Admittedly this doesn't seem like some great security threat to me.
It will be more and more of a threat, especially as we inevitably move toward autonomous robots for housekeeping chores. How 'bout I hack into your "Rosie Robot" and tell her to pick up a kitchen knife and wipe out your family in their sleep? (Not to mention the widespread speculation about Michael Hastings's car getting hacked...) Clearly we've got a long way to go in this regard.
That got me thinking... would it be feasible to build a sort of "black box" recorder for your home? Have it scoop up all wired & wireless traffic and store it for a week or a month... keep the box hidden and hard to tamper with, only controllable by its own hardware interface. You could also have it monitor such traffic to look for attacks and send out alerts, and/or dump data to a list of destinations in case of certain failure/emergency modes.
Need to get from LA to San Fran RIGHT NOW? Take a fucking plane.
Right. Take the plane and you'll spend more time in the airport than in the air. Oh, and you'll also spend an order of magnitude more for the ticket than Musk's expected price.
But other than that.... yeah, what an idiotic idea.
Wish I still had mod points. I hadn't heard this story before, but it's similar to many others I've heard which point to Musk's thoroughness and attention to detail. Case in point: he's been kicking around this idea in his head for at least a year (that we know about, maybe even longer) but he held off on publishing it until he could honestly justify taking enough time away from SpaceX and Tesla to give it a reasonably complete "alpha" treatment.
Yes, at least they are attempting to provide for all those things. But even with multiple redundant fallbacks, it will be a very risky endeavor.
As for landing, Elon Musk claims his next-gen Dragon capsule will be able to land (propulsively) on Mars. That remains to be seen, but at least on paper it is possible. If he can get the Falcon rocket to be fully reusable (another big "if"), it would dramatically reduce the cost of the mission, possibly to the point where this odd "reality show" funding scheme might have a chance of working.
Still, it's not the death I'd choose. But for some adventurous types I can understand the appeal of it.
Other benefits Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing include:
1. Reduction of parasites, pests, and disease vectors. 2. Less need for pharmaceuticals. 3. No need for fertilizer. 4. Less petroleum used in transporting feed and manure to/from the CAFO. 5. Increases soil fertility. 6. Increases topsoil coverage and depth. 7. Can reverse desertification. 8. Sequesters vast amounts of CO2.
Coincidentally, a "space engineer" whose blog I read recently mentioned something similar as a way to generate revenue from the early phase of a lunar mining operation. I'm not sure I buy the numbers, but it's an interesting concept:
I can immediately generate revenue from the use of the laser communications system. Utterly secure, 25 gigabits/sec communications with an unhackable data server would easily be worth $150-250m/year in revenue to the U.S. government, based on the cost of the Advanced EHF and other wideband military satellites. The yearly cost to support this is $1-2m dollars, thus my first infrastructure payload for mining is already generating strongly positive cash flow.
Perhaps they could coat the payload with an ablative heat shield? And presumably they would build the thing at high altitude to avoid the "thick" air below. Nevertheless, you're right that they'd have an "uphill battle" to reach orbit this way.
It would be cool to do a sort of "street view" simulation based on high resolution scanning and photography. For example, you could have a small vehicle that would "hop" over the site at low altitude, making multiple passes from various angles, downloading the data to earth between hops. You would want to repeat the whole process a few times to catch the scene from different lighting angles, etc., but eventually you'd have enough data to reconstruct the whole area in fine detail. It would be a lot of fun to just wander around in there with a VR helmet.
You could even go so far as to rig up a big helium balloon with a harness, to simulate the 1/6th gravity. I would pay some serious coin for an hour in that kind of setup.
This "wood battery" is an interesting concept, but this problem has already been solved by a team at MIT. They've been developing the technology over the last several years, and are now in the process of commercializing it. The first "commercial" prototypes are expected early next year. The details are in this video lecture by the inventor, Donald Sadoway.
This technology has great potential to revolutionize the way we produce and use energy. Worth a look...
In a way, yes... Nobody has ever built a fully reusable rocket yet. Actually, SpaceX is going at a pretty good pace, but it still takes a long time. They have to reach a high degree of certainty that this complex system will work, and will be able to tolerate a few minor glitches along the way.
I can't wait to see them recover a first stage from an actual launch. Musk has said they might be ready to try it as early as next year. I wish it could be sooner, but space hardware always takes a long time to develop. The dragon capsule is already reusable, though they haven't reused one yet. So if they can reuse the 1st stage too, that could greatly reduce launch costs even before they achieve full reusability. The 2nd stage is probably the cheapest 'segment' of the stack, so it's less urgent to get them fully reusable right away. (I don't know how much the 2nd stage costs, compared to the 1st, but with only one engine instead of nine, it's got to be a huge difference.)
Between this and the upcoming human-rated Dragon with propulsive landing capability, there's a lot of "coolness" in the pipeline for the next few years. And not just from SpaceX... Lots of other "NewSpace" companies are doing cool stuff too, like Masten, XCor, Blue Origin, etc.. It's nice to see so much progress in so many areas.
The root of the problem is the "modern" use of mono-species CAFOs instead of the more traditional methods of multi-species pastured livestock. Honestly, even if you set out to intentionally breed drug resistant microbes, you really couldn't devise a much better scheme for it than a CAFO. This is doubly sad because CAFOs are far less efficient in terms of fossil fuel inputs, and use just as much land anyway (if you include all the land used to grow the feed grain, etc.).
The future of livestock production lies in the work of Allan Savory and Joel Salatin. With intensive rotational grazing which mimics the natural behavior of wild herbivores, they achieve impressive yields with minimal infrastructure, NO chemical inputs, NO antibiotics, using only rainfall for water. Furthermore, their methods actually increase the topsoil, rather than depleting it, which has the extra benefit of sequestering massive amounts of CO2.
... or Fox News, or (far worse than Fox, according to a recent Pew study) MSNBC.
You seem to be confusing this Pew study with an earlier Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. survey. The Pew study found MSNBC to be the most "opinion dominated" station, with 85% of its content being opinion. The FDU survey found FOX viewers to be the least well-informed of all TV viewers... even less well informed than people who don't read or watch any news at all.
Hm... actually, I'm not sure about the "weekly departures" bit. It's dependent on the synodic period between Mars and Earth. There may be ways to get more trips into the lineup, but the "short" trips would only happen at synodic intervals.
Buzz Aldrin spent some time discussing this issue in his recent ISDC talk. The trick is to have an entire fleet of "cycler" ships and only use the ones that are in the "just right" phase of their orbit. There are many possible configurations, but most have Earth/Mars transit times in range of 3 to 6 months.
If you timed it right, you could have cyclers departing on a weekly basis with transit times of a few months. Then just leave the ship uninhabited during the long voyage back to the front of the queue.
Our problem is neither "government" nor "business" per se, it is rather the capture of government by business. None of these absurd "interventions" in the market originated from government, they came from highly paid lobbyists, often with the relevant legislative language being written by them.
Like any other tool, "government" is a double-edged sword. If wielded properly, it can be used for good. In this case, I deem the cost/benefit to weigh in our favor.
LOL!! We haven't had a "free market" in the USA in decades, ESPECIALLY in the energy sector. Between corporate capture of government, underfunded regulatory agencies, and the revolving door between public and private sectors... we're a long way off from what you're talking about.
While I agree that putting a "price" on carbon would help, it's currently a political non-starter. The OFSA at least has a chance of bipartisan support, and it stands to put a serious dent in our overall net carbon emissions. In the meantime, solar and wind installations will continue to chip away at the coal-fired electricity emissions. Some judicious "incentives" like a feed-in tariff might speed the process up a bit, but we're already past the tipping point where "going green" makes better business sense than business as usual.
For that matter, we're also already past the tipping point where global climate change is inevitable. Our best hope on that front is adoption of managed grazing of herbivores to sequester CO2 at a massive scale in restoration of topsoil. (See this Allan Savory TED Talk for more info.) That is our best hope for avoiding the worst effects of the coming disruptions.
I agree in spirit but not in practice. (Prohibition laws tend to do more harm than good.) But forcing ethanol to compete with methanol would have the same effect, since ethanol could never compete without government subsidies. Just remove the subsidies and mandate fully flex-fuel cars, and let the market take care of the ethanol problem.
In fact, I would go further and eliminate all subsidies from all industries. Let petroleum compete against the alternatives on a level playing field. I'm confident the market would take care of our oil problem too. (This is also advocated by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. His talks are well worth a look.)
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly this doesn't seem like some great security threat to me.
It will be more and more of a threat, especially as we inevitably move toward autonomous robots for housekeeping chores. How 'bout I hack into your "Rosie Robot" and tell her to pick up a kitchen knife and wipe out your family in their sleep? (Not to mention the widespread speculation about Michael Hastings's car getting hacked...) Clearly we've got a long way to go in this regard.
That got me thinking... would it be feasible to build a sort of "black box" recorder for your home? Have it scoop up all wired & wireless traffic and store it for a week or a month... keep the box hidden and hard to tamper with, only controllable by its own hardware interface. You could also have it monitor such traffic to look for attacks and send out alerts, and/or dump data to a list of destinations in case of certain failure/emergency modes.
Need to get from LA to San Fran RIGHT NOW? Take a fucking plane.
Right. Take the plane and you'll spend more time in the airport than in the air. Oh, and you'll also spend an order of magnitude more for the ticket than Musk's expected price.
But other than that.... yeah, what an idiotic idea.
Wish I still had mod points. I hadn't heard this story before, but it's similar to many others I've heard which point to Musk's thoroughness and attention to detail. Case in point: he's been kicking around this idea in his head for at least a year (that we know about, maybe even longer) but he held off on publishing it until he could honestly justify taking enough time away from SpaceX and Tesla to give it a reasonably complete "alpha" treatment.
Yes, at least they are attempting to provide for all those things. But even with multiple redundant fallbacks, it will be a very risky endeavor.
As for landing, Elon Musk claims his next-gen Dragon capsule will be able to land (propulsively) on Mars. That remains to be seen, but at least on paper it is possible. If he can get the Falcon rocket to be fully reusable (another big "if"), it would dramatically reduce the cost of the mission, possibly to the point where this odd "reality show" funding scheme might have a chance of working.
Still, it's not the death I'd choose. But for some adventurous types I can understand the appeal of it.
That's only because of how we raise livestock. There are other ways which do not have these problems.
Other benefits Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing include:
1. Reduction of parasites, pests, and disease vectors.
2. Less need for pharmaceuticals.
3. No need for fertilizer.
4. Less petroleum used in transporting feed and manure to/from the CAFO.
5. Increases soil fertility.
6. Increases topsoil coverage and depth.
7. Can reverse desertification.
8. Sequesters vast amounts of CO2.
Yes. Actually, given how log this has been a PITA, it's rather amazing that no browser has such a function yet. Maybe there's a 3rd party add-on?
Are they "located" in Chromium or in YouTube?
Coincidentally, a "space engineer" whose blog I read recently mentioned something similar as a way to generate revenue from the early phase of a lunar mining operation. I'm not sure I buy the numbers, but it's an interesting concept:
I can immediately generate revenue from the use of the laser communications system. Utterly secure, 25 gigabits/sec communications with an unhackable data server would easily be worth $150-250m/year in revenue to the U.S. government, based on the cost of the Advanced EHF and other wideband military satellites. The yearly cost to support this is $1-2m dollars, thus my first infrastructure payload for mining is already generating strongly positive cash flow.
Perhaps they could coat the payload with an ablative heat shield? And presumably they would build the thing at high altitude to avoid the "thick" air below. Nevertheless, you're right that they'd have an "uphill battle" to reach orbit this way.
American manfuctors are like Acer
First of all, "manfuctors"???
Second of all, Acer is American? That would be news to the Taiwanese guy who founded it. ;-)
I was expecting a story about credit card fraud. Not that this is any better...
It would be cool to do a sort of "street view" simulation based on high resolution scanning and photography. For example, you could have a small vehicle that would "hop" over the site at low altitude, making multiple passes from various angles, downloading the data to earth between hops. You would want to repeat the whole process a few times to catch the scene from different lighting angles, etc., but eventually you'd have enough data to reconstruct the whole area in fine detail. It would be a lot of fun to just wander around in there with a VR helmet.
You could even go so far as to rig up a big helium balloon with a harness, to simulate the 1/6th gravity. I would pay some serious coin for an hour in that kind of setup.
This "wood battery" is an interesting concept, but this problem has already been solved by a team at MIT. They've been developing the technology over the last several years, and are now in the process of commercializing it. The first "commercial" prototypes are expected early next year. The details are in this video lecture by the inventor, Donald Sadoway.
This technology has great potential to revolutionize the way we produce and use energy. Worth a look...
In a way, yes... Nobody has ever built a fully reusable rocket yet. Actually, SpaceX is going at a pretty good pace, but it still takes a long time. They have to reach a high degree of certainty that this complex system will work, and will be able to tolerate a few minor glitches along the way.
I can't wait to see them recover a first stage from an actual launch. Musk has said they might be ready to try it as early as next year. I wish it could be sooner, but space hardware always takes a long time to develop. The dragon capsule is already reusable, though they haven't reused one yet. So if they can reuse the 1st stage too, that could greatly reduce launch costs even before they achieve full reusability. The 2nd stage is probably the cheapest 'segment' of the stack, so it's less urgent to get them fully reusable right away. (I don't know how much the 2nd stage costs, compared to the 1st, but with only one engine instead of nine, it's got to be a huge difference.)
Between this and the upcoming human-rated Dragon with propulsive landing capability, there's a lot of "coolness" in the pipeline for the next few years. And not just from SpaceX... Lots of other "NewSpace" companies are doing cool stuff too, like Masten, XCor, Blue Origin, etc.. It's nice to see so much progress in so many areas.
The root of the problem is the "modern" use of mono-species CAFOs instead of the more traditional methods of multi-species pastured livestock. Honestly, even if you set out to intentionally breed drug resistant microbes, you really couldn't devise a much better scheme for it than a CAFO. This is doubly sad because CAFOs are far less efficient in terms of fossil fuel inputs, and use just as much land anyway (if you include all the land used to grow the feed grain, etc.).
The future of livestock production lies in the work of Allan Savory and Joel Salatin. With intensive rotational grazing which mimics the natural behavior of wild herbivores, they achieve impressive yields with minimal infrastructure, NO chemical inputs, NO antibiotics, using only rainfall for water. Furthermore, their methods actually increase the topsoil, rather than depleting it, which has the extra benefit of sequestering massive amounts of CO2.
I didn't know that. Thanks. I feel safer already.
No shit. Also: Now the "terrorists" don't even have to be on board, they can just hack the control system remotely.
... or Fox News, or (far worse than Fox, according to a recent Pew study) MSNBC.
You seem to be confusing this Pew study with an earlier Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. survey. The Pew study found MSNBC to be the most "opinion dominated" station, with 85% of its content being opinion. The FDU survey found FOX viewers to be the least well-informed of all TV viewers... even less well informed than people who don't read or watch any news at all.
Hm... actually, I'm not sure about the "weekly departures" bit. It's dependent on the synodic period between Mars and Earth. There may be ways to get more trips into the lineup, but the "short" trips would only happen at synodic intervals.
Buzz Aldrin spent some time discussing this issue in his recent ISDC talk. The trick is to have an entire fleet of "cycler" ships and only use the ones that are in the "just right" phase of their orbit. There are many possible configurations, but most have Earth/Mars transit times in range of 3 to 6 months.
If you timed it right, you could have cyclers departing on a weekly basis with transit times of a few months. Then just leave the ship uninhabited during the long voyage back to the front of the queue.
Our problem is neither "government" nor "business" per se, it is rather the capture of government by business. None of these absurd "interventions" in the market originated from government, they came from highly paid lobbyists, often with the relevant legislative language being written by them.
Like any other tool, "government" is a double-edged sword. If wielded properly, it can be used for good. In this case, I deem the cost/benefit to weigh in our favor.
LOL!! We haven't had a "free market" in the USA in decades, ESPECIALLY in the energy sector. Between corporate capture of government, underfunded regulatory agencies, and the revolving door between public and private sectors... we're a long way off from what you're talking about.
While I agree that putting a "price" on carbon would help, it's currently a political non-starter. The OFSA at least has a chance of bipartisan support, and it stands to put a serious dent in our overall net carbon emissions. In the meantime, solar and wind installations will continue to chip away at the coal-fired electricity emissions. Some judicious "incentives" like a feed-in tariff might speed the process up a bit, but we're already past the tipping point where "going green" makes better business sense than business as usual.
For that matter, we're also already past the tipping point where global climate change is inevitable. Our best hope on that front is adoption of managed grazing of herbivores to sequester CO2 at a massive scale in restoration of topsoil. (See this Allan Savory TED Talk for more info.) That is our best hope for avoiding the worst effects of the coming disruptions.
I agree in spirit but not in practice. (Prohibition laws tend to do more harm than good.) But forcing ethanol to compete with methanol would have the same effect, since ethanol could never compete without government subsidies. Just remove the subsidies and mandate fully flex-fuel cars, and let the market take care of the ethanol problem.
In fact, I would go further and eliminate all subsidies from all industries. Let petroleum compete against the alternatives on a level playing field. I'm confident the market would take care of our oil problem too. (This is also advocated by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. His talks are well worth a look.)