Put the laser satellite in an appropriate orbit, and the occasional course correction could be folded into the routine maintenance of the flywheel(s). Those would need to be spun down every once in a while for inspection anyway.
With a station that exists to shoot at asteroids, wouldn't you expect to have to constantly change where the laser is pointing though? At some point, that portion of the craft is going to cross the rotation plane, unless you have TWO lasers (one on each side) and even then what happens if the target happens to be in the 'dead zone' for a significant portion of time?
On flywheels storing huge amounts of energy: what about when you need to boost/adjust the orbit? The need to be able to rotate the craft for such maneuvers would necessitate a low-friction gimbal between the flywheels (assuming you have two counter-rotating ones) and the spacecraft. The possible orientations allowed for such corrections is also limited by the safety requirements of keeping important stuff out of the plane of rotation. Any drift in that plane of rotation, or imbalance between the two flywheels, could be catastrophic.
A cool idea to be sure, but it seems to me that it is quite a bit more complicated than batteries, especially when it comes to safety.
Assuming the root ssh is blocked, how brute force can work without knowing the login name to apply the password to?
Simple: brute force the username. The username is just another part of the password to guess, except it likely contains much less entropy than your actual password.
There appears to be a reference to his driving at 81mph. Surely that's above the speed limit, so can we look forward to a cop knocking on his door for a fine as well?
Spoken like someone who has never driven in Connecticut.
Isn't it funny how "require more complex passwords!" has risen to the level of knee-jerk groupthink mantra, and typically anyone questioning it is shouted down as ignorant?
When applying a hash+salt to a password to store in a database, you run it a bunch of times to take up an attacker's cpu time. By picking the number of repeated hashes, processing a password->hash attempt can be made to take any amount of cpu power. When designing a system, one attempts to choose a value such that, with current systems, it takes a reasonable amount of time to process a login but also too long for an attacker to brute force.
TFA talks a lot about the 'number of possible combinations', but in reality that is not strictly relevant.
What matters here is only how much more cpu power is available to attackers than to the site owner. This ratio is what determines the number of 'combinations' required to defend against attack by someone who steals the database. So, if attackers start using hardware to run hash algorithms, sites can as well, and the same balance would be maintained.
Biometric door locks? YES
Large-scale projected holograms? NO
HUD glasses for driving? NO
Weather control? NO
Dehydrated pizza? NO
Technological police state with instant conviction for crimes? WORKING ON IT
The issue with "undocumented" labor taking jobs is that minimum wage laws are selectively enforced, not that they are willing to accept a lower wage. In most cases, if a citizen attempts to get a job at an illegal rate they will be rejected, but enforcement for the most part looks the other way in the case of "undocumented" workers. If minimum wage laws were repealed, there would be plenty of citizens lining up to take these jobs at the lower rate.
Bytecode interpreters, as opposed to scripting languages, have a very real advantage that is unrelated to speed: you can use any language. If the target is the.net CLR, you can use C#, VB.NET, C++, F#...plus about a hundred others. Going with the.NET platform allows the language to be flexible, whereas with javascript you're stuck with a hacked language with no internal consistency, ridiculously stupid semantics in some cases, and a loosely typed straitjacket that causes problems in any larger application. Of course if we're using.NET and you LIKE the javascript language, a compiler could easily be developed that compiles it to.NET IL. The opposite is not true.
Any chance of terrestrial contamination? Seems possible that over the last 4 years in storage, at some point the moon rocks in question could have been exposed to moisture from the Earth.
Worse, if you RTFA you will see discussion of the fact that moon rock samples were twice given to each of the 50 states and to each existing country at the time.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that with all those countries, all of them legally prohibited the transfer of state gifts to private individuals. I'm sure several of those could be privately held, completely legally.
Of course, it would still be super rare and the owner would likely retain the gift set itself, which would pretty easily differentiate the sample from those stolen from NASA.
Comcast is likely your only choice because the government has already interfered in the matter to make it the case. But even if it is truly so that only Comcast wishes to provide service to the area, it is still better than the government taxing you $100 a month and providing you crappy internet access whether you want it or not.
And, if the current single provider situation is not due to government interference, it is likely that sometime in the future you could get a better option. Government services tend to be slow to change and wasteful.
Sure, if you're stealing $0.10 each from 10 million different people, the people are unlikely to notice. But if you steal $0.10 ten million times from the same person they will certainly notice.
Theft would seem to be a problem for the Bitcoin system. Under current law, if I find something someone else has and can prove that it was stolen from me, I can force its return regardless of how the current 'owner' got it.
Since Bitcoins are by nature traceable back through every transaction, the retrieval of stolen coins can be taken to the extreme. If I somehow see a coin which was stolen from me, I could retrieve it from the current 'owner' years later. This 'owner' could have obtained the coin through a completely legit transaction, and yet now they have lost their coin through a process they could not avoid. This sort of risk is not present with cash, since after a few transactions it becomes difficult to trace back to the theft.
That is, Bitcoin transactions are actually not final because their return can be compelled by applicable law. Large-scale theft in the manner you describe would likely destroy the currency itself.
Pilots still use the bathroom, right? And if the flight is super long maybe they grab a meal from the galley?
Reinforced cockpit doors only work if the door is never opened. If it is opened and bad guys use that opportunity to attack, the door now means that the superior numbers of the passengers attempting to resist the attack are worthless. There is nothing they can do now to retake the plane or stop it from being used as the bad guys wish. In short, reinforced doors not only ignore but actually work against the effectiveness of the most proved defense against aircraft terrorism: regular passengers.
Add a separate head in the secure cockpit area and require that the secure door never be opened, ever, and we'd be talking real security. Until then it's just a feel-good measure that actually has a negative effect.
The difference is, with a corporation you can choose individually not to participate. If something is mandated by the government because 51% of the people vote for it, individuals who disagree cannot merely opt out.
Andrew Johnson failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1868. Of course, he was a Democrat who had run as Vice President with Lincoln in 1864 under a so-called 'union' ticket, and only became President due to Lincoln's assassination. And, he lost the nomination because of extreme hatred of his response to reconstruction after the civil war; people were so angry that they tried to impeach him over it. It would be easy to claim this is a special case.
In many large cities, tap water tastes like you are drinking out of a sewer. NYC is probably the most famous example, but it is also true elsewhere.
Of course, a Brita-style filter is another option and much cheaper than bottled water, but it may require multiple passes through the filter to remove all the sewer taste.
Where I live, the tap water alternates between tasting like a sewer and tasting like drinking from a swimming pool (they periodically dump in huge amounts of chlorine). During a high-chlorine period it also requires that the water be left to stand for a time to allow the chlorine to dissipate before the tap water is drinkable.
So in these places, getting water with a drinkable taste using filters is quite inconvenient, and I understand why people might buy bottled water. Then there are other places, like for instance the public water system in Burlington, VT, where the tap water tastes better than any spring water I've ever had (it is filtered lake water). It just varies.
If you change it brutally, people will find holes and adapt their behaviour in order to pay less taxes while remaining in total legality.
This. In order for such an optimization to work, it must take into account potential changes in human behavior as a result of the changes in the law. Such shifts are large and will easily dwarf any small efficiency gains. The requirement to accurately predict human response given a nearly immeasurable number of variables makes this about as hard a problem as a Turing test. Good luck with that.
Free speech doesn't protect racist or sexist slurs.
Yes, it does. Free speech is a right to believe and express whatever beliefs you wish. That expression is only rightfully limited when it amounts to actions rather than just expression.
Once people in power can regulate what you're allowed to believe and what you're allowed to argue, it is an inevitable slippery slope to them using it to control their opponents. Luckily, in the US, the first amendment has provided a rather effective guard against this.
Sounds like oversight working as designed. A problem occurred, there was an investigation, and now a full inspection will occur to rectify any existing issues. This means that the safety review architecture is properly dealing with a potential problem before it can cause harm. Every system requires maintenance, and no maintenance is perfect. That's why review exists.
Importantly, the fact that the driver bears some of the responsibility does not absolve McDonalds from their share of the liability.
Only because this case happened in New Mexico, which is a comparative negligence state. In other jurisdictions (such as where I live), contributory negligence is considered a complete defense.
Put the laser satellite in an appropriate orbit, and the occasional course correction could be folded into the routine maintenance of the flywheel(s). Those would need to be spun down every once in a while for inspection anyway.
With a station that exists to shoot at asteroids, wouldn't you expect to have to constantly change where the laser is pointing though? At some point, that portion of the craft is going to cross the rotation plane, unless you have TWO lasers (one on each side) and even then what happens if the target happens to be in the 'dead zone' for a significant portion of time?
BTW, A quick search got me this page, so at least NASA thinks that lower energy flywheels are a great idea: http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov/general_info/flywheel.html
On flywheels storing huge amounts of energy: what about when you need to boost/adjust the orbit? The need to be able to rotate the craft for such maneuvers would necessitate a low-friction gimbal between the flywheels (assuming you have two counter-rotating ones) and the spacecraft. The possible orientations allowed for such corrections is also limited by the safety requirements of keeping important stuff out of the plane of rotation. Any drift in that plane of rotation, or imbalance between the two flywheels, could be catastrophic.
A cool idea to be sure, but it seems to me that it is quite a bit more complicated than batteries, especially when it comes to safety.
Assuming the root ssh is blocked, how brute force can work without knowing the login name to apply the password to?
Simple: brute force the username. The username is just another part of the password to guess, except it likely contains much less entropy than your actual password.
There appears to be a reference to his driving at 81mph. Surely that's above the speed limit, so can we look forward to a cop knocking on his door for a fine as well?
Spoken like someone who has never driven in Connecticut.
Isn't it funny how "require more complex passwords!" has risen to the level of knee-jerk groupthink mantra, and typically anyone questioning it is shouted down as ignorant?
Nothing has changed.
When applying a hash+salt to a password to store in a database, you run it a bunch of times to take up an attacker's cpu time. By picking the number of repeated hashes, processing a password->hash attempt can be made to take any amount of cpu power. When designing a system, one attempts to choose a value such that, with current systems, it takes a reasonable amount of time to process a login but also too long for an attacker to brute force.
TFA talks a lot about the 'number of possible combinations', but in reality that is not strictly relevant.
What matters here is only how much more cpu power is available to attackers than to the site owner. This ratio is what determines the number of 'combinations' required to defend against attack by someone who steals the database. So, if attackers start using hardware to run hash algorithms, sites can as well, and the same balance would be maintained.
Biometric door locks? YES
Large-scale projected holograms? NO
HUD glasses for driving? NO
Weather control? NO
Dehydrated pizza? NO
Technological police state with instant conviction for crimes? WORKING ON IT
The issue with "undocumented" labor taking jobs is that minimum wage laws are selectively enforced, not that they are willing to accept a lower wage. In most cases, if a citizen attempts to get a job at an illegal rate they will be rejected, but enforcement for the most part looks the other way in the case of "undocumented" workers. If minimum wage laws were repealed, there would be plenty of citizens lining up to take these jobs at the lower rate.
Bytecode interpreters, as opposed to scripting languages, have a very real advantage that is unrelated to speed: you can use any language. If the target is the .net CLR, you can use C#, VB.NET, C++, F#...plus about a hundred others. Going with the .NET platform allows the language to be flexible, whereas with javascript you're stuck with a hacked language with no internal consistency, ridiculously stupid semantics in some cases, and a loosely typed straitjacket that causes problems in any larger application. Of course if we're using .NET and you LIKE the javascript language, a compiler could easily be developed that compiles it to .NET IL. The opposite is not true.
40 years, that was.
Any chance of terrestrial contamination? Seems possible that over the last 4 years in storage, at some point the moon rocks in question could have been exposed to moisture from the Earth.
Historically in the US, the judge is the arbiter of questions of law. Questions of fact are for juries.
Worse, if you RTFA you will see discussion of the fact that moon rock samples were twice given to each of the 50 states and to each existing country at the time.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that with all those countries, all of them legally prohibited the transfer of state gifts to private individuals. I'm sure several of those could be privately held, completely legally.
Of course, it would still be super rare and the owner would likely retain the gift set itself, which would pretty easily differentiate the sample from those stolen from NASA.
Comcast is likely your only choice because the government has already interfered in the matter to make it the case. But even if it is truly so that only Comcast wishes to provide service to the area, it is still better than the government taxing you $100 a month and providing you crappy internet access whether you want it or not.
And, if the current single provider situation is not due to government interference, it is likely that sometime in the future you could get a better option. Government services tend to be slow to change and wasteful.
Sure, if you're stealing $0.10 each from 10 million different people, the people are unlikely to notice. But if you steal $0.10 ten million times from the same person they will certainly notice.
If it's a large sum from a single person I don't see how that is any different.
Theft would seem to be a problem for the Bitcoin system. Under current law, if I find something someone else has and can prove that it was stolen from me, I can force its return regardless of how the current 'owner' got it.
Since Bitcoins are by nature traceable back through every transaction, the retrieval of stolen coins can be taken to the extreme. If I somehow see a coin which was stolen from me, I could retrieve it from the current 'owner' years later. This 'owner' could have obtained the coin through a completely legit transaction, and yet now they have lost their coin through a process they could not avoid. This sort of risk is not present with cash, since after a few transactions it becomes difficult to trace back to the theft.
That is, Bitcoin transactions are actually not final because their return can be compelled by applicable law. Large-scale theft in the manner you describe would likely destroy the currency itself.
Pilots still use the bathroom, right? And if the flight is super long maybe they grab a meal from the galley?
Reinforced cockpit doors only work if the door is never opened. If it is opened and bad guys use that opportunity to attack, the door now means that the superior numbers of the passengers attempting to resist the attack are worthless. There is nothing they can do now to retake the plane or stop it from being used as the bad guys wish. In short, reinforced doors not only ignore but actually work against the effectiveness of the most proved defense against aircraft terrorism: regular passengers.
Add a separate head in the secure cockpit area and require that the secure door never be opened, ever, and we'd be talking real security. Until then it's just a feel-good measure that actually has a negative effect.
The difference is, with a corporation you can choose individually not to participate. If something is mandated by the government because 51% of the people vote for it, individuals who disagree cannot merely opt out.
Andrew Johnson failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1868. Of course, he was a Democrat who had run as Vice President with Lincoln in 1864 under a so-called 'union' ticket, and only became President due to Lincoln's assassination. And, he lost the nomination because of extreme hatred of his response to reconstruction after the civil war; people were so angry that they tried to impeach him over it. It would be easy to claim this is a special case.
In many large cities, tap water tastes like you are drinking out of a sewer. NYC is probably the most famous example, but it is also true elsewhere.
Of course, a Brita-style filter is another option and much cheaper than bottled water, but it may require multiple passes through the filter to remove all the sewer taste.
Where I live, the tap water alternates between tasting like a sewer and tasting like drinking from a swimming pool (they periodically dump in huge amounts of chlorine). During a high-chlorine period it also requires that the water be left to stand for a time to allow the chlorine to dissipate before the tap water is drinkable.
So in these places, getting water with a drinkable taste using filters is quite inconvenient, and I understand why people might buy bottled water. Then there are other places, like for instance the public water system in Burlington, VT, where the tap water tastes better than any spring water I've ever had (it is filtered lake water). It just varies.
If you change it brutally, people will find holes and adapt their behaviour in order to pay less taxes while remaining in total legality.
This. In order for such an optimization to work, it must take into account potential changes in human behavior as a result of the changes in the law. Such shifts are large and will easily dwarf any small efficiency gains. The requirement to accurately predict human response given a nearly immeasurable number of variables makes this about as hard a problem as a Turing test. Good luck with that.
Free speech doesn't protect racist or sexist slurs.
Yes, it does. Free speech is a right to believe and express whatever beliefs you wish. That expression is only rightfully limited when it amounts to actions rather than just expression.
Once people in power can regulate what you're allowed to believe and what you're allowed to argue, it is an inevitable slippery slope to them using it to control their opponents. Luckily, in the US, the first amendment has provided a rather effective guard against this.
Sounds like oversight working as designed. A problem occurred, there was an investigation, and now a full inspection will occur to rectify any existing issues. This means that the safety review architecture is properly dealing with a potential problem before it can cause harm. Every system requires maintenance, and no maintenance is perfect. That's why review exists.
Importantly, the fact that the driver bears some of the responsibility does not absolve McDonalds from their share of the liability.
Only because this case happened in New Mexico, which is a comparative negligence state. In other jurisdictions (such as where I live), contributory negligence is considered a complete defense.