According to TFA, he didn't accomplish the hack via WiFi. The inflight entertainment screens have a wired connection, and he connected to them by plugging an ethernet cable into that system (supposedly accessible if you take the right cover off the right box under the seat).
I wouldn't have thought that this system is connected to vital systems, but TFA notes that the seat-back satellite phones are connected to this same system, which seems reasonable.
So, maybe it makes sense that everything is connected for historical reasons. When those phones were added, it didn't make sense to isolate them from the rest of the plane's systems -- because they were just phones; what harm could they do? So, maybe the phones just piggybacked off the existing system. When the inflight entertainment stuff was added, maybe they just piggybacked on the phone system, which was itself piggybacking on the important systems. Clearly, if things were designed from scratch, that wouldn't have happened. But I'm sure many/. users are aware what happens when networks evolve more, uh, organically -- especially in penny-pinching corporations.
According to TFA, he didn't accomplish the hack via WiFi. The inflight entertainment screens have a wired connection, and he connected to them by plugging an ethernet cable into that system (supposedly accessible if you take the right cover off the right box under the seat).
I wouldn't have thought that this system is connected to vital systems, but TFA notes that the seat-back satellite phones are connected to this same system, which seems reasonable.
So, maybe it makes sense that everything is connected for historical reasons. When those phones were added, it didn't make sense to isolate them from the rest of the plane's systems -- because they were just phones; what harm could they do? So, maybe the phones just piggybacked off the existing system. When the inflight entertainment stuff was added, maybe they just piggybacked on the phone system, which was itself piggybacking on the important systems. Clearly, if things were designed from scratch, that wouldn't have happened. But I'm sure many/. users are aware what happens when networks evolve more, uh, organically -- especially in penny-pinching corporations.
You're right: I didn't phrase my first statement well. Change it to "reasonable people _harmlessly_ going about their business". Lead paint is quite dangerous. Putting a table in the back of a pickup truck is not.
That said, I don't think that lead paint is a good way to make your case. Lead paint has been banned in the US since 1978 (with a few legally-defined exceptions), and my understanding is that the law has been uniformly enforced. Are you implying that people still buy lead paint and are thereby violating the law? If so, could you provide details?
I'm pretty darn certain this isn't what they're going after
It doesn't matter who they're going after. If this law is regularly violated by reasonable people just going about their business, then it's a bad law. Full stop.
Now, if they rewrite this law in such a way that there is a clear distinction between you paying for your buddy's gas and you paying for a for-hire service, then fine: enforce away. Until then, they should enforce this law for everyone or no one.
Aside: I think you should be able to challenge laws that are selectively enforced or not enforced at all. If the law isn't enforced, it might as well not be there. If the law is enforced selectively, then it can be used for discrimination or coercion (e.g. racial bias in Ferguson, MO traffic stops). Uniform enforcement of reasonable laws is a hallmark of a free society.
I think that the number of humans will naturally decline. The birth rate in the US has been below the replacement rate since the '70s (expect for a year or two right before the '08 financial crisis). The same is true in every industrialized country, and there's no sign of that changing. The economic benefit of having kids is simply much lower in modern economies.
It'll be interesting to see what increasing automation does to population levels. I have the feeling that a lot of jobs will go poof due to automation, and that will further reduce population levels. If so, it won't be fun: there is a ~20 year lag between when the birth rate declines and when the labor force entrance rate declines...
It's not like NASA's manned space flight program does much better
1) We've been putting humans into low earth orbit for decades. There's not much "expansion of human knowledge" here. Well, they did study ants in space on the ISS recently... 2) ISS is old tech; there's no "improvement" to speak of. Well, they did put a new espresso machine up there recently, right? 3) Unless "development" means "making more of the same thing we already know how to make", then ISS fails again. 4) Maybe the ISS does this, but the main conclusion of the "long-range study" is that, yes, we can keep an inhabited space station in low earth orbit while spending billions of dollars! 5) The ISS does this, but it could also be done by other means at a much lower cost. 6) Nope 7) The ISS is great for this; it's the only way the US still interacts with Russia! 8) "The most effective utilization" Ha!
If you only want to focus on missions that _effectively_ and _efficiently_ fulfill NASA's charter, then a lot of stuff has to go. Since the budget for the ISS is ~$3 billion, I'd focus on that before the climate research -- which is only 1/10th the cost and does a lot more to expand human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere. Even if climate research doesn't fit with NASA's charter (debatable), then its work should be moved to another agency -- not axed.
then its earth science division should be moved to NOAA (or whatever is appropriate). I'd be fine with that. However that's not in the plan. Yes, maybe NASA wasn't the right place to study climate science (debatable), but it needs to be done somewhere; simply cutting it is not acceptable.
Moreover, this is hardly the first time a government agency has had mission creep or that multiple government agencies have overlapped. Mission creep/overlap to the tune of $300 million is absolutely nothing; that's not even the cost of three F-35 fighters. (Aside: dollars are the wrong units to measure government spending; government spending should be measured in F-35 fighters. That puts things in perspective -- especially when you realize we're buying ~2,400 F-35s.)
This is simply an attempted at killing government research into climate science -- not an attempted at reorganization.
I almost did a double-take with this story; a few months ago I read about computers having solved heads-up _limit_ Texas hold’em: http://arstechnica.com/science...
Well, it looks like the computer can win when there is a limit, but humans can still win when there is no limit.
I guess that's not too surprising: the limit really cuts down the number of choices, making a brute-force calculations more practical, and brute-force calculations are what computers do best. Without the restrictions of a limit, the AI needs to be a lot more clever. I wonder how long it'll be until computers win at this.
How exactly is a $125 k kickstarter supposed to help them get into space? They need millions of $$$ in funding -- which they call "Phase 2 (Funding)" on their kickstarter page. If they have a real shot at the funding they need, then a kickstarter is unnecessary. If they don't have a shot at the funding they need, then a kickstarter is worthless. I hate to be a hater, but I think it's the latter. The business plan sounds like:
Let me know when Toyota starts shipping hybrid vehicles with batteries that actually retain their ability to recharge to a usable capacity for 10+ years.
They've been shipping those batteries... since 2001. See this 10 year checkup from Consumer Reports:
Moreover, Toyota made it so that you can replace individual battery cells, instead of only being able to replace everything at once. My GF's Prius needed a few cells replaced, and the price was quite reasonable. ($250? I forget the exact number.)
At the end of the war, Goebbels and his wife killed his six (young) children and then he and his wife committed suicide. His estate should have died with him, his wife, children, and the nazi party.
It seems that a number of commenters are blowing their fuses about the screenshot in TFA. The screenshot is of the media center _not_ the desktop. I agree that the media center looks ugly, but IMHO, the actual desktop (i.e. KDE Plasma) looks nice. Look at screenshots of KDE Plasma 5.3 before passing judgement. (No, I won't link to them; use google.)
Full disclosure: I haven't RTFA, so I don't know who the author thinks will nuke who. However, the responses here mostly assume it would be a nuclear power nuking another nuclear power. As many have pointed out, having precision nukes would not cause that to happen; it's just too risky.
However, I think that precision nukes do increase the chance of a nuclear power nuking a _non_nuclear power. Granted, I don't think the risk is that high, but there are some possible scenarios where a precision nuke could be used -- maybe a major terrorist attack on the US (lead by a hawkish president) by a group based in some remote area. I'm sure other scenarios could give other nuclear powers an itchy trigger finger too. Again, I'm not saying it will happen, but it's more likely with precision nukes than without.
Although the lower receiver seems to be the most regulated part of a gun, it doesn't look that hard to machine (given that you have a mill -- CNC or manual). What parts (if any) are harder to make (at least with off-the-shelf equipment)? The barrel?
It's a bit more complicated that that. Even if an element is somewhat abundant but evenly distributed in the earth's crust, then it's difficult to mine. It's only practical to mine something if it's concentrated in some areas. E.g. gold is rare but you can find it in macroscopic flecks or clumps that are concentrated in certain areas. If gold were not concentrated like that but was instead uniformly distributed in the crust, there'd be no economical way to mine it.
That said, it looks like indium is concentrated somewhere: in zinc ores. So large scale production may be possible.
O RLY? Parting out a bike takes effort and most used bike parts are worth very little. Most stolen bikes are not fancy ones with valuable parts. There simply isn't enough demand for crappy parts to account for the number of crappy stolen bikes; most are sold intact. Having lived in a number of college towns (where there are lots of bikes to be stolen), I know several examples of stolen bikes reappearing intact with a new owner. That's even been the case for expensive bikes, which evidently were not sold for parts. I realize that's anecdotal evidence, but it's not inline with your absurd proposition that the entire point of bike thefts is to sell them for parts.
Yes, it's click-bate, but I agree that there's a rush to connect everything to the internet without thinking about the security consequences; we have enough trouble securing the things already connected to the internet -- never mind an huge influx of cheaply-made, dumb, internet-connected knob turners.
Others have suggested that this isn't new because all technology can and has be used to kill people, but IMHO, the potential for "democratizing" remote and unwanted destruction of physical things is unnerving. Previously, only well-funded governments could pull that shit...
IIRC, all people who need to take medication every day are also out. (I know that I'm out for medical reasons, even though I could handle those physical requirements.)
All the restrictions put together really limits the eligible pool.
it simply reserved such matters to the States, per the 10th Amendment.
I'm not sure how 'not forbidding' is different than 'allowing'. Regardless, slavery wasn't handled just through the 10th amendment. Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 specifies that slaves (i.e. people who are neither free nor indianans) count as 0.6 people for determining the number of congressional representatives from a state. Because of that, I'd say that the constitution condoned slavery.
I'm surprised the "dominating group" is that large. There aren't a ton of _senior_ scientist out there (i.e. professors or researchers with the funding for graduate students and postdocs), and those are the people whose names appear most frequently. A senior scientist will probably have been doing research for years, have lots of projects going on at once, have many students and postdocs, have a number of collaborators, and the senior scientist's name will go on every paper produced by that group (even if it's as a middle author -- which means next to nothing). New guys will often want to collaborate with the big names, which means the big names get on even more papers. If you're working on your own (i.e. you don't have the funding to hire others), then you won't publish as frequently.
What did you expect? Why is this an issue?
Sincerely,
A graduate student who has been working on a project for two years (and who should be working on a paper)
In all these years, nobody has rear-ended me in the dark. Even if the back lights of my car doesn't blink.
That's not a fair comparison; a car has large taillights, but most bike tail lights are low-power LEDs.
Are you mad when car turn signals blink? Even brake lights turn on and off in an attempted to get people's attention.
Maybe blinking bike lights don't help. Maybe they don't. You raise an interesting question, but your thoughts and anecdotal evidence don't contribute much. There are some actual studies out there, and they seem to indicate that blinking lights are more effective. (This has a number of references.)
Just a thought (unsubstantiated): a blinking light may help differentiate a bike from other vehicles, and that may be useful. if there's just one bike and one car on a street, then that isn't an issue. If a cyclists is on a road with many cars -- all with steady red lights -- then it may be hard to recognize that there's a cyclist in the mix. A blinking light could make it easier to tell that there's a non-car on the road.
Do you really think these idiot cyclists don't know what a red light means? They know; they just don't care. A license would not fix that. (Altho it may make the idiots easier to fine.)
It's not like drivers really know the laws relating to cyclists either, and there are some unexpected laws (example). That said, I'm fine with cyclists having to get a license -- as long as drivers have to pass a rigorous test of laws related to bikes...
and oh by the way photons can momentarily turn into other shit on their journeys yet somehow neutrinos can't.
I don't study particle physics, but from what I understand, for photons or neutrinos to "turn into other shit", they need to interact with something -- such as the particles they create, atomic nuclei, etc. Photons interact through electromagnetic forces -- which is the strongest force out there. In contrast, neutrinos interact via the weak force. As you might guess, that force is very weak. That's why neutrinos are so hard to detect.
Since photons interact with "other shit" via a much stronger force than neutrinos, photons are much, much, much more likely to "turn into other shit" than neutrinos are.
So, sorry internet troll, this isn't "cherry picking"; it's science. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
(Replied to wrong comment above; reposting here.)
According to TFA, he didn't accomplish the hack via WiFi. The inflight entertainment screens have a wired connection, and he connected to them by plugging an ethernet cable into that system (supposedly accessible if you take the right cover off the right box under the seat).
I wouldn't have thought that this system is connected to vital systems, but TFA notes that the seat-back satellite phones are connected to this same system, which seems reasonable.
So, maybe it makes sense that everything is connected for historical reasons. When those phones were added, it didn't make sense to isolate them from the rest of the plane's systems -- because they were just phones; what harm could they do? So, maybe the phones just piggybacked off the existing system. When the inflight entertainment stuff was added, maybe they just piggybacked on the phone system, which was itself piggybacking on the important systems. Clearly, if things were designed from scratch, that wouldn't have happened. But I'm sure many /. users are aware what happens when networks evolve more, uh, organically -- especially in penny-pinching corporations.
According to TFA, he didn't accomplish the hack via WiFi. The inflight entertainment screens have a wired connection, and he connected to them by plugging an ethernet cable into that system (supposedly accessible if you take the right cover off the right box under the seat).
I wouldn't have thought that this system is connected to vital systems, but TFA notes that the seat-back satellite phones are connected to this same system, which seems reasonable.
So, maybe it makes sense that everything is connected for historical reasons. When those phones were added, it didn't make sense to isolate them from the rest of the plane's systems -- because they were just phones; what harm could they do? So, maybe the phones just piggybacked off the existing system. When the inflight entertainment stuff was added, maybe they just piggybacked on the phone system, which was itself piggybacking on the important systems. Clearly, if things were designed from scratch, that wouldn't have happened. But I'm sure many /. users are aware what happens when networks evolve more, uh, organically -- especially in penny-pinching corporations.
You're right: I didn't phrase my first statement well. Change it to "reasonable people _harmlessly_ going about their business". Lead paint is quite dangerous. Putting a table in the back of a pickup truck is not.
That said, I don't think that lead paint is a good way to make your case. Lead paint has been banned in the US since 1978 (with a few legally-defined exceptions), and my understanding is that the law has been uniformly enforced. Are you implying that people still buy lead paint and are thereby violating the law? If so, could you provide details?
I'm pretty darn certain this isn't what they're going after
It doesn't matter who they're going after. If this law is regularly violated by reasonable people just going about their business, then it's a bad law. Full stop.
Now, if they rewrite this law in such a way that there is a clear distinction between you paying for your buddy's gas and you paying for a for-hire service, then fine: enforce away. Until then, they should enforce this law for everyone or no one.
Aside: I think you should be able to challenge laws that are selectively enforced or not enforced at all. If the law isn't enforced, it might as well not be there. If the law is enforced selectively, then it can be used for discrimination or coercion (e.g. racial bias in Ferguson, MO traffic stops). Uniform enforcement of reasonable laws is a hallmark of a free society.
I think that the number of humans will naturally decline. The birth rate in the US has been below the replacement rate since the '70s (expect for a year or two right before the '08 financial crisis). The same is true in every industrialized country, and there's no sign of that changing. The economic benefit of having kids is simply much lower in modern economies.
It'll be interesting to see what increasing automation does to population levels. I have the feeling that a lot of jobs will go poof due to automation, and that will further reduce population levels. If so, it won't be fun: there is a ~20 year lag between when the birth rate declines and when the labor force entrance rate declines...
It's not like NASA's manned space flight program does much better
1) We've been putting humans into low earth orbit for decades. There's not much "expansion of human knowledge" here. Well, they did study ants in space on the ISS recently...
2) ISS is old tech; there's no "improvement" to speak of. Well, they did put a new espresso machine up there recently, right?
3) Unless "development" means "making more of the same thing we already know how to make", then ISS fails again.
4) Maybe the ISS does this, but the main conclusion of the "long-range study" is that, yes, we can keep an inhabited space station in low earth orbit while spending billions of dollars!
5) The ISS does this, but it could also be done by other means at a much lower cost.
6) Nope
7) The ISS is great for this; it's the only way the US still interacts with Russia!
8) "The most effective utilization" Ha!
If you only want to focus on missions that _effectively_ and _efficiently_ fulfill NASA's charter, then a lot of stuff has to go. Since the budget for the ISS is ~$3 billion, I'd focus on that before the climate research -- which is only 1/10th the cost and does a lot more to expand human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere. Even if climate research doesn't fit with NASA's charter (debatable), then its work should be moved to another agency -- not axed.
then its earth science division should be moved to NOAA (or whatever is appropriate). I'd be fine with that. However that's not in the plan. Yes, maybe NASA wasn't the right place to study climate science (debatable), but it needs to be done somewhere; simply cutting it is not acceptable.
Moreover, this is hardly the first time a government agency has had mission creep or that multiple government agencies have overlapped. Mission creep/overlap to the tune of $300 million is absolutely nothing; that's not even the cost of three F-35 fighters. (Aside: dollars are the wrong units to measure government spending; government spending should be measured in F-35 fighters. That puts things in perspective -- especially when you realize we're buying ~2,400 F-35s.)
This is simply an attempted at killing government research into climate science -- not an attempted at reorganization.
I almost did a double-take with this story; a few months ago I read about computers having solved heads-up _limit_ Texas hold’em: http://arstechnica.com/science...
Well, it looks like the computer can win when there is a limit, but humans can still win when there is no limit.
I guess that's not too surprising: the limit really cuts down the number of choices, making a brute-force calculations more practical, and brute-force calculations are what computers do best. Without the restrictions of a limit, the AI needs to be a lot more clever. I wonder how long it'll be until computers win at this.
How exactly is a $125 k kickstarter supposed to help them get into space? They need millions of $$$ in funding -- which they call "Phase 2 (Funding)" on their kickstarter page. If they have a real shot at the funding they need, then a kickstarter is unnecessary. If they don't have a shot at the funding they need, then a kickstarter is worthless. I hate to be a hater, but I think it's the latter. The business plan sounds like:
1) $125 k Kickstarter
2) ???
3) Space Profit!
I wish them luck...
Let me know when Toyota starts shipping hybrid vehicles with batteries that actually retain their ability to recharge to a usable capacity for 10+ years.
They've been shipping those batteries... since 2001. See this 10 year checkup from Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org...
Moreover, Toyota made it so that you can replace individual battery cells, instead of only being able to replace everything at once. My GF's Prius needed a few cells replaced, and the price was quite reasonable. ($250? I forget the exact number.)
At the end of the war, Goebbels and his wife killed his six (young) children and then he and his wife committed suicide. His estate should have died with him, his wife, children, and the nazi party.
It seems that a number of commenters are blowing their fuses about the screenshot in TFA. The screenshot is of the media center _not_ the desktop. I agree that the media center looks ugly, but IMHO, the actual desktop (i.e. KDE Plasma) looks nice. Look at screenshots of KDE Plasma 5.3 before passing judgement. (No, I won't link to them; use google.)
Full disclosure: I haven't RTFA, so I don't know who the author thinks will nuke who. However, the responses here mostly assume it would be a nuclear power nuking another nuclear power. As many have pointed out, having precision nukes would not cause that to happen; it's just too risky.
However, I think that precision nukes do increase the chance of a nuclear power nuking a _non_nuclear power. Granted, I don't think the risk is that high, but there are some possible scenarios where a precision nuke could be used -- maybe a major terrorist attack on the US (lead by a hawkish president) by a group based in some remote area. I'm sure other scenarios could give other nuclear powers an itchy trigger finger too. Again, I'm not saying it will happen, but it's more likely with precision nukes than without.
Although the lower receiver seems to be the most regulated part of a gun, it doesn't look that hard to machine (given that you have a mill -- CNC or manual). What parts (if any) are harder to make (at least with off-the-shelf equipment)? The barrel?
It's a bit more complicated that that. Even if an element is somewhat abundant but evenly distributed in the earth's crust, then it's difficult to mine. It's only practical to mine something if it's concentrated in some areas. E.g. gold is rare but you can find it in macroscopic flecks or clumps that are concentrated in certain areas. If gold were not concentrated like that but was instead uniformly distributed in the crust, there'd be no economical way to mine it.
That said, it looks like indium is concentrated somewhere: in zinc ores. So large scale production may be possible.
They're stolen for PARTS.
O RLY? Parting out a bike takes effort and most used bike parts are worth very little. Most stolen bikes are not fancy ones with valuable parts. There simply isn't enough demand for crappy parts to account for the number of crappy stolen bikes; most are sold intact. Having lived in a number of college towns (where there are lots of bikes to be stolen), I know several examples of stolen bikes reappearing intact with a new owner. That's even been the case for expensive bikes, which evidently were not sold for parts. I realize that's anecdotal evidence, but it's not inline with your absurd proposition that the entire point of bike thefts is to sell them for parts.
Not even a politician could have given more non-answers.
Uhhh, that same text basically gives them the right to deny any request you have to amend anything. In particular:
"A covered entity may deny an individual's request for amendment, if it determines that the protected health information... is accurate and complete."
Translation, if they say the record is good, then you have no right to amend it. Guess what they're going to say if you request to amend your record?
Yes, it's click-bate, but I agree that there's a rush to connect everything to the internet without thinking about the security consequences; we have enough trouble securing the things already connected to the internet -- never mind an huge influx of cheaply-made, dumb, internet-connected knob turners.
Others have suggested that this isn't new because all technology can and has be used to kill people, but IMHO, the potential for "democratizing" remote and unwanted destruction of physical things is unnerving. Previously, only well-funded governments could pull that shit...
From what I've read, that number is right, but it's because of additional restrictions. For example, there are restrictions on visible tattoos:
http://insider.foxnews.com/201...
IIRC, all people who need to take medication every day are also out. (I know that I'm out for medical reasons, even though I could handle those physical requirements.)
All the restrictions put together really limits the eligible pool.
it simply reserved such matters to the States, per the 10th Amendment.
I'm not sure how 'not forbidding' is different than 'allowing'. Regardless, slavery wasn't handled just through the 10th amendment. Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 specifies that slaves (i.e. people who are neither free nor indianans) count as 0.6 people for determining the number of congressional representatives from a state. Because of that, I'd say that the constitution condoned slavery.
I'm surprised the "dominating group" is that large. There aren't a ton of _senior_ scientist out there (i.e. professors or researchers with the funding for graduate students and postdocs), and those are the people whose names appear most frequently. A senior scientist will probably have been doing research for years, have lots of projects going on at once, have many students and postdocs, have a number of collaborators, and the senior scientist's name will go on every paper produced by that group (even if it's as a middle author -- which means next to nothing). New guys will often want to collaborate with the big names, which means the big names get on even more papers. If you're working on your own (i.e. you don't have the funding to hire others), then you won't publish as frequently.
What did you expect? Why is this an issue?
Sincerely,
A graduate student who has been working on a project for two years (and who should be working on a paper)
In all these years, nobody has rear-ended me in the dark. Even if the back lights of my car doesn't blink.
That's not a fair comparison; a car has large taillights, but most bike tail lights are low-power LEDs.
Are you mad when car turn signals blink? Even brake lights turn on and off in an attempted to get people's attention.
Maybe blinking bike lights don't help. Maybe they don't. You raise an interesting question, but your thoughts and anecdotal evidence don't contribute much. There are some actual studies out there, and they seem to indicate that blinking lights are more effective. (This has a number of references.)
Just a thought (unsubstantiated): a blinking light may help differentiate a bike from other vehicles, and that may be useful. if there's just one bike and one car on a street, then that isn't an issue. If a cyclists is on a road with many cars -- all with steady red lights -- then it may be hard to recognize that there's a cyclist in the mix. A blinking light could make it easier to tell that there's a non-car on the road.
Do you really think these idiot cyclists don't know what a red light means? They know; they just don't care. A license would not fix that. (Altho it may make the idiots easier to fine.)
It's not like drivers really know the laws relating to cyclists either, and there are some unexpected laws (example). That said, I'm fine with cyclists having to get a license -- as long as drivers have to pass a rigorous test of laws related to bikes...
and oh by the way photons can momentarily turn into other shit on their journeys yet somehow neutrinos can't.
I don't study particle physics, but from what I understand, for photons or neutrinos to "turn into other shit", they need to interact with something -- such as the particles they create, atomic nuclei, etc. Photons interact through electromagnetic forces -- which is the strongest force out there. In contrast, neutrinos interact via the weak force. As you might guess, that force is very weak. That's why neutrinos are so hard to detect.
Since photons interact with "other shit" via a much stronger force than neutrinos, photons are much, much, much more likely to "turn into other shit" than neutrinos are.
So, sorry internet troll, this isn't "cherry picking"; it's science. Deal with it.