Posts by roger stillick

Trump's visa plan leaks: American techies first

H1B visa a red herring..

Here in the good old USA any spouse holding a H1B residence visa can simply BUY an EXISTING BUSINESS and get on with making money.. Here on the NW Oregon Coast failed restaurant and motel franchises are sold on the cheap to just those folks.. If they are any good at milking a cash cow they are legally working without the Green Card (their employees work, owners pay themselves first)..

IMHO= Being successful in a Business seems to Trump any immigration laws (the joke)..RS.

New US rules on 'vehicle-to-vehicle' communications under consultation

DARPA SWARM TECH software??

Tested recently by US military.. mini drone swarm launched by an FA-18 connected to each other.. forming a distributed hive mind and "did things using GPS for position info..

IMHO= this sounds like an Electric Smart Road to me.. the inferred FFT imaging over all who participate gives everyone participating an extremely fine grain picture of the vehicles, the road, and each vehicles intentions..

Sadly this will never be implemented as each Manufacturer will want to "own" the process.. RS.

Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

Re: All this chatter about a (previously) universal constant

Anathem= Concepts from Roger Penrose's books on math: Eg. "road to Reality"..

YUM, first 16 chapters is a review of Math Analysis to enable reading the rest of his book..

caveiat= had to read the book 3 times, First as a SF Novel, Second quickly to see what was covered, Last to actually answer his test questions and get something out of this exquisit book.. RS.

Re: Creates more problems than it solves?

THX1138v2= Welcome to the Buddhist Religion..

The Universe has Always Been Here.. and probably goes on Forever..

With actual Infinity, Time is not relevant, any possible numeric system is actually Zero..

and so are we.. Do the best you can and try to do no harm..

IMHO= Becoming Aware is a wonderful experience..

All of our maths and sciences attempt to help achieve.. Nirvana.. RS.

Zombie Moore's Law shows hardware is eating software

Re: Chuck Moore's Law

Unfortunately the paradigm is exactly right, and it also applies to parts count on hardware..

IMHO=less is always more if it actually works.. RS.

Fast Internals Useless if it cant TALK

AT&T's old single Power PC chip had communication channels internal to the chip to allow anything the processor did to be IO'd externally.. IBM's current Power 8 chip has 8 processors inside a wrapped around a non-blocking switching network on chip connected to a wideband IO MXR..

Haswell and newer Intel chips have the Processors, alas they have a blocking communications system forcing space/ time/ space MXing for the IO stuff.. like limited instruction set boxes, they might appear to be faster, their data crunched throughput is really not much faster..

Hypervisor Software and divided data streams allow these Intel chips to scream.. however the IBM Power 8 architecture CPU's runs simply as fast w/o special sauce software to make it work faster, or at all (sort of what this article implies= Hardware + Special sauce gives Moore's Law traction).. Happy C-64 ?? (still faster than my Haswell laptop)..

IMHO= a non blocking network is needed on chip to take advantage of the many cores on a chip..RS.

CenturyLink set to merge with tier-one provider Level 3 for $34bn

Rural USA has no Level 3

Out here on The NW Oregon Coast we had QWEST w/corroded out copper DSL and a cable service offering oversold internet service 56-300 Kb.. QWEST merged with Century Link 10 years ago and we now have 7 Mb DSL on fiber to the hub with aerial fiber to hubs in every place there is a group of customers.. Hubs in RV parks, Apartment complexes, rural subdivisions, and Subscriber Carrier terminals feeding local pots lines..

Q= how does Level 3 get better than this ?? Do they really have universal fiber to the curb ?? Or, do they pick the available low hanging fruit ??

IMHO= VOIP is not broadband, and Century link is a world spanning broadband carrier.. merging the 2 is simply synergy, or the combo will be much better than each alone.. RS.

caveiat= i am a retired QWEST comm tech..

Firefox to doctor Pepper so it can run Chrome's PDF, Flash plugins

Re: unsafe at any sandbox

IMHO= Here in USA we are months away from DIRECTV aka AT&T video offering their services in it's entirety to internet streaming service as a precursor to the satellite service going dark (stated sale goal of AT&T)..

Firefox needs to fix Linux / flash or remain redundant for world wide video streaming use.. RS.

Adobe reverses decision to kill NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux

Streaming Video ??

Using Ubuntu - Mate= lost the ability of the Netscape Browser to support Streaming Video..

Or, no NHK-TV, no NPR-TV, no streaming video of any kind.. HTML-5 stuff works ok..

a technical complaint to NHK-tv staff resulted in a reply last month= "they were looking into it'..

IMHO= global TV folks finally realized a large percentage of their audience couldn't view them..

Those same TV folks probably asked Adobe to "fix it'.. RS.

Study of asexually reproducing honeybee ponders: But why the mass murder?

Mason Bees do some of this, NOT Apis bees...

The NW Oregon Coast has few flowers and fewer veg gardens... so no Apis honey bees...

To get plant pollination, we have to buy tubes of Mason Bees, most do not survive the winter...

The housing areas 5 miles inland have 5 types of Apis bees to work their gardens, with some working beehives...

AFIK= most hive failure here due to AG insect control chemicals... RDS.

Australian astroboffins reveal hundreds of hidden galaxies

Cosmography of the Local Universe ??

ESA several years ago made this 17 min video map..

Parks and 300 others redid all of the ESA's Space telescope data...

Seems the WMAP data seemed to be bogus, after 18 months we got the map...

Joke Alert= Parks is in Stage 1 of the Benchly Park Historical Archiving System,

OR, take a few pictures and bin it... IMHO=most astro-boffins know this stuff...RS.

How to build a starship - and why we should start thinking about it now

Do Forever= Launch better Starships yearly, Return...

Sarcasm alert= better check out the TV series "the Expanse" b/f doing anything...

Apparently even nearby space exploration with humans on board is next to impossible...

Traveling anywhere w/ hundreds of tons of nukes on board is even less of a good idea...

IMHO= Launch an "out there" improved robot interstellar probe yearly w/ lessons learned...

Joke Alert= Hope our robot explorers remember us until we develop workable Star Gates...RDS.

Boffins unwrap bargain-basement processor that talks light and current

CISCO 15454 Fiber Terminal

Ref Google Images= CISCO 15454 manual...

IMHO= every fiber terminal similar to the CISCO 154454 fiber transmux / terminal has had a direct fiber to electrical interface chip assembly... these folks have a single chip processor version with similar functions that unfortunately look like the 10 year old stuff... great for hobby and makers kit, just not patentable as new teck stuff...RDS.

POLAR DINOSAURS prowled ARCTIC NIGHT, cast doubt on COLD BLOOD theory

WIKI= Azolla Event...

My Son told me about this when he was in Botany class at NAU many years ago... it is common knowlege by most Biologists / Bio Chemists, but kept a quiet subject as it upsets grant funders.

Seems 49 MY ago CO2 levels went from 3500 ppm to 650 ppm, over an 800k year span... Azolla weed sequesters CO2 very efficiently and later becomes crude oil... YUM, my car loves that stuff.... RDS.

BORN to HURL: Man's shoulders are head and shoulders above apes, gorillas, chimps etc

Blame it on the Atlatl and natural selection

IMHO= the Atlatl w/it's unique bone launching hook and twin-holed stone weight has been found in every cave site on every continent that pre-history man lived in as far back as 50k years ago.

This simple weapon allowed man to kill just about everything else for food... got us out of the caves...spears and bows n arrows MUCH later for warefare use...RDS.

CSI GALAXY: Cause of death = STRANGULATION

Deus ex Machina ??

We seem to get a lot of these "ah-ha" momemnents, that, when looked at a second time are simply a plot fix in the unwritten book of everything...

Simply combine Deus ex Machina with the Anthropic Principle and you get the current 'Big Bang' view of the universe...

IMHO= the 800 Pound Gorilla in the room is simply= what is Hydrogen, and, how is it apparently being formed ?? Hydrogen or lack of it seems to be the basic problem of everything...

caveiat= i am a Buddhist techno historian... RS.

Boffins set to reveal state of play on fully duplex comms - on the same FREQ

Re: See the Cambridge Site ad for July 2015 Conference... Pt. 2

Need to mention "echo-supressers" or TR switches that turn a 2 way telephone conversation into a 1 way at a time conversation... preventing standing wave reflections of your own voice (generated by every digital switch your conversation passes thru) being heard as echos of your own voice as you talk...

Basically the preson talking mutes the other end, when the other talks, your end is muted... if both ends talk at the same time, both ends are muted... so, you really need to stop n listen if you want to find out what the far end is saying...

Please note= echo suppressers are Not part of any Duplexer scheme...RS.

See the Cambridge Site ad for July 2015 Conference...

Sponsered by Rhode and Schwartz, and 2 others... Mentioned Plessy doing this in the 1970's with VHF radio repeaters similar to WECO E-6 voice cable repeaters in the 1960's... Negative Impedance Balanced Bridge networks that end up acting as bi-directional quasi analog amplifiers (or the definition of a Duplexer)... add some noise cancelling gear/alogrythms and you get what these folks are talking about... i think... can signup at the Cambridge site for symposium notes this July... until then, Anyone's Guess as to what is really going on, or ask Dr. Bose what he thinks= it's his patent...

Please Note= TMC corp was making IF shift noise limiters for HF SSB in the same 1970's that Plessy made their AN/PRC-25 manpack radios w/audio speech VOGAD processor...(noise reduction eq.)...RS.

Need speed? Then PCIe it is – server power without the politics

IBM Power 8 or better interal busses...

address this quite nicely... sorry Intel, my Haswell chipped Chinese Laptop has the port... nothing fast to hook to it... so it's a workstation-nothing more... Apache server ?? sure, just like my long gone IBM PC.

IMHO= hubris heard here does not equal a server solution... RS

Is hyper-convergence a good thing? Ask a mini computer veteran

IBM Power 8 or better, Apache n Websphere... done.

might actually work too...

AT&T to FTC: I'd like to see YOU install 1Gbps fiber across the US. Which we're still doing

Re: Sod on

ATT jumped the shark years ago on their fiber internet build out.. it is simply obsolete... companies like CenturyLink have quietly been building out fiber to the hub of new fiber and offer all services as an interface card and a net box / wireless hub at the home... we have it w /5 laptops n a desk work station along w / 2 Netflix boxes n Hulu to a laptop... no one interferes w/ each other... CL speed tests show 7mb down n 1.2 mb up... not bad for 35 bucks a month (cheap venison)...

IMHO= it is simple when CenturyLink figured out that fiber to the node was way more cheaper than replacement of corroded out copper that exhausted fill 25 years ago w/ exchange T-carrier systems on powered copper T-spans that failed every rain storm, gell filled cable or not... Coax was never in the mix as fill was limited and the physical plant is unmanageable for anything other than what the cable folks currently offer (actually quite good TV and internet service)... my only attempt at a home Net Apache Server was on Cable that was never down other than ac power fails... RS.

FTC to DirecTV: No more lies! Tell viewers what you really charge

NTSC to HD n bye bye...

We lease a whole household full of DirecTv obsolete wired NTSC set top boxes (3) hooked to a mix of NTSC and HD screens... we now have enough LED screens to go wireless HD... with the exception of "Days of Our Lives" soap (watched since day one, worked nites at ATT) everything we watch is either off air on UHF or on the internet via HULU or NETFLIX... or might just stop using DirecTV.

Joke Alert= have not signed up for any upgrade as we heard ATT wants to buy DirecTV and kill it in 2 years after making their cell phone video tv a USA standard... one of our relatives tried that ATT tv set up the next town over and it failed miserably when a 2nd or 3rd set was added wirelessly... had to go to the master to reboot the slaves... they went back to basic cable w/ Netflix... the joke's on DirecTv= we really do not need their product, especially if it is being groomed for a sale to ATT w/ plans to kill it in 2 years... RS.

Stray positrons caught on ISS hint at DARK MATTER source

Source of positrons ?? man made n observed in Cosmic Rays since the 1930's...

Currantly being used in Medical Imaging, called PET / CT... positrons were the first man made radioactive sources in the 1930's, cosmic Rays from Earth's Lightning strikes n hi energy galactic sourced particles both decay into positron emmission n other particles... we have been looking at these things since 1934.

IMHO= ISS positron detecter ?? sure... seeing some positrons and calling dark matter is similar to calling any newfound object a UFO, which by definition it is... just no LGM's looking out of viewing ports on the Real UFO's that aren't there.

Please Note= positrons are part of the VISIBLE, countable, Universe and Not by anyone's definition= "Dark Matter"... RS.

Nokia boss smashes net neutrality activists

Re: Connected Cars ??... see US AMTRAK...

Riding on a US AMTRAK train in the middle of nowhere is made fun by the train randomly stopping, followed by an announcement that they lost telemetry w/ the traffic control center, and, will remain stopped until the link is re-established... the smart highway would simply stop everything until links are up again.

IMHO= this sounds really unworkable now, however improvments in everything might make FFT Data Swarms the norm w/ all other vehicle travel being considered "off roading"... failure modes might be implemented by an algorithm that takes each vehicle safely to the curb... Note= the State of IOWA wants all normal traffic to occupy the center lane, Even if Stopped, while emergengy or maintenance responders use the outside lane for restoration traffic...RS.

Re: WTF???... try DARPA SWARM Technology...

Russia routinely swarms up to 32 war fighter planes in a WiFi type control group connected to RTOS controller eq... DARPA wants to swarm ALL the aircraft on any given plant... not necessairly Earth.

DARPA's autonomous auto contest of years back was a proposed marriage of Google's Street View sensors w/RTOS motion controllers on a single car. Eventually most entrants completed the test path to a finish line... DARPA described a "Smart Highway" as a Swarm Group of infinite size to accomodate ALL cars on a given road cross-section... by sharing sensor data in FFT form over the entire Swarm, extremely high resolution would be available to each auto to make motion control decisions... the data channel was to be duplex CDMA on unused UHF TV Channels.

IMHO= SciFi Nonsense ?? of course it is... however DARPA really needs to continue w/ this stuff as no auto maker could pull lthis off by itself... Please Note= the old USA NEXTEL Trucker Data Net did just about all of the DARPA Smart Highway Initiative minus the Swarm Technology and vehicle control... RS.

We don't need no steenkin' cabinet: Ericsson hangs base stations off masts

Base Station on Mast ?? Cool, Q= where does the power come from ??

Last time i checked... power needs batteries, AC power converters and backup Solar or Gen Sets... all of this stuff on top of poles is just too funny for words... or are we all going to play "Wind Generator Repair Person" from here on out ?? Perhaps those AI robots can climb poles or maybe we get to sit on a 'copter skid while we change out corroded batteries... personally, i'm voting for robots , i did my 3 'copter crashes and i'm done w/ that nonsense... RS.

Don't touch me up there! Photoshop creator appeals for 'ethical' use

Re: Marketing/advertising have no ethic, so asking for ethical use is useless...

HDTV imaging here in the USA is so intolerent of bad body features that 100 percent of all network TV video is processed to make the images watchable... the other day, one of the soap operas missed a layer for a hallway scene, the grid layering was showing and they aired the scene anyway, no one even seemed to notice... IMHO= i sincerely hope that no one compares themselves to those folks on the telly... RS.

Re: Bring out the GIMP! buy a book...

there are at least 2 books on actually using GIMP to do something... Amazon n Powell's both have them... That n Darktable makes still pix work... probably simple video stuff also (i don't do videos)...RS.

Linux clockpocalypse in 2038 is looming and there's no 'serious plan'

Re: The problem is in applications... so start over, P2

i'm an old ANZII graphics programmer, which could be emulated in a 256bit OS using an updated 256 ASCII code... maybe get my toumbstones back... really miss writing those pre-easter eggs.

So why not write a bloated 256bit OS for 64bit processers ?? would use a 4 cycle word, be 4 times slower, with today's applications we won't even see the reduction, but oh boy will there be an opened up data structure and date problems that will not be a problem for the rest of this millennium... RS.

Re: The problem is in applications... so start over

Keeping track of our IP and keeping a platform working is the ONLY need for us...in the last 30 years we've binned so much SW and kit that it isn't even worth mentioning...

Foward to today... our workstations n better are 64bit Linux, our throw away terminals are 32bit Linux salvaged from MS kit made obsolete by newer MS OS's...Our IP is stored as PDF's on Rust and Silicon...

IMHO= when the time comes, we will simply change, we always have, nice article, there will be many changes B/4 then... remember= replacing a single IBM PC hard drive will cost the same as 3 more SOC modules for our massively parallel matrix mule project... would rather play w/ the mule...RS.

Boffins baffled by the glowing 'plumes' of MARS

Re: Solar wind powered hoover at work? . try Aeronomy, TLE... Pt.2

Ref= WIKI, Noctilucent clouds...Aug 28 2006, "Mars Express mission found CO2 crystals 62 miles above the surface of the planet"... "like Noctilucent clouds on Earth, they can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizen".

Sept 19 2009, DARPA launched a Wallops Island "Charged Aerosol Release Experiment using the exhaust from a sub-orbitol sounding probe... a noctilucent cloud formed and was seen over several eastern US states for 2 weeks.

Foward to today... just about any water or non-water compound if smaller than 30 nanometers can fe formed into a cloud with the addition of enough energy, and the Solar wind is enough, solar particle storms are more than enough.

IMHO=We just have to stop being Carbon chauvanists and realize just about anything will combine if the valence bands allow it... RS

Re: Solar wind powered hoover at work? . try Aeronomy, TLE...

Here on earth, within the same timeframe, the 1946 sciene of Aeronomy and the newfound phenom. of TLE transient luminous event / Upper-atmospheric lightning merged when observations not normally made found these (previously only pressure / chemical composition readings taken - no visuals) things everywhere in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Looking at declassified thermonuclear test pix found the very same upper atmosphere phenom... specifically ELVES due to the EMP generated by the explosion... possible C-sprites directly above the fireball as the ELVES is forming (C-sprite lifetime < 1 milli-second)... anyway all of this is on Earth with the nice magnetic field.

Cosmic Rays cause atmospheric phenom. below the ISS height here on earth... the CR's are formed by both by Lightning strikes and Galactic particle bursts of all kind... this phenom. is by definition, can also produce ELVES and C-sprites...on Earth.

IMHO= C. DaFt has mentioned possible loss of Martian atmosphere due to Solar wind blowing it off via the venturi effect... No magnetic field and very little atmosphere on Mars does not mean CR's cannot form C-sprites and ELVES, perhaps it even makes the clouds more common...19th century astronomers Lowell and Pickering saw Canals on Mars using telescopes similar to the one in this article... the canals could simply be these clouds... RS.

Lightbulb moment for visible light networking: 200 Gbps without a fibre

my obsolete DirecTV system uses IR...

from the controller to the NTSC settop box and coax to the hub... the current DirecTV is WiFi HD... will repl the boxes n sets w/ WiFi HD's this summer... the optical free space thingy was hosed from day one as my hard surfaced walls gave freespace multipath to the IR rcvr on the set top box (making sweet spots n dead zones).

At work we tried IR connected laptops a long time ago n it was a joke, went back to the sneaker net or the Cat-5 test cable... couldn't use WiFi as we were afraid of spoofing a data stream.... ditto cell fones... Cisco, Alcatel, Nortel Networks stuff... metro ring mulispectral transport stuff...base rate oc-3, oc-12, oc-48 fiber cross-connect cabeling between stuff.

IMHO= reality... a simple city telco comm center uses about 500 fiber cables fiber cables to hook all the stuff together... all at the same optical wavelengths, fiber is needed to avoid cross-talk... the proposed freespace system here might work as a CDMA headset n pad comm system but not much more...as a possible replacement for Bluetooth... it would probably work just fine - for a single room.

Note= Model railroaders have 2-way IR train controller systems, but, they need repeaters everywhere to keep in contact w/ engine as it travels over the tracks...RS.

TOTAL DARKNESS lasted 550 MILLION years until the first STARS LIT UP

Cosmography of the Local Universe by ESA ??

IMHO=might want to Google this and watch it , especially the last 4 minutes...Seems that a recompilation of the entire run of data yielded this 17 minute video map...this happened after the data for this article was crunched several years ago...CMB ?? sure, just watch the video... it's a keeper...RS.

ALIENS are surely AMONG US: Average star has TWO potentially Earth-like worlds

Carl Sagan championed "Carbon Chauvanism"

the very idea that life has to be like here on Earth is so very chauvinastic as to be laughable... however combining it w/ the Anthropic principal and you get a mindset of the 19th century Natural History expert... finding Aliens that look and act like WASP's is highly unlikely.... what wasn't stated in this piece is doorknobs, door handles, and door latches just might be Alien observation tools...we will never know... this and all other stuff that is truely Alien...is not in our thought process or viewed as make believe...RS.

Re: It's a long way to the chemist, etc...Sub MM Radio...

since 2007 Sub-Milameter (150-250 terahertz) transmissions to "Out There" have come from several places world-wide ( Russian RT-70 radio telescopes and others) using Terrawatt level CPA's (Chirp Pulse Amps)... with a protocol known as Astro-Pules we may be able to at least "see" comm of others...progress ?? the Astro-Physics folks aren't talking...Scientific Method Rules apply... caveiat ?? :-) ...RS.

MYSTERY RADIO SIGNAL picked up from BEYOND our GALAXY

Re: AstroPulse= a 2010 Parks project ??

All= Parks L-Band rcvr employes a wide band FDM multichannel radiometer using in-house FFT on each channel... probably 40 years old kit but still a Radio Telescope that works just fine...only a few of these left worldwide and L-Band is being looked at for mobile fone use as military and maritime radar is using bands above X-Band / 10 ghz for their present day kit.

the Austrailian Government in their "Science will no longer be funded if it doesn't yield a monetary return" has decided Parks is Redundant and will be closed / dismantled this year.

IMHO= this is the "last hurrah" of a unique museum piece that does not deserve the Benchly Park system of archiving ( take a pix , then bin it) and pix of the surrounding area cry for with at least an interpretive center b/4 being torn down and the scientists made redundant.

When this is gone, it will not be replaced..ever...RS.

AstroPulse= a 2010 Parks project ??

REF= Wiki, AstroPulse...Potential pulse finds... in 2010 Parks found 16 obvious terrestial signals... per the Wiki Article, none of this pulse research has actually been made public...this is the first.

IMHO= what we have here is first AstroPulse... NOT mentioning SETI or AstroPulse means they are using spare time as today's SETI stuff is privately scheduled / funded everywhere by folks who can afford to throw a small part of their funding towards non-mainstream science... REALITY= Parks is P/O the Austrialian Telescope National Facility in the Soutern Hemisphere using this microwave band for the last 50 years...many discoveries from Parks dish...RS.

Verizon posts WANTED poster for copper rustlers

Welcome to 2015....USA...

"Shopping" or druggies using stolen cars to smash into store fronts off hours and grab what they can is the latest crime thing here...

"Working" or druggies ripping copper wiring out of vacent houses and back alley phone cables is a crime that started 10 years ago...

Scrap copper can legally be turned into a recycler in California w/o a bill of sale by the scrapper from the origional owner... not so in Oregon, wire theft is a felony, the wire cannot be sold to a recycler w/o paperwork... so the druggies steal bronze grave markers and aluminum truck rims... those folks go to jail here in Oregon, not so in California...

IMHO= it is a law enforcement thing... or at least a law thing.

Q= why can't we get fiber cable w/ CS- copper-steel line wire n hubs everywhere... no one wants that stuff (CS wire has no scrap value)... at this point it isn't copper anymore, but still cheaper than copper.

note= 100 percent of commercial AC power cabling is aluminum, both overhead or buried, just not used in buildings or homes where copper rules...RS.

You'll get sick of that iPad. And guess who'll be waiting? Big daddy Linux...

Desktops ??= Bring back the SS-100 Buss...

Or perhaps a 4U Blade Server cheapened up to be a super desktop with all the peripheral thingies in psuedo blades (my old 32bit MSI AT-type gaming system comfigured as a Workstation worked as well as a SGI workstation at Work)... played w/ a SS-100 industrial control system b/4 ordering a MSI grey box mule from a Guru in Gearhart, OR... best workstation ever using MS-98 SER-2... obsolete years ago, but definately the way to go for a desktop (actually lived on an extra printer table's paper shelf).

lots of space for extra plug in's... was going to add video cards when a Korean Business 64 bit laptop was chosen for DVD authoring on the then new Win-XP OS... moved photo pix stuff off mule to laptop... years ago.

IMHO= Over the years it has been shown that desktop actually means a Work Station of a size that is affordanle and highly expandable and re-configurable just for the heck of it... No Gallon Can full of packed mystery parts... No Grade School lunch box w/ ATX card n pwr supply... Desktop means Workstation + Linux OS / IBM Lotus Sympony / Apache open office / tons of application software / database lashup's...RS.

What will happen to the oil price? Look to the PC for clues

Missed GTL Conversions and Dewatered Alge oil...

GE and Royal Dutch Shell are quietly getting rich selling pollution free bus diesel made from natural gas at a cost off less than USD $40.00 per barrel crude oil equivalent... Saudi Arabia and Housten has plants running for the last few years wide open making clean synthetic diesel diesel... South Africa has been doing this since WW2.

The US Navy and the USAF has verified F-15 engines run ok on Synthetic Jet-A made from Dewatered Alge oil... US Commercial airlines are starting tests this year... excess heat from power plants is used to dry the Alge oil and then it is proessed into Jet-a by conventional methods, also a USD $40.00 per barrel crude oil equivalent.

Modular plant equipment results in 200K barrels / day capacity units that can be placed anywhere, land or sea... excess heat from our USN Nuclear Fleet can make "free" Jet-A, likewise excess heat from our US Military bases powered by fuel cells (most now are for money reasons)...

IMHO= decent laptops are going for USD $300.00, tablets for USD $100.00, 16 GB usb chips for USD $10.00... we all win in 2015...YUM...RS.

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

re- i must be old= Lotus Smart Suite redux

Win-98, Ser-2 had us running Smart Suite as a business platform for our non-profit... worked just fine.

Foward many years, we are now a 100 percent Linux shop..Enter the link to IBM Lotus Symponany site.

Hello 2004, Lotus Lives again !! w/ Apache Open Office Compatability and ODF compatability...ouch !!

We standardized on PDF's for Archive documentation of our IP...

IMHO= might be too late for that ODF thingy... PDF's are stable enough for forever media shifting (archival media only lasts 5 years or so).

caveiat= cannot comment on MS as i no longer use it, can comment on ODF's as i convert a lot of them to PDF's for Archiving...RS.

Eight pocket-pleasing USB 3.0 hard drives

Jason 7 is right= BUY NAS BOX...

tried 2 different USB extension hubs... neither would support more than 1 pocket drive on 5 different laptops, MS or LINUX Os...

IMHO=they need to be externally powered if you need more than 1 pocket drive... and if you are really using it to keep ANY data off the laptop, Q= do you really need encription it if it never gets off your person ?? how about a NAS box for backup, and a pocket drive for daily use w/laptop ??

The Steampunk folks hollow out a book and totally shield that pocket drive in foam, adding an extermal extension cable ( available at L-COM ) and keep the "book" in their shoulder Messinger bag along w/ the laptop or pad / tablet...

caveiat= dropped my laptop AND my external Pocket drive and killed both drives... lost everything that wasn't backed up on my 3 16GB flash drives...a lot went South, (now have pocket drive duck taped to side of printer table) need a real NAS...RS.

Ford recalls SUVs … to fix the UI

Tried on a 1956 Plymoth Hemi... still doesn't work...

At least it's PRNDL, as mandated by the USDOT for vehicles sold in the USA... the old "Christine" pushbutton drives killed a lot of people= until banned.

2012 brought a USDOT 2015 mandate to get drive controls off touch screens and brought back the PRNDL (Lincoln tried to comply= they forgot the adjacent stop button)...so all 2015 cars have the stop button at least 1 hand span away from the PRNDL ... some luxury cars use a rotary encoder to shift gears.

IMHO= Yet again we get more USDOT mandated uniform driving controls...RS.

LG Flow punches Sonos right in its portable battery speaker hole

Came with the TV bought this Dec...

Set the TV on top of the sub-woofr W/sound bar in front of sub woofer, all on top of a dresser in her bedroom (quad sound, HD TV and no wall mount)...Yum...all AC powered and on sale st Costco.

Note= only thing needed was a coax cable from DirecTv box to TV, all else was plug n play...total time from box to on air= 5 min...RS.

Why has the Russian economy plunged SO SUDDENLY into the toilet?

USA warefare in the 21st Century...

Is not about Boots n Guns... it's more about the bad guys having to huddle in a cold, dark room, hungry and wondering what tomorrow will bring (along w/a bunch of new refuges).

a fact= we pay Russia to supply the folks we say we will supply arms to... Russia actually supplies arms to both sides. a-la the Krups of WW1 Germany, only Russia is going broke doing so... the USA controls their money.

IMHO= Present USA monitery policy works just fine= when Russia or anyone else behaves, they prosper... Carrot and Stick policy works for everyone that isn't inherently evil, and eventually those evil folks will just have to evolve or stay unhappy (ask Cuba how things are going)...RS.

White hats do an NSA, figure out LIVE PHONE TRACKING via protocol vuln

the handset to tower data chan is NOT p/o SS7...

the low-speed data channel, handset to tower, that makes the "cell phone" system actually function was never meant to be seure... with that being said please remember the handset transmits it's "Serial Number", not it's "phone number" and that "phone number" is found in a lookup table in the reigional SS7 rate,route, setup, takedown, call authentication computer (used for EVERY call in the entire reigion= local, toll, or mobile).

Sorry= after a 3rd reading n looking at comments= i got sidetracked on a SS7 rant when a simple "yes, handsets are not secure, Do Not say or send anything you don't want on page 1 of the local newspaper" would have been more appropriate...RS.

No one gets SS7 streaming data unless it is GIVEN to them...

CCIS7, Cmd A link, 56 Kb Data chans, are all signalling channels that have nothing in common with any switched or transported voice channel... they never touch each other, and, no one can connect to them as they are external private - line special circuits, not part of any switched network...anywhere.

With that being said, how do other folks get the SS7 info ??

IMHO= it is simply given away by the Telco involved... using a Digital Network Analyzer could pull out the signalling channels on a 1 by 1 basis (involves real time data analysis from multiple channels within any facility cross section) that even the NSA would have trouble doing.

Reality= don't like SS7 info going to intel agencies or the mobs ?? Thank the local Telcos that give that info away (and the corrupt governments that mandate it)...RS.

We can change a bit from 0 to 1 WITHOUT CURRENT, say boffins

Q= what real life does to these magnetic arrays...

Electronic devices in the homes around me has rendered AM /SSB Radio reception at any frequency useless due to all the noise generated by those uncountable digital devices operating 24x7x365...

Joke Alert= random electromagnetic noise has a voltage component by any of Maxwell's Field eqiations...

Q= how is the voltage component of background noise different from a programming voltage that is advertised as very low ??

IMHO= we went from ferrite everything to get the ferrite out of everything as non-linear magnetic devices were inherently unstable...RS.

If 4G isn’t working, why stick to the same approach for 5G?

Waited 6 years for 7Mb service on copper... Done.

Joke Alert= Here in the USA some telco's have finally discovered that aerial fiber to the hub is infinately cheaper than any copper pair lash up CO to customer... those hubs could also serve any lash up of cell tower wireless, currently being fed on short haul, point to point, digital microwave (subject to loss of siginal due to weather or solar storms)... Verizon and AT&T seem to be unwilling to lease facilities from local Telcos (FCC law allows it)... we continue to have areas of our country that actually have NO internet service due to lack of even useable dial-up service. It is simply Satellite internet or nothing.

IMHO= TV ads show great coverage areas for wireless services... Areas of Coverage does NOT equal being able to actually use wireless due to overloaded facilites due to overselling service.

Caveiat= My nephiew lives 50 miles from a major Hydro power dam in NE Washington state, his one and only dial-up local ISP has a 2Mb monthly data cap... he barely gets email (uses text only browser) and there is no cell service (next to Collville Indian Reservation)...so we all correspond by USB Data Sticks in the mail (visions of C-64 and mailing floppies worldwide 30 years ago)...RS.