningful new information to that field by a diligent research and application of the scientific method, 3) learn how to communicate that information, or any other kind of information, to their colleagues and the world at large, 4) work in a self-directed fashion, 5) work in a collaborative environment with their peers and people with different skill sets, and 6) learn to help guide the activities of more junior colleagues. In other words, you would be intensely focused on one thing for a period of time, but you would gain a skillset that would be useful outside of a purely academic setting.
A lot of PhDs now seem to be the result of endless solitary toil on an abstruse topic, usually at the direction (and discretion) of an overbearing advisor. Academia itself isn't solely to blame for this: the general knowledge in many fields has all been worked out; only the abstruse details remain. Casual inquiry doesn't usually contribute something new. In order to delve deeper into those finer topics, you need more time to develop the more specialized skills. It used to be that to do meaningful particle physics research all you needed was a chunk of some alpha-emitting radioisotope. Now it seems the price of entry is a multi-billion dollar accelerator. Performing genetic analyses ("running gels" as they say) used to be the sole province of graduate students. Today undergrads do it on their own cheek swabs and gain some insight. But to do genetics properly today requires fantastically expensive equipment that takes months or years to learn and a sample set of hundreds or thousands.
But while academia isn't solely to blame for the situation it finds itself in, it can be faulted for not noticing it happening sooner or, having noticed, not doing something about it.
Feel free to take this up the chain of command. Both you and IT probably have valid arguments, and you should have a chance to duke it out to higher-ups. But at the end of the day, both sides will need to abide by whatever decision. To do otherwise would risk firing. If you don't like the decision that comes down ("Yes, IT must be given login access if you have this server"), you can simply tell your clients (the docs and allied health staff you serve) that you can't provide the calendar feature they asked for, and tell them to take it up the chain if they don't like it.
In other words: be the advocate for yourself and your clients, but don't try to be the judge as well, because you're likely to get stomped on by those who are the judges, deserved or not.
Probably the Iranians have bigger targets than the SCADA network for a privately-owned wind farm in New Mexico. Stuxnet was targeted at a key facility of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure: a non-overt attack on the Iranian military and government. I would expect if the Iranians were pissed at us over that they would attempt to retaliate in kind.
Large ungrounded sheets can still have a significant effect on RF. At the higher frequencies such as 2.4 GHz, any substantial piece of metal can, in effect, be a virtual ground and, as you mention, significantly attenuate the signal. More likely it will reflect signals (more on that below). Taken to an extreme, a house wrapped head to toe in a metal would become a sort of Faraday cage, with no RF passing in or out. In practice, this isn't going to happen, because gaps in the foil will let some signal out. There is also the matter of those big holes called windows and doors, which will still let plenty of energy pass. It tends to be very difficult to build a room that is completely shielded, unless that has been designed into it from the beginning. This is one reason why RF test labs are so expensive.
A more likely effect of all that foil would be that signals inside the house bounce around a lot more than normal. All those internal reflections and multiple paths from transmitter to receiver can problematic for Wifi, just like it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation from opposite ends of a very echo-y room. Turning up your broadcast strength, akin to shouting, only makes matters worse.
Indeed.
Another counter-point to their thesis: the development and imminent introduction of commercial space travel. Sure, it'll start off merely as suborbital flops for rich thrill seekers, but they will be (at least briefly) hypersonic thrill seekers.
Looking at this rendering of the design, my first reaction is: how the hell can it see anything with that enormous chunk in the middle? Is that the secondary reflector? Or is that where the curved CCD will be housed (obviating the need for a secondary: it would be the secondary). And there's an awful lot of superstructure to hold that thing in place: won't that also obscure the field of view?
Any optics experts want to field this one?
Yes, the voters of California, New York, Florida, and DC are being rewarded for going for Barack Obama, while Texas is being punished for going to McCain.
Are you nuts?
This is an imbecilic notion if for no other reason than the simple fact that politicians are much more concerned with the elections still to come than the ones in the past. Politicians are in the game of making promises for the future, not delivering on the past. In other words, if politics was the big motivating factor, why was the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, in Ohio, a key battleground for 2012, not chosen?
Orders of magnitude more tourists are going to see the shuttles in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and New York City than they are in Houston. and while mission control is in Houston, the shuttle was assembled, launched from, and usually returned to the Cape. I don't need to search around for nefarious reasons why the shuttles are being allocated this way: these choices make sense.
Today is the day NASA is expected to announce who will receive the retired space shuttles.
By "streaming music" I mean that it has an audio-out port: you can plug it directly into a stereo and play the music from your computer (or other wireless device on the local network) to your stereo. Most wireless routers don't do that: you usually need some additional piece of equipment to bridge from the network to your audio gear (e.g. a Sonos player). Also, the bit about wireless printing also isn't facile: the Airport Express has a built-in print server and a USB port for connecting printers to it. There are other wireless routers with that feature, but it is hardly universal. So in addition to being a fine wireless router for slinging bits around the aether it also has some very useful network-to-real-world features that make it more useful than a commodity router. And, when the Airport Express first came out 5-6 six years ago, this combination of features was unique in a wireless router, particularly at that price point.
He was specifically referring to the Airport Express, which retails for $99. [link]
And for that pricetag, you get the ability to stream music from basically any device on the network (server, laptop, iPhone, etc.) to wherever the Airport is. You also get wireless printing.
I shouldn't be surprised that a guy, when confronted with a broken Airport Express, would go through all the effort of breaking it open, dumping the ROM, and reverse engineering the private key. People get curious, people like to tinker, and the human race is better for it. But, on the other hand, you can pick up an Airport Express for $25-$50 on craiglist or ebay and saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.
While electrically active suspensions use power, the best-designed ones can be regenerative: when the wheel gets pushed upwards by a bump in the road, electrical power can be extracted from that stroke. Another consideration is the overall efficiency of the vehicle: keeping the wheels in better contact with the ground and the car at a constant elevation over the road leads to increased overall efficiency. In any car, vibration through the wheels and noise is wasted power. Even considering the power involved to run the suspension, smoothing the ride could act as a net gain.
precisely. This isn't a story with our obsession with Facebook. It's a story about our obsession with our supposed obsession with Facebook. Move on.
Well, duh! Some of us did not receive Algebra II in high school. Others among us did. I bet most of us didn't take statistics! And I can be pretty sure that no one took a course in the design of experiments.
The other reason why this radio-based synchronization signal is good to keep around is because it is ubiquitous and very cheap to utilize. To get synchronization from GPS you need a GPS transponder in whatever it is you are building. To use NTP you need a network connection to the wide world. To use this radio-based synchronization signal you only need a crude radio receiver tuned to the right frequency and a phase-locked loop circuit, all of which can be packaged in a $0.25 chip.