Make the software shout about its presence instead of hiding.
That would be my strategy too. Something that requires human interaction every few minutes... then after an hour or so, it requires action every minute... then every 30 seconds... Big flashy scary warnings on boot. Make the machine sing painful sounds on alternate boots. Make getting the machine fixed the less painful option than letting things carry on.
Oh, and if the machine in question has a well-known popular email client, append a "this machine is infected by X, Y and Z" to each account's signature code and turn the thing on ; a bit of public shame might help too.
But most of all, make damned good and sure that your new code works and is safe. And that your clean-up tools work. (That bit the FBI ought to be able to out-source to an AV vendor.)
The article linked in the summary appears to have been prompted by a paper on Arxiv, discussing the possible changes that asteroid mining would produce in a star's dust envelope.
All very nice good stuff - I see one of the authors is at Edinburgh Observatory, so I'll keep my ears peeled in case he ever does any public lectures.
... possibly for centuries. I know that I was thinking about things like this in the early 1980s as I started to get into SF. When I went to university, these would have been problems we attacked while walking up mountains or procrastinating to avoid doing our work.
Flying out to an asteroid isn't cheap, neither is returning with the goods.
Which is why I'd make the first serious target a dead comet (in an asteroid-like orbit). Bring back a lot of volatile reaction mass and suddenly a lot of your other problems get considerably easier.
There's a Law somewhere that all posts complaining about grammar or spelling mistakes will themselves contain spelling or grammar errors. Obviously posts commenting on one's own previous errors are subject to a similar Law.
Pidgins are actually quite interesting probes into the development of language. They cast a little light into a very murky area.
Does anyone know if there is any possibility if antimatter might repel regular matter gravitationally?
The idea does sound intuitively attractive, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't work in practice. I can't recall enough physics to say why, but I don't think it's the case.
It's an assumption that the stars we see are ordinary matter. There really is no way of knowing from a distance.
The assumed symmetry of matter vs antimatter would preclude being able to tell the difference by spectroscopy (checking this in the lab is one of the main justifications behind trying to make significant quantities of antihydrogen, antihelium etc.). However, since we know (from accelerator experiments) that matter and antimatter do annihilate vigorously on contact, and we do not see this sort of energy release in the sky, then we can safely deduce that everything that we see is matter, not antimatter. Space is not a perfect vacuum ; the interstellar medium would make a strong glow where a region of matter met a region of antimatter. In this case, absence of evidence actually is positive evidence of absence.
IIRC, one of the early theories to explain gamma-ray bursts was that they were evidence of antimatter object interacting with the Kuiper Belt/ Oort cloud. That theory went out of the window when their distances were measured.
We don't get hit by antimatter meteors so we can tell matter and antimatter don't occur in close proximity to each other.
We do get hit by antimatter meteorites, but they're very small. The first detection of the antielectron was for example, in cosmic ray studies on a balloon. There's a whole-sky telescope in Argentina (IIRC) designed to study precisely these high-energy cosmic ray events, because they're still of higher energy than can be produced in CERN, Fermilab, etc.
Link
So I total which of the following are true:
-Antimatter is extremely rare in the universe maybe none exists today.
See above ; rare, but not absent.
-Antimatter is repelled by reacting with ordinary matter imparting momentum from the explosion segregating it from ordinary matter in the universe. Probably this happened in the earliest times.
There is no mechanism the I know of which can do this. You can easily segregate on charge, but some antiparticles are positive (antielectrons) while some are negative (antiprotons) and others are neutral (antineutrons), so that's not going to segregate matter from antimatter without a prior processing stage.
-Antimatter is repelled by gravity with ordinary matter segregating it from ordinary matter in the universe. Maybe it accounts for dark energy observation.
I don't think gravity works like that - it's concerned with mass, not whether or not particles are matter or antimatter. Descriptions of "dark energy" emphasise that it behaves LIKE an antigravity, not that it is an antigravity.
As you've later agreed... 20MB is actually reasonably useful. The problem with this techniques is that you're going to need in the order of 160GB of non-infringing data to hide the 20MB in. And if you're wanting to do this routinely, you're going to need a lot more, otherwise it's going to start to look suspicious. Lots of Jason Bourne lookalikes crossing your borders, all carrying laptops with the same collection of movies on them... peculiar. Attention-attracting.
Actually... a ripped collection of movies... as long as they were definitely legal (so you'd probably need to be using in-house training videos of mind-exploding tedium ; Hollywood movies could get annoying questions asked, and you don't want to attract attention.
Hmmm. There is a problem there, but thinking a bit more about it, you could probably generate convincing data fairly easily to do your steganography with. And it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a scenario where the hard drive has multiple partitions for data management, again without attracting attention.
Most of these benefits can be obtained by mining asteroids. The downside is that they're (mostly) further away ; the upside is that they're not at the bottom of a significant gravity well. As an additional upside, we'd get practice at moving and/or manipulating asteroids. We don't know when we'll need that hands-on experience, but it's a certainty that one day our species will really need to know how to move asteroids.
Once we've got the issues of radiation protection, long-term power supplies (i.e., nuclear) and living in and maintaining a truly closed ecology solved... the only thing between us and the stars is the psychology of building and manning generation ships. Suspended animation techniques might help there but they're not essential, so if they remain fiction that's not a show stopper.
A thousand-year long exploration expedition to Alpha Centauri might sound incredible today, but such a project would look very different to a family returning from a 10-year mining contract in the Kuiper Belt.
It's very unlikely that we're the only life in the universe, and I think that it's unlikely that we're the only intelligent life in the universe (but out of deference to Conway Morris, I do have to entertain the idea) ; but the galaxy could be ours before our species is a half-million generations old. (Actually, we'd speciate, I'm almost certain ; whether deliberately by genetic engineering or incidentally by founder-effect and drift is moot ; probably both.)
When I was younger I worked as a tech in a major metro newspaper.
I am occasionally contacted by friends in the press to "sanity-check" material in my professional field of competence.
Not all reporters (or editors) are as overblown as you're saying. Though possibly the ones who work on mass-market publications rather than technical publications for niche markets are that bad.
Bing Tsher E (943915) concisely expresses the problem in message #35929626
No, I don't know of any examples where legislation has effectively stopped this sort of problem. It really is a cultural thing, I suspect. Cultures don't change rapidly - it's at least a decadal thing, if not a generational thing.
the never ending bitching and moaning about the US is getting old.
It is, slightly.
Well, it'll end the day that we can persuade (by jack-booted force, if necessary ; "desirable" is taken as a given) the Septics to confine themselves to slashdot.org.us and leave the non-nationalised version for the rest of the world.
Oh, and BTW, in the Rest of The World (to which you are posting, by not posting to slashdot.org.us), "liberal" is not generally a term of abuse. Even here in Britain under our ConDem (pronounced as condemn) coalition.
No. We look at the wide smorgasboard available to us and wonder which to choose to participate in, today. Poly- or single- user ? Bondage-and-discipline or un-typed? Big-endian, little-endian or amphi-endian?
Sex can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Some people even associate it with reproduction.
Were Apple actually attempting to get me to consider any of their products, ever?
I mean, I've brought and used Apple products before (as well having been given them). Then I've chosen to sell them on and use the money for something else.
So, does that make me a target for Apple to try to win me back as a user, or not.
I really can't figure out what (if anything) they're trying to do. And I don't give it much thought though, since it's possible that Apple aren't actually interested in re-gaining former users, considering them as "beyond hope".
It seems like Japan isn't the only country that needs to prevent regulators from later taking jobs with the companies they were supposed to be tough with. They shouldn't be allowed to be paid lobbyists either.
Do you have any examples of any countries that have effective laws preventing a "revolving door" between employment by a regulatory body and employment by a regulated business? Any examples at all?
It is not impossible that general anti-corruption ethos and relatively high moral standards make the "revolving door" ineffective in the Nordic countries ; but whether there are actually laws on their books is a different question. (I don't recall hearing allegations of doors revolving to public disquiet, but I don't keep a particularly close ear open across the German Ocean.)
Come to Aberdeen and say that, and you'll get really good treatment at the hospital : the medics there, who also lost friends and neighbours will want you to be nice and sturdy when you leave... so that you're still alive after Round Two and can be patched up to go in for Round Three.
I'm no medic ; but I do know enough anatomy to look forward to your visit.
Yet, Fucushima is leaking U-235, Pu-239, and their radioactive isotopes, which are definitely NOT safe.
Your source for this claim is... what?
I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137 are reported at the moment in monitoring around the site.
Actually... the other implication of what you wrote is that you know of non-radioactive isotopes of U-235 and Pu-239 : do tell more, I'd be fascinated.
[I don't claim to be a nuclear physicist ; but understanding isotope geochemistry questions is something that comes up from time to time in my employment, at which point I have to educate other people at work. When I say "tell more, I'd be fascinated," I mean exactly that.]
It's just that "Plutonium" is a charged word... "Iodine" and "Caesium" isn't... so waving the Plutonium Monster around is an efficient way of making a buzz.
A decade ago, I'd have laughed at educated intelligent people abandoning something as well-demonstrated as vaccination. These days, I wonder if we'll see the return of goitres in the First World?
The Darwin Award production line must be manning up for a busy decade.
OIC : your worldview includes an expectation of seeing sky from your front door. That's an interesting comment in itself.
So, have you ever lived in a building with several hundred other households? Where it could easily be 10 minutes walk (waiting for elevators, etc) between your GPS device (SatNav, whatever) losing sight of the sky and you arriving at your domicile (in the sense that a search warrant would be limited to one such premises).
I'm planning on consuming beer next Friday with one of our programming team who lives in such a house. Without too much difficulty, by choosing routes to approach his house and with a little luck from the weather (overcast, perhaps haar), I could probably put the last fix recorded by a GPS 10 minutes walk from the entrance to the block of flats.
So, if he were to be designing a suite of GPS tracking software for a product, I suspect that he'd take a substantially different approach to the way that you would. Unless, of course, some mind equally devious to mine covered the question in the specification for the code.
I cast my mind back to the Damilola Taylor case, where a considerable amount of evidence about the minutiae of mobile phone signal strength location methods was disputed at trial. I would anticipate corresponding discussions eventually to arise from a GPS-enabled device case. "So, gentlefolk of the jury, the GPS trace in my phone (extracted by the police for the prosecution) shows clearly that I was [somewhere else] at the time of the murder."
s/their front door/the last time that the GPS module saw enough sky for long enough to update it's position/
Which, given that GPS is, as I said, often affected by foliage, being under a roof, to a significant degree even by cloudy/ rainy weather... could well be a very different location to what gets written into the time-position database. And of course, there is no "right" answer, so pretty much every device's programmer is free to choose how to implement the details of this as they wish to.
Which prompts me with some bloody awkward questions for the camera shop, when I go shopping. Ditto, for the phone shop, next time I'm in the market for a new phone (unless, as is likely, I opt for a standard phone instead of a too-complex-to-use phone).
It's nearly a decade since I last had a GPS receiver (which shows what I think of the technology, and how urgent I considered it's replacement after it got stolen ; also says how much less I think of the SatNav I got a couple of years ago compared to a GPS receiver unit).
Also, I'm not familiar with any diesel powered plants, in the US at least.
Since you report personal experience, this is undebatable. However, it is very likely that there is significant routine diesel generation, in addition to backups, temporary sites, etc.
Natural gas is the secondary powering hydrocarbon medium of choice here.
Probably the case here in the UK too. But with a significant number of small, populated, islands a fair way out to sea, there are a number of places where diesel generation for mains power is the norm. I don't have any numbers, but it's unlikely to be under hundreds of thousands. Example : Fair Isle, which is populated and powered by wind and diesel.
I would be surprised if the US didn't have comparable locations, some of them plausibly on the mainland, but just very remote.
I've seen pictures posted from someone's iPhone taken in their bedroom that contained the GPS coordinates of their house.
Given that GPS devices generally don't work indoors (and often don't work under significant foliage), this begs the question of whether associated cameras report (in their EXIF data, or whatever) the last valid GPS location received, or a "rogue value" (e.g. Long 361, Lat 361), or a marine location off the west of Africa (Long 0, Lat 0).
I'm sure commenters won't read this far, but I'm thinking about getting a new back-camera to go with my existing investment in lenses, and I'm considering whether a GPS-enabled back-camera would be worthwhile. Not a mobile phone. So don't teach me to suck eggs about how iWhatevers triangulate from cellphone towers, because that's not the question. (Besides, I'm known to photograph several hundred miles from the nearest cellphone tower, and I always switch the phone off when it's flying.)
Slashdot Mirror
When is the funeral? No flowers?
That would be my strategy too. Something that requires human interaction every few minutes ... then after an hour or so, it requires action every minute ... then every 30 seconds ... Big flashy scary warnings on boot. Make the machine sing painful sounds on alternate boots. Make getting the machine fixed the less painful option than letting things carry on.
Oh, and if the machine in question has a well-known popular email client, append a "this machine is infected by X, Y and Z" to each account's signature code and turn the thing on ; a bit of public shame might help too.
But most of all, make damned good and sure that your new code works and is safe. And that your clean-up tools work. (That bit the FBI ought to be able to out-source to an AV vendor.)
All very nice good stuff - I see one of the authors is at Edinburgh Observatory, so I'll keep my ears peeled in case he ever does any public lectures.
We knew we weren't even the first generation.
Which is why I'd make the first serious target a dead comet (in an asteroid-like orbit). Bring back a lot of volatile reaction mass and suddenly a lot of your other problems get considerably easier.
pidgin English.
There's a Law somewhere that all posts complaining about grammar or spelling mistakes will themselves contain spelling or grammar errors. Obviously posts commenting on one's own previous errors are subject to a similar Law.
Pidgins are actually quite interesting probes into the development of language. They cast a little light into a very murky area.
The idea does sound intuitively attractive, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't work in practice. I can't recall enough physics to say why, but I don't think it's the case.
The assumed symmetry of matter vs antimatter would preclude being able to tell the difference by spectroscopy (checking this in the lab is one of the main justifications behind trying to make significant quantities of antihydrogen, antihelium etc.). However, since we know (from accelerator experiments) that matter and antimatter do annihilate vigorously on contact, and we do not see this sort of energy release in the sky, then we can safely deduce that everything that we see is matter, not antimatter. Space is not a perfect vacuum ; the interstellar medium would make a strong glow where a region of matter met a region of antimatter. In this case, absence of evidence actually is positive evidence of absence.
IIRC, one of the early theories to explain gamma-ray bursts was that they were evidence of antimatter object interacting with the Kuiper Belt/ Oort cloud. That theory went out of the window when their distances were measured.
We do get hit by antimatter meteorites, but they're very small. The first detection of the antielectron was for example, in cosmic ray studies on a balloon. There's a whole-sky telescope in Argentina (IIRC) designed to study precisely these high-energy cosmic ray events, because they're still of higher energy than can be produced in CERN, Fermilab, etc. Link
See above ; rare, but not absent.
There is no mechanism the I know of which can do this. You can easily segregate on charge, but some antiparticles are positive (antielectrons) while some are negative (antiprotons) and others are neutral (antineutrons), so that's not going to segregate matter from antimatter without a prior processing stage.
I don't think gravity works like that - it's concerned with mass, not whether or not particles are matter or antimatter. Descriptions of "dark energy" emphasise that it behaves LIKE an antigravity, not that it is an antigravity.
As you've later agreed ... 20MB is actually reasonably useful. The problem with this techniques is that you're going to need in the order of 160GB of non-infringing data to hide the 20MB in. And if you're wanting to do this routinely, you're going to need a lot more, otherwise it's going to start to look suspicious. Lots of Jason Bourne lookalikes crossing your borders, all carrying laptops with the same collection of movies on them ... peculiar. Attention-attracting.
Actually ... a ripped collection of movies ... as long as they were definitely legal (so you'd probably need to be using in-house training videos of mind-exploding tedium ; Hollywood movies could get annoying questions asked, and you don't want to attract attention.
Hmmm. There is a problem there, but thinking a bit more about it, you could probably generate convincing data fairly easily to do your steganography with. And it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a scenario where the hard drive has multiple partitions for data management, again without attracting attention.
I suppose I'd better go and RTFA now.
Once we've got the issues of radiation protection, long-term power supplies (i.e., nuclear) and living in and maintaining a truly closed ecology solved ... the only thing between us and the stars is the psychology of building and manning generation ships. Suspended animation techniques might help there but they're not essential, so if they remain fiction that's not a show stopper.
A thousand-year long exploration expedition to Alpha Centauri might sound incredible today, but such a project would look very different to a family returning from a 10-year mining contract in the Kuiper Belt.
It's very unlikely that we're the only life in the universe, and I think that it's unlikely that we're the only intelligent life in the universe (but out of deference to Conway Morris, I do have to entertain the idea) ; but the galaxy could be ours before our species is a half-million generations old. (Actually, we'd speciate, I'm almost certain ; whether deliberately by genetic engineering or incidentally by founder-effect and drift is moot ; probably both.)
I am occasionally contacted by friends in the press to "sanity-check" material in my professional field of competence.
Not all reporters (or editors) are as overblown as you're saying. Though possibly the ones who work on mass-market publications rather than technical publications for niche markets are that bad.
No, I don't know of any examples where legislation has effectively stopped this sort of problem. It really is a cultural thing, I suspect. Cultures don't change rapidly - it's at least a decadal thing, if not a generational thing.
It is, slightly.
Well, it'll end the day that we can persuade (by jack-booted force, if necessary ; "desirable" is taken as a given) the Septics to confine themselves to slashdot.org.us and leave the non-nationalised version for the rest of the world.
Oh, and BTW, in the Rest of The World (to which you are posting, by not posting to slashdot.org.us), "liberal" is not generally a term of abuse. Even here in Britain under our ConDem (pronounced as condemn) coalition.
No. We look at the wide smorgasboard available to us and wonder which to choose to participate in, today.
Poly- or single- user ?
Bondage-and-discipline or un-typed?
Big-endian, little-endian or amphi-endian?
Sex can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Some people even associate it with reproduction.
I mean, I've brought and used Apple products before (as well having been given them). Then I've chosen to sell them on and use the money for something else.
So, does that make me a target for Apple to try to win me back as a user, or not.
I really can't figure out what (if anything) they're trying to do. And I don't give it much thought though, since it's possible that Apple aren't actually interested in re-gaining former users, considering them as "beyond hope".
Do you have any examples of any countries that have effective laws preventing a "revolving door" between employment by a regulatory body and employment by a regulated business? Any examples at all?
It is not impossible that general anti-corruption ethos and relatively high moral standards make the "revolving door" ineffective in the Nordic countries ; but whether there are actually laws on their books is a different question. (I don't recall hearing allegations of doors revolving to public disquiet, but I don't keep a particularly close ear open across the German Ocean.)
I'm no medic ; but I do know enough anatomy to look forward to your visit.
No fair!
How do you expect us to get a good thorough-going scare story going if you go around publicising true facts like that!
Your source for this claim is ... what?
I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137 are reported at the moment in monitoring around the site.
Actually ... the other implication of what you wrote is that you know of non-radioactive isotopes of U-235 and Pu-239 : do tell more, I'd be fascinated.
[I don't claim to be a nuclear physicist ; but understanding isotope geochemistry questions is something that comes up from time to time in my employment, at which point I have to educate other people at work. When I say "tell more, I'd be fascinated," I mean exactly that.]
Well maybe the Fukushima débÃcle will introduce an Iodine Monster too (as well as a probable Slashdot-accented-character-eating Monster). And generations as yet unborn will learn the mantra "can I haz uniodised salt, puleeze".
A decade ago, I'd have laughed at educated intelligent people abandoning something as well-demonstrated as vaccination. These days, I wonder if we'll see the return of goitres in the First World?
The Darwin Award production line must be manning up for a busy decade.
So, have you ever lived in a building with several hundred other households? Where it could easily be 10 minutes walk (waiting for elevators, etc) between your GPS device (SatNav, whatever) losing sight of the sky and you arriving at your domicile (in the sense that a search warrant would be limited to one such premises).
I'm planning on consuming beer next Friday with one of our programming team who lives in such a house. Without too much difficulty, by choosing routes to approach his house and with a little luck from the weather (overcast, perhaps haar), I could probably put the last fix recorded by a GPS 10 minutes walk from the entrance to the block of flats.
So, if he were to be designing a suite of GPS tracking software for a product, I suspect that he'd take a substantially different approach to the way that you would. Unless, of course, some mind equally devious to mine covered the question in the specification for the code.
I cast my mind back to the Damilola Taylor case, where a considerable amount of evidence about the minutiae of mobile phone signal strength location methods was disputed at trial. I would anticipate corresponding discussions eventually to arise from a GPS-enabled device case. "So, gentlefolk of the jury, the GPS trace in my phone (extracted by the police for the prosecution) shows clearly that I was [somewhere else] at the time of the murder."
s/their front door/the last time that the GPS module saw enough sky for long enough to update it's position/
Which, given that GPS is, as I said, often affected by foliage, being under a roof, to a significant degree even by cloudy/ rainy weather ... could well be a very different location to what gets written into the time-position database. And of course, there is no "right" answer, so pretty much every device's programmer is free to choose how to implement the details of this as they wish to.
Which prompts me with some bloody awkward questions for the camera shop, when I go shopping. Ditto, for the phone shop, next time I'm in the market for a new phone (unless, as is likely, I opt for a standard phone instead of a too-complex-to-use phone).
It's nearly a decade since I last had a GPS receiver (which shows what I think of the technology, and how urgent I considered it's replacement after it got stolen ; also says how much less I think of the SatNav I got a couple of years ago compared to a GPS receiver unit).
You must be feeling pretty unfulfilled reading Slashdot then.
Since you report personal experience, this is undebatable. However, it is very likely that there is significant routine diesel generation, in addition to backups, temporary sites, etc.
Probably the case here in the UK too. But with a significant number of small, populated, islands a fair way out to sea, there are a number of places where diesel generation for mains power is the norm. I don't have any numbers, but it's unlikely to be under hundreds of thousands. Example : Fair Isle, which is populated and powered by wind and diesel.
I would be surprised if the US didn't have comparable locations, some of them plausibly on the mainland, but just very remote.
Given that GPS devices generally don't work indoors (and often don't work under significant foliage), this begs the question of whether associated cameras report (in their EXIF data, or whatever) the last valid GPS location received, or a "rogue value" (e.g. Long 361, Lat 361), or a marine location off the west of Africa (Long 0, Lat 0).
I'm sure commenters won't read this far, but I'm thinking about getting a new back-camera to go with my existing investment in lenses, and I'm considering whether a GPS-enabled back-camera would be worthwhile. Not a mobile phone. So don't teach me to suck eggs about how iWhatevers triangulate from cellphone towers, because that's not the question. (Besides, I'm known to photograph several hundred miles from the nearest cellphone tower, and I always switch the phone off when it's flying.)