Nah, this is but one of a number of necessary steps before SkyNet can actually rule.
All it can do now is launch missiles and such with various warheads.
Work like this and the DARPA stuff with autonomous vehicles, drones, and such are all needed to be completed before SkyNet chooses to reveal its presence, power, and control.
The people who continue to try to derail any efforts to stop climate change amaze me.
As more and more weather disasters rack up, and as the climate actually does change, it would seem their misinformation would fall on deaf ears. But I think there is also a want on the part of a lot of people to not believe what is going on, what they are doing to their children's future, and even what they are doing to their own futures.
Not that it really matters at this point. We are ~12 years to the 2 degree C mark over average global temperature from the last century - and climbing. The 2 degrees C mark is considered kind of a line in the sand. Once we cross that, it will be especially hard to recover.
On a global scale, the impact is very small compared to the information it can yield.
The hot spot will only be actual heat generated which will probably be on the order of a small town. The electricity generated to run it may or may not be from non-CO2 producing sources (hydro, nuclear, etc) so that could possibly up the CO2 output at the generating station or on the grid, or not.
When a drive fails and a RAID goes into reconstruction (if you are set up that way), that's when you are significantly more likely to have another drive fail due to all the extra activity across the RAID.
We see it all the time on a big array. One must hustle to repair/rebuild the RAID...;-)
It's a top corner of a large monolith that will start making a loud piercing noise when humans excavate it and go to take a souvenir photo in front of it, Dave.
I'd be willing to bet that either some low paid lackey was in charge of the website and built it with no oversight or anyone even asking simple questions about what he/she was doing, or they farmed it out to someone who apparently didn't have a clue, didn't have the time, or simply didn't care.
It's unbelievable to me that so many don't check their work or verify security settings, or even ask what could possibly go wrong.
Embarrassing breaches are inevitably the result.
And yep - whoever uses "password" or "123456" should be flogged. But then again, how simple is it to beat the prospective password against cracklib or similar, verify it is at least some minimum length with some minimum of upper case, lower case, and non-alpha characters?
All I can say is I recently upgraded with a SSD to hold my boot and system partitions on a Linux box, with spinning media for logs, tmp, and home space, and that thing boots like a wildcat.
Not that I have to boot Linux that often, though. In that respect it may not have been that good of an investment.
But the Windows folks might get a lot of use from really fast boot times...;-)
Around 1990 I was working at an oilfield testing company that had the grown kid of the original company owner at the helm. The guy was a moron and didn't care how the company functioned as long as the money kept coming in for him to go play the horses at a local racetrack.
Anyway, the field guys lost a radioactive source and couldn't find it. They thought it bounced out of an unsecured lead canister along a road somewhere.
They got their hand slapped for it but somewhere in the midwest there is a hot source laying by the road. Or was. Who knows if anyone ever found it.
These kinds of things are inexcusable because anyone who happens to find one and pick it up has their life changed. Cancer and death awaits if anyone spends any length of time with one of those sources. If a company cannot follow a checklist for handling one of those sources, they should not be allowed to use them.
"Obviously you have never heard of TSR programs or BIOS/UEFI attack vectors. Hardware CAN be infected at the 'metal' level."
Um, a TSR doesn't really matter if you reinstall the OS. While BIOS can be infected, you should just be able to update the BIOS to eliminate that infection. You can verify by merely watch the POST to see the before and after BIOS versions. If the system is already at the most current BIOS, down rev it and verify the BIOS level follows and then flash back to the current value and check again.
I would also suggest switching Dad to Linux. While not totally immune to attack, whatever the scammers had him do would probably have had no effect on Linux if the steps could even be duplicated on a Linux box.
The post about contacting the FBI is also a good one. Find out if they are interested in any forensics BEFORE wiping the OS.
If you absolutely have to run some MS software, check Codeweavers.com Crossover. It has an evaluation period and is very reasonably priced if you take the plunge.
It provides the OS hooks that Windows applications need to run natively in Linux - no virtual machines. Office works great and so do a lot of other applications. Codeweavers has a list of both known good and known bad software.
Consider giving them a try. I use their software and it works great for the few Windows applications I still run (circuit design and layout, etc.).
Thanks, Daetrin. I was also hoping for an answer. I had heard of Mars One but not 4Frontiers when I saw the call for questions. Either group by itself sounds like it could be plausible if handled right, but two companies competing raises the stakes a bit I think and they do need to consider what to do if the other settlement loses backing. I also think it would be easier for one company to justify backing out if they think there could be a place for their settlers to go. So what do they do with the extra load and demands if the other guys come knocking? One would hope that if one is going to fail, it happens well before anyone launches for mars.
I think the big question is how do they guarantee the survivability of the colony/colonies in the event that whatever company/companies that is supplying them fails. I know there are no guarantees, but just letting the people who go there die is kind of rough. The astronauts in Apollo 13 almost had that fate save some good shade tree engineering, but that was equipment failure. To send people up and then watch them die because a company goes belly up seems a bit unconscionable.
One thing I noticed when looking over 4Frontiers is that they have Jayne Poynter on board and she was one of the Biosphere people. During the original Biosphere 2 experiment, Wikipedia says she was part of the faction that was for science integrity and stood up to the ones at least suspected of trying to make Biosphere a tourist business and weren't so concerned about the science. If that's all true, I feel better about this group's integrity but still wish Palaia would have been more forthcoming. If my question was bad, he could have explained why.
You might want to take a look at what a breeder rally is. It uses the neutrons from fission of one material to create another fissionable material from a non-useful isotope. After you "breed" the new isotope, you still need to process it to create fuel suitable for another reactor that can burn this other fuel.
The only benefit of a breeder is that you can turn a non-useful isotope of a material into a useful one. But you need pretty sophisticated facilities to recover and process that new fuel.
It makes far more sense to just take the final fuel to mars and use that.
Building a particle accelerator that circles the earth is tough. It's a vacuum chamber so needs vacuum pumps, power, and would be vulnerable to sabotage, tampering, part theft, etc. Plus you have to float it across oceans and span mountains.
Build it in space. It's just a giant ring. The walls don't have to be very strong since you aren't supporting against atmospheric pressure. You don't need much in the way of pumping because you can simply vent to get to a very good vacuum. Power could just be supplied by solar panels. With proper orientation, all would stay illuminated at maximum instead of having half always in the dark.
If you don't want a ring to be the size of the earth's circumference, you just make it the size you want - bigger or smaller.
The only issue is getting the parts up there but I think all in all it would be cheaper to build a ring that large in space than to circle the earth. Both ideas are probably impossible and/or ludicrous.
But I think the big draws to space exploration is that it is technical and spurs innovation. It also gives people a purpose and a vision. The US space program has spun off so many benefits for the US and humanity it isn't funny. People complain about the cost but the computer you are using to view this web page had a lot of it come directly from the space program.
It's hard to know if these guys are legitimate or not. They seem like they might be. But you are making the same arguments that got the Apollo program terminated when there were still flights and experiments planned. It's what helped to end the Shuttle program. And here we sit with no government manned space missions to speak of. We have to hitch rides on Russian rockets and maybe even Chinese in the future. Luckily we have some private companies who have visionary leaders doing what we as a country should be doing but I'll take it. It's the best we have.
But cosmic rays are streams of energetic charge particles. Magnetic fields will definitely affect those. And a lack of a magnetic field on mars will definitely let many more of them hit the surface.
Along these lines, since there are two competing companies with similar funding/support plans, both planning to build and populate outposts on mars, how do you plan to work with the other company in the event either of you run short of funding/support? Would you allow the other colony to take up residence in your colony? What if it would overrun resources available to sustain your colony?
What about the other side of that coin? How would you work with the other colony if 4Frontiers was to see the end of funding and then be unable to support your own colonists?
With two colonies on mars, won't that then become a ratings war as each tries to be more interesting to viewers and not be canceled (or at least keep revenue coming in) by whatever media outlet is supporting your colony/company? How far would colonists be expected to go in order to maintain interest and viewership?
Why not work with the other colony/company from the outset instead of competing? It would seem that competing on such a venture is going to doom one of the colonies. Funding for one is questionable enough. Funding for two and competing for public interest could ultimately doom both, couldn't it?
The mars atmosphere is 95% CO2. Plants need oxygen and carbon dioxide but maybe some could make use of that high of a CO2 atmosphere.
On the other hand, the sea level pressure on earth is 14.7 psi. The pressure at the bottom of the deepest trench on mars is 0.087 psi - about 6/10's of a percent of the pressure on earth at sea level (somewhere around an equivalent of 110-120,000 feet in elevation on earth). The SR-71 set an absolute altitude record of 85,069 feet so it's the equivalent of being higher than an SR-71 can fly.
In short, plants as we know them won't grow. Food will only be able to be grown in pressurized greenhouses.
In comparing 4Frontiers and Mars One, it looks like there are two competing companies working to establish outposts on Mars and both have similar plans for funding - virtual tourism and monitoring of the participants.
The Apollo program was an ambitious program to land humans on the moon. If you consider that it started with Kennedy's speech in 1962 and ended with Apollo 17 in 1972, it only lasted 10 years but the astronauts could all be brought back to Earth to live out their lives.
Even though civil unrest and budget issues led to the demise of the Apollo program, and no humans have visited the moon since, underneath it all was a very quick loss of interest by the public. The world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, but by Apollo 17, the US broadcasters had stopped live broadcasts and had resorted to very short updates during the evening news.
Sending humans to mars is for all practical purposes a one-way trip and those humans will need to be supported for the rest of their natural lives. They simply won't be able to create manufacturing facilities essential to be entirely self-sufficient. With the loss of interest in the Apollo program and the presumed inability to bring humans back to earth if either 4Frontiers or Mars One programs/companies cease operations before all of the astronauts have died, what happens to the astronauts or what will be done so that they can live out a full, and to whatever extent possible, enjoyable life on mars?
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, this is but one of a number of necessary steps before SkyNet can actually rule.
All it can do now is launch missiles and such with various warheads.
Work like this and the DARPA stuff with autonomous vehicles, drones, and such are all needed to be completed before SkyNet chooses to reveal its presence, power, and control.
Almost there. Not quite yet, but getting close...
That's no moon!
The people who continue to try to derail any efforts to stop climate change amaze me.
As more and more weather disasters rack up, and as the climate actually does change, it would seem their misinformation would fall on deaf ears. But I think there is also a want on the part of a lot of people to not believe what is going on, what they are doing to their children's future, and even what they are doing to their own futures.
Not that it really matters at this point. We are ~12 years to the 2 degree C mark over average global temperature from the last century - and climbing. The 2 degrees C mark is considered kind of a line in the sand. Once we cross that, it will be especially hard to recover.
PBS Frontline is running a very topical show this week: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/
If you have four sheep but only three pair of gloves...
It's the mesh. The starting data can be interpolated.
You might want to look up mesh density and what it does for simulations.
Yeah, those massive ice sheets that thin and break off are not melting. Definitely not melting. Definitely...
On a global scale, the impact is very small compared to the information it can yield.
The hot spot will only be actual heat generated which will probably be on the order of a small town. The electricity generated to run it may or may not be from non-CO2 producing sources (hydro, nuclear, etc) so that could possibly up the CO2 output at the generating station or on the grid, or not.
Congrats to NCAR!
When a drive fails and a RAID goes into reconstruction (if you are set up that way), that's when you are significantly more likely to have another drive fail due to all the extra activity across the RAID.
;-)
We see it all the time on a big array. One must hustle to repair/rebuild the RAID...
It's a top corner of a large monolith that will start making a loud piercing noise when humans excavate it and go to take a souvenir photo in front of it, Dave.
I'd be willing to bet that either some low paid lackey was in charge of the website and built it with no oversight or anyone even asking simple questions about what he/she was doing, or they farmed it out to someone who apparently didn't have a clue, didn't have the time, or simply didn't care.
It's unbelievable to me that so many don't check their work or verify security settings, or even ask what could possibly go wrong.
Embarrassing breaches are inevitably the result.
And yep - whoever uses "password" or "123456" should be flogged. But then again, how simple is it to beat the prospective password against cracklib or similar, verify it is at least some minimum length with some minimum of upper case, lower case, and non-alpha characters?
IEEE gets a huge fail on this one. Top to bottom.
All I can say is I recently upgraded with a SSD to hold my boot and system partitions on a Linux box, with spinning media for logs, tmp, and home space, and that thing boots like a wildcat.
;-)
Not that I have to boot Linux that often, though. In that respect it may not have been that good of an investment.
But the Windows folks might get a lot of use from really fast boot times...
It sadly does occur from time to time. You don't always have the brightest bulbs handling those things out in the field.
I used to work at a company that lost one.
I think people should go to jail if they lose a source. It's inexcusable.
Around 1990 I was working at an oilfield testing company that had the grown kid of the original company owner at the helm. The guy was a moron and didn't care how the company functioned as long as the money kept coming in for him to go play the horses at a local racetrack.
Anyway, the field guys lost a radioactive source and couldn't find it. They thought it bounced out of an unsecured lead canister along a road somewhere.
They got their hand slapped for it but somewhere in the midwest there is a hot source laying by the road. Or was. Who knows if anyone ever found it.
These kinds of things are inexcusable because anyone who happens to find one and pick it up has their life changed. Cancer and death awaits if anyone spends any length of time with one of those sources. If a company cannot follow a checklist for handling one of those sources, they should not be allowed to use them.
"Obviously you have never heard of TSR programs or BIOS/UEFI attack vectors. Hardware CAN be infected at the 'metal' level." Um, a TSR doesn't really matter if you reinstall the OS. While BIOS can be infected, you should just be able to update the BIOS to eliminate that infection. You can verify by merely watch the POST to see the before and after BIOS versions. If the system is already at the most current BIOS, down rev it and verify the BIOS level follows and then flash back to the current value and check again.
I would also suggest switching Dad to Linux. While not totally immune to attack, whatever the scammers had him do would probably have had no effect on Linux if the steps could even be duplicated on a Linux box.
The post about contacting the FBI is also a good one. Find out if they are interested in any forensics BEFORE wiping the OS.
Or even the names of the three scientists being inducted into the "Hall of Fame"?
Thanks for posting that. We all know how beneficial irradiated insects, animals, and humans can be.
Just look at the spider that bit Peter Parker.
And that extra hand might come in, well, handy...
Missing crucial software like Photoshop/MS Office
If you absolutely have to run some MS software, check Codeweavers.com Crossover. It has an evaluation period and is very reasonably priced if you take the plunge.
It provides the OS hooks that Windows applications need to run natively in Linux - no virtual machines. Office works great and so do a lot of other applications. Codeweavers has a list of both known good and known bad software.
Consider giving them a try. I use their software and it works great for the few Windows applications I still run (circuit design and layout, etc.).
Thanks, Daetrin. I was also hoping for an answer. I had heard of Mars One but not 4Frontiers when I saw the call for questions. Either group by itself sounds like it could be plausible if handled right, but two companies competing raises the stakes a bit I think and they do need to consider what to do if the other settlement loses backing. I also think it would be easier for one company to justify backing out if they think there could be a place for their settlers to go. So what do they do with the extra load and demands if the other guys come knocking? One would hope that if one is going to fail, it happens well before anyone launches for mars.
I think the big question is how do they guarantee the survivability of the colony/colonies in the event that whatever company/companies that is supplying them fails. I know there are no guarantees, but just letting the people who go there die is kind of rough. The astronauts in Apollo 13 almost had that fate save some good shade tree engineering, but that was equipment failure. To send people up and then watch them die because a company goes belly up seems a bit unconscionable.
One thing I noticed when looking over 4Frontiers is that they have Jayne Poynter on board and she was one of the Biosphere people. During the original Biosphere 2 experiment, Wikipedia says she was part of the faction that was for science integrity and stood up to the ones at least suspected of trying to make Biosphere a tourist business and weren't so concerned about the science. If that's all true, I feel better about this group's integrity but still wish Palaia would have been more forthcoming. If my question was bad, he could have explained why.
You might want to take a look at what a breeder rally is. It uses the neutrons from fission of one material to create another fissionable material from a non-useful isotope. After you "breed" the new isotope, you still need to process it to create fuel suitable for another reactor that can burn this other fuel.
The only benefit of a breeder is that you can turn a non-useful isotope of a material into a useful one. But you need pretty sophisticated facilities to recover and process that new fuel.
It makes far more sense to just take the final fuel to mars and use that.
Building a particle accelerator that circles the earth is tough. It's a vacuum chamber so needs vacuum pumps, power, and would be vulnerable to sabotage, tampering, part theft, etc. Plus you have to float it across oceans and span mountains.
Build it in space. It's just a giant ring. The walls don't have to be very strong since you aren't supporting against atmospheric pressure. You don't need much in the way of pumping because you can simply vent to get to a very good vacuum. Power could just be supplied by solar panels. With proper orientation, all would stay illuminated at maximum instead of having half always in the dark.
If you don't want a ring to be the size of the earth's circumference, you just make it the size you want - bigger or smaller.
The only issue is getting the parts up there but I think all in all it would be cheaper to build a ring that large in space than to circle the earth. Both ideas are probably impossible and/or ludicrous.
But I think the big draws to space exploration is that it is technical and spurs innovation. It also gives people a purpose and a vision. The US space program has spun off so many benefits for the US and humanity it isn't funny. People complain about the cost but the computer you are using to view this web page had a lot of it come directly from the space program.
It's hard to know if these guys are legitimate or not. They seem like they might be. But you are making the same arguments that got the Apollo program terminated when there were still flights and experiments planned. It's what helped to end the Shuttle program. And here we sit with no government manned space missions to speak of. We have to hitch rides on Russian rockets and maybe even Chinese in the future. Luckily we have some private companies who have visionary leaders doing what we as a country should be doing but I'll take it. It's the best we have.
But cosmic rays are streams of energetic charge particles. Magnetic fields will definitely affect those. And a lack of a magnetic field on mars will definitely let many more of them hit the surface.
Along these lines, since there are two competing companies with similar funding/support plans, both planning to build and populate outposts on mars, how do you plan to work with the other company in the event either of you run short of funding/support? Would you allow the other colony to take up residence in your colony? What if it would overrun resources available to sustain your colony?
What about the other side of that coin? How would you work with the other colony if 4Frontiers was to see the end of funding and then be unable to support your own colonists?
With two colonies on mars, won't that then become a ratings war as each tries to be more interesting to viewers and not be canceled (or at least keep revenue coming in) by whatever media outlet is supporting your colony/company? How far would colonists be expected to go in order to maintain interest and viewership?
Why not work with the other colony/company from the outset instead of competing? It would seem that competing on such a venture is going to doom one of the colonies. Funding for one is questionable enough. Funding for two and competing for public interest could ultimately doom both, couldn't it?
The mars atmosphere is 95% CO2. Plants need oxygen and carbon dioxide but maybe some could make use of that high of a CO2 atmosphere.
On the other hand, the sea level pressure on earth is 14.7 psi. The pressure at the bottom of the deepest trench on mars is 0.087 psi - about 6/10's of a percent of the pressure on earth at sea level (somewhere around an equivalent of 110-120,000 feet in elevation on earth). The SR-71 set an absolute altitude record of 85,069 feet so it's the equivalent of being higher than an SR-71 can fly.
In short, plants as we know them won't grow. Food will only be able to be grown in pressurized greenhouses.
In comparing 4Frontiers and Mars One, it looks like there are two competing companies working to establish outposts on Mars and both have similar plans for funding - virtual tourism and monitoring of the participants.
The Apollo program was an ambitious program to land humans on the moon. If you consider that it started with Kennedy's speech in 1962 and ended with Apollo 17 in 1972, it only lasted 10 years but the astronauts could all be brought back to Earth to live out their lives.
Even though civil unrest and budget issues led to the demise of the Apollo program, and no humans have visited the moon since, underneath it all was a very quick loss of interest by the public. The world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, but by Apollo 17, the US broadcasters had stopped live broadcasts and had resorted to very short updates during the evening news.
Sending humans to mars is for all practical purposes a one-way trip and those humans will need to be supported for the rest of their natural lives. They simply won't be able to create manufacturing facilities essential to be entirely self-sufficient. With the loss of interest in the Apollo program and the presumed inability to bring humans back to earth if either 4Frontiers or Mars One programs/companies cease operations before all of the astronauts have died, what happens to the astronauts or what will be done so that they can live out a full, and to whatever extent possible, enjoyable life on mars?