It goes to show how vastly different water is from air. I mean, yes, obviously there are differences, but we take them largely for granted except for those like the parent who intentionally explore them. 90 meters vertical difference is less than the height of many buildings (its, very roughly, 30 floors). In air, we barely think about that sort of altitude change.
But in water, where every 10 m or so is an additional atmosphere of pressure, going down the same distance is a Big Frelling Deal. We may exist in a nice fat slab of the earth's atmosphere, but we are only surface dwellers on the water.
One of the world's most famous vessels is Jacques Cousteau's Calypso. At 42 m long, she isn't a very big ship. If you put two Calypsos end-to-end vertically, that wouldn't quite reach the newly-discovered submarine.
Less virtual money changing hands (grants that go to pay an inflated tuition) means fewer administrators to manage those programs. That would mean staffing cuts and overall savings for the institution.
This is a good thing. Modern universities are far, far too administration heavy.
Oh, and will someone explain what BMW is doing with the i3? When I think BMW, I think sport sedan. That thing has the specs of a Nissan Leaf and the looks of a Scion Cube. I'd expected something Tesla-ish.
On the European side of the Pond, BMW manufactures and sells a lot of things that don't fit into the sport sedan slot. Like covered scooters, hatchbacks, SUVs, and station wagons. Not all of them are available Stateside. Ultra-small cars for the urban market, like the i3, are all the rage in Europe where the small streets and tight parking make a classic VW Beetle look like a large car.
That would be awesome. Especially when nearly all cars have some rudimentary autonomous capability as well as the ability to communicate with each other. Then, when the light turns green, the entire fleet can move forward as one, rather than starting up with a traveling wave and wasting gobs of time. Intelligent intersections and cars will make urban travel far more efficient than the horrorshow one finds in some cities.
LA freeways are a good use-case for autonomous driving: generally slow-varying traffic patterns, with all cars moving at mostly the same speed. Since it only took me 5 seconds to realize that, I have to imagine the people actually working on the problem are attacking that sort of low-hanging fruit.
The counter-argument to all of the broadcast hoo-ha is that when you're standing a gazillion miles away from Earth, you're going to be receiving ALL of the broadcast signals on a given frequency. Do you really think that's going to be indistinguishable from noise even if you know what frequency to look at?
We aren't going to find ET by looking at inadvertent EM spill. We are going to find civilizations that want to be found and are sending a bright, intentional signal that has characteristics that make it pop out from the background. It might be at high probability targets, like Earth. Earth would have been judged to be a high probability target by its size, distance from Sol, atmospheric composition, and accompanying gas giants (to clear most of the potential impact material away quickly during solar system formation).
To assume that all chemical interaction stops merely because you've put a liquid in a glass container is perhaps somewhat naive. Whiskey, wine, and essentially everything else, continues to age in the bottle, albeit at different rates. Given the profound changes that are evident in a matter of days-to-months when wood is included in the ageing process, it is easy to dismiss the changes that happen when it is not included, but that is a mistake.
I make a sour cherry infusion from brandy. It matures significantly in sealed glass, changing color from bright cherry to deep maroon, and peaking in flavor at 5-8 years. The biggest change in color comes after the first year, but the taste continues to develop, significantly, over many years. After about 15 years, the flavor starts to lose it's depth, and it becomes less interesting.
I have no doubt that a difference could be detected between a whiskey aged in vial that in microgravity would lack convective currents versus the equivalent on Earth if vibration were adequately controlled such that convection would be the major mixing force on Earth versus diffusion in space. I do not, however, think anyone could predict what the differences would be. An interesting follow-on experiment would be to age whiskey in a centrifuge at 2g, 5g, 10g, and beyond. In an ultra-centrifuge, convection also essentially ceases as a mixing mechanism, but now diffusion would in addition be limited.
Among the differences that the excellent animation makes clear:
1. Lower case I (i) is made inexplicably ugly. Perhaps it helps legibility at lower rendering sizes, I'm not sure.
2. Parentheses have been moved such that the left paren is moved a little more left, and the right paren a little more right: this gives function calls an arguably more natural look if you like space around the arguments. In particular open/close next to each other are less awkwardly placed with the new spacing.
3. Underscore (_) has been made discontinuous, such that repeated underscores are no longer a single line. You might like this, you might not. The underscore character was originally intended to become a continuous line and used to underline letters (and by originally, I mean with typewriters and lead type).
4. Lower case R (r) has been moved left. This makes words like "try" more evenly spaced, but screws up "stderr". You can't have everything in a monospaced font.
5. Square brackets ([ and ]) have been moved left and right, like parentheses, for the same effect.
A lot of people seem to be slamming it, but perhaps it isn't all that bad.
I don't know the relevant law (or really much of any law) in detail, and hope that someone here who does can express an informed, educated opinion.
Stuff that is TS/SCI (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information) is what commonfolk call state secrets. It's stuff that is so important to national security that we call people who share it with non-cleared foreign folks spies and charge them with treason, and the punishment is up to and including death. It is a Big Frelling Deal. That's the heavy hammer that's being threatened and used against Assange, Snowden and Manning for doing the same thing, albeit on a larger and wider scale. Just storing it on a non-secure system within the government is considered Bad Form and subject to disciplinary action or worse. Printing it out and taking it home is Particularly Bad Form. Doesn't forwarding it over private email systems amount to all of that and much more?
Why aren't we calling for Hillary's political head, if not sending her to jail?
And disk drives are made to deliver data reliably as well, but out-of-band signals can be used to detect other influences (latency reporting vibration, for disk drives). For optical cables, seismic activity might (for example) increase the number of packets that require data correction, and the error rate would be your out-of-band signal.
Knowing that there is seismic activity somewhere along a long cable, even if you don't know where, is better than knowing nothing. With information from enough such cables, it should be possible to pinpoint the origin. That's how modern seismic monitoring works, combining signals from multiple sources to tomographically compute the origin. More data, in such cases, is always better.
Putting instrumentation on the optical cables themselves seems like a losing idea. But if there's a nearly free (beer) signal that could be useful, why not exploit it?
Surely there's some secondary or tertiary affects that can be used to measure cable movement like microphonics, and thus deduce seismic activity. From the title, I had thought that's what the posting was about. If you can influence the error rate of a disk drive by yelling at it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4), then can't you measure earthquakes with a long optical fiber?
Also, depending on the fine print with their policy, you might not come back to the same job.
In Massachusetts (where I have personal experience) the law is that there must be an equivalent job for you to return to, not necessarily your old job. After all, the company doesn't stop needing someone to do the work just because you need to take time off to care for your slobbering bundle of joy. When my wife took her first maternity leave, she did, in fact, return to the same position; after her second maternity leave (with the same company), she was moved horizontally to a job in a different group that, while it had similar responsibilities and identical pay, was far, far less desirable because of her new boss.
Definitely true that it's worth buying cables that you trust for reliability. I have worked in research labs all my adult life. We use gobs and gobs of BNC cables. I've watched countless researchers who don't know any better waste hours and hours of their time chasing down cable / connector problems. I use only ITT / Pomona BNC cables and have never, ever had a failure. Naturally, more of my budget goes to cables than others, but time is the precious resource.
Delta-V of 1.8e-4m/s is not so tiny. If my calculations are correct, that means it will move away by 1 m from an identical satellite in a pseudo-parallel orbit in under an hour if the second craft switches on its EM drive in the other direction for the same duty cycle. Make the two take alternate cycles of acceleration direction and they should see-saw in orbit together. Make the see-saw cycle 100 m long (wait a few days between blasts) and you can even observe it from the ground.
This group sounds like they acted reasonably and responsibly, letting Google know there was a problem, and submitting good patches to correct the issue.
If, now, there's some other fundamental impediment to distributing a correction to the bug that does not have to do with Google, but rather with the heaploads of cell phone manufacturers who use Google's code and who may or may not have the ability to distribute the fix, why should the vulnerability be made public? I don't see any apparent upside to the public good.
Really? You live in New England? You watch how utility cuts are patched? You notice how smooth they are? You take note that even patches made in the middle of the summer are not smooth, and deteriorate rapidly before the first freeze?
I live in New England. We have lots of freeze-thaw cycles during the year. It's rare that you see a proper frost heave in a road (and you certainly know it when you see it). By FAR the most road damage is caused by inexpert patching of the asphalt where the surface needs to be cut for utility work. When inexpertly patched, the surface is no longer remotely planar, and the unevenness right at the (and caused by the) patch increases the wear exactly where it can do the most damage. So, shortly, the patch needs a patch. Which is inexpertly done, and the cycle continues until you get a stretch of crud for surface and the local municipality shells out big bucks to have the road re-surfaced entirely.
Compare this to Southern California (where I lived for a number of years) where the road patches after utility work are 100% as smooth as the original surface. With your eyes closed, you cannot tell that you've driven over a patch. The patch (and especially the transitions from original surface to patch, and back) receives no more or less force than the original road, so there's no focus of wear, and it lasts a very long time.
It baffles me why we can't make proper road patches in New England. It's clearly possible. And I really can't believe that the people working to patch roads in Southern California are that much more talented, so it's either a technology issue, lack of managerial directive, or an out-and-out conspiracy to have a never-ending amount of road resurfacing work.
I wasn't alive during WWII but both of my parents were. My mother was fortunate enough to be evacuated to Canada with her brother and my grandmother while my grandfather stayed behind. Neither of those two then-children saw the war up-front. My grandfather never, ever spoke of the war.
My father, however, did experience it first-hand and did tell me about it. As a precocious young boy, he risked imprisonment and worse by illegally building and repairing radios during the Nazi occupation. I hope you understand the full implications of it being illegal to own radios (think if it being illegal to own a smart phone, a tablet, or any kind of computer). There was no such thing as free speech. The Axis occupation of Greece was horrific, with the Germans being responsible for the worst of the atrocities. 13% of the occupation of Greece was killed or starved to death. Nearly all of the infrastructure was destroyed. The hyperinflation was the 5th worst in history. There is very good reason that many Greeks still do not like Germans, and want war reparations, and it isn't too much of a stretch to view the recent bail out programs as exactly that.
I have no idea if this was because of a corporate policy about it or what, but I found it singularly amazing that these experts would have so little interest in the [bad] actors who were so clearly operating under their noses.
Put the bad actors out of business, and the threat disappears. No threat, no need for their software. Perhaps they were not openly collusive, but it isn't so difficult to imagine that they look the other way at the hand that indirectly feeds them.
Indeed, you definitely do NOT want hundreds-to-thousands of servers doing an update all at the same time, or, worse, rebooting all at the same time. The first has the potential to saturate your network and bring the entire setup to its knees, and the second will blow your rack supplies. I speak from experience on the latter, having been the one who identified the issue with our weekly DB scrubbing procedure once the company I was working for grew to more than a half dozen servers.
You want to stagger things by a few 10s of seconds per server on each rack to avoid power supply issues.
Slashdot Mirror
It goes to show how vastly different water is from air. I mean, yes, obviously there are differences, but we take them largely for granted except for those like the parent who intentionally explore them. 90 meters vertical difference is less than the height of many buildings (its, very roughly, 30 floors). In air, we barely think about that sort of altitude change.
But in water, where every 10 m or so is an additional atmosphere of pressure, going down the same distance is a Big Frelling Deal. We may exist in a nice fat slab of the earth's atmosphere, but we are only surface dwellers on the water.
One of the world's most famous vessels is Jacques Cousteau's Calypso. At 42 m long, she isn't a very big ship. If you put two Calypsos end-to-end vertically, that wouldn't quite reach the newly-discovered submarine.
Less virtual money changing hands (grants that go to pay an inflated tuition) means fewer administrators to manage those programs. That would mean staffing cuts and overall savings for the institution.
This is a good thing. Modern universities are far, far too administration heavy.
Oh, and will someone explain what BMW is doing with the i3? When I think BMW, I think sport sedan. That thing has the specs of a Nissan Leaf and the looks of a Scion Cube. I'd expected something Tesla-ish.
On the European side of the Pond, BMW manufactures and sells a lot of things that don't fit into the sport sedan slot. Like covered scooters, hatchbacks, SUVs, and station wagons. Not all of them are available Stateside. Ultra-small cars for the urban market, like the i3, are all the rage in Europe where the small streets and tight parking make a classic VW Beetle look like a large car.
That would be awesome. Especially when nearly all cars have some rudimentary autonomous capability as well as the ability to communicate with each other. Then, when the light turns green, the entire fleet can move forward as one, rather than starting up with a traveling wave and wasting gobs of time. Intelligent intersections and cars will make urban travel far more efficient than the horrorshow one finds in some cities.
LA freeways are a good use-case for autonomous driving: generally slow-varying traffic patterns, with all cars moving at mostly the same speed. Since it only took me 5 seconds to realize that, I have to imagine the people actually working on the problem are attacking that sort of low-hanging fruit.
The counter-argument to all of the broadcast hoo-ha is that when you're standing a gazillion miles away from Earth, you're going to be receiving ALL of the broadcast signals on a given frequency. Do you really think that's going to be indistinguishable from noise even if you know what frequency to look at?
We aren't going to find ET by looking at inadvertent EM spill. We are going to find civilizations that want to be found and are sending a bright, intentional signal that has characteristics that make it pop out from the background. It might be at high probability targets, like Earth. Earth would have been judged to be a high probability target by its size, distance from Sol, atmospheric composition, and accompanying gas giants (to clear most of the potential impact material away quickly during solar system formation).
Such a signal may have already been found.
Have you not seen the videos that show how trivial it is to get into most suitcases which have a zipper, bypassing any locks?
To assume that all chemical interaction stops merely because you've put a liquid in a glass container is perhaps somewhat naive. Whiskey, wine, and essentially everything else, continues to age in the bottle, albeit at different rates. Given the profound changes that are evident in a matter of days-to-months when wood is included in the ageing process, it is easy to dismiss the changes that happen when it is not included, but that is a mistake.
I make a sour cherry infusion from brandy. It matures significantly in sealed glass, changing color from bright cherry to deep maroon, and peaking in flavor at 5-8 years. The biggest change in color comes after the first year, but the taste continues to develop, significantly, over many years. After about 15 years, the flavor starts to lose it's depth, and it becomes less interesting.
I have no doubt that a difference could be detected between a whiskey aged in vial that in microgravity would lack convective currents versus the equivalent on Earth if vibration were adequately controlled such that convection would be the major mixing force on Earth versus diffusion in space. I do not, however, think anyone could predict what the differences would be. An interesting follow-on experiment would be to age whiskey in a centrifuge at 2g, 5g, 10g, and beyond. In an ultra-centrifuge, convection also essentially ceases as a mixing mechanism, but now diffusion would in addition be limited.
Among the differences that the excellent animation makes clear:
1. Lower case I (i) is made inexplicably ugly. Perhaps it helps legibility at lower rendering sizes, I'm not sure.
2. Parentheses have been moved such that the left paren is moved a little more left, and the right paren a little more right: this gives function calls an arguably more natural look if you like space around the arguments. In particular open/close next to each other are less awkwardly placed with the new spacing.
3. Underscore (_) has been made discontinuous, such that repeated underscores are no longer a single line. You might like this, you might not. The underscore character was originally intended to become a continuous line and used to underline letters (and by originally, I mean with typewriters and lead type).
4. Lower case R (r) has been moved left. This makes words like "try" more evenly spaced, but screws up "stderr". You can't have everything in a monospaced font.
5. Square brackets ([ and ]) have been moved left and right, like parentheses, for the same effect.
A lot of people seem to be slamming it, but perhaps it isn't all that bad.
I don't know the relevant law (or really much of any law) in detail, and hope that someone here who does can express an informed, educated opinion.
Stuff that is TS/SCI (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information) is what commonfolk call state secrets. It's stuff that is so important to national security that we call people who share it with non-cleared foreign folks spies and charge them with treason, and the punishment is up to and including death. It is a Big Frelling Deal. That's the heavy hammer that's being threatened and used against Assange, Snowden and Manning for doing the same thing, albeit on a larger and wider scale. Just storing it on a non-secure system within the government is considered Bad Form and subject to disciplinary action or worse. Printing it out and taking it home is Particularly Bad Form. Doesn't forwarding it over private email systems amount to all of that and much more?
Why aren't we calling for Hillary's political head, if not sending her to jail?
Which is why if you want real security, you roll your own encryption, no?
And disk drives are made to deliver data reliably as well, but out-of-band signals can be used to detect other influences (latency reporting vibration, for disk drives). For optical cables, seismic activity might (for example) increase the number of packets that require data correction, and the error rate would be your out-of-band signal.
Knowing that there is seismic activity somewhere along a long cable, even if you don't know where, is better than knowing nothing. With information from enough such cables, it should be possible to pinpoint the origin. That's how modern seismic monitoring works, combining signals from multiple sources to tomographically compute the origin. More data, in such cases, is always better.
Putting instrumentation on the optical cables themselves seems like a losing idea. But if there's a nearly free (beer) signal that could be useful, why not exploit it?
Surely there's some secondary or tertiary affects that can be used to measure cable movement like microphonics, and thus deduce seismic activity. From the title, I had thought that's what the posting was about. If you can influence the error rate of a disk drive by yelling at it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4), then can't you measure earthquakes with a long optical fiber?
Also, depending on the fine print with their policy, you might not come back to the same job.
In Massachusetts (where I have personal experience) the law is that there must be an equivalent job for you to return to, not necessarily your old job. After all, the company doesn't stop needing someone to do the work just because you need to take time off to care for your slobbering bundle of joy. When my wife took her first maternity leave, she did, in fact, return to the same position; after her second maternity leave (with the same company), she was moved horizontally to a job in a different group that, while it had similar responsibilities and identical pay, was far, far less desirable because of her new boss.
Definitely true that it's worth buying cables that you trust for reliability. I have worked in research labs all my adult life. We use gobs and gobs of BNC cables. I've watched countless researchers who don't know any better waste hours and hours of their time chasing down cable / connector problems. I use only ITT / Pomona BNC cables and have never, ever had a failure. Naturally, more of my budget goes to cables than others, but time is the precious resource.
Delta-V of 1.8e-4m/s is not so tiny. If my calculations are correct, that means it will move away by 1 m from an identical satellite in a pseudo-parallel orbit in under an hour if the second craft switches on its EM drive in the other direction for the same duty cycle. Make the two take alternate cycles of acceleration direction and they should see-saw in orbit together. Make the see-saw cycle 100 m long (wait a few days between blasts) and you can even observe it from the ground.
This group sounds like they acted reasonably and responsibly, letting Google know there was a problem, and submitting good patches to correct the issue.
If, now, there's some other fundamental impediment to distributing a correction to the bug that does not have to do with Google, but rather with the heaploads of cell phone manufacturers who use Google's code and who may or may not have the ability to distribute the fix, why should the vulnerability be made public? I don't see any apparent upside to the public good.
Really? You live in New England? You watch how utility cuts are patched? You notice how smooth they are? You take note that even patches made in the middle of the summer are not smooth, and deteriorate rapidly before the first freeze?
I live in New England. We have lots of freeze-thaw cycles during the year. It's rare that you see a proper frost heave in a road (and you certainly know it when you see it). By FAR the most road damage is caused by inexpert patching of the asphalt where the surface needs to be cut for utility work. When inexpertly patched, the surface is no longer remotely planar, and the unevenness right at the (and caused by the) patch increases the wear exactly where it can do the most damage. So, shortly, the patch needs a patch. Which is inexpertly done, and the cycle continues until you get a stretch of crud for surface and the local municipality shells out big bucks to have the road re-surfaced entirely.
Compare this to Southern California (where I lived for a number of years) where the road patches after utility work are 100% as smooth as the original surface. With your eyes closed, you cannot tell that you've driven over a patch. The patch (and especially the transitions from original surface to patch, and back) receives no more or less force than the original road, so there's no focus of wear, and it lasts a very long time.
It baffles me why we can't make proper road patches in New England. It's clearly possible. And I really can't believe that the people working to patch roads in Southern California are that much more talented, so it's either a technology issue, lack of managerial directive, or an out-and-out conspiracy to have a never-ending amount of road resurfacing work.
What, do they think the world has become globally amnesiac in the last ten years?
No, but the editors around here have.
[ta-dam, tzing!]
Thankyou, thankyou. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your servers!
(Now who's going to mod this funny, and who's going to mod it insightful?)
The Cray-2 was a much earlier large-scale use of computational elements immersed in inert cooling liquid.
I wasn't alive during WWII but both of my parents were. My mother was fortunate enough to be evacuated to Canada with her brother and my grandmother while my grandfather stayed behind. Neither of those two then-children saw the war up-front. My grandfather never, ever spoke of the war.
My father, however, did experience it first-hand and did tell me about it. As a precocious young boy, he risked imprisonment and worse by illegally building and repairing radios during the Nazi occupation. I hope you understand the full implications of it being illegal to own radios (think if it being illegal to own a smart phone, a tablet, or any kind of computer). There was no such thing as free speech. The Axis occupation of Greece was horrific, with the Germans being responsible for the worst of the atrocities. 13% of the occupation of Greece was killed or starved to death. Nearly all of the infrastructure was destroyed. The hyperinflation was the 5th worst in history. There is very good reason that many Greeks still do not like Germans, and want war reparations, and it isn't too much of a stretch to view the recent bail out programs as exactly that.
On Kaspersky:
I have no idea if this was because of a corporate policy about it or what, but I found it singularly amazing that these experts would have so little interest in the [bad] actors who were so clearly operating under their noses.
Put the bad actors out of business, and the threat disappears. No threat, no need for their software. Perhaps they were not openly collusive, but it isn't so difficult to imagine that they look the other way at the hand that indirectly feeds them.
Indeed, you definitely do NOT want hundreds-to-thousands of servers doing an update all at the same time, or, worse, rebooting all at the same time. The first has the potential to saturate your network and bring the entire setup to its knees, and the second will blow your rack supplies. I speak from experience on the latter, having been the one who identified the issue with our weekly DB scrubbing procedure once the company I was working for grew to more than a half dozen servers.
You want to stagger things by a few 10s of seconds per server on each rack to avoid power supply issues.
Please, learn how to use quotation marks correctly. They are not for emphasis.
Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well.
And here I thought the movement of electrons in normal computers was already the embodiment of algorithmic manipulation of physical matter. Silly me.