I hired a guy who was in a small time band for 20 years after high school. Traveled all over US. No one ever paid an admission price to hear them. Hotel lobby. Restaurant. Etc. Decided to get a degree at age 40. 20 years of travel showed him the cheapest place in USA. Upper peninsula of Michigan. Mich tech or some such place. Finished degree in three years with summer session. Started as entry level coder at age 44. One of the smartest guys I have met. He joined and enjoyed our London times cryptic crossword puzzle group.
So go north young man.
You are confusing the term "mining" with some kind of digging the earth to find gold or coal. What they call mining is simply the process of validating a large block of transactions. To provide an incentive for validating these transactions they provide a transaction fee. That fee is paid in bitcoins. They used the term mining to "jazz" up the work.
The plan is to make the transaction fee paid to validate the block go to zero at some point in the future. It is expected enough people will be using bitcoins to exchange. And it is in their best interest to validate large blocks of transactions and they will do it for free. That is what is meant by "there will be no more coins to mine".
At that point there will be a fixed number of bit coins and they will be exchanged freely between other currencies. It will be almost like the gold standard. But with one difference. There is some outside chance a suddenly a new gold field might be discovered. Or some sunken vessel of gold discovered and salvaged. Or there could be really El Dorado and it gets discovered. But in the bitcoin universe, you are guaranteed there will not be a sudden influx of new bitcoins. The number of coins are fixed. Their value floats up or down.
Today the private companies and the corporations have more power than the federal government. Yes, they can't arrest you and throw in jail, yet. But they can ruin your life so much it is just as bad as being thrown in jail.
We get all worked up about the government data collection. But what LAPD is doing is perfectly legal for a private company to do. There is already a huge industry of people with license plate scanners to scan every car in a parking lot and tip off repossession companies for the tip money. Private investigators collect such data to use in divorce cases, child custody cases. Stalkers and creeps could use private detective agencies to access such data base of collected license plate scans.
I am not saying, "So we should let LAPD scan license plates". What I am saying is whatever argument you use against LAPD is valid an order of magnitude more for private companies too. And any solution, change we propose should also prohibit such private companies from consolidating such data into some kind of national data base queriable by private detective agencies, repossession companies, divorce lawyers, etc.
When it comes to building mock-ups, there is no one to beat India.
It seems to have built a complete mock-up of a democracy, complete with a mock-up judiciary, a mock up legislature and even a mock up of a functioning economy.
Your name is apt. You must be smoking gunja. Taxation is simply dividend paid by the beneficiaries of government investment in infrastructure, education, peace and security. Some people make full use of it, they make a ton of money and they have to pay a hefty dividend. People who did/could not make use of it pay less. But no matter how poor one is, that person has the potential to create and nurture future American citizens. We must take care of them to get a healthy viable growing next generation.
All that tripe you hear from the right wingers arguing for lower taxes is just the winners of the current generation destroying the ladder they climbed.
Earth is emitting energy in the 300K temp range. Sun is emitting at 6000K range. Classical thermodynamics defines the maximum possible efficiency of conversion purely based on source and sink temperatures. With earth emitting at 300K which is nearly the ambient, where are we going to find a sink? The sun/earth ratio is 6000/300 = 20. To get the same efficiency as the present solar collectors, you need a sink at 15K.
For all this theoretical work, we could think of putting a huge thermocouple with one end in deep space pulled up by the space elevator. Hey! Let us build the space elevator using two different metals and the rungs using non conducting material. Dual project both space elevator and a space thermocouple! It is totally useless except may be it can sell one more issue of Popular Mechanics with cool graphics.
Both the libertarian ideal free markets and the general evolution of species are governed by the same dynamics. Optimize for short term versus long term, rigidly follow what worked before without trying anything new/seek novelty, hedgehog vs fox, etc. And both evolution and free markets do not foresee anything, they don't design for anything. They just keep creating variations and whatever survives survives. Neither evolution nor free market cares who wins or who loses.
That is how natural selection and evolution works, but we don't accept it as the natural thing and resign ourselves to the fate. We constantly use artificial selection. We domesticated plants and animals, we constantly create new cutlivars and breeds. Same way we need not accept the libertarian ideal completely unfettered free market. We can shape the fitness landscape. Government should not pick winners or losers, but Government should stop the race to the bottom. We could demand certain level of resilience, certain level of redundancy in the systems, certain standards. As long as these rules apply to all players, the playing field is level and the free markets and the competition would work.
This is nuanced defense for government regulations in the abstract, but I don't think I would be able to convince anyone. Takes too long, and too many people with vested interest disrupt the communication channels.
Babe Ruth said, "How can you think and hit at the same time?". But that was an intentional misdirection to throw his competitors and rivals off track. Slow motion analysis of ancient footage shows the slugger smuggled into the base a slide rule, a theodolite, an anemometer and a protractor all hidden in his jersey. You really don't believe some one could be that fat and be a star athlete didn't you? The truth is out, he was not fat, he was hiding these instruments in his jersey. He used them to calculate the trajectory of the pitch and the angle and speed at which he should hit the ball.
Well, enough posters have made the same point. But there is some interesting science hidden behind that stupid title and summary. Why does the fly respond to changes in airflow but not the airflow itself?. Flies have very low mass for the amount of surface area they expose to the air stream. Given all the little hairs and wing surface area, the air will feel to them as thick as oil feels to us. They will simply be carried by the air flow. It is not just that they can't fight it, they can't even feel it. It is like us sitting on the surface of the Earth which has a linear velocity of 1500 miles per hour at the equator, but we don't feel it. They can respond only to changes in airflow, which is turbulence. Quite interesting. Looks obvious once the result is known, but I would not have understood this purely based on theory. Of course there are fluid dynamicists who would have known this even before the experiment. Dale Anderson, Pletcher, Tannehill, Parpia.. may be they would have.
Let us say we get to break whatever you are doing and force you to watch this very interesting and enjoyable commercial, some three or four times a day, for about two weeks at a stretch at the end of every quarter. Would you still be so kind to them. Even the most interesting, entertaining, information packed commercial starts grating on your nerves after the sixth or tenth repeat.
Everyday I walk across a bridge built 120 years ago to carry horse and buggy traffic at 5 mph. Today it carries four lanes of traffic with city buses and 18 wheelers at some 40 mph. Would anyone even think of building something with this level of "over specification" or "over building"? Is it any wonder bridges hardly 40 years old designed to carry 18 wheelers at 65 mph are falling apart?
Sometime back some small solar wind even knocked out a satellite. Normally it would not even be a blip in the radar. But that satellite was the link to credit card processing in the pay-at-the pump gas stations. Almost all these gas stations have cut down their employee down to one guy who sells chips and soda. Almost all the bays are self service. When the pay at the pump payment system got knocked out, people had to fill the car and walk in to pay that lone guy. Lines started forming, then the lines stretched, and reached the exit ramps of highways, and the highway started getting blocked. But at the end, after the mess cleared, still there is no incentive to create alternate routing or redundancy in the system.
It costs money to make things secure. To make things robust. But if some company does it the right way and it competes with another company that does not, it is not going to be competitive. Yes, in the long run, catastrophe will strike and the chickens will come home to roost and the corner cutters would find themselves getting the short end of the stick. But, the non-corner-cutter could have been driven out of business before the catastrophe strikes.
So it all depends on the frequency of the odd ball event. If the odd ball event is less frequent than once in a decade, there is no structural incentive for any manager to do the right thing. Most people change jobs once a decade and they will not be there to face the music. This is a systemic structural thing. The race to the bottom is the only race there is.
It might not be a solar storm, or a terrestrial storm. It could be some fiber optic cable being accidentally severed. Or sabotaged. Or an oil spill blocks rail traffic somewhere. So don't think it is mere fear mongering or rationalize it saying solar storms are rare. Systematically our infrastructure has become very vulnerable without redundancy without factors of safety.
I agree with you in the first part. If the products are clearly marked and there is no confusion we should encourage competition. But don't malign customs agents. They do a surprisingly good job for their low pay and constant belittling by everyone.
This is the sparkfun multimeter: https://www.sparkfun.com/produ...
These are the look and feel of Fluke:
https://www.google.com/search?...
I am glad the customs caught and destroyed the Sparkfun's imitations. I might have a different perspective on this than most (native born) Americans. I grew up in India where the " look and feel " infringement is rampant, and there is absolutely no enforcement. The best quality steel cases are made by a company called Godrej. I have seen cheap knock-offs with barely perceptible difference in name "Golred" Godrel" "Gotrej" etc etc.You have to be very careful when you buy stuff. The electrical fittings made by a company called Bos is top of the line. They will pack cheap knock offs inside discarded packaging of Bos and try to sell it to you. You need to fight the retailer, wholesaler and the manufacturer to get the right product. Have you seen "Clogged" tooth paste? Funny as it is, it exists/existed in India sometime back.
But most Americans born here grew up with more honest set of retailers, more honest wholesalers, reasonably effective enforcement, they have not had this cheap imitation knock off problem. The worst you would see is the Walmart brand (Equate?) of nasal spray next to one made by J&J. If you had never gone home and opened a package of Cynthol bar soap and find inside a foul smelling skin abrading cake of caustic alkali with Sinthol stamped on it, you have not been affected by these knock-offs.
So all the power to customs agents to spot the cheap knock-offs and take suo moto action to knock the imitations off the planet.
If he had tried to make the multimeter in the "rounded rectangle" shape, with a form factor that will fit in one's palm, with a readable display facing the user, Apple would have sued zim for $30000 per infringement.
It might sound a little bizarre, but there are some users who demand that "exact reproduction of results of a previous run from the previous version" as an acceptance test of the new version. Even if the vendor proves the old run was buggy, and the old "gold standard" results are bad, they want exact rerun including the bugs. Apparently these customers have written acceptance test documents, written scripts to do the comparison with "gold standard" old results, got it all approved and got it signed off by every one up and down the chain of command. Changing that process requires something akin to getting a constitutional amendment passed. So the vendor doesn't get to sell the next version unless we migrate all the bugs too to the new version.
So many project files will have "version strings". Unless the project is translated into the newer version and saved with a new version string, the code will repeat all old runs. This strange thing goes down the food chain. Some CAD companies would let you "choose" an API from the older version at run time.
Most military image recognition software looks for the outline of a tank. If there is a tree breaking the outline, human beings would identify the tank in milliseconds. Most image recognition software fail. It is a classic problem in image recognition.
It is object behind a translucent screen. It does some AI based image sharpening. It is not the classic tank behind a tree. Nor reconstructing a face partially hidden by faces or hoodies etc.
The entire flight control system is based on trust, and it works out ok because it is in the best interest of the planes to tell the truth. Except for small planes in the narcotics corridor, I don't think there is much of audit of the flight plans and verification of planes and identities.
When control towers "hand over" the planes from one to the next, there is no serious authenticated transfer of stuff. It is completely on trust. Control tower A says, "handing over to the next tower" it basically says, "stop talking to me, call the other guy and get instructions". Pilot calls the next tower, self identifies and asks for directions. If they had filed a fake flight plan of a chartered flight from say Aceh, Indonesia to Tashkent, Tajikistan the plane can change identities and fly through air defense systems without rousing suspicion. So many flight plans get filed, the flight does not take off for some reason or the other, and they don't bother canceling it. But you are right, what you gonna do with a 777 on the tarmac with 260 passengers?
Almost all the conjectures have been quit exotic and very imaginative, which coincidentally keeps the interest alive and boosts TV ratings and acts as click bait.
The delays in turning off the transponder and the data stream to the modem, flying between way points on a well known path etc might be explained by confused and disabled pilots too.
Hypoxia can set in as little as 90 seconds of oxygen deprivation and will severely incapacitate and confuse people. Cabin pressure loss is the most common theory for hypoxia. But cabin pressure loss would deploy oxygen masks, sound alarms and the pilot would have been alert in the first few seconds to declare emergency and radio out. The captain seems to be nerd with home made flight simulator, he would have reacted correctly to oxygen masks dropping from the ceilings.
Carbon monoxide is a way for hypoxia to set in. If there was a slow smoldering fire in the cockpit, not hot enough to trigger fire alarms it could result in incapacitated confused pilots. Again there are CO detectors, and warnings and associated with it.
I am not sure how regularly these systems that detect cabin pressure loss and CO detectors are tested. It is quite expensive to actually deploy all those oxygen masks. So even the regular testing protocol would require the maintenance crew to disable the actual deployment of the oxygen masks and test the detection and deployment signals. They could forget to turn them back on, like the did in the Helios flight disaster I mentioned in another thread. CO detector is chemical based.
They have to be replaced regularly and this is an old plane.
Once the pilots flip switches on and off in confused state lose their consciousness completely, the plane would fly on autopilot following the way points that happened to be programmed.
If there is foul play involved, it would be worthwhile exercise to make sure every flight plan that was file in that duration and every flight directed by the control towers in that time is legit and locate those planes. The pilot(s) could easily turn off the transponder, drop out of radar, pop back in and start using a different call sign. Without a transponder, air traffic control completely trusts the pilot to self identify the plane correctly. If the malefactors had filed a fake flight plan, the plane could change its identity mid flight without attracting attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I hired a guy who was in a small time band for 20 years after high school. Traveled all over US. No one ever paid an admission price to hear them. Hotel lobby. Restaurant. Etc. Decided to get a degree at age 40. 20 years of travel showed him the cheapest place in USA. Upper peninsula of Michigan. Mich tech or some such place. Finished degree in three years with summer session. Started as entry level coder at age 44. One of the smartest guys I have met. He joined and enjoyed our London times cryptic crossword puzzle group. So go north young man.
The plan is to make the transaction fee paid to validate the block go to zero at some point in the future. It is expected enough people will be using bitcoins to exchange. And it is in their best interest to validate large blocks of transactions and they will do it for free. That is what is meant by "there will be no more coins to mine".
At that point there will be a fixed number of bit coins and they will be exchanged freely between other currencies. It will be almost like the gold standard. But with one difference. There is some outside chance a suddenly a new gold field might be discovered. Or some sunken vessel of gold discovered and salvaged. Or there could be really El Dorado and it gets discovered. But in the bitcoin universe, you are guaranteed there will not be a sudden influx of new bitcoins. The number of coins are fixed. Their value floats up or down.
Today the private companies and the corporations have more power than the federal government. Yes, they can't arrest you and throw in jail, yet. But they can ruin your life so much it is just as bad as being thrown in jail.
I am not saying, "So we should let LAPD scan license plates". What I am saying is whatever argument you use against LAPD is valid an order of magnitude more for private companies too. And any solution, change we propose should also prohibit such private companies from consolidating such data into some kind of national data base queriable by private detective agencies, repossession companies, divorce lawyers, etc.
Touche' [takes a bow]
It seems to have built a complete mock-up of a democracy, complete with a mock-up judiciary, a mock up legislature and even a mock up of a functioning economy.
Huawei had stolen the code from Cisco. So it is no big loss for them. They are laughing at NSA for not getting the source from the source.
All that tripe you hear from the right wingers arguing for lower taxes is just the winners of the current generation destroying the ladder they climbed.
For all this theoretical work, we could think of putting a huge thermocouple with one end in deep space pulled up by the space elevator. Hey! Let us build the space elevator using two different metals and the rungs using non conducting material. Dual project both space elevator and a space thermocouple! It is totally useless except may be it can sell one more issue of Popular Mechanics with cool graphics.
That is how natural selection and evolution works, but we don't accept it as the natural thing and resign ourselves to the fate. We constantly use artificial selection. We domesticated plants and animals, we constantly create new cutlivars and breeds. Same way we need not accept the libertarian ideal completely unfettered free market. We can shape the fitness landscape. Government should not pick winners or losers, but Government should stop the race to the bottom. We could demand certain level of resilience, certain level of redundancy in the systems, certain standards. As long as these rules apply to all players, the playing field is level and the free markets and the competition would work.
This is nuanced defense for government regulations in the abstract, but I don't think I would be able to convince anyone. Takes too long, and too many people with vested interest disrupt the communication channels.
Well, enough posters have made the same point. But there is some interesting science hidden behind that stupid title and summary. Why does the fly respond to changes in airflow but not the airflow itself?. Flies have very low mass for the amount of surface area they expose to the air stream. Given all the little hairs and wing surface area, the air will feel to them as thick as oil feels to us. They will simply be carried by the air flow. It is not just that they can't fight it, they can't even feel it. It is like us sitting on the surface of the Earth which has a linear velocity of 1500 miles per hour at the equator, but we don't feel it. They can respond only to changes in airflow, which is turbulence. Quite interesting. Looks obvious once the result is known, but I would not have understood this purely based on theory. Of course there are fluid dynamicists who would have known this even before the experiment. Dale Anderson, Pletcher, Tannehill, Parpia .. may be they would have.
Let us say we get to break whatever you are doing and force you to watch this very interesting and enjoyable commercial, some three or four times a day, for about two weeks at a stretch at the end of every quarter. Would you still be so kind to them. Even the most interesting, entertaining, information packed commercial starts grating on your nerves after the sixth or tenth repeat.
Never in a million years, even if your life depended on it engage in exaggerations.
Don't be tautologically repetitive by repeating the same thing again and again.
Forswear grandiloquence.
Sometime back some small solar wind even knocked out a satellite. Normally it would not even be a blip in the radar. But that satellite was the link to credit card processing in the pay-at-the pump gas stations. Almost all these gas stations have cut down their employee down to one guy who sells chips and soda. Almost all the bays are self service. When the pay at the pump payment system got knocked out, people had to fill the car and walk in to pay that lone guy. Lines started forming, then the lines stretched, and reached the exit ramps of highways, and the highway started getting blocked. But at the end, after the mess cleared, still there is no incentive to create alternate routing or redundancy in the system.
It costs money to make things secure. To make things robust. But if some company does it the right way and it competes with another company that does not, it is not going to be competitive. Yes, in the long run, catastrophe will strike and the chickens will come home to roost and the corner cutters would find themselves getting the short end of the stick. But, the non-corner-cutter could have been driven out of business before the catastrophe strikes.
So it all depends on the frequency of the odd ball event. If the odd ball event is less frequent than once in a decade, there is no structural incentive for any manager to do the right thing. Most people change jobs once a decade and they will not be there to face the music. This is a systemic structural thing. The race to the bottom is the only race there is.
It might not be a solar storm, or a terrestrial storm. It could be some fiber optic cable being accidentally severed. Or sabotaged. Or an oil spill blocks rail traffic somewhere. So don't think it is mere fear mongering or rationalize it saying solar storms are rare. Systematically our infrastructure has become very vulnerable without redundancy without factors of safety.
I agree with you in the first part. If the products are clearly marked and there is no confusion we should encourage competition. But don't malign customs agents. They do a surprisingly good job for their low pay and constant belittling by everyone.
But most Americans born here grew up with more honest set of retailers, more honest wholesalers, reasonably effective enforcement, they have not had this cheap imitation knock off problem. The worst you would see is the Walmart brand (Equate?) of nasal spray next to one made by J&J. If you had never gone home and opened a package of Cynthol bar soap and find inside a foul smelling skin abrading cake of caustic alkali with Sinthol stamped on it, you have not been affected by these knock-offs. So all the power to customs agents to spot the cheap knock-offs and take suo moto action to knock the imitations off the planet.
If he had tried to make the multimeter in the "rounded rectangle" shape, with a form factor that will fit in one's palm, with a readable display facing the user, Apple would have sued zim for $30000 per infringement.
So many project files will have "version strings". Unless the project is translated into the newer version and saved with a new version string, the code will repeat all old runs. This strange thing goes down the food chain. Some CAD companies would let you "choose" an API from the older version at run time.
Small price to pay. You stole all their land.
Most military image recognition software looks for the outline of a tank. If there is a tree breaking the outline, human beings would identify the tank in milliseconds. Most image recognition software fail. It is a classic problem in image recognition.
It is object behind a translucent screen. It does some AI based image sharpening. It is not the classic tank behind a tree. Nor reconstructing a face partially hidden by faces or hoodies etc.
When control towers "hand over" the planes from one to the next, there is no serious authenticated transfer of stuff. It is completely on trust. Control tower A says, "handing over to the next tower" it basically says, "stop talking to me, call the other guy and get instructions". Pilot calls the next tower, self identifies and asks for directions. If they had filed a fake flight plan of a chartered flight from say Aceh, Indonesia to Tashkent, Tajikistan the plane can change identities and fly through air defense systems without rousing suspicion. So many flight plans get filed, the flight does not take off for some reason or the other, and they don't bother canceling it. But you are right, what you gonna do with a 777 on the tarmac with 260 passengers?
He would have to secure some kind of cooperation with the copilot on the suicide plot.
The delays in turning off the transponder and the data stream to the modem, flying between way points on a well known path etc might be explained by confused and disabled pilots too.
Hypoxia can set in as little as 90 seconds of oxygen deprivation and will severely incapacitate and confuse people. Cabin pressure loss is the most common theory for hypoxia. But cabin pressure loss would deploy oxygen masks, sound alarms and the pilot would have been alert in the first few seconds to declare emergency and radio out. The captain seems to be nerd with home made flight simulator, he would have reacted correctly to oxygen masks dropping from the ceilings.
Carbon monoxide is a way for hypoxia to set in. If there was a slow smoldering fire in the cockpit, not hot enough to trigger fire alarms it could result in incapacitated confused pilots. Again there are CO detectors, and warnings and associated with it.
I am not sure how regularly these systems that detect cabin pressure loss and CO detectors are tested. It is quite expensive to actually deploy all those oxygen masks. So even the regular testing protocol would require the maintenance crew to disable the actual deployment of the oxygen masks and test the detection and deployment signals. They could forget to turn them back on, like the did in the Helios flight disaster I mentioned in another thread. CO detector is chemical based. They have to be replaced regularly and this is an old plane.
Once the pilots flip switches on and off in confused state lose their consciousness completely, the plane would fly on autopilot following the way points that happened to be programmed.
If there is foul play involved, it would be worthwhile exercise to make sure every flight plan that was file in that duration and every flight directed by the control towers in that time is legit and locate those planes. The pilot(s) could easily turn off the transponder, drop out of radar, pop back in and start using a different call sign. Without a transponder, air traffic control completely trusts the pilot to self identify the plane correctly. If the malefactors had filed a fake flight plan, the plane could change its identity mid flight without attracting attention.
Either way humanity is doomed. Either it collapses or becomes slaves to the machines who rule the earth.