Meanwhile in Tuva
Some farmer is trying to decide whether these odd foil wrapped bricks that say FOOD are edible or not, and someone else is freaking out about a huge silver-white space alien invader that appeared out of the sky in a fireball.
726 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2014
…and then the ghost cried, "DOOM! YOU ARE DOOMED!"
"Ahhhh!" the user screamed. "Why am I doomed?"
"THE OWNERS OF THIS HOUSE," cried the ghost, "KNOW NOT THEIR OWN WI-FI PASSWORD!"
"Oh no! My connectivity!" said the user. "Wait… ghost, do you know the password?"
"NOOOOOOO!" and then it vanished, leaving the user huddled in terror and fear.
Planes can kill planes, birds can kill birds, and there are now drones that kill drones. Additionally, planes have killed birds, birds have killed planes, and birds have killed drones. Therefore, logically a drone can kill a plane. It's your classic trilemma symmetry!
(This excludes drones intentionally designed to kill planes since it's a little harder for civilians to own SAMs.)
Under a strict interpretation of local weapons laws, in my area this would count as "defensive clothing" and would be illegal to wear without somehow magically getting the police to issue you a concealed firearms permit (hint: they don't unless you're wealthy and famous).
"You don't, it doesn't count."
-The court system.
"They're all guilty of something anyway."
-Our heroes in blue
"This is going to have to be addressed on a case by case basis by defendants who will have to be able to afford expensive lawyers and appeals with no help from us."
-HARD ON CRIME District Attorney
"You guys fucked up my life and now it's either crime or starvation."
-Guy who got felony record and sex offender listing for a misdemeanor
Surely you jest, as a non-domiciled person* my heroically vast income gets channeled through investment schemes and offshore havens; its hardly reportable as income at all.
*I think that's the English term for it. Over here in the US if you are intelligent enough to have that sort of lifestyle without paying the fed, the correct term is President-elect.
The best (worst) part of Lifelock's CEO SSN stunt was the one person they managed to catch using the stolen number (no preventative value, apparently) was a desperate mentally disabled man who possibly didn't even realize that it was wrong to use this freely offered SSN. Then their lawyers coerced him on video into signing a confession he certainly was incapable of understanding. The police did a collective facepalm and said they couldn't prosecute thanks to Lifelock sticking their dick into the pudding.
Meanwhile, Symantec keeps looking for new opportunities to turn uselessness into an actual product standard.
"THIS BABY'S HAVING REAL PROBLEMS, CAN YOU HELP"
"Oookay, is this a person baby or a colloquial term for an equipment item?"
"ITS BRAND NEW, FREQUENTLY STOPS MOVING AND IS TURNING BLUE ALL THE TIME"
"Same question as before."
"I GET BSODS EVERY TIME I TRY TO RUN A MANUAL BACKUP"
"Alright, then, that's a computer and you're talking to the right people."
My equipment room phone extension used to be 61, and my company is in the 617 area code (American, Eastern MA). Every time anyone in the company tried calling an outside line without properly dialing out first it would ring my phone.
They fixed this mostly by me unplugging my phone in the equipment room and then promoting me to a job with an actual office with a different phone extension.
The phone tells you so, of course! I'm sure it's telling you the truth. You're the phone's owner, with full control over every aspect of your device, not the multitude of corporate and government interests who are stakeholders in your phone's ability to gather personal data.
Then the police authorities will simply follow their usual standard operating procedure and declare it arbitrarily illegal under a vague interpretation of existing laws. Then they will find someone wearing the glasses/dazzle makeup/whatever who is unsavory enough not to garner public sympathy, prosecute him, and therefore set a legal precedent to apply in the future.
This is America- the country where some towns ban baggy pants, or can legally use them as a valid reason to stop-and-frisk.
If banks made long-term predictions about strategies that could go wrong or worst-case scenarios, they'd be more liable for deliberately running programs into the ground anyway for short-term profits.
Then again when the worst-case scenario is "taxpayer bailout, pay executive bonuses anyway" that tends not to encourage responsible forethought,
This was me with our main bioinformatics machine four months ago. Fortunately it was under a full service contract and was getting regular backups. All of the following items were performed by the vendor's service engineers or by me under their direction.
First service action: Replace degraded disk, attempt rebuild, borks.
Second action: Source and replace RAID controller, all disks, goes titsup.
Third action: Replace entire server under warranty.
I am an ex-IT generalist, currently a geneticist and technical scientist, I do not think of myself as ignorant about computer systems, but as far as I know RAIDs are sinister and mysterious forces of nature that cannot be understood by typical mortals.
I have a seven year old flip phone and a two year old 'budget' tablet that work great for all the things and I have no desire to upgrade either device. AFAIK Samsung has a history of making reliable devices and unfortunately the exception to that happened to be a high-end flagship product.
According to your calculations, Symon, the thrusters used for this maneuver have a specific impulse of 147 seconds. Before analyzing that, let's compare it to my homework.
Mass of Juno postburn: 1700.0kg
Mass of expended fuel: 3.6kg
deltaV: 2.59 m/s
The ideal rocket equation:
2.59m/s = (Isp)(9.8m/s^2)(ln(1703.6/1700)) gives an Isp of 125 seconds, differing from your estimate because I estimate Juno is 300kg closer to empty than you do. Still, our numbers match fairly closely.
What does this mean? Juno's RCS thrusters use hydrazine monopropellant, which has a theoretical maximum Isp of ~230 seconds. So this burn was in fact fairly inefficient in a thermal sense. Since hydrazine decomposition is exothermic, this inefficiency may be attributed largely to the small size of the engine, and the desire to run 'cold' as to avoid damage to the motors and payload. The engineers who figured this stuff out when planning the mission probably realized the savings on engine mass, thermal shielding, and radiators, would outweigh the fuel mass efficiency of larger, hotter RCS engines of the same reliability.
I suspect that Samsung doesn't want to grossly announce to the public that they can actually do this. I mean, sure, they can do it, and we know they can do it, but they don't want to be screaming on the front page "We can brick anyone's or everyone's phone whenever we want, it's not really your phone."
Space exploration is one of the few things a government can spend money on that is strongly, arguably, of benefit to the entire human species. Going to the moon, for example, was far more than a stunt- even the most rational critics would have to concede that there was real economic benefit from the surge in science and technology far greater than the monetary cost of the programs themselves.
To put it in perspective: In 2016 NASA had a budget of $19.3 billion, of which I will personally pay $60-70 out of my income, which is paying for a few minutes of a fellow scientist's time or a few little parts that are going to end up exploring another planet. The 2008 AIG bailout of $180 billion cost me personally about $300, which for all I know went directly into some billionaire's overseas nontaxable bank account.
I sincerely hope the ESA manages to recontact their lander and get it working. Whenever I feel the temptation of pride in NASA's scientific achievements (such as Mars landings), I remember that my professional reference library is full of papers and studies by colleagues from more countries on Earth that I can name.
Yes lets give out highly breakable devices to incredibly competitive individuals who are inevitably going to be placed in losing situations and traditionally experience catharsis by slamming or throwing various handheld objects against the cold, unfeeling earth that is betraying their team. What could go wrong.
Belichick has too much self-control to actually slam his tablet, but it leaves him frustrated.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to most people, the cool part of the modular phone project was the modular hardware aspect- which has been killed- and not the bits of OS that are being used for other things that are not modular phones. At the end of the day, we don't get a modular phone.
To be fair to Owlet, they are not selling (and it would be either very expensive, or very stupid) their baby monitor as a medical device.
Also to be fair to them, this is horribly bad security that arguably "compromises the average use case and expectation for a device of this type" regardless of any large-type disclaimer of responsibility.
I would rather attempt to disarm a live land mine by hand, than be in charge of attempting to integrate the WTF of contemporary Yahoo into the labyrinthine corporate organization that seems to be running Verizon.
And honestly either task sounds more fun than trying to get first tier Verizon support to solve a serious issue in the first place, but at least having to deal with reps with a dubious command of English can hardly make it worse, right?
Those devices tend to fail one or more of the "select", "locate" and "lethal force" parameters, unless you count natural selection against stupid/reckless/unprepared people as a deliberate target engagement algorithm.
Seriously though, that's why in most civilized places there are laws regulating the deployment of electric fences and hunting traps, and mandating visibility and signage of level crossings.
Apple v. Samsung drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Patent lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises…. ...Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Apple v. Samsung, without knowing how or why; whole user groups have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new iMac Blueberry G3 , has grown up, possessed himself of a Galaxy 7, and trotted away into the other world.
October 2016- Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer has announced a career transition into professional acting, and in a press conference today said that he had accepted a role in Michael Bay's hotly anticipated 2018 remake of Casablanca, promoted as a more "explosive and explicit" adaptation of the dated and anachronistic 1942 original.
Ferrer performed a line from his audition script for the press:
"I am shocked- shocked- to find prostitution going on in here!" (cut to huge explosion)