The idea is that once the ice has melted it will be cheaper to get to the fuel/resources there.
Wrong. Development plans have been multi-stranded : directional drilling from artificial, artificially increased, or natural islands ; drilling and piping from sub-sea (and sub-ice-gouge) manifolds ; drilling from gravity base structures of the scale of Hibernia (East of Canada, installed in the mid-1980s, designed for "Iceberg Ally", which is a harsher test than the relatively slow, flexible sea ice.
In Feburary 2006 there was a conference on Arctic oil resources - I attended - which discussed the important questions of - is there likely to be any? ; if so, very approximately how much? ; where is better than where? . The question of "how to get it out of the ground" didn't receive any podium attention (there may have been discussion in coffee breaks and poster sessions - I wasn't everywhere) ; the question of how to get it to market received more attention, since tankering is unattractive (ice + shallow seas = troublesome shipping), but railheads and pipelines are few, far between, and slow to build. The engineering of how to get it out of the ground isn't considered a challenge. It won't be easy, but there's little reason to expect to need anything novel.
But that makes the spokescritter's point re: finding pieces moot and the comment mostly FUD.
So, the spokesperson's point utterly indistinguishable from almost all points uttered by paid-up members of the Guild of Spokescritters, Flacks and Disattentionistas : viz - all pure, high grade FUD.
Natural space junk of similar mass hits the Earth all the time. When was the last time you heard of anyone getting killed by a meteorite?
A claim was made concerning a dog and the Nakhla meteorite in 190-something. Tunguska was big enough and over a wide enough area that there was a good chance of someone getting whacked by either the meteorite, or a falling tree. And it was a sufficiently wild area that someone disappearing is not likely to raise eyebrows. Eyewitnesses == chance of getting too close. In the 1950s or 60s there were two reports of near-misses in the American domain - one woman who got whacked in the side by a biggish lump that pierced the roof of her house, and one car that got a "bumper bender".
But there's time yet. What's that rapidly brightening light in the sky?
Still. the idea of a refridgerator sized piece of toxic metal slamming down, perhaps anywhere, does make one a little nervous.
The metal isn't described as toxic - it's the ammonia that the metal contains. And that's probably stretching the term 'toxic' somewhat. Ammonia isn't nice stuff, but it does take substantial amounts to hurt, let alone kill. I've probably cleared up more carbouy-full puddles of SG0.880 ammonia-water from inside cupboards than you have. My opinion may be prejudiced by experience.
I wonder if they can track where this stuff will end up falling to earth.
The summary (let alone TFA!) says that they don't know when it'll come down, exactly ; since the object is moving in it's orbit while the Earth moves differently, this equates to it being significantly uncertain where it will come down. IIRC, the ISS orbits at an inclination of about 52 degrees (to the celestial equator). So if you're outside latritudes -52 to +52, than you've nothing to worry about. Beyond that, I'm unwilling to comment, and since I'm outside that window, I see no reason to look up ephemerides.
Ammonium Chloride (aka Sal Ammoniac, aka smelling salts) used to be an integral part of first aid kits until fairly recently, BTW.
Sal volatile - ammonium carbonate, according to Wikipedia ; though my memory had it that there's also ammonium hydrosulphide too. Again, wikipedia points that particular compound at "stink bombs". In practice, I'd bet there were quantities of all of these, and any other ammonium compound that honked to the point of gagging ; different amounts according to different apothecary's methods of preparation.
Good candy to have at work too. No one steals it, at least not after the first piece.
Victory-V used to be good too - while they still had several percent w/w of a cumulative liver poison (chloroform) in them. Since they replaced that with some namby-pamby E-number, they've not been worth spitting at people, let alone eating.
People writing software could simply manually mark their own software, or non-packaged software as needed.
So how would malware not mark itself in the same way?
The "mark" would need to be made using something like a public-key signature system. The signature contains the path of the OK'd file, it's MDx hash (doesn't particularly matter which hash you choose), and the public key ID of the person who says it's OK, then sign it with that person's private key. The "OK" mark should be trivial to check then. In addition, since you're talking about someone's within-company ID, you're also talking about their within-company public and private keys, so they can't take those signatures with them and the marking of the system becomes part of the owner's intellectual property.
The malware would have to infiltrate a user ID (and public/private keys) into the system that is secured. And probably they'd need to find and circumvent whatever hash system is being used too (you don't need to use MD5 - there are many other cryptographic hashes around, and the benefits of a multiculture are obvious here).
The problem with that is that the people who do it become "criminals" under US law.
And this is a problem because? Oh - this particular bit of research is based in the US.
OK, so do your research under some more favourable legal system. Problem solved. After all, it's not as if the US is the only place in the world with acceptably high living standards for carrying out asll sorts of research, and if you feel the US's laws are inappropriate in this respect, then moving yourself (and any funding you carry, and any tax income derived from you) out of the US is one of the few things that you can do which would actually gain the attention of the "powers that be". Heretical though it may sound, you might actually prefer life in the outside world.
No, Gentry Lee is a devout Roman Catholic. His following several books were even more preachy.
Sweet! We had one of those "beat the meek into church by shouting at them in the street" organisms cluttering up Mammon square in town this afternoon. But since he was doing such a hilariously bad job of persuading people to take Bog's shilling (sorry, last week's book was "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ; until then, I'd forgotten about the Russian honorific for the monotheists' common delusion), I let him carry on making a fool of himself in public. Why, indeed, go about interrupting organisms who are damaging your enemies' case so effectively?
There's something particularly nice about a Bog-fan shooting his religion in the back by means of a particularly crass piece of advertisement. Costs them money, brains and time, while making them publicly ridiculous and reducing their already waning support. Sweet!
The earliest tetrapods commonly had from four to eight digits on their fore-limbs and hind-limbs.
The last time I looked, octadactyl limbs were known, heptadactyls and (of course) the stereotypical pentadactyl ; I'm not sure whether hexadactyl limbs are or are not known from the fossil record, but I'm sure that tetradactyls are not reported except as reduced pentadactyls.
This corresponded to the ancestral lobe structure of their immediate fishy predecessors.
Hmmm, that's a VERY broad brush. I'd recommend Jenny Clack's "Gaining Ground" for a medium-weight introduction. (I'll admit - despite JC's relatively engaging style, I've not finished reading my copy.) There's also a commemorative volume coming out of the Geological Society's Publishing House for Pete Forey's work on the fishy end of the tetrapod continuum, which might be clearer. http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/publications/bookshop/page3213.html
Come to think of it, Forey's coelacanth book is pretty good too, when it comes to the different structures of fish limbs.
However insects and relatives have been more creative with all even numbers - 2, 4, 6, 8 and dozens.
Echinodermata, anyone? Pentameric symmetry (as a secondary developmental twist, literally, on an early embryological bilateral symmetry). Maybe not as numerically significant as 6-limbed (insects), 8-limbed (Chelicates, spiders & scorpions) and 10-limbed (Decapoda, crustaceans), but probably beating the miserable 4-limbed vertebrates.
I'm at a loss to think of any two-limbed complex organisms.
Extant ones... look at the ratite birds ostriches (who you could argue have 4 limbs, but two of them are almost useless), or at emus (better example of 2-limbed), or at kiwis arms anatomically present, but almost completely invisible under the plumage. Looking back in time... the Phorusrhacos had no effective forelimbs. Whether the Tyrannosaurids could make effective use of their forelimbs is open to debate. and what the hell was Mononychus up to?
A number of snakes have one pair of rear limbs, or front limbs, or indeterminate limbs, or internal limb girdles but no external expression ; and whether they fit your "two-limbed" criterion is up to you. Axolotls too, IIRC.
Stretching the definition beyond the tediously stereotypic vertebrates, or even the chordates, there's a range of water-dwelling near-microscopic organisms which have one pair of limbs. "Copepods" (not a formal genus, IIRC), Daphnia (a modified crustacean, IIRC) I have a clear mental image of, and there are hosts (tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of species) of conodont morphospecies whose host organisms I believe are thought to be two limbed. At least in the Leith specimens. But they're back into the chordates, if not vertebrates, so we might as well chuck the lampreys and/ or hagfish in too, as they're two-limbed too.
In case anyone doesn't know, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction classic that only gets better with age.
I recall reading it a couple of decades ago. Flagged as "probably worth a re-read, when I've nothing better on the to-do list". (I'm currently re-reading Time Enough for Love.)
The sequels made in collaboration with Gentry Lee, however, have no touch of Clarke's genius.
An allegation I've heard before.
It's suggested that Gentry Lee penned them all by himself, and his interests were peculiar indeed.
This does not, in and of itself, constitute grounds for bypassing the book.
The third volume of the series has some of the most ridiculous sex ever found in science fiction, a genre already infamous for bad erotic scenes.
This does not, in and of itself, constitute grounds for bypassing the book. In some circles, it could be a feature.
Then, in the fourth volume, Lee reveals that the mysterious aliens whose starship humans had boarded were, in fact, angels serving the Christian God.
Ah, satire?
Though why an omnipotent deity works through robots and subjects races to agonizingly slow slower-than-light travel is never explained.
It is well established that the christian deity is an unjust sadist. So having this sort of behaviour attributed to this deity is what you'd expect from satire.
I'm intrigued - I might remember to get pick up one of the Rama books next time I'm idly browsing the bookshop. How did Lazarus Long put it? "One man's blasphemy is another's belly-laugh." ?
I know there are a lot of jokes floating around here, but could the applications be useful? Can we grow diamond ball-bearings or something? Ideas?
I was discussing this in a job interview... when... 1994 IIRC. The company I was being interviewed by had recently announced new products involving putting diamond coatings onto non-planar surfaces. At first glance, diamond coating the balls and races in a ball bearing seemed like a good idea. Then we wondered what would happen when an impact (and this was in a high-impact application with non-radial and non-axial forces, all varying on the millisecond scale) led to part of the diamond coating spalling off. You now have bare steel exposed to lubrication greases with fragments of diamond floating around in them (and there was no room to put a lube-oil cleaning system into the machine. Well, not easily.) The steel wouldn't last long. Whether the composite would last longer... moot point ; whether the failure would be more reliably distributed in time or more stochastic... again a moot point. Being able to be confident of getting (say) 50 hours or 500,000 revolutions of use out of a machine was considered more important than getting 1000 hours of use out of one machine in 10. But, yes, diamond-coating of bearing surfaces is an interesting topic. That it doesn't get used (yet, TTBOMK) suggests that there are other issues than coating the bearings.
But who uses the current build of AR? AR 8.0 is a disaster and the reason I switched to Foxit. I guess the versions after 8.0 are not better.
Substitute "5.05" for "8.02 and you'll be getting closer to my experience. Once Acrobat removed the capability for me to export the text of a PDF to a text file without having to pick up a mouse and plug it in, then I stopped downgrading to newer versions. Now that I'm occasionally (under 1%) seeing PDFs generated with image types that aren't recognised, then I'm having to look at other programs. FoxIt solved that particular problem, but I don't know if I'll replace AR 5.05 with FoxIt in my re-install set, yet.
If you look closely, I think you'll find that the satellite itself (ammortized over the years, if you like) dominates the program cost - that's why this 747 idea makes sense. Non-satellite telescopes are just orders of magnitude cheaper.
That's not in dispute. (Except by whoever wrote "So, a satellite is way cheaper - even if you were to completely replace it every fews years." ; the spelling mistake should make it easy to locate the author.) But the original statement that "The satellite is free to fly after launch, of course." remains flat-out wrong.
Actually, I wonder how much the costs would balance out for long-lived satellites. Hubble has the complicating factor of servicing missions, but for something like a relatively run-of-the-mill EOS satellite that's up for a decade and a half or even two, that's a long time to run ground systems. Plus, of course, "whose" budget it comes out of is always a bit unclear. Does it really matter (except in a fairly bean-counter-ish way) whether the costs are borne by tax payers via NASA and central government, or by tax payers via an Astronomy department, a university board, and the equivalent of PPARC, from central government.
The satellite is free to fly after launch, of course.
Certainly it's free, as long as you don't do anything with the data that it sends down. That's both the imaging data and the engineering data. If you don't do that, and don't listen to it, then you don't need to build and maintain Earth-based reception stations to pick up the signals, nor pay for the ground-based (or satellite-based) network links to get the data to the researchers who aren't going to be looking at the data. you also won't need to pay for any engineering teams to listen to any of the equipment status, nor to maintain any archives of the "as designed" and "as built" records of the equipment. Those programmers who understand the software that runs the satellite - you can get rid of them too, because you're never going to find any of the bugs that may or may not be there, and even if you did, you're not going to be uploading any new software. Come to think of it, since you're not going to be listening to any of the data that comes down, you might as well not bother with that infrastructure for allocating time on the telescope, optimising time usage, etc. Fire the lot of them, I say! What else can you trim from the budget, now that you're not going to be spending anything after the satellite is launched? Oh, you can get rid of the guy who's liaison with the "space junk" department. Who cares if your satellite gets hit by a dropped glove and smashed into a thousand pieces - you're not going to know, because you've not got any ground infrastructure to hear the signal go "Is there anyone there?... Please, Is there anyone there?... Is there an$5&$^£! [No Carrier]".
Oh, so you've got an international legal agreement to monitor the flight path of your satellites, to avoid generating more "space junk". Gosh darn it. Perhaps, to avoid that on-going cost, we'd better deliberately bring the satellite down now. Make that guys last job, as he packs up his desk and picks up his P45, to calculate where in the orbit to fire the retro rockets. Damn, we need that ground-based infrastructure. And where's that Flight Engineer? Left? Well, hire him back... from China?!... and he's demanding how much!!? OK, we'll train someone from the Friendly Manuals. What do mean - the Friendly Manuals weren't written, to save costs??/SARCASM
The costs of ground-based infrastructure may be lower than the cost of the satellites, but it's non-zero, and often significant.
Throw in the fact that many (most?) insurance companies won't pay out in the case of a break-in without signs of forceful entry and it is a pretty scary situation.
Read your policy documents. Phone the company if necessary to clarify their position (use the following story as a scenario if necessary - you're checking if you'd be covered in a case similar to "your friend") ; if possible, get them to clarify it in writing, if it's not clear in the policy. If you don't like their terms, take your business elsewhere.
Some years ago I was away from home for a week or two. I suspect the drug dealer living nearby noticed that I wasn't in, and sent some of his customers round to earn their smack money. (Modify the scenario as appropriate to your area ; my drug dealer actually lives in the apartment upstairs. You may not know where all your local drug dealers live, so choose other local demons.) Next day, one of my neighbours noticed that my door was flapping in the breeze, and informed the police. The police could plainly see that I'd been burgled, but couldn't contact me, so they just got a locksmith to repair the damage to the door and make the place secure again. I came back into the country, discovered the burglary, talked to the police, and spent a miserable weekend cataloguing the stolen goods. I then went to the police station with the list of stolen items, serial numbers etc, leaving my laptop locked up inside the house. While I was at the police, someone (from footprints, not the same someone(s), or at least, wearing different shoes) used a set of keys which had been taken in the original burglary but which I'd forgotten about, walked into the house, and walked out with my laptop. They didn't lock the door behind them - there wasn't a lot of point, was there? Two separate burglaries ; two distinct crimes ; possibly two (several) separate criminals ; two separate claims. Both claims accepted.
If you don't like how a company deals with situations, don't buy their product. I understand that they may think that you're likely to defraud them, while there were unusual circumstances in my case. But it's not too incredible. Got a kid with keys, who goes to a party one night and loses his/her/it's keys? Are you going to change ALL the locks under all such circumstances? Yes, as a householder you have to exercise reasonable care, but that is "reasonable" care, not high levels of paranoia. (I'm more paranoid now ; whether I'm paranoid enough is another question.)
I can almost hear the flurry of foolish {Insert deity of your choice}-ian people (*) writing to {Insert idiotic excuse for a newspaper in your region} along the lines of "Look at this photo of a pumpkin I brought. It's got an image of [ {Insert deity of choice} OR {Insert angel of choice} OR {Insert demon of choice} OR {Insert politician of choice} ] and therefore proves that [ { ( {deity of choice} exists ) OR ( {politician of choice} is the [spawn of {devil of choice} ] OR [ favoured of {deity of choice} ] )
Have I mismatched a parenthesis there?
(*) I use the word "people" in an anatomical sense, not to imply any mental abilities that would make a mother amoeba proud.
Oh, and let me re-iterate: Sensitive data should not be stored on a computer that can be carried away or easily accessed, with or without encryption. Just look on how MI5 left laptops all over the place.
You use (have used) the past tense? Do you know something that we don't?
though Niven did write one animated Star Trek episode
Well, yes and no. It was an adaptation (which he did) of his earlier Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon", with Spock substituting for the Puppeteer Nessus in the animation (and other minor variations).
It's been re-written recently. By Niven. With a lot more about what's going on inside Nessus' head. Sorry, hump. not head. Or heads.
"You saved his life by tying a tourniquet around his neck ? !"
Spoiler for yourself CRCulver (715279) and Ernesto Alvarez (750678) : there is significant new matter on this in the recent "Juggler of Worlds" by LarryN and ANOther. . . . Spoiler space . . . There isn't any plan to colonize the antimatter planet as such, but there is a plan to send people and/ or equipment to mine the antimatter planet. The military implications of this are not lost on the pacified species (Kzinti) of Known Space, nor on the several remaining dangerous, if not aggressive, species (not named - RTFn). The materials needed for this mining job are not "Unobtanium" in the universe - stasis fields are well-known if poorly understood phenomena in Known Space ; the other component in the plan was "fine control of magnetic fields", which for a universe that's had 500 years of experience with on-ship fusion power plants, should be a well-established technology. Stasis fields to prevent matter contacting antimatter (at the same time - stasis is a time-dilation technology), including any crew ; magnetic fields to manipulate the antimatter. Well established technology in the universe, but it's still a dangerous undertaking. I'm still debating if JoW is a piece of classic Niven. I haven't re-read it yet, which isn't a very good sign.
There are much better neutron shields, but they are very exotic and expensive. Borated Polyethylene, hafnium, cadmium or any other material with large numbers of hydrogen atoms present, water being one of the better ones.
Definitely, the point being that you get the most scattering in collisions between objects of near equal mass. The closest mass neutral particle to a neutron is a hydrogen atom (with it's approximately 1 electron associated with one proton), and so the important oil-well petrophysical measurement "neutron density" is actually a measure of the mean number of hydrogen atoms per unit volume in the measured area. In contrast, the so-called "bulk density" petrophysical measurement uses gamma ray photons with an energy that gives each photon a comparable momentum with an electron, so the "bulk density" tool is actually giving you a measure of the number of electrons (and hence protons) per unit volume.
It might sound useless to you, but I have to explain this at least once per quarter year to colleagues trying to perform a "quick look" analysis of a set of wireline logs from an oilwell under evaluation. The teaching of these skills is riddled with such obfuscations.
... and we _have_ demonstrated the ability to create artificial ecologies that are sustainable in the long-term.
Your example, please? Journal, volume number and page number would do - there's a good library just down the road. Actually, you use the plural. ExampleS, please.
Also, considering that I'm a geologist and I have a sightly different understanding of the meaning of "long-term" to most people (hey, what's a gigayear between friends?), I'd be interested to read what you'd consider to be an adequate "long-term" demonstration of the effectiveness of a proposed closed-ecology system. If I were assessing such a system to commit both myself and my children (and their children, should they choose to have any) to living in... I'd want to have seen the demonstration / test-bed system working with a real-live test group for at least a generation and a bit. That would mean, getting the first children who conceived in the closed system to the point of conceiving the next generation in the system. Say, at least 16 years (legal niceties aside). That test could be done in reasonable safety - high Earth orbit is as good a vacuum and a radiation test as interstellar space, but a lot more reachable. But the time is the critical requirement. (Note : I'm not asking for the system to be perfect. Lessons will be learned on the way. But the crew inside the test system would have to fix any problems that occur during the test without importing anything other than data. And preferably not even that - communications links are tricky enough without Einstein sticking his oar in.)
The longest that a closed ecology has been run other than the whole planet is... a couple of weeks. The various space missions have run on importing food, air and water while throwing away trash. That's not closed. The experiment that I'm expecting you to cite... well I was watching the reports of it as it was happening. So, surprise me by citing a different experiment.
Are generation ships necessary? Assume a drive that can produce 0.1 g from here to around Alpha Centauri (not the most likely candidate - the binary nature makes life hard for planets):
4 light years at 0.1g = 1.0 m/s/s with mid-point turn-over.
4LY = 4* y 4
365* d 1,460
24* h 35,040
3600* s 126,144,000
300,000,000 m 37,843,200,000,000,000 divide by 2 for half-way point : 18,921,600,000,000,000 m
s=0.5*a*t^2 t = sqrt(2*s/a)
= sqrt(37843200000000000)
= 194,533,287 s
= 6.16 years to/ from turn-over
= 12.3 years for the one-way trip. v = a*t velocity at turnover : = 194,533,287 m/s
~= 0.64 times legal max. We're getting into decidedly relativistic territory, but not too far in. There would be significant time-dilation effects, making ship-time appear shorter than Earth time, but the effects aren't going to be drastic. You could do the nearest neighbours without going into generation ships, IF you can sustain 0.1g from your drive for a decade. but if you try going much further, say to the galactic roundabout at Barnard's Star, or to Sirius, and you're into generation ship territory. Until the physics of Star Trek becomes the physics of the Real World, you're looking at generation ships. (This should not come as news - generations of hard-SF authors have come to the same conclusion, or pulled the FTL driv
simply start with putting all the politicians, lawyers, C*Os, university professors and administrators and middle managers on the first ship so they can prepare the way for us mere mortals
Well, we'll have already used up the global warming deniers, creationists and other religious fundamentalists in the basic experiments on closed ecology work, so we might be reduced to these unpromising dregs for experimental animals.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong.
Development plans have been multi-stranded : directional drilling from artificial, artificially increased, or natural islands ; drilling and piping from sub-sea (and sub-ice-gouge) manifolds ; drilling from gravity base structures of the scale of Hibernia (East of Canada, installed in the mid-1980s, designed for "Iceberg Ally", which is a harsher test than the relatively slow, flexible sea ice.
In Feburary 2006 there was a conference on Arctic oil resources - I attended - which discussed the important questions of - is there likely to be any? ; if so, very approximately how much? ; where is better than where? . The question of "how to get it out of the ground" didn't receive any podium attention (there may have been discussion in coffee breaks and poster sessions - I wasn't everywhere) ; the question of how to get it to market received more attention, since tankering is unattractive (ice + shallow seas = troublesome shipping), but railheads and pipelines are few, far between, and slow to build.
The engineering of how to get it out of the ground isn't considered a challenge. It won't be easy, but there's little reason to expect to need anything novel.
So, the spokesperson's point utterly indistinguishable from almost all points uttered by paid-up members of the Guild of Spokescritters, Flacks and Disattentionistas : viz - all pure, high grade FUD.
A claim was made concerning a dog and the Nakhla meteorite in 190-something.
Tunguska was big enough and over a wide enough area that there was a good chance of someone getting whacked by either the meteorite, or a falling tree. And it was a sufficiently wild area that someone disappearing is not likely to raise eyebrows. Eyewitnesses == chance of getting too close.
In the 1950s or 60s there were two reports of near-misses in the American domain - one woman who got whacked in the side by a biggish lump that pierced the roof of her house, and one car that got a "bumper bender".
But there's time yet. What's that rapidly brightening light in the sky?
The metal isn't described as toxic - it's the ammonia that the metal contains. And that's probably stretching the term 'toxic' somewhat. Ammonia isn't nice stuff, but it does take substantial amounts to hurt, let alone kill. I've probably cleared up more carbouy-full puddles of SG0.880 ammonia-water from inside cupboards than you have. My opinion may be prejudiced by experience.
The summary (let alone TFA!) says that they don't know when it'll come down, exactly ; since the object is moving in it's orbit while the Earth moves differently, this equates to it being significantly uncertain where it will come down.
IIRC, the ISS orbits at an inclination of about 52 degrees (to the celestial equator). So if you're outside latritudes -52 to +52, than you've nothing to worry about. Beyond that, I'm unwilling to comment, and since I'm outside that window, I see no reason to look up ephemerides.
Sal volatile - ammonium carbonate, according to Wikipedia ; though my memory had it that there's also ammonium hydrosulphide too. Again, wikipedia points that particular compound at "stink bombs". In practice, I'd bet there were quantities of all of these, and any other ammonium compound that honked to the point of gagging ; different amounts according to different apothecary's methods of preparation.
Victory-V used to be good too - while they still had several percent w/w of a cumulative liver poison (chloroform) in them. Since they replaced that with some namby-pamby E-number, they've not been worth spitting at people, let alone eating.
The "mark" would need to be made using something like a public-key signature system. The signature contains the path of the OK'd file, it's MDx hash (doesn't particularly matter which hash you choose), and the public key ID of the person who says it's OK, then sign it with that person's private key. The "OK" mark should be trivial to check then.
In addition, since you're talking about someone's within-company ID, you're also talking about their within-company public and private keys, so they can't take those signatures with them and the marking of the system becomes part of the owner's intellectual property.
The malware would have to infiltrate a user ID (and public/private keys) into the system that is secured. And probably they'd need to find and circumvent whatever hash system is being used too (you don't need to use MD5 - there are many other cryptographic hashes around, and the benefits of a multiculture are obvious here).
And this is a problem because? Oh - this particular bit of research is based in the US.
OK, so do your research under some more favourable legal system. Problem solved. After all, it's not as if the US is the only place in the world with acceptably high living standards for carrying out asll sorts of research, and if you feel the US's laws are inappropriate in this respect, then moving yourself (and any funding you carry, and any tax income derived from you) out of the US is one of the few things that you can do which would actually gain the attention of the "powers that be".
Heretical though it may sound, you might actually prefer life in the outside world.
The last time I looked, octadactyl limbs were known, heptadactyls and (of course) the stereotypical pentadactyl ; I'm not sure whether hexadactyl limbs are or are not known from the fossil record, but I'm sure that tetradactyls are not reported except as reduced pentadactyls.
Hmmm, that's a VERY broad brush. I'd recommend Jenny Clack's "Gaining Ground" for a medium-weight introduction. (I'll admit - despite JC's relatively engaging style, I've not finished reading my copy.) There's also a commemorative volume coming out of the Geological Society's Publishing House for Pete Forey's work on the fishy end of the tetrapod continuum, which might be clearer. http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/publications/bookshop/page3213.html
Come to think of it, Forey's coelacanth book is pretty good too, when it comes to the different structures of fish limbs.
Echinodermata, anyone? Pentameric symmetry (as a secondary developmental twist, literally, on an early embryological bilateral symmetry). Maybe not as numerically significant as 6-limbed (insects), 8-limbed (Chelicates, spiders & scorpions) and 10-limbed (Decapoda, crustaceans), but probably beating the miserable 4-limbed vertebrates.
I recall reading it a couple of decades ago. Flagged as "probably worth a re-read, when I've nothing better on the to-do list". (I'm currently re-reading Time Enough for Love.)
An allegation I've heard before.
This does not, in and of itself, constitute grounds for bypassing the book.
This does not, in and of itself, constitute grounds for bypassing the book.
In some circles, it could be a feature.
Ah, satire?
It is well established that the christian deity is an unjust sadist. So having this sort of behaviour attributed to this deity is what you'd expect from satire.
I'm intrigued - I might remember to get pick up one of the Rama books next time I'm idly browsing the bookshop. How did Lazarus Long put it? "One man's blasphemy is another's belly-laugh." ?
I was discussing this in a job interview ... when ... 1994 IIRC. The company I was being interviewed by had recently announced new products involving putting diamond coatings onto non-planar surfaces. At first glance, diamond coating the balls and races in a ball bearing seemed like a good idea. Then we wondered what would happen when an impact (and this was in a high-impact application with non-radial and non-axial forces, all varying on the millisecond scale) led to part of the diamond coating spalling off. You now have bare steel exposed to lubrication greases with fragments of diamond floating around in them (and there was no room to put a lube-oil cleaning system into the machine. Well, not easily.) The steel wouldn't last long. Whether the composite would last longer ... moot point ; whether the failure would be more reliably distributed in time or more stochastic ... again a moot point. Being able to be confident of getting (say) 50 hours or 500,000 revolutions of use out of a machine was considered more important than getting 1000 hours of use out of one machine in 10.
But, yes, diamond-coating of bearing surfaces is an interesting topic. That it doesn't get used (yet, TTBOMK) suggests that there are other issues than coating the bearings.
Substitute "5.05" for "8.02 and you'll be getting closer to my experience.
Once Acrobat removed the capability for me to export the text of a PDF to a text file without having to pick up a mouse and plug it in, then I stopped downgrading to newer versions. Now that I'm occasionally (under 1%) seeing PDFs generated with image types that aren't recognised, then I'm having to look at other programs. FoxIt solved that particular problem, but I don't know if I'll replace AR 5.05 with FoxIt in my re-install set, yet.
That's not in dispute. (Except by whoever wrote "So, a satellite is way cheaper - even if you were to completely replace it every fews years." ; the spelling mistake should make it easy to locate the author.) But the original statement that "The satellite is free to fly after launch, of course." remains flat-out wrong.
Actually, I wonder how much the costs would balance out for long-lived satellites. Hubble has the complicating factor of servicing missions, but for something like a relatively run-of-the-mill EOS satellite that's up for a decade and a half or even two, that's a long time to run ground systems.
Plus, of course, "whose" budget it comes out of is always a bit unclear. Does it really matter (except in a fairly bean-counter-ish way) whether the costs are borne by tax payers via NASA and central government, or by tax payers via an Astronomy department, a university board, and the equivalent of PPARC, from central government.
Certainly it's free, as long as you don't do anything with the data that it sends down. That's both the imaging data and the engineering data. If you don't do that, and don't listen to it, then you don't need to build and maintain Earth-based reception stations to pick up the signals, nor pay for the ground-based (or satellite-based) network links to get the data to the researchers who aren't going to be looking at the data. you also won't need to pay for any engineering teams to listen to any of the equipment status, nor to maintain any archives of the "as designed" and "as built" records of the equipment. Those programmers who understand the software that runs the satellite - you can get rid of them too, because you're never going to find any of the bugs that may or may not be there, and even if you did, you're not going to be uploading any new software. ... Please, Is there anyone there? ... Is there an$5&$^£! [No Carrier]".
Come to think of it, since you're not going to be listening to any of the data that comes down, you might as well not bother with that infrastructure for allocating time on the telescope, optimising time usage, etc. Fire the lot of them, I say!
What else can you trim from the budget, now that you're not going to be spending anything after the satellite is launched? Oh, you can get rid of the guy who's liaison with the "space junk" department. Who cares if your satellite gets hit by a dropped glove and smashed into a thousand pieces - you're not going to know, because you've not got any ground infrastructure to hear the signal go "Is there anyone there?
Oh, so you've got an international legal agreement to monitor the flight path of your satellites, to avoid generating more "space junk". Gosh darn it. Perhaps, to avoid that on-going cost, we'd better deliberately bring the satellite down now. Make that guys last job, as he packs up his desk and picks up his P45, to calculate where in the orbit to fire the retro rockets. Damn, we need that ground-based infrastructure. And where's that Flight Engineer? Left? Well, hire him back ... from China?! ... and he's demanding how much!!? OK, we'll train someone from the Friendly Manuals. What do mean - the Friendly Manuals weren't written, to save costs?? /SARCASM
The costs of ground-based infrastructure may be lower than the cost of the satellites, but it's non-zero, and often significant.
Read your policy documents. Phone the company if necessary to clarify their position (use the following story as a scenario if necessary - you're checking if you'd be covered in a case similar to "your friend") ; if possible, get them to clarify it in writing, if it's not clear in the policy.
If you don't like their terms, take your business elsewhere.
Some years ago I was away from home for a week or two. I suspect the drug dealer living nearby noticed that I wasn't in, and sent some of his customers round to earn their smack money. (Modify the scenario as appropriate to your area ; my drug dealer actually lives in the apartment upstairs. You may not know where all your local drug dealers live, so choose other local demons.) Next day, one of my neighbours noticed that my door was flapping in the breeze, and informed the police. The police could plainly see that I'd been burgled, but couldn't contact me, so they just got a locksmith to repair the damage to the door and make the place secure again. I came back into the country, discovered the burglary, talked to the police, and spent a miserable weekend cataloguing the stolen goods. I then went to the police station with the list of stolen items, serial numbers etc, leaving my laptop locked up inside the house. While I was at the police, someone (from footprints, not the same someone(s), or at least, wearing different shoes) used a set of keys which had been taken in the original burglary but which I'd forgotten about, walked into the house, and walked out with my laptop. They didn't lock the door behind them - there wasn't a lot of point, was there?
Two separate burglaries ; two distinct crimes ; possibly two (several) separate criminals ; two separate claims. Both claims accepted.
If you don't like how a company deals with situations, don't buy their product. I understand that they may think that you're likely to defraud them, while there were unusual circumstances in my case. But it's not too incredible. Got a kid with keys, who goes to a party one night and loses his/her/it's keys? Are you going to change ALL the locks under all such circumstances? Yes, as a householder you have to exercise reasonable care, but that is "reasonable" care, not high levels of paranoia.
(I'm more paranoid now ; whether I'm paranoid enough is another question.)
I can almost hear the flurry of foolish {Insert deity of your choice}-ian people (*) writing to {Insert idiotic excuse for a newspaper in your region} along the lines of "Look at this photo of a pumpkin I brought. It's got an image of [ {Insert deity of choice} OR {Insert angel of choice} OR {Insert demon of choice} OR {Insert politician of choice} ] and therefore proves that [ { ( {deity of choice} exists ) OR ( {politician of choice} is the [spawn of {devil of choice} ] OR [ favoured of {deity of choice} ] )
Have I mismatched a parenthesis there?
(*) I use the word "people" in an anatomical sense, not to imply any mental abilities that would make a mother amoeba proud.
You use (have used) the past tense? Do you know something that we don't?
It's been re-written recently. By Niven. With a lot more about what's going on inside Nessus' head. Sorry, hump. not head. Or heads.
"You saved his life by tying a tourniquet around his neck ? !"
Spoiler for yourself CRCulver (715279) and Ernesto Alvarez (750678) : there is significant new matter on this in the recent "Juggler of Worlds" by LarryN and ANOther.
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Spoiler space
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There isn't any plan to colonize the antimatter planet as such, but there is a plan to send people and/ or equipment to mine the antimatter planet. The military implications of this are not lost on the pacified species (Kzinti) of Known Space, nor on the several remaining dangerous, if not aggressive, species (not named - RTFn).
The materials needed for this mining job are not "Unobtanium" in the universe - stasis fields are well-known if poorly understood phenomena in Known Space ; the other component in the plan was "fine control of magnetic fields", which for a universe that's had 500 years of experience with on-ship fusion power plants, should be a well-established technology. Stasis fields to prevent matter contacting antimatter (at the same time - stasis is a time-dilation technology), including any crew ; magnetic fields to manipulate the antimatter. Well established technology in the universe, but it's still a dangerous undertaking.
I'm still debating if JoW is a piece of classic Niven. I haven't re-read it yet, which isn't a very good sign.
Definitely, the point being that you get the most scattering in collisions between objects of near equal mass. The closest mass neutral particle to a neutron is a hydrogen atom (with it's approximately 1 electron associated with one proton), and so the important oil-well petrophysical measurement "neutron density" is actually a measure of the mean number of hydrogen atoms per unit volume in the measured area. In contrast, the so-called "bulk density" petrophysical measurement uses gamma ray photons with an energy that gives each photon a comparable momentum with an electron, so the "bulk density" tool is actually giving you a measure of the number of electrons (and hence protons) per unit volume.
It might sound useless to you, but I have to explain this at least once per quarter year to colleagues trying to perform a "quick look" analysis of a set of wireline logs from an oilwell under evaluation. The teaching of these skills is riddled with such obfuscations.
Your example, please? Journal, volume number and page number would do - there's a good library just down the road.
Actually, you use the plural. ExampleS, please.
Also, considering that I'm a geologist and I have a sightly different understanding of the meaning of "long-term" to most people (hey, what's a gigayear between friends?), I'd be interested to read what you'd consider to be an adequate "long-term" demonstration of the effectiveness of a proposed closed-ecology system. If I were assessing such a system to commit both myself and my children (and their children, should they choose to have any) to living in ... I'd want to have seen the demonstration / test-bed system working with a real-live test group for at least a generation and a bit. That would mean, getting the first children who conceived in the closed system to the point of conceiving the next generation in the system. Say, at least 16 years (legal niceties aside). That test could be done in reasonable safety - high Earth orbit is as good a vacuum and a radiation test as interstellar space, but a lot more reachable. But the time is the critical requirement.
(Note : I'm not asking for the system to be perfect. Lessons will be learned on the way. But the crew inside the test system would have to fix any problems that occur during the test without importing anything other than data. And preferably not even that - communications links are tricky enough without Einstein sticking his oar in.)
The longest that a closed ecology has been run other than the whole planet is ... a couple of weeks. The various space missions have run on importing food, air and water while throwing away trash. That's not closed. The experiment that I'm expecting you to cite ... well I was watching the reports of it as it was happening. So, surprise me by citing a different experiment.
Are generation ships necessary? :
Assume a drive that can produce 0.1 g from here to around Alpha Centauri (not the most likely candidate - the binary nature makes life hard for planets)
4 light years at 0.1g = 1.0 m/s/s with mid-point turn-over.
4LY = 4* y 4
365* d 1,460
24* h 35,040
3600* s 126,144,000
300,000,000 m 37,843,200,000,000,000
divide by 2 for half-way point : 18,921,600,000,000,000 m
s=0.5*a*t^2 t = sqrt(2*s/a)
= sqrt(37843200000000000)
= 194,533,287 s
= 6.16 years to/ from turn-over
= 12.3 years for the one-way trip.
v = a*t
velocity at turnover : = 194,533,287 m/s
~= 0.64 times legal max. We're getting into decidedly relativistic territory, but not too far in. There would be significant time-dilation effects, making ship-time appear shorter than Earth time, but the effects aren't going to be drastic.
You could do the nearest neighbours without going into generation ships, IF you can sustain 0.1g from your drive for a decade. but if you try going much further, say to the galactic roundabout at Barnard's Star, or to Sirius, and you're into generation ship territory.
Until the physics of Star Trek becomes the physics of the Real World, you're looking at generation ships. (This should not come as news - generations of hard-SF authors have come to the same conclusion, or pulled the FTL driv
Well, we'll have already used up the global warming deniers, creationists and other religious fundamentalists in the basic experiments on closed ecology work, so we might be reduced to these unpromising dregs for experimental animals.