I suspect that they went with blocking because it is way, way easier(especially if you are just aiming for an aggregate use reduction, not an ironclad 100% ban). Blocking probably just involves setting your DNS servers to return localhost or some LAN-side warning page for the domains. Priority setting would mean dicking around with QoS on god knows how many switches, that may or may not have the CPU time and resources to support it.
I doubt that the mission crews themselves can get away with it(and, were alertness aids needed, they'd probably just prescribe them amphetamines as the Air Force does); but I agree that having somebody in the position to fuck things up, even on the ground, doing lines to make deadlines is probably not the best of ideas. I'm just not at all surprised that people would be doing it anyway.
Cocaine does have the virtue of being a stimulant, so it will make you more alert, and whatever stupid mistakes it may induce will be pretty similar to the ones all your coffee-and-sleep-deprivation coworkers will be committing.
I suspect that its lack of telltale smell is a fairly large factor, though: A fair few alcoholics will(outside of formal reflex tests, or high precision machinery operation) barely feel the first few drinks. Even a single shot of something with no added scent(ie. vodka, rather than a hoppy beer) will be easily noticeable in face to face contact or confined areas for a while. Nearly all the alcohol that your liver doesn't get ends up being exhaled as a very noticeable vapor.
I am utterly shocked that a facility with a large concentration of people exposed to deadline pressures might be found to contain an alertness-enhancing recreational alkaloid stronger than caffeine...
That goes double if the NASA employee population skews a little older: children raised during/after Prozac and Ritalin became mainstream would be somewhat more likely to be expected to use some mixture of Provigil and one of the common prescription amphetamines for a mood and alertness boost, while powder cocaine is a venerable classic.
And ushered off the stage about as fast as they could be... Remember the wacky hijinks that ensued when Apple canceled their plans for 64-bit Carbon at the very last moment, after months of reaffirming their plans for it?
Should the meltdown reach the sea, I probably won't be eating the local sushi for a while, some of those radioisotopes are either chemically nasty or fairly peppy alpha emitters.
Thermally, though, almost totally irrelevant. The three reactors that are running into trouble are a 460MWe and two 760MWe units. In rough numbers, I think that such plants might manage efficiency in the ~25% range, which would correspond to total heat outputs of 1840MW and two at 3040MW(under optimal, full-power operating conditions).
1 calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1gm of water by 1 degree celsius, 4.184 joules. If we go with our(pessimistic) assumption that the meltdown mass is putting out heat equivalent to the reactor operating as designed, that means 1840 million J/s or roughly 440,000,000 calories/s. That would mean that, per second, at maximum output, the core would be good for raising the temperature of 440,000L of water by 1 degree every second.
More plausibly(because there is no way that a meltdown blob is going to come in contact with that much water that fast), it will superheat the water immediately surrounding it, generating some very, very toasty steam(some of which will lose energy to the surrounding water, heating it, some of which will escape into the atmosphere). Thus, a fair percentage of the thermal energy will into the atmosphere, or into overcoming the enthalpy of vaporization of water, which is fairly high.
Even if 100% of the thermal energy from all three crippled reactors went directly into heating water (7920MW or ~1.9 billion calories/s) it would be facing the ~1.34442 x 10^21 L of water in earth's oceans. That would provide ~1.4x 10^-12 calories/s for each Liter. If we make the (highly pessimistic) assumption that the reactor meltdown blobs would continue at full power for a decade(315 569 260 seconds), that would correspond to a 0.000445977891 degree (celsius) rise in world ocean temps.
Spilling the fun stuff that you find in a live reactor is a terrible plan. Wholly ill advised. Don't do it. Not really a thermal concern, thon,
I suspect that cost will largely boil down to the "fabric", type unspecified, and whatever the "because we can" premium for this device happens to be.
Since the A9s are in mass production, and have some vendor competition, they should be reasonably cheap, and of basically knowable price; but, depending on what sort of interconnect this thing has, you could end up paying handsomely for that. "Basically ethernet; but cut down to handle short signal paths over known PCBs" shouldn't be too bad; but if it is some sort of custom NUMA unified memory thing, bend over and open your checkbook...
It really depends on how much(and what kind of) support hardware ends up being involved in having lots and lots of them together in some useful way. That and what inefficiencies, if any, are present because your workload was really expecting a smaller number of higher-performance cores.
The power/performance of the core itself remains the same whether you have 1 or 1 million. The power demands of the memory may or may not change: phones and the like usually use a fairly small amount of low-power RAM in a package-on-package stack with the CPU. For server applications, something that takes DIMMS or SODIMMs might be more attractive, because PoP usually limits you in terms of quantity.
The big server-specific questions are going to be the nature of the "fabric" across which 120 nodes in a 2U are communicating. Because 120 ports worth of 10/100 or GigE would occupy 3Us and nonzero power themselves, I'm assuming that this fabric is either not ethernet at all, or some sort of cut-down "we don't need to care about the standards because the signal only has to travel 6 inches over boards we designed, with our hardware at both ends" pseudo-ethernet that looks like an ethernet connection for compatibility purposes; but is electrically more frugal. Whatever that costs, in terms of energy, will have to be added on to the effective energy cost of the CPUs themselves.
Then you get perhaps the most annoying variable: Many tasks are(either fundamentally, or because nobody bothered to program them to support it) basically dependent on access to a single very fast core, or to a modest number of cores with very fast access to one another's memory. For such applications, the performance of 400+ slow cores is going to be way worse than a naive addition of their individual powers would suggest. Sharing time on a fast core is both fundamentally easier, and enjoys a much longer history of development, than does dividing a task among small ones. With some workloads, that will make this box nearly useless(especially if the interconnect is slow and/or doesn't do memory access). For others, performance might be nearly as good as a naive prediction would suggest.
The only problem that I see with this case is that it cost 50 thousand pounds: While there is no particular evidence that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice(3k for politically-motivated smear on election day seems fairly lenient), the cost of the case is worrisome.
At roughly current exchange rates($1.61 per pound) the court costs were just over $80,000. Our spook buddies at the CIA world factbook put the estimated 2010 GDP per capita in the UK at a hair over $35,000.
So, at least going by this case, the court costs were ~2.3 years of per capita GDP for a resident of the country in which the case took place. At those prices, anybody who doesn't have a 100% ironclad case or a substantially above-average income had better stay the hell away from loser-pays cases, no matter how small the damages themselves. And, if there are situations where loser doesn't pay, even people with 100% ironclad cases will have to stay the hell away unless the expected damages are quite high indeed, enough to attract a lawyer on contingency.
That is my concern: as long as the costs of touching a court are this high, you almost necessarily(no matter how good your laws and just your judges and juries) end up in a situation where the civil justice system is basically unavailable to anybody who isn't somewhere between "wealthy" and "plutocratic".
Well, let's just say that some snazzy looking CIA dossier folders(gold embossed on dark blue, very classy. Not your basic cheap folder here. Looks like something you'd get a diploma in...) somehow ended up being stored among the assorted paraphernalia there...
In fairness, the prototype does tether to a smartphone, to use it as a cell modem for transmitting results to a remote site(or from a remote site) in real time.
However, the smartphone appears to occupy the role of simple cellular modem, and is in no way integral to the design. A dedicated cell modem, or just about any other internet connection mechanism, could conceivably have been used instead...
There appears to be a fairly significant engineering component to this as well: the "MicroNMR" is a separate device, that uses some sort of protein-binding ferrous nanoparticles to allow NRM imaging without the usual Big Serious Apparatus.
Presumably the signal processing guys who take the output from that device and beat it into something useful get the other half of the credit. The "smartphone" angle appears to just involve using the smartphone as a more or less dumb modem(unlike, say, some of the "low cost field microscope" designs that use cheap plastic or fluid optics to mate with a cellphone camera and then transmit images or do image processing onboard...)
The smartphone prototyping is certainly cute, and would work; but I would fairly strongly suspect that(with the costs of GSM modules in modest bulk being ~$50, falling sharply with number purchased) that any final product is going to skip the FDA-Approval-compromising prospect of including a chunk of un-audited consumer software that can be changed every ten minutes at the whim of the telco or manufacturer in the chain, and just integrate a cell modem...
Who could ever have expected that a wireless(and thus inherently shared-medium, with some partial exceptions from clever antenna shaping and stuff) ISP would be even worse than the wireline ones about bandwidth throttling and general dickishness? I, for one, am shocked.
All of this crap was really writing on the wall the moment we started down the "$FOO is licensed, not sold" road. The rest is just technical implementation details of the measures needed to keep the remote systems, and their users, in line.
Take advantage of Australia's uniquely malevolent fauna and boost domestic IT manufacturing by mandating that the bit-buckets into which all routers and security appliances drop potentially malicious packets be filled with saltwater crocodiles. All patched but unused ethernet drops are to be protected by nests of poisonous spiders.
Unfortunately, these hysterical schoolgirls are jumping up on chairs and obtaining new surveillance powers...
While political entities are not free of common human foibles, it is generally safer to view them as actors value-rationally emulating the set of outputs that is most likely to get them what they want, rather than assume that their outputs actually correlate with their internal states...
You are entirely correct when you say that optically powered systems are unequal to the task of powering anything serious. We are talking under 2 watts/strand here. Nice if you want to put an electrically powered sensor right in the middle of 'if-it-sparks-here-everybody-will-die-horribly-ville'; but you'd be looking at a real tentacle of a cable if you wanted to move serious energy.
It's a stormtrooper: you don't need to see the shots to know that the answer is "close enough to add drama; never close enough to kill an important character, despite these guys being the Empire's crack infantry forces..." In a universe ruled by narrative causality, ontology is an excellent substitute for empiricism...
As all right thinking people do, I have to love dangerous toys. The build quality and aesthetics are pretty sweet as well.
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with exotic energy weapons, I just can't shake the nagging feeling that.22s or even compressed gas propelled sub-.22 rounds almost certainly pack more punch...
Given the relatively stringent standards for commercial pilots(who are likely the bulk of 737 fliers, along with a few uber-wealthy VIPs who have a personal motivation to hire good pilots, these aren't your single-engine hobbyist-killers here), "bring one down" is almost certainly a severe overstatement.
Seriously inconvenience? Quite possibly. Fuck with the relatively tight timeslot scheduling of the nation's busier airports, causing millions in inconvenience? Conceivable. Cause the plane to automagically fall out of the sky the moment that the pilots have to break out the map and stop staring at the screen? Pretty unlikely...
It is pretty dubiously practical; but you can carry power over fiber(bright light on one end, photocell on the other). Both the max power per strand and the efficiency kind of suck; but that does allow you to(for low power systems about which you are rather paranoid) build a completely optocoupled device...
Rarely practical(and obviously wholly unhelpful for things like radar and radio communications gear, which explicitly rely on collecting RF); but the only thing stopping you is good sense...
My understanding(admittely layman's) is that not all devices are Part 15 devices. Part 15 is basically the "Go ahead and use the shitty parts of the spectrum, or have a less than totally RF-tight case; but don't fuck it up for any of the real people" license.
I'm guessing that aircraft systems may well be held to stricter standards in terms of rejecting interference; but may or may not be required to accept any interference received.
Having tested a few, with nothing more than a script-kiddie level of knowledge and whatever attack tools I could apt-get without leaving the default repos, you Do. Not. Want. To. Know. how awful the Linux, and network-related daemons running on top of it, generally is in that embedded consumer junk.
If you are lucky, the most recent patch(if any patches are offered) will be a relatively sane configuration that is 8 months and several critical vulnerabilities out of date. If less lucky, you can forget the "recent patch" and "relatively sane" parts entirely, and increment the numbers for months-out-of-date and critical vulnerabilities considerably. That shit is horrendous.
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I suspect that they went with blocking because it is way, way easier(especially if you are just aiming for an aggregate use reduction, not an ironclad 100% ban). Blocking probably just involves setting your DNS servers to return localhost or some LAN-side warning page for the domains. Priority setting would mean dicking around with QoS on god knows how many switches, that may or may not have the CPU time and resources to support it.
I doubt that the mission crews themselves can get away with it(and, were alertness aids needed, they'd probably just prescribe them amphetamines as the Air Force does); but I agree that having somebody in the position to fuck things up, even on the ground, doing lines to make deadlines is probably not the best of ideas. I'm just not at all surprised that people would be doing it anyway.
Cocaine does have the virtue of being a stimulant, so it will make you more alert, and whatever stupid mistakes it may induce will be pretty similar to the ones all your coffee-and-sleep-deprivation coworkers will be committing.
I suspect that its lack of telltale smell is a fairly large factor, though: A fair few alcoholics will(outside of formal reflex tests, or high precision machinery operation) barely feel the first few drinks. Even a single shot of something with no added scent(ie. vodka, rather than a hoppy beer) will be easily noticeable in face to face contact or confined areas for a while. Nearly all the alcohol that your liver doesn't get ends up being exhaled as a very noticeable vapor.
I am utterly shocked that a facility with a large concentration of people exposed to deadline pressures might be found to contain an alertness-enhancing recreational alkaloid stronger than caffeine...
That goes double if the NASA employee population skews a little older: children raised during/after Prozac and Ritalin became mainstream would be somewhat more likely to be expected to use some mixture of Provigil and one of the common prescription amphetamines for a mood and alertness boost, while powder cocaine is a venerable classic.
And ushered off the stage about as fast as they could be... Remember the wacky hijinks that ensued when Apple canceled their plans for 64-bit Carbon at the very last moment, after months of reaffirming their plans for it?
Apple? Do something architecturally inelegant for the sake of backwards compatibility? Are you sure that you aren't mixing up your Steves here?
Should the meltdown reach the sea, I probably won't be eating the local sushi for a while, some of those radioisotopes are either chemically nasty or fairly peppy alpha emitters.
Thermally, though, almost totally irrelevant. The three reactors that are running into trouble are a 460MWe and two 760MWe units. In rough numbers, I think that such plants might manage efficiency in the ~25% range, which would correspond to total heat outputs of 1840MW and two at 3040MW(under optimal, full-power operating conditions). 1 calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1gm of water by 1 degree celsius, 4.184 joules. If we go with our(pessimistic) assumption that the meltdown mass is putting out heat equivalent to the reactor operating as designed, that means 1840 million J/s or roughly 440,000,000 calories/s. That would mean that, per second, at maximum output, the core would be good for raising the temperature of 440,000L of water by 1 degree every second.
More plausibly(because there is no way that a meltdown blob is going to come in contact with that much water that fast), it will superheat the water immediately surrounding it, generating some very, very toasty steam(some of which will lose energy to the surrounding water, heating it, some of which will escape into the atmosphere). Thus, a fair percentage of the thermal energy will into the atmosphere, or into overcoming the enthalpy of vaporization of water, which is fairly high.
Even if 100% of the thermal energy from all three crippled reactors went directly into heating water (7920MW or ~1.9 billion calories/s) it would be facing the ~1.34442 x 10^21 L of water in earth's oceans. That would provide ~1.4x 10^-12 calories/s for each Liter. If we make the (highly pessimistic) assumption that the reactor meltdown blobs would continue at full power for a decade(315 569 260 seconds), that would correspond to a 0.000445977891 degree (celsius) rise in world ocean temps.
Spilling the fun stuff that you find in a live reactor is a terrible plan. Wholly ill advised. Don't do it. Not really a thermal concern, thon,
I suspect that cost will largely boil down to the "fabric", type unspecified, and whatever the "because we can" premium for this device happens to be.
Since the A9s are in mass production, and have some vendor competition, they should be reasonably cheap, and of basically knowable price; but, depending on what sort of interconnect this thing has, you could end up paying handsomely for that. "Basically ethernet; but cut down to handle short signal paths over known PCBs" shouldn't be too bad; but if it is some sort of custom NUMA unified memory thing, bend over and open your checkbook...
It really depends on how much(and what kind of) support hardware ends up being involved in having lots and lots of them together in some useful way. That and what inefficiencies, if any, are present because your workload was really expecting a smaller number of higher-performance cores.
The power/performance of the core itself remains the same whether you have 1 or 1 million. The power demands of the memory may or may not change: phones and the like usually use a fairly small amount of low-power RAM in a package-on-package stack with the CPU. For server applications, something that takes DIMMS or SODIMMs might be more attractive, because PoP usually limits you in terms of quantity.
The big server-specific questions are going to be the nature of the "fabric" across which 120 nodes in a 2U are communicating. Because 120 ports worth of 10/100 or GigE would occupy 3Us and nonzero power themselves, I'm assuming that this fabric is either not ethernet at all, or some sort of cut-down "we don't need to care about the standards because the signal only has to travel 6 inches over boards we designed, with our hardware at both ends" pseudo-ethernet that looks like an ethernet connection for compatibility purposes; but is electrically more frugal. Whatever that costs, in terms of energy, will have to be added on to the effective energy cost of the CPUs themselves.
Then you get perhaps the most annoying variable: Many tasks are(either fundamentally, or because nobody bothered to program them to support it) basically dependent on access to a single very fast core, or to a modest number of cores with very fast access to one another's memory. For such applications, the performance of 400+ slow cores is going to be way worse than a naive addition of their individual powers would suggest. Sharing time on a fast core is both fundamentally easier, and enjoys a much longer history of development, than does dividing a task among small ones. With some workloads, that will make this box nearly useless(especially if the interconnect is slow and/or doesn't do memory access). For others, performance might be nearly as good as a naive prediction would suggest.
The only problem that I see with this case is that it cost 50 thousand pounds: While there is no particular evidence that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice(3k for politically-motivated smear on election day seems fairly lenient), the cost of the case is worrisome.
At roughly current exchange rates($1.61 per pound) the court costs were just over $80,000. Our spook buddies at the CIA world factbook put the estimated 2010 GDP per capita in the UK at a hair over $35,000.
So, at least going by this case, the court costs were ~2.3 years of per capita GDP for a resident of the country in which the case took place. At those prices, anybody who doesn't have a 100% ironclad case or a substantially above-average income had better stay the hell away from loser-pays cases, no matter how small the damages themselves. And, if there are situations where loser doesn't pay, even people with 100% ironclad cases will have to stay the hell away unless the expected damages are quite high indeed, enough to attract a lawyer on contingency.
That is my concern: as long as the costs of touching a court are this high, you almost necessarily(no matter how good your laws and just your judges and juries) end up in a situation where the civil justice system is basically unavailable to anybody who isn't somewhere between "wealthy" and "plutocratic".
Well, let's just say that some snazzy looking CIA dossier folders(gold embossed on dark blue, very classy. Not your basic cheap folder here. Looks like something you'd get a diploma in...) somehow ended up being stored among the assorted paraphernalia there...
Luckily, should an outbreak of super-digester bacteria occur, we can simply dust it with Ice-9, which should stop it in its tracks.
In fairness, the prototype does tether to a smartphone, to use it as a cell modem for transmitting results to a remote site(or from a remote site) in real time.
However, the smartphone appears to occupy the role of simple cellular modem, and is in no way integral to the design. A dedicated cell modem, or just about any other internet connection mechanism, could conceivably have been used instead...
There appears to be a fairly significant engineering component to this as well: the "MicroNMR" is a separate device, that uses some sort of protein-binding ferrous nanoparticles to allow NRM imaging without the usual Big Serious Apparatus.
Presumably the signal processing guys who take the output from that device and beat it into something useful get the other half of the credit. The "smartphone" angle appears to just involve using the smartphone as a more or less dumb modem(unlike, say, some of the "low cost field microscope" designs that use cheap plastic or fluid optics to mate with a cellphone camera and then transmit images or do image processing onboard...)
The smartphone prototyping is certainly cute, and would work; but I would fairly strongly suspect that(with the costs of GSM modules in modest bulk being ~$50, falling sharply with number purchased) that any final product is going to skip the FDA-Approval-compromising prospect of including a chunk of un-audited consumer software that can be changed every ten minutes at the whim of the telco or manufacturer in the chain, and just integrate a cell modem...
Who could ever have expected that a wireless(and thus inherently shared-medium, with some partial exceptions from clever antenna shaping and stuff) ISP would be even worse than the wireline ones about bandwidth throttling and general dickishness? I, for one, am shocked.
All of this crap was really writing on the wall the moment we started down the "$FOO is licensed, not sold" road. The rest is just technical implementation details of the measures needed to keep the remote systems, and their users, in line.
Take advantage of Australia's uniquely malevolent fauna and boost domestic IT manufacturing by mandating that the bit-buckets into which all routers and security appliances drop potentially malicious packets be filled with saltwater crocodiles. All patched but unused ethernet drops are to be protected by nests of poisonous spiders.
Unfortunately, these hysterical schoolgirls are jumping up on chairs and obtaining new surveillance powers...
While political entities are not free of common human foibles, it is generally safer to view them as actors value-rationally emulating the set of outputs that is most likely to get them what they want, rather than assume that their outputs actually correlate with their internal states...
You are entirely correct when you say that optically powered systems are unequal to the task of powering anything serious. We are talking under 2 watts/strand here. Nice if you want to put an electrically powered sensor right in the middle of 'if-it-sparks-here-everybody-will-die-horribly-ville'; but you'd be looking at a real tentacle of a cable if you wanted to move serious energy.
For low power, though, it's an off-the-shelf item...
It's a stormtrooper: you don't need to see the shots to know that the answer is "close enough to add drama; never close enough to kill an important character, despite these guys being the Empire's crack infantry forces..." In a universe ruled by narrative causality, ontology is an excellent substitute for empiricism...
As all right thinking people do, I have to love dangerous toys. The build quality and aesthetics are pretty sweet as well.
.22s or even compressed gas propelled sub-.22 rounds almost certainly pack more punch...
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with exotic energy weapons, I just can't shake the nagging feeling that
Given the relatively stringent standards for commercial pilots(who are likely the bulk of 737 fliers, along with a few uber-wealthy VIPs who have a personal motivation to hire good pilots, these aren't your single-engine hobbyist-killers here), "bring one down" is almost certainly a severe overstatement.
Seriously inconvenience? Quite possibly. Fuck with the relatively tight timeslot scheduling of the nation's busier airports, causing millions in inconvenience? Conceivable. Cause the plane to automagically fall out of the sky the moment that the pilots have to break out the map and stop staring at the screen? Pretty unlikely...
It is pretty dubiously practical; but you can carry power over fiber(bright light on one end, photocell on the other). Both the max power per strand and the efficiency kind of suck; but that does allow you to(for low power systems about which you are rather paranoid) build a completely optocoupled device...
Rarely practical(and obviously wholly unhelpful for things like radar and radio communications gear, which explicitly rely on collecting RF); but the only thing stopping you is good sense...
My understanding(admittely layman's) is that not all devices are Part 15 devices. Part 15 is basically the "Go ahead and use the shitty parts of the spectrum, or have a less than totally RF-tight case; but don't fuck it up for any of the real people" license.
I'm guessing that aircraft systems may well be held to stricter standards in terms of rejecting interference; but may or may not be required to accept any interference received.
Having tested a few, with nothing more than a script-kiddie level of knowledge and whatever attack tools I could apt-get without leaving the default repos, you Do. Not. Want. To. Know. how awful the Linux, and network-related daemons running on top of it, generally is in that embedded consumer junk.
If you are lucky, the most recent patch(if any patches are offered) will be a relatively sane configuration that is 8 months and several critical vulnerabilities out of date. If less lucky, you can forget the "recent patch" and "relatively sane" parts entirely, and increment the numbers for months-out-of-date and critical vulnerabilities considerably. That shit is horrendous.