I read the screenplay for this about 5 years ago at this point. Honestly surprised it took so long to get made. I guess Cameron wanted technology to catch up to his imagination.
The basic plot is a) humanity discovers alien world, b) populated by weird creatures, the most intelligent of which are the blue humanoid ones - you can think of them sort of as Native Americans; and c) that's pretty much the plot. Humans come to conquer this new world.
To do this they d) grow "avatars" who are biologically like the aliens but into which human consciousness can be uploaded. This is done to e) interact with the aliens and convince them to let humans take over their planet. f) The aliens are not so keen on the idea and g) fight back. h) it turns out that they're not just primitives but that they i) live in close consciousness-sharing harmony with other creatures on their planet and j) their entire planet via plants.
See, they k) have nerve bundles growing in their hair and these let them connect with other living beings, such as l) the pterodactyls which they're able to pilot by mind control. m) One particularly nasty human soldier scalps one of the main aliens and this is a very dramatic thing. n) the protagonist is a crippled Earth scientist who can't walk, but when loaded into his "avatar" he can, and so he wants to stay in his alien body. o) When an alien dies they get absobed by the foliage and become part of the planetary consciousness. p) Because the protagonist helps to chase off the nasty humans q)by wiping out the invading force and sending Earth a fake message about a lethal virus being on the planet, r) the aliens make him a permanent alien. s) there is also the obligatory love story.
There, aren't you glad I just saved you 2 hours and $20???
Sure, it'll be visually pretty but the plot is lame. Unless you're 13.
Having worked in Nuclear software development, I can't see how it can be called worst in terms of cyber security.
All the control systems I've worked on, SCADA and monitoring as well as balance of plant, has always been isolated from the externally accessible computers via air-gap.
The only connection to the outside world from these systems is a dedicated phone line to the NRC - with specialized out-only protocols.
Yes, the control, monitoring and BoP systems are networked, but only within their function, not even to one another, never mind the outside world.
Not only that, but each system is implemented on different hardware and OS specifically to avoid a common point of failure.
So while someone can very likely get into the out-facing network in a plant - due to bad IT practices - and can probably get reporting data that is processed on those systems, they cannot affect the functioning of the plant without either being physically on-site or somehow manipulating an operator to tweak operational safety setpoints on the SCADA system.
Collateral damage, by definition, is unintentional. The contradiction aside, why would the most technologically advanced (arguably, I suppose) part of the US military seek to cause more than the necessary amount of damage?
I can dig this. I mean, the independent country of Kosovo just appeared in the middle of Croatia last week. A couple years ago Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina just popped into existence. Serbia and Croatia shortly before that. And where the hell did Yugoslavia go!? That's not Geography, it's more like quantum physics - if you so much as look at that part of the world, it changes.
"Eastern Europe" is not some nebulous region with fuzzy borders on a map, with "Here there be coders" written in illuminated calligraphy in the very middle of a vast, blank area.
This guy's email address is in Hungary which means he's probably Hungarian. That's a country directly between Austria and Bulgaria, south of Poland and north of Greece (indirectly) which, depending on where you draw the Eastern boundary of Europe, may or may not be in "Eastern" Europe. It lies almost precisely between the western border of France and the Eastern border of Ukraine, the northern border of Poland and the southern border of Greece (excluding Cyprus), making this guy more of a Central European.
French coders are French, German coders are German. What makes a Hungarian coder "Eastern European"?
Don't try to confuse me with details, correct or otherwise.:)
The initial comparison was very high level. Traffic enters in the back and leaves from the front. If there is a slowdown in egress while the entry rate stays the same, there is a jam. If there is already a jam, changing lanes adds to the overall delay and so adding lanes doesn't solve the problem unless the entry rate drops enough for the jam to clear due to cars leaving whatever data structure best represents the operations required to realistically model a congested highway.
Quite right, but the road as a whole is a queue as there are no cars entering or leaving at arbitrary locations. There are entrances and exits but these are irrelevant to cars not using them and the stretches in between the exits are linear. A list has considerably more flexibility to it as a structure and doesn't apply to the behavior of a traffic jam.
Yes, traffic IS a queue. It's got multiple lanes but it's a linear road. If it helps you, think of it as a set of parallel queues, but the same ideas apply, especially if there is a bottleneck such as a merge, an accident (rubbernecking) or an exit where people need to change lanes.
Someone who is in the left lane and needs to get over to a slower, right lane, and can't get in, will be forced to slow down in the left lane, causing that lane to slow down as much as the right lane - until he finally gets in. Since at rush hour, more than one person needs to merge and change lanes, the situation persists rather than resolving.
Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam on a multi-lane highway? I'm sure you have, and I'm sure that "you can pass people at will" now sounds as absurd to you as it does to me. When the road is clear or moving smoothly, yes, passing is easy and keeps the flow of traffic going. But when you have a jam, which is the very point of the article, passing isn't an option and so the jam amplifies - especially when people start changing lanes in an attempt to pass, only to exacerbate the jam.
Coming back to the comparison of traffic to a queue, think of it like as a task queue for IO access. If each task does it's 1 millisecond IO operation and moves on, things go swimmingly. If, however, some task "puts on the brakes" by hogging the IO, other tasks pile up behind it.
Now, think of several IO queues all processing the same sort of tasks. If one gets jammed up, tasks can "change lanes" and go into another of the queues - but, again, if any task hogs the IO, the rest of THAT queue gets blocked.
SO... Adding queues (lanes) doesn't solve the problem when you have a likelihood of many IO hogging tasks. If, however, you slow down the rate at which tasks are entering the queue, tasks hogging the IO can complete without causing the queue to fill. If you have a dynamically sized queue, one that grows in size to accommodate input, you can think of the stuffed queue growing in size as being effectively the same as the length of the jammed roadway.
This is BASIC OS design, and frankly, I'm shocked that you're unable to draw the parallel between a roadway and a queue.
Using the shoulders is, in effect, adding lanes. If you've ever driven on a 3, 5 or even 8 lane highway, you'll agree that more lanes can just as easily jam up as fewer.
The solution isn't to add bandwidth but to adjust thruput. Jams happen because cars are coming to the back of the queue faster than they are leaving the front of the queue. If incoming traffic were to slow down well before getting to the jam, the leaving rate would allow the jam to dissipate more effectively.
For this very reason, you will often see tractor trailers get along-side each other and drive slowly before getting to the jammed area. They create a rolling barrier that allows traffic to keep moving at a slower but steady pace instead of in frustrating and fuel-wasting stops and starts. Steady inertia is better.
As for this being "news", that's BS. Just watch how truckers change their driving pattern when congestion starts to build up. This has been common-sense knowledge for most sensible drivers for decades. Only now there's a peer-reviewed paper about it.
The fact that the missile used shot down a satellite does not mean that the purpose here was to see if we could shoot down a satellite. Look here...
The Chinese took out one of their telecomm birds last year. It was 500 miles up and in steady orbit. That was a sat-kill test.
The US spy satellite was a) 150 miles up, b) in unstable orbit and c) a spy sat. Destroying the super-secret spy technology on the satellite was a bonus. The shoot down was a test of whether US anti-ICBM systems worked as intended. THIS was the whole point. We've done contrived tests of the missile defense technology before, but here was an opportunity to shoot down a real, faster moving, unpredictably moving target.
Shooting down satellites in stable orbit isn't hard. The challenge is getting a missile up there, and the US has this technology locked. Shooting down a very fast moving object that is coming at you in a more or less unpredictable way is tough. The success of this test makes China and Russia nervous not about their satellites but about their ability to lob missiles.
As for all-our space-war, the challenge would be to be selective. The EMP from a small number of well placed nukes would fry the electronics of nearly every communication and weather satellite in space, not to mention taking the GPS system out of commission. Only a low-tech rogue nation with nuclear weapons, like N. Korea or Iran would in any way benefit from such tactics.
The judge's order "should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don't know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It's a mystery," said Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive.'"
It boggles the mind that the White House would not store a duplicate backup at an off-site location to prevent a disaster from taking out all their backups. It is the sane and reasonable thing to do. They do with with their top executives, shuffling them to "undisclosed locations" whenever anyone in the Middle East so much as sneezes.
The financial and many other high-security institutions are required to store all their backups - documents, email and even IM logs - off-site. This the the bread and butter of companies like Iron Mountain. How the White House does not have this as basic security policy is absolutely boggling. It seems almost a deliberate "oversight".
So doctors will now be able to see in 3D that the arterial blockage that killed the patient is the little probe they sent in to find a suspected arterial blockage?
Cool tech and all, but how do they control where it goes?
Slashdot Mirror
I read the screenplay for this about 5 years ago at this point. Honestly surprised it took so long to get made. I guess Cameron wanted technology to catch up to his imagination.
The basic plot is a) humanity discovers alien world, b) populated by weird creatures, the most intelligent of which are the blue humanoid ones - you can think of them sort of as Native Americans; and c) that's pretty much the plot. Humans come to conquer this new world.
To do this they d) grow "avatars" who are biologically like the aliens but into which human consciousness can be uploaded. This is done to e) interact with the aliens and convince them to let humans take over their planet. f) The aliens are not so keen on the idea and g) fight back. h) it turns out that they're not just primitives but that they i) live in close consciousness-sharing harmony with other creatures on their planet and j) their entire planet via plants.
See, they k) have nerve bundles growing in their hair and these let them connect with other living beings, such as l) the pterodactyls which they're able to pilot by mind control. m) One particularly nasty human soldier scalps one of the main aliens and this is a very dramatic thing. n) the protagonist is a crippled Earth scientist who can't walk, but when loaded into his "avatar" he can, and so he wants to stay in his alien body. o) When an alien dies they get absobed by the foliage and become part of the planetary consciousness. p) Because the protagonist helps to chase off the nasty humans q)by wiping out the invading force and sending Earth a fake message about a lethal virus being on the planet, r) the aliens make him a permanent alien. s) there is also the obligatory love story.
There, aren't you glad I just saved you 2 hours and $20???
Sure, it'll be visually pretty but the plot is lame. Unless you're 13.
I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Or, maybe they just obstructed their view of Venus.
ALOHA!
And now for some filler to get the filter to let me post.
He invented the World Wide Web.
Everyone KNOWS Al Gore invented the Internet! Sheesh!
There are fields, Jerf. Endless fields, where thorium isn't born, it's grown...
Having worked in Nuclear software development, I can't see how it can be called worst in terms of cyber security.
All the control systems I've worked on, SCADA and monitoring as well as balance of plant, has always been isolated from the externally accessible computers via air-gap.
The only connection to the outside world from these systems is a dedicated phone line to the NRC - with specialized out-only protocols.
Yes, the control, monitoring and BoP systems are networked, but only within their function, not even to one another, never mind the outside world.
Not only that, but each system is implemented on different hardware and OS specifically to avoid a common point of failure.
So while someone can very likely get into the out-facing network in a plant - due to bad IT practices - and can probably get reporting data that is processed on those systems, they cannot affect the functioning of the plant without either being physically on-site or somehow manipulating an operator to tweak operational safety setpoints on the SCADA system.
Nuclear plants are part of the "public" utilities that feed the power grid.
You cannot just stroll into a nuclear plant to see how things work.
After your smug and false assertion that you can, everything else you have to say, no matter how "insightful" is may seem to some, is suspect.
5 finger-knuckle units?
There's a pr0n joke in there, somewhere.
Collateral damage, by definition, is unintentional. The contradiction aside, why would the most technologically advanced (arguably, I suppose) part of the US military seek to cause more than the necessary amount of damage?
Oh sure... But, Will It Blend?!
I can dig this. I mean, the independent country of Kosovo just appeared in the middle of Croatia last week. A couple years ago Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina just popped into existence. Serbia and Croatia shortly before that. And where the hell did Yugoslavia go!? That's not Geography, it's more like quantum physics - if you so much as look at that part of the world, it changes.
But Hungary has been there for centuries.
Clearly there's no difference between Bulgaria and Romania. It's all just "Eastern Europe". :)
"Eastern Europe" is not some nebulous region with fuzzy borders on a map, with "Here there be coders" written in illuminated calligraphy in the very middle of a vast, blank area.
This guy's email address is in Hungary which means he's probably Hungarian. That's a country directly between Austria and Bulgaria, south of Poland and north of Greece (indirectly) which, depending on where you draw the Eastern boundary of Europe, may or may not be in "Eastern" Europe. It lies almost precisely between the western border of France and the Eastern border of Ukraine, the northern border of Poland and the southern border of Greece (excluding Cyprus), making this guy more of a Central European.
French coders are French, German coders are German. What makes a Hungarian coder "Eastern European"?
Don't try to confuse me with details, correct or otherwise. :)
The initial comparison was very high level. Traffic enters in the back and leaves from the front. If there is a slowdown in egress while the entry rate stays the same, there is a jam. If there is already a jam, changing lanes adds to the overall delay and so adding lanes doesn't solve the problem unless the entry rate drops enough for the jam to clear due to cars leaving whatever data structure best represents the operations required to realistically model a congested highway.
Quite right, but the road as a whole is a queue as there are no cars entering or leaving at arbitrary locations. There are entrances and exits but these are irrelevant to cars not using them and the stretches in between the exits are linear. A list has considerably more flexibility to it as a structure and doesn't apply to the behavior of a traffic jam.
Yes, traffic IS a queue. It's got multiple lanes but it's a linear road. If it helps you, think of it as a set of parallel queues, but the same ideas apply, especially if there is a bottleneck such as a merge, an accident (rubbernecking) or an exit where people need to change lanes.
Someone who is in the left lane and needs to get over to a slower, right lane, and can't get in, will be forced to slow down in the left lane, causing that lane to slow down as much as the right lane - until he finally gets in. Since at rush hour, more than one person needs to merge and change lanes, the situation persists rather than resolving.
Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam on a multi-lane highway? I'm sure you have, and I'm sure that "you can pass people at will" now sounds as absurd to you as it does to me. When the road is clear or moving smoothly, yes, passing is easy and keeps the flow of traffic going. But when you have a jam, which is the very point of the article, passing isn't an option and so the jam amplifies - especially when people start changing lanes in an attempt to pass, only to exacerbate the jam.
Coming back to the comparison of traffic to a queue, think of it like as a task queue for IO access. If each task does it's 1 millisecond IO operation and moves on, things go swimmingly. If, however, some task "puts on the brakes" by hogging the IO, other tasks pile up behind it.
Now, think of several IO queues all processing the same sort of tasks. If one gets jammed up, tasks can "change lanes" and go into another of the queues - but, again, if any task hogs the IO, the rest of THAT queue gets blocked.
SO... Adding queues (lanes) doesn't solve the problem when you have a likelihood of many IO hogging tasks. If, however, you slow down the rate at which tasks are entering the queue, tasks hogging the IO can complete without causing the queue to fill. If you have a dynamically sized queue, one that grows in size to accommodate input, you can think of the stuffed queue growing in size as being effectively the same as the length of the jammed roadway.
This is BASIC OS design, and frankly, I'm shocked that you're unable to draw the parallel between a roadway and a queue.
Using the shoulders is, in effect, adding lanes. If you've ever driven on a 3, 5 or even 8 lane highway, you'll agree that more lanes can just as easily jam up as fewer.
The solution isn't to add bandwidth but to adjust thruput. Jams happen because cars are coming to the back of the queue faster than they are leaving the front of the queue. If incoming traffic were to slow down well before getting to the jam, the leaving rate would allow the jam to dissipate more effectively.
For this very reason, you will often see tractor trailers get along-side each other and drive slowly before getting to the jammed area. They create a rolling barrier that allows traffic to keep moving at a slower but steady pace instead of in frustrating and fuel-wasting stops and starts. Steady inertia is better.
Here is a very involved article, from 1998, that explains this "traffic wave" phenomenon. The "study" behind it was done by one guy, not by some bunch of "researchers". All they did was to conduct their experiments in a more controlled environment.
As for this being "news", that's BS. Just watch how truckers change their driving pattern when congestion starts to build up. This has been common-sense knowledge for most sensible drivers for decades. Only now there's a peer-reviewed paper about it.
I already make my own combustible gas while I drive. I just need a motor that will work with it.
The fact that the missile used shot down a satellite does not mean that the purpose here was to see if we could shoot down a satellite. Look here...
The Chinese took out one of their telecomm birds last year. It was 500 miles up and in steady orbit. That was a sat-kill test.
The US spy satellite was a) 150 miles up, b) in unstable orbit and c) a spy sat.
Destroying the super-secret spy technology on the satellite was a bonus.
The shoot down was a test of whether US anti-ICBM systems worked as intended. THIS was the whole point. We've done contrived tests of the missile defense technology before, but here was an opportunity to shoot down a real, faster moving, unpredictably moving target.
Shooting down satellites in stable orbit isn't hard. The challenge is getting a missile up there, and the US has this technology locked. Shooting down a very fast moving object that is coming at you in a more or less unpredictable way is tough. The success of this test makes China and Russia nervous not about their satellites but about their ability to lob missiles.
As for all-our space-war, the challenge would be to be selective. The EMP from a small number of well placed nukes would fry the electronics of nearly every communication and weather satellite in space, not to mention taking the GPS system out of commission. Only a low-tech rogue nation with nuclear weapons, like N. Korea or Iran would in any way benefit from such tactics.
No, the BSOD problem has NOT been fixed.
It's a bit better than it was in Win95 and Win98, but still there.
It isn't a war, it's self-defense.
Ok, go ahead and mod me to hell for being a troll. Just do it already.
The judge's order "should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don't know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It's a mystery," said Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive.'"
It boggles the mind that the White House would not store a duplicate backup at an off-site location to prevent a disaster from taking out all their backups. It is the sane and reasonable thing to do. They do with with their top executives, shuffling them to "undisclosed locations" whenever anyone in the Middle East so much as sneezes.
The financial and many other high-security institutions are required to store all their backups - documents, email and even IM logs - off-site. This the the bread and butter of companies like Iron Mountain. How the White House does not have this as basic security policy is absolutely boggling. It seems almost a deliberate "oversight".
So doctors will now be able to see in 3D that the arterial blockage that killed the patient is the little probe they sent in to find a suspected arterial blockage?
Cool tech and all, but how do they control where it goes?