Nothing that's still inside the case is "backup". Sure, snapshots are useful for when you say "oops", and that's good to have, but still.
For home use, I regularly backup 6 TB of data by just copying the data to extra drives, and carrying those drives to work. That way if someone breaks in and steals everything that's not nailed down, I'm good.
For work, we're trying to move away from even using RAID. Once everything's on multiple servers, and you're provisioned to survive (and recover from) both server and datacenter failure, RAID is just wasted money. In my last job they did RAID because of significant analysis of the expense of swapping a drive out and failure rates and the like, but that already had all the human process in place to do that at scale. Now we just don't bother - any sign of hardware issues, and we just power down the server, no human-involved steps after that.
Similar here. All my "media" is on spinning disk, and it's entirely fit for the purpose. I use WD enterprise drives just to reduce the chance of an annoying failure (they're overpriced, really, but I freaking hate drive failures).
Sure, boot drive, personal stuff, home software projects, anything but music and videos, goes on SSD, but that's maybe 5% of my storage.
That makes some sense - of course, figuring out how to get something to carve platinum out to that asteroid will be the fun part, but I guess if you found just the right orbit that came in closer to the Sun for a bunch of easy power - maybe. Seems more likely than Slashcode ever getting Unicode support, anyhow.
Maybe some of the other grown up Republics in the world can help carry some of the ball.
Japan should handle its own defense. The The Poles, British, French and Germans theirs.
If everyone chips in, then none of us have to be the hated police and tax man.
A heavily armed Europe and militarized Japan - what could possibly go wrong? Well, joking aside, it's for the best. Germany is poised to conquer Europe just by calling in its debts, and Japan is culturally quite distant from 80 years ago. Sucks to be Taiwan, but not everyone can be a winner.
You've fallen for the "discretionary spending" sales pitch. This pie chart is a bit old, and still has some war spending that we don't have for 2014, but it's still informative. http://usdebtclock.org/ is up to the minute, and cites every number.
Mostly what the federal government does is mail checks to old and/or poor people. Stuff like infrastructure and NASA is collectively an afterthought, and much (most?) of that is pork. As others have said, our government is a pension plan with a military.
I'd like to see more NASA, more roads, more NSF, more building anything, but that's just not the focus of the federal government these days.
Relative spending doesn't matter the way you think it does. For example, it doesn't matter how much we spent if there's no aircraft carrier in a particular ocean the month we need one, and that requires a fixed minimum count of hulls. We've fallen below that count (and it will fall over time) - now we can pick a few places where we can project power, but as soon as we respond to one crisis, any asshole tinpot dictator can see we're tied up there and can send troops across his border.
All of which is only relevant if we want to be the world's police force, of course. Was it worth the cost, to have 70 years with no large-scale war? I think it was, but we're no longer willing to be everyone else's defense budget. We can continue to protect ourselves, no doubt, but I believe turbulent times are ahead if that's all we do.
Exactly - like I said, just pick someone we don't like, and deorbit all the chunks of asteroid we want to down on them, then just pick up the pieces.:)
Seriously, the scenario as I understand it is: we'd park an asteroid in a high orbit (you wouldn't want it dangerously low), maybe above GEO. Slicing off a chunk of platinum itself takes a bunch of energy, but lets pretend we could use a solar furnace or something (seems plausible). We've still got to change the orbit for a chunk of metal for a high orbit to a reentry trajectory - that's a non-trivial mass of fuel per kilo of payload, right? And the cost of getting that fuel to high orbit is nuts, so the economics don't work. But you're better at this math than I am - what do you come up with?
OTOH, if we start with a CHON asteroid in high orbit, and some automated way to process it into fuel (which I think you'd need to get it into orbit in the first place, but isn't that much of a stretch), then everything changes.
really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant
There's a long distance between "superpower" and "weak and irrelevant", no?
We once had a military to fight "two and a half wars", with simultaneous control of every ocean. That's a superpower. We're at around half that strength now. Our naval power is mostly older hulls, and new capital ships are not being built at replacement rate. We'll still be able to project power, no doubt, but not like we used to. Now responding in strength in one part of the world means leaving "opportunities" elsewhere for territorial aggression. Oh well, everyone kept going on about how we shouldn't be the world's police force, and I guess we won't be - at least not in 2 places at once.
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
Most of our (expensive) strategic force: large naval vessels, bombers, etc, are mostly older now. As we're building far fewer bombers/carriers/fighters/etc than we used to, that means we have mostly old stuff in service now - but still usable today given our likely opponents (though B1B bombers are easy for current opponents to shoot down, only usable after we've already won, really, and will still be in service for 20 more years). For a reduced mission that will be fine, but it's becoming evident that if Russia of China decides to expand its borders a bit, we'll be writing them stern notes.
Do you understand the difference between "stealth", the B2's thing, which is "remaining undetected", and "stealthy", the modern thing, which is "no missile lock"?
Everyone understands that you can see F22s and F35s on radar. No one is unclear about this. What you can't do is get missile lock before they do. There are fundamental reasons that missile guidance uses short-wave radar (the original radar, from the 30s, was long wave, and military "over the horizon" and early detection radar still is).
Sure it's an arms race, a literal one in fact. That's normal for, you know, arms. But long-wave missile guidance isn't coming soon.
Because NASA is funded by politicians, who care very much about bad news. When a shuttle crashes there must be congressional investigations! Congresscretters must be seen doing something about it.
"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...
It's not the engineers who are confused about this. Nor is it the politicians. Both groups understand the situation well.
conservatives spend bribing old people with freebies
So Social Security, Medicare, and Federal Pensions (collectively over half the budget) are conservative programs now? Man, when did that happen - I can't keep up with these shifts in the political landscape!
Meanwhile, the defense budget is only 1/6th of the federal budget and falling. The left got their way: America's military dominance is fading. The Pax Americana is ending.
Why don't we skip Mars and set our sights on mining precious metals from the asteroid belt. Much more complicated, but:
Planetary Resources says that platinum from a 30-meter long asteroid is worth 25Ã"50 billion USD.
It costs more for the fuel to de-obit platinum safely than the value of platinum. We can't start there. We should either:
1. Find a country we really don't like, and declare it "America's new platinum mine", so we can skip the whole "safely" part of "de-obit platinum safely"; or
2. Start with a CHON asteroid. Most of the expense of space past LEO is the cost of the fuel to lift the fuel. If we could make endless fuel in orbit, well, whole new worlds of space exploration open up to us. (Plus then it's cost efficient to do the platinum asteroid thing.)
And it has. We are no longer a superpower. We're barely a world power, and mostly because of legacy ships and planes that are still relevant to modern warfare. That has also hurt R&D in America significantly, but not with the same proportionality that cutting NASAs budget would.
NASAs budget is just a mix of R&D and congressional earmarks. All that money? Spent right here on Earth. Did you know there are no malls in space? NASA does a crappy job of "pounds of payload lifted per dollar of budget" because they do so much research (and congressional earmarks).
Sure, but I also pay for content (the vast majority of bits streamed to my endpoint are Netflix, followed by game-related stuff), and surely blogs could still make money from non-tracking ads, right? It's only the likes of Facebook that would vanish, so nothing of value would be lost.
"Liberals" could mean just about anyone, but the very vocal SJW crowd are famous for being humorless, prudish buzzkills. What used to be the case for the right wing religious whackos is now true of the left wing SJWs: they lay awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. No more representative of the mainstream left than the televangelists were of the mainstream right, but boy are they vocal. Heck, some of them are probably the same people, just with a new excuse for moral scolding and finger wagging.
The F35 and F22 aren't "stealth" fighters in that way - not like the B2. It's expected the enemy knows they're there. They're stealthy enough to get missile lock long before the enemy fighter does, and that's all that matters today. Dogfight indeed.
Drones will probably take over during the service life of the F35, but since we're not there yet we needed something. Sadly, we get this plane that's great at nothing but pork delivery, but it's not a complete waste of time. It's just sad that it was used as an excuse to stop building the F22, which really was great at air superiority, which is likely the last thing the drones take over.
Of course the work can be done anywhere - the key is it works better if everyone on a project is together, somewhere. I'd really like that "somewhere" to be the US!
As far as immigrations goes, that's just bullshit. We don't have a shortage of people that are willing to do the work, we have a shortage of people that can afford to work for the wages that companies are willing to pay. Big difference, immigration just screws up the market forces that would correct the imbalance
Well, everyone wants higher pay. But supply and demand always win in the end. The big software companies already have development centers in China, India, Canada, and many other places. They can already hire cheap developers - cheaper than you pay US immigrants! It's not about driving down wages, when you can hire someone for $20k easily enough today if you just want basic competence. Companies want to pay these talented developers more, and bring them to the US because this is where top talent comes. What labor pool do you imagine you're protecting? The work can in theory be done anywhere, and we in the US benefit greatly from being the concentration of top talent.
I can't believe populist sentiment among programmers. This job can be done anywhere. You want to compete with immigrants, who have your same cost of living!
But that misses the most fundament point in all these "they turk or jurbs" arguments. You can't keep the business here by keeping immigrants out. If you want the US to be a center for the good programming jobs, then you must be pro-immigrant, because those jobs will go wherever it's easiest for programmers to legally assemble (it's not like you easily can spot the top 5% - you hire as many "good" programmers as you can, then observe their actual performance). If you want just the shit jobs to stay here, and all the best jobs to be elsewhere, then by all means get your immigrant hatred on!
Re:The TOR Project was well aware of this a while
on
Lizard Squad Targets Tor
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is seriously one of the first things anyone in security would have thought up
Ah, the/. 30-second expert. Indeed, the TOR guys did think of that too.
Malicious exit nodes do not per se compromise TOR, though they are in a position to take advantage of some potential exploits (also, exit nodes are irrelevant to.onion servers) It's been known since the start that if an attacker both controlled the exit node and could directly tap your line, there'd be and endless stream of exploits possible - and IIRC the NSA had just such attacks in its arsenal. But that doesn't scale - you have to be actively monitoring a specific target to de-anonimize them, you can't do it to everyone. If the NSA actually got warrants when they did that to Americans [pause for laughter] I think it's a fine system.
TFA seems to be about taking over more than half of all TOR nodes, which can hardly be done in secret, and really makes 0-days in the TOR bundle visible.
Far more worrying, especially for the conspiracy theorist, is the never-ending stream of vulnerabilities in.onion servers allowing the operators to be de-anonymized. It's hard to believe TOR wasn't designed that way. TOR seemed designed from the start as a system to let Chinese dissidents use American servers safely, but not allow Silk Road-style sites (servers illegal in the US) to stay up. That IMO would be pretty cool if the US itself weren't growing ever more repressive.
Maybe, while we are at it, we should indemnify Snowden?
Presidents can grant pardons at any time, not just as they're leaving office. If only we could somehow elect a president who favored the people over a stronger central government [pause for laughter]. I'm not even sure how the system would need to change to make that possible, but I do think the eventual death of broadcast TV (with the auction system for advertising airtime meaning you can never have enough political advertising budget) will help.
Why bother spending hundreds of thousands for servers who will only see utilization on launch day? By the time you're ready for another launch, the hardware will be obsolete. I had this same debate on battlenet when Blizzard launched the Hearthstone expansion and the massive load took their billing and account management servers offline. (Everything went back to normal within 24 hours)
Maybe you've heard of "the cloud"? It lets you do this nifty thing where you rent servers by the hour - quite cheaply, too. Other companies manage to handle holiday surges just fine. Need, say, an extra 1,000 servers for a day? Won't even be that expensive.
I've seen the flag-on-the-truck thing many times - never seen a confederate flag. While there are many in the South that still hate the damnyankees for the War of Northern Aggression, it's mostly pirate flags now. For a while I was confused - why were there so many Raiders fans across the South? But it's just the current generation's Rebel flag, without confusing the Northerners that it was about racism.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing that's still inside the case is "backup". Sure, snapshots are useful for when you say "oops", and that's good to have, but still.
For home use, I regularly backup 6 TB of data by just copying the data to extra drives, and carrying those drives to work. That way if someone breaks in and steals everything that's not nailed down, I'm good.
For work, we're trying to move away from even using RAID. Once everything's on multiple servers, and you're provisioned to survive (and recover from) both server and datacenter failure, RAID is just wasted money. In my last job they did RAID because of significant analysis of the expense of swapping a drive out and failure rates and the like, but that already had all the human process in place to do that at scale. Now we just don't bother - any sign of hardware issues, and we just power down the server, no human-involved steps after that.
Similar here. All my "media" is on spinning disk, and it's entirely fit for the purpose. I use WD enterprise drives just to reduce the chance of an annoying failure (they're overpriced, really, but I freaking hate drive failures).
Sure, boot drive, personal stuff, home software projects, anything but music and videos, goes on SSD, but that's maybe 5% of my storage.
That makes some sense - of course, figuring out how to get something to carve platinum out to that asteroid will be the fun part, but I guess if you found just the right orbit that came in closer to the Sun for a bunch of easy power - maybe. Seems more likely than Slashcode ever getting Unicode support, anyhow.
Maybe some of the other grown up Republics in the world can help carry some of the ball.
Japan should handle its own defense. The The Poles, British, French and Germans theirs.
If everyone chips in, then none of us have to be the hated police and tax man.
A heavily armed Europe and militarized Japan - what could possibly go wrong? Well, joking aside, it's for the best. Germany is poised to conquer Europe just by calling in its debts, and Japan is culturally quite distant from 80 years ago. Sucks to be Taiwan, but not everyone can be a winner.
You've fallen for the "discretionary spending" sales pitch. This pie chart is a bit old, and still has some war spending that we don't have for 2014, but it's still informative. http://usdebtclock.org/ is up to the minute, and cites every number.
Mostly what the federal government does is mail checks to old and/or poor people. Stuff like infrastructure and NASA is collectively an afterthought, and much (most?) of that is pork. As others have said, our government is a pension plan with a military.
I'd like to see more NASA, more roads, more NSF, more building anything, but that's just not the focus of the federal government these days.
Relative spending doesn't matter the way you think it does. For example, it doesn't matter how much we spent if there's no aircraft carrier in a particular ocean the month we need one, and that requires a fixed minimum count of hulls. We've fallen below that count (and it will fall over time) - now we can pick a few places where we can project power, but as soon as we respond to one crisis, any asshole tinpot dictator can see we're tied up there and can send troops across his border.
All of which is only relevant if we want to be the world's police force, of course. Was it worth the cost, to have 70 years with no large-scale war? I think it was, but we're no longer willing to be everyone else's defense budget. We can continue to protect ourselves, no doubt, but I believe turbulent times are ahead if that's all we do.
Exactly - like I said, just pick someone we don't like, and deorbit all the chunks of asteroid we want to down on them, then just pick up the pieces. :)
Seriously, the scenario as I understand it is: we'd park an asteroid in a high orbit (you wouldn't want it dangerously low), maybe above GEO. Slicing off a chunk of platinum itself takes a bunch of energy, but lets pretend we could use a solar furnace or something (seems plausible). We've still got to change the orbit for a chunk of metal for a high orbit to a reentry trajectory - that's a non-trivial mass of fuel per kilo of payload, right? And the cost of getting that fuel to high orbit is nuts, so the economics don't work. But you're better at this math than I am - what do you come up with?
OTOH, if we start with a CHON asteroid in high orbit, and some automated way to process it into fuel (which I think you'd need to get it into orbit in the first place, but isn't that much of a stretch), then everything changes.
really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant
There's a long distance between "superpower" and "weak and irrelevant", no?
We once had a military to fight "two and a half wars", with simultaneous control of every ocean. That's a superpower. We're at around half that strength now. Our naval power is mostly older hulls, and new capital ships are not being built at replacement rate. We'll still be able to project power, no doubt, but not like we used to. Now responding in strength in one part of the world means leaving "opportunities" elsewhere for territorial aggression. Oh well, everyone kept going on about how we shouldn't be the world's police force, and I guess we won't be - at least not in 2 places at once.
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
Most of our (expensive) strategic force: large naval vessels, bombers, etc, are mostly older now. As we're building far fewer bombers/carriers/fighters/etc than we used to, that means we have mostly old stuff in service now - but still usable today given our likely opponents (though B1B bombers are easy for current opponents to shoot down, only usable after we've already won, really, and will still be in service for 20 more years). For a reduced mission that will be fine, but it's becoming evident that if Russia of China decides to expand its borders a bit, we'll be writing them stern notes.
Do you understand the difference between "stealth", the B2's thing, which is "remaining undetected", and "stealthy", the modern thing, which is "no missile lock"?
Everyone understands that you can see F22s and F35s on radar. No one is unclear about this. What you can't do is get missile lock before they do. There are fundamental reasons that missile guidance uses short-wave radar (the original radar, from the 30s, was long wave, and military "over the horizon" and early detection radar still is).
Sure it's an arms race, a literal one in fact. That's normal for, you know, arms. But long-wave missile guidance isn't coming soon.
First: Why? everything in life is a risk
Because NASA is funded by politicians, who care very much about bad news. When a shuttle crashes there must be congressional investigations! Congresscretters must be seen doing something about it.
"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...
It's not the engineers who are confused about this. Nor is it the politicians. Both groups understand the situation well.
conservatives spend bribing old people with freebies
So Social Security, Medicare, and Federal Pensions (collectively over half the budget) are conservative programs now? Man, when did that happen - I can't keep up with these shifts in the political landscape!
Meanwhile, the defense budget is only 1/6th of the federal budget and falling. The left got their way: America's military dominance is fading. The Pax Americana is ending.
Why don't we skip Mars and set our sights on mining precious metals from the asteroid belt. Much more complicated, but:
Planetary Resources says that platinum from a 30-meter long asteroid is worth 25Ã"50 billion USD.
It costs more for the fuel to de-obit platinum safely than the value of platinum. We can't start there. We should either:
1. Find a country we really don't like, and declare it "America's new platinum mine", so we can skip the whole "safely" part of "de-obit platinum safely"; or
2. Start with a CHON asteroid. Most of the expense of space past LEO is the cost of the fuel to lift the fuel. If we could make endless fuel in orbit, well, whole new worlds of space exploration open up to us. (Plus then it's cost efficient to do the platinum asteroid thing.)
USA should trim the military budget first.
And it has. We are no longer a superpower. We're barely a world power, and mostly because of legacy ships and planes that are still relevant to modern warfare. That has also hurt R&D in America significantly, but not with the same proportionality that cutting NASAs budget would.
NASAs budget is just a mix of R&D and congressional earmarks. All that money? Spent right here on Earth. Did you know there are no malls in space? NASA does a crappy job of "pounds of payload lifted per dollar of budget" because they do so much research (and congressional earmarks).
Sure, but I also pay for content (the vast majority of bits streamed to my endpoint are Netflix, followed by game-related stuff), and surely blogs could still make money from non-tracking ads, right? It's only the likes of Facebook that would vanish, so nothing of value would be lost.
"Liberals" could mean just about anyone, but the very vocal SJW crowd are famous for being humorless, prudish buzzkills. What used to be the case for the right wing religious whackos is now true of the left wing SJWs: they lay awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. No more representative of the mainstream left than the televangelists were of the mainstream right, but boy are they vocal. Heck, some of them are probably the same people, just with a new excuse for moral scolding and finger wagging.
Hey, now, there's only so much width to the printed page for that headline, so if we can save a few letters, we can get the larger font out!
Dang, man, you're really worried - did you get one of the CCs that still charges you the first $50 for fraud? Might try one with a $0 fraud promise.
Or is it something worse? Did you use your real email address for that furry porn site, and now it might have leaked? Sucks to be you, man.
The F35 and F22 aren't "stealth" fighters in that way - not like the B2. It's expected the enemy knows they're there. They're stealthy enough to get missile lock long before the enemy fighter does, and that's all that matters today. Dogfight indeed.
Drones will probably take over during the service life of the F35, but since we're not there yet we needed something. Sadly, we get this plane that's great at nothing but pork delivery, but it's not a complete waste of time. It's just sad that it was used as an excuse to stop building the F22, which really was great at air superiority, which is likely the last thing the drones take over.
Of course the work can be done anywhere - the key is it works better if everyone on a project is together, somewhere. I'd really like that "somewhere" to be the US!
As far as immigrations goes, that's just bullshit. We don't have a shortage of people that are willing to do the work, we have a shortage of people that can afford to work for the wages that companies are willing to pay. Big difference, immigration just screws up the market forces that would correct the imbalance
Well, everyone wants higher pay. But supply and demand always win in the end. The big software companies already have development centers in China, India, Canada, and many other places. They can already hire cheap developers - cheaper than you pay US immigrants! It's not about driving down wages, when you can hire someone for $20k easily enough today if you just want basic competence. Companies want to pay these talented developers more, and bring them to the US because this is where top talent comes. What labor pool do you imagine you're protecting? The work can in theory be done anywhere, and we in the US benefit greatly from being the concentration of top talent.
I can't believe populist sentiment among programmers. This job can be done anywhere. You want to compete with immigrants, who have your same cost of living!
But that misses the most fundament point in all these "they turk or jurbs" arguments. You can't keep the business here by keeping immigrants out. If you want the US to be a center for the good programming jobs, then you must be pro-immigrant, because those jobs will go wherever it's easiest for programmers to legally assemble (it's not like you easily can spot the top 5% - you hire as many "good" programmers as you can, then observe their actual performance). If you want just the shit jobs to stay here, and all the best jobs to be elsewhere, then by all means get your immigrant hatred on!
This is seriously one of the first things anyone in security would have thought up
Ah, the /. 30-second expert. Indeed, the TOR guys did think of that too.
Malicious exit nodes do not per se compromise TOR, though they are in a position to take advantage of some potential exploits (also, exit nodes are irrelevant to .onion servers) It's been known since the start that if an attacker both controlled the exit node and could directly tap your line, there'd be and endless stream of exploits possible - and IIRC the NSA had just such attacks in its arsenal. But that doesn't scale - you have to be actively monitoring a specific target to de-anonimize them, you can't do it to everyone. If the NSA actually got warrants when they did that to Americans [pause for laughter] I think it's a fine system.
TFA seems to be about taking over more than half of all TOR nodes, which can hardly be done in secret, and really makes 0-days in the TOR bundle visible.
Far more worrying, especially for the conspiracy theorist, is the never-ending stream of vulnerabilities in .onion servers allowing the operators to be de-anonymized. It's hard to believe TOR wasn't designed that way. TOR seemed designed from the start as a system to let Chinese dissidents use American servers safely, but not allow Silk Road-style sites (servers illegal in the US) to stay up. That IMO would be pretty cool if the US itself weren't growing ever more repressive.
Maybe, while we are at it, we should indemnify Snowden?
Presidents can grant pardons at any time, not just as they're leaving office. If only we could somehow elect a president who favored the people over a stronger central government [pause for laughter]. I'm not even sure how the system would need to change to make that possible, but I do think the eventual death of broadcast TV (with the auction system for advertising airtime meaning you can never have enough political advertising budget) will help.
Why bother spending hundreds of thousands for servers who will only see utilization on launch day? By the time you're ready for another launch, the hardware will be obsolete. I had this same debate on battlenet when Blizzard launched the Hearthstone expansion and the massive load took their billing and account management servers offline. (Everything went back to normal within 24 hours)
Maybe you've heard of "the cloud"? It lets you do this nifty thing where you rent servers by the hour - quite cheaply, too. Other companies manage to handle holiday surges just fine. Need, say, an extra 1,000 servers for a day? Won't even be that expensive.
I've seen the flag-on-the-truck thing many times - never seen a confederate flag. While there are many in the South that still hate the damnyankees for the War of Northern Aggression, it's mostly pirate flags now. For a while I was confused - why were there so many Raiders fans across the South? But it's just the current generation's Rebel flag, without confusing the Northerners that it was about racism.