The Orion was being developed by Lockheed-Martin, but Boeing already has an Orion-like capsule design. So this may be more of a lateral move from one company to another than a setback.
I'm sure there's some good reason for moving from L-M to Boeing for that work. Not sure exactly what it would be, but I'm certain there's a valid reason. If only we could guess...
On a completely unrelated historical side note, did you know that Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago in 2001? In an amazing coincidence, I think some major figure in the US political system lives in Chicago, doesn't he? Isn't that terribly interesting, if completely coincidental and off-topic?
The funny part of this story is that Verizon routers take so much effort to hack based on their default configuration. I read it as a good move on Verizon's part.
It's just hard enough that someone thinks that "hacking" it is some form of accomplishment. That's pretty impressive given that this is a default configuration, which by definition has to use some form of predictable algorithm for their password. At least they are shipping them with OK encryption enabled by default and a password that takes 4 minutes to crack.
Now, if someone managed to hack into one of these gizmos and get free Internet after a user changed the password to a properly secure one, that would be news.
I was at my father's house once, setting up a new wireless router. This was a few years ago. The directions said to plug it into the Internet, power it up, connect to it, and set up wireless security (optional). The problem is, the wireless side comes on at first power-up, and it's an open access point. So I connected all the cables, plugged it in, went to go get a cup of coffee, and by the time I returned 15 minutes later the wireless light was blinking solid and someone had already changed the configuration password. I had to do a factory reset and beat the guy to the configuration screen when it powered up again. There was no way to tell the router to power up without wireless enabled, and the antenna was not removable. I was seriously considering wrapping the !@#$ thing in tin foil to give me enough time to get the admin password changed, but on the third try I beat the little bastard to it or he gave up.
I can imagine that 90% of Internet users at the time would simply have powered up their router, seen the access point name, connected to it, and gone on blissfully unaware that a script kiddie next door had set up port forwarding and was running a Torrent client or webserver off their connection.
I think the fact that it takes 4 minutes to hack into a default-configured router is a pretty good indication of how far we've come. Maybe not far enough, but still pretty far.
Just realize that your dad will loose this file AND the password - requiring a cross country flight to visit.
Or at least instruction on how to press-and-hold the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds. On nearly every router I've heard of, that forces a factory reset, then you have them go through the setup process again.
Of course, if your dad is ponying up for a cross-country flight to come visit, I'd be the last one to interfere with good family relationships...:)
LEO and the moon are, as you say, wildly different. I don't think you appreciate just HOW wildly different, however.
If I were a potential customer looking to place something on the moon, I'd choose someone who had past Lunar experience. LEO, on the other hand, is child's play compared to going to the moon, and I probably wouldn't consider lunar experience relevant to a decision about an LEO vendor.
Low Earth Orbit means getting something to anywhere between 200 and 2000 kilometers up. The moon is 384,000 kilometers away. Even for the highest values of "Low Earth Orbit", you're still two orders of magnitude short of a one-way Lunar trip, much less a round trip. The launch from the moon, alone, will be more complex than the entire LEO mission.
It would be on the order of me asking who can build a play house for my daughter, and someone trying to impress me by saying they had just finished building the replacement for the World Trade Center for free so they could impress me with their building prowess. The experience of building a massive steel structure isn't relevant to the building of a small wooden structure. Likewise, for the most part the technology involved in a Lunar roundtrip is going to be almost completely dissimilar to LEO technology. Yeah, they're all rockets, but the similarity pretty much ends there.
It doesn't have to be particularly compelling. I could make a static pie chart and "explode" some small minority of the pie chart to make it look bigger, and mention specifically how small a percentage it represents, and I'll have a room full of audience members with a significant percentage who think the number is much bigger than it really is.
If anything, cartoony reconstructions are (for a while) going to be more compelling because they are a novelty. And many people won't believe them at a conscious level, but a few days later when they remember the story it'll be more like what the cartoon showed than what the mouth puppet behind the anchor desk said.
My Ghandi and Greedo mentions were more of a "slippery slope" argument about where this may end up going in the very near future. Once viewers accept cartoons as our data input for news, it'll be that much easier to fabricate it for us.
Not that most anchorpeople are much more than teleprompter interpreters ("reverse close-captioned for the non-hearing-impaired!") anyway.
There's a big difference between a misleading verbal description and a misleading reconstruction. The human mind is more likely to accept and believe something it's seen over something it's heard.
A lot of it depends on the quality of the "reconstruction" or "enhancement". An adjustment of just a few pixels in certain news shots could turn a story completely around. "Is that a plasma cannon from Unreal Tournament that Ghandi is holding up? I always thought that was a spinning wheel."
Adding a few special effects details, and doing just a tiny bit of adjustment, and suddenly Greedo shot first.
It's already getting hard to believe what is on the news. This is not going to help. It's not a surprise at all, in fact I'd be astonished to find out that a lot of video footage I've seen HASN'T been "enhanced" in some way or other. "Enhanced" can easily mean "altered to more accurately fit the story we want to tell."
"I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven."
Putting in a 6-point harness and/or a helmet with a head strap ignores one of the major advantages of deceleration-by-airbag - namely the fact that the seatbelt and airbag can give way and give you an extra 2 feet or so over which your valuable noggin can decelerate in an accident.
As far as wanting one - well, your call, but I'd prefer a poke to the snoot if it means the bruise will have a chance to heal.
Actually, it's closer to 6 feet, maybe a tad more, at least as far as your head is concerned in a frontal impact.
Car hits wall, car's 2-to-3-foot crumple zone does its thing and you experience a survivable but uncomfortable G-force until the airbag can deploy.
At that point, the initial crumple zone is gone and G-forces increase as the engine compartment starts absorbing energy over its few feet of space, but the airbag has now deployed and allows your head to move forward in a controlled deceleration over 2-3 feet as the seatbelt gives way. So the deceleration there is happening in two ways as far as your noggin is concerned (car slowing down, your head moving forward).
So the overall distance might be as much as 2-3 feet of initial crumple zone, plus another 4 feet or more between the engine compartment and the airbag.
I oversimplified my explanation a bit. Surviving an major accident is usually a multi-staged and complex bit of engineering. As one teeny detail, the airbag needs to go off just so to absorb the worst deceleration as the engine compartment is compressing and "pushing back" harder. As another, there can't be fatal-level G-forces during any part of the accident. They can vary, but they cannot exceed the fatal point. So putting one bolt in the wrong place can turn a crumple zone into a death zone.
Hats off to the eggheads who think about these things, figure them out, and come up with decent-looking cars that aren't 400 feet long.
Probably pretty well, for smaller accidents. But you wouldn't catch me driving one.
A (combined) 28MPH accident in a regular car with another regular car is, well, pretty trivial. Each car is assumed to be doing 14, or one car rear-ends another at 28. You'll know damned well you hit something, but as long as both people are in decently-designed cars, the worst injury will generally be to the wallet of the person found at fault. Maybe a little whiplash, but you'd have to be doing something really odd to be killed by it (like not wearing a seatbelt, but I digress, and probably not even then anyway).
But that's partly because a car is designed for much more serious crashes, and the current design is a compromise between the size of the crumple zone, the G-force you have to subject your occupants to, and how much impact you expect it to take. If we all drove spheres 150 feet in diameter, we could make them out of pretty soft stuff and absorb 200MPH impacts with nothing more than a few harsh words exchanged. However, in most accidents, the other car impacts you mere feet from your person, and it's some pretty amazing engineering that leads to anyone walking away from a serious accident at all.
A well-designed crumple zone "spreads out" the deceleration over as much time as possible, focusing on the more severe deceleration at the cost of making less severe impacts uncomfortable. If I tune my crumple zone to absorb exactly 40MPH of impact, then I'll be out of crumple zone once the accident reaches 41MPH, and then I hit the solid frame behind the crumple zone and the remainder of the speed is decelerated over a few inches. A well-designed crumple zone would crumple only halfway, giving me twice the deceleration force (which is less comfy, of course), but leaving me with enough reserve to sustain an 80MPH impact without running out of crumple zone.
You could take an EXISTING crumple zone and, with a gas ax and a little skill, remove a lot of its materials and re-tune it to absorb a 28MPH accident with very little apparent G-force (5MPH accident). But that car would be unsafe at any speed much beyond that. Get into a 50MPH accident, and the difference between 28MPH and 50MPH would be absorbed directly into the car's frame after the crumple zones run out, and you'd be "hurting or harping". The original crumple zone would be able to give you, say, a sustained survivable (but probably pretty damned uncomfortable) level of G-force up to a 75MPH crash. Your new crumple zone gives you a really comfortable level of G-forces followed by a sudden G-force when the crumple zone runs out. If you are still moving at more than about 10-20MPH once the crumple zones run out, you're going to be in a lot of pain, or dead.
I read it as his desire to use this foam as a replacement for the bumper and crumple zones. It would turn the existing crumple zones into something in the car's frame and bumper system that would absorb a great deal more of the impact and, therefore, largely eliminate the need for airbags.
I'm not sure I'm buying it, though. Airbags are an "also need" feature, and cannot be replaced wholly by a better crumple zone.
The problem lies in the elasticity and the distance. If you hit a brick wall doing 65MPH and your crumple zone is too squishy, it will continue crumpling up until you are included in the crumple zone. In other words, you're dead.
Make it too hard, and the car will stop more quickly than your flesh can handle. The airbag is a crude but effective way of allowing a relatively stiff crumple zone that can manage to keep your passenger cabin intact during a VERY major impact, and still accommodate your body's need to decelerate as gradually as possible. If you hit a brick wall doing 65MPH, the crumple zone decelerates the car from 65MPH - 0MPH in the distance represented by the zone (usually a few feet at best), and materials aren't going to improve on that a whole hell of a lot. You are still going from 65MPH-0MPH in just a few feet. That's a SERIOUS amount of deceleration.
The airbag is what takes your head and torso and slows them down as gently and slowly as possible, leveraging the deceleration already provided by the crumple zone and making the best use of it to keep your brains from splashing around in your noggin, and/or snapping your neck. Which is not to say the airbag is gentle or slow at all, far from it, just more gentle and slower than making your dainty neck bones absorb all of the force as your torso is stopped by the seatbelt and your several pounds of head really wants to keep going to make Newton happy.
Could be worse, though. You could be wearing no seatbelt at all and expect your chest and head to absorb all of the speed when they impact the steering wheel and windshield respectively. That always ends colorfully, particularly in shades of red and grey.
Well, in this case, doing the right thing IS about getting recognition for it, and that's OK.
Personally, every time I see a celebrity "spokescritter" for a product, I think "what a shame, they probably paid this schmoe millions of dollars to shill their product, when all they had to do to earn my attention was spend a half that on a socially useful cause, run a simpler ad telling me how good a citizen their company is, and lower the price of their product with the leftover amount."
Or, you know, maybe build the product you are selling me in the country I live in. I know, crazy idea, but if you're going to drop a few tens of millions on an afternoon filming session with a celebrity, that would pay for a lot of actual workers making actual product for a year.
I'm having a "Soup Bowl Party". Everyone comes, pays $10, and gets a bowl of soup and fixins including chicken wings and beer. We'll have a large-screen TV on with the closest related thing I can think of, something about a "Soup Bowl" as far as I can tell, must be some sort of cooking program.
Seriously...
I must admit that I'm confused. The Super Bowl is broadcast over the air, which means anyone can put an antenna in front of some radio waves and turn it into an image using readily available technology that was so important to the TV broadcasters they made the Government help pay for it last year. Said image is paid for by advertisers, who have spent vast sums of money to put their 30-second shills in front of various sets of eyeballs attached to wallets, and I would think that they'd want as many eyeballs watching the TV as is possible when their ad shows.
If I'm a tavern owner, how is showing the game not serving the needs of the network showing the Bowl? If I'm running a party at my house and asking people to chip in to help pay for snacks and beer, how am I detracting from the NFL's profits? Both have the effect of increasing the number of eyeballs focused on the TV. Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass about the Superbowl, but if a friend is having a Superbowl Party I'll sometimes attend, and that's about the only time I've ever seen it. So the stations are, by making a big deal about who gets to intercept the public radio waves and turn then into images for me, arranged it so I'm less likely to see the ads that pay for that content. I do not have a television at home any more, well, so I'm not watching it there...
I can see this with Pay Per View, because the consumer is paying a fixed fee to watch something, and they can put restrictions on how many people can view it. Too many people watching at a single house would directly cut into revenues.
But putting restrictions on who can show something you are broadcasting openly over the public airwaves? I completely don't get that. I can't prevent you from saturating my environment with your electronic signal, but I can't use the signal that you broadcast onto my property without your permission? If you don't want me watching it and having a few friends over, don't bombard me with the electrons.
Hell, the US Government could lock it at the A root if they so chose, and if you don't like it, well... tough.
Yes, they could. But that's already possible, and this doesn't really add to the risk. If I choose to use a DNS server that does not do this optimization, the DNS server's first three octets are already sent. The only thing this change does is to locate me a little closer, and if I need a new source IP address to spoof I can always TOR or proxy my DNS lookups.
But, in reality, if the government wanted to block, they'd start blocking routing, not DNS lookups. Otherwise, all I'd need is an IP address for where I want to go and they couldn't stop me. Not a terribly effective block...
Also, what exactly does this do to DNS caching? Right now, if you ask for google.com, the DNS servers are going to cache the four addresses returned for it. However, storing geographic information along with that is going to mean a lot higher cache miss rates.
Good point. Hmmmm...
I hadn't though of that angle.
I would think that the need to do additional DNS lookups would be more than offset by the geolocation data associated with them. After all, DNS sends very little data but once you have the IP address a lot of data can potentially be sent and received.
So doing even a unique authoritative DNS lookup for each class C network for each domain would probably still result in a reduction of overall bandwidth from a given site (if you include their actual site AND their authoritative DNS lookup).
The DNS server would take on a little more load, but your DNS server or any intermediates could also just choose not to participate and send their own three octets anyway, if the extra database space and/or bandwidth was that big a deal.
Actually, I could also see a variant of this scheme where the authoritative DNS server could send back a three-octet set of its own, indicating what IP address range the result is valid for.
So you ask from 4.4.4.4 what IP address www.yahoo.com is. Your DNS server asks Yahoo!'s authoritative, Yahoo! returns an IP and that it is valid for 4.0.0. Now anytime anyone asks about Yahoo! from any IP address starting in 4., your DNS server knows it doesn't need to look it up again.
Someone like Google would obviously return pretty detailed octets, since they have tons of data centers. They might frequently go to the third octet.
Someone somewhat smaller or with less colocation might use the first octet a good bit, the second occasionally, and very rarely the third.
Someone like the sites I run (which are not colocated, just a single server) would return a single IP address valid for 0.0.0, meaning that will ALWAYS be the correct IP address no matter where you are coming from.
That would mitigate the mass lookups, and ensure they are only used when they would actually be useful.
That would depend on the DNS server you chose to use. You might be able to set it to slightly randomize the first three octets to something still in your vicinity but not quite as close, or you might be able to ask your DNS server to spoof it entirely.
But think about the flow of data as it stands today:
1. You do a DNS lookup. Your DNS server has your full IP address. 2. Your DNS server does an authoritative lookup (assuming it's not cached). The authoritative DNS server now has the first three octets of your DNS server. 3. Authoritative DNS server returns poorly geolocated IP address to your DNS server. 4. Your DNS server returns the IP address to you. 5. You use that IP address to visit the web site. That web site now has your full IP address.
Chances are, the authoritative DNS server is run by the same organization that runs the host you are accessing, or at least the last few routers leading to it.
If the authoritative DNS server wants your IP address, they've already got it the instant you try to use the IP address they gave you as a result of the DNS lookup. Having the first three octets is now useless to them.
From the censorship side, having you spoof those first three octets to get an IP address to reach them will do you no good because it's FAR more effective to block or redirect requests through their routers by your source IP address. In other words, they'd give you an accurate IP address but you wouldn't be able to use it.
Yes, you could use TOR or a proxy, but then you'd already be proxying the DNS lookup anyway, so again there's nothing to gain by spoofing the first three octets in the DNS lookup.
This scheme has no impact on privacy - the organization that runs the authoritative server gets FAR more information the instant you use the IP address they gave you.
It also has little impact on censorship, because censorship via DNS is going to be highly ineffective. If I knew my country used DNS-based censorship, I'd just give out IP-address-based URLs that don't need to use a DNS lookup at all. Countries that do blocking will (and already do) use blocking at the HTTP or routing layer, not DNS.
How is this stupid? The DNS system already does this load balancing.
The DNS server you use today already sends ITS first three octets to the authoritative DNS server so the authoritative DNS server can make these load balancing decisions. In my case, with Comcast, this is less than optimal because my DNS server is located several states from me.
The only change Google is proposing is to make that location awareness a little more accurate by sending YOUR first three octets, so the authoritative server can then make a more informed decision about what data center to send you to.
And yes, I can see a government's authoritative DNS server "being evil", but you can always use a DNS server that does not use this function, and in fact probably a lot of public-use DNS servers will make this an option if you want to visit web sites and want to pretend to be from a country you are not (at which point the government will simply block your IP address range in their routers anyway so the DNS question is moot).
Of course, since this is only to give them enough information so you can access a Google server nearby as opposed to one somewhere else, they'll have your FULL IP ADDRESS about 1/100 of a second later.
Google doesn't need this to track you. In fact, this information is less useful than what they already have. This is about Google (and anyone else who has distributed datacenters) being able to make better decisions about which datacenter to send you to. This saves them bandwidth charges, which adds up to BIG money. That alone is plenty of reason why Google wants this, and everyone who manages multiple distributed datacenters should too.
Google stands to gain a LOT from this, and they do not stand to gain any benefits from additional tracking of any users. In fact, everyone on the Internet could easily benefit from this, and it's a relatively trivial change.
But the summary is deeply flawed. The sky is not falling, we just had a Chicken Little post a summary that bears almost no resemblance to the original source article or what is proposed there.
This is the important bit from the article, though there's a lot of background explanation before this paragraph you might want to read.
Currently, to determine your location, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of your DNS resolver, rather than your IP address. This DNS resolver is often managed by your ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, your lookup for www.google.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away from you. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where you were, a closer server might have been available.
Google stands to save that holy grail of holy grails... bandwidth charges. If this is implemented, all of my requests to Google would go to a Google server in the United States, rather than one in Germany or the Netherlands. All of my requests to Yahoo!, or whomever, would benefit from the same location awareness. And since I'm requesting less data over precious overseas deep sea cable, it costs less to get the information to me as well.
And to a large extent, this is already in place. My ISP already uses a DNS server that approximates my location when asking authoritative server what IP address I should use. The only real change here is that I can choose to use any DNS server I want and still get the same benefit of location awareness, and my current DNS server can be even more accurate in providing my location to the authoritative server. After all, my ISP (Comcast) gives me a DNS server that is located four states away from me at the moment. If Amazon.com had a datacenter in my state and one near where my DNS server is located, I'd currently end up using the one near the DNS server. Under the new scheme, I'd use the one located closer to me. Amazon saves bandwidth charges, I get a faster page load time, fewer tubes have gunk going through them to get the pages to me, everyone happy.
I'm confused at your assertion. Maybe I'm missing something in the article (as opposed to the summary, which is just making shit up to be scary).
At the moment, I make a DNS request for a given domain. The DNS server sees if it has an entry cached and, if it does not, it asks an authoritative server for that domain what IP address should be used. Then it returns that IP address to me. That IP address is a fixed entity and could be located anywhere in the world. My initial connection to the domain, at least, is made using the server attached to that IP address. Then, if the data center wants to get clever, they can redirect me to a local data center by mangling the domain on all of their image loads, etc, to refer to a server closer to me. But it's clumsy, and I still have to talk to a distant server.
Under Google's proposal, my DNS server would send the domain I'm interested in and my approximate location (first three octets of my four-octet IPv4 address). The authoritative DNS server can then make a decision whether to send me to a data center in my general area, or a data center located on the other side of the planet. The IP address I receive is determined accordingly, so I contact the local data center. The local server represents the actual domain as far as I'm concerned, so no mangling is necessary, and I never have to talk to a datacenter half a planet away. I get faster results, the domain giving me the results has a greatly simplified time doing so, and life is good.
The only new information going to the authoritative DNS server is my approximate location. If I'm using Google's DNS servers, hell, they already have all four octets with the original DNS request. If I'm using someone another DNS server that supports this and I'm visiting Google, they'll give Google the first three octets. But, as soon as I have the IP address, I'm visiting the website itself and therefore the website has my full IP address. So it's not like I'm giving away any new information.
About the only "evil" I could see is an authoritative DNS server looking at the first three octets and deciding to return a black holed address because they don't like that country. But that's already very possible without it. I do it all the time on my PHPNuke discussion boards - NukeSentinel allows me to enter large ranges of IP addresses to block, and anyone visiting from those ranges gets a very low-bandwidth "go away" message.
I suppose my authoritative DNS server could gather more information about people looking up my domain, but then again they are my host provider, so if they want the data all they need to do is pull the IP connection logs and get the full IP.
So I'm really struggling to figure out how this introduces any new risks of monitoring or censorship. The only entity that will receive this new data already gets far more data as soon as you visit the site. And censorship is far more easily done at the routing layer, not the DNS layer.
Yup, that's about the size of it. Except, of course, you can get an iPad with a 3G radio in it, so it becomes an iPod Touch with connectivity pretty much anywhere.
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The Orion was being developed by Lockheed-Martin, but Boeing already has an Orion-like capsule design. So this may be more of a lateral move from one company to another than a setback.
I'm sure there's some good reason for moving from L-M to Boeing for that work. Not sure exactly what it would be, but I'm certain there's a valid reason. If only we could guess...
On a completely unrelated historical side note, did you know that Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago in 2001? In an amazing coincidence, I think some major figure in the US political system lives in Chicago, doesn't he? Isn't that terribly interesting, if completely coincidental and off-topic?
The funny part of this story is that Verizon routers take so much effort to hack based on their default configuration. I read it as a good move on Verizon's part.
It's just hard enough that someone thinks that "hacking" it is some form of accomplishment. That's pretty impressive given that this is a default configuration, which by definition has to use some form of predictable algorithm for their password. At least they are shipping them with OK encryption enabled by default and a password that takes 4 minutes to crack.
Now, if someone managed to hack into one of these gizmos and get free Internet after a user changed the password to a properly secure one, that would be news.
I was at my father's house once, setting up a new wireless router. This was a few years ago. The directions said to plug it into the Internet, power it up, connect to it, and set up wireless security (optional). The problem is, the wireless side comes on at first power-up, and it's an open access point. So I connected all the cables, plugged it in, went to go get a cup of coffee, and by the time I returned 15 minutes later the wireless light was blinking solid and someone had already changed the configuration password. I had to do a factory reset and beat the guy to the configuration screen when it powered up again. There was no way to tell the router to power up without wireless enabled, and the antenna was not removable. I was seriously considering wrapping the !@#$ thing in tin foil to give me enough time to get the admin password changed, but on the third try I beat the little bastard to it or he gave up.
I can imagine that 90% of Internet users at the time would simply have powered up their router, seen the access point name, connected to it, and gone on blissfully unaware that a script kiddie next door had set up port forwarding and was running a Torrent client or webserver off their connection.
I think the fact that it takes 4 minutes to hack into a default-configured router is a pretty good indication of how far we've come. Maybe not far enough, but still pretty far.
Just realize that your dad will loose this file AND the password - requiring a cross country flight to visit.
Or at least instruction on how to press-and-hold the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds. On nearly every router I've heard of, that forces a factory reset, then you have them go through the setup process again.
Of course, if your dad is ponying up for a cross-country flight to come visit, I'd be the last one to interfere with good family relationships... :)
The only problems would be stuff like acronyms beginning with H (so non-silent).
Is that an universal rule? An helpful tip, if so. Honestly, though, a clear and consistent English rule is about as rare as an unicorn. ;)
LEO and the moon are, as you say, wildly different. I don't think you appreciate just HOW wildly different, however.
If I were a potential customer looking to place something on the moon, I'd choose someone who had past Lunar experience. LEO, on the other hand, is child's play compared to going to the moon, and I probably wouldn't consider lunar experience relevant to a decision about an LEO vendor.
Low Earth Orbit means getting something to anywhere between 200 and 2000 kilometers up. The moon is 384,000 kilometers away. Even for the highest values of "Low Earth Orbit", you're still two orders of magnitude short of a one-way Lunar trip, much less a round trip. The launch from the moon, alone, will be more complex than the entire LEO mission.
It would be on the order of me asking who can build a play house for my daughter, and someone trying to impress me by saying they had just finished building the replacement for the World Trade Center for free so they could impress me with their building prowess. The experience of building a massive steel structure isn't relevant to the building of a small wooden structure. Likewise, for the most part the technology involved in a Lunar roundtrip is going to be almost completely dissimilar to LEO technology. Yeah, they're all rockets, but the similarity pretty much ends there.
It doesn't have to be particularly compelling. I could make a static pie chart and "explode" some small minority of the pie chart to make it look bigger, and mention specifically how small a percentage it represents, and I'll have a room full of audience members with a significant percentage who think the number is much bigger than it really is.
If anything, cartoony reconstructions are (for a while) going to be more compelling because they are a novelty. And many people won't believe them at a conscious level, but a few days later when they remember the story it'll be more like what the cartoon showed than what the mouth puppet behind the anchor desk said.
My Ghandi and Greedo mentions were more of a "slippery slope" argument about where this may end up going in the very near future. Once viewers accept cartoons as our data input for news, it'll be that much easier to fabricate it for us.
Not that most anchorpeople are much more than teleprompter interpreters ("reverse close-captioned for the non-hearing-impaired!") anyway.
There's a big difference between a misleading verbal description and a misleading reconstruction. The human mind is more likely to accept and believe something it's seen over something it's heard.
A lot of it depends on the quality of the "reconstruction" or "enhancement". An adjustment of just a few pixels in certain news shots could turn a story completely around. "Is that a plasma cannon from Unreal Tournament that Ghandi is holding up? I always thought that was a spinning wheel."
Adding a few special effects details, and doing just a tiny bit of adjustment, and suddenly Greedo shot first.
It's already getting hard to believe what is on the news. This is not going to help. It's not a surprise at all, in fact I'd be astonished to find out that a lot of video footage I've seen HASN'T been "enhanced" in some way or other. "Enhanced" can easily mean "altered to more accurately fit the story we want to tell."
"I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven."
Well, I would think death would have taken away that incentive, myself, but then again with current copyright laws maybe not.
Putting in a 6-point harness and/or a helmet with a head strap ignores one of the major advantages of deceleration-by-airbag - namely the fact that the seatbelt and airbag can give way and give you an extra 2 feet or so over which your valuable noggin can decelerate in an accident.
As far as wanting one - well, your call, but I'd prefer a poke to the snoot if it means the bruise will have a chance to heal.
Actually, it's closer to 6 feet, maybe a tad more, at least as far as your head is concerned in a frontal impact.
Car hits wall, car's 2-to-3-foot crumple zone does its thing and you experience a survivable but uncomfortable G-force until the airbag can deploy.
At that point, the initial crumple zone is gone and G-forces increase as the engine compartment starts absorbing energy over its few feet of space, but the airbag has now deployed and allows your head to move forward in a controlled deceleration over 2-3 feet as the seatbelt gives way. So the deceleration there is happening in two ways as far as your noggin is concerned (car slowing down, your head moving forward).
So the overall distance might be as much as 2-3 feet of initial crumple zone, plus another 4 feet or more between the engine compartment and the airbag.
I oversimplified my explanation a bit. Surviving an major accident is usually a multi-staged and complex bit of engineering. As one teeny detail, the airbag needs to go off just so to absorb the worst deceleration as the engine compartment is compressing and "pushing back" harder. As another, there can't be fatal-level G-forces during any part of the accident. They can vary, but they cannot exceed the fatal point. So putting one bolt in the wrong place can turn a crumple zone into a death zone.
Hats off to the eggheads who think about these things, figure them out, and come up with decent-looking cars that aren't 400 feet long.
Probably pretty well, for smaller accidents. But you wouldn't catch me driving one.
A (combined) 28MPH accident in a regular car with another regular car is, well, pretty trivial. Each car is assumed to be doing 14, or one car rear-ends another at 28. You'll know damned well you hit something, but as long as both people are in decently-designed cars, the worst injury will generally be to the wallet of the person found at fault. Maybe a little whiplash, but you'd have to be doing something really odd to be killed by it (like not wearing a seatbelt, but I digress, and probably not even then anyway).
But that's partly because a car is designed for much more serious crashes, and the current design is a compromise between the size of the crumple zone, the G-force you have to subject your occupants to, and how much impact you expect it to take. If we all drove spheres 150 feet in diameter, we could make them out of pretty soft stuff and absorb 200MPH impacts with nothing more than a few harsh words exchanged. However, in most accidents, the other car impacts you mere feet from your person, and it's some pretty amazing engineering that leads to anyone walking away from a serious accident at all.
A well-designed crumple zone "spreads out" the deceleration over as much time as possible, focusing on the more severe deceleration at the cost of making less severe impacts uncomfortable. If I tune my crumple zone to absorb exactly 40MPH of impact, then I'll be out of crumple zone once the accident reaches 41MPH, and then I hit the solid frame behind the crumple zone and the remainder of the speed is decelerated over a few inches. A well-designed crumple zone would crumple only halfway, giving me twice the deceleration force (which is less comfy, of course), but leaving me with enough reserve to sustain an 80MPH impact without running out of crumple zone.
You could take an EXISTING crumple zone and, with a gas ax and a little skill, remove a lot of its materials and re-tune it to absorb a 28MPH accident with very little apparent G-force (5MPH accident). But that car would be unsafe at any speed much beyond that. Get into a 50MPH accident, and the difference between 28MPH and 50MPH would be absorbed directly into the car's frame after the crumple zones run out, and you'd be "hurting or harping". The original crumple zone would be able to give you, say, a sustained survivable (but probably pretty damned uncomfortable) level of G-force up to a 75MPH crash. Your new crumple zone gives you a really comfortable level of G-forces followed by a sudden G-force when the crumple zone runs out. If you are still moving at more than about 10-20MPH once the crumple zones run out, you're going to be in a lot of pain, or dead.
I read it as his desire to use this foam as a replacement for the bumper and crumple zones. It would turn the existing crumple zones into something in the car's frame and bumper system that would absorb a great deal more of the impact and, therefore, largely eliminate the need for airbags.
I'm not sure I'm buying it, though. Airbags are an "also need" feature, and cannot be replaced wholly by a better crumple zone.
The problem lies in the elasticity and the distance. If you hit a brick wall doing 65MPH and your crumple zone is too squishy, it will continue crumpling up until you are included in the crumple zone. In other words, you're dead.
Make it too hard, and the car will stop more quickly than your flesh can handle. The airbag is a crude but effective way of allowing a relatively stiff crumple zone that can manage to keep your passenger cabin intact during a VERY major impact, and still accommodate your body's need to decelerate as gradually as possible. If you hit a brick wall doing 65MPH, the crumple zone decelerates the car from 65MPH - 0MPH in the distance represented by the zone (usually a few feet at best), and materials aren't going to improve on that a whole hell of a lot. You are still going from 65MPH-0MPH in just a few feet. That's a SERIOUS amount of deceleration.
The airbag is what takes your head and torso and slows them down as gently and slowly as possible, leveraging the deceleration already provided by the crumple zone and making the best use of it to keep your brains from splashing around in your noggin, and/or snapping your neck. Which is not to say the airbag is gentle or slow at all, far from it, just more gentle and slower than making your dainty neck bones absorb all of the force as your torso is stopped by the seatbelt and your several pounds of head really wants to keep going to make Newton happy.
Could be worse, though. You could be wearing no seatbelt at all and expect your chest and head to absorb all of the speed when they impact the steering wheel and windshield respectively. That always ends colorfully, particularly in shades of red and grey.
I think you mean "tapeworms in" not "leeches on".
Well, in this case, doing the right thing IS about getting recognition for it, and that's OK.
Personally, every time I see a celebrity "spokescritter" for a product, I think "what a shame, they probably paid this schmoe millions of dollars to shill their product, when all they had to do to earn my attention was spend a half that on a socially useful cause, run a simpler ad telling me how good a citizen their company is, and lower the price of their product with the leftover amount."
Or, you know, maybe build the product you are selling me in the country I live in. I know, crazy idea, but if you're going to drop a few tens of millions on an afternoon filming session with a celebrity, that would pay for a lot of actual workers making actual product for a year.
I'm having a "Soup Bowl Party". Everyone comes, pays $10, and gets a bowl of soup and fixins including chicken wings and beer. We'll have a large-screen TV on with the closest related thing I can think of, something about a "Soup Bowl" as far as I can tell, must be some sort of cooking program.
Seriously...
I must admit that I'm confused. The Super Bowl is broadcast over the air, which means anyone can put an antenna in front of some radio waves and turn it into an image using readily available technology that was so important to the TV broadcasters they made the Government help pay for it last year. Said image is paid for by advertisers, who have spent vast sums of money to put their 30-second shills in front of various sets of eyeballs attached to wallets, and I would think that they'd want as many eyeballs watching the TV as is possible when their ad shows.
If I'm a tavern owner, how is showing the game not serving the needs of the network showing the Bowl? If I'm running a party at my house and asking people to chip in to help pay for snacks and beer, how am I detracting from the NFL's profits? Both have the effect of increasing the number of eyeballs focused on the TV. Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass about the Superbowl, but if a friend is having a Superbowl Party I'll sometimes attend, and that's about the only time I've ever seen it. So the stations are, by making a big deal about who gets to intercept the public radio waves and turn then into images for me, arranged it so I'm less likely to see the ads that pay for that content. I do not have a television at home any more, well, so I'm not watching it there...
I can see this with Pay Per View, because the consumer is paying a fixed fee to watch something, and they can put restrictions on how many people can view it. Too many people watching at a single house would directly cut into revenues.
But putting restrictions on who can show something you are broadcasting openly over the public airwaves? I completely don't get that. I can't prevent you from saturating my environment with your electronic signal, but I can't use the signal that you broadcast onto my property without your permission? If you don't want me watching it and having a few friends over, don't bombard me with the electrons.
Sorry for the coverup. Just leave the whales and dolphins alone, OK?
Pity the cows and chickens.
Hell, the US Government could lock it at the A root if they so chose, and if you don't like it, well... tough.
Yes, they could. But that's already possible, and this doesn't really add to the risk. If I choose to use a DNS server that does not do this optimization, the DNS server's first three octets are already sent. The only thing this change does is to locate me a little closer, and if I need a new source IP address to spoof I can always TOR or proxy my DNS lookups.
But, in reality, if the government wanted to block, they'd start blocking routing, not DNS lookups. Otherwise, all I'd need is an IP address for where I want to go and they couldn't stop me. Not a terribly effective block...
Also, what exactly does this do to DNS caching? Right now, if you ask for google.com, the DNS servers are going to cache the four addresses returned for it. However, storing geographic information along with that is going to mean a lot higher cache miss rates.
Good point. Hmmmm...
I hadn't though of that angle.
I would think that the need to do additional DNS lookups would be more than offset by the geolocation data associated with them. After all, DNS sends very little data but once you have the IP address a lot of data can potentially be sent and received.
So doing even a unique authoritative DNS lookup for each class C network for each domain would probably still result in a reduction of overall bandwidth from a given site (if you include their actual site AND their authoritative DNS lookup).
The DNS server would take on a little more load, but your DNS server or any intermediates could also just choose not to participate and send their own three octets anyway, if the extra database space and/or bandwidth was that big a deal.
Actually, I could also see a variant of this scheme where the authoritative DNS server could send back a three-octet set of its own, indicating what IP address range the result is valid for.
So you ask from 4.4.4.4 what IP address www.yahoo.com is. Your DNS server asks Yahoo!'s authoritative, Yahoo! returns an IP and that it is valid for 4.0.0. Now anytime anyone asks about Yahoo! from any IP address starting in 4., your DNS server knows it doesn't need to look it up again.
Someone like Google would obviously return pretty detailed octets, since they have tons of data centers. They might frequently go to the third octet.
Someone somewhat smaller or with less colocation might use the first octet a good bit, the second occasionally, and very rarely the third.
Someone like the sites I run (which are not colocated, just a single server) would return a single IP address valid for 0.0.0, meaning that will ALWAYS be the correct IP address no matter where you are coming from.
That would mitigate the mass lookups, and ensure they are only used when they would actually be useful.
That would depend on the DNS server you chose to use. You might be able to set it to slightly randomize the first three octets to something still in your vicinity but not quite as close, or you might be able to ask your DNS server to spoof it entirely.
But think about the flow of data as it stands today:
1. You do a DNS lookup. Your DNS server has your full IP address.
2. Your DNS server does an authoritative lookup (assuming it's not cached). The authoritative DNS server now has the first three octets of your DNS server.
3. Authoritative DNS server returns poorly geolocated IP address to your DNS server.
4. Your DNS server returns the IP address to you.
5. You use that IP address to visit the web site. That web site now has your full IP address.
Chances are, the authoritative DNS server is run by the same organization that runs the host you are accessing, or at least the last few routers leading to it.
If the authoritative DNS server wants your IP address, they've already got it the instant you try to use the IP address they gave you as a result of the DNS lookup. Having the first three octets is now useless to them.
From the censorship side, having you spoof those first three octets to get an IP address to reach them will do you no good because it's FAR more effective to block or redirect requests through their routers by your source IP address. In other words, they'd give you an accurate IP address but you wouldn't be able to use it.
Yes, you could use TOR or a proxy, but then you'd already be proxying the DNS lookup anyway, so again there's nothing to gain by spoofing the first three octets in the DNS lookup.
This scheme has no impact on privacy - the organization that runs the authoritative server gets FAR more information the instant you use the IP address they gave you.
It also has little impact on censorship, because censorship via DNS is going to be highly ineffective. If I knew my country used DNS-based censorship, I'd just give out IP-address-based URLs that don't need to use a DNS lookup at all. Countries that do blocking will (and already do) use blocking at the HTTP or routing layer, not DNS.
How is this stupid? The DNS system already does this load balancing.
The DNS server you use today already sends ITS first three octets to the authoritative DNS server so the authoritative DNS server can make these load balancing decisions. In my case, with Comcast, this is less than optimal because my DNS server is located several states from me.
The only change Google is proposing is to make that location awareness a little more accurate by sending YOUR first three octets, so the authoritative server can then make a more informed decision about what data center to send you to.
And yes, I can see a government's authoritative DNS server "being evil", but you can always use a DNS server that does not use this function, and in fact probably a lot of public-use DNS servers will make this an option if you want to visit web sites and want to pretend to be from a country you are not (at which point the government will simply block your IP address range in their routers anyway so the DNS question is moot).
Of course, since this is only to give them enough information so you can access a Google server nearby as opposed to one somewhere else, they'll have your FULL IP ADDRESS about 1/100 of a second later.
Google doesn't need this to track you. In fact, this information is less useful than what they already have. This is about Google (and anyone else who has distributed datacenters) being able to make better decisions about which datacenter to send you to. This saves them bandwidth charges, which adds up to BIG money. That alone is plenty of reason why Google wants this, and everyone who manages multiple distributed datacenters should too.
Google stands to gain a LOT from this, and they do not stand to gain any benefits from additional tracking of any users. In fact, everyone on the Internet could easily benefit from this, and it's a relatively trivial change.
But the summary is deeply flawed. The sky is not falling, we just had a Chicken Little post a summary that bears almost no resemblance to the original source article or what is proposed there.
This is the important bit from the article, though there's a lot of background explanation before this paragraph you might want to read.
Currently, to determine your location, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of your DNS resolver, rather than your IP address. This DNS resolver is often managed by your ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, your lookup for www.google.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away from you. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where you were, a closer server might have been available.
Google stands to save that holy grail of holy grails... bandwidth charges. If this is implemented, all of my requests to Google would go to a Google server in the United States, rather than one in Germany or the Netherlands. All of my requests to Yahoo!, or whomever, would benefit from the same location awareness. And since I'm requesting less data over precious overseas deep sea cable, it costs less to get the information to me as well.
And to a large extent, this is already in place. My ISP already uses a DNS server that approximates my location when asking authoritative server what IP address I should use. The only real change here is that I can choose to use any DNS server I want and still get the same benefit of location awareness, and my current DNS server can be even more accurate in providing my location to the authoritative server. After all, my ISP (Comcast) gives me a DNS server that is located four states away from me at the moment. If Amazon.com had a datacenter in my state and one near where my DNS server is located, I'd currently end up using the one near the DNS server. Under the new scheme, I'd use the one located closer to me. Amazon saves bandwidth charges, I get a faster page load time, fewer tubes have gunk going through them to get the pages to me, everyone happy.
I'm confused at your assertion. Maybe I'm missing something in the article (as opposed to the summary, which is just making shit up to be scary).
At the moment, I make a DNS request for a given domain. The DNS server sees if it has an entry cached and, if it does not, it asks an authoritative server for that domain what IP address should be used. Then it returns that IP address to me. That IP address is a fixed entity and could be located anywhere in the world. My initial connection to the domain, at least, is made using the server attached to that IP address. Then, if the data center wants to get clever, they can redirect me to a local data center by mangling the domain on all of their image loads, etc, to refer to a server closer to me. But it's clumsy, and I still have to talk to a distant server.
Under Google's proposal, my DNS server would send the domain I'm interested in and my approximate location (first three octets of my four-octet IPv4 address). The authoritative DNS server can then make a decision whether to send me to a data center in my general area, or a data center located on the other side of the planet. The IP address I receive is determined accordingly, so I contact the local data center. The local server represents the actual domain as far as I'm concerned, so no mangling is necessary, and I never have to talk to a datacenter half a planet away. I get faster results, the domain giving me the results has a greatly simplified time doing so, and life is good.
The only new information going to the authoritative DNS server is my approximate location. If I'm using Google's DNS servers, hell, they already have all four octets with the original DNS request. If I'm using someone another DNS server that supports this and I'm visiting Google, they'll give Google the first three octets. But, as soon as I have the IP address, I'm visiting the website itself and therefore the website has my full IP address. So it's not like I'm giving away any new information.
About the only "evil" I could see is an authoritative DNS server looking at the first three octets and deciding to return a black holed address because they don't like that country. But that's already very possible without it. I do it all the time on my PHPNuke discussion boards - NukeSentinel allows me to enter large ranges of IP addresses to block, and anyone visiting from those ranges gets a very low-bandwidth "go away" message.
I suppose my authoritative DNS server could gather more information about people looking up my domain, but then again they are my host provider, so if they want the data all they need to do is pull the IP connection logs and get the full IP.
So I'm really struggling to figure out how this introduces any new risks of monitoring or censorship. The only entity that will receive this new data already gets far more data as soon as you visit the site. And censorship is far more easily done at the routing layer, not the DNS layer.
No one said it had to be a MAXIMUM limit....
Yup, that's about the size of it. Except, of course, you can get an iPad with a 3G radio in it, so it becomes an iPod Touch with connectivity pretty much anywhere.