From the scripps article: While the polymerase does not replicate the unnatural DNA with the same fidelity observed in nature, (roughly one mistake for every 10 million bases of DNA copied), its fidelity is reasonable (typically making only one mistake for every 1000 base pairs).
Fidelity is reasonable? Maybe for bacteria, but not in my body! You'd get this in you in the morning and you'd probably have cancer before dinner. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration... Still, they ever get this thing working with eukaryotes, and I'm gonna be concerned.
This is why your constitution protected your right to bear arms.
Actually, it's the Bill of Rights and not the Constitution, and it doesn't grant the right to bear arms. The Constitution and Bill of Rights don't grant rights to the people, they provide a list of rights that the government should be unable to take away from the people.
As for the right to bear arms, you seem to suffer from the same misunderstanding as most of the people thinking they are granted the right to own machine guns. The actual text is, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." First words: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary..." In other words, I don't think they had the idea of people owning guns to protect their home and overthrow the government, but more for the idea of protecting the country against attack.
Not that overthrowing the government was something they didn't consider and even potentially expected in the future. A lot of people are familiar with Thomas Jefferson's famous words, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But, war, any kind of war, should be the option of last resort, our present administration notwithstanding. You throw it out there as if all options have been exhausted, but come January, there will be a transfer of power. Now, if that doesn't happen, then of course, an overthrow of the government might be in order, but to suggest that we ought to overthrow the government now is more ridiculous than the invasion of Iraq.
If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
Actually, they've made HUGE strides. Do we have a self-aware machine yet? Of course not (or at least not one that I'm aware of). On the other hand, has there been progress made in that direction? Absolutely. Some really phenomenal progress, actually.
The single biggest breakthrough, I think, has been Blue Brain where they've simulated a chunk of rat neocortex in a Blue Gene machine. Now, they only simulated ten seconds of existence, but even in those 10 seconds, signals were produced that appeared "life-like", for lack of a better word.
Granted, this isn't even close to human brain scale. The human brain has ~100 billion neurons. That's actually a fairly manageable number. It's the synapses that are pretty overwhelming in number at an estimated 100 trillion.
While these are huge numbers, I suspect we're within 2 decades of producing a true artificial intelligence. Factoring in the rate of growth of memory and storage, these numbers ought to be pretty manageable in 10-15 years. Computationally, we're probably not that far from making it doable and probably even without a super computer. It could probably be done with a few dozen of these and the appropriate software.
When I wanted to get into robotics, I just dove right in. Bought some books on electronics and started buying tools and components.
For components, there are a lot of options. Check out E-bay and any of the many electronics surplus suppliers on the internet. For specific components, Mouser and Digi-Key tend to be excellent.
I'd recommend buying some of the mix packs of things like resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc. You can usually get variety packs of them pretty cheap.
As for books, Horowitz' The Art of Electronics is generally considered the bible, and for good reason. Any other basic book on electronics (Idiot's Guide type stuff is good) help as a second point of view, particularly if one description doesn't make sense to you, perhaps the way another author phrases it will.
As for projects, the if you don't have any ideas of your own, there are plenty of internet sites with ideas and schematics. There are several volumes of The Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits, as well, which tend to have a variety of cool little projects. Buy a few breadboards or wirewrap boards and start building... I find breadboards to be pretty good for doing small projects.
I would suggest you take your husband shopping for a chair (no price limit, or a set a limit, whatever you want), but have him try them out. I tried out a bunch of chairs before I decided on one.
I work from home and I tend to sit in unusual ways. For example, I often lean back against one arm with a leg over the other arm. Most of the time, I sit Indian style, leaning forward (a couple decades of this and my back and posture somehow seem fine), with my elbows on the inside of my knees.
So, for me, a soft seat and padded arm rests are crucial. Granted, it's far more likely your husband sits like a normal human being but still, the choice of a chair I think, is important enough that you shouldn't pick it out, he should.
Unfortunately, it's also going to send a mega-volt spike into any nearby conductors that will be powerful enough to disrupt communications and power delivery, plus fry hundreds of million or billions of dollars worth of electronic
Actually, they come in varying degrees of power and they only induce currents up to kilovolts, not mega-volts. Furthermore, their range is limited to only a few hundred yards and the actual range is more or less in proportion to the power of the device.
Actually, they already have it. Granted, right now most of the military ones are built as bombs, and even if they're not in a bomb package, the device is definitely a one time use. But the range is a few hundred meters. It would certainly disable a plane and I suspect any boat with a motor. Of course, if the induced current ignited the fuel, that might be a problem.
This is precisely how books made us stupid when the printing press came into being. Before that, everyone figured out everything on their own and they were all geniuses. Then the printing press came around and people said, "Hey, I don't have to learn anymore because all the information is in books now."
Sorry, but this is a pretty stupid line of reasoning in my mind. But then maybe that's because Google made me stupid.
That's not to say that the net might, to some degree, worsen the problem of ADD/ADHD which I think has been made worse by television already. I can't say for sure. But does it make us stupid? I don't think so.
I can't speak for others, but since the WWW came into being, and my access to information has increased, I've been able to learn more, faster, than I ever had the opportunity to learn before then.
Sure glad I switched from AT&T to Cox last week. The truth is, it's crazy that I didn't do it sooner. My plan with AT&T was for 3mbps down and 512kbps up. They only guaranteed 1.5mbps down and of course, over the 4 years I had the service, I never saw anything much over 1.5.
I switched both my phone and internet to Cox. In return, I'm getting 12mbps down, 1mbps up, and a handful of phone services (3-way calling, call forwarding, and some other services I actually have uses for) and I'm paying 25% less.
AT&T needs to get competitive, and charging yet another fee is just going to push more people away to their competitors (where people actually have a choice, at least).
The communications markets really need to be opened up more to inspire true competition. Not all markets offer a choice of internet providers, for example. Especially in rural areas. There are only really 4 options where I live, and AT&T and Cox are by far the best alternatives.
It is, in a way. This is a train that's going to benefit Las Vegas and L.A., two cities that are probably among the 5 richest in the country. Come on, you don't think the casinos in Vegas alone could afford this without even noticing the hit? It's going to be a huge payoff for them. I say let the casinos and entertainment industry in L.A. pay for it. They're the ones who will benefit the most. Why should my tax dollars go to helping two very rich cities? I'd much rather my tax dollars be spent on improving education in poor school districts. Money to increase teacher salaries, buy books, pay for teacher training...
Paying for increased tourism for Vegas? Not my idea of a good use of my tax dollars. Students produce stuff. Vegas produces $$$ and not much else.
Now that is good advice. Educate, and teach people critical thinking. Create a system with checks and balances.
Good advice, though completely useless. It ignores the fact that most people don't want to be educated (when I say "most people", I'm speaking largely of my fellow Americans). A lot of them want to get degrees, but that's a different thing. You can get a degree and completely skip the education part.
What we need is to induce people into wanting to learn. Look at the kinds of role models kids have these days. Not really much that would inspire education.
I've been tossing around the idea of leaving the U.S. again. Last time I left for the destination (Southern Mexico beach). Now I want to leave because the U.S. is quickly becoming the kind of place where I don't want to live anymore...
I'm hoping that a new administration with fresh ideas might go some way to improve the situation here, but I'm getting tired of a country whose politics are motivated by money. It wasn't too many years ago that companies felt some sort of obligation to the betterment of society. Today, their only obligation seems to be to their board and their stockholders (in that order). And through lobbying, too much money is finding its way to politicians, corrupting the entire system. It no longer seems like a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."
this toy I have called a Web Browser... It actually shows all this stuff graphically...
Serioously, though, this seems kind of ridiculous to me. I can do most of this stuff in firefox, thanks to bookmark keywords. If I want to do a google search, I go to the address bar and type: g . If I want to do a wiki search, I type: wiki . If I want to do a google image search: gi
All the speed of command-line typing with the bonus of rendered HTML output. I think I'll stick with what I have.
I look forward to the indictment, conviction, and imprisonment of the executives of their operation.
Failure to achieve these things will not reflect well on the fitness of the rulers to rule.
ROFL... You must be new here. Allow me to welcome you to planet Earth. Expect no useful action against Media Defender. And again, welcome to our humble planet...
Java isn't going to die any more than C. Nor will Python or Ruby die any time in the foreseeable future.
Anyone can play Devil's Advocate and make one language look better than another from some point of view, but the fact is, different languages have their different pluses and minuses. I'm sure Ruby and Python have their pluses, but I don't see them being used NEARLY as much as Java. And take into consideration that Ruby has been around just as long as Java and Python has 4 years on both languages. If they were going to kick Java's ass, it would have happened by now.
I suspect the article is wishful thinking (though I can't read it 'cause the site didn't survive this post). I don't know why people have to make such a big deal about this stuff anyway. Languages evolve and new languages and paradigms will be created in the future. Computer programming is still in its infancy. There's a good possibility that 20-30 years down the road, none of these languages will be around. They may be completely replaced by some far more powerful paradigm we can't even imagine yet.
This actually solves a problem I've been stumped on for a while. I need a way to search for similar images such that images that are similar have a searchable value with an inherent "nearness" quality.
That is, there are a number of image similarity algorithms, but the computed values of two similar images are not necessarily mathematically near to each other. This algorithm produces values that are, which can make searching for similar images among very many images, quite fast.
The fact that actual studies of landfills indicate exactly the opposite notwithstanding...
There are studies? Cool. Can you point some out? Google seems to be returning a bunch of results that appear to lean towards supporting my position, so I'd be happy to see some examples that contradict it. Thanks
Actually, yes I do. It was, I suppose, the way it was worded, that made it confusing for me.
My mis-interpretation was that where SOAP was making 900 calls, etch was generating 50,000 messages or 15,000 transactions from those 900 calls. The comparison, unless you really understand the mechanics underneath and what transactions vs. messages vs. calls means, seems very apples and oranges...
I guess it would have made a lot more sense to say, "where SOAP was managing 900 calls a second, Etch was managing x calls a second", which would have been far clearer, in my opinion.
Actually, bacteria mutate fairly quickly as it is. First of all, they don't have nearly the same level of DNA repair ability that eukaryotes (that's all multi-celled creatures and some single-celled) do. Second of all, their sheer numbers are enormous. In a small container, populations many orders of magnitude larger than the human population, can be grown. So out of the huge populations alone, you can expect a much larger overall mutation count.
Finally, different species of bacteria can share genetic material (DNA plasmids) through a type of "mating" called conjugation, allowing species to trade traits with other species.
Any mutations that makes them more efficient reproducers and better able to create energy from their environment is likely to ensure survival and ability to out-reproduce their peers.
Through these various methods, you should get a fairly high rate of mutation. Adding radiation may actually be detrimental to the overall success of the intent. Mutations tend to be detrimental, so if you increase the rate too much, you end up killing them off too fast. You also increase the risk of killing off the small populations with the new positive mutations you want, before they have a chance to spread.
It wouldn't surprise me if you went digging through a bunch of dumps that have been covered up years ago, to find bacteria that have evolved to eat some of that garbage. I suspect that the time required for our garbage to decompose is actually lower than we predict since we don't really factor in the possibility of bacterial mutations which can make them good consumers of the garbage. I suspect these mutations will happen in far less time than the natural decomposition period of the materials in question.
Can someone explain how 900 calls generating 50,000 messages/15,000 transactions is better than what SOAP does? I'm not terribly familiar with how SOAP works, so please excuse my ignorance, but it seems to me that 2 messages per synchronous call and 1 for an async call would not only be ideal, but fairly straight-forward.
Estonia I can almost forgive, as they're relatively poor and didn't have much time to go from Soviet-era attitudes to something saner. They should still have done more. What bothers me much more is that the scorecards for US departments make it clear that the US is even less prepared for a cyberwar than even Balkan castoffs.
Actually, Estonia isn't very poor. They're a member of the E.U. They're the wealthiest of the Baltic States and their market economy has "one of the highest per capita income levels of Central Europe" (CIA World Factbook). Their unemployment is comparable to the U.S., at just 5.2%. They're actually quite modern. Most of their population files tax returns online. Does that sound like a poverty-struck backwards nation to you?
There's nothing very Soviet about them, really. They speak their own language, Estonian, which is quite similar to Finnish. Estonia and Finland have very close ties, culturally and financially.
Slashdot Mirror
From the scripps article: While the polymerase does not replicate the unnatural DNA with the same fidelity observed in nature, (roughly one mistake for every 10 million bases of DNA copied), its fidelity is reasonable (typically making only one mistake for every 1000 base pairs).
Fidelity is reasonable? Maybe for bacteria, but not in my body! You'd get this in you in the morning and you'd probably have cancer before dinner. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration... Still, they ever get this thing working with eukaryotes, and I'm gonna be concerned.
This is why your constitution protected your right to bear arms.
Actually, it's the Bill of Rights and not the Constitution, and it doesn't grant the right to bear arms. The Constitution and Bill of Rights don't grant rights to the people, they provide a list of rights that the government should be unable to take away from the people.
As for the right to bear arms, you seem to suffer from the same misunderstanding as most of the people thinking they are granted the right to own machine guns. The actual text is, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." First words: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary..." In other words, I don't think they had the idea of people owning guns to protect their home and overthrow the government, but more for the idea of protecting the country against attack.
Not that overthrowing the government was something they didn't consider and even potentially expected in the future. A lot of people are familiar with Thomas Jefferson's famous words, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But, war, any kind of war, should be the option of last resort, our present administration notwithstanding. You throw it out there as if all options have been exhausted, but come January, there will be a transfer of power. Now, if that doesn't happen, then of course, an overthrow of the government might be in order, but to suggest that we ought to overthrow the government now is more ridiculous than the invasion of Iraq.
If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
Actually, they've made HUGE strides. Do we have a self-aware machine yet? Of course not (or at least not one that I'm aware of). On the other hand, has there been progress made in that direction? Absolutely. Some really phenomenal progress, actually.
The single biggest breakthrough, I think, has been Blue Brain where they've simulated a chunk of rat neocortex in a Blue Gene machine. Now, they only simulated ten seconds of existence, but even in those 10 seconds, signals were produced that appeared "life-like", for lack of a better word.
Granted, this isn't even close to human brain scale. The human brain has ~100 billion neurons. That's actually a fairly manageable number. It's the synapses that are pretty overwhelming in number at an estimated 100 trillion.
While these are huge numbers, I suspect we're within 2 decades of producing a true artificial intelligence. Factoring in the rate of growth of memory and storage, these numbers ought to be pretty manageable in 10-15 years. Computationally, we're probably not that far from making it doable and probably even without a super computer. It could probably be done with a few dozen of these and the appropriate software.
When I wanted to get into robotics, I just dove right in. Bought some books on electronics and started buying tools and components.
For components, there are a lot of options. Check out E-bay and any of the many electronics surplus suppliers on the internet. For specific components, Mouser and Digi-Key tend to be excellent.
I'd recommend buying some of the mix packs of things like resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc. You can usually get variety packs of them pretty cheap.
As for books, Horowitz' The Art of Electronics is generally considered the bible, and for good reason. Any other basic book on electronics (Idiot's Guide type stuff is good) help as a second point of view, particularly if one description doesn't make sense to you, perhaps the way another author phrases it will.
As for projects, the if you don't have any ideas of your own, there are plenty of internet sites with ideas and schematics. There are several volumes of The Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits, as well, which tend to have a variety of cool little projects. Buy a few breadboards or wirewrap boards and start building... I find breadboards to be pretty good for doing small projects.
Almost everything stated is based on opinion.
Except that the author has solid credentials, wasn't an employee of the company in question, but a consultant hired to provide his opinion.
Finally, the project clearly failed. I'd say the consultant was right on!
I would suggest you take your husband shopping for a chair (no price limit, or a set a limit, whatever you want), but have him try them out. I tried out a bunch of chairs before I decided on one.
I work from home and I tend to sit in unusual ways. For example, I often lean back against one arm with a leg over the other arm. Most of the time, I sit Indian style, leaning forward (a couple decades of this and my back and posture somehow seem fine), with my elbows on the inside of my knees.
So, for me, a soft seat and padded arm rests are crucial. Granted, it's far more likely your husband sits like a normal human being but still, the choice of a chair I think, is important enough that you shouldn't pick it out, he should.
Unfortunately, it's also going to send a mega-volt spike into any nearby conductors that will be powerful enough to disrupt communications and power delivery, plus fry hundreds of million or billions of dollars worth of electronic
Actually, they come in varying degrees of power and they only induce currents up to kilovolts, not mega-volts. Furthermore, their range is limited to only a few hundred yards and the actual range is more or less in proportion to the power of the device.
Actually, they already have it. Granted, right now most of the military ones are built as bombs, and even if they're not in a bomb package, the device is definitely a one time use. But the range is a few hundred meters. It would certainly disable a plane and I suspect any boat with a motor. Of course, if the induced current ignited the fuel, that might be a problem.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
No, it's just making Nick Carr stupid. The rest of us are fine.
This is precisely how books made us stupid when the printing press came into being. Before that, everyone figured out everything on their own and they were all geniuses. Then the printing press came around and people said, "Hey, I don't have to learn anymore because all the information is in books now."
Sorry, but this is a pretty stupid line of reasoning in my mind. But then maybe that's because Google made me stupid.
That's not to say that the net might, to some degree, worsen the problem of ADD/ADHD which I think has been made worse by television already. I can't say for sure. But does it make us stupid? I don't think so.
I can't speak for others, but since the WWW came into being, and my access to information has increased, I've been able to learn more, faster, than I ever had the opportunity to learn before then.
Sorry, but I patented the brain when I created Adam and Eve. Prior art and all. Guess I'll have to smite them.
Sure glad I switched from AT&T to Cox last week. The truth is, it's crazy that I didn't do it sooner. My plan with AT&T was for 3mbps down and 512kbps up. They only guaranteed 1.5mbps down and of course, over the 4 years I had the service, I never saw anything much over 1.5.
I switched both my phone and internet to Cox. In return, I'm getting 12mbps down, 1mbps up, and a handful of phone services (3-way calling, call forwarding, and some other services I actually have uses for) and I'm paying 25% less.
AT&T needs to get competitive, and charging yet another fee is just going to push more people away to their competitors (where people actually have a choice, at least).
The communications markets really need to be opened up more to inspire true competition. Not all markets offer a choice of internet providers, for example. Especially in rural areas. There are only really 4 options where I live, and AT&T and Cox are by far the best alternatives.
It's not as big a boondoggle as you think.
It is, in a way. This is a train that's going to benefit Las Vegas and L.A., two cities that are probably among the 5 richest in the country. Come on, you don't think the casinos in Vegas alone could afford this without even noticing the hit? It's going to be a huge payoff for them. I say let the casinos and entertainment industry in L.A. pay for it. They're the ones who will benefit the most. Why should my tax dollars go to helping two very rich cities? I'd much rather my tax dollars be spent on improving education in poor school districts. Money to increase teacher salaries, buy books, pay for teacher training...
Paying for increased tourism for Vegas? Not my idea of a good use of my tax dollars. Students produce stuff. Vegas produces $$$ and not much else.
Now that is good advice. Educate, and teach people critical thinking. Create a system with checks and balances.
Good advice, though completely useless. It ignores the fact that most people don't want to be educated (when I say "most people", I'm speaking largely of my fellow Americans). A lot of them want to get degrees, but that's a different thing. You can get a degree and completely skip the education part.
What we need is to induce people into wanting to learn. Look at the kinds of role models kids have these days. Not really much that would inspire education.
I've been tossing around the idea of leaving the U.S. again. Last time I left for the destination (Southern Mexico beach). Now I want to leave because the U.S. is quickly becoming the kind of place where I don't want to live anymore...
I'm hoping that a new administration with fresh ideas might go some way to improve the situation here, but I'm getting tired of a country whose politics are motivated by money. It wasn't too many years ago that companies felt some sort of obligation to the betterment of society. Today, their only obligation seems to be to their board and their stockholders (in that order). And through lobbying, too much money is finding its way to politicians, corrupting the entire system. It no longer seems like a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."
this toy I have called a Web Browser... It actually shows all this stuff graphically...
Serioously, though, this seems kind of ridiculous to me. I can do most of this stuff in firefox, thanks to bookmark keywords. If I want to do a google search, I go to the address bar and type: g . If I want to do a wiki search, I type: wiki . If I want to do a google image search: gi
All the speed of command-line typing with the bonus of rendered HTML output. I think I'll stick with what I have.
I look forward to the indictment, conviction, and imprisonment of the executives of their operation.
Failure to achieve these things will not reflect well on the fitness of the rulers to rule.
ROFL... You must be new here. Allow me to welcome you to planet Earth. Expect no useful action against Media Defender. And again, welcome to our humble planet...
Java isn't going to die any more than C. Nor will Python or Ruby die any time in the foreseeable future.
Anyone can play Devil's Advocate and make one language look better than another from some point of view, but the fact is, different languages have their different pluses and minuses. I'm sure Ruby and Python have their pluses, but I don't see them being used NEARLY as much as Java. And take into consideration that Ruby has been around just as long as Java and Python has 4 years on both languages. If they were going to kick Java's ass, it would have happened by now.
I suspect the article is wishful thinking (though I can't read it 'cause the site didn't survive this post). I don't know why people have to make such a big deal about this stuff anyway. Languages evolve and new languages and paradigms will be created in the future. Computer programming is still in its infancy. There's a good possibility that 20-30 years down the road, none of these languages will be around. They may be completely replaced by some far more powerful paradigm we can't even imagine yet.
These kinds of predictions are old and pointless.
Nah, it's nothing interesting. Just a martian groundhog looking for his shadow.
This actually solves a problem I've been stumped on for a while. I need a way to search for similar images such that images that are similar have a searchable value with an inherent "nearness" quality.
That is, there are a number of image similarity algorithms, but the computed values of two similar images are not necessarily mathematically near to each other. This algorithm produces values that are, which can make searching for similar images among very many images, quite fast.
The fact that actual studies of landfills indicate exactly the opposite notwithstanding...
There are studies? Cool. Can you point some out? Google seems to be returning a bunch of results that appear to lean towards supporting my position, so I'd be happy to see some examples that contradict it. Thanks
Now do you see ?
Actually, yes I do. It was, I suppose, the way it was worded, that made it confusing for me.
My mis-interpretation was that where SOAP was making 900 calls, etch was generating 50,000 messages or 15,000 transactions from those 900 calls. The comparison, unless you really understand the mechanics underneath and what transactions vs. messages vs. calls means, seems very apples and oranges...
I guess it would have made a lot more sense to say, "where SOAP was managing 900 calls a second, Etch was managing x calls a second", which would have been far clearer, in my opinion.
Actually, bacteria mutate fairly quickly as it is. First of all, they don't have nearly the same level of DNA repair ability that eukaryotes (that's all multi-celled creatures and some single-celled) do. Second of all, their sheer numbers are enormous. In a small container, populations many orders of magnitude larger than the human population, can be grown. So out of the huge populations alone, you can expect a much larger overall mutation count.
Finally, different species of bacteria can share genetic material (DNA plasmids) through a type of "mating" called conjugation, allowing species to trade traits with other species.
Any mutations that makes them more efficient reproducers and better able to create energy from their environment is likely to ensure survival and ability to out-reproduce their peers.
Through these various methods, you should get a fairly high rate of mutation. Adding radiation may actually be detrimental to the overall success of the intent. Mutations tend to be detrimental, so if you increase the rate too much, you end up killing them off too fast. You also increase the risk of killing off the small populations with the new positive mutations you want, before they have a chance to spread.
It wouldn't surprise me if you went digging through a bunch of dumps that have been covered up years ago, to find bacteria that have evolved to eat some of that garbage. I suspect that the time required for our garbage to decompose is actually lower than we predict since we don't really factor in the possibility of bacterial mutations which can make them good consumers of the garbage. I suspect these mutations will happen in far less time than the natural decomposition period of the materials in question.
Can someone explain how 900 calls generating 50,000 messages/15,000 transactions is better than what SOAP does? I'm not terribly familiar with how SOAP works, so please excuse my ignorance, but it seems to me that 2 messages per synchronous call and 1 for an async call would not only be ideal, but fairly straight-forward.
Estonia I can almost forgive, as they're relatively poor and didn't have much time to go from Soviet-era attitudes to something saner. They should still have done more. What bothers me much more is that the scorecards for US departments make it clear that the US is even less prepared for a cyberwar than even Balkan castoffs.
Actually, Estonia isn't very poor. They're a member of the E.U. They're the wealthiest of the Baltic States and their market economy has "one of the highest per capita income levels of Central Europe" (CIA World Factbook). Their unemployment is comparable to the U.S., at just 5.2%. They're actually quite modern. Most of their population files tax returns online. Does that sound like a poverty-struck backwards nation to you?
There's nothing very Soviet about them, really. They speak their own language, Estonian, which is quite similar to Finnish. Estonia and Finland have very close ties, culturally and financially.
You're clearly thinking of some other Estonia.