I agree with you functionality wise, but a video showing it in use would be a good idea so those of us away from our midi devices can at least see it in action.
Contextually no one is using nanometers in aviation nav applications. Many aviation systems are case insensitive or all caps only so capitalisation is rarely an important distinction.
No one is using nanometers in aviation navigation. Quite a few aviation systems are case insensitive or all caps only so you can't always make a distinction.
In fact, if you say "miles", you mean nautical miles. You have to use "sm" to mean statute miles if you're using that unit, which is often used for measuring visibility.
Sure but I could imagine some kind of software failure caused by trying to divide by a distance that rounded two zero because the same location was listed in two databases that were almost but not exactly the same location. In fact I did when I first read the headline, then realized that it was probably nautical miles.
That would be roughly consistent with the title and not a totally absurd thing to happen in the world.
Indeed, having locations internally represented in software with a resolution of nanometers is as ridiculous as having your calendar's internal times represented as milliseconds since some arbitrary moment more than fifty years ago!
And as always, when problems get solved, other problems get revealed. We didn't even really know about cancer until life expectancies got to the point where dying in your 30s is a tragedy instead of being fairly normal.
I don’t think dying in your 30s has been normal in the Western world anytime In the last 500 years. Remember all those life expectancy mean statistics were heavily dragged down by the huge infant mortality stats.
If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)
The idea that most people more than ~120 years ago died in their 30s or 40s is a popular misconception. LEAB (Life expectancy at birth) used to be in the mid-30s, but this was largely due to a bimodal distribution of deaths: a large number dying during childbirth, infancy, or early childhood, and a lot at more typical old age (60-70, still a bit lower than is common in much of the west today, but you get the idea). If you made it past puberty, there were pretty good odds of you making it to old age.
100%. I carried this misconception after high school and college and was surprised to learn it’s completely wrong. There’s a name for the old-age end of the bimodal distribution: longevity. Longevity is the natural lifespan of people who don’t die of any early mortality factors. Most people who have the misconception are accidentally conflating life expectancy with longevity. A few unscrupulous peddlers of false hope, like Ray Kurzweil for example, intentionally conflate life expectancy with longevity to reinforce the misconception. As I was learning about longevity I started talking to my anthropologist brother about it, and he was like, oh yeah, people who don’t die from war or disease or infection have always lived to be about 80 years old for all of known history. He mentioned there’s plenty of written evidence from, e.g. Socrates’ day, and also lots of human remains that support it from ten thousand years ago.
This is why life expectancy has gone up, while longevity has mostly remained unchanged (for at least thousands of years). Longevity represents the best we can do, and life expectancy can’t exceed longevity. Life expectancy will asymptotically approach longevity as medicine improves.
I think it's worth noting that we (in the west) have a lot less of most diseases and infections now, stuff like polio, plague, malaria.
I don't suffer from delusions that we have accurate data on conditions like obesity and T2D going back to the middle ages, but we have seen incidence rates of these kinds of disease explode upwards over the last century.
I'd be interested in more detailed data broken down by disease over time.
Not sure if he had this turned off beforehand or if it's because it's on the front page of HN, but there's no slots available. Not that I was personally going to book one!
I'd love to do something like this though - I've always enjoyed teaching so maybe something where I offer free calls to help newer developers with their project for an hour? Interesting idea!
On the one hand, I like your idea and I would love to find someone who would help me improve at things like math, AI/ML, software dev, electronics, and 3D printing. On the other hand, I can't get my own students to sign up for my (virtual) office hours, despite offering them extra credit.
Could a skill swap work? Like, a website that says something like "I can teach you about linear algebra if you can teach me about CAD software" -- or would the marketplace be too sparse?
I'm the same, I've basically upgraded on release or shortly thereafter to every version of windows since Windows XP, and the only one that actually felt bad and I rolled back was Vista. Windows 8 was a tad whacky, but since windows 10 things have been pretty dang stable, which I'll remind you is 9 years old. Windows has been pretty consistent for a long time at this point.
IMO a lot of complaints about new OS versions are just a plain psychological aversion to UI changes. I always try and give them a go with an open mind, and most of the time it's honestly just fine if not actually a bit better in some way.
I feel like every time this device shows up I need to yell from the rooftops how dangerous(and illegal) some of the wifi and Bluetooth attacks can be. Even if it's totally baffling WHY any safety critical devices including industrial cranes and pacemakers have consumer radios in them, that doesn't make you less responsible when you crash tons of metal into someones skull or stop someone's heart.
Cool device, and I'm not saying it should be illegal or anything, but I've met people who have zero clue with these devices and it's a bit scary.
"… or stop someone's heart." Please give an example of a pacemaker that is known to (potentially) kill the patient if the WiFi/Bluetooth is unavailable for a few minutes. I know that some modern medical devices use 2.4GHz radios for uploading telemetry, self service interfaces, etc. If such a device really exists the manufacturer should be held liable for putting a dangerous, defective product on the market.
Which pacemakers rely on ISM band communications to work?
Not doubting you (M in ISM stands for Medical, after all), just curious how it works to get from messing around on 2.4GHz to someone's ticker stopping.
Given how much of a soup ISM is already I don't know if I'd want someone's ancient cordless phone, stupid "hacker" toy, or my microwave stopping my heart.
Why send agents with flipper zeros when American consumers willingly buy millions of consumer electronics from China every year that could be part of a supply chain attack?
It’s really bizarre that you bring up physical border security when Israel just demonstrated that’s not at all necessary.
> 2M+ illegal crossings every year from a country that hates us
Huh? Since when does Mexico hate America? Many Mexicans like visiting America for shopping and sightseeing, which is why over 2.3M were issued visitor visas in 2023 alone. Mexicans living in American tend to be very hardworking and friendly. Also, I thought most of the people crossing illegally are originally coming from points south of Mexico?
Most of the people coming here illegally now are not from Mexico. Some of the last ICE numbers I saw, border patrol had over 150 countries represented and none of them were Mexico. It is true that Mexican cartels who employ Coyotes do account for the majority of the trafficking since they control all the major routes into this country. All of these illegals are violating the Safe Country asylum rule and the majority of people who are seen for asylum cases are rejected and deported anyways.
>> Mexicans living in American tend to be very hardworking and friendly.
They also remit billions back to Mexico which never make into our economy:
Mexicans living and working abroad sent $63.31 billion home last year, a 7.6% increase compared to 2022. Remittances out of Mexico increased 19.5% last year to total $1.05 billion, or just 1.7% of the incoming amount.
Most of the incoming money — 99% of which was wired electronically in transfers that averaged $393 per transaction — came from the United States, where millions of Mexicans live.
> They also remit billions back to Mexico which never make into our economy:
OK, but that's not illegal in any way, and I don't think most people would consider it wrong either. The US is a free market economy, so you can pretty much do whatever you want with the money you earned, and gifts aren't taxed at normal wealth levels. Why would it be any different for Mexican residents (and if they aren't permanent residents, it makes even more sense to send their money back home where they are legally expected to return)?
The wording was "crossing from a country that hates us," so I guess it depends on how you interpret the word "crossing." To me "crossing from" as opposed to "journeying/coming/emigrating from" seems to refer to the moment of actually crossing the border, in which case they are crossing from Mexico so that would be the country in the sentence.
Hmm I wonder why the downvotes? Maybe people felt this did not add enough to the discussion. Let me try again with more words.
I am pointing out that the world is full of risk. Under-prepared kids with half-developed prefrontal cortexes driving cars is a risk that we accept in exchange for the societal good that comes from reliable access to fast transportation. Poorly considered knock-knock attacks on pacemakers is a risk that we can choose to accept in exchange for the societal good that comes from the freedom to create and market security testing devices to the masses.
In other words, as I've said before, don't blame the tools, blame the humans, and expect some eggs to get broken along the way. The goal should not be zero risk, as that's unobtainable and leads to warped priorities and dangerous decisions.
The responsibility remains squarely with the people who developed these devices and the people who give it FCC approval.
Devices shouldn’t malfunction and handle interference gracefully. It is an FCC certification requirement and that requirement includes any interference.
I don’t think that is either legally, or morally, true.
Sure, it would be better if devices weren’t broken by attack attempts, but if you are purposefully trying to attack something, you are to blame for your attack succeeding?
There is a difference between tinkering with WiFi/Bluetooth and accidentally offing your neighbour with the faulty pacemaker and knowingly exploiting a 0day the Insulin pump of a politician to deliver the whole reservoir at once while short selling the manufacturer stock.
This is for data breaches, but similar laws exists for all sort of conduct related to negligence in securing and adequately protecting privacy, safety, health, and so on.
Literally anyone can do this with an MCU of some type and a 50 cent device. Bluetooth, RF, NFC, etc. This just makes is a nice little convenient package.
There is victim blaming and there is practicality.
A pacemaker that can't withstand random radio bursts is useless, as the first time you walk down the street you are dead.
So unless you are going to ban any sort of microcontroller, and very well documented and simple circuit designs, this is still not victim blaming.
Almost every residential building ever built can be broken into by throwing a brick through a window. We could use reinforced glass, but most people don’t. We still convict people for throwing bricks through people’s windows.
Generally speaking pacemakers aren’t failing from random radio signals, but if they fail if you specifically attack them, it’s your fault.
A device may be required to not malfunction due to interference, but it can't be required to function in the presence of interference because that's a technical impossibility if the interference is strong enough to overpower the intended signal. That's why there are laws which say that if you use something like the Flipper as an RF jammer (which is possible with custom firmware) then angry feds might show up at your house.
For any sane medical device radio interference should at most degrade non-essential functions e.g. uploading of medical data, inspecting the battery status from your phone. If such functions are important and unavailable for extended periods the device should give audible/visual alarms.
These devices do have FCC approval. It is why I can't send a garage door opener signal from my Flipper on the 315MHz band, because in the US, that isn't spectrum allocated to my fucking-about. I get a little message when I click send that says so.
All devices can be modified after the fact. Whether a manufacturer makes it easy, in the case of Flipper Zero, or hard, in the case of many other devices, to modify and install custom firmware that breaks FCC approvals, that lets it broadcast in frequencies it was not approved for, and allow the user to attack certain systems, is not really the manufacturers problem, anymore than Apple selling me a laptop I write malicious code on is Apple's fault, or the manufacturer of an IR blaster being responsible for me using it to mess with the TVs at the sports bar, or the Raspberry Pi Foundation for creating a device with a WiFi chipset that can be used to run deauth attacks, or the generic FM transmitter I could hardware hack to interfere with all sorts of stuff, or the RTL-SDR...or the ad infinitum
Yes, in the early days of cell phones, it was easy to purchase a scanner from Radio Shack, cut a few resistors and then be able to listen in on phone calls. Radio Shack, the FCC, cell phone companies, and pretty much everyone else involved knew about this but it was allowed to continue because the scanners as sold were unable to eavesdrop, which was good enough for them to be legal.
