Please stop the FUD. Approximately nothing of what you have said is true, cdrguru.
The FAA's office of Space Transportation (AST) has a mandate written in its authorizing law to both regulate and promote commercial space activities. They take both parts of that quite seriously. Please do not spread FUD.
I am not aware of any commercial space activity which was denied an AST license or permit. There have been a few "Can't fly from this airport" snafu's from the aviation side, who are alternately happy and sad about rockets, but the AST crew are doing the "promote" thing quite seriously.
Is it always a completely smooth relationship? No. Is any of the startup companies spending most of their time (more than 10-20%) on paperwork? No. People are getting licenses and permits, they're flying.
From a reasonable standpoint, someone does need to be an external review to make sure we don't kill someone on the ground. If the industry neglected that, we'd eventually *really* get shut down when we did something neglegent. The reviews and regulation are appropriate to avoid dropping rockets on some poor family some day, which would be a tragedy both for the victims and for the industry.
EPA has no authority, the FAA has a standing environmental finding that there's no significant impact from the reusable rocket industry.
Am I personally flying rockets? No. Have I had to talk to AST about some proposed activities? Some. Do I know the people flying stuff now (Xcor, Armadillo, Masten, Unreasonable)? Yes, in most cases for decade-plus and personally. When we all get together, most of the griping is about operational lessons, and learning new things about rocket design, and high-fives for new successes. Only a small fraction of it is regulatory. It's there, but we know how to deal with it.
Actually you do, with most cars... Because your center of mass is above the centroid of impact in the nose of the car, you get tumbled over onto the hood and then windshield by the impact, and are accelerated over a significant distance as that happens. Unless the car's fast enough that you then faceplant into the windshield.
There's an airbag in research which fits into the gap between the hood and windshield, to deflect you gently out of that as well, absorbing you in low speed impacts and flipping you (much more gently) up and over the roof in higher speed impacts.
Doesn't work as well for SUVs where there's vehicle nose at your waist and chest level. But normal cars are already much better than "splat", and getting better as pedestrian safety standards round off corners and put energy absorbtion into the hood and engine top (part of the reason for those flat, plastic panels on the top of a lot of engines these days).
I don't believe why any portable secure drive needs to or should trust its host computer. This is a particularly stupid implementation, with an obvious and blatant exploit. But the host computer could by definition be compromised, and could intercept or store / cache or misbehave generically with the password you enter to get in.
Put a thumb-key sized numeric or hex keypad on the device, and make the owner punch in the code on insertion into a host device. One could still physically break into and tap the keys somehow, if the device is stolen and then returned without the owner knowing, but the user interface moves to right next to the data...
Buying the info is in many jurisdictions using someone else as an agent for law enforcement, and entails many of the same privacy related restrictions.
However, what's keeping me from renting a thermal imaging scanner and an aircraft (and, as I'm not a private pilot, borrowing a friend who is) and flying around and taking thermal image pictures of all my home down, and then creating a new website that offers image overlays for Google Earth of the resulting heat data, for free?
Anyone who isn't the police isn't prohibited or limited from using that part of the spectrum passively. It's not legally private data for private citizens. We have the optical analogy in California - a bunch of people did that with normal digital photography and the California ocean coastline, flew all up and down it and produced a high res photomap of the whole distance.
It's putting 2 and 2 together in a slightly novel method, but none of the substeps are illegal. If I were to do that, then the info's out in public. If I were to do that, are the police then doing something wrong if they look at the images?
Actually, the specific reactor proposed here - a Thorium Fluoride liquid material reactor - is high up on a "What if we wanted to make a shortest/cheapest path to weapons grade fissile materials?" list of candidate technologies, because you can continuously chemically process the U-233 parent material out of the salt bath and divert a direct weapons grade output stream without extensive difficult dirty post-processing.
It's funny how some nuclear power people can look at a technology and see "safe power" when weapons oriented technical experts think it's a great path to weapons.
One has to be realistic - anything nuclear related has potential for weapons use. This includes medical isotopes and industrial radiation sources (dirty bombs), any reactor inputs or outputs (dirty bombs, or potentially nuclear weapons). However, this is energy we're talking about. We have weapons grade concentrations of potential explosive materials in and around most major cities - look at a how common propane tanks are, and natural gas is piped almost everywhere. Gasoline is toxic and its vapors are explosive, and yet it's sold openly to anyone with a car (or moped, or kart), including illegal aliens and children. Lethal and weapons-grade quantities of electricity are available in practically every home and office.
The nuclear industry can, unfortunately, output truly citybusting class devices if it's not careful. It takes some effort to do that much damage short of actual atomic weapons. But civilization needs to be careful with energy. We generally pay it not enough heed.
They are not trained to protect your life. They are specifically trained to desensitize them to one's natural aversion to killing a human being. They are trained to protect their own lives by killing you. This is their reason for existence, to kill people
You have to train anyone who might have to use a firearm that way, because many people naturally won't immediately aim at a human target and pull the trigger even if their life depends on it. Most of the ones that will, will forget to aim properly, and miss... requiring more shots to defend yourself, and with every extra bullet fired risking killing some bystander.
Anyone who is considering owning a gun for home defense (or in states where you can legally carry for your own self-defense outside the home, generalized self defense) should take similar training. Get used to shooting the gun, then go to a properly equipped range with pop-up or flip-on targets which are photos of real people not just silhouettes, and practice shooting those too.
Officers, and anyone likely to be going in to and having to deal with ambiguous potentially lethal but usually not situations, should also get the video based shoot/no shoot training. Officers who have good basic firearms skills typically shoot a few perfectly innocent people, and get killed by a few innocent looking lethal people, in those training scenarios, before they internalize procedures to protect themselves.
Any police officer who does not come out of that training with an acceptably safe approach for dealing with situations on the street is likely to be let go by the department. Because if they will not shoot when their life is on the line, they are placing other officers' lives and innocent crime victims' lives at risk. If they will shoot inappropriately, they will wound or kill someone who didn't deserve it, and wreck themselves mentally, and get a huge lawsuit against the department.
A vast majority of the people police shoot are career criminals, who have guns or knives, and who pose an immediate and obvious risk to the officers or civilians. See for example the nutcase in New York City a couple of days ago, who was threatening and scamming tourists and when stopped by police pulled a MAC-10 (semiautomatic) and started shooting.
If police can't stop those people, then we're all screwed.
If we let the police turn into those people, then we're also screwed - but isolated incidents are not the totality of what police in the US are. Most are out to protect us, not screw with us.
Exactly - hypothermia in under-ice immersions, and surgical hypothermia, are well studied now and effective.
You can't possibly do that on the battlefield... but, with these chemical equivalents, turning off the oxygen for the decay processes rather than the temperature needed for them to occur, it's a possibly field expedient method of achieving the same goals.
Not magic - may not work if the blood's lost too fast or heart's not beating by the time you get to them - but CPR may be good enough circulation, and possibly IV bags with the chemical cocktail and saline solution would be enough to perfuse the patient even if most of the blood is gone (if you're putting them out, then no oxygen in the saline is not even vaguely a problem... it's actually helpful).
It may not end up working on human sized animals. That's what the trials are for. But if it does, it could save not just soldiers but many many many people who die in trauma or in surgical incidents.
Have to test in human sized animals, if that works then go for humans as with any other medical procedure. No way of knowing ahead of time. Scale effects may screw people sized patients. But we won't know until we try.
Academic programs often have an unfortunate tendency to turn out people educated like they were going on to be academics.
That said - Unawareness of the wider world of algorithms (and wider world of Computer Science, writ large) is a self imposed glass ceiling in the programming field.
The real key is not whether you went to school. It's whether you care enough about yourself and your career to learn enough to be proficient and eventually excellent. 4-year colleges, and in particular very good 4-year colleges and grad programs, work hard to get proficiency in what they think is relevant (with the above-mentioned proviso that they think a future in academia is more likely than statistics actually support) and open your eyes to the skills and factors for excellence.
I've known curious bright people who never got any 2 or 4 year degree or who got completely non-technical degrees who are world class programmers. They go to conferences, read journals, participate in technical professional development, etc.
If you assume just going to college is going to get you through, and not following up with conferences and journals and technical professional development, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that your m@d l33t code hacking skills will get you through and that you don't need to care about algorithms and computer science topics writ large, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that reading slashdot and a dozen more websites is an acceptable replacement for doing homework (reading actual tech journals, CS papers, etc), you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself.
Grad students generally never survive to graduate degrees without understanding that, though not all succeed in the real world. A lot of 4-year students don't get that, even ones who went to good universities. Far too many 2-year university students and self taught people don't get it.
Put the video game down and go find out what researchers and cutting edge programmers are doing, what they see as the next hard problems, and find out what's going on which will be relevant to the work you're doing now, what you're going to be doing next year, and what you hope to be doing in your wildest dreams in two to five years. If you aren't actually going out and looking at the advanced stuff coming down the pipe your skills will erode over time, no matter how hot they are now. Widen your scope and look deeper.
Minor local damage??? It's a 400 kiloton equivalent airburst energy...
It will do 1 PSI overpressure (broken windows, etc) about 13 kilometers away from ground center point of explosion.
Right under the explosion, it will do about 2.5 PSI overpressure, and collapse relatively weak residential structures.
That energy level is going to kill people, if it's over inhabited areas. Not a lot of people - many or most directly under it would survive that overpressure level - but it will collapse things, and of a few things collapse people will die from the collapses.
I used to have a large cage in an Exodus colocation facility. Turns out that if we wanted to put in an EMC Symm5 (these are three tiles wide), we would have to rent a fork lift and put it through an open rollup door on the second floor. Their "freight elevator" was barely big enough for two people and a dolly.
I bet I know what facility you're talking about.
I put the first Sun E10Ks in one of those, when they were pretty new. It took a while to communicate "No, we're serious, it's that many inches wide, that many inches deep, and weighs 1,600 pounds. Show me your engineering drawings on the raised floor, and I need to measure the elevator again."
Let's be clear - if you have hot-aisle cold-aisle with proper plenum separation, i.e. either walls or curtains blocking airflow from cold to hot other than via the racks and systems - then you can run all the air from the ceiling fine and it doesn't matter.
If you do not do that, you have to pump up the cold air pressure to jet it down so that it goes down into the cold aisles to floor level, and does not get sucked right back up into the return vents in the hot aisles in a loop up near the ceiling.
Once you pump it up with enough pressure to do that, you're at the same energy usage you would have had running it down into a raised floor plenum.
IF your datacenter has those hot aisle / cold aisle plenums with physical separation so it doesn't short circuit, concrete floor is fine. I've seen exactly two places that put them in, one of which screwed it up and was in fact in worse shape than before.
IF you just spray it down from above without separation, and you don't have enough cold air pressure, you are losing all the cooling efficiency circulating air without running it down to/through servers. Convection will make the hot aisle air rise, but not fast enough to win entirely.
Raised floor is not perfect. But it does have the advantage that if you cold aisle hot aisle with overhead exhaust, you can be reasonably sure the cold is done right just by managing the ventilated floor squares right and doing a little measuring. It is MUCH MUCH SIMPLER to make work with reasonable effectiveness and efficiency and much less likely to be grossly wrong.
If someone says "My datacenter floor is concrete for energy efficiency" and does not immediately then describe the curtains or plenum separations for hot/cold aisle, they are bullshitting you. They heard that it's better but don't know what will kill you in doing it that way, and they are probably going to get it wrong, orat least not get it right enough to save energy. If you find the right people and they're doing the proper plenum separation then go for it. If not, don't. The other people should use raised floors until the knowledge on plenum separation soaks out into the industry enough that they can do it right.
Lifetime - significantly better than Flash, 3 plus orders of magnitude more write/erase cycles before there's degradation.
Impact on overall computer heat & energy required to use - lower read power than Flash, no maintenance power (DRAM requires rewrite cycles as the bits decay)
Expected size - Initial model is 0.5 GB (512 MB) per chip. That's on a much larger fab process than current CPUs or DRAM though - expect that to increase rapidly once demand is established.
The teaser has a mixture of detail levels. They are probably still actively doing animation for parts of it, CGI production runs tend to end up like that.
There's one very sharp, in focus (mostly not motion blurred) frame of angry alien face at 1:39, after the armored marines come charging out of the lander, which is fully 1080 photorealistic, and could be a photo of a person if it wasn't for people's heads not being built quite that way.
That's what the movie's production team is *capable of*. What they do for most of the movie is unknown - some of the shots had no-better-than-good video game graphics. Some of them have far better. Hopefully the obviously deficient shots are rerendered at the level we see in the 1:39 face by the time they reach the screen. If not, they didn't spend enough money on the render farm (or take enough time), and that would be a pity.
Remote access is secure - SSH, RDP, decent VPNs are fine for remote administration.
If you don't trust the admin if you don't have them in your direct line of sight, why would you trust them if you're out of the room temporarily?
If you don't trust them when you're not looking over their shoulders, why do you trust them at all?
Either you trust them - and where they are sitting is irrelevant to that question - or you don't. If you don't trust them, fire them and get someone else you trust. If you don't trust them but think watching them in person makes it better, you're misjudging the situation and asking the wrong question.
There are almost 200 customer delivered Tesla sedans on the road today (one owned by someone about 2 miles from my house, saw it being delivered a few weeks ago). They're all over the roads in Palo Alto if you happen to work here, though some of those are undoubtedly factory test drives.
It may take a while to get yours if you plunk down your $110,000 today, but it's a real shipping product.
I suppose all the UFS, NFS, VxFS, EXT2, EXT3, Reiser, et al filesystem bugs were not good enough for you either?
Anyone who thinks any filesystems are by nature entirely perfect is naive or too new to be pronouncing wisdom. They're pretty thoroughly debugged, but that's different than being perfect. The hardware/software interactions change over time, breaking design assumptions even in older FS code that's probably completely debugged. You get subtle hardware or firmware flaws in chips somewhere in the data transfer chain.
Things go wrong.
Either you understand this and prepare for it, or you're in trouble.
ZFS handles a lot of failures that other filesystems don't even realize happened, or can't recover from. It also has some new and somewhat bizarre failure modes of its own. You win some, you lose some.
Kono, that's not exactly true. I've also been on the zfs-discuss list for years, and there are at least two unfixed issues in it that I have seen.
First was the unplug-a-disk-keep-writing problem, where data kept being written into the cache but not committed to disk, so you got a consistent return and write verification at the application/OS level but on reboot the data's gone. This was first identified some years ago by Darren Dunham and posted to zfs-discuss by him and myself, using a E250 and the earliest public Solaris 10 betas. Nobody ever answered the question until very recently where someone else spotted the mechanism behind it (writes going to cache and being acknowledged, but not committed to disk). Still not fixed that I know of.
Second is a low level zpool / iscsi issue, where under some circumstances you can get into a situation where writes go into the cache and are acknowledged but reads get an older, "stuck in time" version of the data (we encountered this trying to manually overwrite an iscsi mounted Oracle RAC shared disk which was having Oracle problems, trying to dd zeros on top of the device... could dd all we wanted, either locally or remotely, but reading the disk kept stuck at the old Oracle ASM header). Nobody's exactly sure what's up with that one.
That said - UFS, VXFS, NFS, every filesystem in the world has had some bugs. Anyone who thinks otherwise is silly. Sysadmins and system architects have to plan for this...
BART round trip from my house to San Francisco, plus 30 min walk each trip (to station, from station to work): $8.60/day
Driving to SF: 22 miles, 1.0 gal gas each direction observed (currently $2.40/gal for midgrade), $4.00 toll, parking in SF free (when had handicapped tag) to $20/day. Car insurance and repair costs very close to $5/day. Total $13.80 - 33.80/day.
Cost of having car at home for social/shopping but commuting on BART: $13.80/day.
Current location: Same as-crow-flies distance, but no direct transit links.
Auto to work and back, using other bridge, 22 miles (1.0 gal observed), $4.00 toll, parking free, $13.80/day
Auto to work long way around w/o bridge 34 miles to / 22 miles back on bridge - $11.10 / day
Given that I can't walk long distances with heavy loads for shopping all the time, having a car is mandatory. Once I do that, the total cost to commute in the car to SF (urban center, pay parking) is more than riding transit, but to anywhere else is less than riding transit.
And there's a hefty fare hike coming from BART.
Oh, did I mention that about 80 cents per gallon comes out of my gas money and about 60 cents of that (plus a bunch of my sales tax money) ends up in BART and other local bus and transit systems?
When you're done factoring in subsidy from Cars to transit, the numbers no longer even vaguely favor transit. But that's apparently not PC.
They're already more expensive. The expense increase has been down in the noise for customers - that will no longer be true by the end of the year, and it will hurt by mid 2010.
IPv4 is no longer too cheap to meter. If that's not a business case for IPv6 I don't know what is.
Bruce, the cable cuts were in San Jose and San Carlos. The cable between San Jose and Morgan Hill was cut, but the cut location was in the city of San Jose.
(otherwise, agree with what you said, hopefully wider audience for this will help...)
Cut the fiber carefully and cleanly back from the cut, which has ragged ends. Usually a few feet in each direction.
Bring in a fiber patch section.
Go in with fiber polishing gear, to every individual fiber on one side, polish end, test end, polish again until it's smooth enough. Identify what fiber ID that fiber is. patch it together with the patch cable. Repeat on the other side of the patch.
Cross-test to ensure that you didn't cross any fibers in the reattachment - if so, pick one end as new ground truth, and repatch or logically reroute the other to match new physical reality.
Once the whole bundle has been repolished, patched, and tested on both sides, you wrap the patch sections up with new covering (armored section, flexible covering, depends on the cable and location). Apply waterproofing goop.
Put the manhole cover back on. Consider locking it down in place, this time...
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
In addition to not being a trivial exercise, the Feds tend to view building a guidance system as going beyond model rocketry to building a guided a missile, which they frown on.
This is simply not true.
First, the FAA (Office of Commercial Spaceflight, or AST) regulates rocketry unless it's intended to be a weapon. I.e., don't load it with explosives or flash powder, or fire it horizontally from a tube, and it's fine.
Second, guided rockets are fairly ok now.
The old FAA regulations for rockets treated guided rockets as needing permits or waivers for flights. Now, if you're under certain altitude thresholds and far enough from an airport, it's fine - hovering flight under guidance out on a ranch for example just requires calling the nearest airport and notifying them.
A flight out of one of the (few) unregulated airspace locations in the US (Black Rock desert, for example) to any altitude, with a rocket with less than 200,000 pound thrust-seconds of impulse (up to about a thousand pounds of propellant, give or take some performance normalizing) also requires no permitting or waiver, other than notifying the nearest airport a day ahead of time.
Larger rockets, or rockets flown near airports, or not far from innocent bystanders, are subject to increasing scrutiny for safety (of the general public and overflying aircraft).
Even if you do reach the size or performance that requires a waiver or permit, doing the paperwork is being found by experience to be less burdensome than doing a decent job of designing the rocket and testing it. It just isn't the hardest part of it. If you're spending six months to a year building it, what's a month or two's part time effort on the paperwork?
If you're in that performance regime and flying near where you could conceivably kill someone, the FAA will quite reasonably give you plenty of free advice on how not to do that, as will plenty of other amateur and semi-professional and professional rocketry people... John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace has helped other companies and groups out a lot with advice and moral support, and he's far from the only one.
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop the FUD. Approximately nothing of what you have said is true, cdrguru.
The FAA's office of Space Transportation (AST) has a mandate written in its authorizing law to both regulate and promote commercial space activities. They take both parts of that quite seriously.
Please do not spread FUD.
I am not aware of any commercial space activity which was denied an AST license or permit. There have been a few "Can't fly from this airport" snafu's from the aviation side, who are alternately happy and sad about rockets, but the AST crew are doing the "promote" thing quite seriously.
Is it always a completely smooth relationship? No. Is any of the startup companies spending most of their time (more than 10-20%) on paperwork? No. People are getting licenses and permits, they're flying.
From a reasonable standpoint, someone does need to be an external review to make sure we don't kill someone on the ground. If the industry neglected that, we'd eventually *really* get shut down when we did something neglegent. The reviews and regulation are appropriate to avoid dropping rockets on some poor family some day, which would be a tragedy both for the victims and for the industry.
EPA has no authority, the FAA has a standing environmental finding that there's no significant impact from the reusable rocket industry.
Am I personally flying rockets? No. Have I had to talk to AST about some proposed activities? Some. Do I know the people flying stuff now (Xcor, Armadillo, Masten, Unreasonable)? Yes, in most cases for decade-plus and personally. When we all get together, most of the griping is about operational lessons, and learning new things about rocket design, and high-fives for new successes. Only a small fraction of it is regulatory. It's there, but we know how to deal with it.
Actually you do, with most cars... Because your center of mass is above the centroid of impact in the nose of the car, you get tumbled over onto the hood and then windshield by the impact, and are accelerated over a significant distance as that happens. Unless the car's fast enough that you then faceplant into the windshield.
There's an airbag in research which fits into the gap between the hood and windshield, to deflect you gently out of that as well, absorbing you in low speed impacts and flipping you (much more gently) up and over the roof in higher speed impacts.
Doesn't work as well for SUVs where there's vehicle nose at your waist and chest level. But normal cars are already much better than "splat", and getting better as pedestrian safety standards round off corners and put energy absorbtion into the hood and engine top (part of the reason for those flat, plastic panels on the top of a lot of engines these days).
I don't believe why any portable secure drive needs to or should trust its host computer. This is a particularly stupid implementation, with an obvious and blatant exploit. But the host computer could by definition be compromised, and could intercept or store / cache or misbehave generically with the password you enter to get in.
Put a thumb-key sized numeric or hex keypad on the device, and make the owner punch in the code on insertion into a host device. One could still physically break into and tap the keys somehow, if the device is stolen and then returned without the owner knowing, but the user interface moves to right next to the data...
Buying the info is in many jurisdictions using someone else as an agent for law enforcement, and entails many of the same privacy related restrictions.
However, what's keeping me from renting a thermal imaging scanner and an aircraft (and, as I'm not a private pilot, borrowing a friend who is) and flying around and taking thermal image pictures of all my home down, and then creating a new website that offers image overlays for Google Earth of the resulting heat data, for free?
Anyone who isn't the police isn't prohibited or limited from using that part of the spectrum passively. It's not legally private data for private citizens. We have the optical analogy in California - a bunch of people did that with normal digital photography and the California ocean coastline, flew all up and down it and produced a high res photomap of the whole distance.
It's putting 2 and 2 together in a slightly novel method, but none of the substeps are illegal. If I were to do that, then the info's out in public. If I were to do that, are the police then doing something wrong if they look at the images?
Actually, the specific reactor proposed here - a Thorium Fluoride liquid material reactor - is high up on a "What if we wanted to make a shortest/cheapest path to weapons grade fissile materials?" list of candidate technologies, because you can continuously chemically process the U-233 parent material out of the salt bath and divert a direct weapons grade output stream without extensive difficult dirty post-processing.
It's funny how some nuclear power people can look at a technology and see "safe power" when weapons oriented technical experts think it's a great path to weapons.
One has to be realistic - anything nuclear related has potential for weapons use. This includes medical isotopes and industrial radiation sources (dirty bombs), any reactor inputs or outputs (dirty bombs, or potentially nuclear weapons). However, this is energy we're talking about. We have weapons grade concentrations of potential explosive materials in and around most major cities - look at a how common propane tanks are, and natural gas is piped almost everywhere. Gasoline is toxic and its vapors are explosive, and yet it's sold openly to anyone with a car (or moped, or kart), including illegal aliens and children. Lethal and weapons-grade quantities of electricity are available in practically every home and office.
The nuclear industry can, unfortunately, output truly citybusting class devices if it's not careful. It takes some effort to do that much damage short of actual atomic weapons. But civilization needs to be careful with energy. We generally pay it not enough heed.
You have to train anyone who might have to use a firearm that way, because many people naturally won't immediately aim at a human target and pull the trigger even if their life depends on it. Most of the ones that will, will forget to aim properly, and miss... requiring more shots to defend yourself, and with every extra bullet fired risking killing some bystander.
Anyone who is considering owning a gun for home defense (or in states where you can legally carry for your own self-defense outside the home, generalized self defense) should take similar training. Get used to shooting the gun, then go to a properly equipped range with pop-up or flip-on targets which are photos of real people not just silhouettes, and practice shooting those too.
Officers, and anyone likely to be going in to and having to deal with ambiguous potentially lethal but usually not situations, should also get the video based shoot/no shoot training. Officers who have good basic firearms skills typically shoot a few perfectly innocent people, and get killed by a few innocent looking lethal people, in those training scenarios, before they internalize procedures to protect themselves.
Any police officer who does not come out of that training with an acceptably safe approach for dealing with situations on the street is likely to be let go by the department. Because if they will not shoot when their life is on the line, they are placing other officers' lives and innocent crime victims' lives at risk. If they will shoot inappropriately, they will wound or kill someone who didn't deserve it, and wreck themselves mentally, and get a huge lawsuit against the department.
A vast majority of the people police shoot are career criminals, who have guns or knives, and who pose an immediate and obvious risk to the officers or civilians. See for example the nutcase in New York City a couple of days ago, who was threatening and scamming tourists and when stopped by police pulled a MAC-10 (semiautomatic) and started shooting.
If police can't stop those people, then we're all screwed.
If we let the police turn into those people, then we're also screwed - but isolated incidents are not the totality of what police in the US are. Most are out to protect us, not screw with us.
Exactly - hypothermia in under-ice immersions, and surgical hypothermia, are well studied now and effective.
You can't possibly do that on the battlefield... but, with these chemical equivalents, turning off the oxygen for the decay processes rather than the temperature needed for them to occur, it's a possibly field expedient method of achieving the same goals.
Not magic - may not work if the blood's lost too fast or heart's not beating by the time you get to them - but CPR may be good enough circulation, and possibly IV bags with the chemical cocktail and saline solution would be enough to perfuse the patient even if most of the blood is gone (if you're putting them out, then no oxygen in the saline is not even vaguely a problem... it's actually helpful).
It may not end up working on human sized animals. That's what the trials are for. But if it does, it could save not just soldiers but many many many people who die in trauma or in surgical incidents.
Have to test in human sized animals, if that works then go for humans as with any other medical procedure. No way of knowing ahead of time. Scale effects may screw people sized patients. But we won't know until we try.
"Fogbank", widely presumed to be a heavy-metal doped aerogel material.
We can manufacture it again. There was a gap - we couldn't for a while, but it's back in production.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FOGBANK
Good on you. You get it.
Academic programs often have an unfortunate tendency to turn out people educated like they were going on to be academics.
That said - Unawareness of the wider world of algorithms (and wider world of Computer Science, writ large) is a self imposed glass ceiling in the programming field.
The real key is not whether you went to school. It's whether you care enough about yourself and your career to learn enough to be proficient and eventually excellent. 4-year colleges, and in particular very good 4-year colleges and grad programs, work hard to get proficiency in what they think is relevant (with the above-mentioned proviso that they think a future in academia is more likely than statistics actually support) and open your eyes to the skills and factors for excellence.
I've known curious bright people who never got any 2 or 4 year degree or who got completely non-technical degrees who are world class programmers. They go to conferences, read journals, participate in technical professional development, etc.
If you assume just going to college is going to get you through, and not following up with conferences and journals and technical professional development, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that your m@d l33t code hacking skills will get you through and that you don't need to care about algorithms and computer science topics writ large, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that reading slashdot and a dozen more websites is an acceptable replacement for doing homework (reading actual tech journals, CS papers, etc), you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself.
Grad students generally never survive to graduate degrees without understanding that, though not all succeed in the real world. A lot of 4-year students don't get that, even ones who went to good universities. Far too many 2-year university students and self taught people don't get it.
Put the video game down and go find out what researchers and cutting edge programmers are doing, what they see as the next hard problems, and find out what's going on which will be relevant to the work you're doing now, what you're going to be doing next year, and what you hope to be doing in your wildest dreams in two to five years. If you aren't actually going out and looking at the advanced stuff coming down the pipe your skills will erode over time, no matter how hot they are now. Widen your scope and look deeper.
Minor local damage??? It's a 400 kiloton equivalent airburst energy...
It will do 1 PSI overpressure (broken windows, etc) about 13 kilometers away from ground center point of explosion.
Right under the explosion, it will do about 2.5 PSI overpressure, and collapse relatively weak residential structures.
That energy level is going to kill people, if it's over inhabited areas. Not a lot of people - many or most directly under it would survive that overpressure level - but it will collapse things, and of a few things collapse people will die from the collapses.
Relevant calculations for blast overpressure:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html Sect 5.6.2 Blast Damage and Injury
I used to have a large cage in an Exodus colocation facility. Turns out that if we wanted to put in an EMC Symm5 (these are three tiles wide), we would have to rent a fork lift and put it through an open rollup door on the second floor. Their "freight elevator" was barely big enough for two people and a dolly.
I bet I know what facility you're talking about.
I put the first Sun E10Ks in one of those, when they were pretty new. It took a while to communicate "No, we're serious, it's that many inches wide, that many inches deep, and weighs 1,600 pounds. Show me your engineering drawings on the raised floor, and I need to measure the elevator again."
Let's be clear - if you have hot-aisle cold-aisle with proper plenum separation, i.e. either walls or curtains blocking airflow from cold to hot other than via the racks and systems - then you can run all the air from the ceiling fine and it doesn't matter.
If you do not do that, you have to pump up the cold air pressure to jet it down so that it goes down into the cold aisles to floor level, and does not get sucked right back up into the return vents in the hot aisles in a loop up near the ceiling.
Once you pump it up with enough pressure to do that, you're at the same energy usage you would have had running it down into a raised floor plenum.
IF your datacenter has those hot aisle / cold aisle plenums with physical separation so it doesn't short circuit, concrete floor is fine. I've seen exactly two places that put them in, one of which screwed it up and was in fact in worse shape than before.
IF you just spray it down from above without separation, and you don't have enough cold air pressure, you are losing all the cooling efficiency circulating air without running it down to/through servers. Convection will make the hot aisle air rise, but not fast enough to win entirely.
Raised floor is not perfect. But it does have the advantage that if you cold aisle hot aisle with overhead exhaust, you can be reasonably sure the cold is done right just by managing the ventilated floor squares right and doing a little measuring. It is MUCH MUCH SIMPLER to make work with reasonable effectiveness and efficiency and much less likely to be grossly wrong.
If someone says "My datacenter floor is concrete for energy efficiency" and does not immediately then describe the curtains or plenum separations for hot/cold aisle, they are bullshitting you. They heard that it's better but don't know what will kill you in doing it that way, and they are probably going to get it wrong, orat least not get it right enough to save energy. If you find the right people and they're doing the proper plenum separation then go for it. If not, don't. The other people should use raised floors until the knowledge on plenum separation soaks out into the industry enough that they can do it right.
Lifetime - significantly better than Flash, 3 plus orders of magnitude more write/erase cycles before there's degradation.
Impact on overall computer heat & energy required to use - lower read power than Flash, no maintenance power (DRAM requires rewrite cycles as the bits decay)
Expected size - Initial model is 0.5 GB (512 MB) per chip. That's on a much larger fab process than current CPUs or DRAM though - expect that to increase rapidly once demand is established.
The teaser has a mixture of detail levels. They are probably still actively doing animation for parts of it, CGI production runs tend to end up like that.
There's one very sharp, in focus (mostly not motion blurred) frame of angry alien face at 1:39, after the armored marines come charging out of the lander, which is fully 1080 photorealistic, and could be a photo of a person if it wasn't for people's heads not being built quite that way.
That's what the movie's production team is *capable of*. What they do for most of the movie is unknown - some of the shots had no-better-than-good video game graphics. Some of them have far better. Hopefully the obviously deficient shots are rerendered at the level we see in the 1:39 face by the time they reach the screen. If not, they didn't spend enough money on the render farm (or take enough time), and that would be a pity.
Remote access is secure - SSH, RDP, decent VPNs are fine for remote administration.
If you don't trust the admin if you don't have them in your direct line of sight, why would you trust them if you're out of the room temporarily?
If you don't trust them when you're not looking over their shoulders, why do you trust them at all?
Either you trust them - and where they are sitting is irrelevant to that question - or you don't. If you don't trust them, fire them and get someone else you trust. If you don't trust them but think watching them in person makes it better, you're misjudging the situation and asking the wrong question.
Trust or no? If no, replace.
There are almost 200 customer delivered Tesla sedans on the road today (one owned by someone about 2 miles from my house, saw it being delivered a few weeks ago). They're all over the roads in Palo Alto if you happen to work here, though some of those are undoubtedly factory test drives.
It may take a while to get yours if you plunk down your $110,000 today, but it's a real shipping product.
I suppose all the UFS, NFS, VxFS, EXT2, EXT3, Reiser, et al filesystem bugs were not good enough for you either?
Anyone who thinks any filesystems are by nature entirely perfect is naive or too new to be pronouncing wisdom. They're pretty thoroughly debugged, but that's different than being perfect. The hardware/software interactions change over time, breaking design assumptions even in older FS code that's probably completely debugged. You get subtle hardware or firmware flaws in chips somewhere in the data transfer chain.
Things go wrong.
Either you understand this and prepare for it, or you're in trouble.
ZFS handles a lot of failures that other filesystems don't even realize happened, or can't recover from. It also has some new and somewhat bizarre failure modes of its own. You win some, you lose some.
Kono, that's not exactly true. I've also been on the zfs-discuss list for years, and there are at least two unfixed issues in it that I have seen.
First was the unplug-a-disk-keep-writing problem, where data kept being written into the cache but not committed to disk, so you got a consistent return and write verification at the application/OS level but on reboot the data's gone. This was first identified some years ago by Darren Dunham and posted to zfs-discuss by him and myself, using a E250 and the earliest public Solaris 10 betas. Nobody ever answered the question until very recently where someone else spotted the mechanism behind it (writes going to cache and being acknowledged, but not committed to disk). Still not fixed that I know of.
Second is a low level zpool / iscsi issue, where under some circumstances you can get into a situation where writes go into the cache and are acknowledged but reads get an older, "stuck in time" version of the data (we encountered this trying to manually overwrite an iscsi mounted Oracle RAC shared disk which was having Oracle problems, trying to dd zeros on top of the device... could dd all we wanted, either locally or remotely, but reading the disk kept stuck at the old Oracle ASM header). Nobody's exactly sure what's up with that one.
That said - UFS, VXFS, NFS, every filesystem in the world has had some bugs. Anyone who thinks otherwise is silly. Sysadmins and system architects have to plan for this...
Earlier work location:
BART round trip from my house to San Francisco, plus 30 min walk each trip (to station, from station to work): $8.60/day
Driving to SF: 22 miles, 1.0 gal gas each direction observed (currently $2.40/gal for midgrade), $4.00 toll, parking in SF free (when had handicapped tag) to $20/day. Car insurance and repair costs very close to $5/day. Total $13.80 - 33.80/day.
Cost of having car at home for social/shopping but commuting on BART: $13.80/day.
Current location:
Same as-crow-flies distance, but no direct transit links.
Auto to work and back, using other bridge, 22 miles (1.0 gal observed), $4.00 toll, parking free, $13.80 /day
Auto to work long way around w/o bridge 34 miles to / 22 miles back on bridge - $11.10 / day
Given that I can't walk long distances with heavy loads for shopping all the time, having a car is mandatory. Once I do that, the total cost to commute in the car to SF (urban center, pay parking) is more than riding transit, but to anywhere else is less than riding transit.
And there's a hefty fare hike coming from BART.
Oh, did I mention that about 80 cents per gallon comes out of my gas money and about 60 cents of that (plus a bunch of my sales tax money) ends up in BART and other local bus and transit systems?
When you're done factoring in subsidy from Cars to transit, the numbers no longer even vaguely favor transit. But that's apparently not PC.
Fortunately, nobody in their right mind would let Slashdot design a new network protocol.
They're already more expensive. The expense increase has been down in the noise for customers - that will no longer be true by the end of the year, and it will hurt by mid 2010.
IPv4 is no longer too cheap to meter. If that's not a business case for IPv6 I don't know what is.
Bruce, the cable cuts were in San Jose and San Carlos. The cable between San Jose and Morgan Hill was cut, but the cut location was in the city of San Jose.
(otherwise, agree with what you said, hopefully wider audience for this will help...)
Cut the fiber carefully and cleanly back from the cut, which has ragged ends. Usually a few feet in each direction.
Bring in a fiber patch section.
Go in with fiber polishing gear, to every individual fiber on one side, polish end, test end, polish again until it's smooth enough. Identify what fiber ID that fiber is. patch it together with the patch cable. Repeat on the other side of the patch.
Cross-test to ensure that you didn't cross any fibers in the reattachment - if so, pick one end as new ground truth, and repatch or logically reroute the other to match new physical reality.
Once the whole bundle has been repolished, patched, and tested on both sides, you wrap the patch sections up with new covering (armored section, flexible covering, depends on the cable and location). Apply waterproofing goop.
Put the manhole cover back on. Consider locking it down in place, this time...
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
This is simply not true.
First, the FAA (Office of Commercial Spaceflight, or AST) regulates rocketry unless it's intended to be a weapon. I.e., don't load it with explosives or flash powder, or fire it horizontally from a tube, and it's fine.
Second, guided rockets are fairly ok now.
The old FAA regulations for rockets treated guided rockets as needing permits or waivers for flights. Now, if you're under certain altitude thresholds and far enough from an airport, it's fine - hovering flight under guidance out on a ranch for example just requires calling the nearest airport and notifying them.
A flight out of one of the (few) unregulated airspace locations in the US (Black Rock desert, for example) to any altitude, with a rocket with less than 200,000 pound thrust-seconds of impulse (up to about a thousand pounds of propellant, give or take some performance normalizing) also requires no permitting or waiver, other than notifying the nearest airport a day ahead of time.
Larger rockets, or rockets flown near airports, or not far from innocent bystanders, are subject to increasing scrutiny for safety (of the general public and overflying aircraft).
Even if you do reach the size or performance that requires a waiver or permit, doing the paperwork is being found by experience to be less burdensome than doing a decent job of designing the rocket and testing it. It just isn't the hardest part of it. If you're spending six months to a year building it, what's a month or two's part time effort on the paperwork?
If you're in that performance regime and flying near where you could conceivably kill someone, the FAA will quite reasonably give you plenty of free advice on how not to do that, as will plenty of other amateur and semi-professional and professional rocketry people... John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace has helped other companies and groups out a lot with advice and moral support, and he's far from the only one.