Atmospheric life support systems would easily be externalized, provided by whatever carrier is currently responsible for them. They already hook planes up to external A/C units while they're parked at the gate so the passengers don't freeze or roast while the APU engines are off, conserving jet fuel. Similarly, when they plug the pods in, they'd establish the ventilation connections.
But it doesn't solve the related problems of food or restrooms. You'd have to externalize the facilities, because plumbing sewer and water would not only add lots of weight to each pod, but would take up too much room that could be occupied by paying passengers.
I doubt jettisoning pods in-flight would be a design consideration. A life threatening problem could possibly be solved by deploying the pod's fire suppression system. It risks the humans inside that pod, but that might be a needed outcome depending on the situation.
The cost of hauling an extra couple of kilograms today works out to about a million dollars in extra fuel over the service life of the airframe. Unless those pods and parachutes weigh less than the current seat and overhead bins, they're going to be rejected by the airlines. Either that or the price for riding in a pod will be based on total pod weight, resulting in fares substantially higher than today's ticket prices.
Some things would be different, of course. Pods could be routed to an off-airport TSA checkpoint for pre-flight bomb sniffing, and post-flight they would be diverted to customs, immigration, and agricultural inspection centers, letting the airlines off the hook for paying for on-airport facilities. On-airport parking would be dramatically reduced. Private party pods would be all the rage for wealthy people. Brokers would spring up with matchmaking services where they cram multiple strangers into a single pod, trying to lower the ticket prices. But affordable tickets would probably come to an end.
Yeah, I miss the old days when cars used to break down completely before they reached 80,000 miles, and when they poured out lead-contaminated exhaust and enough sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide to create acid rain, and when they got 8 miles per gallon, and when they would fly off the corners in improperly banked turns, and fly into a spin when braking on a wet road, and would impale drivers on steering wheel shafts in head-on collisions. Not only could you fix them with a screwdriver, but you could steal them with a screwdriver, too, just by hammering it into the key slot and twisting it with a wrench.
Or were you implying that "over"-engineering was a bad thing?
He built it because he could, of course, but he's planning on it becoming an educational display. It's just that a computer with no actual applications is a pretty boring thing for non-techies to behold.
BTW: solar panels, as in photovoltaics, exist since over 50 years. We have a pretty good idea how long they last and degrade.
Do you honestly think that a photovoltaic cell produced today is similar enough in construction to one produce 50 years ago, such that you can make a meaningful comparison? That no improvements have been made in the technology, the coatings, the contacts, the fact that a thin-film cell is almost completely different construction than a wafer cell (the only type available 50 years ago?)
Each product has to be evaluated independently in order to make claims of longevity. Such testing requires exposing samples to various artificial environments in an attempt to accelerate the natural processes of weather and sunlight. They need to see how durable the AR coating is; typically done by exposing samples to massive amounts of UV, in extremely high and low temperatures, and checking for signs of degradation. They need to see if the structural components, such as adhesives, sealants, and supporting materials, can withstand the environment when combined together in this new way. Even the glass may be of a unique formulation that may age differently than expected. From there, they make their predictions of lifetime and warranty promises.
50 years of data on the PN junction helps understand one tiny bit of the problem space, but not nearly as much as an actual test of the product.
You americans are really quite dumb. Or your school system... or what ever.
Really? You slag an entire nation because you failed to understand one guy who didn't feel the need to fully explain his remarks? Next time you post, please apply some neurons to the problem before reaching for your keyboard.
Consider that your drive might have detected some anomaly while updating the sector containing your secret, and migrated some of your super-secret data away from the suspect sector to another, then marking the original sector as bad. No amount of overwriting will ever overwrite the bad sector, as the drive electronics will not allow it. That data is there permanently.
If you need to really secure your data, the time to do it is before you write it to a device that was designed to not lose it. Use disk encryption. When you need to wipe the drive, erase the key. As a bonus, it takes much less time than a full overwrite of the drive, so you can be assured your data is completely gone in just a few milliseconds.
Regardless of whether Gutman's claims in 1996 were valid back then, they fundamentally relied on loose manufacturing tolerances of certain mechanical attributes of the drives of that era. Drive tech has completely changed in the last 20 years in the race for increased data density, and those old faults are no longer relevant.
That said, if you want to keep your data safe today, there are a few things to consider:
1. Drives are made for reliability as a primary goal, not secure erasure. A drive that detects a fault will silently place a new copy of the data on a sector reserved for migrating away from bad sectors, leaving the original data in place, never to be overwritten again. No "secure delete" operation will be effective on it.
2. NIST recommends that when security is your main concern, you should be encrypting the data on the drive. When it comes time to wipe the drive, simply erase all copies of the key.
3. If you have any doubt about your ability to wipe a drive, physically destroy it. The risk is rarely worth the $20 you might get for it on the resale market.
Technically, you never had the legal right to use that device driver software with that counterfeit chip. Doesn't matter if it was good faith or not.
Legally, it's the same as buying any other counterfeit goods. The factory is overseas and out of reach of US laws, of course. But the OEM reseller could be fined and the buyer could even go to jail. The merchant you bought it from could have them seized without remuneration, and possibly fined.
How is it better for you? If you know it's counterfeit, you could be complicit, so you avoid legal troubles. You are not entirely without blame, because even if you didn't know it was a fake, you still benefited by paying a cheaper price.
But your rational, fact-based explanation doesn't match my outrage as to what is obviously a conspiracy theory based on my preconceived notions of anti-competitive behavior! How can I get all paranoid and weird about this now?
Wait, I know. First, I'll call you a shill, and then post my fanciful rants anyway!
BlackBerry has always been willing to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in exchange for making a device secure enough that top ranking government officials can trust it. After the election, Obama famously insisted on keeping his BlackBerry, so the NSA tweaked one for him. Both backs were scratched, but once the NSA was wound deeply into the device, do you think they ever let go? Doubt it.
Maybe they can capitalize on this. Imagine this marketing campaign: "People who own BlackBerry Phones are honest and and have nothing to hide [picture of Obama with his BB.] Terrorists hide behind iPhones [picture of police at San Bernadino.] What kind of phone do you want to be seen carrying?"
I look at that in reverse. A pair of Bose noise canceling earbuds comes in at about $300 retail, so the total of lobbying, bribes, hookers, blow, and Congressional junkets must approach about $1700 per pair.
Actually, they're playing the Ol' Switcheroo long game. By putting out Windows 8 in the condition it was in, then offering Windows 10 as a "gee, we're so sorry about how horrible that was", they were legitimately able to claim that Windows 10 was an "upgrade" (because after Windows 8 an unclogged toilet qualifies as an upgrade.)
But nobody who uses Windows 7 has ever believed Windows 10 is any kind of upgrade. Normal users were forced into it by GWX; so their installation statistics can be twisted into making it sound like people are "voluntarily" upgrading, making this statement not technically a lie: "With over 100 million downloads, Windows 10 is our most popular OS ever." (They've since changed it to "our best OS ever.")
I'm sorry. Without more context, we can't help you.
If you'd helped him by giving him a set of noise cancelling earbuds before he lost his hearing in combat, he probably wouldn't be asking this question today.
You could at least have read The Fine Summary above, which actually has "$2000 pair" as the first words of the link to The Fine Article. No extrapolation necessary.
So you'd create an Auto-Mistake generator based on common typos. The problem is that people make a LOT of different typos. PBKDF2 would be running until next week keeping up with all the variants on a single password.
Okay, we get it: Windows 10 updates are annoying and pushy, most users are too stupid to avoid them, and Microsoft doesn't give a crap how the users feel. Now can we PLEASE stop seeing the same goddamned story posted every goddamned day?
You're looking at it all wrong. The way Slashdot is battering us daily with "Windows 10 Upgrade Horror Stories" is exactly like the way the Get Windows 10 nagware update screens batter the Windows 7 owners. This is just a sympathy posting.
As a matter of fact, there's been so much battering of Windows 7 users that they've opened a shelter for them over on Second Street. When you walk in the door a counselor meets you to help you get over the abuse. But it turns out it's the Shuttleworth Shelter, and the counselors install Ubuntu and systemd on the poor peoples' machines! Oh, the irony!!
As a general question to all commentators; if you're not using Open Street Maps, what is your reason?
As a contributor to OSM, I really want to use the data more.
But my primary need is for a real-time traffic-based routing app to help me get to work in the mornings. I don't need a static route planning app, because I know how to get there. Even an ordinary map with traffic data on it is not as useful, because those take brain cells away from driving in order to interpret and replan a route.
What I use every day are the two functions of traffic-avoidance and navigation, fused into a single interface that answers the question "What is the fastest predicted route, from right here and right now, to get me to X?" And the most effective traffic-negotiating app out there today is Waze, which performs real-time routing based on current and forecast crowd-sourced traffic data.
Waze originally leveraged Google maps, and was subsequently bought by Google (Alphabet, whatever.) They are not switching to OSM maps any time soon.
What I'd really like today would be a route planning/navigation app that uses OSM data that takes into account my truck and travel trailer, and takes me to camping sites in state parks by selecting truck routes that are suitable for a larger rig. I want to avoid the two-lane roads as much as practical so I'm inconveniencing other drivers to the minimum extent possible. When I need gas, I want it to find me a station that has pull-through pumps with a high enough canopy. I'm less interested in traffic speeds, although avoiding crashes, standstills, and narrow construction lanes would be a plus. And when I need a dump station or propane tank refills, knowing where they are would also help. I haven't found those features in an OSM-based app yet. But every so often, I look.
The study is sponsored by the New Venture Fund, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Academy of Sciences."
I don't see a lot of evil, conspiring corporations in that list. I also don't see people who want to prove their version, either. I see people and organizations who have a genuine interest in food safety, and who really want to know if GMOs are safe or not. They arrived at a conclusion based on facts, not on desires. And the facts are that current GMOs are safe.
If they didn't arrive at your personally preconceived results, it's probably because your biases came from non-scientific sources. You should closely examine the sources where you get your "news", as they aren't exactly proving themselves trustworthy here.
And how exactly is resistance to a GMO-produced toxin different from creating resistance to spray-applied pesticides?
In the case of GMOs internally creating Bt toxin, there is no chance of overspray, or spraying too many times, or the spray getting into the groundwater. Not so with a tractor dragging a tank of Tristar around a field. By that definition, GMOs cause far less harm than sprayed pesticides.
If there is an argument about "harm" here, it should be on whether or not pesticides should be legal. It would have nothing to do with GMOs.
People bring up the "terminator gene" argument, but they always forget to bring up the ancient hybrid version, otherwise known as a 'mule'.
Nobody complains that if they buy a mule, they can't breed a herd of baby mules. And I'm pretty sure the patent on cross breeding a horse and a donkey expired millennia ago. Many common decorative plants are also sterile hybrids.
This isn't a problem restricted to GMOs, but it's one the genetics companies don't mind exploiting for profit. It also doesn't affect plant safety.
Those are a specific class of pesticides called 'neonicotinoids' that recently rose to prominence in the industry because they're safer than just about any other pesticides, ever. Their LD50 in mammals is so high you could probably sprinkle Safari AG on your breakfast cereal with no ill effects (not recommended, however!) The problem is that they're extremely toxic to bees, much moreso than they are to any other insects.
But these chemicals are produced in a factory, and not naturally produced by plants. They have to be applied in the field by spraying. They have nothing to with GMOs.
GMOs produce their own pesticides, commonly bT toxin, by splicing in genes from creatures that naturally produce it, like bacillus thurengis. So the main safety concern is there could be bT toxin found in the edible portions of the crops.
Slashdot Mirror
Atmospheric life support systems would easily be externalized, provided by whatever carrier is currently responsible for them. They already hook planes up to external A/C units while they're parked at the gate so the passengers don't freeze or roast while the APU engines are off, conserving jet fuel. Similarly, when they plug the pods in, they'd establish the ventilation connections.
But it doesn't solve the related problems of food or restrooms. You'd have to externalize the facilities, because plumbing sewer and water would not only add lots of weight to each pod, but would take up too much room that could be occupied by paying passengers.
I doubt jettisoning pods in-flight would be a design consideration. A life threatening problem could possibly be solved by deploying the pod's fire suppression system. It risks the humans inside that pod, but that might be a needed outcome depending on the situation.
The cost of hauling an extra couple of kilograms today works out to about a million dollars in extra fuel over the service life of the airframe. Unless those pods and parachutes weigh less than the current seat and overhead bins, they're going to be rejected by the airlines. Either that or the price for riding in a pod will be based on total pod weight, resulting in fares substantially higher than today's ticket prices.
Some things would be different, of course. Pods could be routed to an off-airport TSA checkpoint for pre-flight bomb sniffing, and post-flight they would be diverted to customs, immigration, and agricultural inspection centers, letting the airlines off the hook for paying for on-airport facilities. On-airport parking would be dramatically reduced. Private party pods would be all the rage for wealthy people. Brokers would spring up with matchmaking services where they cram multiple strangers into a single pod, trying to lower the ticket prices. But affordable tickets would probably come to an end.
Yeah, I miss the old days when cars used to break down completely before they reached 80,000 miles, and when they poured out lead-contaminated exhaust and enough sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide to create acid rain, and when they got 8 miles per gallon, and when they would fly off the corners in improperly banked turns, and fly into a spin when braking on a wet road, and would impale drivers on steering wheel shafts in head-on collisions. Not only could you fix them with a screwdriver, but you could steal them with a screwdriver, too, just by hammering it into the key slot and twisting it with a wrench.
Or were you implying that "over"-engineering was a bad thing?
He uploaded them to YouTube a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... is the grand tour. From there, you can find links to the other videos.
He built it because he could, of course, but he's planning on it becoming an educational display. It's just that a computer with no actual applications is a pretty boring thing for non-techies to behold.
BTW: solar panels, as in photovoltaics, exist since over 50 years. We have a pretty good idea how long they last and degrade.
Do you honestly think that a photovoltaic cell produced today is similar enough in construction to one produce 50 years ago, such that you can make a meaningful comparison? That no improvements have been made in the technology, the coatings, the contacts, the fact that a thin-film cell is almost completely different construction than a wafer cell (the only type available 50 years ago?)
Each product has to be evaluated independently in order to make claims of longevity. Such testing requires exposing samples to various artificial environments in an attempt to accelerate the natural processes of weather and sunlight. They need to see how durable the AR coating is; typically done by exposing samples to massive amounts of UV, in extremely high and low temperatures, and checking for signs of degradation. They need to see if the structural components, such as adhesives, sealants, and supporting materials, can withstand the environment when combined together in this new way. Even the glass may be of a unique formulation that may age differently than expected. From there, they make their predictions of lifetime and warranty promises.
50 years of data on the PN junction helps understand one tiny bit of the problem space, but not nearly as much as an actual test of the product.
You americans are really quite dumb. Or your school system ... or what ever.
Really? You slag an entire nation because you failed to understand one guy who didn't feel the need to fully explain his remarks? Next time you post, please apply some neurons to the problem before reaching for your keyboard.
Simple, but wrong.
Consider that your drive might have detected some anomaly while updating the sector containing your secret, and migrated some of your super-secret data away from the suspect sector to another, then marking the original sector as bad. No amount of overwriting will ever overwrite the bad sector, as the drive electronics will not allow it. That data is there permanently.
If you need to really secure your data, the time to do it is before you write it to a device that was designed to not lose it. Use disk encryption. When you need to wipe the drive, erase the key. As a bonus, it takes much less time than a full overwrite of the drive, so you can be assured your data is completely gone in just a few milliseconds.
Regardless of whether Gutman's claims in 1996 were valid back then, they fundamentally relied on loose manufacturing tolerances of certain mechanical attributes of the drives of that era. Drive tech has completely changed in the last 20 years in the race for increased data density, and those old faults are no longer relevant.
That said, if you want to keep your data safe today, there are a few things to consider:
1. Drives are made for reliability as a primary goal, not secure erasure. A drive that detects a fault will silently place a new copy of the data on a sector reserved for migrating away from bad sectors, leaving the original data in place, never to be overwritten again. No "secure delete" operation will be effective on it.
2. NIST recommends that when security is your main concern, you should be encrypting the data on the drive. When it comes time to wipe the drive, simply erase all copies of the key.
3. If you have any doubt about your ability to wipe a drive, physically destroy it. The risk is rarely worth the $20 you might get for it on the resale market.
"We are making the change in response to customer feedback"
s/customer/litigious bastards/
Funny how there's only one kind of feedback that they actually respond to.
Technically, you never had the legal right to use that device driver software with that counterfeit chip. Doesn't matter if it was good faith or not.
Legally, it's the same as buying any other counterfeit goods. The factory is overseas and out of reach of US laws, of course. But the OEM reseller could be fined and the buyer could even go to jail. The merchant you bought it from could have them seized without remuneration, and possibly fined.
How is it better for you? If you know it's counterfeit, you could be complicit, so you avoid legal troubles. You are not entirely without blame, because even if you didn't know it was a fake, you still benefited by paying a cheaper price.
But your rational, fact-based explanation doesn't match my outrage as to what is obviously a conspiracy theory based on my preconceived notions of anti-competitive behavior! How can I get all paranoid and weird about this now?
Wait, I know. First, I'll call you a shill, and then post my fanciful rants anyway!
BlackBerry has always been willing to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in exchange for making a device secure enough that top ranking government officials can trust it. After the election, Obama famously insisted on keeping his BlackBerry, so the NSA tweaked one for him. Both backs were scratched, but once the NSA was wound deeply into the device, do you think they ever let go? Doubt it.
Maybe they can capitalize on this. Imagine this marketing campaign: "People who own BlackBerry Phones are honest and and have nothing to hide [picture of Obama with his BB.] Terrorists hide behind iPhones [picture of police at San Bernadino.] What kind of phone do you want to be seen carrying?"
I look at that in reverse. A pair of Bose noise canceling earbuds comes in at about $300 retail, so the total of lobbying, bribes, hookers, blow, and Congressional junkets must approach about $1700 per pair.
Still not bad money if you can get it.
Actually, they're playing the Ol' Switcheroo long game. By putting out Windows 8 in the condition it was in, then offering Windows 10 as a "gee, we're so sorry about how horrible that was", they were legitimately able to claim that Windows 10 was an "upgrade" (because after Windows 8 an unclogged toilet qualifies as an upgrade.)
But nobody who uses Windows 7 has ever believed Windows 10 is any kind of upgrade. Normal users were forced into it by GWX; so their installation statistics can be twisted into making it sound like people are "voluntarily" upgrading, making this statement not technically a lie: "With over 100 million downloads, Windows 10 is our most popular OS ever." (They've since changed it to "our best OS ever.")
What?
I'm sorry. Without more context, we can't help you.
If you'd helped him by giving him a set of noise cancelling earbuds before he lost his hearing in combat, he probably wouldn't be asking this question today.
You could at least have read The Fine Summary above, which actually has "$2000 pair" as the first words of the link to The Fine Article. No extrapolation necessary.
So you'd create an Auto-Mistake generator based on common typos. The problem is that people make a LOT of different typos. PBKDF2 would be running until next week keeping up with all the variants on a single password.
Thank you! It looks like setting up an import task is a ton of work, but possible.
Okay, we get it: Windows 10 updates are annoying and pushy, most users are too stupid to avoid them, and Microsoft doesn't give a crap how the users feel. Now can we PLEASE stop seeing the same goddamned story posted every goddamned day?
You're looking at it all wrong. The way Slashdot is battering us daily with "Windows 10 Upgrade Horror Stories" is exactly like the way the Get Windows 10 nagware update screens batter the Windows 7 owners. This is just a sympathy posting.
As a matter of fact, there's been so much battering of Windows 7 users that they've opened a shelter for them over on Second Street. When you walk in the door a counselor meets you to help you get over the abuse. But it turns out it's the Shuttleworth Shelter, and the counselors install Ubuntu and systemd on the poor peoples' machines! Oh, the irony!!
As a general question to all commentators; if you're not using Open Street Maps, what is your reason?
As a contributor to OSM, I really want to use the data more.
But my primary need is for a real-time traffic-based routing app to help me get to work in the mornings. I don't need a static route planning app, because I know how to get there. Even an ordinary map with traffic data on it is not as useful, because those take brain cells away from driving in order to interpret and replan a route.
What I use every day are the two functions of traffic-avoidance and navigation, fused into a single interface that answers the question "What is the fastest predicted route, from right here and right now, to get me to X?" And the most effective traffic-negotiating app out there today is Waze, which performs real-time routing based on current and forecast crowd-sourced traffic data.
Waze originally leveraged Google maps, and was subsequently bought by Google (Alphabet, whatever.) They are not switching to OSM maps any time soon.
What I'd really like today would be a route planning/navigation app that uses OSM data that takes into account my truck and travel trailer, and takes me to camping sites in state parks by selecting truck routes that are suitable for a larger rig. I want to avoid the two-lane roads as much as practical so I'm inconveniencing other drivers to the minimum extent possible. When I need gas, I want it to find me a station that has pull-through pumps with a high enough canopy. I'm less interested in traffic speeds, although avoiding crashes, standstills, and narrow construction lanes would be a plus. And when I need a dump station or propane tank refills, knowing where they are would also help. I haven't found those features in an OSM-based app yet. But every so often, I look.
Wouldn't that be some beautiful irony, if the NASA research was wrong because of a bug in software Myhrvold's company had a hand in developing?
Easy enough: that's in the report's FAQ: http://nas-sites.org/ge-crops/...
"Who is sponsoring this study?
The study is sponsored by the New Venture Fund, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Academy of Sciences."
I don't see a lot of evil, conspiring corporations in that list. I also don't see people who want to prove their version, either. I see people and organizations who have a genuine interest in food safety, and who really want to know if GMOs are safe or not. They arrived at a conclusion based on facts, not on desires. And the facts are that current GMOs are safe.
If they didn't arrive at your personally preconceived results, it's probably because your biases came from non-scientific sources. You should closely examine the sources where you get your "news", as they aren't exactly proving themselves trustworthy here.
And how exactly is resistance to a GMO-produced toxin different from creating resistance to spray-applied pesticides?
In the case of GMOs internally creating Bt toxin, there is no chance of overspray, or spraying too many times, or the spray getting into the groundwater. Not so with a tractor dragging a tank of Tristar around a field. By that definition, GMOs cause far less harm than sprayed pesticides.
If there is an argument about "harm" here, it should be on whether or not pesticides should be legal. It would have nothing to do with GMOs.
People bring up the "terminator gene" argument, but they always forget to bring up the ancient hybrid version, otherwise known as a 'mule'.
Nobody complains that if they buy a mule, they can't breed a herd of baby mules. And I'm pretty sure the patent on cross breeding a horse and a donkey expired millennia ago. Many common decorative plants are also sterile hybrids.
This isn't a problem restricted to GMOs, but it's one the genetics companies don't mind exploiting for profit. It also doesn't affect plant safety.
Those are a specific class of pesticides called 'neonicotinoids' that recently rose to prominence in the industry because they're safer than just about any other pesticides, ever. Their LD50 in mammals is so high you could probably sprinkle Safari AG on your breakfast cereal with no ill effects (not recommended, however!) The problem is that they're extremely toxic to bees, much moreso than they are to any other insects.
But these chemicals are produced in a factory, and not naturally produced by plants. They have to be applied in the field by spraying. They have nothing to with GMOs.
GMOs produce their own pesticides, commonly bT toxin, by splicing in genes from creatures that naturally produce it, like bacillus thurengis. So the main safety concern is there could be bT toxin found in the edible portions of the crops.