tritium

Meh, if Mark Zuckerberg has only that one, same, tired sideways quote dragged out and tossed around every time criticism is leveled against him, then Christ almighty if he isn't squeaky clean. A little too clean, if you really wanted my opinion.

His attitude and all-around conduct is pretty much that of a boy scout, and to be honest, I find it boring. Linus Torvalds curses like a sailor, and he doesn't spare anyone's feelings with his criticism, whether it's an individual or a broad generalization. Would you mistrust Linux based on the principal developer's language, or is it more about the project's overall opacity?

Mark Zuckerberg's general demeanor can be read from many obvious tells across all the things he touches. He's not dating super models, he's not buying people Audis, his flagship website has one theme for everyone, two colors (blue & white), five uninteresting emojis, and all the personality of AOL and Yahoo! combined. Yet this reveals nothing about what goes on across Facebook's backplane.

If you're going to criticize his character, you have to criticize the depth and breadth of whatever the faustian bargain is, according to the Snowden leaks. You can compare Zuckerberg to Snowden in terms of choices made, but you really can't fault Zuckerberg for using harsh language in casual conversation. It comes across as whiny and pathetic, like some petulant child. Actions speak louder than words, as they say.

Hmmm, so a there's a broad suspicion that endocrine disruption is a widespread problem, and suddenly we see a dubious article provoking confusion, and possibly a lot of very costly research only to determine we might've been barking up the wrong tree?

This story sounds familiar... [0]

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2146171.stm

This makes me want less software control in my vehicle. Ideally none.

Yes, that's the idea. Force specialization in the attack sphere, reduce the attacker population with prerequisite knowledge as an entry barrier, simultaneously shrinking the targetable hosts.

Yes, I get that electronic signaling is electronic signaling, and none of it is actually different, at the transmission layer. It's just more DSP and more fast fourier transforms under the hood.

Yes, technical barriers can be eroded with adapters and facades, but it's an added cost to attack, and reduces detective work in that you have to know someone to jump the learning curve and enter the attack envelope. That means detective work can happen within a smaller social graph, and that alone becomes a deterent from sharing information, because everything becomes need-to-know, and insider awareness is a give away for inside jobs.

It's also easier to stamp out, and ostracize insiders, if they have loose lips or have a tendency to lend and give away the car keys.

Not everything needs to be as cheesy as Encryption DRM for optical movie disks and video games. For critical infrastructure safety is important enough to warrant independent military-grade safe guards.

Do military protocols fail? Yes, we have the enigma machines sitting in enough museums to prove it.

This in not an XKCD "too many standards can be solved with one more standard" concept. Isolation and specialization can be effective defense concepts.

The only way true isolation will emerge, is by regulatory mandate of a purpose defined hardware implementation, with a separate protocol, different datagrams (instead of TCP/IP/UDP packets) and independent land line plants, undersea cables, satellites and more.

Otherwise, you'll always have some goon plugging in a wi-fi router, rigging it to a sat phone with a modem, all just to play quake with their friends, while they idle on some crane barge, or wherever their stuck, bored on some hurry-up-and-wait project plan.

Even then, you'll still have wonder about silicon bugs, or tempest and row-hammer style attacks, for anything software ever touches, when a given industry fails to identify such threats themselves.

Put another way, there doesn’t seem to be any apparent correlation between effort and success.

Much ado about nothing. You could say a waste of time is worth a waste of time.

I don’t think there’s anything to fix here, when the real problem is adults with the power to vote, can have their votes swayed by Saturday morning cartoons, because all they ever look at are Saturday morning cartoons.

Yeah, one terabyte is simply an absolutely gigantic octal value, with a trillion place settings.

Perfect for storing a quantity of high resolution “unique numbers” which you might need to recall at some point, when you want to match them up with other oddly similar (but not precisely equal) high resolution unique numbers.

I hear that you can convert images to “unique numbers” using a technique known as “lossless compression” but that stuff’s all way above my pay grade.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have some really limited applications. There are maybe 5 or 6 silver bullet consumer ideas I can think of, but they’re such prohibitively expensive concepts that I can’t think of a way to bring these ideas to a wide audience to distribute costs, such that mass appeal gains realistic traction toward high adoption and growth potential.

In fact, these ideas might only make sense under circumstances where there is literally nothing to do for really, really long periods of time, waiting around in tight quarters until you’re able to unbuckle and move freely. In other words during space travel.

I hope that’s where this is going. Any other setting or context for application of such technologies doesn’t make any normal amount of sense. And this fits, since space travel isn’t exactly normal yet.

My intuition tells me Carmack and Zuckerburg have discussed this WRT rocket ships and outer space. And that combination of subject matter, legitimate credibility, intellect and wealth is the only thing that makes sense, to justify such a bet.

I don’t think you should feel bad about it. The New York Times should be held to a high standard.

Feature phones that run android will lack an accelerometer, might lack a camera, but any phone without a microphone would certainly be strange.

Nonetheless, there's nothing preventing a system bus from reporting that a virtual device exists, even if there's no physical hardware to match. Besides, as soon as you plug a headset into the audio jack, the microphone becomes available.

The problem with this type of system is that the primary benefit is outnumbered by at least two unwanted detriments.

The primary benefit is that remote control can be effective from around the world and outer space.

This is countered by the reality that your command might get bounced off a satellite, even if you’re across the room from the device you’re controlling remotely.

The converse additional problem is that you could be standing next to a device on the north pole, and someone from antarctica could override you.

We haven’t become sophisticated enough about this level of remote control yet, to mitigate these undesirable side effects of extended range remoting via internet tunnels.

So, the guy “Travis Bickled” you?

Yes, and now you’ve mentioned that it was mentioned in the article. So here we are, mentioning things.

Hey, neat!

Jupiter almost has an octagon on it's north pole (and nearly a pentagonal version on it's south pole), similar to Saturn's northern polar hexagon!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=1930

Also, consider the ecological effects. It may be wiser to coalesce material and fabricate structures as satellites than to import them onto the surface of Earth.

Expiration after installation makes sense from the perspective of planned obsolescence, and in anticipation of long-term-support sunsets.

It makes absolutely no sense to the end user, acting as possessor or potentially a reseller of an object, since the very premise implies that an owner should not be provided total control over their device, that it's never really "theirs", and that a vendor should retain the capacity to take a "sold good" away from the owner, under the guise of expected behavior, built as designed, effectively converting a sale into a rental, in time, perhaps after statutes expire.

It's effectively a back door for manufacturers, so that they can count on well-made products not lasting forever, not in museums, not for resale, not for nostalgia.

A discount, in my mind isn’t quite the same as a rebate, even if the net result is the same.

A rebate usually requires the full retail price to be paid up front, with the cost savings deferred to a seperate transaction, often paid by the vendor, when there’s a retail supply chain intervening between purchaser and the supplier.

Beside the fact that you should be concerned about whether the controlling company goes out of business, or sells your data, here stands yet another reason to never trust devices that require an internet connection to activate in the first place, or phone home periodically to remain active.

This includes phones, cars, self-driving cars, watches, farm equipment, computing devices and anything marketed as an IoT appliance.

One glitch, as minor as an improper system time, and you’re dead in the water.

Wow, you know, I never really thought about it, but this highlights the political premise that all postmortems are only expressions of either extreme shame or heroism, and perhaps only rarely honestly recount mediocre transgressions.

Meanwhile the article links to https://www.igkt.net, which I'm sure, must have some members interested in topology, as applicable to knot tying.

I think it's about force and hardness, contrasted against elastic and inelastic collisions.

Either that, or maybe the caustic qualities have something to do with it? I'm not sure of the chemical aspects of the exhaust, but that part is also mentioned in conjunction with the debris accumulation.

  They also negotiate a rebate.

Geeze, if Honda Accords didn’t look drastically different back then...

But... brain damage?

The level of energy at work, required to cause harm like that would have to operate on the level of two sonar pings from hell, fortunitously converging to form a node with appropriate geometry to harm a watermelon-sized organ.

We know that blasts from high explosives can transmit brain damaging pressure waves through durable vehicular armor, and there aren’t many other sources of energy known to send opportunistic signals through mediums, quite like that.

If I needed to surreptitiously send an accoustic message to an audience positioned at a distance, I might need to use a very powerful source, with a locally inaudible signal that only incidentally becomes audible when crossing other signals, but...

Such a transmission would probably only be effective up to the horizon, and require line-of-sight reception. Provided that the distance for line-of-sight access up to the horizon is about 25-ish miles, depending on topography, and the loudness required for that kind of reach, generating two beams (as powerful as noises produced by attenuated explosive blast waves) seems like it would require some pretty heavy equipment. Like room-sized equipment.

Think about what it takes to push a sound wave several miles, like a ripple across a pond, and what that sounds like up close. Race tracks, rock concerts, passenger jets. These things all readily occupy a three meter cube, at least. Not to mention that the fidelity of such loud noised is very low, and blurred by the intervening air, the further away you get, meaning any digital packet-based transmission would require really coarse, slow bandwidth.

That rules out a lot of sneaky carry-on luggage sized equipment, for generating such signals. Which points, maybe, to no less than two off-site phased-array tone generators forming crossed noise beams for receipt by someone.

Still a lot of mystery to suss out, and a lot of gray areas to speculate upon. And I’m tossing a lot of assumptions into the mix, like whether there was deliberate intent at all, and whether side effects were emergent or not. And while there’d be limits and ceilings based on line of sight, that doesn’t rule out scale of equipment or range of activity.

The only takeaway is that brain damage at a distance requires a lot of intense energy, usually explosive, although deleterious explosive energy and associated noise can scale from sizes relative to something as small as fire crackers and .22L rounds on up.

Given TOR's U.S. Navy roots and the theme of TOR's origin story, I can't say I'm particularly shocked at this. That TOR was a technology developed as part of naval research that "no one wanted anymore" was kind of a flimsy veil, since there weren't any names associated with the narrative.

Similar to bitcoin's story: no one knows who built it, but gee, it's so useful... ~shrug!~

In a shooting war, you wouldn’t want a large conventional rocket attack or zodiac-delivered explosion, to disable the controls for scuttling the ship, and disrupt the chain of command for orders to scuttle due enemy action killing key crew members. The fog of war could lead to enough confusion and damage, such that a seaworthy ship is left afloat with no leadership, in dangerous waters.

Military ships can be difficult to sink, and willfully sinking them might not always be an option. So if the ship is captured, and held long enough to put warheads in the hands of a dangerous people, the weapons could disappear and appear in the hands of someone looking to extract a ransom to return them unused.

With submarines, this is not the case, even if the bottom of the ocean isn’t always unreachable. At least the bottom of the ocean sufficiently complicates salvage, past a certain depth.

It sounds like it’s likely to be subsonic, since whatever it is, it’s maintaining a low profile in every way beyond simply being a highly visible white paint job, and appearing on radar at all.

The ATC commentary suggests a fast relative speed, in reference to other traffic only. So, in the 600MPH to 700MPH region, it would be going faster than most air traffic, but wouldn’t cut the noisy wake of a sonic boom overflight, which means, in my mind it wasn’t going “very fast” or fast enough to put it in the same league as what qualifies for fast for any fighter or other fast military plane.

The “large” description is also vague, but suggesting as big as a passenger jet is my estimate. Perhaps not freakishly large like a KC-10 Extender, C-5 Galaxy or a C-17 Globemaster III [0,1,2]. Large, in aviation, often means “not a 2 passeneger Cessna,” to evoke not scale relative to other humans, but scale of catastrophe if it fell into a neighborhood or if a pilot had to think about colliding with such a thing, which would “win.”

That said, the white paint job sounds uncharacteristic of military/government (especially skunkworks) operations, and the expanding attention of the incident, points to unexpected events.

Another hypothesis is high level leadership asking questions about actual preparedness for something that fits the profile of a sudden terrorist hijacking incident, based on peered civil aviation inputs alone, along with an undisclosed fire drill.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_KC-10_Extend...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-17_Globemaster_III

If the universe expands in a big bang, collapses in a big crunch, and then expands in another big bang, then it’s not a different universe.

The black hole wouldn’t be older than the universe. The black hole is just older than the last, most recent big bang, and the big bang doesn’t explain anything anymore.

It’s disproven as an event of creation. The big bang just becomes different parlance for turtles all the way down.

Wow, paying money to have a large corporation invasively coerce me into agreeing to adopt obligations that only benefit them?

Where do I sign up?