...that Hawking has argued for some time now that since time is curved by gravity, you never reach a point 0. Instead of time being a cone from some origin, time is parabolic and has no gradient at the minimum. This eliminates the need for a singularity at the point of origin, by eliminating the need for an origin. If you have no origin, you have no need of a creation event. (Which he gets into in his Brief History of Time.)
However, here you get into a small problem. If you have no need of a creation event, there is nowhere to have this "nothing" from which the Universe supposedly spawned. Even a nothing has to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere. It is meaningless to talk about what happened prior to time, because without time there can be no "prior". Likewise, if there is no creation event, you START with the Big Bang and can dispense with the need of this nothingness.
Personally, I would tend to go for the idea that time (but not space) is a closed loop. (Yes, it is possible for only time to be closed, provided there is a stable solution to the wormhole equations.) If you allow matter and/or energy to be slingshot back to the start, and thus have a Universe with a variable mass, many of the problems in cosmology (an apparently variable speed of light, and an apparently variable Hubble Constant for example) stop being problems. These would be the normal and expected consequences of such a system. By having time strictly bounded, we can eliminate a lot of the problems that occur in other cyclic models. (We can also eliminate the need for an inflationary model, which causes no end of headaches, because the start of the loop can be placed AFTER the point in time that inflation would be expected to finish. This allows us to avoid all kinds of strange things, like superluminal velocities, twelve dimensions of space, a wholly even Universe forming structures, etc.
The problem with cosmology is that many theories add more paradoxes and conundrums than they resolve. This is generally not considered a good sign, and has led many to question the validity of much of cosmology. I think it reasonable to trust cosmologists to have a pretty good idea of what observations are supporting, so the only solution I can come up with is to conclude they are holding some single assumption to be true that is, in fact, completely wrong. Everything else is correct, but that one assumption. Then it becomes inevitable that everything would have to be almost - but not quite - right, which is what we see.
My guess is that the entire theory of everything between the Big Bang and the end of the Inflationary Era is the assumption that is invalid. No, not the model, the theory that such a period of time even existed. If we eliminate that entire period of time, we eliminate virtually all of the problems. Eliminating problems is generally a Good Thing and usually a sign of being on the right track. However, we would now have to explain how you can suddenly get this fairly complex, non-uniform structure, without introducing ANY problems to replace the ones that are now unnecessary. Looping time is one possible solution, there may be others. All that seems obvious at the moment is that if an assumption needs any kind of unsolvable problem, it's probably wrong.
This is an English Press Release about an English University. How do we know it's not an English billion? (That would make it a giga-giga-gigahertz.) Sure, technology is usually metric, but the English have been rebelling against such European standards for decades. (Bath, being a Roman city, is probably still using Roman units, not Imperial units.)
The original article does indeed talk about being closer to desktop computers that use photonics, as does the news article that is directly linked to from Slashdot. Even though the main body of the article doesn't talk about desktop computing, the strong implication of the press release is that that is exactly what the researchers are working on. This is far from the worst headline ever and is actually a pretty decent writeup, even if it is only of the first paragraph.
If the manufacturers standardize on a cartridge format, then it could be automatically removed and a fresh cartridge inserted. The robotics for such an operation have been more than adequate for about a decade now.
Of course, you are right in questioning how standard these things will get. (Answer: If it will kill a competitor or three, not very)
A beowulf cluster of OpenMosix-configured computerized Tux dolls with hundred gigabit ethernet. And $10,000 worth of programming books. I don't think that an unreasonable demand.
...that that was an effort at sarcasm or satire. (If so, PLEASE watch "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" and "Spitting Image" before attempting either of these forms of humour again. "Yes, Prime Minister" would also be helpful. There are some helpful hints on "The Goodies" and "The Morcambe and Wise Show" which are worthy of study. Angry Man humour is frankly rather dated and was never that good anyway.)
If Linux had used the BSD license, there is absolutely no way on Earth that SGI or IBM would have ported their flagship filing systems to it. Why? Because under the GPL, it is relatively benign. It can't be used against them in a rival commercial product. Under the BSD license, it could - and probably would.
This is not to say that the GPL is perfect - there is no such thing as "perfect" in this context. You should always use the right tool for the job, if you expect to do the job well. Rather, what I am saying is that the GPL is nowhere near as hostile to business as some make out and in many cases is actually business-friendly. (More hardware companies supply drivers - closed or open - to Linux than they do for any of the *BSDs. Not because there is a problem with the BSd kernel - in some ways it is superior. Nor is it because of market-share - we're talking fractions of a percent for both types of OS in many specialist industries. It is because BSD-licensed code could improve a competitor's closed product and no vendor is so stupid as to do that.)
Both licenses are important, both have probably put some people off, both have indisputedly been seen as attractive by others. So stop dissing something you don't like merely because the other happens incidentally to be good for you. Your understanding of the whole of the industry is simply not great enough. Nobody's is. Not even mine, and I've seen and worked in more sectors of the IT profession than most. Nobody, nobody at all, has the knowledge to say that open source license XYZ has done more harm than good, because nobody at all has seen more than a pathetically insignificant number of cases. All I can do is show that the number of cases where GPL has been a primary positive factor AND where BSD licenses have probably been detrimental is non-zero and is probably not even remotely close to zero. That is enough to blow any anti-GPL argument out of the water.
Exactly the same set of arguments and methods can be used to blow out the water all anti-BSD arguments and all anti-Public Domain arguments. The other licenses probably have something similar but I can't think of any solid examples right now. I can for those three.
Frankly, bitching about licenses is probably the biggest problem with Open Source, as it makes the community look like spoiled children - and how many managers want spoiled children running their IT centers? It also helps proliferate secretive Open Source projects and helps detract from the much-needed community support that any project needs to thrive. I am sick of the trolls, the flames, the bitching and the whining whenever these issues come up. These aren't expressions of opinion - there can be no opinion without thought and the thoughtless have none.
Personally, I would agree with you. I have to say I am not fond of OpenMP - I grew up on Occam, and these days Occam-Pi blows anything done in C out of the water. (You can write threads which can auto-migrate over a cluster, for example. Even OpenMOSIX won't work at a finer granularity than entire processes, and most compile-time parallelism is wholly static after the initial execution.)
On the other hand, OpenMP is a far more solid, robust, established, reputable, reliable solution than Codeplay. The patent in Codeplay is also bothersome - there aren't many ways to produce an auto-parallelizing compiler and they've mostly been done. This means the patent either violates prior art (most likely), or is such "black magic" that no other compiler-writing company could expect to reproduce the results and would be buying the technology anyway. It also means they can't ship to Europe, because Europe doesn't allow software patents and has a reputation of reverse-engineering such code (think "ARC-4") or just pirating/using it anyway (think: pretty good privacy version 2, international version, which had patented code in it)
I mean, it was only running on two threads AND showed clear signs of excess barrier operations at the end of every character. From here on out, I expect first parallel posts to run over at least four threads and not be sequentially-coherent. The world is moving towards async! Don't let first posts suffer with past limitations!
Simple version: Parallel code need not be re-entrant, but all re-entrant code is parallel.
More complex version: There are four ways to run a program. These are "Single Instruction, Single Data" (ie: a single-threaded program), "Single Instruction, Multi Data" (SETI@Home would be an example of this), "Multi Instruction, Single Data" (a good way to program genetic algorithms) and "Multi Instruction, Multi Data" (traditional, hard-core parallelism).
SIMD would need to be re-entrant to be parallel, otherwise you can't be running the same instructions. (Duh.:) SIMD is fashionable, but is limited to those cases where you are operating on the data in parallel. If you want to experiment with dynamic methods (herustics, genetic algorithms, self-learning networks) or where you want to apply multiple algorithms to the same data (eg: data-mining, using a range of specialist algorithms), then you're going to be running a vast number of completely different routines that may have no components in common. If so, you wouldn't care if they were re-entrant or not.
In practice, you're likely to use a blend of SIMD, MISD and MIMD in any "real-world" program. People who write "pure" code of one type or another usually end up with something that is ugly, hard to maintain and feels wrong for the problem. On the other hand, it usually requires the fewest messaging and other communication libraries, as you're only doing one type of communication. You can also optimize the hell out of the network, which is very likely to saturate with many problems.
The Greeks had formal proofs that, one day, humans would have fully automated machines capable of performing menial work normally given to laborers. My wild speculations are about on that level. As with them, I probably have the basic form about right and the basic results about right. Also as with them, there are probably a few million bits in between that I don't know.
But, then, maybe I have the correct solution. And how many had built functioning powered heavier-than-air aircraft before the Wright Brothers? Probably a few dozen. Who gets the credit? The guys with the best PR.
And, finally, who the hell ever gives a damn about what's written on a blog? Each and every Slashdotter could post up tomorrow an absolutely perfect solution to the top 100 great mysteries in science and medicine, yet it would have bugger all impact. That's the nature of industry - the Not Invented Here syndrome is alive and well. Part of that is that there are a few billion posts being written to blogs each day. If a hundred pieces of utter brilliance were posted a day, that gives you ten million crap posts for every enlightened one. Who has the time to look through them for those gems? And it's very unlikely it's even close to a hundred great postings a day.
Bad RAM isn't really detected by the counter (which is just there to look nice) and the BadRAM patch which autodetects it and works round it on a live system is probably a more sensible way to go.
(What would be cool would be to merge the BadRAM patch with the hot-pluggable memory code, so that if a chip dies on a live system, the system can handle it and request a hot memory swap.)
Whenever I update the Freshmeat record, I'm noting the addition of two or three FLASH chips, probably the same number of support chips, and usually one or two motherboards. The web pages are hopelessly out-of-date when it comes to what LinuxBIOS supports. My suggestion is to print out the web page then add everything I've noted in the updates since the page was last changed. My guess would be that you would give LinuxBIOS a great deal more credibility.
What's wrong with a gamma knife? (Uses eight sources, none of which are exceptionally dangerous in themselves, such that the area of overlap is totally lethal.)
For that matter, since cancer cells tend to generate heat, the cancerous region should be nearer the point of cell death than non-cancerous tissue. Use microwaves to raise the water temperature such that healthy cells will still be below the threshold but cancer cells are cooked.
Alternatively, cancer cells must pull in far more amino acids than healthy cells simply to duplicate so rapidly. Synthesize some amino acids that use an isotope you know the frequency for a-la x-ray fluorescence. Beam in some x-rays at the required frequency. The isotope will absorb them and emit electrons. Because the cancerous cells have more of the isotope, they will have more electrons blasting around. I would have thought you could do some really nasty things to the cancer before the healthy cells even noticed the extra charge on their bill.
There are some startup cell phone companies (such as Cricket) which are devoid of contracts. I would not be willing to put money into them surviving long - if they're crap, they'll die. If they're not crap, the other companies will attempt to murder them up some dark alley. Or switch the customers to another carrier. (Yes, that's illegal. Doesn't seem to stop any of the regular telecos any - they do that all the time.)
"The Federal budget probably goes through our software. Hell, the DoT's bank probably uses our software, as do all of the archiving services that track DoT's backup tapes, the DoT's leased-line providers, the DoT's managers' home computers, the DoT's managers' children's school computers... If the DoT knows what's good for it, it will obey without question every instruction we give them on what to buy and when to buy it. Money is to be in used notes, have non-consecutive serial numbers and be deposited in the large skip marked "blackmail payments" parked on the front lawn."
I don't see the problem.
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Breathing hard vaccuum is a really bad idea, so most space suits likely to be worn will be 100% isolated from the outside. This means that the only possible place for dust to get into lungs would be in the landing capsule - if the helmets are removed. Let's say, however, that they are not. That the astronaut simply connects to a piped oxygen supply when in the capsule. Then the risk of contamination is greatly reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced.
There is still the problem of when the astronaut connects to the piped air. That connection could potentially get contaminated with dust and therefore potentially be hazardous. With no air in the capsule, the dust cannot be carried by convection currents. This means that dust must eventually hit the floor. If the floor is a mesh with aerogel under it, the dust will be trapped by the gel but the astronauts will be able to walk just fine.
This eliminates the problem of when the astronauts finally return to the main rocket. With the dust trapped in aerogel, you should be able to repressurize the capsule without stirring the dust back up. Thus, there should be no risk in doing so. If you want to be ultra-careful, you could always have the astronauts spacewalk to and from the capsule and never have the capsule pressurized at all. The saving in weight by not having it pressurized would be minimal and spacewalks are not risk-free, but it would remove any last possibility of dust hazard. Personally, I'd have thought the aerogel would be sufficient, but that would certainly be one way to remove the last remaining risk-factor.
(*aerogel is used here to denote not only the substance that trades under that name but any material that could act as a sponge for ultrafine dust particles of the quantities under consideration AND which is light enough to be a practical method of preventing dust circulation. Frankly, if you could find a way of stacking toothpicks to do the same thing, I'd take that over a brand-name for the sheer geek value.)
If people cared about sniffers, they wouldn't be using unsecured protocols with wireless. They probably wouldn't use unsecured routers either. They're rather restricted on the Internet itself, as most websites don't provide SSL/TLS access or IPSec tunneling. It's quite pathetic, really. (For that matter, why are wireless routers so nausiatingly limited? There are a half-dozen very standard wireless routing protocols and over two hundred have been developed. But wireless routers often don't support any. If they do, it's the ad-hoc protocol, which is probably the least-useful. I've yet to see a wireless router even support the Mobile IP extensions, which you would think would be the first thing that would be included.)
If you're using Linux, then airsnort and WifiRadar will probably provide most of what you want for wireless. Wireshark captures on wireless as well, as others have noted, but I've never used it in that mode and can't tell you what the results are like. I am not sure of the status of EtherApe, which is graphically superior when it comes to mapping activity, although it is informationally pretty pathetic. You'd certainly want passive fingerprinting tools, as sniffers are generally not too hot in that arena - nmap and other active fingerprinting tools would probably not be smart if the user has any kind of security in place. However, there are only a few hundred of those, so you're not at massive risk. Of course, running Nessus or another auditing package might be a little obvious, even for those who are fairly clueless.
Now, if you're the sadistic, malicious sort, basic wardriving must be getting rather tiresome anyway. Why not add some excitement to the process - say by installing nmap on the other person's computer and have it scan the NSA's network repeatedly?
But they do mine rock salt in Cheshire. The tunnels are a good ten foot or so in height and the salt is blasted out with high explosives. Now, that's the stuff you should be taking with stories like this.
I believe Tolkien had a few words to say about suspension of disbelief, in his essay "On Fairy Stories". In essence, his argument was that a good story should essentially have you in that other world; that if you are so totally disconnected from the fiction that you have to actively suspend disbelief to remotely enjoy it, then the fiction is basically crap and you shouldn't bother with it. His belief was that a story should draw you in, that it should be "real" in its own way, no matter how fantastic.
IMHO, most of Hollywood's output is generally crap. Pulp that will sell well for a few days, for its skin/shock/sfx value, but after that die off. They stayers - the stuff that actually entertains, and keeps entertaining for decades - is not necessarily more realistic. Some of it is highly fantastic. But it is invariably stuff that is "internally" realistic (a sub-creation, Tolkien called it) and has a power that suspends nothing - it grabs you by the cortex and stuffs you into the writer's world - that really lasts.
Slashdot Mirror
However, here you get into a small problem. If you have no need of a creation event, there is nowhere to have this "nothing" from which the Universe supposedly spawned. Even a nothing has to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere. It is meaningless to talk about what happened prior to time, because without time there can be no "prior". Likewise, if there is no creation event, you START with the Big Bang and can dispense with the need of this nothingness.
Personally, I would tend to go for the idea that time (but not space) is a closed loop. (Yes, it is possible for only time to be closed, provided there is a stable solution to the wormhole equations.) If you allow matter and/or energy to be slingshot back to the start, and thus have a Universe with a variable mass, many of the problems in cosmology (an apparently variable speed of light, and an apparently variable Hubble Constant for example) stop being problems. These would be the normal and expected consequences of such a system. By having time strictly bounded, we can eliminate a lot of the problems that occur in other cyclic models. (We can also eliminate the need for an inflationary model, which causes no end of headaches, because the start of the loop can be placed AFTER the point in time that inflation would be expected to finish. This allows us to avoid all kinds of strange things, like superluminal velocities, twelve dimensions of space, a wholly even Universe forming structures, etc.
The problem with cosmology is that many theories add more paradoxes and conundrums than they resolve. This is generally not considered a good sign, and has led many to question the validity of much of cosmology. I think it reasonable to trust cosmologists to have a pretty good idea of what observations are supporting, so the only solution I can come up with is to conclude they are holding some single assumption to be true that is, in fact, completely wrong. Everything else is correct, but that one assumption. Then it becomes inevitable that everything would have to be almost - but not quite - right, which is what we see.
My guess is that the entire theory of everything between the Big Bang and the end of the Inflationary Era is the assumption that is invalid. No, not the model, the theory that such a period of time even existed. If we eliminate that entire period of time, we eliminate virtually all of the problems. Eliminating problems is generally a Good Thing and usually a sign of being on the right track. However, we would now have to explain how you can suddenly get this fairly complex, non-uniform structure, without introducing ANY problems to replace the ones that are now unnecessary. Looping time is one possible solution, there may be others. All that seems obvious at the moment is that if an assumption needs any kind of unsolvable problem, it's probably wrong.
It's Michael Jackson doing an Alice Cooper impression.
This is an English Press Release about an English University. How do we know it's not an English billion? (That would make it a giga-giga-gigahertz.) Sure, technology is usually metric, but the English have been rebelling against such European standards for decades. (Bath, being a Roman city, is probably still using Roman units, not Imperial units.)
The original article does indeed talk about being closer to desktop computers that use photonics, as does the news article that is directly linked to from Slashdot. Even though the main body of the article doesn't talk about desktop computing, the strong implication of the press release is that that is exactly what the researchers are working on. This is far from the worst headline ever and is actually a pretty decent writeup, even if it is only of the first paragraph.
Duh. It's an Ang with an Excent.
Of course, you are right in questioning how standard these things will get. (Answer: If it will kill a competitor or three, not very)
A beowulf cluster of OpenMosix-configured computerized Tux dolls with hundred gigabit ethernet. And $10,000 worth of programming books. I don't think that an unreasonable demand.
...that that was an effort at sarcasm or satire. (If so, PLEASE watch "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" and "Spitting Image" before attempting either of these forms of humour again. "Yes, Prime Minister" would also be helpful. There are some helpful hints on "The Goodies" and "The Morcambe and Wise Show" which are worthy of study. Angry Man humour is frankly rather dated and was never that good anyway.)
"Bread and Circuses". It's all you need to placate the populace. Getting things done might be productive, but cheap entertainment is so much easier.
Never, ever tell a Scotsman that they're a European. Doubly so if they're into their fourth single-malt and second haggis of the morning.
This is not to say that the GPL is perfect - there is no such thing as "perfect" in this context. You should always use the right tool for the job, if you expect to do the job well. Rather, what I am saying is that the GPL is nowhere near as hostile to business as some make out and in many cases is actually business-friendly. (More hardware companies supply drivers - closed or open - to Linux than they do for any of the *BSDs. Not because there is a problem with the BSd kernel - in some ways it is superior. Nor is it because of market-share - we're talking fractions of a percent for both types of OS in many specialist industries. It is because BSD-licensed code could improve a competitor's closed product and no vendor is so stupid as to do that.)
Both licenses are important, both have probably put some people off, both have indisputedly been seen as attractive by others. So stop dissing something you don't like merely because the other happens incidentally to be good for you. Your understanding of the whole of the industry is simply not great enough. Nobody's is. Not even mine, and I've seen and worked in more sectors of the IT profession than most. Nobody, nobody at all, has the knowledge to say that open source license XYZ has done more harm than good, because nobody at all has seen more than a pathetically insignificant number of cases. All I can do is show that the number of cases where GPL has been a primary positive factor AND where BSD licenses have probably been detrimental is non-zero and is probably not even remotely close to zero. That is enough to blow any anti-GPL argument out of the water.
Exactly the same set of arguments and methods can be used to blow out the water all anti-BSD arguments and all anti-Public Domain arguments. The other licenses probably have something similar but I can't think of any solid examples right now. I can for those three.
Frankly, bitching about licenses is probably the biggest problem with Open Source, as it makes the community look like spoiled children - and how many managers want spoiled children running their IT centers? It also helps proliferate secretive Open Source projects and helps detract from the much-needed community support that any project needs to thrive. I am sick of the trolls, the flames, the bitching and the whining whenever these issues come up. These aren't expressions of opinion - there can be no opinion without thought and the thoughtless have none.
On the other hand, OpenMP is a far more solid, robust, established, reputable, reliable solution than Codeplay. The patent in Codeplay is also bothersome - there aren't many ways to produce an auto-parallelizing compiler and they've mostly been done. This means the patent either violates prior art (most likely), or is such "black magic" that no other compiler-writing company could expect to reproduce the results and would be buying the technology anyway. It also means they can't ship to Europe, because Europe doesn't allow software patents and has a reputation of reverse-engineering such code (think "ARC-4") or just pirating/using it anyway (think: pretty good privacy version 2, international version, which had patented code in it)
I mean, it was only running on two threads AND showed clear signs of excess barrier operations at the end of every character. From here on out, I expect first parallel posts to run over at least four threads and not be sequentially-coherent. The world is moving towards async! Don't let first posts suffer with past limitations!
More complex version: There are four ways to run a program. These are "Single Instruction, Single Data" (ie: a single-threaded program), "Single Instruction, Multi Data" (SETI@Home would be an example of this), "Multi Instruction, Single Data" (a good way to program genetic algorithms) and "Multi Instruction, Multi Data" (traditional, hard-core parallelism).
SIMD would need to be re-entrant to be parallel, otherwise you can't be running the same instructions. (Duh. :) SIMD is fashionable, but is limited to those cases where you are operating on the data in parallel. If you want to experiment with dynamic methods (herustics, genetic algorithms, self-learning networks) or where you want to apply multiple algorithms to the same data (eg: data-mining, using a range of specialist algorithms), then you're going to be running a vast number of completely different routines that may have no components in common. If so, you wouldn't care if they were re-entrant or not.
In practice, you're likely to use a blend of SIMD, MISD and MIMD in any "real-world" program. People who write "pure" code of one type or another usually end up with something that is ugly, hard to maintain and feels wrong for the problem. On the other hand, it usually requires the fewest messaging and other communication libraries, as you're only doing one type of communication. You can also optimize the hell out of the network, which is very likely to saturate with many problems.
But, then, maybe I have the correct solution. And how many had built functioning powered heavier-than-air aircraft before the Wright Brothers? Probably a few dozen. Who gets the credit? The guys with the best PR.
And, finally, who the hell ever gives a damn about what's written on a blog? Each and every Slashdotter could post up tomorrow an absolutely perfect solution to the top 100 great mysteries in science and medicine, yet it would have bugger all impact. That's the nature of industry - the Not Invented Here syndrome is alive and well. Part of that is that there are a few billion posts being written to blogs each day. If a hundred pieces of utter brilliance were posted a day, that gives you ten million crap posts for every enlightened one. Who has the time to look through them for those gems? And it's very unlikely it's even close to a hundred great postings a day.
If you can just increase it to 2001 and have the whole thing controlled by a computer that uses a camera with an embedded red light...
(What would be cool would be to merge the BadRAM patch with the hot-pluggable memory code, so that if a chip dies on a live system, the system can handle it and request a hot memory swap.)
Whenever I update the Freshmeat record, I'm noting the addition of two or three FLASH chips, probably the same number of support chips, and usually one or two motherboards. The web pages are hopelessly out-of-date when it comes to what LinuxBIOS supports. My suggestion is to print out the web page then add everything I've noted in the updates since the page was last changed. My guess would be that you would give LinuxBIOS a great deal more credibility.
For that matter, since cancer cells tend to generate heat, the cancerous region should be nearer the point of cell death than non-cancerous tissue. Use microwaves to raise the water temperature such that healthy cells will still be below the threshold but cancer cells are cooked.
Alternatively, cancer cells must pull in far more amino acids than healthy cells simply to duplicate so rapidly. Synthesize some amino acids that use an isotope you know the frequency for a-la x-ray fluorescence. Beam in some x-rays at the required frequency. The isotope will absorb them and emit electrons. Because the cancerous cells have more of the isotope, they will have more electrons blasting around. I would have thought you could do some really nasty things to the cancer before the healthy cells even noticed the extra charge on their bill.
There are some startup cell phone companies (such as Cricket) which are devoid of contracts. I would not be willing to put money into them surviving long - if they're crap, they'll die. If they're not crap, the other companies will attempt to murder them up some dark alley. Or switch the customers to another carrier. (Yes, that's illegal. Doesn't seem to stop any of the regular telecos any - they do that all the time.)
"The Federal budget probably goes through our software. Hell, the DoT's bank probably uses our software, as do all of the archiving services that track DoT's backup tapes, the DoT's leased-line providers, the DoT's managers' home computers, the DoT's managers' children's school computers... If the DoT knows what's good for it, it will obey without question every instruction we give them on what to buy and when to buy it. Money is to be in used notes, have non-consecutive serial numbers and be deposited in the large skip marked "blackmail payments" parked on the front lawn."
There is still the problem of when the astronaut connects to the piped air. That connection could potentially get contaminated with dust and therefore potentially be hazardous. With no air in the capsule, the dust cannot be carried by convection currents. This means that dust must eventually hit the floor. If the floor is a mesh with aerogel under it, the dust will be trapped by the gel but the astronauts will be able to walk just fine.
This eliminates the problem of when the astronauts finally return to the main rocket. With the dust trapped in aerogel, you should be able to repressurize the capsule without stirring the dust back up. Thus, there should be no risk in doing so. If you want to be ultra-careful, you could always have the astronauts spacewalk to and from the capsule and never have the capsule pressurized at all. The saving in weight by not having it pressurized would be minimal and spacewalks are not risk-free, but it would remove any last possibility of dust hazard. Personally, I'd have thought the aerogel would be sufficient, but that would certainly be one way to remove the last remaining risk-factor.
(*aerogel is used here to denote not only the substance that trades under that name but any material that could act as a sponge for ultrafine dust particles of the quantities under consideration AND which is light enough to be a practical method of preventing dust circulation. Frankly, if you could find a way of stacking toothpicks to do the same thing, I'd take that over a brand-name for the sheer geek value.)
If you're using Linux, then airsnort and WifiRadar will probably provide most of what you want for wireless. Wireshark captures on wireless as well, as others have noted, but I've never used it in that mode and can't tell you what the results are like. I am not sure of the status of EtherApe, which is graphically superior when it comes to mapping activity, although it is informationally pretty pathetic. You'd certainly want passive fingerprinting tools, as sniffers are generally not too hot in that arena - nmap and other active fingerprinting tools would probably not be smart if the user has any kind of security in place. However, there are only a few hundred of those, so you're not at massive risk. Of course, running Nessus or another auditing package might be a little obvious, even for those who are fairly clueless.
Now, if you're the sadistic, malicious sort, basic wardriving must be getting rather tiresome anyway. Why not add some excitement to the process - say by installing nmap on the other person's computer and have it scan the NSA's network repeatedly?
But they do mine rock salt in Cheshire. The tunnels are a good ten foot or so in height and the salt is blasted out with high explosives. Now, that's the stuff you should be taking with stories like this.
IMHO, most of Hollywood's output is generally crap. Pulp that will sell well for a few days, for its skin/shock/sfx value, but after that die off. They stayers - the stuff that actually entertains, and keeps entertaining for decades - is not necessarily more realistic. Some of it is highly fantastic. But it is invariably stuff that is "internally" realistic (a sub-creation, Tolkien called it) and has a power that suspends nothing - it grabs you by the cortex and stuffs you into the writer's world - that really lasts.