Yeah, now it's bad, because the reactor containment that "couldn't crack" has cracked. It's still not Chernobyl, though. As in, the boiling-water reactor hasn't popped like a popcorn kernel like one poster professing nuclear engineering/control knowledge described it.
IMHO, a major thing that seems really stupid was the plants venting the radioactive hydrogen gas into the upper building instead of out into the air. The explosions clearly must have jeopardized the control over the process, since workers got hurt. From what I understand, the radioactive gas could have been vented without any ill effects. I suppose the reactor just isn't built to do that though.
What discussion do you mean? There's been lots of discussion here over the Fukushima incident. It's been dominated by the "pro-nuke" side, if you can call it that, but that's not surprising considering Slashdot's demographics.
I remember a plot point from the Shadowrun games being the GridGuide system, something like this but additionally using a "routing system" using transceivers placed in/by the road. I assume you could use a peer-to-peer system of some sort where the individual nodes sort out the shortest path for any given vehicle and then transmit that route to the vehicles, recalculating it every so often to make up for the changing conditions. People would probably accept a system with some measure of central control easier, especially if there where human operators monitoring the system from a birds-eye view.
It wouldn't do anything for the safety or control of the vehicle versus its immediate surroundings of course, but traffic routing of some sort would have to come into play if you wanted to, say, just hop into the car skunk drunk with an assault rifle and an ork and tell the car to take you to the local warzone-ghetto-clinic in order to put the ork's guts back into the ork.
That's the gist of my argument, really. I'm into computer security because I basically think it's fun to play splinter cell with computer systems. Nothing else.
Actually, we don't have trial by jury in Sweden, or in any of the other European "socialist democracies"; the legal systems . The only reason the system doesn't keel over from corruption is that most everyone is scared shitless of what would happen if it did. Including the bureaucrats. This seems to work.
I live in a European "Social Democracy", Sweden, and the "social democrat thing" is a bit more deeper than a mere structure of socialism - neither of the parties are capitalist in the way the US would term it, and I say this as a general supporter of the "capitalist" parties as the situation now stands. As for "rights", it's not a matter of putting others down, it's a matter of other people being able to afford healthcare and other things even if they are total and utter idiots. Because of compassion, plain and simple.
No, that is productive work in my (ill-informed) eyes. The implied Devilishness is bright young people being snatched up to manipulate Finance and The Market (through magic or whatever, realize that finance is as foreign to me as ancient Greek) to get ridiculous profit for "normal" work. Then the question becomes, does this occur?
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd. And don't talk about ability, unless I'm completely mistaken these people are not taking any more risks or putting in any more effort than any of the other MIT grads that continue to work as productive engineers.
Yeah. I'm thinking the main drive behind cracking/releasing is recognition and cred. You get to be all secret and stuff, part of an "inner circle". You're doing things that other people can't do, and are looking in awe at - your abilities are speculated about and discussed. But given that you're not actually creating anything or making real changes (just giving people free entertainment), it's probably going to wind up feeling pretty empty I'd imagine.
Or you have met ones, but they can't tell you that they are because they don't wan't to wind up in trouble for it. It's probably reasonable to assume that there's less crackers where there are enforced laws against computer crime though. Russia seems to have an open "hacker scene" like the one I've read about in the US in the 80ies, and that probably helps a lot.
This "divide" is probably the one I've been hearing about where some people just can't program. As in, they can "type in commands" as the parent described but they can't program in the abstract. This is probably the same people (again, heard about, never met one) who fail the FizzBuzz test, yet claim to have worked as programmers for a very long time - that would mean that these people must have hunkered through their career by copying code of the internet and altered it until it works.
Now, most people who become programmers without a degree probably either succeed or fail, and most in the above category probably just give up and try something else - but if you have a degree from a university that (in the eyes of the people doing the hiring) says that "you are a competent programmer", and you are the sort of person who aren't otherwise interested in programming, you might just expect to learn on the job. And you get a job, since you have a degree, but you never really learn to program, or learn just enough not to get fired.
But how many man-hours would that entail? Looking at Punkbuster and the various DRM schemes, it looks like the main blockage to the built-in-security-in-games suggestion is the pervasive outsourcing of security solutions to outside companies, and they obviously can't just waltz in and redesign the program. Either the programmers or an external consulting group of some sort would have to work/collaborate on it from the beginning. And management would probably only be able to see "cheaper faster clamp-on security vs. inherent expensive and slow security" without understanding the real tradeoffs. Or just not caring, because none of their competitors have it, and hey, people buy and play the game right?
I think you're sort of answering your own question. He's not good at what he does, and evidently can't work or think in a structured manner, so he's a bad hacker/cracker/programmer/what-have-you. Personally, even though I don't have a formal programming education I think that it's intuitively self-evident that any "competent programmer" can learn to break copy-protection/write exploits/etc, not because "it's easy" but because most security holes that can be exploited are perfectly evident if you actually understand the systems that incorporates them. You could think of hacking/cracking as a specialized subset of programming.
Buffer overflows and stack/heap smashing attacks are as obvious as brute-forcing passwords or SQL injections if you understand how the processor and OS executes code and manages memory. But of course learning those things requires structured, hard work.
Let's see, I live here in a town in the middle of a forest, inland, supplied by industrial rail (for the mine and forest industry), road, and a small passenger/freight airport. The town is on a hill, so there's no risk for flooding - and the ferro-magnetic mountains and rivers surrounding the area tend to absorb most of the lightning strikes. Heavy snowing might be a risk, but there's a large fleet of snow-clearing vehicles that can be brought out at any time. There are no mining activities that could pose a risk, and nothing that could explode or catch fire, not close to the inhabited areas in any case. The only spectacular accident that could befall me would be a rocket falling on my head from the local spaceport, but those are launched in the completely opposite direction so that seems unlikely. There's a certain lack of police manpower, but that doesn't pose a problem as long as you live inside the city and not in any of the surrounding villages. There's a modern fire station, and (for the moment anyway) emergency surgery and delivery capacity at the local hospital.
Recently, there's been problems with the central heating system pipes (there's a central waste burning facility that heats most of the houses in town) getting torn by the mountain shifting a bit due to mining activities, but they fix that in a day or so.
Having a weapon (gun or otherwise) at home for self-defense isn't legally or socially acceptable at all here, unless you are in the military/police, so that's not an issue. Violent crime is rare, mostly bar fights and such AFAIK. All in all, I think I'm pretty sure I'm well off on the safety front. But it'd sure be nice not to live halfway out in the middle of nowhere.
Slight confusion of past and present tense there, yes. Current news says that one reactor is filled, and some unclear information says that the other two Fukushima reactors are in the process of being filled as well; the local Swedish news seems to be a bit confused at the moment, though, so that may or may not be true.
There's some interesting information buried inside that article too: they keep spent fuel rods in a pool in a nearby building or somesuch, that (if uncooled) will also melt. I saw pictures of such a storage once; it looked as if the fuel was gripped by industrial robot cranes and pulled into a "submerged" underground pool through a tunnel.
If the description of the reactor containment in the link is accurate, no, the fuel is not "exposed" as such. It is sealed inside a massive containment vessel, that prevents contamination of the surrounding area. And in any case, the reactors are full of seawater now, that will not evaporate due to the residual heat. And the boric acid apparently stops the nuclear reaction in the same way the control rods do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, now it's bad, because the reactor containment that "couldn't crack" has cracked. It's still not Chernobyl, though. As in, the boiling-water reactor hasn't popped like a popcorn kernel like one poster professing nuclear engineering/control knowledge described it.
IMHO, a major thing that seems really stupid was the plants venting the radioactive hydrogen gas into the upper building instead of out into the air. The explosions clearly must have jeopardized the control over the process, since workers got hurt. From what I understand, the radioactive gas could have been vented without any ill effects. I suppose the reactor just isn't built to do that though.
What discussion do you mean? There's been lots of discussion here over the Fukushima incident. It's been dominated by the "pro-nuke" side, if you can call it that, but that's not surprising considering Slashdot's demographics.
I remember a plot point from the Shadowrun games being the GridGuide system, something like this but additionally using a "routing system" using transceivers placed in/by the road. I assume you could use a peer-to-peer system of some sort where the individual nodes sort out the shortest path for any given vehicle and then transmit that route to the vehicles, recalculating it every so often to make up for the changing conditions. People would probably accept a system with some measure of central control easier, especially if there where human operators monitoring the system from a birds-eye view.
It wouldn't do anything for the safety or control of the vehicle versus its immediate surroundings of course, but traffic routing of some sort would have to come into play if you wanted to, say, just hop into the car skunk drunk with an assault rifle and an ork and tell the car to take you to the local warzone-ghetto-clinic in order to put the ork's guts back into the ork.
That's the gist of my argument, really. I'm into computer security because I basically think it's fun to play splinter cell with computer systems. Nothing else.
Actually, we don't have trial by jury in Sweden, or in any of the other European "socialist democracies"; the legal systems . The only reason the system doesn't keel over from corruption is that most everyone is scared shitless of what would happen if it did. Including the bureaucrats. This seems to work.
I live in a European "Social Democracy", Sweden, and the "social democrat thing" is a bit more deeper than a mere structure of socialism - neither of the parties are capitalist in the way the US would term it, and I say this as a general supporter of the "capitalist" parties as the situation now stands. As for "rights", it's not a matter of putting others down, it's a matter of other people being able to afford healthcare and other things even if they are total and utter idiots. Because of compassion, plain and simple.
Does these "neuroses" perhaps involve adverse, hysterical reactions to garlic or sunlight?
I think the word you're looking for is "cunning."
So it's fine to live in hell to you, as long as you're on top and have clever workmates so you can feel all clever and young and powerful?
No, that is productive work in my (ill-informed) eyes. The implied Devilishness is bright young people being snatched up to manipulate Finance and The Market (through magic or whatever, realize that finance is as foreign to me as ancient Greek) to get ridiculous profit for "normal" work. Then the question becomes, does this occur?
Since thievery became a profession.
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd. And don't talk about ability, unless I'm completely mistaken these people are not taking any more risks or putting in any more effort than any of the other MIT grads that continue to work as productive engineers.
"And now for todays FOX News: Kikes on Steroids! These people treat our Global Economy like a Video Game!"
...No, no I don't really think it has the same panache and flair.
Yeah. I'm thinking the main drive behind cracking/releasing is recognition and cred. You get to be all secret and stuff, part of an "inner circle". You're doing things that other people can't do, and are looking in awe at - your abilities are speculated about and discussed. But given that you're not actually creating anything or making real changes (just giving people free entertainment), it's probably going to wind up feeling pretty empty I'd imagine.
Or you have met ones, but they can't tell you that they are because they don't wan't to wind up in trouble for it. It's probably reasonable to assume that there's less crackers where there are enforced laws against computer crime though. Russia seems to have an open "hacker scene" like the one I've read about in the US in the 80ies, and that probably helps a lot.
This "divide" is probably the one I've been hearing about where some people just can't program. As in, they can "type in commands" as the parent described but they can't program in the abstract. This is probably the same people (again, heard about, never met one) who fail the FizzBuzz test, yet claim to have worked as programmers for a very long time - that would mean that these people must have hunkered through their career by copying code of the internet and altered it until it works.
Now, most people who become programmers without a degree probably either succeed or fail, and most in the above category probably just give up and try something else - but if you have a degree from a university that (in the eyes of the people doing the hiring) says that "you are a competent programmer", and you are the sort of person who aren't otherwise interested in programming, you might just expect to learn on the job. And you get a job, since you have a degree, but you never really learn to program, or learn just enough not to get fired.
But how many man-hours would that entail? Looking at Punkbuster and the various DRM schemes, it looks like the main blockage to the built-in-security-in-games suggestion is the pervasive outsourcing of security solutions to outside companies, and they obviously can't just waltz in and redesign the program. Either the programmers or an external consulting group of some sort would have to work/collaborate on it from the beginning. And management would probably only be able to see "cheaper faster clamp-on security vs. inherent expensive and slow security" without understanding the real tradeoffs. Or just not caring, because none of their competitors have it, and hey, people buy and play the game right?
I think you're sort of answering your own question. He's not good at what he does, and evidently can't work or think in a structured manner, so he's a bad hacker/cracker/programmer/what-have-you. Personally, even though I don't have a formal programming education I think that it's intuitively self-evident that any "competent programmer" can learn to break copy-protection/write exploits/etc, not because "it's easy" but because most security holes that can be exploited are perfectly evident if you actually understand the systems that incorporates them. You could think of hacking/cracking as a specialized subset of programming.
Buffer overflows and stack/heap smashing attacks are as obvious as brute-forcing passwords or SQL injections if you understand how the processor and OS executes code and manages memory. But of course learning those things requires structured, hard work.
Let's see, I live here in a town in the middle of a forest, inland, supplied by industrial rail (for the mine and forest industry), road, and a small passenger/freight airport. The town is on a hill, so there's no risk for flooding - and the ferro-magnetic mountains and rivers surrounding the area tend to absorb most of the lightning strikes. Heavy snowing might be a risk, but there's a large fleet of snow-clearing vehicles that can be brought out at any time. There are no mining activities that could pose a risk, and nothing that could explode or catch fire, not close to the inhabited areas in any case. The only spectacular accident that could befall me would be a rocket falling on my head from the local spaceport, but those are launched in the completely opposite direction so that seems unlikely. There's a certain lack of police manpower, but that doesn't pose a problem as long as you live inside the city and not in any of the surrounding villages. There's a modern fire station, and (for the moment anyway) emergency surgery and delivery capacity at the local hospital.
Recently, there's been problems with the central heating system pipes (there's a central waste burning facility that heats most of the houses in town) getting torn by the mountain shifting a bit due to mining activities, but they fix that in a day or so.
Having a weapon (gun or otherwise) at home for self-defense isn't legally or socially acceptable at all here, unless you are in the military/police, so that's not an issue. Violent crime is rare, mostly bar fights and such AFAIK. All in all, I think I'm pretty sure I'm well off on the safety front. But it'd sure be nice not to live halfway out in the middle of nowhere.
Slight confusion of past and present tense there, yes. Current news says that one reactor is filled, and some unclear information says that the other two Fukushima reactors are in the process of being filled as well; the local Swedish news seems to be a bit confused at the moment, though, so that may or may not be true.
Ye-es. Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying, actually.
I saw that interview. He didn't give any reasons, but he did look and sound very worried.
There's some interesting information buried inside that article too: they keep spent fuel rods in a pool in a nearby building or somesuch, that (if uncooled) will also melt. I saw pictures of such a storage once; it looked as if the fuel was gripped by industrial robot cranes and pulled into a "submerged" underground pool through a tunnel.
If the description of the reactor containment in the link is accurate, no, the fuel is not "exposed" as such. It is sealed inside a massive containment vessel, that prevents contamination of the surrounding area. And in any case, the reactors are full of seawater now, that will not evaporate due to the residual heat. And the boric acid apparently stops the nuclear reaction in the same way the control rods do.