What is it with the constant disbelieving of Snowden?

One of the things Snowden exposed was systematic disinformation campaigns by the spooks to achieve various political goals, including the discrediting of their own critics.

Perhaps these comments are examples of such a program in action?

At present we have two parties that are both owned, for the most part, by the same people, and kept in power by gerrymandering and the systemic weakness of first-past-the-post elections.

Further, the people in control of the major parties themselves cheat when someone not of their faction tries to go the primary/caucus root. They change rules in midstream, miscount, break meeting rules, physically attack supporters of opponents, pass out bogus delegate slates, and a host of other dirty tricks.

For a list of the things the Republican have done to just one challenger in the last two cycles, check out the archives of any of the several sites where Ron Paul supporters congregate. (For example, The Daily Paul.)

The Democrats do this as well. (The riots in Chicago in 1968 were largely a public reaction to the party machine repelling a primary effort by Gene McCarthy, popular with the antiwar movement, in favor of Hubert Humphrey. The Paul/Romney nomination battle was eeriely similar.)

This has been a long known fact,

Some of this was known back in the '60s and '70s. But the federal government decided to suppress it. In particular: Any drug with side-effects that were pleasant was considered a threat to the status quo of governance - a way for productive people to achieve happiness without driving industrial profit and/or part of a Communist conspiracy to rot the "Free World"'s moral fiber.

There was a period where researchers would only get new grants if the conclusions of their studies stated that the drugs - psychedelics, marijhuana, etc. - were useless for medical purposes and/or dangerous. (The papers in Science, for instance, were often pathetically hilarious. The reduced data said one thing, while the conclusion said the opposite.)

Meanwhile the government (notably with such things as the FBI's COINTELPRO program) smeared those (formerly highly respected scientists) who had been proponents of finding uses for them (especially those who had tried to use them to augment intelligence and experimented on themselves - often with bizarre results). The most prominent of these was Timothy Leary, though there were a number of others.

Somewher in there the drugs were added to various "schedules" and banned from medical use.

After a couple years of this, with any actual benefits buried in the noise, the government declared that it was "settled science" that there were no useful treatments using these drugs and stopped issuing new permits for their use in new research projects. (It's very much like research into global warming: You can't convince people on either side because the research is suspect due to the government becoming involved and pushing its horse in the race.)

Then the government declared acts related to banned-drug trafficing, possession, and use to be "serious" crimes and imposed passed mandatory minimum sentences - recreating the scenario of alcohol prohibition, funding organized crime, filling up the prisons, and lining corrupt police personell's pockets with graft money. Then it passed RICO and created the same financial incentive structure that fueled the Spanish Inquisition - driving ever-increasing anti-drug activity and blocking attempts to repeal drug bans.

And that's where it stood for decades. Negligible work on uses for the chemicals - either by organized research or private self-medication (with drugs of uncertain content and quality).

So while Moore's Law drove the computes from giant cabnets filling floors of office buildings to chips in everything under the sun, work on a nimber of categories of drugs stagnated.

The canabinoids of Marijuana, alone, have a number of apparent (but not adequately researhed) benefits:

  - They appear to be a specific treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, itself, seems to be a result of undermeidcation for pain - also driven by the "drug war").
  - Canabinoids (including at least one which does not produce a substantial "high") also appear to be a successful treatment for a debilitating form of childhood epilepsy.
  - Parkinson's disease eventually kills, not directly through loss of dopamine, but by the body's attempt to compensate for it by fouling up a system that uses the recently discovered endocanabinoids as neurotransmitters. (These are the chemicals that THC and its relatives mimic, much as opioids mimic endorphins.) This ends up with loss of memory and loss of appetite, and the victim starves herself to death. Canabinoids may help alleviate this and/or prolong life, (if only by reducing the tendency to self-starvation by inducing "the munchies").
  - Canabinoids have been claimed to arrest the progress of several cancers, including a brain cancer.d
  - Canabinoids have long been used for reducing the nausea of chemotherapy, easing self-starvation in cancer patients. (Similarly with side-effects of anti-AIDS drug coctails.)

I could go on.

But "more research is needed" to determine which (if any) of these effects are real, turn them into practical treatments, and deploy them. And it's not going to happen smoothly and rapidly with the government continuing to interfere.

However, the term "assault weapon" is more fuzzy, at least according to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has it right, in its own "being unbiased in the wording" way.

"Assault Rifle" is a technical term in warfare. It first applied to a particluar select-fire rifle short enough to avoid getting hung up when popping up through the hatch of a tank to fire at surrounding infantry (or otherwise going through tight spaces), and since has been applied to others with simiilar characteristics. This trades away some accuracy for rapid fire and rapid movement.

"Assault Weapon" is a term invented by antigunners and defined in particular laws, to confuse the population about proposed gun control laws by making them appear to be banning military design Assault Rifles when they actually ban a hodge-podge of civilian guns based on some arbitrary (and juristiction-specific) set of characteristics typically unrelated to any objective standard of danger or functionaity.

I'd really like to be able to install something on the lines leaving my breaker panel that acts like a firewall and blocks any kind of network communication over powerline.

1. Get some electrical-noise suppression ferrite toroids and some ceramic capacitors at your local electronics store. (.005 microfarad at a minimum of 600V would be good for the caps. 1000V or higher on cap used for 240V circuits.)

2. In your fusebox connect a cap from each breaker's hot output to the nearest ground bus, keeping the wires as short as possible. (You want them downstream of the breaker so they blow the breaker, rather than start a fire, in the very unlikely chance that one fails shorted.) On 220v loads hook the cap between the two hot wires (red and black in the US).

The cap wires are too small to carry the current in case of a short, so get some tiny 1A pigtail fuses and wire them in series on the hot side (either side in the 240V both-are-hot case). Put plastic insulation rated at least 600V over (at least) the hot side wires and the fuse. (You can get such insulation, of adequate voltage and temperature ratings, by stripping the insulation from a spare piece of electrical wiring.)

3. In your fusebox disconnect the circuits, one by one, both hot and neutral. On each run the hot and neutral lines through a ferrite toroid core in opposite directions and reconnect the . For a 220V circuit run the two hot lines through the ferrite core, again in opposite directions, and ignore the Neutral. If you have multiple loads on a breaker, you can use separate toroids on each load or a single one on from two to all of them: Run the hot wires all one way through the toroid and the neutral (or red-hot on 240V) the other way.

This puts inductance in series with the signal and capacitance shunting it, forming a low pass filter. The low-frequency power will get through just fine and the high frequency networking signals will get stopped.

Putting cores on the main feeds also works, and takes fewer cores. You can also put one on each of the hot wires, separately, rather than using one with the wires crossed through it. You can get big ones that are split, intended to be clamped over a computer signal cable to prevent it from acting like an antenna, which you can clamp onto the wires without unhooking them.

Don't bother putting the two haves of the circuit through the core in the SAME direction, as you would with the signals in a cable or power cord if you clamped a core around the whole thing. This keeps the common-mode (both wires go positive or negative together) from propagating past the core, but the differential mode (one goes positive while the other goes negative), which is what power line networking uses, goes right through.

Note that putting this stuff in your fusebox may be against code, and void your fire insurance. The capacitor wiring may also be problematic for creating hazards if not done properly (insulated with "spaghetti tubing" on at least the hot side, hot side cut short, a little fuse (1A or so) in series, etc.).

"THE" billion dollar hacker club? Seems to me there are several of those.

Two instances just from the public record: First there's the Homebrew Computer Club, founded in '73, which includes a number of leading lights in the Silicon Valley part of the industry, including Jobs and Woz. (Apple alone has WhatsApp beat by a factor of neary 25, as of today's close.) Then there's the (invitation-only) Hackers Conference, Founded by in '84, whose membership may not have as high a percentage of people who made billions in high tech, but does have more than one just among those whose membership is publicly known.

I could go on for a while, and I'm SURE I don't know anywhere near all such organizations.

NYC [treats] electric bikes [as] illegal [... No] (lights, signals, VIN numbers, etc).

But this box DOES have lights, as the ilustration clearly shows. Looks like it has signals, too, though that's not clear. (There are rear-facing lights, too.)

As another has already pointed out, it's designed so you have to start up manually before the motor will cut in, to make it escape the definition of a motor vehicle.

Yep, 3D printing, were the per unit price is likely 10x more than other techniques ...

That goes well with the one-grand-plus pricetag for a device that should be selling for a couple hundred bux or less in mass production.

If this catches on I expect to see an injection-molded version closer to the price I mentioned. Either this guy will go to that as he ramps up or the Chinese/Koreans/whatever will have a knockoff out in a few months after it catches on.

Whatsamatter, fattie, can't pedal for more than 5 minutes without having a coronary?

I expected more math literacy on Slashdot. Silly me.

12 to 20 miles at a top speed of 16 MPH is an hour (+-25%).

That's up and down the steep hills of San Francisco, of course, in all sorts of weather. Do you want to try it - twice a day, to and from work in rush hour traffic? (Didn't think so.)

If you don't like Apple's energy policy, buy majority shares.

And/or recruit other shareholders to your opinion.

Which is what he tried to do. It's a testiment to the Apple shareholders that it didn't work. B-)

Surely energy policies are about creating a feel-good aspect to the brand. Plus if you learn something along the way by trying perhaps you can commercialize it and it takes you off on another wild ride, like the iPhone did.

Directors and officers of a corporation have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders to run the company in their interest.

This USUALLY means trying to maximize return on investment. But the sotckholders may want other things, in addition to or in place of, financial gain. When this is the case, the duty requires them to set their own target appropriately.

This is not uncommon: Think "green energy company" or "church" for two examples. The Bell Telephone company, started by Alexander G. out of his research into hearing aids, has always done work on assisting the hearing impaired. Hershey's, at the direction of its founder, is owned by a trust and 30% of its profits go to support a school for orphans.

One typical strategy is to "satisfice", rather than maximize, financial gain, while pursuing other interests. This produces a sound financial base for pursuing those interests. (i.e. Hershey's, churches, "green companies"...) Another is to do things that are win-win with respect to the business (i.e. Bell Telephone, doing things like designing phones to work well with hearing aids, make ringing sounds that are auddible to the partially deaf and light-flashing ringer devices, and otherwise making the phone system accessable to hearing impaired.)

As you point out, these approaches may also lead to financial benefits that typical businesses and business-school graduate executives miss in their pursuit of the short-term bottom line. Good will, new inventions, synergies, etc.

Another example: Hershey's, not constrained or incentivized by short-term bottom-line, doesn't use typical industrial-food ingredients such as corn syrup, or follow other food-processing fads. It sticks with basic, high quality, time-proven, ingredients and recipies. This produces a consistent product (which also forms the base for consumer recipies) and a loyal customer base. (No "New Coke" debacle or gradual deterioration of product quality over decades with this company.)

When I was working in retail about 5 years ago competitors of ours did the same. Our store name, their phone number.

That reminds me of why dial phones were invented.

Early telephone exchanges used an operator to connect all calls. You picked up the phone and this lit a lamp and sounded a buzzer at an operator's console in the central office. The operator pulgged a cable into a jac and talked to you, found out who you wanted to talk to, and plugged another cable into the other customer's jack (or a trunk to another operator) to hook you up. Similarly when you hung up, or (if the call needed some other modification and you "flashed" by flicking the hook switch).

Some businesses bribed unscrupulous operators to redirect their competitor's calls to them, stealiing some of their buiness (especially in high customer turnover businesses, where a large fraction of the calls were initial contacts.) There was much flap over this, of course.

One such customer - an undertaker - decided to attack this problem at its root. He also happened to be what we'd now call a hacker (in the "exceptionally competent technologist" sense). He developed the earliest version of a dial telephone system, and got one of the telephone companies serving his area to install it. Electromechanical stepper switches were not susceptable to bribery, problem solved.

Of course electromechanical stepper switches are also cheaper than even low-wage people. So dial systems caught on very quickly. You still needed operators for non-simple stuff, but a company handling the bulk of the calls mechanically needed far less of them, and when such service was available businesses switched over en masse.

Is this cell site actually intended to be connected back to the grid, or is it only for communication between phones connected to this one site?

Back to the grid. According to TFA:

Backhaul to Vodafone is through the Cobham Explorer 500 Broadband Global Area Network, with communications being encrypted through IPsec.

That's a satellite modem that sells for about three grand. A bit over 0.4 mbps of encrypted data plus voice.

I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool.

It IS MIMO: the special case where:

  - The base station antennas are widely separated.

  - The data is mapped so each remote antenna gets a particular one-spectrum-channel-worth subset of the data stream (rather than several antennas getting several spectru-channels worth, but in the form of differently phased-and-weighted sums of several carriers with mixes of the data). This allows the remobe devices to work with a single antenna that can move around independently of the others.

There's no reason the signal can't be mapped so that a device with two or more sufficiently separated antennas can receive roughly as many spectrm-channels worth of bandwidth as it has antennas.

Might not be practical on a handset (at least not at frequencies below 3GHz), because there is not enough space to put adequate separation between antennas, but it could work well with tablets and other physically larger devices.

You called it. The separation doesn't need to be all that large (if the device is positioned near enough to the base stations that it "sees" adeqiate separation of the base antennas). But it does need to be at least in the ballpark of a quarter wavelength or more, even in the best of cases.

Spreading the component antennas of the MIMO base station out to different cell towers expands the area where MIMO tricks can be fully utilized in proportion - at the cost of requiring precise synchronization of local oscillators among the various antenna sites (and precise compensation for relative sway of the cell towers). But it doesn't require any changes at the remote end of the link - those antennas need the same separation for a given frequency and given perceived angular separation of the base antennas, regardless of the distance to the base antennas. (Spreading them further just means the remote can resolve smaller apparent angles, and thus work in more-than-spectrum mode further from the set of base stations.)

Sounds like, in the process of creating the virtual-reality hand model, they've also identified, extracted, and processed EXACTLY the signals necessary to operate a prosthetic.

This gives us the expectation that with the cybernetic prosthetic in place the phantom limb pain may not be a problem, as well.

(Of course that's presuming the summary is correct and it is confirmed.)