Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Fairness, Radioactivity, Recovery
Ha, ha, puny earthlings! TinoMNYY24 writes "The Independent broke the story of SpaceShipOne leaving the Earth's atmosphere. The headline of the story is "'SpaceShipOne' becomes first privately funded vehicle to break through earth's atmosphere." One more step towards the X-Prize."
A data recovery success story - please send more. bigdog1 writes "I also had the IBM 75GXP data loss problem reported on slashdot. Like the guy in this article, I was not able to pay someone to do my data recovery. However, I eventually was able to get almost all of my data back using a free program, NTFS Reader. The only problem was that the file names were not in the long format. From now on I am buying an extra hard drive, but has anyone else had success stories recovering their data? Long file names?"
Too little, too late. An anonymous reader writes "I recently e-mailed paypals's public relations department and urged them to restore Freenet's paypal account. Their reply indicates that they have reexamined Freenet's account and decided not to terminate it after all. No news on the freenet project page, but here's paypal's reply:
'I apologize that your concerns were not addressed in the previous email. Our Compliance Department has reviewed The Freenet Project account in question and the service has been fully restored. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
Sincerely,
Andrew
PayPal Account Manager'"
ultranova writes "Because PayPal has offered no explanation or apology, the project does not intend to continue advocating its usage, and has migrated to Amazon Honor System."
'Adventure Capitalist' is a much better motorcycle story anyhow. malign writes "Mary Mycio notes that the 'Ghost town' photo essay is probably faked, and notes her reasons. There go my fantasies! :(" Rumors and grumblings to this effect have been around for quite a while, but this seems the most straightforward debunking I've seen of the trip a Ukrainian woman named Elena claimed to have taken through the Chernobyl area.
(We posted two stories about the alleged trip in March.)
Corporate machinations meet the mounties. los furtive writes "The CBC is reporting that HP has agreed to pay back the Canadian Government $146 million that had been defrauded from the Department of National Defense (previously mentioned here). HP claims it was the victim of 'a complex scheme designed to exploit both parties through contracts inherited through HP's merger with Compaq Computer Corp.' In the end they decided it was more appropriate to take action against those responsible and not engage in protracted litigation with the government."
lets Slashdot readers (and others) write to their Congresscritter with one click,
In other news: Amazon sues the EFF
Shame to hear that the Chernobyl story is probably fake, even more so that Elena has a husband!
Website was featured in The Mail on Sunday - so much for background research.
The HP/Compaq story seems to be implying that they are actually taking action against individual employees of the corporation who were responsible for doing such-and-such, as opposed to HP/Compaq itself.
This could set a GREAT precedent! As things stand currently, people within corporations can pretty much do whatever they want, while acting in the interest of the corporation, and they'll never see a personal fine or the inside of a jail cell. (Case in point: Bill Gates was never fined or jailed for all the things he did. MS just got a slap on the wrist, but nothing happened to Gates himself.) Maybe now, we'll see some accountability, as people won't simply be able to hide behind their involvement with $BIG_CORPORATION to avoid criminal charges...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I think I have that much in my couch cushions ;) (Just kidding!)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I got MOST of my data back. Here is a step by step that I posted:
b[RESTORE YOUR LOST DATA]b - If your Deskstar drive is doing a click-click-pause, you can get your data back!
I have 2 IBM Deskstar 60GB drives, about 1.5 years old. A month ago, I was backing up data from one of them, and it froze. I rebooted, and WinXP took 10mins too boot, and the drive in question never showed up. So I ripped the case off, and to my gut renching surpise, the drive was giving me the r[click of death]r . So I spent the next few weeks trying to find a solution, as I am not going to RMA a drive with all my data on it. I *NEED* that data. So after trying just about every method I could find, I finally found a combination that worked.
Things to note:
- Freezing the drive had no effect, but try to keep the drive cool throughout the restore process. I had a fan blowing over the drive in question constantly
- Putting the drive in different positions (i.e. on it's side, end, etc) had no effect. Lay it flat.
- From what I can tell, the data is not lost. The drive seems to make sectors as 'bad' in certain sections of the drive, and thus 'can't read them'.
What you will need:
- 2 Drives of equal or greater size that are working
- A copy of "Media Tools Professional" [FULL] http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/mtl.htm (I had version 3.3)
- A copy of "Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional 6" [FULL] http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
- A floppy diskette
[For these instructions, the BAD drive will be called Drive-B, and the good drive will be Drive-A. Drive-C is where the data will be restored (This CAN be an FTP site)]
1 - Hook up Drive-B and Drive-A onto your mainboards IDE controller (NOT any onboard HPT, RAID, etc)
2 - Boot off the floppy containing Media Tools Pro
3 - Select the Drive-B and choose Clone, Drive-to-Drive
4 - Select the Drive-A as the destination, and press Ctrl-S to bring up the options screen
5 - Change the rety attepts to '1', and click off the 'disable error control codes on last attempt'
6 - Choose to 'Invert' the clone (the last check box on the options screen)
7 - Start this process and wait for days (my 60GB drive took 49 hours) You will hear ALOT of clicking and it will the remaining time will bounce around from 200,000 hours down to 2 seconds. This is normal, but be prepared for a LONG wait.
--After clone is done--
8 - Reboot into WindowsXP, with Drive-A connected (disconnect Drive-B)
9 - Open up Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro 6 and do an advanced recovery
10 - Choose Drive-A and select the Advanced Options
11 - Choose Advanced scan, and 'Disable MFT'
12 - Start the scan (this took 1.2 hours). Then it will present you with a file list of what it files it found.
13 - Select the files/directories you want to restore and then select Drive-C as your destination
14 - As it starts to restore, it will prompt you to 'Overwrite' files. DO NOT OVERWRITE ANYTHING. Most of the files are cross-linked, and you will end up with garbage. You need to either 'RENAME' each one, OR, wait for it prompt you to rename, then in an explorer window, delete the files that it restored, and then click overwrite. Here is an example:
- You have selected the dir 'mp3'
- It starts restoring by putting all your *.mp3 files in there (ex: e:\mp3\*.mp3)
- After it restores all the files in that dir, it will restore the same files, with different data.
- At this point, it will ask you if you want to overwrite or rename
- Open Explorer, and delete all the files in e:\mp3\
- Then click 'Rename' in the dialogue box
- It will then write out the GOOD data
AND THANKS TO THE GRACE OF GOD, YOUR DATA IS BACK! I got %99 of my data restored, using this workflow.
The ONLY thing I didn't mention was that I updated the drives BIOS before I did this. I have NO clue if that made any d
The question I have is why did she fake it? I mean, the story says she went in the standard Chernobyl tourist ride with a helmet, in order to fake photos, so it was a deliberate, planned deception.
So why did she take the pain to do all this? I doubt it's the money, since she didn't sell her story AFAIK, and I doubt she wants to promote some form of radioactive tourism. So, unless she's completely mythomaniac and/or she really really wanted to delude herself that she had made the trip for real, I just don't get it...
I'm on a couple of these "fax your representative and senators" alert systems now. I have two feelings on them, either they've opened a new avenue (or rather mass transport for an older one" for communicating with our public servants, or they will just further immunize our representatives from individual opinions.
So, as long as we don't use the EFF one-click interface to send campain contributions, we're ok?
Otherwise, it's buying congressmen with one click and we're back to "Amazon sues the EFF".
"PayPal's restoration of Freenet doesn't help at all. It's hard to unring that bell, and Freenet now doesn't want to deal with them anyway."
Err hold on, you need to think about the bigger picture. Paypal's restoration helps at least some. I mean, didn't you consider never ever using Paypal again over it? I did. Restoring service made me feel a bit better about it, but offering no explanation still bothers me.
However, there is something to think about: Slashdot's involvement in it. I have a feeling the negative press they got (on a massive scale, mind you) changed their minds in the first place. But now they've restored it, any reason they gave would either be real boneheaded/unfair, or they would say that Freenet did something wrong, in which case most people who'd be active in a discussion here would blindly run to Freenet's defense. No win scenario for Paypal.
So the only real choice I can make right now is "Something happened, and it's really a private matter that I have no right to know about." It still makes me wary, though.
"Derp de derp."
Great. Now, instead of the whole company being held responsible for the actions of employees, the company will instead be able to throw a couple of those employees to the lions and go on with what they were doing. How much do you want to bet it will never be high-level management that takes the fall for this kind of thing? Personally, I think I kind of prefer it when the whole company takes a hit - at least it hits the managers (the ones ultimately responsible) in the pocketbook, if nowhere else.
I guess employees just better become a lot more careful - get all directives in writing, and ignore anything your boss tells you to do that they don't write down. Employees are going to be held responsible for what they have most likely been directed to do, or at least have done with full knowledge of their bosses, so they better learn to protect themselves.
Basically, my point is (if I actually have one), while it is great that "those responsible" are being held responsible, somehow I doubt they are the ones that are really responsible.
wouldn't a slash back be /..(slashdotdot)?
It's a tour of an abandoned missile silo. Pretty kool. Don't try this at home (well unless your home IS a missile silo).
A very brief summary in English:
- it's been 18 years since reactor 4 exploded and that lead to the greatest ecological disaster man has accomplished - so far
- the reason for the disaster was human error
- some irrelevant stuff about what opinions Swedish politicians have about prolonging the use of atomic energy in this country (not stated in the article: a decision has been made to eventually dismantle it)
- a quite respectable (not stated in the article, but that's the opinion of most people here), Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has published the images from Elena's site
- the story is fantastic but a hoax
- Elena's father is not a nuclear scientist and she doesn't drive around in the dead zone
- she and her husband, Igor, have taken the pictures during one visit with the supervision of the zone administration
- the page has had millions of visitors
- an Ukrainian friend of the reporter tells from Kiev that the zone administration has gotten many inquiries from motorcyclists interested in riding in the dead zone so in that sense the page is a commercial grip on the disaster
Karma. Moderation. Is my
EFF's solution has been to quietly accept e-gold since 1999. Freenet takes e-gold, too.
http://102948-USD10.e-gold.com would give a gram to EFF (they had it working before, and now they've somehow managed to bust it! Sigh...).
http://767764-USD20.e-gold.com
donates $20 worth to Freenet (or you can use their page at donate )
We may not have the hype or marketing-budget of other systems, but we've been around since 1996 (and, frankly, Slashdot should have taken e-gold since at least a year ago, it's not like sci.e-gold.com is all that hard to use!). (And yes, I'll still click anyone from Slashdot a bit of e-gold to play with if you send me an account number!)
JMR
Speaking ONLY for Jim Ray, the Barbarous Relic of the e-gold system!
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I still don't get the point why would she bother to make a story like that. Back when I read it the first time it did seem odd that anyone would let her into the zone by herself. What if she fell and broke her leg or something, or had an accident. But I guess the risk made the fantasy so much more thrilling. I suspect she might have wanted to try to either publish a photo album, or was expecting that someone from the West would pay her to go back and shoot some more, or maybe invite her on Oprah. I grew up and lived in those parts and I know that as nice and hospitable as Ukranians (and Russians for that matter) are, they can also be liars and manipulators (learned from papa lenin himself). I think the young couple wanted to somehow make money off of it, which if true, would be very sad.
(But I'm biased, since I was lucky enough to be present at that launch.)
What body decides what marks the boundary of space? I see all sorts of references to "officially defined" but no one says by whom.
That is such total bullshit that it's not even funny (and the political comments in the article makes it pretty likely the author isn't the kind of peg flaws on the Soviet system, if you know what I mean.)
It's not that the Soviets couldn't have built a safe reactor, it's because they chose not to do so. The reactor was most definitely technologically faulty - it failed some of the most basic safety requirements. It was a human error only in that the Soviet authorities ever allowed this reactor design to be built and fuelled.
So what was this technological flaw? The graphite-moderated reactor has a so-called positive void coefficient, which means that a overheating reactor will speed up the reaction in the core. Western - and some Soviet - reactors have a negative void coefficient, in which an overheating reactor will slow itself down and reach equilibrium.
That difference, combined with a solid containment, was the chief difference between the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl accidents. Both were major disasters, but the former was confined to the plant and had economic consequences; the latter spread radioactivity over large parts of Europe and had yet-untold consequences in terms of both human life and environmental destruction.
A nuclear reactor should not depend on humans doing the right thing for its safe operation, and in the event of a disaster, its safe shutdown. Any reactor that does so is dangerously flawed and technically unfit for operation.
Unfortunately there is in Sweden a sizable group who has as their political agenda to close down domestic nuclear power, whereas what probably would make more sense is to take the money that would cost and pay for the Russians and Lithuanians to built new plants and shut down the currently operating RBMK (Chernobyl-type) reactors on the Baltic coast.
Or maybe it just brought home the arbitrary and capricious way in which PayPal can freeze the account of anyone they feel like.
Maybe FreeNet just decided that they wanted to go with an organization that showed a little more responsiveness and responsibility.
I don't think the point is that PayPal has frozen or unfrozen the account; the point is that they could do so again at any time, without giving any reason.
What really sucks is that Mary Mycio's article debunking the Chernobyl photos has so little
verifiable information.
"They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv." I'm sorry, who picked them up? What was their name? Or was this an untraceable Chornobyl ghost car?
"They organized their trip through a Kyiv travel agency", but what was the name of the agency? Can we get a quote from someone at the agency?
"Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar", but what were their names and what positions of authority do they hold? Why no direct quotes?
If we have become savvy enough not take take the Chernobyl diary at face value, then why should we believe the undocumented assertions in Mycio's article?
It was not an error, it was a conscious decision. If I remember correctly, RBMK reactors have design that allows exchange of fuel rods without shutting down the reactor. Weapon-grade plutonium is almost-pure isotope 239, isotope 240 (which is what 239 turns into when staying in the reactor for too long) doesn't produce neutrons during fission, so the resulting bombushka has less boom for the same bucks. Shutdown of the reactor is easy to see even from the space (eg. drop in the temperature of the cooling towers) and shutdown intervals of the plants are carefully monitored. Reactor that doesn't require observable shutdown to refuel, and thus allows unmonitored shortening of the refueling intervals, is a big military advantage; as another advantage, the RBMK construction was fairly simple and easy to build.
Then the day D came, a snafu escalated to a fubar, and the rest is a well-known story.