was an expensive military drone using civilian GPS? The military has encrypted GPS signals (the P codes), which I very much doubt have been cracked. I'll bet someone made a decision to fallback to relying on unencrypted signals, instead of self-destructing after X minutes, upon loss of the encrypted signals.
From what I've heard military receivers need to bootstrap from the L1 channel so there may be some opportunity for shady business there.
The interesting thing about encryption is the context within which it is used. How can I copy an encrypted DVD if I have no way of decrypting it first? The answer is in the assumption you need to decrypt it at all. A bit for bit copy works just as well.
All GPS receivers care about is the propogation delay of signals from GPS satellites. If you can delay various signals by the right amount to fool the receiver who cares if their encrypted?
So, first of all, this is just really neat. It sounds like something that would happen in a movie. That's some movie-hacker shit right there.
That aside, the thing that really worries me here is that the military's GPS was able to be spoofed in the first place. One would think that the GPS the military relies on would be encrypted or something, y'know? How difficult is it to spoof military GPS?
Who cares if it is encrypted? You don't have to understand military L2 signals to generate a false convergence. At the end of the day all GPS does is measure propogation delay of signals. All you need to do capture and replay signals in the right proportions so the receiver converges on your fantasy location.
If it is continuously tracked and you have a high precision clock onboard you can detect any such tampering due to the prop delay of ground signal and any computer time needed to calculate a proper deception.
But why give this article any credence anyway? Anonymous sources, sources that directly gain by dissemination of propoganda?
If you were Iran and you had a capability why piss it away by telling your advasary exactly what you did so that they can develop a countermeasure causing you to loose said capability? You can make up a story that makes you look good for nationalistic reasons without giving up the goods.
I find it hard to believe a 6m stealth drone does not also come standard with intertial guidance.
Who knows maybe someone screwed up... but all of the random guessing by pundents with no actual evidence is getting old.
But maybe if that 'kid' had even put his break lights on, the buses would have also and the collision would have been just a rear ending. You concentrate on the car in front of you and if you are too close, you depend on them to give you some warning. If there's no warning, you both fail.
The law on this is pretty clear cut on this issue. If you hit the person in front of you it is YOUR fault period full stop. Yes this even includes your vechicle being pushed into the vechicle in front of you by the vechile behind you.
It simply does not matter what they were doing it is YOUR responsibility to maintain a safe driving distance at all times and be fully prepared to respond to any and everything that can occur.
Ask any lawyer or insurance agent they will tell you the same thing.
The text of their recommendation reads "1.(1) Ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers;"
Notice "cell phones" are not mentioned explicitly they just happen to be a subset of "portable electronic devices". TFA seems to have made an assumption which does not in fact exist.
If a portable device is in your pocket and commanded via bluetooth via your car stereo does that count as using it? Your car stereo is not a portable device. You are "using" your stereo not the portable device.
If it still counts what if a cell phone was permanently installed into your vechicle it would no longer be a "portable device" and therefore not subject to the text of their recommendation.
In other words it is pluasable at least to me what NTSB really intended was to say that portable device use should be banned while driving.
Permanently installed hands free communication gear may not actually be the target of their recommendation.
Yeah, an act of war against a foreign nation after they shoot down your spy drone that was in their airspace sounds like a great plan. Particularly when they're one of the world's largest oil suppliers and gas would probably hit $10 a gallon.
I agree on the right call being made not to blow it up.
Gas prices are already high enough to make shale oil extraction profitable. At $10/gallon pretty much every oil extraction technology under the sun becomes profitable. Worst cast you can do what the Germans did during WWII and turn coal for which the US has infinite quantities into gas.
There is essentially an unlimited quantity of this shit oil between the US and Canada. It would be a short term spike / speculative bubbles but longer term US oil production would skyrocket to the detrement of Middle eastern production.
Personally a bit unfair but I would love to see gas at astronomical prices so people have a reason to solve this unsustainable nightmare once and for all.
Hopefully this will dampen the reality distorting field (oil curse) over the middle east to the long term benefit of everyone in that region.
The general question can't be answered. YOU need to do research and understand the cost benefits of each approach and make an informed decision based on the specifics of your situation.
This means all stakeholders need to do necessary reserch and then sit down and communicate with each other.
Personally I've seen enough DIY outcomes from IT shops to have a strong default of preference to keep software development as far away from IT as possible.
Then said airlines need to to invest in proper GPS equipment, instead of shit-ass receivers that don't know what the fuck 1575.42 MHz means. LightSquared's licensed spectrum is 1525-1559 MHz, and GPS L1 is 1575.42 MHz. Now, unless you can point to some solid evidence that LightSquared is broadcasting outside their spectrum
Unfortunatly an allocation does not give you free reign to use your band however you would like. There is (lots of) fine print involved.
Current LS allocation to which you refer is subject to the FCCs ATC integrated services rule where boundless proliferation of ground stations is NOT permitted within said bands.
I'll probably get modded "-1, Troll", or more likely, "-1, Flamebait", for the strong language, but this whole LightSquared vs. GPS mess seems like a total crock of badly-designed GPS crapola to me.
Imagine a Boeing 787 Dreamliner conducting an nighttime instrument approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when the GPS signal is overwhelmed at a critical phase. Now imagine that same Boeing 787 Dreamliner plowing into downtown Arlington, Virginia at 150 miles per hour, leaving a wake of bloody body parts and burning jetfuel for a quarter-mile.
Thatâ(TM)s the worst that could happen.
Written by someone who has no clue how an instrumented landing actually works.
I'm all for bashing LS about real interference issues and their associated power play to avoid paying fair market value for that type of nationally scoped allocation like everyone else.
There are plenty of life safety arguments one can honestly make about LS interference. And it is all not just about inability to figure out where exactly to send help when shit goes wrong.
Precision timing is critial for self organizing communication networks intended to prevent accidents from occuring in the first place. Utilities often use GPS based clocking sources for silly unimportant things like phase management. Things you would think would have nothing to do with GPS turn out to have important dependancies.
If GPS were gone for a day I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of instances of breakdown of systems where usable albit degraded backups were avaliable but people had no clue or practice in operating properly.
If anything good comes out of LS it will be some hedging against the real problem of overdependance on GPS.
From a performance perspective it might be interesting, but from a power consumption perspective the SSD blows away a handful of DDR3 sticks
Higher density, process and lower operating voltages have been dropping DRAM power consumption many times over in the last few years. Latest DDR3 is able to run 24GB on 7 watts.
Whether you will see better or worse power consumption depends on your workload (how much longer or shorter computer needs to run to get the same job done) under each SSD vs DRAM usage scenario.
I don't know, if deep enough underwater storms won't really effect it.
Since its producing energy anyway you could easily run some current to provide active corrosion resistance.
Anti fouling coatings are avaliable although this will certainly remain a maintenance item.
Seems like a simple enough design that it might work... I think at the end of the day feasibility will be driven more by economies of scale and steady build up of dead labor engineering costs out of the system.
You can purchase 24 GB of ram for less than $200 today. I would love to see a side by side performance and energy consumption comparison with someone who decided to spend their extra money on DRAM.
I suspect what you'll see is that after a day all read operations are resolved instantly from the OS disk cache without the performance and power hit of flash. If you have write intensive workloads the current crop of SSDs would not be for you anyway.
The 1984 "Big Brother" concept is 1984 - in the 21st century, you will not be arrested because some office drone in the ministry of truth read through all your e-mails and decided you're a bad person. No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why , because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
For the life of me I don't understand why LEA would share such a valuable feedback channel with terrorists... Am I on the no fly list?... How about now?.. Now?.. Now???... Seriously still not on your list?
It seems like there has been some effort from the US to further increase tensions with Iran - including a string of three catastrophic, improbable but still officially accidental explosions at various Iranian industrial facilities. Add that to Stuxnet and targeted assassinations of Iran's brightest nerds, and it paints a pretty clear picture that we the West are trying to ratchet up tensions. On the other side, there are probably hardliners who are happy to play along. I don't like any of this escalation.
My guess covert US involvement is at least partially to keep Isreal from feeling soo cornered it sees no alternative other than a unilateral strike against Iran.
For all practical purposes Isreal == USA. If they do something stupid we pay the price for cleanup / consequences.
So wouldn't the right way to go be to update TCP for the times? i mean we didn't slow computers down so we could keep PATA or PCI, we came up with new tech like SATA and PCIe to take advantage of the faster throughput. Shouldn't we do the same here as well?
We have SCTP which was intended to replace TCP except nobody seems to care.
At the end of the day the concept of TCP is not rocket science - there is a limit and diminishing returns to what more can be done twoard making TCP a perfect reflection of the concept of TCP.
Congestion management and ack/windowing have certainly evolved into high arts..but fundementally all TCP does is implement a loss free ordered data stream on top of an unordered lossy packet switched network.
This means your core limitation is embedded in the definition of TCP itself...the problem of head-of-line blocking. By using TCP you are by definition limiting yourself to the constraints of TCP.
Realtime voice/video and multi-player games use their own protocols because they are not willing to accept the constraints of TCP. It is not the implementation of TCP that is holding them back. It is the *concept* of TCP.
In my opinion we need more IP protocols to better handle varied use cases more than we need a new TCP.
If you look at buffers allocated to fast multi-gigabit interfaces at the core of the network they are simply not large enough compared to forwarding rates involved to be able to induce the kinds of delays needed to cause Internet wide problems.
You can argue they may not be ideal for real time voice, game or video communication when these links are oversubscribed but no doomsday is possible.
Today buffer bloat effects are mostly observed at the edge even though they need not always be.
Failure of a congestion control algorithm to control link saturation does not translate into congestive collapse of the larger network. It just results in *your* network connection turning to shit. When netalyzer runs it intentionally saturates your link at that time. In the real world only a few portions of the edge are ever saturated to the extent congestion control failure becomes an issue leading to more packets through core routers. The number of edge machines in this category would need to be significant to cause a rerun of previous issues.
That condition can not be met due to self feedbacks. If everyone maxed their pipes at once the core would saturate self-limiting edge saturation due to gross over-provisioning of available edge bandwidth in relation to core bandwidth which would ensure congestion control algorithms function properly.
I'm not arguing there is not a problem or more can't be done. I'm just arguing the doomsday congestive collapse scenario is bullshit.
I've always wondered what happens to laws with specific dollar amounts over time. Are they inflation adjusted regularly or do they just wreak even more havoc as they age?
I work with DC power in Telecom and it has 3 huge advantages I can think of off the top of my head: 3) Any old technician with a brain in their head can run DC power feeds to equipment relatively safely due to the low voltages involved. AC power work of any kind should have a qualified electrician involved.
Short the posts of a car battery, count the number of milliseconds it takes the pliers to be welded to the leads... Then come back here and tell us all about how low voltage is "safe" and requires no qualifications.
Wouldn't it make more sense to drive at 12v with an insane amperage behind it, than to drive at 380v and garantee the necessity of a voltage regulator rated for high voltages?
I mean, the whole reason for doing away with ac current was to eliminate the rectifier and regulator circuits, which belch heat into the data center
There seems to be a popular/fundemental misunderstanding of the tesla/edison debate.
DC is MORE effecient on the wire than AC given the same voltage, amperage and wire gauge.
The reason for this is in AC systems eddy currents induced by changing electric fields at 50/60hz cause electrons to migrate away from the core effectivly reducing wire size.
Why AC has been the choice for so long is an engineering problem.
Building rectifiers to convert AC to DC from huge AC generators which produce virtually all of our electricity with the kinds of voltages needed to carry massive quantities of volumes of energy is difficult, unreliable and ineffecient..even today.
Back then it was practically impossible. The choice between Tesla and Edison really boiled down to high vs low voltage. Low voltage transmission required impossible quantities of copper or decentralized generation.
Tesla wanted larger more centralized generation which given what we use for fuel these days is an exceedingly smart move.
It used to be worst case your arch nemesis would social engineer themselves a scary but somewhat amusing swat raid at 3am..
Death from above raining on my parade with live ordinance is no joke.
There is no algorithm possible that can say for sure where an attack came from. Such technology simply does not exist especially in the face of thinking advasaries who would undoubtably seek to use US munitionions as a force multipler against their advasaries. Not all conspiracies are false.
Barring misguided censorship in the name of big media, the United States is still relatively free. We can and seriously should have a frank talk about the nature and extent of filtering in the United States. To suggest that Russia and China are serious alternatives, however, doesn't advance this discourse in any meaningful way.
Baidu might suck for researching the perils of tank student interactions yet you won't find a better resource for your faux holday shopping needs.
Slashdot Mirror
was an expensive military drone using civilian GPS? The military has encrypted GPS signals (the P codes), which I very much doubt have been cracked. I'll bet someone made a decision to fallback to relying on unencrypted signals, instead of self-destructing after X minutes, upon loss of the encrypted signals.
From what I've heard military receivers need to bootstrap from the L1 channel so there may be some opportunity for shady business there.
The interesting thing about encryption is the context within which it is used. How can I copy an encrypted DVD if I have no way of decrypting it first? The answer is in the assumption you need to decrypt it at all. A bit for bit copy works just as well.
All GPS receivers care about is the propogation delay of signals from GPS satellites. If you can delay various signals by the right amount to fool the receiver who cares if their encrypted?
So, first of all, this is just really neat. It sounds like something that would happen in a movie. That's some movie-hacker shit right there.
That aside, the thing that really worries me here is that the military's GPS was able to be spoofed in the first place. One would think that the GPS the military relies on would be encrypted or something, y'know? How difficult is it to spoof military GPS?
Who cares if it is encrypted? You don't have to understand military L2 signals to generate a false convergence. At the end of the day all GPS does is measure propogation delay of signals. All you need to do capture and replay signals in the right proportions so the receiver converges on your fantasy location.
If it is continuously tracked and you have a high precision clock onboard you can detect any such tampering due to the prop delay of ground signal and any computer time needed to calculate a proper deception.
But why give this article any credence anyway? Anonymous sources, sources that directly gain by dissemination of propoganda?
If you were Iran and you had a capability why piss it away by telling your advasary exactly what you did so that they can develop a countermeasure causing you to loose said capability? You can make up a story that makes you look good for nationalistic reasons without giving up the goods.
I find it hard to believe a 6m stealth drone does not also come standard with intertial guidance.
Who knows maybe someone screwed up... but all of the random guessing by pundents with no actual evidence is getting old.
But maybe if that 'kid' had even put his break lights on, the buses would have also and the collision would have been just a rear ending. You concentrate on the car in front of you and if you are too close, you depend on them to give you some warning. If there's no warning, you both fail.
The law on this is pretty clear cut on this issue. If you hit the person in front of you it is YOUR fault period full stop. Yes this even includes your vechicle being pushed into the vechicle in front of you by the vechile behind you.
It simply does not matter what they were doing it is YOUR responsibility to maintain a safe driving distance at all times and be fully prepared to respond to any and everything that can occur.
Ask any lawyer or insurance agent they will tell you the same thing.
Lets say I spend millions on R&D to make an automated tour car happen.
Then I also have to pay google royalities to use the basic concept of replacing a human tour guide with a computer? Why?
This seems absurd to me especially since automated tour trains have been around for years.
The text of their recommendation reads "1.(1) Ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers;"
Notice "cell phones" are not mentioned explicitly they just happen to be a subset of "portable electronic devices". TFA seems to have made an assumption which does not in fact exist.
If a portable device is in your pocket and commanded via bluetooth via your car stereo does that count as using it? Your car stereo is not a portable device. You are "using" your stereo not the portable device.
If it still counts what if a cell phone was permanently installed into your vechicle it would no longer be a "portable device" and therefore not subject to the text of their recommendation.
In other words it is pluasable at least to me what NTSB really intended was to say that portable device use should be banned while driving.
Permanently installed hands free communication gear may not actually be the target of their recommendation.
Yeah, an act of war against a foreign nation after they shoot down your spy drone that was in their airspace sounds like a great plan. Particularly when they're one of the world's largest oil suppliers and gas would probably hit $10 a gallon.
I agree on the right call being made not to blow it up.
Gas prices are already high enough to make shale oil extraction profitable. At $10/gallon pretty much every oil extraction technology under the sun becomes profitable. Worst cast you can do what the Germans did during WWII and turn coal for which the US has infinite quantities into gas.
There is essentially an unlimited quantity of this shit oil between the US and Canada. It would be a short term spike / speculative bubbles but longer term US oil production would skyrocket to the detrement of Middle eastern production.
Personally a bit unfair but I would love to see gas at astronomical prices so people have a reason to solve this unsustainable nightmare once and for all.
Hopefully this will dampen the reality distorting field (oil curse) over the middle east to the long term benefit of everyone in that region.
Getting caught and then asking to return their spying device, lol.
It works when the FBI does it.
The general question can't be answered. YOU need to do research and understand the cost benefits of each approach and make an informed decision based on the specifics of your situation.
This means all stakeholders need to do necessary reserch and then sit down and communicate with each other.
Personally I've seen enough DIY outcomes from IT shops to have a strong default of preference to keep software development as far away from IT as possible.
Then said airlines need to to invest in proper GPS equipment, instead of shit-ass receivers that don't know what the fuck 1575.42 MHz means. LightSquared's licensed spectrum is 1525-1559 MHz, and GPS L1 is 1575.42 MHz. Now, unless you can point to some solid evidence that LightSquared is broadcasting outside their spectrum
Unfortunatly an allocation does not give you free reign to use your band however you would like. There is (lots of) fine print involved.
Current LS allocation to which you refer is subject to the FCCs ATC integrated services rule where boundless proliferation of ground stations is NOT permitted within said bands.
I'll probably get modded "-1, Troll", or more likely, "-1, Flamebait", for the strong language, but this whole LightSquared vs. GPS mess seems like a total crock of badly-designed GPS crapola to me.
If only RF were that simple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodulation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift
Imagine a Boeing 787 Dreamliner conducting an nighttime instrument approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when the GPS signal is overwhelmed at a critical phase. Now imagine that same Boeing 787 Dreamliner plowing into downtown Arlington, Virginia at 150 miles per hour, leaving a wake of bloody body parts and burning jetfuel for a quarter-mile.
Thatâ(TM)s the worst that could happen.
Written by someone who has no clue how an instrumented landing actually works.
I'm all for bashing LS about real interference issues and their associated power play to avoid paying fair market value for that type of nationally scoped allocation like everyone else.
There are plenty of life safety arguments one can honestly make about LS interference. And it is all not just about inability to figure out where exactly to send help when shit goes wrong.
Precision timing is critial for self organizing communication networks intended to prevent accidents from occuring in the first place. Utilities often use GPS based clocking sources for silly unimportant things like phase management. Things you would think would have nothing to do with GPS turn out to have important dependancies.
If GPS were gone for a day I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of instances of breakdown of systems where usable albit degraded backups were avaliable but people had no clue or practice in operating properly.
If anything good comes out of LS it will be some hedging against the real problem of overdependance on GPS.
From a performance perspective it might be interesting, but from a power consumption perspective the SSD blows away a handful of DDR3 sticks
Higher density, process and lower operating voltages have been dropping DRAM power consumption many times over in the last few years. Latest DDR3 is able to run 24GB on 7 watts.
Whether you will see better or worse power consumption depends on your workload (how much longer or shorter computer needs to run to get the same job done) under each SSD vs DRAM usage scenario.
I don't know, if deep enough underwater storms won't really effect it.
Since its producing energy anyway you could easily run some current to provide active corrosion resistance.
Anti fouling coatings are avaliable although this will certainly remain a maintenance item.
Seems like a simple enough design that it might work... I think at the end of the day feasibility will be driven more by economies of scale and steady build up of dead labor engineering costs out of the system.
You can purchase 24 GB of ram for less than $200 today. I would love to see a side by side performance and energy consumption comparison with someone who decided to spend their extra money on DRAM.
I suspect what you'll see is that after a day all read operations are resolved instantly from the OS disk cache without the performance and power hit of flash. If you have write intensive workloads the current crop of SSDs would not be for you anyway.
My understanding is that you can patent a function but not a style, logo, look..etc. Works of "art" are protected by copyrights not patents.
In either case Apple sucks for using legal systems to try and keep others from competing with them for reasons that are clearly bullshit.
The 1984 "Big Brother" concept is 1984 - in the 21st century, you will not be arrested because some office drone in the ministry of truth read through all your e-mails and decided you're a bad person. No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why , because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
For the life of me I don't understand why LEA would share such a valuable feedback channel with terrorists... Am I on the no fly list? ... How about now? .. Now? .. Now??? ... Seriously still not on your list?
It seems like there has been some effort from the US to further increase tensions with Iran - including a string of three catastrophic, improbable but still officially accidental explosions at various Iranian industrial facilities. Add that to Stuxnet and targeted assassinations of Iran's brightest nerds, and it paints a pretty clear picture that we the West are trying to ratchet up tensions. On the other side, there are probably hardliners who are happy to play along. I don't like any of this escalation.
My guess covert US involvement is at least partially to keep Isreal from feeling soo cornered it sees no alternative other than a unilateral strike against Iran.
For all practical purposes Isreal == USA. If they do something stupid we pay the price for cleanup / consequences.
So wouldn't the right way to go be to update TCP for the times? i mean we didn't slow computers down so we could keep PATA or PCI, we came up with new tech like SATA and PCIe to take advantage of the faster throughput. Shouldn't we do the same here as well?
We have SCTP which was intended to replace TCP except nobody seems to care.
At the end of the day the concept of TCP is not rocket science - there is a limit and diminishing returns to what more can be done twoard making TCP a perfect reflection of the concept of TCP.
Congestion management and ack/windowing have certainly evolved into high arts..but fundementally all TCP does is implement a loss free ordered data stream on top of an unordered lossy packet switched network.
This means your core limitation is embedded in the definition of TCP itself...the problem of head-of-line blocking. By using TCP you are by definition limiting yourself to the constraints of TCP.
Realtime voice/video and multi-player games use their own protocols because they are not willing to accept the constraints of TCP. It is not the implementation of TCP that is holding them back. It is the *concept* of TCP.
In my opinion we need more IP protocols to better handle varied use cases more than we need a new TCP.
If you look at buffers allocated to fast multi-gigabit interfaces at the core of the network they are simply not large enough compared to forwarding rates involved to be able to induce the kinds of delays needed to cause Internet wide problems.
You can argue they may not be ideal for real time voice, game or video communication when these links are oversubscribed but no doomsday is possible.
Today buffer bloat effects are mostly observed at the edge even though they need not always be.
Failure of a congestion control algorithm to control link saturation does not translate into congestive collapse of the larger network. It just results in *your* network connection turning to shit. When netalyzer runs it intentionally saturates your link at that time. In the real world only a few portions of the edge are ever saturated to the extent congestion control failure becomes an issue leading to more packets through core routers. The number of edge machines in this category would need to be significant to cause a rerun of previous issues.
That condition can not be met due to self feedbacks. If everyone maxed their pipes at once the core would saturate self-limiting edge saturation due to gross over-provisioning of available edge bandwidth in relation to core bandwidth which would ensure congestion control algorithms function properly.
I'm not arguing there is not a problem or more can't be done. I'm just arguing the doomsday congestive collapse scenario is bullshit.
I was under the impression the complete DNA sequence for a human can be stored on an ordinary CD.
Given the amount of data mentioned in TFA it it begs the question what the hell are they sequencing? The genome of everyone on the planet?
$27.63 seems oddly specific
I've always wondered what happens to laws with specific dollar amounts over time. Are they inflation adjusted regularly or do they just wreak even more havoc as they age?
I work with DC power in Telecom and it has 3 huge advantages I can think of off the top of my head:
3) Any old technician with a brain in their head can run DC power feeds to equipment relatively safely due to the low voltages involved. AC power work of any kind should have a qualified electrician involved.
Short the posts of a car battery, count the number of milliseconds it takes the pliers to be welded to the leads... Then come back here and tell us all about how low voltage is "safe" and requires no qualifications.
Wouldn't it make more sense to drive at 12v with an insane amperage behind it, than to drive at 380v and garantee the necessity of a voltage regulator rated for high voltages?
I mean, the whole reason for doing away with ac current was to eliminate the rectifier and regulator circuits, which belch heat into the data center
Only if you run a copper mine :)
I told you bitches I would prevail one day!
There seems to be a popular/fundemental misunderstanding of the tesla/edison debate.
DC is MORE effecient on the wire than AC given the same voltage, amperage and wire gauge.
The reason for this is in AC systems eddy currents induced by changing electric fields at 50/60hz cause electrons to migrate away from the core effectivly reducing wire size.
Why AC has been the choice for so long is an engineering problem.
Building rectifiers to convert AC to DC from huge AC generators which produce virtually all of our electricity with the kinds of voltages needed to carry massive quantities of volumes of energy is difficult, unreliable and ineffecient..even today.
Back then it was practically impossible. The choice between Tesla and Edison really boiled down to high vs low voltage. Low voltage transmission required impossible quantities of copper or decentralized generation.
Tesla wanted larger more centralized generation which given what we use for fuel these days is an exceedingly smart move.
It used to be worst case your arch nemesis would social engineer themselves a scary but somewhat amusing swat raid at 3am..
Death from above raining on my parade with live ordinance is no joke.
There is no algorithm possible that can say for sure where an attack came from. Such technology simply does not exist especially in the face of thinking advasaries who would undoubtably seek to use US munitionions as a force multipler against their advasaries. Not all conspiracies are false.
Barring misguided censorship in the name of big media, the United States is still relatively free. We can and seriously should have a frank talk about the nature and extent of filtering in the United States. To suggest that Russia and China are serious alternatives, however, doesn't advance this discourse in any meaningful way.
Baidu might suck for researching the perils of tank student interactions yet you won't find a better resource for your faux holday shopping needs.