Comment [Yawn] (Score 1) 4
Aircraft manufacturing data. Done. Decades ago.
The weight of the documentation must be greater than the weight of the airplane before it is permitted to fly.
Comment Re:That's fine. And probably enough. (Score 1) 147
Ever hear of high functioning alcoholics ?
No.
the US Trump cabinet is full of them.
Not high functioning by any stretch of the imagination. Although Trump might be the exception that proves the rule: He doesn't drink.
Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
Comment Re:Question (Score 0) 28
I have updates turned off. Every time I open Fx after a shut down, it harasses me. Then, about a minute later, it does it again. Throughout the day it harasses me.
If I tell it never to install updates unless I choose to, don't harass me.
It used to be like that until a year or so ago. Check the box, never be harassed. Now it's incessant.
Comment Question (Score 1, Interesting) 28
Have they removed the incessent harassment notifying you there is an update?
There used to be a time when you checked a box, you were never harassed. Clear, simple, and useful.
I guess that's no longer possible.
Comment Re:That's fine. And probably enough. (Score 1) 147
And the vast majority of kids were also not smoking weed
Are they now?
I missed Woodstock by about a decade. But when I made it into the school music program (high school and college), we were all looking back and mourning the demise of our creative heros. Either due to actual deaths or the inevitable menal decline that turned their creative output into garbage.
And no, we are not going to pass legislation to make weed smokers a protected class, like the ADA. You show up for work stoned and you're fired.
Comment Re:just another reason to impeach this piece of sh (Score 1) 75
There are 535 of them.
Comment Re:Title Correction: (Score 2) 158
Go ahead. Show me the ads. But when I set tracking protection to strict, don't lie to me and tell me that I can't visit your page because I'm blocking your ads.I'm not. I can still see them. Just like I can see the billboards I drive by every day.
Comment Re:in other words (Score 3, Informative) 151
The ObamaPhone was started by Bush.
Comment OMG!WTF? (Score 1) 252
160 characters should be enough for anyone.
Comment Re:That's fine. And probably enough. (Score 2) 147
it was usually easier for kids to get pot than booze...
Yeah. Pot market back then: illegal. Booze market: legal but regulated. Much more for businesses to lose in the latter case.
One good argument for legalizing skunk.
Comment Re:Yes (Score 2) 252
Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays.
It doesn't help that right-wingers have been forcing schools to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein's Monster, anything dealing with slavery or how Native Americans were treated by Europeans, and yes, 1984.
CNN had an article about parents in Tennessee complaining their kids shouldn't have to read about slavery and how slaves were treated because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
In other words, the people who cry the loudest about participation trophies are crying about little Johnny having to read about how horrible white people can be to others. None of this helps the ongoing issue of Johnny not able to read.
It doesn't help that right-wingers have been forcing schools to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein's Monster, anything dealing with slavery or how Native Americans were treated by Europeans, and yes, 1984.
CNN had an article about parents in Tennessee complaining their kids shouldn't have to read about slavery and how slaves were treated because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
In other words, the people who cry the loudest about participation trophies are crying about little Johnny having to read about how horrible white people can be to others. None of this helps the ongoing issue of Johnny not able to read.
Comment Re:My take (Score 1) 31
sqrt(2.25)
My slide rule gets this right every time.
Comment Re:So, when I ... (Score 1) 90
A firmware update is rolling out to customers with GM Energy's vehicle-to-home hardware, converting those systems into full vehicle-to-grid assets with no new hardware and turning home backup systems into grid resources when utilities need them.
And I see nothing about configuration capabilities being left for the vehicle owner once this is pushed out. In fact, I see nothing about benefits to owners at all in TFA.
Utility demand response is a contractual thing. Once you sign up, you are obliged to load shed at the utilities request. Or face penalties. V2G just goes a step further than unidirectional (V1G) flow control in that GM can just take power back. Note that it is GM on the other side of the deal. Not your local, regulated and answerable to state utilities commisioners, utilities.
Comment So, when I ... (Score 0) 90
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