BSD code is perfectly GPL compatible. You can include it line-for-line, but IIRC you have to keep the copyright notice and BSD license in the file.
Only true of the newer BSD license: the original contains the "advertising clause", which is incompatible with the GPL. Alan Cox had a problem with this: he wanted to integrate a BSD IP stack (back before Linux had one), but at the time the BSD license wasn't GPL compatible. So, he wrote his own GPLed one and integrated that instead.
The discussion was about Mars and explorer missions and reasons for their failures not NASA in general. Not the Space shuttle, its navigation systems or science payloads, which are clearly more modern.
Actually, the current core Shuttle systems are pretty old, and for good reason: they do the job, and have been very thoroughly debugged. The new bits appear in areas where they need new technology - the Shuttle's flight systems do exactly the same job now that they did on the very first flight, in exactly the same way - why would they need or even want new chips there?
I fault NASA on the image of its programs that it actively promotes. That every solder or wire in all its missions is a breakthrough in technology and will benefit all mankind. NASA needs to be honest, open and more scientific in its leadership. To sink or swim on the merits of the missions, not prey upon the memory of past technological breakthroughs that actually did benefit all of mankind.
I agree there - while the space program as a whole has brought enormous benefits to us all (communications satellites are probably the most obvious), does breeding ants in low earth orbit really matter? (Worse still is quantum physics: what exactly does smashing two very small particles together in a trillion-dollar toy to create a Big Pink Stripey Spinning Quark achieve?)
From what I've seen (living just outside JSC), NASA's obsessed with Mars. Like the moon decades ago, they want to go there - unlike the moon, it's still a pipedream for manned exploration. Mir and the ISS did show it's possible to keep humans alive for months at a time in microgravity - as long as you have monthly supply flights, and you're not exposed to any solar storms etc. In terms of getting to Mars, the best course is to work on new and better propulsion and shielding - neither of which the ISS achieves - then do an Apollo-style project, getting progressively closer to walking on the surface. Unfortunately, that removes NASA's reason for existing in the mean time, so we get ants being trained to sort tiny screws in orbit, or whatever, with a huge PR machine to convince us all it's worth billions a year...
Sorry - having had one brain-donor deny that Turing completeness is a significant attribute, I think you'll have to be more obvious;-)
But if you want to be serious,I was originally responding to the guy that said that the problem was that there was Gigabytes of code to go through leading to overly complex code. Which is rediculous, overly complex code is not NASA's problem. Overly complex beaurocracy, maybe, but not code. Since the software being produced is naturally constrained by the size limitations of older hardware. This is simply because it takes NASA so friggin long to procure and test space worthy hardware.
They have and use various PowerPC CPUs. Modern enough for you?;-) - they just don't use a PowerPC for tasks involving only simple arithmetic and logic, because that would be dumb. Why use an expensive hardened PowerPC chip when a standard 6502 (much larger features -> intrinsically hardened anyway) would do the same job for a tenth of the power?!
Yes, my point was that NASA computer technology is not state of the art. It is specialized, sure, but definately not state of the art computing.
It's close enough to state of the art - but only when they need it. There was an upgrade program to add PowerPC 603e modules to the Orbiter, for example (which currently uses x86 laptops internally, with older CPUs for the flight systems). OK, a 603 isn't quite "state of the art", but it's no museum piece either...
I guess I have to agree though, it would be state of the art on Mars... if they could just get the damn things there.
Yep - and arsing around trying to upgrade the hardware for the sake of being "up to date" isn't going to help that;-)
"State of the art is not always measured in Gigahertz."
Ummm... I was measuring it in MIPS.
Also wrong: for this environment, you measure in watts (or fractions of a watt), and in how much radiation it can take. The ability to play MP3s is not useful, the ability to survive on the target planet is.
"Yes, but can your computer recover from a triple memory failure?"
I have three computers...does that count?
No. One memory failure in each, and all three are dead. If you're using majority voting control, two memory failures will kill your whole three-node cluster, while the single NASA system is ticking happily away...
"Can you rewire your computer remotely to fall back on a redundent system?"
If one breaks I stop using it...
Not really an option when the machine is the only one available on that planet...
Right. Put control of the system into the hands of the very organization that dropped the ball and let Sep-11 happen in the first place. Sounds like a plan.:-)
Let it happen?! They didn't prevent it - they'd proposed a plan which could well have prevented it, but that was nixed by either Reno or Clinton at the time.
The system is already in their hands, and has been all along. My plan isn't putting any control anywhere - just making the existing lists be checked more frequently.
Of course, you'll have privacy advocates up in arms. OTOH, you already have to have photo ID to purchase a plane ticket anyway, so it's not like they can't already track which flights you've taken.
You really don't have that kind of "privacy" anyway - not just photo ID, most people pay with credit cards (hence giving name and address, as well as the name of their bank). Unless they wear gloves, they leave fingerprints anyway, and it's pretty difficult to avoid being seen by any of the CCTV cameras in the airport!
I dunno, I'd be a bit on the fence if the system actually worked as advertised, but I'm still not confident such a system would.
As long as it worked reliably - picking out wanted criminals, not picking out others - it would be OK. False positives shouldn't be a big deal in this case: if it flags you as being wanted, a quick manual check of the photo, details and prints will settle it in minutes. False negatives - a wanted criminal gets to fly (but has left prints and a photo in the audit trail, which could get picked up in a later investigation) - and that happens today anyway, since they aren't automatically on the no-fly list!
Who guarantees the integrity of the database? How do we know it contains valid data? How do we ensure against someone tampering with the data? There's a thousand questions.
Already addressed: the database exists now, it just isn't checked for airline passengers. It's maintained and secured by the FBI, IIRC. They've been doing it for many years now, and probably got the idea by now...
Of course I don't think a 'No Fly' database is a good idea. But if you're going to implement such a thing, you should probably *at least* do it the RIGHT way, don'tcha think?
I think it's a good idea - provided you put the right people on it. I'd love it to run a check against, say, an FBI list of people with outstanding arrest warrants, then alert airport security if a match is found.
One company makes electronic fingerprint readers (designed for computer access control) - something like that could easily rule out 99% of false positives, as long as the suspect's fingerprints are on file. Or just check every passenger's fingerprints as they check in: all they do is press a "button" for a second, and you can be fairly sure it's OK.
OK, that doesn't work with suspects who don't have prints in the database, but typically there will be at least a name and photograph; add automatic face recognition and the name check, and it'll be pretty solid.
There: a system which can be very confident in its identification - few false positives, very few false negatives - as well as quick, cheap, simple and non-intrusive.
Well, if there only was a RFID tag taped on the guns, what's stopping you from just removing it?
Nothing. It's a very dumb idea. Since an RFID tag would be nothing more than a machine-readable number anyway, WTF is wrong with a serial number, like they already have? Unlike a supermarket, you don't normally need to scan dozens of gun serial numbers per hour...
Over here in the civilized world, you need a licence to own and operate a gun. Seems to work quite well. Yes, the government has a database of all guns and their owners. Boo!! hiss!! So what?
Yes, Texas's system seems to work pretty well.
The idea that a gun-equipped public could prevent the government from turning against its own people was perhaps a good idea 150-200 years ago when wars were won by the side who had the most guys with handguns. That time is long gone.
Try telling that to the Russians, especially those in Chechnya - where the Russian military (still the nearest thing to a superpower outside the US) has been experiencing enormous difficulty suppressing rebels armed with nothing more than portable weapons (rifles, grenade launchers and some shoulder-launch SAMs). Or Afghanistan, where the then-superpower USSR was forced out by similar resistance. (Yes, they were armed and advised by the CIA, but still only had weapons of that level.)
To invade another country, a bunch of people with rifles stand no chance. To defend their own from an invader or a hostile regime, it's a different story: in Iraq, Hussein needed a large army just to keep the populace under control - and even then, it entailed many thousands of deaths per year, using helicopter gunships and nerve gas against his opponents. Determined civilians with firearms can make life extremely difficult for any occupying force.
Nothing is stopping them from launching a satellite with a nuclear weapon on board. It could be quite useful as an EMP generator, if the bomb is big enough.
Nothing, that is, apart from it being a really dumb attack (it would fry billions of dollars worth of their own satellites, significantly degrading their own intelligence and communications systems, as well as GPS) and ineffective against almost any conceivable enemy. (Military ground/air assets are all hardened anyway; terrorists rely on nothing more advanced than telephones and cars/planes.) If you wanted to knock half the planet's civilians offline for a couple of weeks, it would work (at enormous cost) - but otherwise useless.
An orbital EMP would also be hard to justify as "more dangerous than a Tomahawk" (particularly since Tomahawks can be nuclear-armed for real).
So: theoretically, if you were really dumb and/or desperate, you could detonate a nuke in orbit which you launched using this rocket - although nobody has ever tried it, unlike the Tomahawk. Of course, the same is true of the Space Shuttle; for that matter, you could also use a car to deliver a nuclear warhead, with rather more effect and control. Does that make cars "more dangerous than a Tomahawk"?
Considering that both Titan and Atlas rockets were originally developed as ICBMs to carry multiple megaton thermonuclear weapons, yes, I do think that their payload COULD be a lot more dangerous than a Tomahawk.
The original design, yes; however, the Titan and Atlas rockets that plant manufactures are not missiles. (The original launch rockets were recycled from ICBMs in that plant.) The point remains: they are not missiles. They do not (and cannot) carry bombs, they carry satellites: certainly not "more dangerous than a Tomahawk".
He actually refers to them as "rockets with a Pentagon payload", which is about right. There's a good chance that the kind of payload that those Titan and Atlas rockets carry is a LOT more dangerous than a Tomahawk.
You think a satellite is more dangerous than a large bomb?
Did y'all know that China has very recently launched it's third navigational satellite, making it possible for china to use its own positional system independently of US / EU / Russia? (three is the minimum for triangulation - if you assume that the triangulated point in space is to be thrown out)
You need three visible satellites for triangulation. Picture the globe, and work out where the satellites would be. Either they're geostationary, clustered over one part (which would give a crude GPS service - over one chunk of the Earth only) or they're not (in which case you can't triangulate anything from them on Earth). You might be able to use them from a lower orbit, though, for positioning satellites; all 3 equidistant GEO satellites would be visible when you're over either pole. Whatever it is, it's not [yet] a GPS rival!
btw, I find it so very amusing that whenever western sources refer to the chinese space program, they just HAVE to add phrase like "secret, military linked," as if NASA is completely independent of the military, or something...
It is independent of the military, actually; the Pentagon did have input in the Shuttle program early on (they wanted to be able to use it for launching and servicing/upgrading spy satellites, which can't be done with a rocket) but these days they launch their own stuff, on rockets from Lockheed Martin. (Built in what Michael Moore claimed in BFC was a "missile factory", as it happens.) NASA probably handle some stuff for the military, still, but most of it is done "in-house" using their own systems - in fact, orbital monitoring is military, with a full-time member of staff to liase with NASA and monitor the status of the Shuttle and ISS.
I am familiar with tempest monitoring, I have weighed the risks and will continue using my CRT monitor, but I will NEVER own a 46-49Mhz or 900Mhz analog cordless phone.
Both versions of Tempest are actually easier than intercepting digital cellphone calls, however! (The original Tempest actually uses much of the same equipment, but with different - simpler - processing of the results.) With properly implemented CDMA, your attempt to break the crypto will run out of universe to operate in (128 bit symmetric crypto). Your CRT, on the other hand, just involves getting close with a suitable antenna.
Hiding the risks and attempting to legislate the methods used only mask the problem.
The same is true of any crime: the law can't prevent the attack, nor can it catch every culprit - it can (and does) act as a disincentive, however.
Hold it, Arnold... I'm sure a regular SWAT guy can gun down 10 armed guys...
Only if he has enough ammunition to do the job! That regular SWAT guy will look very silly - and very dead - when he aims at the 11th armed bad guy, pulls the trigger, and hears a 'click'...
The SAS, incidentally, use the regular MP5 (or MP5-K), and use pairs of 30 round magazines, taped back-to-back. Changing magazine is, with a bit of practice, incredibly quick and easy. That gives them the same 60 rounds as this gun holds. They seem to think this is useful, and they've been doing the whole counter-terrorism thing for quite a long time...
Re:Other tech from the battlefield to the enterpri
on
The Soldier is the Network
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So American cops reguarly need to shoot 60 people without the inceonvenient delay of a reload?
60 people? No. Try to stop a car by shooting out the tires/engine? Yes. Also, remember "law enforcement" covers SWAT teams; using 3-round bursts, this will give you 20 pulls of the trigger before it needs to be reloaded. Still a bit excessive for most situations - but better to have too many rounds than to be first into a drug den, and be up against 11 people with only enough to take out 10...
Blimey, it must be like living in a war zone over there.
Not from what I've seen - and no, the police don't carry these things on patrol! They just have a lot of stuff "just in case", for dealing with really serious problems. Everything from adapted tanks for breaking down doors, to helicopters for chasing getaway cars without endangering other traffic.
Anyone talking on anything not hardwired SHOULD expect or at least understand that the transmissions can be intercepted.
That's true of landline communications too. (Apart from which, 'landline' communications often go over wireless links anyway, without your knowledge; apart from services like Sprint ION, telcos often use microwave links for trunk lines.) So in effect, you're saying NO phone call should be considered private, or entitled to any protection?
From a technical point of view, intercepting a landline call is easier than a modern cellphone call: just hook up a pair of wires to your local loop. Or even run my own wire alongside yours, and pick it up via induction: I'm only receiving an EM signal you're transmitting, so that's fine by you?
Then we get to Tempest (electronic and optical), at which point your argument says anything displayed on your computer screen shouldn't be considered private. Then I'll put a directional microphone just outside your house, and hear every word said: again, I'm just picking up a broadcast, nothing wrong with that?
Economically, you're reducing the value of the service. Just like illegal software or music copying: losing a $10 CD sale doesn't actually cost the record label $10, but it doesn't cost $0 either.
SO, you're not detecting the reception, you're detecting a broadcast the equipment is sending out (unintentionally). Block that, and Bob's yer Uncle!
You can try. They'll still turn up at your door periodically, just to check. Get caught, especially if you've gone to those lengths to avoid being detected, and you'll be sharing a TV with lots of other people with lots of spare time for a few months. Ironically, you don't have to pay the TV tax to watch the jail's TV...
And you approve of tactics like this?
Of course not. I strongly favor technological enforcement instead - i.e. encrypting the signal well, so viewing requires a card you only issue to subscribers. Exactly what DirecTV (and almost everyone else, cable and satellite) does - and exactly the system these clowns were undermining.
and hydro isn't even a clean power source! (Hydroelectric damns actually cause significant CO2 release,
It came as quite a big shock once this was realised; basically, when you flood an area, all the vegetation dies and decays, continuing to release CO2 and methane for years after the dam is first built. In greenhouse effect terms, the gas release is non-trivial, especially compared to other "clean" power sources which don't do this.
(2) We must criminalize modifying your own personal property in the privacy of your home even when you are not affecting anyone else.
The logic here is that you are affecting someone else, by intercepting their communications.
(3) We must also criminalize the "reception" of radio signals.
Already done in many countries; in the UK, it has been a crime for more than half a century to possess any device capable of receiving TV broadcasts without payment of a license fee (currently GBP 116/yr; about US$180).
I don't agree with the UK's system (which is currently being challenged in court), but I don't buy your argument that receiving and decrypting radio signals is "thought", either. The same argument could be applied to breach of copyright, and copyright has been enforced for centuries...
The "crimes" of decryption, modification, and reception are all generally undetectable and therefore effectively unenforcable. None of them and have any effect on anyone else. It is criminalizing undectectable non-events. It leaves a constant conflict between trying to enforce artificial protections and people doing things they have every right to do.
If reception is undetectable, tell that to the UK's TV Licensing Agency, which operates a fleet of TV detector vans! (TV tuner circuits leak a small but detectable signal back to the antenna.) Most of their enforcement is done via data mining (i.e. they visit everybody who hasn't paid for a TV license, on the assumption they're probably breaking the law), but they do operate detector vans as well...
I admit losing any privacy in "broadcast" radio kinda sucks, but I think the alternative is worse. It's just too screwed up trying to criminalize the reciept of information and to criminalize the processing of information. Prossessing information equals thinking. I'm not saying hardware "thinks", but the hardware/software is merely a fast and convient substitute for something that I *can* do do entirely in my head if I so choose.
I just don't buy this argument. Apart from anything else, it would negate not only all privacy and copyright laws, court secrecy orders, NDAs, anti-trust legislation (after all, a non-compete agreement or price-fixing collusion is also "just thought"!) - to me, that is by far the worse option.
Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are perfectly viable power sources,
Not very. The first two are intermittent, and hydro isn't even a clean power source! (Hydroelectric damns actually cause significant CO2 release, as well as major ecological damage to the area flooded.) Solar power is actually having problems just keeping initial costs down to current levels: the silicon wafers required are very expensive. A limited demand can be satisfied using "waste" wafers from semiconductor manufacture - above that volume, costs explode.
Now if I under stand this properly, this plant uses biomass, not strait garbage.
You don't understand it correctly, then: it does use straight garbage of various sorts. Anything organic, from sewage to coal.
this method gets near 100% efficiency, and doesn't place extra hydrocarbons in the air...
The waste->oil plant doesn't release any extra hydrocarbons anywhere, either: if the waste were allowed to decay in a landfill site, it would mostly be released as methane - a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. This mechanism converts raw organic waste (which would otherwise release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere!) into fertilizer, clean oil, and water. I'd call that a good deal, personally...
Sure they can. If the person who gave you the free software wasn't the copyright holder, the copyright holder can come after you.
That's their problem: the copyright holder is Microsoft. The person giving me the software is, legally, Microsoft: that's the meaning of vicarious liability. He is, legally, acting on behalf of Microsoft; whether or not they want him acting on their behalf in that way is irrelevant. (They can, of course, fire him for it, at which point he can't do it again...)
This is both right and wrong, though it is true that to create hydrogen we have to input energy, there is a way to use hydrogen that generates much more energy than what was used to create it.
It is called Hydrogen fusion
Fusion power is indeed wonderful, whether using hydrogen or helium, but this is totally unrelated to "hydrogen power" of the kind in the article.
In my perfect world H fusion plant generate enough electricity to power all the electrolysis plants you need, thus allowing the replacement of the oil based economy by an hydrogen based one, much cleaner and reusable.
Counter-intuitively, it's actually less clean than the waste->oil plant: fusion produces power with virtually no fuel used or waste produced, but the depolymerization plant goes one better and recycles existing waste as fuel - effectively producing a negative amount of waste! (Unlike fossil fuel, the only CO2 released is recently sequestered CO2 from the biomass being used.) With your fusion power, you still have organic matter becoming landfill waste rather than being recycled.
Under Canadian law it would be illegal for you to divulge what you hear.
That sucks. So I could monitor a conversation (legally), as could you - but we couldn't then discuss it?!
(It is actually illegal to decode encrypted signals; but the law is written in such a way as to cover legitimate broadcasters in Canada, it is not actually written in such a way as to cover foreign broadcasts without broadcast privledges in Canada. (Not kidding.)).
UK law has the same loophole - perhaps more useful, though, since the UK has much stricter censorship laws than Holland, meaning it's entirely legal to receive Dutch adult channels which are banned in the UK! Now, if only the UK could pick up DirecTV signals....
That's sort of my position on this too... if they don't want me intercepting it, then don't BEAM it at me.
So you're OK with me putting all your cellphone conversations online? After all, they're broadcast radio signals, using encryption (very weak encryption, at least in GSM's case) to control access. If you don't want me listening in, don't beam it at me!
However, I must say, if you want to put your attitude into action, at least don't a) put up a web site bragging about it and b) don't use the word "pirate" in your domain name.
Yep, the domain name was pretty much asking to be attacked like this...
I remember reading about this a wile ago, we could be using it now if we wanted to, but(in the US at lest) oil is only cost effective because the government subsidizes drilling...
Looks like Philadelphia didn't get that memo: "So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that." (from the linked article)
Not only that, the government is supporting this development too (for obvious reasons):
Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy."
Even if he's exaggerating by a factor of 2, that would be competitive with current crude oil prices. It also produces a good fertilizer as a byproduct, and converts PVC into hydrochloric acid - useful in itself, and far cleaner than the dioxins produced by incinerating it. It's even starting to be commercialized:
This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.
OK, only 200 tons per day - but that should be enough proof-of-concept to get other plants, and certainly a step in the right direction!
It is true that strait electric cars tend to be either small or need to be recharged to often, but hybrids are incredibly efficient, getting 100 miles to the gallon, and often more. If they were hydrogen electric instead of oil electric hybrid then they would produce no pollution...
Not really true - you've fallen into the usual trap. Hydrogen, unlike fossil fuels, is not an energy source - it merely stores energy produced by some other process (usually fossil fuel or nuclear, sometimes hydro or wind). IMO, hybrid cars (either gasoline, or better, diesel) burning fuel from plants like this represent a much better setup: apart from anything else, burning hydrogen doesn't solve the waste disposal issue this plant does!
Oil has served us, at some times even well, but now cleaner cheeper energy sources are viable, it is time to change...
I'm not sure either of those is true. Where are you going to get the electricity for an electric or hydrogen car? Most of the choices reduce to: coal, oil or nuclear. Sometimes hydro, wind or a little solar, but they aren't yet viable without subsidies, let alone cheaper! Using this plant to generate clean, recycled oil seems a much better arrangement all round: no need to change cars at all, no pollution (you're just recycling biomass), no change in infrastructure, and it cleans up landfill problems too.
Slashdot Mirror
Only true of the newer BSD license: the original contains the "advertising clause", which is incompatible with the GPL. Alan Cox had a problem with this: he wanted to integrate a BSD IP stack (back before Linux had one), but at the time the BSD license wasn't GPL compatible. So, he wrote his own GPLed one and integrated that instead.
Actually, the current core Shuttle systems are pretty old, and for good reason: they do the job, and have been very thoroughly debugged. The new bits appear in areas where they need new technology - the Shuttle's flight systems do exactly the same job now that they did on the very first flight, in exactly the same way - why would they need or even want new chips there?
I fault NASA on the image of its programs that it actively promotes. That every solder or wire in all its missions is a breakthrough in technology and will benefit all mankind. NASA needs to be honest, open and more scientific in its leadership. To sink or swim on the merits of the missions, not prey upon the memory of past technological breakthroughs that actually did benefit all of mankind.
I agree there - while the space program as a whole has brought enormous benefits to us all (communications satellites are probably the most obvious), does breeding ants in low earth orbit really matter? (Worse still is quantum physics: what exactly does smashing two very small particles together in a trillion-dollar toy to create a Big Pink Stripey Spinning Quark achieve?)
From what I've seen (living just outside JSC), NASA's obsessed with Mars. Like the moon decades ago, they want to go there - unlike the moon, it's still a pipedream for manned exploration. Mir and the ISS did show it's possible to keep humans alive for months at a time in microgravity - as long as you have monthly supply flights, and you're not exposed to any solar storms etc. In terms of getting to Mars, the best course is to work on new and better propulsion and shielding - neither of which the ISS achieves - then do an Apollo-style project, getting progressively closer to walking on the surface. Unfortunately, that removes NASA's reason for existing in the mean time, so we get ants being trained to sort tiny screws in orbit, or whatever, with a huge PR machine to convince us all it's worth billions a year...
Sorry - having had one brain-donor deny that Turing completeness is a significant attribute, I think you'll have to be more obvious ;-)
But if you want to be serious,I was originally responding to the guy that said that the problem was that there was Gigabytes of code to go through leading to overly complex code. Which is rediculous, overly complex code is not NASA's problem. Overly complex beaurocracy, maybe, but not code. Since the software being produced is naturally constrained by the size limitations of older hardware. This is simply because it takes NASA so friggin long to procure and test space worthy hardware.
They have and use various PowerPC CPUs. Modern enough for you? ;-) - they just don't use a PowerPC for tasks involving only simple arithmetic and logic, because that would be dumb. Why use an expensive hardened PowerPC chip when a standard 6502 (much larger features -> intrinsically hardened anyway) would do the same job for a tenth of the power?!
Yes, my point was that NASA computer technology is not state of the art. It is specialized, sure, but definately not state of the art computing.
It's close enough to state of the art - but only when they need it. There was an upgrade program to add PowerPC 603e modules to the Orbiter, for example (which currently uses x86 laptops internally, with older CPUs for the flight systems). OK, a 603 isn't quite "state of the art", but it's no museum piece either...
I guess I have to agree though, it would be state of the art on Mars... if they could just get the damn things there.
Yep - and arsing around trying to upgrade the hardware for the sake of being "up to date" isn't going to help that ;-)
Ummm... I was measuring it in MIPS.
Also wrong: for this environment, you measure in watts (or fractions of a watt), and in how much radiation it can take. The ability to play MP3s is not useful, the ability to survive on the target planet is.
"Yes, but can your computer recover from a triple memory failure?"
I have three computers...does that count?
No. One memory failure in each, and all three are dead. If you're using majority voting control, two memory failures will kill your whole three-node cluster, while the single NASA system is ticking happily away...
"Can you rewire your computer remotely to fall back on a redundent system?"
If one breaks I stop using it...
Not really an option when the machine is the only one available on that planet...
Let it happen?! They didn't prevent it - they'd proposed a plan which could well have prevented it, but that was nixed by either Reno or Clinton at the time.
The system is already in their hands, and has been all along. My plan isn't putting any control anywhere - just making the existing lists be checked more frequently.
You really don't have that kind of "privacy" anyway - not just photo ID, most people pay with credit cards (hence giving name and address, as well as the name of their bank). Unless they wear gloves, they leave fingerprints anyway, and it's pretty difficult to avoid being seen by any of the CCTV cameras in the airport!
I dunno, I'd be a bit on the fence if the system actually worked as advertised, but I'm still not confident such a system would.
As long as it worked reliably - picking out wanted criminals, not picking out others - it would be OK. False positives shouldn't be a big deal in this case: if it flags you as being wanted, a quick manual check of the photo, details and prints will settle it in minutes. False negatives - a wanted criminal gets to fly (but has left prints and a photo in the audit trail, which could get picked up in a later investigation) - and that happens today anyway, since they aren't automatically on the no-fly list!
Who guarantees the integrity of the database? How do we know it contains valid data? How do we ensure against someone tampering with the data? There's a thousand questions.
Already addressed: the database exists now, it just isn't checked for airline passengers. It's maintained and secured by the FBI, IIRC. They've been doing it for many years now, and probably got the idea by now...
I think it's a good idea - provided you put the right people on it. I'd love it to run a check against, say, an FBI list of people with outstanding arrest warrants, then alert airport security if a match is found.
One company makes electronic fingerprint readers (designed for computer access control) - something like that could easily rule out 99% of false positives, as long as the suspect's fingerprints are on file. Or just check every passenger's fingerprints as they check in: all they do is press a "button" for a second, and you can be fairly sure it's OK.
OK, that doesn't work with suspects who don't have prints in the database, but typically there will be at least a name and photograph; add automatic face recognition and the name check, and it'll be pretty solid.
There: a system which can be very confident in its identification - few false positives, very few false negatives - as well as quick, cheap, simple and non-intrusive.
Nothing. It's a very dumb idea. Since an RFID tag would be nothing more than a machine-readable number anyway, WTF is wrong with a serial number, like they already have? Unlike a supermarket, you don't normally need to scan dozens of gun serial numbers per hour...
Over here in the civilized world, you need a licence to own and operate a gun. Seems to work quite well. Yes, the government has a database of all guns and their owners. Boo!! hiss!! So what?
Yes, Texas's system seems to work pretty well.
The idea that a gun-equipped public could prevent the government from turning against its own people was perhaps a good idea 150-200 years ago when wars were won by the side who had the most guys with handguns. That time is long gone.
Try telling that to the Russians, especially those in Chechnya - where the Russian military (still the nearest thing to a superpower outside the US) has been experiencing enormous difficulty suppressing rebels armed with nothing more than portable weapons (rifles, grenade launchers and some shoulder-launch SAMs). Or Afghanistan, where the then-superpower USSR was forced out by similar resistance. (Yes, they were armed and advised by the CIA, but still only had weapons of that level.)
To invade another country, a bunch of people with rifles stand no chance. To defend their own from an invader or a hostile regime, it's a different story: in Iraq, Hussein needed a large army just to keep the populace under control - and even then, it entailed many thousands of deaths per year, using helicopter gunships and nerve gas against his opponents. Determined civilians with firearms can make life extremely difficult for any occupying force.
Nothing, that is, apart from it being a really dumb attack (it would fry billions of dollars worth of their own satellites, significantly degrading their own intelligence and communications systems, as well as GPS) and ineffective against almost any conceivable enemy. (Military ground/air assets are all hardened anyway; terrorists rely on nothing more advanced than telephones and cars/planes.) If you wanted to knock half the planet's civilians offline for a couple of weeks, it would work (at enormous cost) - but otherwise useless.
An orbital EMP would also be hard to justify as "more dangerous than a Tomahawk" (particularly since Tomahawks can be nuclear-armed for real).
So: theoretically, if you were really dumb and/or desperate, you could detonate a nuke in orbit which you launched using this rocket - although nobody has ever tried it, unlike the Tomahawk. Of course, the same is true of the Space Shuttle; for that matter, you could also use a car to deliver a nuclear warhead, with rather more effect and control. Does that make cars "more dangerous than a Tomahawk"?
The original design, yes; however, the Titan and Atlas rockets that plant manufactures are not missiles. (The original launch rockets were recycled from ICBMs in that plant.) The point remains: they are not missiles. They do not (and cannot) carry bombs, they carry satellites: certainly not "more dangerous than a Tomahawk".
You think a satellite is more dangerous than a large bomb?
You need three visible satellites for triangulation. Picture the globe, and work out where the satellites would be. Either they're geostationary, clustered over one part (which would give a crude GPS service - over one chunk of the Earth only) or they're not (in which case you can't triangulate anything from them on Earth). You might be able to use them from a lower orbit, though, for positioning satellites; all 3 equidistant GEO satellites would be visible when you're over either pole. Whatever it is, it's not [yet] a GPS rival!
btw, I find it so very amusing that whenever western sources refer to the chinese space program, they just HAVE to add phrase like "secret, military linked," as if NASA is completely independent of the military, or something...
It is independent of the military, actually; the Pentagon did have input in the Shuttle program early on (they wanted to be able to use it for launching and servicing/upgrading spy satellites, which can't be done with a rocket) but these days they launch their own stuff, on rockets from Lockheed Martin. (Built in what Michael Moore claimed in BFC was a "missile factory", as it happens.) NASA probably handle some stuff for the military, still, but most of it is done "in-house" using their own systems - in fact, orbital monitoring is military, with a full-time member of staff to liase with NASA and monitor the status of the Shuttle and ISS.
Both versions of Tempest are actually easier than intercepting digital cellphone calls, however! (The original Tempest actually uses much of the same equipment, but with different - simpler - processing of the results.) With properly implemented CDMA, your attempt to break the crypto will run out of universe to operate in (128 bit symmetric crypto). Your CRT, on the other hand, just involves getting close with a suitable antenna.
Hiding the risks and attempting to legislate the methods used only mask the problem.
The same is true of any crime: the law can't prevent the attack, nor can it catch every culprit - it can (and does) act as a disincentive, however.
Only if he has enough ammunition to do the job! That regular SWAT guy will look very silly - and very dead - when he aims at the 11th armed bad guy, pulls the trigger, and hears a 'click'...
The SAS, incidentally, use the regular MP5 (or MP5-K), and use pairs of 30 round magazines, taped back-to-back. Changing magazine is, with a bit of practice, incredibly quick and easy. That gives them the same 60 rounds as this gun holds. They seem to think this is useful, and they've been doing the whole counter-terrorism thing for quite a long time...
60 people? No. Try to stop a car by shooting out the tires/engine? Yes. Also, remember "law enforcement" covers SWAT teams; using 3-round bursts, this will give you 20 pulls of the trigger before it needs to be reloaded. Still a bit excessive for most situations - but better to have too many rounds than to be first into a drug den, and be up against 11 people with only enough to take out 10...
Blimey, it must be like living in a war zone over there.
Not from what I've seen - and no, the police don't carry these things on patrol! They just have a lot of stuff "just in case", for dealing with really serious problems. Everything from adapted tanks for breaking down doors, to helicopters for chasing getaway cars without endangering other traffic.
That's true of landline communications too. (Apart from which, 'landline' communications often go over wireless links anyway, without your knowledge; apart from services like Sprint ION, telcos often use microwave links for trunk lines.) So in effect, you're saying NO phone call should be considered private, or entitled to any protection?
From a technical point of view, intercepting a landline call is easier than a modern cellphone call: just hook up a pair of wires to your local loop. Or even run my own wire alongside yours, and pick it up via induction: I'm only receiving an EM signal you're transmitting, so that's fine by you?
Then we get to Tempest (electronic and optical), at which point your argument says anything displayed on your computer screen shouldn't be considered private. Then I'll put a directional microphone just outside your house, and hear every word said: again, I'm just picking up a broadcast, nothing wrong with that?
Economically, you're reducing the value of the service. Just like illegal software or music copying: losing a $10 CD sale doesn't actually cost the record label $10, but it doesn't cost $0 either.
SO, you're not detecting the reception, you're detecting a broadcast the equipment is sending out (unintentionally). Block that, and Bob's yer Uncle!
You can try. They'll still turn up at your door periodically, just to check. Get caught, especially if you've gone to those lengths to avoid being detected, and you'll be sharing a TV with lots of other people with lots of spare time for a few months. Ironically, you don't have to pay the TV tax to watch the jail's TV...
And you approve of tactics like this?
Of course not. I strongly favor technological enforcement instead - i.e. encrypting the signal well, so viewing requires a card you only issue to subscribers. Exactly what DirecTV (and almost everyone else, cable and satellite) does - and exactly the system these clowns were undermining.
It came as quite a big shock once this was realised; basically, when you flood an area, all the vegetation dies and decays, continuing to release CO2 and methane for years after the dam is first built. In greenhouse effect terms, the gas release is non-trivial, especially compared to other "clean" power sources which don't do this.
The logic here is that you are affecting someone else, by intercepting their communications.
(3) We must also criminalize the "reception" of radio signals.
Already done in many countries; in the UK, it has been a crime for more than half a century to possess any device capable of receiving TV broadcasts without payment of a license fee (currently GBP 116/yr; about US$180).
I don't agree with the UK's system (which is currently being challenged in court), but I don't buy your argument that receiving and decrypting radio signals is "thought", either. The same argument could be applied to breach of copyright, and copyright has been enforced for centuries...
The "crimes" of decryption, modification, and reception are all generally undetectable and therefore effectively unenforcable. None of them and have any effect on anyone else. It is criminalizing undectectable non-events. It leaves a constant conflict between trying to enforce artificial protections and people doing things they have every right to do.
If reception is undetectable, tell that to the UK's TV Licensing Agency, which operates a fleet of TV detector vans! (TV tuner circuits leak a small but detectable signal back to the antenna.) Most of their enforcement is done via data mining (i.e. they visit everybody who hasn't paid for a TV license, on the assumption they're probably breaking the law), but they do operate detector vans as well...
I admit losing any privacy in "broadcast" radio kinda sucks, but I think the alternative is worse. It's just too screwed up trying to criminalize the reciept of information and to criminalize the processing of information. Prossessing information equals thinking. I'm not saying hardware "thinks", but the hardware/software is merely a fast and convient substitute for something that I *can* do do entirely in my head if I so choose.
I just don't buy this argument. Apart from anything else, it would negate not only all privacy and copyright laws, court secrecy orders, NDAs, anti-trust legislation (after all, a non-compete agreement or price-fixing collusion is also "just thought"!) - to me, that is by far the worse option.
Not very. The first two are intermittent, and hydro isn't even a clean power source! (Hydroelectric damns actually cause significant CO2 release, as well as major ecological damage to the area flooded.) Solar power is actually having problems just keeping initial costs down to current levels: the silicon wafers required are very expensive. A limited demand can be satisfied using "waste" wafers from semiconductor manufacture - above that volume, costs explode.
Now if I under stand this properly, this plant uses biomass, not strait garbage.
You don't understand it correctly, then: it does use straight garbage of various sorts. Anything organic, from sewage to coal.
this method gets near 100% efficiency, and doesn't place extra hydrocarbons in the air...
The waste->oil plant doesn't release any extra hydrocarbons anywhere, either: if the waste were allowed to decay in a landfill site, it would mostly be released as methane - a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. This mechanism converts raw organic waste (which would otherwise release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere!) into fertilizer, clean oil, and water. I'd call that a good deal, personally...
That's their problem: the copyright holder is Microsoft. The person giving me the software is, legally, Microsoft: that's the meaning of vicarious liability. He is, legally, acting on behalf of Microsoft; whether or not they want him acting on their behalf in that way is irrelevant. (They can, of course, fire him for it, at which point he can't do it again...)
It is called Hydrogen fusion
Fusion power is indeed wonderful, whether using hydrogen or helium, but this is totally unrelated to "hydrogen power" of the kind in the article.
In my perfect world H fusion plant generate enough electricity to power all the electrolysis plants you need, thus allowing the replacement of the oil based economy by an hydrogen based one, much cleaner and reusable.
Counter-intuitively, it's actually less clean than the waste->oil plant: fusion produces power with virtually no fuel used or waste produced, but the depolymerization plant goes one better and recycles existing waste as fuel - effectively producing a negative amount of waste! (Unlike fossil fuel, the only CO2 released is recently sequestered CO2 from the biomass being used.) With your fusion power, you still have organic matter becoming landfill waste rather than being recycled.
That sucks. So I could monitor a conversation (legally), as could you - but we couldn't then discuss it?!
(It is actually illegal to decode encrypted signals; but the law is written in such a way as to cover legitimate broadcasters in Canada, it is not actually written in such a way as to cover foreign broadcasts without broadcast privledges in Canada. (Not kidding.)).
UK law has the same loophole - perhaps more useful, though, since the UK has much stricter censorship laws than Holland, meaning it's entirely legal to receive Dutch adult channels which are banned in the UK! Now, if only the UK could pick up DirecTV signals....
So you're OK with me putting all your cellphone conversations online? After all, they're broadcast radio signals, using encryption (very weak encryption, at least in GSM's case) to control access. If you don't want me listening in, don't beam it at me!
However, I must say, if you want to put your attitude into action, at least don't a) put up a web site bragging about it and b) don't use the word "pirate" in your domain name.
Yep, the domain name was pretty much asking to be attacked like this...
Looks like Philadelphia didn't get that memo: "So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that." (from the linked article)
Not only that, the government is supporting this development too (for obvious reasons):
Even if he's exaggerating by a factor of 2, that would be competitive with current crude oil prices. It also produces a good fertilizer as a byproduct, and converts PVC into hydrochloric acid - useful in itself, and far cleaner than the dioxins produced by incinerating it. It's even starting to be commercialized:
OK, only 200 tons per day - but that should be enough proof-of-concept to get other plants, and certainly a step in the right direction!
It is true that strait electric cars tend to be either small or need to be recharged to often, but hybrids are incredibly efficient, getting 100 miles to the gallon, and often more. If they were hydrogen electric instead of oil electric hybrid then they would produce no pollution...
Not really true - you've fallen into the usual trap. Hydrogen, unlike fossil fuels, is not an energy source - it merely stores energy produced by some other process (usually fossil fuel or nuclear, sometimes hydro or wind). IMO, hybrid cars (either gasoline, or better, diesel) burning fuel from plants like this represent a much better setup: apart from anything else, burning hydrogen doesn't solve the waste disposal issue this plant does!
Oil has served us, at some times even well, but now cleaner cheeper energy sources are viable, it is time to change...
I'm not sure either of those is true. Where are you going to get the electricity for an electric or hydrogen car? Most of the choices reduce to: coal, oil or nuclear. Sometimes hydro, wind or a little solar, but they aren't yet viable without subsidies, let alone cheaper! Using this plant to generate clean, recycled oil seems a much better arrangement all round: no need to change cars at all, no pollution (you're just recycling biomass), no change in infrastructure, and it cleans up landfill problems too.