Why aren't phones generating their own keys when they're activated at the store? Burn a fusible link if necessary. This would be more secure _and_ cheaper for the carriers. Oh, because NSA has plants on the GSM committees?
No, because the subscriber identity is linked to the SIM card (it's in the name...),
and not to the phone. You can switch a SIM card into any phone (some simlock
issues excluded) and just keep going with your one subscriber identity.
Or put another SIM card in your phone and use a completely different one.
It's great when traveling.
It's a feature - it's even a "we actually want this" kind of feature.
In the past the end user can still opt to not see any ads, even if they comply with the "acceptable ads" policy. This would be news if they are making a change so that the end user is forced to see a given ad that the advertiser pays extra for, regardless of their extension settings.
If a card is stolen and known stolen, the owner can report the theft and the card is deactivated, whether or not it contains an "encryption chip". If the card is stolen and the owner does not know it was stolen, and the thief also has the pin, then they can use the card, whether or not it has an "encryption chip".
The "not knowing it is stolen" is the point: Magstripe cards can be trivially copied.
The chips do an actual challenge-response handshake with a secret that never leaves the
chip, and cannot be copied (at least not without decapping and some very high end lab gear,
thereby also destroying the card - which prevents the "swipe card through a copying reader
and hand it back" attack).
Guess you don't live in a cold part of the world in the winter, or where it can hit 35C+ in the summer. Around here in Canada, we use 30-50m segments that aren't welded because the tracks shrink and expand so much. Once the temps drop to -20C here, you can lose over an 3cm, and once it gets over 35C with the train's on them they can expand over 10cm causing them to warp off the bed.
Then that's a cheap bed and rail mounting, there's no technical reason for it.
I do live where it routinely gets over 30C, and -20C isn't unheard of (we hit it
two winters ago, and -12C was just last week) - and all rail on main lines is welded.
The expansion and contraction forces are completely dissipated by proper
mounting to the sleepers and go into the ballast, even at those temperatures.
Welding itself can only happen during "neutral" temperatures though, somewhere around 2C
Also: really, slashdot, no degree sign - not even using the HTML entity?
You're actually incorrect. There's enough radiation to lock up computers in low earth orbit, including on board the ISS.
Not really, no. They run quite a lot of unmodified, off-the shelf, near-current-generation laptops on the ISS
(most new crews bring a couple of laptops and leave most of them them there, while only broken ones are
put in the "garbage trucks"). They don't run any worse than on the ground.
True, none of those is mission-critical as in "a failure will kill the crew", but some are experiment-result-critical.
The people designing the experiments apparently are fine with that, so it can't be that bad.
. At least then the Saturn V launch rocket was being tested as well.
The early Apollo test missions were on a Saturn 1B
Yup. That's what I consider one of the craziest/most amazing aspects of the crazy-stuff-rich
whole Apollo program: The final Saturn V configuration (S-IC + S-II + S-IVB) had only two
unmanned test flight - in the form of full orbital missions, Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 (Apollo 4 was
also the very first flight for both S-IC and S-II). Both missions were complete successes
(and led to the discovery of lots of problems, including the famous "pogo oscillations").
There were plans for a third unmanned Saturn V launch, but they were running out of time, and
more importantly, out of Saturn Vs, so it was decided to make that launch Apollo 8 instead - the
first manned flight around the moon.
Nobody was really sure this would work...
Not a single Saturn V ever failed in a mission-critical way (Apollo 13 was a service module poblem).
Start alphabetically, and with a long list of random names (take randomly from US+other census data, or other large pools), and each successive vulernbility gets the next name from the list, no exceptions.
Not only did this work for hurricanes, this is actually how the US Government has decided on operation names for a while:
How the US Army choses operation names
You should read the articles you link to. They used to use random names, but they don't anymore, for PR reasons.
The deficit they're talking about is around 1% to 2% of the annual production.
Right now, yes. The deficit they are talking about is 25%-50% of the annual production.
I can't see this working for more than a handful of years even under the assumption of large
stockpiles - "rolling reserves" attenuate the problem of age, but not the one of consumption.
How is this supposed to work? Are they just printing more cocoa beans?
I can imagine demand rising a lot, but unless there are huge cocoa reserves
somewhere (which I doubt in the case of a perishable) in the order of multiple
yearly harvests (global production seems to be somewhere around four million
tonnes), I can't see how this demand is going to be met with actual chocolate.
Pacemakers don't use RTGs, they use non-thermal radioisotope generators, like betavoltaics that harvest the current created by escaping beta particles.
That's only true for the Promethium-powered ones with a Betacel unit. I think the number of
actual thermoelectric ones still "in the wild" using Plutonium is about the same.
Do you even know how this case of infection occurred?
I don't. You, however, speculated about contaminated suits which "still have to
be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected."
Which really shouldn't happen.
you're the one who says he knows,
or rather knows enough to know there was a systemic problem and not one merely attributable to failure to follow established protocols.
Please tell me where I said that.
Huh? Plane flights? Are we still talking about a controlled clinical environment in a big American city?
There are only about a dozen BSL-4 facilities in the US; if you want to establish the principle that patients must be treated in such a facility, you will be moving A LOT of them.
1.) I don't. My video example above was meant as a "look at how the pros do it".
2.) You do expect "A LOT" of Ebola patients in the US?
you seem to think every metro in the US has a world-class biohazard facility and infrastructure, and has plenty to spare on a wild goose chase of
isolating minimally-virulent ebola patients, and you can't seem to understand that your fears are based completely on your own speculation and snap judgement.
Your conceptualization of this disease, and the means required to contain it, constitute the textbook definition of cargo cult science.
Hm? What part of "don't mix clean and unclean environments" is cargo cult?
Also: I'm not afraid.
Just to clarify: I'm not talking about the Ebola outbreak as such, and arbitrary
patients. I'm talking about this one specific case of an infected health worker in
a proper clinical environment.
So basically you're just anxious, because none of this "seems right" in complete absence of empirical evidence?
Somebody in a modern clinical environment who supposedly knew what they were doing got infected.
That right there is empirical evidence of something not being right.
And in your sample of 10 (or 20, who knows!) one person became ill, because, we dunno, but it sounds fishy.
It doesn't to you? "Well, they have to take off those contaminated suits, and some will get infected while
doing that. Shit happens." really isn't the right approach here.
What recommendations would you make, if you were, say, a public health official? Everyone who develops illness has to be treated in something akin to a BSL-4 facility?
No, but how about "don't mix clean and unclean environments, and follow proper decontamination
procedures while moving between them, and before undressing"?
Have you any idea how many plane flights that would require, just to cite one small aspect of the logistics?
Huh? Plane flights? Are we still talking about a controlled clinical environment in a big American city?
And all this to protect from a disease vector that's completely unsubstantiated in the literature?
Or do you do like Judge Clay Jenkins, and personally go to the family's house in shirt-sleeves and drive them to a new home? Which approach is more appropriate? Which one balances our available resources against the actual concrete threat of the disease? Which one is actually workable?
BSL-4 is a standard that only applies to laboratories, the same standards aren't necessarily applied to clinical environments, and in the case of Ebola are major overkill.
I mostly agree, but I'd still expect strict precautions to be taken to prevent the mixing of
clean and contaminated environments. That includes not taking contaminated objects (suits,
gloves, whatever) out of the containment area.
Ebola can't travel through the air, so positive pressure suits aren't appropriate, and they still have to be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected.
So WhyTF are they taking off undecontaminated gear?
People who "test positive" for Ebola are not contagious, only people who have symptoms are, and they can only pass the disease through contact with bodily fluids -- this usually implies touch, since hemorrhagic fevers cause people to give off all kinds of gross effluent, but it's just not like a "virus" one gets from casual contact, like, say, rubella.
And still somebody got infected. Somebody who knew they were dealing with an
infectious
and lethal disease. This should never have happened. You're not making me feel better about the
competence of those involved.
The fact is, Ebola isn't that contagious -- HIV is more virulent, and these two are nothing compared to the influenza or SARS. It's bad that health workers can get it, but this is still one person, so on a completely epidemiological basis it's really not a big deal. Characterizing a single case as somehow indicative of the safety of these procedures is sensationalism.
Well, yes and no. I'm not really concerned about it "getting out". And while it's obviously not enough
for proper statistics, it's more than enough for concern for the health workers: How many people were
treating this patient? 10-20?
That makes for a 5-10% infection rate amongst people who knew what they were dealing with, in a supposedly
first-rate facility in a highly developed country. And the infection happened despite Ebola "not being that contagious".
well no, I bet a dollar there was a tear in his suit. Simplest explanation is always right.
Be prepared to lose a dollar. The protocol for donning and removing the protective gear is very complex, and very hard to get perfect. When putting the suit on, it's possible to get gaps between the goggles and suit without even knowing it.
Goggles?! - Proper biohazard suits are full-body and pressurized, with a full-head hood and absolutely
no openings in the vicinity of the head. Or any place on the front side of the body for that matter.
And when taking it off, a tiny flap of the contaminated suit brushing against a clean surface is almost impossible to detect.
Eh, again? - There's a multi-step decontamination procedure before taking off the suit.
Taking off a still-contaminated suit would be a major fuckup, and a (potentially) contaminated suit should never be in an environment where any "un-suited" contact can happen.
It is estimated the Great Pyramid was built in just over twenty years. So say 7500 days - which means placing 320 blocks a day assuming you work 365 days 24 hours a day. Pretty sure the Egyptians would be limited to daylight hours work, so they'd need to cut & move at least 500 blocks a day.
What? No! The limitation to daylight hours meant they had to be faster per stone,
but it didn't suddenly double the amount of stones needed.
A 2.4 million stone pyramid built in 20 years is built at an average rate of 229 stones
per day, completely independent of the length of the work day.
Slashdot Mirror
Why aren't phones generating their own keys when they're activated at the store? Burn a fusible link if necessary. This would be more secure _and_ cheaper for the carriers. Oh, because NSA has plants on the GSM committees?
No, because the subscriber identity is linked to the SIM card (it's in the name...),
and not to the phone. You can switch a SIM card into any phone (some simlock
issues excluded) and just keep going with your one subscriber identity.
Or put another SIM card in your phone and use a completely different one.
It's great when traveling.
It's a feature - it's even a "we actually want this" kind of feature.
Surely a rocket trying to come in for a soft landing and going splat! boom! can't be worse than blowing up on the pad during lunch.
Definitely correct. That ruins everyone's dinner plans.
In the past the end user can still opt to not see any ads, even if they comply with the "acceptable ads" policy. This would be news if they are making a change so that the end user is forced to see a given ad that the advertiser pays extra for, regardless of their extension settings.
They are not.
If a card is stolen and known stolen, the owner can report the theft and the card is deactivated, whether or not it contains an "encryption chip". If the card is stolen and the owner does not know it was stolen, and the thief also has the pin, then they can use the card, whether or not it has an "encryption chip".
The "not knowing it is stolen" is the point: Magstripe cards can be trivially copied.
The chips do an actual challenge-response handshake with a secret that never leaves the
chip, and cannot be copied (at least not without decapping and some very high end lab gear,
thereby also destroying the card - which prevents the "swipe card through a copying reader
and hand it back" attack).
Damn: the neutral temperature is somewhere around 20 C of course.
Guess you don't live in a cold part of the world in the winter, or where it can hit 35C+ in the summer. Around here in Canada, we use 30-50m segments that aren't welded because the tracks shrink and expand so much. Once the temps drop to -20C here, you can lose over an 3cm, and once it gets over 35C with the train's on them they can expand over 10cm causing them to warp off the bed.
Then that's a cheap bed and rail mounting, there's no technical reason for it.
I do live where it routinely gets over 30C, and -20C isn't unheard of (we hit it
two winters ago, and -12C was just last week) - and all rail on main lines is welded.
The expansion and contraction forces are completely dissipated by proper
mounting to the sleepers and go into the ballast, even at those temperatures.
Welding itself can only happen during "neutral" temperatures though, somewhere around 2C
Also: really, slashdot, no degree sign - not even using the HTML entity?
They never said "land at the same place".
Yes they did. Landing at the launch site is the planned final goal.
You're actually incorrect. There's enough radiation to lock up computers in low earth orbit, including on board the ISS.
Not really, no. They run quite a lot of unmodified, off-the shelf, near-current-generation laptops on the ISS
(most new crews bring a couple of laptops and leave most of them them there, while only broken ones are
put in the "garbage trucks"). They don't run any worse than on the ground.
True, none of those is mission-critical as in "a failure will kill the crew", but some are experiment-result-critical.
The people designing the experiments apparently are fine with that, so it can't be that bad.
. At least then the Saturn V launch rocket was being tested as well.
The early Apollo test missions were on a Saturn 1B
Yup. That's what I consider one of the craziest/most amazing aspects of the crazy-stuff-rich
whole Apollo program: The final Saturn V configuration (S-IC + S-II + S-IVB) had only two
unmanned test flight - in the form of full orbital missions, Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 (Apollo 4 was
also the very first flight for both S-IC and S-II). Both missions were complete successes
(and led to the discovery of lots of problems, including the famous "pogo oscillations").
There were plans for a third unmanned Saturn V launch, but they were running out of time, and
more importantly, out of Saturn Vs, so it was decided to make that launch Apollo 8 instead - the
first manned flight around the moon.
Nobody was really sure this would work...
Not a single Saturn V ever failed in a mission-critical way (Apollo 13 was a service module poblem).
Start alphabetically, and with a long list of random names (take randomly from US+other census data, or other large pools), and each successive vulernbility gets the next name from the list, no exceptions.
Not only did this work for hurricanes, this is actually how the US Government has decided on operation names for a while: How the US Army choses operation names
You should read the articles you link to. They used to use random names, but they don't anymore, for PR reasons.
...
"Just Cause", "Desert Shield", "Provide Comfort", "Northern Watch", "Desert Fox", "Desert Freedom", "Desert Storm", "Iraqi Freedom", "Enduring Freedom",
Really not that random.
The deficit they're talking about is around 1% to 2% of the annual production.
Right now, yes. The deficit they are talking about is 25%-50% of the annual production.
I can't see this working for more than a handful of years even under the assumption of large
stockpiles - "rolling reserves" attenuate the problem of age, but not the one of consumption.
How is this supposed to work? Are they just printing more cocoa beans?
I can imagine demand rising a lot, but unless there are huge cocoa reserves
somewhere (which I doubt in the case of a perishable) in the order of multiple
yearly harvests (global production seems to be somewhere around four million
tonnes), I can't see how this demand is going to be met with actual chocolate.
Pacemakers don't use RTGs, they use non-thermal radioisotope generators, like betavoltaics that harvest the current created by escaping beta particles.
That's only true for the Promethium-powered ones with a Betacel unit. I think the number of
actual thermoelectric ones still "in the wild" using Plutonium is about the same.
Skargarrat
Skagerrak
Kattgarat
Kattegat
He's not in England. He's in Ecuador.
No he isn't. He is in the Ecuadorian embassy, in London, England.
The embassy is their sovereign soil, by international treaty.
No it isn't.
Contrary to popular belief, diplomatic missions do not enjoy full extraterritorial status and are not sovereign territory of the represented state.
If the English police set foot in there to deport him to Sweden (as they would do if he left), that's an invastion of their territory.
No it isn't.
It would break a very important international treaty though, and likely
lead to lots of diplomatic problems.
Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.
Neither is there a 100kW/hr battery. Moron.
replace Herz, [...] with a more english ideal; cycles-per-second (so much for brevity).
This one is a false near-cognate: The cycles-per-second unit is "Hertz", as in Heinrich, not as in heart.
That still makes it German though...
Do you even know how this case of infection occurred?
I don't. You, however, speculated about contaminated suits which "still have to
be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected."
Which really shouldn't happen.
you're the one who says he knows, or rather knows enough to know there was a systemic problem and not one merely attributable to failure to follow established protocols.
Please tell me where I said that.
Huh? Plane flights? Are we still talking about a controlled clinical environment in a big American city?
There are only about a dozen BSL-4 facilities in the US; if you want to establish the principle that patients must be treated in such a facility, you will be moving A LOT of them.
1.) I don't. My video example above was meant as a "look at how the pros do it".
2.) You do expect "A LOT" of Ebola patients in the US?
you seem to think every metro in the US has a world-class biohazard facility and infrastructure, and has plenty to spare on a wild goose chase of isolating minimally-virulent ebola patients, and you can't seem to understand that your fears are based completely on your own speculation and snap judgement. Your conceptualization of this disease, and the means required to contain it, constitute the textbook definition of cargo cult science.
Hm? What part of "don't mix clean and unclean environments" is cargo cult?
Also: I'm not afraid.
Just to clarify: I'm not talking about the Ebola outbreak as such, and arbitrary
patients. I'm talking about this one specific case of an infected health worker in
a proper clinical environment.
So basically you're just anxious, because none of this "seems right" in complete absence of empirical evidence?
Somebody in a modern clinical environment who supposedly knew what they were doing got infected.
That right there is empirical evidence of something not being right.
And in your sample of 10 (or 20, who knows!) one person became ill, because, we dunno, but it sounds fishy.
It doesn't to you? "Well, they have to take off those contaminated suits, and some will get infected while
doing that. Shit happens." really isn't the right approach here.
What recommendations would you make, if you were, say, a public health official? Everyone who develops illness has to be treated in something akin to a BSL-4 facility?
No, but how about "don't mix clean and unclean environments, and follow proper decontamination
procedures while moving between them, and before undressing"?
Have you any idea how many plane flights that would require, just to cite one small aspect of the logistics?
Huh? Plane flights? Are we still talking about a controlled clinical environment in a big American city?
And all this to protect from a disease vector that's completely unsubstantiated in the literature?
Or do you do like Judge Clay Jenkins, and personally go to the family's house in shirt-sleeves and drive them to a new home? Which approach is more appropriate? Which one balances our available resources against the actual concrete threat of the disease? Which one is actually workable?
You're losing me here.
BSL-4 is a standard that only applies to laboratories, the same standards aren't necessarily applied to clinical environments, and in the case of Ebola are major overkill.
I mostly agree, but I'd still expect strict precautions to be taken to prevent the mixing of
clean and contaminated environments. That includes not taking contaminated objects (suits,
gloves, whatever) out of the containment area.
Ebola can't travel through the air, so positive pressure suits aren't appropriate, and they still have to be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected.
So WhyTF are they taking off undecontaminated gear?
People who "test positive" for Ebola are not contagious, only people who have symptoms are, and they can only pass the disease through contact with bodily fluids -- this usually implies touch, since hemorrhagic fevers cause people to give off all kinds of gross effluent, but it's just not like a "virus" one gets from casual contact, like, say, rubella.
And still somebody got infected. Somebody who knew they were dealing with an infectious
and lethal disease. This should never have happened. You're not making me feel better about the
competence of those involved.
The fact is, Ebola isn't that contagious -- HIV is more virulent, and these two are nothing compared to the influenza or SARS. It's bad that health workers can get it, but this is still one person, so on a completely epidemiological basis it's really not a big deal. Characterizing a single case as somehow indicative of the safety of these procedures is sensationalism.
Well, yes and no. I'm not really concerned about it "getting out". And while it's obviously not enough
for proper statistics, it's more than enough for concern for the health workers: How many people were
treating this patient? 10-20?
That makes for a 5-10% infection rate amongst people who knew what they were dealing with, in a supposedly
first-rate facility in a highly developed country. And the infection happened despite Ebola "not being that contagious".
Yikes.
well no, I bet a dollar there was a tear in his suit. Simplest explanation is always right.
Be prepared to lose a dollar. The protocol for donning and removing the protective gear is very complex, and very hard to get perfect. When putting the suit on, it's possible to get gaps between the goggles and suit without even knowing it.
Goggles?! - Proper biohazard suits are full-body and pressurized, with a full-head hood and absolutely
no openings in the vicinity of the head. Or any place on the front side of the body for that matter.
And when taking it off, a tiny flap of the contaminated suit brushing against a clean surface is almost impossible to detect.
Eh, again? - There's a multi-step decontamination procedure before taking off the suit.
Taking off a still-contaminated suit would be a major fuckup, and a (potentially) contaminated suit should never
be in an environment where any "un-suited" contact can happen.
Have a look at how this works at the BSL-4 level (skip to about minute 13).
What kind of amateurs are running this place?
North Italy, Austria and then south Germany where the first regions hit by the Chernobyl explosion.
Don't quote me on that, but I'm decently sure that Chernobyl (and Pripyat) were the first regions hit by the Chernobyl explosion...
It is estimated the Great Pyramid was built in just over twenty years. So say 7500 days - which means placing 320 blocks a day assuming you work 365 days 24 hours a day. Pretty sure the Egyptians would be limited to daylight hours work, so they'd need to cut & move at least 500 blocks a day.
What? No! The limitation to daylight hours meant they had to be faster per stone,
but it didn't suddenly double the amount of stones needed.
A 2.4 million stone pyramid built in 20 years is built at an average rate of 229 stones
per day, completely independent of the length of the work day.
You're not factoring in the 2011 Thailand flood that set back Moore's Law for hard drives by 2+ years...
This might have set back manufacturing and availability of existing products
at the time, but whyTF would it have set back R&D for new products?
Oh, Really?
No, really.