There is a very large drug industry that says that there's a lot of profit in this war. Sure, the Americans probably aren't getting a whole lot of it, but you can be absolutely certain that the Afghan warlords are. Afghanistan is supposedly now the dominant player in markets only South American states had any involvement in. Even the Taliban have reputedly quit beheading drug runners and are cashing in on the market, it's that big.
(As a footnote, I think that this is something the press should be paying more attention to. The warlords are now stinking rich and their only hope of maintaining their luxury lifestyle is to keep their source of income going and to not split the profits - with the Taliban or the Kabul government. It also seems very likely said warlords are now richer than both. It doesn't seem to me that religious extremists will be the problem once America leaves.)
Some of the data is 6 years old. Ok, 1944, that would be 1938. Ok, the better parallel would be the WikiLeaks of 1944 broadcasting information about the German invasion of Poland. Or, since you really need to factor in that people can move faster and react faster these days (causing information to age faster), perhaps it would be more in line with the WikiLeaks of 1944 broadcasting top secret information on World War I's Battle of the Somme.
Well, that's only the announced military spending. There's an unknown black budget to factor in as well. Problem is, you can't factor it in as you've no means of calculating it. It could be anywhere from $1 to twice the announced military spending.
In Britain, "anti-terrorism" was indeed regular police work for over 20 years. The police handling of the Arndale Manchester bombing (3000 lbs truck bomb in a crowded city center) was one of the most spectacular evacuations in living history and although I tend to be rather critical of the way the police generally handle things, this was damn-near superhuman effort on their part and they deserve to be proud for saving the lives of every single person there. (There were a few minor injuries to those who stood right up against the barrier to watch the bomb go off, which surely would have deserved a Good Try from the Darwin Awards at the time, but that's it.)
In other situations, an Armed Response Unit might be called in, but that's still police. The SAS were called in once, to storm the Iranian Embassy, but even then the SAS report to the Home Office directly and are not strictly part of the regular army. Even if you did consider them, though, that's one operation out of how many hundreds?
I'm not sure who is in charge of the bomb disposal units, but that's such a tiny part of the whole operation that it really doesn't matter.
(I won't get into the source of funding for the terrorists, as many Slashdotters live in that country and might object.)
To an extent, yes, which is why I said I'll probably end up using it anyway. It is better in many ways than existing alternatives (although XFS and JFS are still filesystems I like for specialist work). However, if you are planning any major migrations, it can't merely be better than existing alternatives because you have to factor in the effort and the risk of error in the migration. Also, never, ever use version 1.0 of something. Anyways, the only way to factor in the overheads in any meaningful way is to forecast. Cost:benefit ratios are all fine and good but unless you've something to compare the current cost:benefit ratio to, all you have is a number. I'll accept that BtrFS' design is not broken (and my original post I did note that I didn't entirely believe the claim), but let's say it had been and version 2.0 had fixed this. We now have something to compare to. Migrating to version 1.0 might still be worth it, if the benefit is great enough to overwhelm the cost, but if you do the forecast you can predict whether it's better to migrate or wait.
And that's the key to any migration. You've got to see if it would (overall) be cheaper to stick with what you have and migrate later OR migrate now. Things will ALWAYS be better down the road, though, so how can you tell? Because part of the cost is the cost of waiting. The longer you're on an inferior system, the greater the overheads you have to pay. Somewhere there will be a sweet spot, a point where you get the most out of the upgrade. Waiting longer will get you something better, but the cost of the wait becomes so great that it's no longer worth it. Waiting less will cut down the penalties, but will create more effort and more risk.
For most of us, especially on home systems, the effort is part of the fun and the risk is insignificant as we all keep backups........right? So keeping a system fresh and current is just fine. I routinely use the staging tree rather than the actual release because the benefits to me overwhelm all other considerations. In a work environment, effort is not part of the fun and the risk is rather more than rolled eyes and grabbing the backups. Mind you, I have actually run experimental kernels in the workplace on production machines in the past, where I've decided that the benefits are worth taking that kind of chance. But as a rule, that's a bit of a no-no. For workplace servers, you want to keep as close to the sweet spots for upgrades as you can, recalculating the costs if a significant vulnerability is announced or a major bug that impacts the system is discovered.
For a kiosk turnkey product, an extensible OS that can work for the server or desktop is probably not that useful. You're never going to want to run commodity software on it, you're never going to want to extend it, and you're never going to want to make use of the flexibility it has.
Rather, you'd be much more interested in a real-time OS that is compact (so that most of the memory can be used for double-buffering the video and buffering the network traffic and disk activity) and supports only the absolute key features you must have. In the end, it is cheaper to develop a few minor features for an OS kernel than to test a horribly large number of pathways, and for something like TiVo, users aren't going to care about the 99.999% of the time it works great, they're going to remember and whine about the 0.0001% it doesn't.
(I like Linux, I consider it to be one of the best OS' yet developed, and it would be great for a platform that was going to combine the elements of a cable box with a video recorder with a web browser, especially if it was then going to act as a central server for on-demand TV to the rest of the house. It could handle something like that with one bitmask tied behind its back. For something much more basic like decode-store-and-play, FreeRTOS is probably sufficient and the simpler code would make verification much easier.)
There's champagne that's drinkable after 200 years. Until the troll passes the century mark, I'm not going to consider it as even coming close to having been aged.
I'm increasingly wary of BtrFS, due to claims that there are fundamental design flaws. This does not mean I believe such claims (although I observe LWN's top file-system contributing journalist is quitting her job, her entire career path and her State) but it does mean that I want to see someone do a proper systematic analysis of the methods used and algorithms chosen. I'll probably use it anyway. Radical filesystem architecturing is hard and better options are almost always likely to exist - the question I have is how much impact this actually has on performance and safety of BtrFS. A little? A lot? About average for filesystems?
Well, duh, obviously not. And therefore the claim that the ability to fingerprint fissile material is going away (as per the original article) is highly suspect at best, blatantly false at most likely. The skills are too damn simple. This is the usual scaremongering in an effort to bolster spending for weapons programs at a time when they may well get cutbacks.
One of the biggest problems with any such mission is the radiation levels. Even space-hardened chips can't survive indefinitely, Mars offers no serious protection and a Rover can't carry a whole lot of shielding. Another problem, peculiar to Mars, is its infamous dust devils - which, if I understand correctly, are about the size of Earthly hurricanes and pack the punch of a tornado crossed with a sandblaster.
That's what you get for using decaf. Me, I say tea is better than coffee anyway. But since I come from the same country as Monty Python, this may not reflect well on my sanity.
They would be able to tell that a given sample was from a fast-breeder reactor, they'd also be able to tell that it was not one they'd got data for and they'd probably be able to tell which uranium mine the ore was from (there aren't many and no more are likely to be discovered at any depth we have the technology to operate at at this time). Since the fingerprint is unique, and since radioactive waste is awfully hard to get rid of subtly, it would be extremely quick and easy to find where the reactor was.
An example of just how hard it is to hide these kinds of signatures -- the Russian who was poisoned by Polonium in London some years back. They can identify not only which reactor but which reactor vessel that Polonium came from. And that was with a very very trace sample. (As I recall, it was identified within a few hours of it being established Polonium was used.) Polonium has a half-life of 138.376 days. Since Britain closed Daresbury's 20MeV tandem accelerator, the options for doing a high-resolution run would have been limited, but they would certainly have been able to tell to within a day or two when the Polonium had been produced.
THAT is the kind of fingerprinting that can be done. Hell, even with my A-Level project software, I was able to isolate almost every radioisotope in the Chernobyl fallout from just the gamma signatures and no AMS at all. (Every radioisotope not only has a unique mass, it also has a unique energy signature.)
What would it take to get a sample for analyzing? Well, you get a bucket that you can open and close at both ends. You lower it into the water and take a sample. There won't be much plutonium or uranium floating near the surface, but there'll be enough even a few feet below to analyze. Back in 1978, that's how most of the research on the nuclear waste in the Irish Sea was done - with buckets, string, a dinghy and someone to keep look-out. Nothing fancier was needed and the results were staggeringly good. An actual core sample from the radioactive sludge would not have given you better results.
The thing is, it's almost impossible for a reactor to not release enough waste for it to be (a) identified as a nuclear reactor, and (b) listed alongside its radioisotope signature. No country - USA and Russia included - has ever successfully hidden a reactor. At least, not for more than about a week. And the kit needed by a radiochemist to do any serious work is virtually nothing. At the time of Chernobyl, it was possible to take a mobile lab up to any farm in the Cumbrian hills and do studies of soil, lichen and sheep. If the US Navy can't fit such a lab into a small manned submersible or even an ROV, it's their own damn fault.
Every reactor produces unique isotopes. It's an absolutely unique fingerprint. It will be present in the plutonium (unless you are suggesting that someone is going to refine plutonium to near 100%) and has been used for decades. Air monitors during the cold war would harvest particles of radioactive debris from surface testing, permitting identification of which reactor the material was from.
Almost nobody actually makes a pure uranium bomb. Horribly inefficient stuff. You need a lot of it to do anything, which immediately makes missiles impractical. Even if you did use uranium, the impurities would give away which mine it came from. Again, that is unique.
No, I said Sandia because they do more interesting work. Los Alamos is, frankly, dull.
(I have a 4-digit ID, yes, but far more importantly I was taught by an expert in radio-chemistry - which is why I was able to do said A-level project - who had been working on this kind of stuff since the 70s. He had fully automated radioisotope analysis down to a fine art by 1979.)
This is hardly rocket science. You get a sample from each reactor and perform an AMS* run on it. This gives you a fingerprint for that reactor. You get a sample from a nuclear weapon (pre-detonation or post-detonation) or fallout from debris (as in the case of Chernobyl) and perform an AMS* run on that.
*You can also look for specific gamma energies.
My A-Level computer science project could take the masses or energies and correctly infer which isotopes were present, in what ratios, and which reactor the sample likely came from. It double-checked by looking for daughter isotopes (decay products), since there are isotopes that look similar but follow different decay paths. I wrote that in less than a year in Turbo Pascal for the IBM PC.
And the US Government is now saying that all of its nuclear labs combined can't either write their own frigging version, don't have the books I worked from, and don't have any AMS equipment to collect fresh data as needed?
If they are that stupid and incompetent in relation to my talent and skills, when can I expect them to hand Sandia over to my care?
Oh, they're not? Then maybe there's something seriously dodgy about their claim.
You don't seriously believe that they were worried about being targeted, do you? Half these people outsource to the same overseas/unregulated call centers, so the same social engineering tricks will work and there's nothing that can be done about it without looking stupid. The other half have employees that are almost certain to fall for social engineering tricks but are "well-connected". In academia, you can kick someone upstairs* in situations like that. In a business, there's rarely an upstairs to kick them.
*Promoting people into positions that pay better but have minimal contact with the outside world and virtually no actual authority. Plenty of sub-committees, though. Lots of those. That way, you can get rid of high-risk people whilst keeping them close at hand. The lofty ivory towers aren't to isolate the scholars from the masses, they're to keep the masses safe from those who have totally lost it.
Corporate does not automatically equal accountability either, which is why one should never buy a product in order to have someone to blame if it goes wrong. One should try to buy products that won't go wrong in the first place.
However, it is a mistake to think that legal action equals accountability either. The law, these days, has little provision for the judge to take the facts into account and lawyers don't put in equal effort, which means the law ceases to be about what is far and becomes who can game the system the best.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, quite probably they were hooked up to the entire NASA Deep Space communications antennas.
There is a very large drug industry that says that there's a lot of profit in this war. Sure, the Americans probably aren't getting a whole lot of it, but you can be absolutely certain that the Afghan warlords are. Afghanistan is supposedly now the dominant player in markets only South American states had any involvement in. Even the Taliban have reputedly quit beheading drug runners and are cashing in on the market, it's that big.
(As a footnote, I think that this is something the press should be paying more attention to. The warlords are now stinking rich and their only hope of maintaining their luxury lifestyle is to keep their source of income going and to not split the profits - with the Taliban or the Kabul government. It also seems very likely said warlords are now richer than both. It doesn't seem to me that religious extremists will be the problem once America leaves.)
Some of the data is 6 years old. Ok, 1944, that would be 1938. Ok, the better parallel would be the WikiLeaks of 1944 broadcasting information about the German invasion of Poland. Or, since you really need to factor in that people can move faster and react faster these days (causing information to age faster), perhaps it would be more in line with the WikiLeaks of 1944 broadcasting top secret information on World War I's Battle of the Somme.
Well, that's only the announced military spending. There's an unknown black budget to factor in as well. Problem is, you can't factor it in as you've no means of calculating it. It could be anywhere from $1 to twice the announced military spending.
In Britain, "anti-terrorism" was indeed regular police work for over 20 years. The police handling of the Arndale Manchester bombing (3000 lbs truck bomb in a crowded city center) was one of the most spectacular evacuations in living history and although I tend to be rather critical of the way the police generally handle things, this was damn-near superhuman effort on their part and they deserve to be proud for saving the lives of every single person there. (There were a few minor injuries to those who stood right up against the barrier to watch the bomb go off, which surely would have deserved a Good Try from the Darwin Awards at the time, but that's it.)
In other situations, an Armed Response Unit might be called in, but that's still police. The SAS were called in once, to storm the Iranian Embassy, but even then the SAS report to the Home Office directly and are not strictly part of the regular army. Even if you did consider them, though, that's one operation out of how many hundreds?
I'm not sure who is in charge of the bomb disposal units, but that's such a tiny part of the whole operation that it really doesn't matter.
(I won't get into the source of funding for the terrorists, as many Slashdotters live in that country and might object.)
Acording to the MIA conspiracy theorists, yes, the US is indeed still there. Tilling fields, perhaps, but still there.
So we should prevent lawyers breeding at all costs?
I take it you've not seen footage from the House of Commons.
*hits WrongSizeGlass over the head with a virtual beer bottle*
To an extent, yes, which is why I said I'll probably end up using it anyway. It is better in many ways than existing alternatives (although XFS and JFS are still filesystems I like for specialist work). However, if you are planning any major migrations, it can't merely be better than existing alternatives because you have to factor in the effort and the risk of error in the migration. Also, never, ever use version 1.0 of something. Anyways, the only way to factor in the overheads in any meaningful way is to forecast. Cost:benefit ratios are all fine and good but unless you've something to compare the current cost:benefit ratio to, all you have is a number. I'll accept that BtrFS' design is not broken (and my original post I did note that I didn't entirely believe the claim), but let's say it had been and version 2.0 had fixed this. We now have something to compare to. Migrating to version 1.0 might still be worth it, if the benefit is great enough to overwhelm the cost, but if you do the forecast you can predict whether it's better to migrate or wait.
And that's the key to any migration. You've got to see if it would (overall) be cheaper to stick with what you have and migrate later OR migrate now. Things will ALWAYS be better down the road, though, so how can you tell? Because part of the cost is the cost of waiting. The longer you're on an inferior system, the greater the overheads you have to pay. Somewhere there will be a sweet spot, a point where you get the most out of the upgrade. Waiting longer will get you something better, but the cost of the wait becomes so great that it's no longer worth it. Waiting less will cut down the penalties, but will create more effort and more risk.
For most of us, especially on home systems, the effort is part of the fun and the risk is insignificant as we all keep backups.... ....right? So keeping a system fresh and current is just fine. I routinely use the staging tree rather than the actual release because the benefits to me overwhelm all other considerations. In a work environment, effort is not part of the fun and the risk is rather more than rolled eyes and grabbing the backups. Mind you, I have actually run experimental kernels in the workplace on production machines in the past, where I've decided that the benefits are worth taking that kind of chance. But as a rule, that's a bit of a no-no. For workplace servers, you want to keep as close to the sweet spots for upgrades as you can, recalculating the costs if a significant vulnerability is announced or a major bug that impacts the system is discovered.
For a kiosk turnkey product, an extensible OS that can work for the server or desktop is probably not that useful. You're never going to want to run commodity software on it, you're never going to want to extend it, and you're never going to want to make use of the flexibility it has.
Rather, you'd be much more interested in a real-time OS that is compact (so that most of the memory can be used for double-buffering the video and buffering the network traffic and disk activity) and supports only the absolute key features you must have. In the end, it is cheaper to develop a few minor features for an OS kernel than to test a horribly large number of pathways, and for something like TiVo, users aren't going to care about the 99.999% of the time it works great, they're going to remember and whine about the 0.0001% it doesn't.
(I like Linux, I consider it to be one of the best OS' yet developed, and it would be great for a platform that was going to combine the elements of a cable box with a video recorder with a web browser, especially if it was then going to act as a central server for on-demand TV to the rest of the house. It could handle something like that with one bitmask tied behind its back. For something much more basic like decode-store-and-play, FreeRTOS is probably sufficient and the simpler code would make verification much easier.)
There's champagne that's drinkable after 200 years. Until the troll passes the century mark, I'm not going to consider it as even coming close to having been aged.
It's 3.6.35 that's not released yet.
I'm increasingly wary of BtrFS, due to claims that there are fundamental design flaws. This does not mean I believe such claims (although I observe LWN's top file-system contributing journalist is quitting her job, her entire career path and her State) but it does mean that I want to see someone do a proper systematic analysis of the methods used and algorithms chosen. I'll probably use it anyway. Radical filesystem architecturing is hard and better options are almost always likely to exist - the question I have is how much impact this actually has on performance and safety of BtrFS. A little? A lot? About average for filesystems?
It's a plot to beat SCO's Linus 2.7 lawsuit claims.
Well, duh, obviously not. And therefore the claim that the ability to fingerprint fissile material is going away (as per the original article) is highly suspect at best, blatantly false at most likely. The skills are too damn simple. This is the usual scaremongering in an effort to bolster spending for weapons programs at a time when they may well get cutbacks.
One of the biggest problems with any such mission is the radiation levels. Even space-hardened chips can't survive indefinitely, Mars offers no serious protection and a Rover can't carry a whole lot of shielding. Another problem, peculiar to Mars, is its infamous dust devils - which, if I understand correctly, are about the size of Earthly hurricanes and pack the punch of a tornado crossed with a sandblaster.
I suggest calling AAA. All they need is a tow truck and a jump start.
That's what you get for using decaf. Me, I say tea is better than coffee anyway. But since I come from the same country as Monty Python, this may not reflect well on my sanity.
They would be able to tell that a given sample was from a fast-breeder reactor, they'd also be able to tell that it was not one they'd got data for and they'd probably be able to tell which uranium mine the ore was from (there aren't many and no more are likely to be discovered at any depth we have the technology to operate at at this time). Since the fingerprint is unique, and since radioactive waste is awfully hard to get rid of subtly, it would be extremely quick and easy to find where the reactor was.
An example of just how hard it is to hide these kinds of signatures -- the Russian who was poisoned by Polonium in London some years back. They can identify not only which reactor but which reactor vessel that Polonium came from. And that was with a very very trace sample. (As I recall, it was identified within a few hours of it being established Polonium was used.) Polonium has a half-life of 138.376 days. Since Britain closed Daresbury's 20MeV tandem accelerator, the options for doing a high-resolution run would have been limited, but they would certainly have been able to tell to within a day or two when the Polonium had been produced.
THAT is the kind of fingerprinting that can be done. Hell, even with my A-Level project software, I was able to isolate almost every radioisotope in the Chernobyl fallout from just the gamma signatures and no AMS at all. (Every radioisotope not only has a unique mass, it also has a unique energy signature.)
What would it take to get a sample for analyzing? Well, you get a bucket that you can open and close at both ends. You lower it into the water and take a sample. There won't be much plutonium or uranium floating near the surface, but there'll be enough even a few feet below to analyze. Back in 1978, that's how most of the research on the nuclear waste in the Irish Sea was done - with buckets, string, a dinghy and someone to keep look-out. Nothing fancier was needed and the results were staggeringly good. An actual core sample from the radioactive sludge would not have given you better results.
The thing is, it's almost impossible for a reactor to not release enough waste for it to be (a) identified as a nuclear reactor, and (b) listed alongside its radioisotope signature. No country - USA and Russia included - has ever successfully hidden a reactor. At least, not for more than about a week. And the kit needed by a radiochemist to do any serious work is virtually nothing. At the time of Chernobyl, it was possible to take a mobile lab up to any farm in the Cumbrian hills and do studies of soil, lichen and sheep. If the US Navy can't fit such a lab into a small manned submersible or even an ROV, it's their own damn fault.
Every reactor produces unique isotopes. It's an absolutely unique fingerprint. It will be present in the plutonium (unless you are suggesting that someone is going to refine plutonium to near 100%) and has been used for decades. Air monitors during the cold war would harvest particles of radioactive debris from surface testing, permitting identification of which reactor the material was from.
Almost nobody actually makes a pure uranium bomb. Horribly inefficient stuff. You need a lot of it to do anything, which immediately makes missiles impractical. Even if you did use uranium, the impurities would give away which mine it came from. Again, that is unique.
No, I said Sandia because they do more interesting work. Los Alamos is, frankly, dull.
(I have a 4-digit ID, yes, but far more importantly I was taught by an expert in radio-chemistry - which is why I was able to do said A-level project - who had been working on this kind of stuff since the 70s. He had fully automated radioisotope analysis down to a fine art by 1979.)
This is hardly rocket science. You get a sample from each reactor and perform an AMS* run on it. This gives you a fingerprint for that reactor. You get a sample from a nuclear weapon (pre-detonation or post-detonation) or fallout from debris (as in the case of Chernobyl) and perform an AMS* run on that.
*You can also look for specific gamma energies.
My A-Level computer science project could take the masses or energies and correctly infer which isotopes were present, in what ratios, and which reactor the sample likely came from. It double-checked by looking for daughter isotopes (decay products), since there are isotopes that look similar but follow different decay paths. I wrote that in less than a year in Turbo Pascal for the IBM PC.
And the US Government is now saying that all of its nuclear labs combined can't either write their own frigging version, don't have the books I worked from, and don't have any AMS equipment to collect fresh data as needed?
If they are that stupid and incompetent in relation to my talent and skills, when can I expect them to hand Sandia over to my care?
Oh, they're not? Then maybe there's something seriously dodgy about their claim.
You don't seriously believe that they were worried about being targeted, do you? Half these people outsource to the same overseas/unregulated call centers, so the same social engineering tricks will work and there's nothing that can be done about it without looking stupid. The other half have employees that are almost certain to fall for social engineering tricks but are "well-connected". In academia, you can kick someone upstairs* in situations like that. In a business, there's rarely an upstairs to kick them.
*Promoting people into positions that pay better but have minimal contact with the outside world and virtually no actual authority. Plenty of sub-committees, though. Lots of those. That way, you can get rid of high-risk people whilst keeping them close at hand. The lofty ivory towers aren't to isolate the scholars from the masses, they're to keep the masses safe from those who have totally lost it.
Perry the Platypus.
Corporate does not automatically equal accountability either, which is why one should never buy a product in order to have someone to blame if it goes wrong. One should try to buy products that won't go wrong in the first place.
However, it is a mistake to think that legal action equals accountability either. The law, these days, has little provision for the judge to take the facts into account and lawyers don't put in equal effort, which means the law ceases to be about what is far and becomes who can game the system the best.