The cheaper part is that Musk can afford to take a loss and underbid, because he's got deep pockets. Therefore he can offer a package deal that includes development and testing of a new system. Most major aerospace companies operate on very thin profit margins, and don't have cash reserves like that for R&D.
But no matter how quickly you fire Bob, the thieves still have that money
That statement misses the point.
First, I have a chance to detect Bob's dangerous behavior before the thieves do. Your "no matter how quickly" statement assumes they get to Bob before I do.
Second, my point is, if it weren't for Bobs, these thieves would be looking at boobies on channel 9 and filing TPS reports instead of collecting ill-gotten booty. Bob is a root cause. (Thieves' greed is another.)
The point isn't to blame the victim, but to figure out how to prevent them from becoming victims
Bob's not the victim, in this scenario. I am. Bob is the exploit.
At least you demonstrate my underlying point even as you pick nits at the example. The way to prevent being a victim is to not be Bob.
In other words, don't be stupid and you won't be a victim. Blaming the stupidity is not blaming the victim.
And ultimately, it's my stupidity -- If I give a Bob access to my bank account, I'm the stupid one. So therefore, I don't give that job to a Bob.
Just R'ed the FA, and my first reaction was "Bob's an idiot."
First, either he is using his home PC to make financial transactions for his employer, or he is taking a laptop home that can be used to access his employer's financial institution.
Second, he's installing shareware/freeware on this machine, and he does it without scanning the downloaded files or researching the reliability of the publisher.
Third, he uses a browser over an unsecured internet connection instead of via VPN to the company network, which should incorporate well maintained filters and firewalls.
Fourth, he continues to use this browser after it exhibits strange behavior.
Fifth, he ignores red flags like unexplained 'Safety Pass' requests.
If I discovered Bob did this when he worked for me, I'd fire Bob, no matter how much the boss on the temp agency radio commercials loves him.
While I don't disagree that we could do more in the area of computer security, one needs to look closely at the affiliations of the people running this "exercise."
They're both loyal Neocon insiders. John Negroponte is the former Bush Director of National Intelligence. Michael Chertoff is the former Director of Homeland Security, and co-author of the Patriot Act. And both of these positions were just the last in a string of appointments by Bush/Cheney.
And as career neoconservatives, they've been at the forefront of fearmongering and prevarication in order to lead the US to war and erode civil liberties. These are not opinions, these are well-documented facts.
The neocons are a one trick circus; this is just their newest pony. If you've been paying attention the past nine years, how can you possibly doubt that this is anything else?
More problems than that, even. The article does nothing to address the puzzled questions that my son (or even my wife, who is smart but no techie) would ask if I showed them this. That's where the REAL lessons are:
1 - "How does this measure the speed of light when we are using the microwave and not a flashlight?" (Answer: because microwaves and visible light are both forms of electromagnetic radiation... so is infrared, what you feel on your face when you stand by the campfire, and radio waves that bring music to our car stereos.)
2 - "Why does this experiment mean anything about speed? We are measuring a distance, not a speed." (Answer: because the wavelength is related to frequency by the speed of propagation. Think about shaking one end of the rope and watching the waves travel down it. Frequency is how many times per minute you shake. Each shake makes a peak and the space between peaks is how far the previous peak moved down the rope before the next shake. That's how wavelength and frequency are related by propagation velocity.)
If your child is still paying attention at the end of that thought experiment, you know he's a scientist. Buy her a model rocket or a microscope. If not, give her a set of watercolors or a video camera.
If your child just eats the chocolate and asks for more, then just buy him a guitar.
I'm with you. Of all the classic SF/Fantasy series out there, The Foundation Trilogy is probably the one LEAST amenable to a screenplay.
I mean, consider these series, just off the top of my head, in no particular order:
- Chalker's Well of Souls series - Varley's Gaea Trilogy - Heinlein's Lazarus Long epics - Niven's Ringworld trilogy - Niven/Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand - Flynn's Firestar series - Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Gap Cycle - Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky - Any of Piers Anthony's tripe starting with the Tarot novels - Anything good by Piers Anthony up to and including the Cluster series - McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series - Morris' Silistra series
I could go on and on and on, Philip Jose Farmer, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks...
Anyone attempting to translate any of these series to a Cinema or Television screenplay would FAIL, for various reasons... content, scope, depth, or combinations thereof.
But yet, I can't think of ONE that would be harder to translate to a screenplay than Asimov's Foundation series.
So, why is that one chosen? The only thing I can think of is that it's the only one that's the property of an estate looking to commercialize a dead author's bibliography.
And I'm not even going to honor the '3D' quotation with a comment. [shudder]
So zero-day has joined the rather exclusive League of Semiotic Hyperlatives, along with other misused terms such as Robot, Virtual Reality, 3D, and Artificial Intelligence.
GPS works by triangulating the phase delays of radio signals transmitted from GPS satellites. The accuracy of your position is proportional to the square root of the phase delay of a signal whose frequency is in the Megahertz, so you're losing a factor of 1 to 100 million right there. Add on top of that the scaling factors due to the orbital velocity of the satellites, the rotational velocity of the earth's surface, and the velocity of the airplane, and (for things like landing planes) a seven- to nine-nines reliability requirement, and even the best non-differential GPS systems only get an accuracy on the order of 10 meters.
This is a lot when you're trying to land the nose gear of a plane full of living humans going 100 MPH on a stripe about half a meter wide.
According to TFA, the Aluminum Ion clock offers about a 3000x factor of improvement on precision, which gets us down to the kind of accuracy we need for landing commercial airliners without the kinds of mishaps that will cause disproportional media feeding frenzies over the use of automated landing systems.
If the drone is just capturing video of what is out in the open for all to see anyway, I don't have a problem with a drone recording it.
I would agree with this opinion as long as:
1 - The drone records police activity as well as civilian activity, and
2 - The "video of what is out in the open for all to see" is publicly available.
Without both of the above, it's far too easily abused. And in just the past year or two we've seen how quickly abuse of surveillance becomes routine behavior by law enforcement, despite assurances to the contrary when the surveillance policies are enacted.
or at least semi-private... there is a difference between putting a satellite in orbit and putting a man on the space station
It appears that you at least suspect you know what I meant.
Yes, lots of for-profit companies are successful at taking technology developed under government sponsorship and applying it to launching comm satellites or conducting the operations of government owned systems.
To clarify the statement you are quoting: commercial space =/= government contract space
Of the launch vehicles that are currently operating, only the Pegasus, Taurus and Falcon aren't built using motors designed under contract to (i.e. using the money of) either NASA or the DoD.
Not that lots of people haven't tried. But only Elias and Musk have met with any measurable success.
Fine. Let them do it with their own astronauts, and with their own money. Nothing's stopping them.
What troubles me is when we decide to throw away a nearly 50 year tradition of manned space excellence with a better than average track record and replace it with contracts to commercial space companies who have been making more promises than results for the past 25 years.
Only Orbital and SpaceX have made it past the "Step 2" phase, and they both had to learn the hard way that the space biz is exceptionally technically challenging and extremely risky, both technically and financially.
When there's a real financial incentive to be in space (e.g., mineral rich asteroids or selling water on the moon) then for-profit companies will succeed. Until then, they're just a vehicle to privatize what is otherwise be a government research function.
Slashdot Mirror
The cheaper part is that Musk can afford to take a loss and underbid, because he's got deep pockets. Therefore he can offer a package deal that includes development and testing of a new system. Most major aerospace companies operate on very thin profit margins, and don't have cash reserves like that for R&D.
Musk, on the other hand, has options.
I wish him luck.
The GP's Subject line is inaccurate, but the body of his post is correct.
It is censorship, but it's not 'evil' censorship, nor is it a violation of anyone's rights.
Apple is exercising their right to control what's in their storefront. If you don't like it, you have other options for your porn^H^H^Hhone.
Yeah, but that wasn't the scenario described in TFA.
The scenario described in TFA was that Bob is an idiot.
But no matter how quickly you fire Bob, the thieves still have that money
That statement misses the point.
First, I have a chance to detect Bob's dangerous behavior before the thieves do. Your "no matter how quickly" statement assumes they get to Bob before I do.
Second, my point is, if it weren't for Bobs, these thieves would be looking at boobies on channel 9 and filing TPS reports instead of collecting ill-gotten booty. Bob is a root cause. (Thieves' greed is another.)
The point isn't to blame the victim, but to figure out how to prevent them from becoming victims
Bob's not the victim, in this scenario. I am. Bob is the exploit.
At least you demonstrate my underlying point even as you pick nits at the example. The way to prevent being a victim is to not be Bob.
In other words, don't be stupid and you won't be a victim. Blaming the stupidity is not blaming the victim.
And ultimately, it's my stupidity -- If I give a Bob access to my bank account, I'm the stupid one. So therefore, I don't give that job to a Bob.
Just R'ed the FA, and my first reaction was "Bob's an idiot."
First, either he is using his home PC to make financial transactions for his employer, or he is taking a laptop home that can be used to access his employer's financial institution.
Second, he's installing shareware/freeware on this machine, and he does it without scanning the downloaded files or researching the reliability of the publisher.
Third, he uses a browser over an unsecured internet connection instead of via VPN to the company network, which should incorporate well maintained filters and firewalls.
Fourth, he continues to use this browser after it exhibits strange behavior.
Fifth, he ignores red flags like unexplained 'Safety Pass' requests.
If I discovered Bob did this when he worked for me, I'd fire Bob, no matter how much the boss on the temp agency radio commercials loves him.
Utor Latin cotidie, vos frigus agrestis.
Evil? Or just smart?
What does it matter to you?
When you've got a job to do
You've got to do it well;
You gotta give the other fellow hell!
Thank you. Interesting how several Troll and Flamebait mods came in overnight on every top reply critical of the exercise leaders' pedigrees.
You deserve the +6 mod, friend. Not I.
Ugh. And Michael Hayden. Bush's chief wiretapper.
Please. These people are among the threats we need security from.
While I don't disagree that we could do more in the area of computer security, one needs to look closely at the affiliations of the people running this "exercise."
They're both loyal Neocon insiders. John Negroponte is the former Bush Director of National Intelligence. Michael Chertoff is the former Director of Homeland Security, and co-author of the Patriot Act. And both of these positions were just the last in a string of appointments by Bush/Cheney.
And as career neoconservatives, they've been at the forefront of fearmongering and prevarication in order to lead the US to war and erode civil liberties. These are not opinions, these are well-documented facts.
The neocons are a one trick circus; this is just their newest pony. If you've been paying attention the past nine years, how can you possibly doubt that this is anything else?
You misunderstand me. The problem isn't with the child asking questions, it's with the article not arming the parent with the answers.
The questions AND the answers bring enlightenment, and it's the joy of enlightenment that creates a scientist out of a curious child.
More problems than that, even. The article does nothing to address the puzzled questions that my son (or even my wife, who is smart but no techie) would ask if I showed them this. That's where the REAL lessons are:
1 - "How does this measure the speed of light when we are using the microwave and not a flashlight?" (Answer: because microwaves and visible light are both forms of electromagnetic radiation... so is infrared, what you feel on your face when you stand by the campfire, and radio waves that bring music to our car stereos.)
2 - "Why does this experiment mean anything about speed? We are measuring a distance, not a speed." (Answer: because the wavelength is related to frequency by the speed of propagation. Think about shaking one end of the rope and watching the waves travel down it. Frequency is how many times per minute you shake. Each shake makes a peak and the space between peaks is how far the previous peak moved down the rope before the next shake. That's how wavelength and frequency are related by propagation velocity.)
If your child is still paying attention at the end of that thought experiment, you know he's a scientist. Buy her a model rocket or a microscope. If not, give her a set of watercolors or a video camera.
If your child just eats the chocolate and asks for more, then just buy him a guitar.
I'm with you. Of all the classic SF/Fantasy series out there, The Foundation Trilogy is probably the one LEAST amenable to a screenplay.
I mean, consider these series, just off the top of my head, in no particular order:
- Chalker's Well of Souls series
- Varley's Gaea Trilogy
- Heinlein's Lazarus Long epics
- Niven's Ringworld trilogy
- Niven/Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand
- Flynn's Firestar series
- Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Gap Cycle
- Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
- Any of Piers Anthony's tripe starting with the Tarot novels
- Anything good by Piers Anthony up to and including the Cluster series
- McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series
- Morris' Silistra series
I could go on and on and on, Philip Jose Farmer, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks...
Anyone attempting to translate any of these series to a Cinema or Television screenplay would FAIL, for various reasons... content, scope, depth, or combinations thereof.
But yet, I can't think of ONE that would be harder to translate to a screenplay than Asimov's Foundation series.
So, why is that one chosen? The only thing I can think of is that it's the only one that's the property of an estate looking to commercialize a dead author's bibliography.
And I'm not even going to honor the '3D' quotation with a comment. [shudder]
Aye. And verily, your pedantry obscures the allusion... and, concomitantly, its humor.
Yea, but unfortunately his short term memory is going.
He forgot the new cover sheet on his TPM report.
Um. No.
For an observer at 6ft from sea level, the distance to the horizon is 3.25 miles.
If you want to see a distance of 100 miles, then you need an altitude of 6660 feet.
More detail here
Its meaning has been lately bastardized
So zero-day has joined the rather exclusive League of Semiotic Hyperlatives, along with other misused terms such as Robot, Virtual Reality, 3D, and Artificial Intelligence.
GPS works by triangulating the phase delays of radio signals transmitted from GPS satellites. The accuracy of your position is proportional to the square root of the phase delay of a signal whose frequency is in the Megahertz, so you're losing a factor of 1 to 100 million right there. Add on top of that the scaling factors due to the orbital velocity of the satellites, the rotational velocity of the earth's surface, and the velocity of the airplane, and (for things like landing planes) a seven- to nine-nines reliability requirement, and even the best non-differential GPS systems only get an accuracy on the order of 10 meters.
This is a lot when you're trying to land the nose gear of a plane full of living humans going 100 MPH on a stripe about half a meter wide.
According to TFA, the Aluminum Ion clock offers about a 3000x factor of improvement on precision, which gets us down to the kind of accuracy we need for landing commercial airliners without the kinds of mishaps that will cause disproportional media feeding frenzies over the use of automated landing systems.
Does it have 'wings?'
If the drone is just capturing video of what is out in the open for all to see anyway, I don't have a problem with a drone recording it.
I would agree with this opinion as long as:
1 - The drone records police activity as well as civilian activity, and
2 - The "video of what is out in the open for all to see" is publicly available.
Without both of the above, it's far too easily abused. And in just the past year or two we've seen how quickly abuse of surveillance becomes routine behavior by law enforcement, despite assurances to the contrary when the surveillance policies are enacted.
or at least semi-private... there is a difference between putting a satellite in orbit and putting a man on the space station
It appears that you at least suspect you know what I meant.
Yes, lots of for-profit companies are successful at taking technology developed under government sponsorship and applying it to launching comm satellites or conducting the operations of government owned systems.
But what we're talking about now is letting these companies manage the development. Development of systems where prioritizing management needs over engineering advice will sooner or later have disastrous results.
Pardon me if I don't have much confidence in the outcome.
To clarify the statement you are quoting: commercial space =/= government contract space
Of the launch vehicles that are currently operating, only the Pegasus, Taurus and Falcon aren't built using motors designed under contract to (i.e. using the money of) either NASA or the DoD.
Not that lots of people haven't tried. But only Elias and Musk have met with any measurable success.
what is otherwise be a government research function
Correction: what should otherwise be a government research function.
Fine. Let them do it with their own astronauts, and with their own money. Nothing's stopping them.
What troubles me is when we decide to throw away a nearly 50 year tradition of manned space excellence with a better than average track record and replace it with contracts to commercial space companies who have been making more promises than results for the past 25 years.
Only Orbital and SpaceX have made it past the "Step 2" phase, and they both had to learn the hard way that the space biz is exceptionally technically challenging and extremely risky, both technically and financially.
When there's a real financial incentive to be in space (e.g., mineral rich asteroids or selling water on the moon) then for-profit companies will succeed. Until then, they're just a vehicle to privatize what is otherwise be a government research function.