2,762 karma · joined January 1, 2017
Or "sacrificial part" -- designed to break first to protect the rest of the system. The NTSB report (https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...) is an interesting read, by the way.
what would possess someone to introduce a padding oracle/side-channel into something that didnt even need it??
https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/10/6/779
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450662/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7233687/
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.001...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.21.20179671v...
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/jimmunol/198/10/4046.full.p...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191632/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7363620/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11906-020-01073-x
Yes, but a loitering anti-air missile.
Internal-combustion engines are not limited by the Carnot efficiency; see page 4 of these slides. In fact, latest-generation Priuses gets almost 40% thermal efficiency on the gasoline engine, and large diesel engines -- thanks to lean combustion (favorable ratio of specific heats for the gases that push on the piston), no throttling losses, higher compression ratio -- do even better.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f8/deer11_ed...
The canonical example is the combined heat/power/chilled-water plants often found in university campuses. There's a gas turbine, usually running on natural gas, and its hot exhaust gas is used to make steam. The chilled water is usually generated by variable-speed centrifugal chillers, which are remarkably efficient machines compared to smaller-scale refrigeration systems. Nowadays, there's centrifugal chillers that don't even need oil in the refrigerant to lubricate the bearings because the bearings are active magnetic bearings (like in turbomolecular vacuum pumps and uranium enrichment centrifuges): the shaft with the turbine/motor is made to levitate and a computer actively controls its position to micrometer accuracy. Oil-free magnetic bearings not only eliminate a source of frictional loss but also allow for more efficient heat transfer in the heat exchangers (https://mnashrae.org/downloads/Presentations/magnetic_bearin...) because there's no oil to provide unwanted insulation between the copper surface and the refrigerant inside.
Since a single entity controls the buildings and the utility tunnels alike, there are steam and chilled water pipes going to every building. In each building the steam is passed through heat exchangers to heat potable/domestic hot water and also heat hot water that'll be used for heating air. (It's also possible to have a single-phase system where no steam is generated at the central plant -- just hot water; apparently there are efficiency gains from doing so). The chilled water is directly used for cooling air. Equipment that needs heating or cooling can be plumbed into the facility's heating hot water or chilled water systems, rather than requiring their own (smaller and less efficient) heating or vapor-compression refrigeration systems.
The electricity generated on-site might be somewhat more expensive than grid rates since your utility's large-scale generation facilities are hopefully more efficient. In exchange, the waste heat from the generation process -- which would otherwise be discarded -- will keep your buildings and equipment warm for free (well, for the cost of moving steam / hot water around and maintaining the system).
You can be clever and throttle your gas turbine based on the facility's instantaneous electrical / chilled-water / steam requirements (and even import power from the grid if it's economical); or run the chillers a bit more than necessary overnight (and store the chilled water in tanks) so during the day there's less load required on the system.
Ironically, the obverse task -- trying to create a molecule that acts on similar neurobiological targets as an illegal drug but doesnt get people "high" or look like a molecule from an illegal drug -- can be similarly fraught. The flagrant example is BIA 10-2474, an experimental drug meant to target the endocannabinoid system in a roundabout way: not by directly activating receptors, but by inhibiting an enzyme that degrades the endogenous chemicals that activate endocannabinoid receptors, which would, ideally, have similar effects as directly activating those receptors. A trial of it killed one person and irreversibly and severely neurologically damaged a few others. This isn't to claim that FAAH inhibition is doomed to failure, just that safely messing around with sublimely complex neurochemistry is difficult; adding constraints like "must not make people feel high" or "must not look like Prohibited Molecules" makes it needlessly harder.
For operations on accounts where illicit access can cause massive irreversible damage -- either by exfiltrating private information (emails, DMs/PMs, posts on locked accounts, etc) or by making a post that appears authorized (the more notable the victim the worse it gets) -- there has got to be some sort of two-man rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule) integrated into the system that can't be bypassed by the people with authority to make changes to accounts. Otherwise any insider / careless spear-phishing victim will make the changes they want, and theres no reason the adversary will limit themselves to posting shoddily-executed (they used the same address instead of generating one per victim!) bitcoin scams.
Furthermore, i'd really like there a way for any user (not just bluechecks) to opt-in to some sort of feature where Twitter enforces more stringent requirements/documentation/delays for the email/phone-change / password-reset processes -- at the cost of accepting higher delays or maybe even monetary payment.
There's no reason i need such critical account procedures to happen on twitter (or my email accounts, for that matter) to happen in real-time, and i would happily give that up in order to require that such a procedure only happen after, like, a week of enforced, non-bypassable delay where they contact me with details of the change on all my phone-numbers and emails every day.
You're absolutely correct and i wholeheartedly concur with you on all this. i'd add Mac OS X (at least Catalina) to that as well, stuff like switching virtual desktops shows an animation and there's no way AFAICT to disable it.
Unless there's serious computation/data-transfer (including over a network) happening, i feel like computer user-interfaces really shouldn't have human-perceptible latency; and even then, only the specific component that's requiring computation/data-transfer should get latency'd, it's inexcusable for a whole system to get slow because one application is doing a lot.
"Bring" is the wrong word here, because building up industrial capacity in US for critical sectors (including but not limited to pharmaceuticals and electronic components / semiconductors) doesnt mean destroying the capacity that exists abroad.
But yes, I do believe there should be sufficient manufacturing capacity in CONUS so that if on 1 January 2020 all the borders of the US had been closed to all goods/people indefinitely; life could continue as usual in the US: no medication shortages, no ventilator shortages, no mask/respirator shortages, and no iPhone shortages.
Right now we have China openly stating (https://twitter.com/YanzhongHuang/status/1235300037875335170) stuff like this:
> China's Xinhua News just posted a piece titled "Be bold: the world owes China a thank you", which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be "plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus".
How does this make you feel?
In the end there's no substitute for having manufacturing capacity in your own country -- whether it means resiliency in the face of these sorts of events, or whether it means that second-hand/surplus/inactive tooling/consumables/equipment/experience can find its way to smaller-volume sectors and enable what'd otherwise be unprofitable. You can go to a machine shop in the US today and there's a nontrivial probability of seeing equipment that was made in the 1940s because it still works! This is the enduring power of a robust industrial base.
This isn't a "China vs US" thing; i bear zero ill will towards China and their massive gain of industrial capacity, my ire is solely focused towards those in power (government and industry alike) who presided over the suicidal deindustrialization of the United States and Europe.
The net result is that it's China who's able to send medical aid (ventilators, masks, respirators, test kits, etc) to Italy, and not the US, if only because the US is incapable of meeting its own needs: https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675
> Further research is required to understand the influence of different icing parameters on ice adhesion and to assess the compatibility and robustness of such surfaces in operational environment (i.e., rain and sand erosion, UV resistance, interaction with other fluids, such as hydraulic and anti‐icing)
Also Philippe Spalart's quote is right on the money: "It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist".
i think most items that are "sold and shipped by amazon" are commingled as well.
It's not a small significance, and it's not FUD. It's admittedly possible to take some measured numbers for the prevalence of one of the nitrosamines, put that through a dose-response model (of controversial accuracy) and come up with low-sounding numbers of expected cancers, but that's not enough to dismiss the issue.
Nitrosamines are notorious carcinogens, the side-reactions that produced them is well-known (if this comment (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/04/th...) is to be believed, known since the 1930s), and detecting these genotoxic impurities is feasible without exotic analytical equipment.
The mechanics of the synthesis routes should never have allowed production of those impurities, the active pharmaceutical ingredient should have been monitored for these impurities as well, and this aberration should have been discovered far earlier than it actually was.
It's a lot like foreign object debris in aircraft, or retained surgical instruments inside a patient. Neither are a guaranteed death sentence, but they're harmful, utterly avoidable, and their prevalence is a good indicator of careless/inappropriate working practices and inadequate monitoring procedures. If their procedures couldn't detect these nitrosamines for years -- what else is being let through? Heavy metals? Pyrogens? Some other class of toxic chemicals? Inadequate/overly-high active ingredient dose/concentration?
I've installed avionics inside other people's aircraft and I was careful to not leave behind any tools / bits of wire insulation / snipped-off wires / screws / etc floating around. Yes, the probability that a single bit of wire will find its way onto uninsulated connectors is small, but that argument is not an excuse for sloppy working methods. With life-critical systems, it's not OK to be careless just because someone else might catch the problem or because there's other subsystems that'll attenuate the severity of the fault.
i think this is not exactly correct. The scooter-riding apps i've tried do make users take a photograph of the correctly-parked scooter after the ride, and even if there wasn't that enforcement in place, if the riders are to use the service more than once, they have an incentive to leave the scooters in positions that will be amenable for further riding.
i'm not denying that the riders can be arseholes, but there's also a significant proportion of people who don't use the scooters but are angry at the presence of those scooters and vandalize them, push them over, and even drop them into bodies of water.
That's why i specifically mentioned double-interlock preaction systems, where if someone hits the sprinkler and causes it to open, the only thing that comes out is compressed air (and a trouble/supervisory alarm sounds).
i agree that the lack of a graphic/synoptic display for the smoke detection system was a horrid flaw, especially when rapid response is needed.
However, i feel that the lack of an automatic extinguishing system was pretty grave too; given the excellent record of automatic fire sprinklers in containing -- if not fully extinguishing -- fires, well before the fire brigade arrives.
Of course, accidental activation is a serious concern, but this can be addressed, whether through the use of a double-interlock preaction scheme (where the piping is kept water-free with a valve that is opened only when the heat/smoke detectors signal a fire; and even once the pipes are filled with water, sprinkler heads need to be individually activated with heat) or using a gaseous clean-agent instead of water.
> and LTE
i thought LTE used OFDMA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Manufacturin...
i would suggest looking outside the US. The zoning/land-use regime where single-family zoning dominates is not universal -- see http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zonin.... In fact, Japan kind of is a shining example of upzoning bringing down (and keeping down) rents to levels unthinkable in US cities.
If you mandate luxury in housing, everyone who cannot afford that level of luxury will go without housing -- or will end up in illegal and unsafe sublets with abusive landlords, which is far worse than an apartment of one's own that happens to have a floor area that is below your idea of luxury.