Yeah, well, part of it is that people ALWAYS overestimate themselves in some ways, like how competent they are and how much people will give them what they want (that they'll get it somehow). OF COURSE what these people want is to be HMFWICH (Head Muther Fucker What's in Charge Here). They don't imagine that they'll be downtrodden serfs, they imagine that their special insight and talents will make them valued members of the advantaged elite. Of course that's a meaningless argument to present, so it isn't presented, and is probably as often not even consciously understood by them. They are elitists because they are elitists, the justifications are always secondary, and facts can always be molded in ways that let people hold logically fallacious ideas or facts.
While I said "buy these morons a history book" the truth is that they HAVE all the history books they need. The most logical response to this kind of nonsense is dismissal. These people believe what they believe IN SPITE OF the evidence to the contrary for 95% of it. Someone should present the arguments, lest others be caught in the lie, but you can't fight this kind of thinking. Its adherents will have to come to their own senses, and while they may I'd guess an equal number of new fools will join them! Elitist snobbery never ends.
Yeah, I love how they pass off the blame for Hitler, Stalin, and guys like Saddam Hussein as the fault of liberal democracy, lol.
The other mystery they seem to have left untouched is exactly how would you create an old-fashioned monarchy? You'd have to convince MODERN people that some shmuck has the DIVINE RIGHT TO RULE because if his/her rule is merely a convention, then ANYONE can assume that mantle and once again all you have is a dictatorship ruled by absolute power (which is really what these monarchs effectively were anyway unless they were weak, in which case their governments were anything but stable or beneficial). You'd have to establish an hereditary right to rule and an hereditary elite, which no modern rational polity has any mechanism for doing that I can see. Even if there were some 'good' monarchies, theoretically, at some point in the past there is zero chance of re-establishing that model today. Society would have to be socially beaten back to a primitive state of serfs and overlords first, at immense cost, and even then nobody can put the genie of liberalism back in the bottle. In their heart of hearts people are always going to know that any absolutist system is simply arbitrary and rests on force. Free people will never rest while that state of affairs lasts, just like they didn't put up with that BS the first time around in the 17th Century. It just cannot work. Any philosophy which seeks to apply to the real world must actually conform to reality, and this idiocy doesn't even do that. Frankly it is all just silly wishing for unicorns if you ask me.
Of course they will. The first people to be purged are the ones with the most similar outlook to whomever is in charge. Give them a month and they'll be wishing for some DIFFERENT guy running things more to their liking and blood will stain some walls. I think fundamentally these people haven't internalized what it means to be unfree. They imagine some fuzzy paradise where their opinions and ideas will be cherished and they'll be part of some privileged intellectual class or something. In reality they'll be dead along with all the other free thinkers, or else if they want to live they'll shut up and hope for the best, which they won't get.
Sounds good to me. Heck, I'm all for freedom, let them set up their nice little absolutist state and run it however they want, the rest of us will keep our hard-earned liberty. I've seen and experienced the PRC firsthand, these guys wouldn't last a month there, they'd be in some re-education camp...
Please! Someone buy these idiots a history book. This is such a perfect example of people who think they're smart but they actually know jack shit about anything except pushing bits. The funny thing is, after the first arbitrary detention and execution of a dissident for "lesse majesty" or "treason against the crown" they'd all be up in arms and in jail. I really hope they're not all really this stupid and this is all just a way to get a reaction.
Right, but what conclusions can you draw from a simulation/model where changing one bit changes the entire result? Models are inexact by definition, so if your model can produce basically arbitrary answers out of the solution space depending on the LSB of some input value then its inherently useless. You need either A) a stable model that produces similar results for similar inputs (IE not a 'chaotic' system) OR B) you need to examine an ENSEMBLE of outputs derived from many possible sets of inputs so that you can understand the possible behaviors as a whole. ANY case where you can't do one of these two things means "scrap your model, it is worthless".
Hope it was at least slightly useful;) Fixed scaled arithmetic is AWESOME if you can get away with it. Back in the 80's when I was doing real time stuff that went on things flying through the air (and space) we loved it. Of course back then FPUs were a LOT slower (and usually a separate chip!). There are times when you can get away with infinite precision too, its slow but things like Java BigDecimal DO work, and the advantage is you get fine control over most sources of error (or exceptions and explicit changes in precision that you asked for). Nowadays though avoiding FP is like fighting City Hall, you might win now and then, but you'll probably regret it, lol.
Trust me, its a subject I've studied. The problem here is that your system is unstable, tiny differences in inputs generate huge differences in output. You cannot simply take one set of inputs that produces what you think is the 'right answer' from that system and ignore all the rest! You have to explore the ensemble behavior of many different sets of inputs, and the overall set of responses of the system is your output, not any one specific run with specific inputs that would produce a totally different result if one was off by a tiny bit.
Of course Lorenz realized this. Simple experiments with an LDE will show you this kind of result. You simply cannot treat these systems the way you would ones which exhibit function-like behavior (at least within some bounds). Lorenz of course also realized THAT, but sadly not everyone has got the memo yet! lol.
I think the problem is that people PERCEIVE it to be a problem. Nothing is any more problematic than it was before, good numerical simulations will be stable over some range of inputs. It shouldn't MATTER if you get slightly different results for one given input. If that's all you tested, well, you did it wrong indeed. Mathematica is fine, people need to A) understand scientific computing and B) understand how to run and interpret models. I think most scientists that are doing a lot of modelling these days DO know these things. Its the occasional users that get it wrong I suspect.
Yes, you can do this, but its not feasible for all calculations. Things like trig functions are implemented on FP numbers, and once you start using FP its better to just keep using it, converting back and forth is just bad and defeats the whole purpose anyway. So in reality you end up with applications that DO use FP (believe me, as an old FORTH programmer I can attest to the benefits of scaled integer arithmetic!). Its one of those things, we're stuck with FP and once we assume that, then the whole question of small differences in results of machine-level instructions or of minor differences in libraries on different platforms, etc. you will probably find that arbitrary VMs won't produce exactly identical results when you run on different platforms (AWS, KVM, VMWare, some new thing).
Is it ia huge problem though? The results produced should be similar, the parameters being varied were never controlled for anyway. Its how often the rounding errors between two FPUs are identical. Neither the new nor the old results should be considered 'better' and they should generally be about the same if the result is robust. A climate sym for example run on two different systems for an ensemble of runs with similar inputs should produce statistically indistinguishable results. If they don't then you should know what the differences are by comparison. In reality I doubt very many experiments will be in doubt based on this.
Now that's some interesting thinking. BTRFS/ZFS snapshotting capabilities certainly do open up a lot of interesting options. You could do similar things before but at the FS level it is damned convenient and much more efficient. I hope BTRFS hits production quality soon...
While I'm not arguing with your analysis, rsync is still a perfectly valid way to create offsite recovery copies of your filesystem, which is what the OP appears to desire. As ls671 noted, you can also use the backup dir option. You can also backup the remote server in whatever way you wish, which adds another layer. Along with backup dirs you can get a perfectly fine father, grandfather, son recovery set using something as simply as tar (though star will work better). Still rsync by itself will protect you from physical loss of your drive (theft, fire, etc).
The point being, rsync isn't 'useless' at all, even just used on its own, and we really don't know all the other components of the OP's data protection strategy. Obviously we could devise some elaborate plan for him using various tools that would provide for every eventuality. Go ahead and do so. Frankly I assumed he was sophisticated enough based on his question to supply himself with those answers.
I mean that would fit the bill in terms of being a fairly easy automatic setup. Just rsync your machine to the remote backup at midnight every day, or you can even do it ever hour or ever 5 minutes if you want. Obviously any scheme can run into "you have too much data to deal with RIGHT NOW" but there's no cure for that. I guess the other option is sneakernet. You might swing something with a neighbor that involves using wireless. If the guy next door can pick up the signal from your router you could locate a NAS box in his place, etc. This of course presumes you really trust your neighbor...
Document what's happening as thoroughly as you can, and the whole history of the thing, and then go to the state police in your state. They may refer you to the FBI, and I'm guessing will not be all that eager to deal with the issue, but its a crime being committed against you and you should have the benefit of law enforcement to whatever degree they can feasibly help you. At the very least you will have documented what is happening and they'll know about it so that if the situation evolves they will have a clear understanding of what's going on. DOS by itself probably isn't really too alarming to them, but I've seen these things evolve into threats, vandalism, etc, and they'll take that sort of thing more seriously.
I also have to concur with other posters. SOMETHING has to be allowing them to discover your IP/MAC addresses even when they change. I'd assume you have some sort of malware on some system on your network that is the culprit. Its possible they could have compromised your ISP or in theory there could be other ways to obtain that information, but the simple explanation is your PC is telling them where it is. Burn it down to a bare drive and reinstall from scratch, then run some good AV/IPS software, and consider packet logging all outgoing traffic to see if you can spot something.
Yeah, I never really saw what the appeal of Myst was myself. It wasn't a new genre, really, it was just Zork with pictures. It was STATIC, that was the whole problem. The pictures were pretty, but lots of pictures are pretty. The puzzles were OK, but Zork had equally intricate puzzles, that wasn't new. The story line was somewhat better than that of other games of the same vintage, but given the static nature of the game state (nothing evolves without player interaction) there's not a lot that you can do with pushing the story. In fact the story is just a slow reveal of something that happened in the past, the player isn't participating in the REAL story, just uncovering it.
Honestly, I think Myst was influential in some respects, but it was FAR too limited a game format to really spawn a vigorous genre. I think you're right, John Carmack came along and added guns and monsters to nice graphics and the world never looked back. NOW the player was in the middle of the story, MADE the story. It was a thinner and less interesting story, but you were part of it.
Of course now with Internet and very much faster machines maybe there's something to revisit. Honestly though, I think the labor involved in world-design is always the limit on games. You can only afford to create so much world. The next stage has to be computer generated and managed world content so that games can truly become virtually infinite in size and complexity.
You can't say that with any certainty at all. It heavily depends on the exact composition, structure, velocity, and angle of entry. It is quite possible for a rock this size to either reach the ground or generate a fireball at an altitude that could cause some significant damage on the ground in a limited area. It is just largely moot, there's virtually no chance such a thing would happen.
You wouldn't want to be anywhere near where it hit, but agreed, the overall effect would be small and chances are it would hit a remote region where no significant damage would result.
My guess would be that the whole thing would be done on the basis of 'zero risk'. At NO point would the asteroid even transiently pass through a configuration where it would impact at all. This isn't as hard as it might sound either. Surely there is SOME orbit within the Earth/Moon system that can be achieved under that criteria. Once you are in ANY Earth/Moon orbit transitioning to other orbits safely should be relatively easy. Notice that the NASA blurb shows the asteroid in a counter-rotating distant Lunar orbit, one which would be pretty safe presumably. As long as you have a Constellation configuration with 10 or so days of transit time capability it really doesn't much matter exactly what the orbit is, you can get there.
So, I would STRONGLY suggest that this whole program is being proposed in a safe manner where impact is simply not possible. The 'tractor' capturing spacecraft could fail at any point and wherever the asteroid went would be OK.
That being said, it is true that statistically speaking any random orbit probably is more likely to lead to an impact than whatever orbit any random object is currently in. However NEOs are ALREADY generally in transient pseudo-stable orbits, so it probably doesn't make much difference. Obviously if you start pushing main-belt asteroids around its a bit different. Still, bad orbits are a very small subset of all orbits.
I don't think there should be a universal shunning of Javascript. OTOH it sees a lot of overuse. Given that I browse with NoScript set to "deny everything" and selectively enable (I have a fairly short whitelist) I get a pretty good view of where people are using JS, and they often use it in the strangest and most puzzling places. Half the simple static 'brochure' and 'C/V' pages out there in the world DEMAND JS just to follow ordinary links. Often ones I can't even see the slightest bit of dynamic styling on. 99.9% of all that styling can be achieved in CSS anyway and will work in all but the most archaic of browsers that are out there (and degrades to something useful when it won't work). Surely most of these people would be far better off eschewing scripting as all they're doing is forcing people to either go away or open a security hole in their browsers. The VAST majority of this sort of content is not being run by people who have the slightest ability to manage a server, secure their content, monitor it for corruption, etc. In other words there's no reason why I should NEED to be asked to trust most of these sites when somewhere up to 30% of all legitimate sites nowadays have been compromised.
So, it may be more data to have something like a table as you describe with summaries and rollups, but if that's the only thing you need to stick some JS on the page for me to see I'd as soon you just gave me the longer static page. Its all autogenerated content anyway in this kind of case, so who cares? Worst case its a few extra bytes, and chances are the JS eats up ALL of the advantage, if not more. This way when some nice Russian gentleman adds HIS content to your page, I don't have to allow it to run.
I find it to be a considerably more polished and usable plugin. I haven't really explored all of the dimensions of ScriptSafe either. NoScript has been around for a number of years and has built a solid reputation. The author is reliable, the plugin works and is quite hard (in most cases impossible) to circumvent etc. At this point I can't say the same for ScriptSafe or that it covers all various little crafty browser holes that NoScript does. I'll give it a chance, and if FF really did ever eliminate blocking of JS I'd probably have no choice but to use it. We'll see. My feeling with security tools is use what you know well and be careful about new stuff.
I'll do some testing with ScriptSafe and perhaps if I get a chance I'll comment back here on what I see.
"Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."
Such people should be fired out of hand. I mean sure, if you're creating some specific UI for a web based application then 'no fallback' is acceptable, you just can't get anything like the same functionality. I sell software which falls into this category, but it would be utterly useless without JS. OTOH the idiots who can't put up a plain old web site without insisting we all have to enable JS on it so they can make a cute rollover on a link or something stupid are just retarded and should resign.
There is ZERO chance I'm going to use a browser which doesn't allow me to default JS to being disabled. NoScript is also FAR advanced beyond other similar tools, so it would REALLY SUCK to have to use Chromium's lame equivalent, but I will if it is the only choice. At least in other respects Chromium is pretty good.
Yeah, agreed. I'm an old FORTH programmer, talk about basics. We got more done with that tool at a faster rate BY FAR than any other tool chain in the past 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well, part of it is that people ALWAYS overestimate themselves in some ways, like how competent they are and how much people will give them what they want (that they'll get it somehow). OF COURSE what these people want is to be HMFWICH (Head Muther Fucker What's in Charge Here). They don't imagine that they'll be downtrodden serfs, they imagine that their special insight and talents will make them valued members of the advantaged elite. Of course that's a meaningless argument to present, so it isn't presented, and is probably as often not even consciously understood by them. They are elitists because they are elitists, the justifications are always secondary, and facts can always be molded in ways that let people hold logically fallacious ideas or facts.
While I said "buy these morons a history book" the truth is that they HAVE all the history books they need. The most logical response to this kind of nonsense is dismissal. These people believe what they believe IN SPITE OF the evidence to the contrary for 95% of it. Someone should present the arguments, lest others be caught in the lie, but you can't fight this kind of thinking. Its adherents will have to come to their own senses, and while they may I'd guess an equal number of new fools will join them! Elitist snobbery never ends.
Yeah, I love how they pass off the blame for Hitler, Stalin, and guys like Saddam Hussein as the fault of liberal democracy, lol.
The other mystery they seem to have left untouched is exactly how would you create an old-fashioned monarchy? You'd have to convince MODERN people that some shmuck has the DIVINE RIGHT TO RULE because if his/her rule is merely a convention, then ANYONE can assume that mantle and once again all you have is a dictatorship ruled by absolute power (which is really what these monarchs effectively were anyway unless they were weak, in which case their governments were anything but stable or beneficial). You'd have to establish an hereditary right to rule and an hereditary elite, which no modern rational polity has any mechanism for doing that I can see. Even if there were some 'good' monarchies, theoretically, at some point in the past there is zero chance of re-establishing that model today. Society would have to be socially beaten back to a primitive state of serfs and overlords first, at immense cost, and even then nobody can put the genie of liberalism back in the bottle. In their heart of hearts people are always going to know that any absolutist system is simply arbitrary and rests on force. Free people will never rest while that state of affairs lasts, just like they didn't put up with that BS the first time around in the 17th Century. It just cannot work. Any philosophy which seeks to apply to the real world must actually conform to reality, and this idiocy doesn't even do that. Frankly it is all just silly wishing for unicorns if you ask me.
Of course they will. The first people to be purged are the ones with the most similar outlook to whomever is in charge. Give them a month and they'll be wishing for some DIFFERENT guy running things more to their liking and blood will stain some walls. I think fundamentally these people haven't internalized what it means to be unfree. They imagine some fuzzy paradise where their opinions and ideas will be cherished and they'll be part of some privileged intellectual class or something. In reality they'll be dead along with all the other free thinkers, or else if they want to live they'll shut up and hope for the best, which they won't get.
LOL, one of my best friends lives in Toronto, I hear you!
Sounds good to me. Heck, I'm all for freedom, let them set up their nice little absolutist state and run it however they want, the rest of us will keep our hard-earned liberty. I've seen and experienced the PRC firsthand, these guys wouldn't last a month there, they'd be in some re-education camp...
Please! Someone buy these idiots a history book. This is such a perfect example of people who think they're smart but they actually know jack shit about anything except pushing bits. The funny thing is, after the first arbitrary detention and execution of a dissident for "lesse majesty" or "treason against the crown" they'd all be up in arms and in jail. I really hope they're not all really this stupid and this is all just a way to get a reaction.
Right, but what conclusions can you draw from a simulation/model where changing one bit changes the entire result? Models are inexact by definition, so if your model can produce basically arbitrary answers out of the solution space depending on the LSB of some input value then its inherently useless. You need either A) a stable model that produces similar results for similar inputs (IE not a 'chaotic' system) OR B) you need to examine an ENSEMBLE of outputs derived from many possible sets of inputs so that you can understand the possible behaviors as a whole. ANY case where you can't do one of these two things means "scrap your model, it is worthless".
Hope it was at least slightly useful ;) Fixed scaled arithmetic is AWESOME if you can get away with it. Back in the 80's when I was doing real time stuff that went on things flying through the air (and space) we loved it. Of course back then FPUs were a LOT slower (and usually a separate chip!). There are times when you can get away with infinite precision too, its slow but things like Java BigDecimal DO work, and the advantage is you get fine control over most sources of error (or exceptions and explicit changes in precision that you asked for). Nowadays though avoiding FP is like fighting City Hall, you might win now and then, but you'll probably regret it, lol.
Trust me, its a subject I've studied. The problem here is that your system is unstable, tiny differences in inputs generate huge differences in output. You cannot simply take one set of inputs that produces what you think is the 'right answer' from that system and ignore all the rest! You have to explore the ensemble behavior of many different sets of inputs, and the overall set of responses of the system is your output, not any one specific run with specific inputs that would produce a totally different result if one was off by a tiny bit.
Of course Lorenz realized this. Simple experiments with an LDE will show you this kind of result. You simply cannot treat these systems the way you would ones which exhibit function-like behavior (at least within some bounds). Lorenz of course also realized THAT, but sadly not everyone has got the memo yet! lol.
I think the problem is that people PERCEIVE it to be a problem. Nothing is any more problematic than it was before, good numerical simulations will be stable over some range of inputs. It shouldn't MATTER if you get slightly different results for one given input. If that's all you tested, well, you did it wrong indeed. Mathematica is fine, people need to A) understand scientific computing and B) understand how to run and interpret models. I think most scientists that are doing a lot of modelling these days DO know these things. Its the occasional users that get it wrong I suspect.
Yes, you can do this, but its not feasible for all calculations. Things like trig functions are implemented on FP numbers, and once you start using FP its better to just keep using it, converting back and forth is just bad and defeats the whole purpose anyway. So in reality you end up with applications that DO use FP (believe me, as an old FORTH programmer I can attest to the benefits of scaled integer arithmetic!). Its one of those things, we're stuck with FP and once we assume that, then the whole question of small differences in results of machine-level instructions or of minor differences in libraries on different platforms, etc. you will probably find that arbitrary VMs won't produce exactly identical results when you run on different platforms (AWS, KVM, VMWare, some new thing).
Is it ia huge problem though? The results produced should be similar, the parameters being varied were never controlled for anyway. Its how often the rounding errors between two FPUs are identical. Neither the new nor the old results should be considered 'better' and they should generally be about the same if the result is robust. A climate sym for example run on two different systems for an ensemble of runs with similar inputs should produce statistically indistinguishable results. If they don't then you should know what the differences are by comparison. In reality I doubt very many experiments will be in doubt based on this.
Yup, always buy on bad news!
Now that's some interesting thinking. BTRFS/ZFS snapshotting capabilities certainly do open up a lot of interesting options. You could do similar things before but at the FS level it is damned convenient and much more efficient. I hope BTRFS hits production quality soon...
While I'm not arguing with your analysis, rsync is still a perfectly valid way to create offsite recovery copies of your filesystem, which is what the OP appears to desire. As ls671 noted, you can also use the backup dir option. You can also backup the remote server in whatever way you wish, which adds another layer. Along with backup dirs you can get a perfectly fine father, grandfather, son recovery set using something as simply as tar (though star will work better). Still rsync by itself will protect you from physical loss of your drive (theft, fire, etc).
The point being, rsync isn't 'useless' at all, even just used on its own, and we really don't know all the other components of the OP's data protection strategy. Obviously we could devise some elaborate plan for him using various tools that would provide for every eventuality. Go ahead and do so. Frankly I assumed he was sophisticated enough based on his question to supply himself with those answers.
I mean that would fit the bill in terms of being a fairly easy automatic setup. Just rsync your machine to the remote backup at midnight every day, or you can even do it ever hour or ever 5 minutes if you want. Obviously any scheme can run into "you have too much data to deal with RIGHT NOW" but there's no cure for that. I guess the other option is sneakernet. You might swing something with a neighbor that involves using wireless. If the guy next door can pick up the signal from your router you could locate a NAS box in his place, etc. This of course presumes you really trust your neighbor...
Document what's happening as thoroughly as you can, and the whole history of the thing, and then go to the state police in your state. They may refer you to the FBI, and I'm guessing will not be all that eager to deal with the issue, but its a crime being committed against you and you should have the benefit of law enforcement to whatever degree they can feasibly help you. At the very least you will have documented what is happening and they'll know about it so that if the situation evolves they will have a clear understanding of what's going on. DOS by itself probably isn't really too alarming to them, but I've seen these things evolve into threats, vandalism, etc, and they'll take that sort of thing more seriously.
I also have to concur with other posters. SOMETHING has to be allowing them to discover your IP/MAC addresses even when they change. I'd assume you have some sort of malware on some system on your network that is the culprit. Its possible they could have compromised your ISP or in theory there could be other ways to obtain that information, but the simple explanation is your PC is telling them where it is. Burn it down to a bare drive and reinstall from scratch, then run some good AV/IPS software, and consider packet logging all outgoing traffic to see if you can spot something.
Yeah, I never really saw what the appeal of Myst was myself. It wasn't a new genre, really, it was just Zork with pictures. It was STATIC, that was the whole problem. The pictures were pretty, but lots of pictures are pretty. The puzzles were OK, but Zork had equally intricate puzzles, that wasn't new. The story line was somewhat better than that of other games of the same vintage, but given the static nature of the game state (nothing evolves without player interaction) there's not a lot that you can do with pushing the story. In fact the story is just a slow reveal of something that happened in the past, the player isn't participating in the REAL story, just uncovering it.
Honestly, I think Myst was influential in some respects, but it was FAR too limited a game format to really spawn a vigorous genre. I think you're right, John Carmack came along and added guns and monsters to nice graphics and the world never looked back. NOW the player was in the middle of the story, MADE the story. It was a thinner and less interesting story, but you were part of it.
Of course now with Internet and very much faster machines maybe there's something to revisit. Honestly though, I think the labor involved in world-design is always the limit on games. You can only afford to create so much world. The next stage has to be computer generated and managed world content so that games can truly become virtually infinite in size and complexity.
I saw nothing in the blurb about a specific size. Of course there's not a lot of reason to mess with larger rocks if you don't have to.
You can't say that with any certainty at all. It heavily depends on the exact composition, structure, velocity, and angle of entry. It is quite possible for a rock this size to either reach the ground or generate a fireball at an altitude that could cause some significant damage on the ground in a limited area. It is just largely moot, there's virtually no chance such a thing would happen.
You wouldn't want to be anywhere near where it hit, but agreed, the overall effect would be small and chances are it would hit a remote region where no significant damage would result.
My guess would be that the whole thing would be done on the basis of 'zero risk'. At NO point would the asteroid even transiently pass through a configuration where it would impact at all. This isn't as hard as it might sound either. Surely there is SOME orbit within the Earth/Moon system that can be achieved under that criteria. Once you are in ANY Earth/Moon orbit transitioning to other orbits safely should be relatively easy. Notice that the NASA blurb shows the asteroid in a counter-rotating distant Lunar orbit, one which would be pretty safe presumably. As long as you have a Constellation configuration with 10 or so days of transit time capability it really doesn't much matter exactly what the orbit is, you can get there.
So, I would STRONGLY suggest that this whole program is being proposed in a safe manner where impact is simply not possible. The 'tractor' capturing spacecraft could fail at any point and wherever the asteroid went would be OK.
That being said, it is true that statistically speaking any random orbit probably is more likely to lead to an impact than whatever orbit any random object is currently in. However NEOs are ALREADY generally in transient pseudo-stable orbits, so it probably doesn't make much difference. Obviously if you start pushing main-belt asteroids around its a bit different. Still, bad orbits are a very small subset of all orbits.
I don't think there should be a universal shunning of Javascript. OTOH it sees a lot of overuse. Given that I browse with NoScript set to "deny everything" and selectively enable (I have a fairly short whitelist) I get a pretty good view of where people are using JS, and they often use it in the strangest and most puzzling places. Half the simple static 'brochure' and 'C/V' pages out there in the world DEMAND JS just to follow ordinary links. Often ones I can't even see the slightest bit of dynamic styling on. 99.9% of all that styling can be achieved in CSS anyway and will work in all but the most archaic of browsers that are out there (and degrades to something useful when it won't work). Surely most of these people would be far better off eschewing scripting as all they're doing is forcing people to either go away or open a security hole in their browsers. The VAST majority of this sort of content is not being run by people who have the slightest ability to manage a server, secure their content, monitor it for corruption, etc. In other words there's no reason why I should NEED to be asked to trust most of these sites when somewhere up to 30% of all legitimate sites nowadays have been compromised.
So, it may be more data to have something like a table as you describe with summaries and rollups, but if that's the only thing you need to stick some JS on the page for me to see I'd as soon you just gave me the longer static page. Its all autogenerated content anyway in this kind of case, so who cares? Worst case its a few extra bytes, and chances are the JS eats up ALL of the advantage, if not more. This way when some nice Russian gentleman adds HIS content to your page, I don't have to allow it to run.
I find it to be a considerably more polished and usable plugin. I haven't really explored all of the dimensions of ScriptSafe either. NoScript has been around for a number of years and has built a solid reputation. The author is reliable, the plugin works and is quite hard (in most cases impossible) to circumvent etc. At this point I can't say the same for ScriptSafe or that it covers all various little crafty browser holes that NoScript does. I'll give it a chance, and if FF really did ever eliminate blocking of JS I'd probably have no choice but to use it. We'll see. My feeling with security tools is use what you know well and be careful about new stuff.
I'll do some testing with ScriptSafe and perhaps if I get a chance I'll comment back here on what I see.
"Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."
Such people should be fired out of hand. I mean sure, if you're creating some specific UI for a web based application then 'no fallback' is acceptable, you just can't get anything like the same functionality. I sell software which falls into this category, but it would be utterly useless without JS. OTOH the idiots who can't put up a plain old web site without insisting we all have to enable JS on it so they can make a cute rollover on a link or something stupid are just retarded and should resign.
There is ZERO chance I'm going to use a browser which doesn't allow me to default JS to being disabled. NoScript is also FAR advanced beyond other similar tools, so it would REALLY SUCK to have to use Chromium's lame equivalent, but I will if it is the only choice. At least in other respects Chromium is pretty good.
Yeah, agreed. I'm an old FORTH programmer, talk about basics. We got more done with that tool at a faster rate BY FAR than any other tool chain in the past 30 years.