For any given componet or communications bus, you should be able to determine the energy needed to bit-flip, the level of effectiveness per mm of shielding, the noise from background radiation at international flight altitudes and the maximum error rate that any given error-correction protocol can handle. From this, it should be easy to produce a formula that tells you the maximum disruption from personal electronics that can be tolerated by the system for any given specific aircraft configuration.
You then look not at every device but the worst-case devices (those that have large power requirements, no shielding worth a damn, frequencies that closely correspond with those in the aircraft, etc). If those devices, over the shortest distance possible (floor/wall of cabin to wires), generate RFI in excess of the maximum disruption tolerable, then those devices WILL interfere with the aircraft.
Since selective bans (you canuse brand X of laptop but not brand Y) would be (a) unpopular and (b) unenforceable, if the worst-case could cause catastrophic problems then you have to ban ALL such devices.
There's a difference? One glance at the relative economies of China and the US convinces me that cell phones are weapons that are extremely effective at disrupting.
Certainly it is possible DHS could try and stop the talk. IIRC, US authorities acted against a Russian who broke Adobe Acrobat security and gave a talk at Defcon. Whilst, understandably, copyright laws are a higher priority than national security for the government, it is entirely possible that similar action might be threatened should it look likely the talk would go ahead prior to a fix being distributed. And even then, you never know.
On the other hand, the talk can't be delayed forever. Not necessarily by the experts here, but the fact that people have known about SCADA vulnerabilities existing for decades means it's inevitable the work will be duplicated sooner or later and that means it'll be presented by someone, somewhere, sooner or later. The fuse starts burning the moment a flaw is first introduced, NOT the moment the flaw is first described.
The DHS probably won't do this, but to me the "right thing" is to leverage the talk as pressure on Siemens to put more resources into making the system secure and then use the entire case as leverage on all other vendors of mission-critical systems in the US to secure their systems too. But in order to do that, Siemens would need to believe that the talk will take place, fix or no fix. If they think the DHS is just playing chicken, they'll ignore it. The DHS would HAVE to be serious and therefore HAVE to not only allow the talk to take place but also facilitate it in whatever way they could, whilst also making sure Siemens was commercially in a position to do the kind of fixing and testing needed to produce a rock-solid upgrade that their customers could actually trust in things like nuclear facilities, power grids, etc.
(Fixes are zero-income expenses, which is why companies tend to avoid them.)
Based on the Sony experience and the fact that the lab Manning was working on had passwords to secure accounts stuck on the monitors, War Games *WAS* a documentary...
Should be called Lazarium. After all, it's safe to say nobody has an earlier claim of discovery.:) (Hey, I said nothing about any actual discovery, just a claim of one.)
Look, conservative pundits and talk-show hosts are expensive to hire and expensive to fire. Covering Palin gives all the benefits but has none of the costs and few of the risks.
Au contrare. This revised version will sell well with the NRA, and they're a very large voting block. People generally don't win without their support. Having this wannabe hero be sticking up for US gun rights improves Palin's credibility rating with them. Never a bad thing, politically. It will doubtless be followed in the next few days by claims that the left will be involved in some effort to control guns (despite this claim having been repeated since the Dems won office and no evidence of such a bill even being considered has ever come to light). There is, after all, little point to a politician in boosting credibility if they don't then try and damage others.
Well, yes it did. The early manuscript had Winston writing "1+1=" on the wall, leading scholars to believe that the original intent was to have had him crack by that time. The later version has "1+1=2", indicating he was still resisting. So, yes, there ARE versions of 1984.
But they have the Fields Medal. Indeed, other disciplines have found ways round this problem. It is not the lack of a Nobel that is the issue, but the lack of a belief within the field that could bring about a comparable prestigious award.
Well, yeah. Can you imagine the response they'd have got if they'd asked for 7 years of funding? We'd still be waiting for the Rovers to be launched. They gamed the system because that's the only way you can make it work. Which is stupid because it's now impossible to truly evaluate a damn thing in high-end science, which means projects are not being funded according to their potential scientific value but according to how good the top brass are at out-politicking the politicians.
In order to get a proper, rational perspective on big-ticket science projects, Congress (and all other governments) have to recognize the value of risk and the importance of investing. It has to be possible for NASA to create a project - be it to go to the moon, launch robots to Mars, or sent probes to Pluto - that will take two or even three decades to run to completion AND be 100% guaranteed that it will be 100% funded from day one to completion.
At present, the only way that this works is by setting the original project so short that "completion" is damn-near inevitable and there's enough PR involved to make the actual work (via a follow-up) equally damn-near inevitable. That is NOT competent management, that's fraud by Congress (who deceive the public into thinking they're funding science) and fraud by NASA (who deceive Congress into thinking they're funding a PR stunt not science).
Congress HAS to fund NASA properly. A 5x-10x increase in budget would be a good start. Congress ALSO has to partially devolve NASA into a quango - neither the President nor Congress should have any power to hire or fire anyone at NASA, nor should they have any say over what projects NASA is involved in. There should be a charter (ie: a contract with the President) that states what the overall objectives should be over the lifetime of the charter, to which NASA can be held legally liable if they don't fulfull their side, and which states Congress' obligations in return, to which they also can be held legally liable.
One of the benefits of a quango type setup is that NASA currently can't own anything, it is currently obliged to choose a COTS solution even if they already have a solution (which would be GOTS) that's both cheaper and better, and it's required to opt for what is cheaper even if it is inferior, all because of government spending rules. If it were semi-private, government spending rules don't apply and government ownership rules don't apply. The problem with a fully private NASA is that it couldn't be government-funded at all, it has to be answerable to shareholders rather than independently-monitored objectives, and space research is expensive with little return on any predictable timeframe (if, indeed, there's any return at all). If it were semi-public, none of these limitations of private corporations would apply.
Many of the fiascos within the US government are as a result of trying NOT to use quangos but to have a hard division between the public and private sectors, with incredibly unhealthy ties and obligations between them, deception run rampant (as noted earlier), massive uncertainty and no coherent strategy. This might be highly desirable to those who hate the idea of "big government", but it is highly undesirable to anyone who likes "big science".
It is conventional for all vehicles and containers to be considered female. Not sure if the convention comes from the Latium family of languages, but that's certainly what I was taught. It seems a little odd, since most older languages have a neuter gender. English has become so degenerate over the years that it lost the capability to represent anything other than male or female. You'd therefore expect English to be the language that used such forms, but no. French and German both have neuter but don't use it for things that lack gender.
(Which implies that the origin of gender terms had nothing to do with how they're used today.)
No, because it has velocity relative to Mars. It must have therefore travelled a nearly-infinitesimal amount more than 30 kilometers to reach the 30 kilometer mark.
That's not too far from the truth. At least certain forms of cancer are believed to be fossil genes and/or genes from an earlier phase of life being reactivated. In other words, life exists because of cancer. Other forms have other causes (if a telemere runs to zero length, so the next cell division corrupts the encoding, then that may also cause a cancer; you also have retroviruses which are compatible enough with modern human DNA that they can infect it and thrive but which are incompatible enough that the cell becomes cancerous).
True, and look at all the people who have died throughout history! If you draw a graph plotting coffee consumption vs. people dying that year, there's a clear possibility of some correlation or other.
(Sarcasm mode off)
Seriously, the problem is that substances can be healthy at one dose and toxic and/or carcinogenic at another. The media can't handle complexities like that, and as departments are increasingly reliant on sponsors, citation indexes and other ephemera, scientists are increasingly aware of the power of Drama.
If academics were to plot coffee-induced benefits vs. coffee-induced risks vs. volume of intake, you'd end up with a graph that would be highly informative to anyone who cared but completely useless to the press who are totally dependent on Shock Value to sell papers.
Not that I care overmuch, I drink black tea. Which is linked to cancer of the throat due to the absurdly high temperatures it's normally drunk at.*
*I don't consider the chemical brew known as "iced tea" to be tea at all. I'm not sure what's in it, to be honest. It looks like some weird bromine/iodine mixture.
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For any given componet or communications bus, you should be able to determine the energy needed to bit-flip, the level of effectiveness per mm of shielding, the noise from background radiation at international flight altitudes and the maximum error rate that any given error-correction protocol can handle. From this, it should be easy to produce a formula that tells you the maximum disruption from personal electronics that can be tolerated by the system for any given specific aircraft configuration.
You then look not at every device but the worst-case devices (those that have large power requirements, no shielding worth a damn, frequencies that closely correspond with those in the aircraft, etc). If those devices, over the shortest distance possible (floor/wall of cabin to wires), generate RFI in excess of the maximum disruption tolerable, then those devices WILL interfere with the aircraft.
Since selective bans (you canuse brand X of laptop but not brand Y) would be (a) unpopular and (b) unenforceable, if the worst-case could cause catastrophic problems then you have to ban ALL such devices.
There's a difference? One glance at the relative economies of China and the US convinces me that cell phones are weapons that are extremely effective at disrupting.
Weird, certainly. You could sort, search and store documents in the way described using Gopher or WAIS long before HTML was even invented.
It's ok to take seriously. It'll be done by 2150, when the Daleks will invade the Earth. (The Daleks are too smart to invade a disorganized planet.)
Learn how to spell in English, not just American.
Sharepoint is hardly FOSS, though. If you want that kind of solution, DSpace is a more logical starting point.
In the Open Source world, DSpace is probably the document management system to beat.
Certainly it is possible DHS could try and stop the talk. IIRC, US authorities acted against a Russian who broke Adobe Acrobat security and gave a talk at Defcon. Whilst, understandably, copyright laws are a higher priority than national security for the government, it is entirely possible that similar action might be threatened should it look likely the talk would go ahead prior to a fix being distributed. And even then, you never know.
On the other hand, the talk can't be delayed forever. Not necessarily by the experts here, but the fact that people have known about SCADA vulnerabilities existing for decades means it's inevitable the work will be duplicated sooner or later and that means it'll be presented by someone, somewhere, sooner or later. The fuse starts burning the moment a flaw is first introduced, NOT the moment the flaw is first described.
The DHS probably won't do this, but to me the "right thing" is to leverage the talk as pressure on Siemens to put more resources into making the system secure and then use the entire case as leverage on all other vendors of mission-critical systems in the US to secure their systems too. But in order to do that, Siemens would need to believe that the talk will take place, fix or no fix. If they think the DHS is just playing chicken, they'll ignore it. The DHS would HAVE to be serious and therefore HAVE to not only allow the talk to take place but also facilitate it in whatever way they could, whilst also making sure Siemens was commercially in a position to do the kind of fixing and testing needed to produce a rock-solid upgrade that their customers could actually trust in things like nuclear facilities, power grids, etc.
(Fixes are zero-income expenses, which is why companies tend to avoid them.)
Based on the Sony experience and the fact that the lab Manning was working on had passwords to secure accounts stuck on the monitors, War Games *WAS* a documentary...
Sorry, BBS codes aren't valid here. Slashdot uses Real HTML. :)
I thought it was: In Russia, Copyright copies GNU.
Should be called Lazarium. After all, it's safe to say nobody has an earlier claim of discovery. :) (Hey, I said nothing about any actual discovery, just a claim of one.)
Look, conservative pundits and talk-show hosts are expensive to hire and expensive to fire. Covering Palin gives all the benefits but has none of the costs and few of the risks.
Au contrare. This revised version will sell well with the NRA, and they're a very large voting block. People generally don't win without their support. Having this wannabe hero be sticking up for US gun rights improves Palin's credibility rating with them. Never a bad thing, politically. It will doubtless be followed in the next few days by claims that the left will be involved in some effort to control guns (despite this claim having been repeated since the Dems won office and no evidence of such a bill even being considered has ever come to light). There is, after all, little point to a politician in boosting credibility if they don't then try and damage others.
Well, yes it did. The early manuscript had Winston writing "1+1=" on the wall, leading scholars to believe that the original intent was to have had him crack by that time. The later version has "1+1=2", indicating he was still resisting. So, yes, there ARE versions of 1984.
But they have the Fields Medal. Indeed, other disciplines have found ways round this problem. It is not the lack of a Nobel that is the issue, but the lack of a belief within the field that could bring about a comparable prestigious award.
AOL wishes to plead innocence through reason of insanity.
Well, yeah. Can you imagine the response they'd have got if they'd asked for 7 years of funding? We'd still be waiting for the Rovers to be launched. They gamed the system because that's the only way you can make it work. Which is stupid because it's now impossible to truly evaluate a damn thing in high-end science, which means projects are not being funded according to their potential scientific value but according to how good the top brass are at out-politicking the politicians.
In order to get a proper, rational perspective on big-ticket science projects, Congress (and all other governments) have to recognize the value of risk and the importance of investing. It has to be possible for NASA to create a project - be it to go to the moon, launch robots to Mars, or sent probes to Pluto - that will take two or even three decades to run to completion AND be 100% guaranteed that it will be 100% funded from day one to completion.
At present, the only way that this works is by setting the original project so short that "completion" is damn-near inevitable and there's enough PR involved to make the actual work (via a follow-up) equally damn-near inevitable. That is NOT competent management, that's fraud by Congress (who deceive the public into thinking they're funding science) and fraud by NASA (who deceive Congress into thinking they're funding a PR stunt not science).
Congress HAS to fund NASA properly. A 5x-10x increase in budget would be a good start. Congress ALSO has to partially devolve NASA into a quango - neither the President nor Congress should have any power to hire or fire anyone at NASA, nor should they have any say over what projects NASA is involved in. There should be a charter (ie: a contract with the President) that states what the overall objectives should be over the lifetime of the charter, to which NASA can be held legally liable if they don't fulfull their side, and which states Congress' obligations in return, to which they also can be held legally liable.
One of the benefits of a quango type setup is that NASA currently can't own anything, it is currently obliged to choose a COTS solution even if they already have a solution (which would be GOTS) that's both cheaper and better, and it's required to opt for what is cheaper even if it is inferior, all because of government spending rules. If it were semi-private, government spending rules don't apply and government ownership rules don't apply. The problem with a fully private NASA is that it couldn't be government-funded at all, it has to be answerable to shareholders rather than independently-monitored objectives, and space research is expensive with little return on any predictable timeframe (if, indeed, there's any return at all). If it were semi-public, none of these limitations of private corporations would apply.
Many of the fiascos within the US government are as a result of trying NOT to use quangos but to have a hard division between the public and private sectors, with incredibly unhealthy ties and obligations between them, deception run rampant (as noted earlier), massive uncertainty and no coherent strategy. This might be highly desirable to those who hate the idea of "big government", but it is highly undesirable to anyone who likes "big science".
It is conventional for all vehicles and containers to be considered female. Not sure if the convention comes from the Latium family of languages, but that's certainly what I was taught. It seems a little odd, since most older languages have a neuter gender. English has become so degenerate over the years that it lost the capability to represent anything other than male or female. You'd therefore expect English to be the language that used such forms, but no. French and German both have neuter but don't use it for things that lack gender.
(Which implies that the origin of gender terms had nothing to do with how they're used today.)
Smaller planet. On Mars, the milestones are closer together.
No, because it has velocity relative to Mars. It must have therefore travelled a nearly-infinitesimal amount more than 30 kilometers to reach the 30 kilometer mark.
The sun is 8 light minutes away, so it becomes easy to figure out how many astronomical units it has moved.
I dunno, it would be a neat way to never have to pay the phone bill.
That's not too far from the truth. At least certain forms of cancer are believed to be fossil genes and/or genes from an earlier phase of life being reactivated. In other words, life exists because of cancer. Other forms have other causes (if a telemere runs to zero length, so the next cell division corrupts the encoding, then that may also cause a cancer; you also have retroviruses which are compatible enough with modern human DNA that they can infect it and thrive but which are incompatible enough that the cell becomes cancerous).
True, and look at all the people who have died throughout history! If you draw a graph plotting coffee consumption vs. people dying that year, there's a clear possibility of some correlation or other.
(Sarcasm mode off)
Seriously, the problem is that substances can be healthy at one dose and toxic and/or carcinogenic at another. The media can't handle complexities like that, and as departments are increasingly reliant on sponsors, citation indexes and other ephemera, scientists are increasingly aware of the power of Drama.
If academics were to plot coffee-induced benefits vs. coffee-induced risks vs. volume of intake, you'd end up with a graph that would be highly informative to anyone who cared but completely useless to the press who are totally dependent on Shock Value to sell papers.
Not that I care overmuch, I drink black tea. Which is linked to cancer of the throat due to the absurdly high temperatures it's normally drunk at.*
*I don't consider the chemical brew known as "iced tea" to be tea at all. I'm not sure what's in it, to be honest. It looks like some weird bromine/iodine mixture.