How about ones that are qualified to properly dispose of nuclear waste.
But that leaves the politicians completely out of the loop. How can you make sound, scientific technical decisions without the valuable input of politicians, both appointed and elected? I mean, isn't that sort of thing best left to experts in the art of talking out of both sides of their asses?
It does seem odd that they wouldn't keep working all the data they have to find more spammers, or why they couldn't have shut it down after it had "caught on" with the botnet operators (ten days.) I'm guessing the people behind the experiment had no idea how successful it would be and so arbitrarily chose 20 days. The people operating the honeypot probably weren't the same people who were running the experiment, and were just told "run this PC for 20 days and give us this data."
The reason they would let the spam go is because spammers (and their spammy clients) have tripwire addresses. As a honeypot operator, you have no way of knowing if joe@someplace.org is an ordinary spam victim, or actually an address used by the spammer to verify that the spam is indeed being sent.
You may be unaware of how deep the spam industry is these days. There are several levels: the Vi4gr4 vendors are just the ones you see. They pay the "spammers" to send out X thousand messages. The spammers contract with "botnet operators". These are the guys who operate the hijacked PCs (like the one in the article.) The botnet operators in turn pay the freeware, shareware and ActiveX drive-by people to package their trojan horses in with their software. There's a lot of money changing hands in this business.
I have no problem with Excel. It does exactly what I want it to do, and has for many years. About 10 years ago I developed a "quoting application" that did materials computations, profits, etc., and then with the click of a button would generate a printable version of the quote for the customer and would also fax it directly to him. Was some of it ugly? Sure. Was it tied to a weird fax interface, and completely non-portable? Yup. But it was possible then, and it still works today (except for the faxing part.)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
heh. modlove.
10% Troll 30% Overrated 20% Flamebait
Oh well, what's karma good for if not to get a bit of forgiveness for when you make a big, ugly mistake?
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Thanks for the clarification. I had always believed it was primarily a Java app (especially considering the strong backing by Sun.)
I wish I could retract my previous comment.
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Hmm. I've been running MS Office 2003 for over a year and have yet to experience a single crash with Word or Excel. I've had Outlook freeze up numerous times, but virtually all of those problems have their roots in our Exchange server (and the seriously mismanaged overload they've piled on it.)
How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
How much of this slowness is the application's fault vs. this being a giant Java app running in a JRE? AFAIK, MS Office 2003 is still a suite of (mostly) C++ applications, and isn't running in.NET yet.
I'm not saying that adding water is the right thing to do. I'm saying that the firefighter I spoke to was trained to use a class D extinguisher, but if that fails to put it out, the answer they have and use is lots and lots of water. Thousands and thousands of gallons, apparently.
My guess is that the magnesium car fire my friend mentioned where they emptied more than one pumper truck probably used their water as an oxidant and simply burned itself out as it ran out of fuel.
Apart from the "it's his blog" type of responses, just consider the results. As I type this, the front page says "844 of 1090 comments". How many front page 'news' items generate more than a few hundred comments, let alone over a thousand?
The point is, this isn't just a news site. It's a community. This demonstrates that people are more important to each other than the latest geeky tech gadget or inane software patent. Sure, there are other more personal blogs out there, but Rob is still the heart and soul of this one.
Well, duh! Of course you were trolled. (I just found the parent post in meta-mod, and spotted your very well-reasoned rebuttal.)
At least you were polite. Sometimes it's hard to forget that these people have been deluded all their life, lied to by preachers and parents alike, and have been taught that separating fact from myth is heresy. So it's not totally their fault they walk around spouting this nonsense. The unfortunate part comes when they pass this misinformation on to their offspring, in a viral meme fashion.
It's interesting to consider religions in this context. For them to flourish as they do, they must provide some benefit to the "hosts" or else they would have evolved out of existence (quakers, Amish, and other fringe cults appear to be showing these sorts of losses already.) Historically, religious tenets (such as "don't eat meat from cloven-hoofed animals") offered real-world tangible benefits (avoidance of trychinosis) so it's easier to see how they would have survived back then. But why now? Why do they continue to thrive?
Actually, firefighters use water to extinguish magnesium. 'Copious amounts of water.' Read my previous comment about a conversation I had with a firefighter tonight where I asked him "so how do you put out a magnesium fire?"
Well, I talked to a veteran firefighter buddy of mine tonight, and was telling him about the magnesium-fueld vehicles, and so I asked, "How do you put out a magnesium fire?"
He laughed, and said, "Well, the book says 'Copious amounts of water.' But we've asked our instructor 'how many gallons is copious' and he never could answer it.'"
He then told me they use "Class D" fire extinguishers, which are specifically designed to extinguish flammable metals. Each of their big rigs carries a 20 pounder. But they recently had a magnesium fire in a vehicle (he thinks it may have been an older VW bus.) They tried the class D extinguisher, but it didn't put the fire out. He believes the crew may not have been close enough. Anyway, they emptied an entire pumper truck onto the vehicle and part of another pumper before the flames went out.
He said the "dig a hole" thing is just a story, but he did say they do try to put it out basically the same way: by smothering it.
How do they propose to instantly extinguish the burning (oxidizing) magnesium when the driver turns the car off?
Let me ask instead: how do you instantly extinguish the flame in an internal combustion engine when you shut off the car? The answer, of course, is that you don't "instantly" extinguish it. It burns itself out in the combustion chamber when you cut off the spark. Perhaps the normal shutdown procedures for a small aircraft engine would provide a better example. Did you know you don't turn off the key when you're done running the engine? Instead, you cut off the fuel supply and allow the engine to starve itself -- then you turn off the key. It's definitely not an "instant" process.
The answer is the same for a mangesium fueled vehicle. Cut off the fuel source. Literally. The magnesium strip is being mechanically fed into the combustion chamber. When the vehicle is shut off, the port through which the magnesium is fed can be closed. If this port just happens to have powerful sharpened jaws, it will sever the magnesium fuel, dropping the remaining bits into the chamber where they will burn out. If these jaws are designed to be normally closed by powerful springs, but electrically "held open" by the ignition and other safety sensors in the car, they could be used as a fail-safe. Any fault (or turning off the vehicle) would cause the fuel supply to be cut off.
The only difference between the two is time. In a four stroke engine, this happens in a few milliseconds due to the rapid nature of the combustion of gasoline. With magnesium, it will just take longer. Neither is truly instant.
(Mind you this is just idle speculation based on TFA's limited description. In reality I have not seen any such design. And given the overall lack of forethought shown in many ways, such as how they've proposed refuelling the vehicle, I'm guessing that much of what they're designing is based on lab-only experiments and has never gone to a real automotive engineer.)
Sorry, I wrote this with a lot of cutting and pasting, and I messed up the part where I was going to compare in-home recharging of electric car batteries with in-home refueling of natural gas powered vehicles. And forgetting the in-home vs service station thing, only a low percentage of existing service stations offer propane, and I'm not aware of any that commercially offer natural gas. So some "final mile" work would need to be done at the service stations anyway.
In any case, the main points I was trying to make were: there isn't enough infrastructure in place today for significant vehicular use of natural gas or propane; and gaseous fuels aren't commonly seen as "consumer ready" in this country.
Perhaps if petrol was taxed to include the cost of the clean up required it would make hydrogen appear rather quickly.
Funny, we've just had a mini-experiment of that nature take place in this country, and it has me rethinking my assumptions.
In addition to their other damages, hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the American oil drilling and refining industries pretty hard, causing temporary shutdowns of about a quarter of the U.S.'s refineries. Market pressures already stressed by OPEC, the self-induced Persian Gulf mess and Venezuelan troubles caused imported oil to skyrocket in price, causing price increases at the gas pumps of 50% or more (they've been falling somewhat in recent weeks, but are still higher than Americans are used to.) Short term effects have been seen in a huge drop in sales of large gas-guzzling vehicles (I believe the overall drop in sales announced by Ford and GM was 40% across the board, most of that coming from almost no sales of SUVs) and a sharply renewed interest in economy and alternative or hybrid fuel vehicles. National Public Radio mentioned yesterday that household energy costs in the U.S. have risen from 4% of mean household income in 2003 to 10% of mean household income today.
( Personally, I heard estimates that our region's natural gas prices would shoot up as much as 75% this year, which led me to prematurely replace my 18-year-old furnace and air conditioner with new highly efficient models. My furnace went from about 65% efficient to 95% efficient, and I replaced the old air conditioner with a 15 SEER combination air conditioner/air-source heat pump. I'm estimating the ROI could show me payback in as little as three years, and possibly faster if energy prices continue to rise. )
So what does this all mean? I believe that with the right financial incentives Americans might jump on alternative fuel sources much faster than I thought possible.
Would it be possible to deliver the metal in a slurry form (powdered and mixed with water)?
Probably not. As others have pointed out, mixing raw magnesium with water will release hydrogen as the two slowly react (fire in steam is basically the same reaction, only much, much faster.) While the quantity of hydrogen produced would probably never reach "dangerous" levels and could easily be handled by proper venting, it's something that would have to be dealt with. And it would make your fuel go bad over time, as it's just oxidizing in storage without doing any useful work for you.
It's also actually more dangerous. You would never want to let it dry out because you wouldn't want to deal with magnesium dust. The dust is far more dangerous than a coil or spool. The trick with magnesium is igniting it, which means heating it up till it reaches its combustion point. Applying heat to one end of a coil causes the rest of the coil to act as a heat sink, meaning it takes a lot of heat rapidly to overcome that much mass. But if you have a powder, you only have to heat up a single grain to the flash point, at which point it's able to ignite other grains which in turn ignite more grains, causing a brilliant explosion. You've probably seen this effect in fireworks.
Magnesium is fun to play with. The Boy Scouts sell a "fire starter kit", which is a solid block of magnesium along with a striker and steel that boys can safely carry in their pockets. The idea is the scout uses his pocket knife to shave off a few thin strips of magnesium into some tinder, and then ignite them by striking sparks into the shavings. It's a neat idea for camping: it won't work wet, but unlike a match it will work after it's been dried out. And the magnesium block itself is fairly safe: it has too much mass to easily be ignited (unless the scouts are pyros, but I repeat myself!)
I'm not exactly biased "against" hydrogen. But I do believe that any fuel system that requires a brand-new infrastructure be created is going to take a very long time (10-20 years) to gain consumer acceptance. And that makes it almost useless here in the United States for people like me. My wife and I have two vehicles, her car and my pickup truck. I use my truck for commuting 98% of the time, but occasionally I use it to haul a Boy Scout troop trailer camping. But if there are no alternative-fuel stations in the back woods of Wisconsin, I'm left with two choices: either I don't go camping, or I don't buy an alternative-fuel vehicle. And my wife's car? 90% of her miles are commuter miles around town, but we take it on family trips to the Canadian border a couple times a year. Again, until I'm comfortable that these small towns can offer the fuel I'll need, I'm going to continue to buy gasoline or diesel vehicles.
In those respects, I figure I'm a pretty typical selfish American.
So, what would it take to make me check out a different fuel? Availability. That's why E-85 vehicles are so attractive; in the absence of E-85 you can pour regular gasoline down their throats. And that's also why I'd find a solid metal fuel attractive: current service stations could carry it in their regular delivery trucks, and have it stacked on their shelves. But gaseous fuels are going to be a problem. I simply won't consider a vehicle that uses them until I know that Baudette, Minnesota has a pumping station that can deliver them. And Baudette won't get one until their local demand is high enough.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, or that it won't happen. For example, state governments could hasten the adoption by making "fleet" decisions, such as requiring highway department trucks or school buses use the alternative fuel. Such measures would effectively legislate the remote placement of refueling stations. But full adoption will be much slower for a fuel system that requires a new distribution network. And every day that it isn't nationally accepted brings the risk that I bought an unrefuelable lemon.
Slashdot Mirror
But that leaves the politicians completely out of the loop. How can you make sound, scientific technical decisions without the valuable input of politicians, both appointed and elected? I mean, isn't that sort of thing best left to experts in the art of talking out of both sides of their asses?
The pusher robot is malfunctioning.
Thank you, I'll be here all the week. Tip your servers...
but not women in blue dresses!
And slashdot is a blog -- one of several that "hammered" Kryptonite. That's the point.
The reason they would let the spam go is because spammers (and their spammy clients) have tripwire addresses. As a honeypot operator, you have no way of knowing if joe@someplace.org is an ordinary spam victim, or actually an address used by the spammer to verify that the spam is indeed being sent.
You may be unaware of how deep the spam industry is these days. There are several levels: the Vi4gr4 vendors are just the ones you see. They pay the "spammers" to send out X thousand messages. The spammers contract with "botnet operators". These are the guys who operate the hijacked PCs (like the one in the article.) The botnet operators in turn pay the freeware, shareware and ActiveX drive-by people to package their trojan horses in with their software. There's a lot of money changing hands in this business.
I was going to disagree with you, but then I got an image of just how many penis birds and gnaa posts would be filling his server. *shudder*
Of course, if that simply diverted the trolls away from slashdot for a while, I guess that'd be all right with me...
I have no problem with Excel. It does exactly what I want it to do, and has for many years. About 10 years ago I developed a "quoting application" that did materials computations, profits, etc., and then with the click of a button would generate a printable version of the quote for the customer and would also fax it directly to him. Was some of it ugly? Sure. Was it tied to a weird fax interface, and completely non-portable? Yup. But it was possible then, and it still works today (except for the faxing part.)
I wish I could retract my previous comment.
Hmm. I've been running MS Office 2003 for over a year and have yet to experience a single crash with Word or Excel. I've had Outlook freeze up numerous times, but virtually all of those problems have their roots in our Exchange server (and the seriously mismanaged overload they've piled on it.)
How much of this slowness is the application's fault vs. this being a giant Java app running in a JRE? AFAIK, MS Office 2003 is still a suite of (mostly) C++ applications, and isn't running in .NET yet.
My guess is that the magnesium car fire my friend mentioned where they emptied more than one pumper truck probably used their water as an oxidant and simply burned itself out as it ran out of fuel.
Only to Ratbert. This is for Slashdot, I had to work a troll in there somehow.
The point is, this isn't just a news site. It's a community. This demonstrates that people are more important to each other than the latest geeky tech gadget or inane software patent. Sure, there are other more personal blogs out there, but Rob is still the heart and soul of this one.
Sent from my Newton.
Well, duh! Of course you were trolled. (I just found the parent post in meta-mod, and spotted your very well-reasoned rebuttal.)
At least you were polite. Sometimes it's hard to forget that these people have been deluded all their life, lied to by preachers and parents alike, and have been taught that separating fact from myth is heresy. So it's not totally their fault they walk around spouting this nonsense. The unfortunate part comes when they pass this misinformation on to their offspring, in a viral meme fashion.
It's interesting to consider religions in this context. For them to flourish as they do, they must provide some benefit to the "hosts" or else they would have evolved out of existence (quakers, Amish, and other fringe cults appear to be showing these sorts of losses already.) Historically, religious tenets (such as "don't eat meat from cloven-hoofed animals") offered real-world tangible benefits (avoidance of trychinosis) so it's easier to see how they would have survived back then. But why now? Why do they continue to thrive?
See? You were right all along! It's universal.
Now go back to listen to more Zappa, it's all good.
Actually, firefighters use water to extinguish magnesium. 'Copious amounts of water.' Read my previous comment about a conversation I had with a firefighter tonight where I asked him "so how do you put out a magnesium fire?"
He laughed, and said, "Well, the book says 'Copious amounts of water.' But we've asked our instructor 'how many gallons is copious' and he never could answer it.'"
He then told me they use "Class D" fire extinguishers, which are specifically designed to extinguish flammable metals. Each of their big rigs carries a 20 pounder. But they recently had a magnesium fire in a vehicle (he thinks it may have been an older VW bus.) They tried the class D extinguisher, but it didn't put the fire out. He believes the crew may not have been close enough. Anyway, they emptied an entire pumper truck onto the vehicle and part of another pumper before the flames went out.
He said the "dig a hole" thing is just a story, but he did say they do try to put it out basically the same way: by smothering it.
Let me ask instead: how do you instantly extinguish the flame in an internal combustion engine when you shut off the car? The answer, of course, is that you don't "instantly" extinguish it. It burns itself out in the combustion chamber when you cut off the spark. Perhaps the normal shutdown procedures for a small aircraft engine would provide a better example. Did you know you don't turn off the key when you're done running the engine? Instead, you cut off the fuel supply and allow the engine to starve itself -- then you turn off the key. It's definitely not an "instant" process.
The answer is the same for a mangesium fueled vehicle. Cut off the fuel source. Literally. The magnesium strip is being mechanically fed into the combustion chamber. When the vehicle is shut off, the port through which the magnesium is fed can be closed. If this port just happens to have powerful sharpened jaws, it will sever the magnesium fuel, dropping the remaining bits into the chamber where they will burn out. If these jaws are designed to be normally closed by powerful springs, but electrically "held open" by the ignition and other safety sensors in the car, they could be used as a fail-safe. Any fault (or turning off the vehicle) would cause the fuel supply to be cut off.
The only difference between the two is time. In a four stroke engine, this happens in a few milliseconds due to the rapid nature of the combustion of gasoline. With magnesium, it will just take longer. Neither is truly instant.
(Mind you this is just idle speculation based on TFA's limited description. In reality I have not seen any such design. And given the overall lack of forethought shown in many ways, such as how they've proposed refuelling the vehicle, I'm guessing that much of what they're designing is based on lab-only experiments and has never gone to a real automotive engineer.)
In any case, the main points I was trying to make were: there isn't enough infrastructure in place today for significant vehicular use of natural gas or propane; and gaseous fuels aren't commonly seen as "consumer ready" in this country.
Funny, we've just had a mini-experiment of that nature take place in this country, and it has me rethinking my assumptions.
In addition to their other damages, hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the American oil drilling and refining industries pretty hard, causing temporary shutdowns of about a quarter of the U.S.'s refineries. Market pressures already stressed by OPEC, the self-induced Persian Gulf mess and Venezuelan troubles caused imported oil to skyrocket in price, causing price increases at the gas pumps of 50% or more (they've been falling somewhat in recent weeks, but are still higher than Americans are used to.) Short term effects have been seen in a huge drop in sales of large gas-guzzling vehicles (I believe the overall drop in sales announced by Ford and GM was 40% across the board, most of that coming from almost no sales of SUVs) and a sharply renewed interest in economy and alternative or hybrid fuel vehicles. National Public Radio mentioned yesterday that household energy costs in the U.S. have risen from 4% of mean household income in 2003 to 10% of mean household income today.
( Personally, I heard estimates that our region's natural gas prices would shoot up as much as 75% this year, which led me to prematurely replace my 18-year-old furnace and air conditioner with new highly efficient models. My furnace went from about 65% efficient to 95% efficient, and I replaced the old air conditioner with a 15 SEER combination air conditioner/air-source heat pump. I'm estimating the ROI could show me payback in as little as three years, and possibly faster if energy prices continue to rise. )
So what does this all mean? I believe that with the right financial incentives Americans might jump on alternative fuel sources much faster than I thought possible.
Probably not. As others have pointed out, mixing raw magnesium with water will release hydrogen as the two slowly react (fire in steam is basically the same reaction, only much, much faster.) While the quantity of hydrogen produced would probably never reach "dangerous" levels and could easily be handled by proper venting, it's something that would have to be dealt with. And it would make your fuel go bad over time, as it's just oxidizing in storage without doing any useful work for you.
It's also actually more dangerous. You would never want to let it dry out because you wouldn't want to deal with magnesium dust. The dust is far more dangerous than a coil or spool. The trick with magnesium is igniting it, which means heating it up till it reaches its combustion point. Applying heat to one end of a coil causes the rest of the coil to act as a heat sink, meaning it takes a lot of heat rapidly to overcome that much mass. But if you have a powder, you only have to heat up a single grain to the flash point, at which point it's able to ignite other grains which in turn ignite more grains, causing a brilliant explosion. You've probably seen this effect in fireworks.
Magnesium is fun to play with. The Boy Scouts sell a "fire starter kit", which is a solid block of magnesium along with a striker and steel that boys can safely carry in their pockets. The idea is the scout uses his pocket knife to shave off a few thin strips of magnesium into some tinder, and then ignite them by striking sparks into the shavings. It's a neat idea for camping: it won't work wet, but unlike a match it will work after it's been dried out. And the magnesium block itself is fairly safe: it has too much mass to easily be ignited (unless the scouts are pyros, but I repeat myself!)
In those respects, I figure I'm a pretty typical selfish American.
So, what would it take to make me check out a different fuel? Availability. That's why E-85 vehicles are so attractive; in the absence of E-85 you can pour regular gasoline down their throats. And that's also why I'd find a solid metal fuel attractive: current service stations could carry it in their regular delivery trucks, and have it stacked on their shelves. But gaseous fuels are going to be a problem. I simply won't consider a vehicle that uses them until I know that Baudette, Minnesota has a pumping station that can deliver them. And Baudette won't get one until their local demand is high enough.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, or that it won't happen. For example, state governments could hasten the adoption by making "fleet" decisions, such as requiring highway department trucks or school buses use the alternative fuel. Such measures would effectively legislate the remote placement of refueling stations. But full adoption will be much slower for a fuel system that requires a new distribution network. And every day that it isn't nationally accepted brings the risk that I bought an unrefuelable lemon.