Interestingly the Shah engaged in the first three and *refused* to make any promises not to make nuclear warheads. In fact the most controversial installations in Iran relating to nuclear weapons development were built under the Shah with US help.
Of course the 1:1000 rule is only for one piece of a something hitting in NYC. The basic issue though is that the problem is sufficiently complicated that any human solution will be a gross oversimplification. My own preference would be to stop talking about casualty estimates and simply put together a risk index which is acknowledged to be artificial and simplistic. The risk index would be the best attempt to measure the relative risk to human life and limb relative to other similar cases. I.e. the goal isn't to say "we expect there to be an x% likelihood of injury or death" but rather a close comparison to other similar cases ("this satellite is far more risky than that one"). Given that deorbiting stuff has not yet caused human casualties (regardless whether it is from the US, former USSR, etc) suggests that we simply don't have adequate data to provide any sort of reliable casualty risk estimates in an absolute sense.
Interestingly, I can only think of one case of an individual actually getting injured by a falling meteorite as well....
See, if they said "More than 1:500, which is too much risk" I might buy it, but when they say "more than 1:45" I tend to wonder since nobody is even sure where it is going to deorbit... An order of magnitude may not make a tremendous difference to the author of the paper, but it undermines the credibility of those of us outside that community.
Also I assume with Columbia, you are specifically talking about ground casualties (a breakup on re-entry is not survivable by the crew), and a 1:3 seems amazingly high to me. While I know that these are all overly simplistic calculations, it does seem questionable how much the actual numbers represent accurate statistics. Hence it would seem to me that a major part of the issue is one of truth-in-labeling. In reality, it seems that we really have no clue what the actual risk really is to human life (in terms of numbers of casualties per similar deorbit) and can only say "this seems more risky than that."
One thing I started to do with this was to ask "suppose a satellite deorbitted over a major metropolitan center. What sort of casualties could one expect?" This is an unbelievably complex problem. Even a city like New York has a population density of something like one person per 1000 sq ft. of surface area. This suggests that a single projectile piece is very unlikely to strike an individual. Once you take into account the protective elements of walls, etc. the risk goes down even more. This suggests that a small meteorite (say, an inch across) striking NYC would be unlikely to hurt anyone. Same with any individual piece of a satellite (however, this would still be well above the 1:10000 threshold stated in the article). Hence if a satellite is most likely to deorbit over a major city, particularly one as dense as NYC, it poses a significant risk well above the safety threshold.
The toxic elements are more troubling, but again a lot of things matter. The risk is largely defined as chance of fuel tank surviving intact (depends on a large number of factors and would be by no means certain), the population density near the impact zone, weather conditions, and the exposure scenario. As with everything the risk factor is (basically) the chance of survival to the ground muliplied by the risk of an individual on the ground interacting with it in a way that would cause injury or death. This is a bigger issue than general debris but it seems like this is not a real number which connects to anything other than an attempt to be as alarmist as possible within the estimates (which might be the job of such experts in safety-- we all know that paranoia is in the firewall admin's job description-- but it would be nice to have that said up front).
Again, I don't stand in the ASAT-test camp because that is stretching the incompetence of even this administration. I think more likely it was some combination of some threshold of risks exceeded (including risk of disclosure of sensitive electronics and lenses, the risk to human life and health, etc) and the idea that this could be a selling point for the ballistic missile shield program (not general ASAT directed at operating spy satellites, but rather selling a side benefit of reduced risk from deorbits).
"See? Our Ballistic missile program is a great thing after all! See what else we can protect you from?" I will say that the hydrazine explanation and the article's figures (which the author states are second-hand and never cites) are only slightly more credible than the ASAT-test theory.
More likely it is part PR for the ballistic missile shield program and one part a requirement to keep sensitive electronics secret. But that may be less credible too because it requires some level of competence in the Bush administration.
Funny, I thought I was only turned off by his general acceptance of secondhand unnamed sources which seemed to have unbelievably strange risk figures. A 4% risk of death due to a falling satellite component seems unreasonable to me, but without any real transparent analysis (on a classified satellite, of course), there can be no transparency as to the motivation, despite the article's claims to the contrary.
I may have to send a letter to the editor of spectrum suggesting that the use of the word "transparent" in the piece places it firmly in the realm of propaganda.
Sure, and in fact, if this was an ASAT test, it would be a competence failure in the Bush Administration even greater than the Iraq debacle. The fact is that this is limited in comparison to real-world war-oriented ASAT scenarios, and was an easy shot as far as that field goes.
As a demonstration ("See? The ABM program isn't so bad!") it might also be useful...
Although I agree with your concerns (and I am not an expert), the article seemed sufficiently left-field to make me question it. The first major concern was the figure that the risk of human death from the deorbiting satellite was between 1:25 and 1:45. Where was this headed? Metropolitan NYC?
It would be nice if one were able to see a real, transparent analysis of the issue (the author of TFA doesn't even provide one). However, since it was a spy satellite, I suspect that hiding the truth is more important than exposing it to people who do know what was going on.
FWIW, I don't think it was an ASAT test. The interceptor missiles aren't really designed for that role, and this would be a pretty lousy test when compared to real-world applications. However, it *could* be a PR thing for the balistic missile defense program ("Hey, look what else we can protect you from!"), an attempt to keep sensitive electronics out of the hands of others, or any number of other reasons... It could even have been a low risk to human life, somewhat above the accepted threshold. However, a 1:49 risk of death is something that I find difficult to find credible without detailed analysis.
Actually the major issue is that peak oil starts hitting the supply/demand curve. Hence the price would go up.
That is not what is happening now, naturally. Oil prices compared to gold haven't gone up much. Really, what we have is across-the-board inflation and hence a weak dollar. That is a matter of broad economic policy, not a matter of something specific to the energy industry.
There are other issues, and some of these are localized ones. Iran is currently having supply/demand issues with oil because of heavy subsidies (one of the major reasons for a civilian nuclear energy program is to keep both oil exports and subsidies up).
Ajax has always been second-best to Achilles, the greatest hero of the Trojan war. In other words, the only thing better than Ajax would be Achilles (maybe Asynchronous C or Haskall In Lisp List Extensible Style).
Who was this Arax fellow? What wars did he fight in?
with something like this, I would think X.509 would be a better match. This allows you better options for verification than you get with PGP.
Usually I use GPG for similar things but I have it set up with the client before-hand and do an in-person exchange of keys. This is still not as good as you can get with X.509.
I am not sure that you can prove anything more than the fact that the right factors will lead eventually to a halt assuming proper inputs.
However consider the following problem: you have a control system for a nuclear reactor. Under certain circumstances it is necessary to do an emergency shutdown of the reactor fast. You can indeed prove that it will shut down under the right circumstances, but proving that it will do so in the time required may be beyond the scope of a code analysis tool, even on the assembly-language level. I believe that this is a fundamental mathematical impossibility because of the fact that many sorts of issues which can arise which are beyond the scope of the proof.
In short there *are* limits as to what one can validate in a software system, but this does not mean that it is a waste of time. Instead it is just something where one needs to be aware of certain limits of this sort.
Touchscreens have been mainstays of certain types of terminals for a while. Point of sale terminals in restaurants, for example.
I also remember seeing them used in hospitals way back into the 1980's.
The issue is simply that in most environments, they are clumsy and only in a few applications do you see real benefits. Even today, you don't see touchscreens marketed for general purpose PC's as a general rule, right?
Actually, I think that a lot of your post is wrong relating to massive effects on the human population. We know that there have been a number of global climate shifts is recorded history (current thinking is that a climate shift which cooled down Greenland may have been the main reason why the Norse abandoned their settlements there).
However global warming is a real threat for reasons which never get any press:
1) Most of our big cities are on coasts for reasons of commerce. Rising water levels would be a major threat to many of our largest cities around the world. Maybe it won't kill lots of people, but it *will* cause vast amounts of property loss. Some countries (like the Maldives) could be entirely submerged! Imagine what sea levels a few feet higher would do in Florida!
2) It *will* cause economic and short-term damage while things adjust. Also note that many ski areas in Europe are having trouble surviving now due to rising snow levels. This is just one small example of the sorts of things which will happen. We don't know what will happen with global weather patterns, but it is possible that the great agricultural power houses in the US and EU could be replaced by others elsewhere in the world (like South America, Africa, etc).
There are many other environmental threats which may cause a greater threat of mass death, but what surprises me about global warming is that the main damage which is threatened is economic and yet business interests oppose doing anything about the problem. This is a long-term threat to wealth, especially here in the US, and also in places like the Netherlands.
You have to understand that astronomy is central to agriculture. If you get your calendar wrong, you have problems growing things. Hence most ancient agrarian people tended to put a lot of emphasis on astronomy. In Egypt, the year was measured from the rising of Sirius at dusk because this was a good predictive measure of when the Nile would flood.
The next bit has to do with the sorts of gods one would believe in. Well, if you are agriculturally centric, you have weather, land, the sun, and possibly the stars. Hence one tends to have gods of rain and storm, fertility gods an goddesses, divinification of the sun, and the whole thing tied into the stars.
My guess is that Stonehenge was an astronomical monument which was also a place of worship relating to the celestial forces relating to agriculture (weather, sun, stars) and possibly a place of worship as relates to the whole agrarian concept of natural order in totality (hence including the fertility/land gods and goddesses.
Could this relate to an early idea of healing? I suppose. Is that its central focus? I doubt it.
What started out as a necessary maintenance programming excersize (regarding SQL-Ledger) turned into a full-time development project (LedgerSMB) where we realized that the former program (SQL-Ledger) was almost a perfect textbook of what not to do. Not that I would ever send a beginner into that codebase-- they will create more bugs than they solve. However, maintenance programming on our new code and architecture ought to be a lot easier and more useful.
Look at the LedgerSMB core team. Most of us are married with kids.
As you start getting out into the committers and greater community, you see that most of the geeks end up married and happy. In fact, I think that the reason why most of us are not in the dating game is because we are married or otherwise in committed relationships:-)
This being said, the one thing that does make a love life difficult involves schedules, deadlines, and death marches. I can remember in the early days of LedgerSMB, when we were trying to get critical inherited security problems fixed, that I would work until late at night (maybe midnight every night for two weeks), and Chris Murtagh would work even harder. And he has 3 kids!
So while there are some tradeoffs, I think the geeks who really can't get a girlfriend (or for the lady-geeks out there, a boyfriend) are really in a tiny minority.
This seems to be a pretty natural outgrowth of the dual-license model but applied to patents as well.
The problem is we should be working towards community-developed open source projects, rather than proprietary and commercial products which happen to be available under open source licenses. In many ways, this represents a step back rather than forward.
Last I checked, HIPAA allowed releasing medical records to other businesses under certain circumstances. If DHS creates a HIPAA-Compliant privacy policy, I see no reason they couldn't get access to such records. IANAL though.
That also shows how much difficulty HIPAA imposed for how little gain....
Bald Eagles have been listed to the State Department list of international terrorist organizations after several members of this group disabled and destroyed several of COM-BAT's in various countries in North America. John Negroponte stated "We believe that this group, which typically uses airborn counter-intelligence tactics has an international reach and has demonstrated a willingness to attack members of our armed forces, including such flying robots." Addressing those who have complained that the bald eagle is the official US bird, Negroponte added "It has now become clear that terrorists have infiltrated even this historic ally of ours and, like Saddam, we must eliminate them. Later today, we will propose legislation to Congress changing the national bird to the pidgeon."
The state department is said to be considering adding various other carnivorous birds to the list as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly the Shah engaged in the first three and *refused* to make any promises not to make nuclear warheads. In fact the most controversial installations in Iran relating to nuclear weapons development were built under the Shah with US help.
But he was our ally so I guess it was OK.....
Of course the 1:1000 rule is only for one piece of a something hitting in NYC. The basic issue though is that the problem is sufficiently complicated that any human solution will be a gross oversimplification. My own preference would be to stop talking about casualty estimates and simply put together a risk index which is acknowledged to be artificial and simplistic. The risk index would be the best attempt to measure the relative risk to human life and limb relative to other similar cases. I.e. the goal isn't to say "we expect there to be an x% likelihood of injury or death" but rather a close comparison to other similar cases ("this satellite is far more risky than that one"). Given that deorbiting stuff has not yet caused human casualties (regardless whether it is from the US, former USSR, etc) suggests that we simply don't have adequate data to provide any sort of reliable casualty risk estimates in an absolute sense.
Interestingly, I can only think of one case of an individual actually getting injured by a falling meteorite as well....
See, if they said "More than 1:500, which is too much risk" I might buy it, but when they say "more than 1:45" I tend to wonder since nobody is even sure where it is going to deorbit... An order of magnitude may not make a tremendous difference to the author of the paper, but it undermines the credibility of those of us outside that community.
Also I assume with Columbia, you are specifically talking about ground casualties (a breakup on re-entry is not survivable by the crew), and a 1:3 seems amazingly high to me. While I know that these are all overly simplistic calculations, it does seem questionable how much the actual numbers represent accurate statistics. Hence it would seem to me that a major part of the issue is one of truth-in-labeling. In reality, it seems that we really have no clue what the actual risk really is to human life (in terms of numbers of casualties per similar deorbit) and can only say "this seems more risky than that."
One thing I started to do with this was to ask "suppose a satellite deorbitted over a major metropolitan center. What sort of casualties could one expect?" This is an unbelievably complex problem. Even a city like New York has a population density of something like one person per 1000 sq ft. of surface area. This suggests that a single projectile piece is very unlikely to strike an individual. Once you take into account the protective elements of walls, etc. the risk goes down even more. This suggests that a small meteorite (say, an inch across) striking NYC would be unlikely to hurt anyone. Same with any individual piece of a satellite (however, this would still be well above the 1:10000 threshold stated in the article). Hence if a satellite is most likely to deorbit over a major city, particularly one as dense as NYC, it poses a significant risk well above the safety threshold.
The toxic elements are more troubling, but again a lot of things matter. The risk is largely defined as chance of fuel tank surviving intact (depends on a large number of factors and would be by no means certain), the population density near the impact zone, weather conditions, and the exposure scenario. As with everything the risk factor is (basically) the chance of survival to the ground muliplied by the risk of an individual on the ground interacting with it in a way that would cause injury or death. This is a bigger issue than general debris but it seems like this is not a real number which connects to anything other than an attempt to be as alarmist as possible within the estimates (which might be the job of such experts in safety-- we all know that paranoia is in the firewall admin's job description-- but it would be nice to have that said up front).
Again, I don't stand in the ASAT-test camp because that is stretching the incompetence of even this administration. I think more likely it was some combination of some threshold of risks exceeded (including risk of disclosure of sensitive electronics and lenses, the risk to human life and health, etc) and the idea that this could be a selling point for the ballistic missile shield program (not general ASAT directed at operating spy satellites, but rather selling a side benefit of reduced risk from deorbits).
Nah... More like:
"See? Our Ballistic missile program is a great thing after all! See what else we can protect you from?" I will say that the hydrazine explanation and the article's figures (which the author states are second-hand and never cites) are only slightly more credible than the ASAT-test theory.
More likely it is part PR for the ballistic missile shield program and one part a requirement to keep sensitive electronics secret. But that may be less credible too because it requires some level of competence in the Bush administration.
Funny, I thought I was only turned off by his general acceptance of secondhand unnamed sources which seemed to have unbelievably strange risk figures. A 4% risk of death due to a falling satellite component seems unreasonable to me, but without any real transparent analysis (on a classified satellite, of course), there can be no transparency as to the motivation, despite the article's claims to the contrary.
I may have to send a letter to the editor of spectrum suggesting that the use of the word "transparent" in the piece places it firmly in the realm of propaganda.
Sure, and in fact, if this was an ASAT test, it would be a competence failure in the Bush Administration even greater than the Iraq debacle. The fact is that this is limited in comparison to real-world war-oriented ASAT scenarios, and was an easy shot as far as that field goes.
As a demonstration ("See? The ABM program isn't so bad!") it might also be useful...
Doesn't the figures (1:25 - 1:45 chance of human fatalities) seem unreasonably high to you?
Although I agree with your concerns (and I am not an expert), the article seemed sufficiently left-field to make me question it. The first major concern was the figure that the risk of human death from the deorbiting satellite was between 1:25 and 1:45. Where was this headed? Metropolitan NYC?
It would be nice if one were able to see a real, transparent analysis of the issue (the author of TFA doesn't even provide one). However, since it was a spy satellite, I suspect that hiding the truth is more important than exposing it to people who do know what was going on.
FWIW, I don't think it was an ASAT test. The interceptor missiles aren't really designed for that role, and this would be a pretty lousy test when compared to real-world applications. However, it *could* be a PR thing for the balistic missile defense program ("Hey, look what else we can protect you from!"), an attempt to keep sensitive electronics out of the hands of others, or any number of other reasons... It could even have been a low risk to human life, somewhat above the accepted threshold. However, a 1:49 risk of death is something that I find difficult to find credible without detailed analysis.
Actually the major issue is that peak oil starts hitting the supply/demand curve. Hence the price would go up.
That is not what is happening now, naturally. Oil prices compared to gold haven't gone up much. Really, what we have is across-the-board inflation and hence a weak dollar. That is a matter of broad economic policy, not a matter of something specific to the energy industry.
There are other issues, and some of these are localized ones. Iran is currently having supply/demand issues with oil because of heavy subsidies (one of the major reasons for a civilian nuclear energy program is to keep both oil exports and subsidies up).
Ajax has always been second-best to Achilles, the greatest hero of the Trojan war. In other words, the only thing better than Ajax would be Achilles (maybe Asynchronous C or Haskall In Lisp List Extensible Style).
Who was this Arax fellow? What wars did he fight in?
with something like this, I would think X.509 would be a better match. This allows you better options for verification than you get with PGP.
Usually I use GPG for similar things but I have it set up with the client before-hand and do an in-person exchange of keys. This is still not as good as you can get with X.509.
I am not sure that you can prove anything more than the fact that the right factors will lead eventually to a halt assuming proper inputs.
However consider the following problem: you have a control system for a nuclear reactor. Under certain circumstances it is necessary to do an emergency shutdown of the reactor fast. You can indeed prove that it will shut down under the right circumstances, but proving that it will do so in the time required may be beyond the scope of a code analysis tool, even on the assembly-language level. I believe that this is a fundamental mathematical impossibility because of the fact that many sorts of issues which can arise which are beyond the scope of the proof.
In short there *are* limits as to what one can validate in a software system, but this does not mean that it is a waste of time. Instead it is just something where one needs to be aware of certain limits of this sort.
Touchscreens have been mainstays of certain types of terminals for a while. Point of sale terminals in restaurants, for example.
I also remember seeing them used in hospitals way back into the 1980's.
The issue is simply that in most environments, they are clumsy and only in a few applications do you see real benefits. Even today, you don't see touchscreens marketed for general purpose PC's as a general rule, right?
A hat which warns "ERROR ALERT" when you are starting to get distracted might do more harm than good!
Actually, I think that a lot of your post is wrong relating to massive effects on the human population. We know that there have been a number of global climate shifts is recorded history (current thinking is that a climate shift which cooled down Greenland may have been the main reason why the Norse abandoned their settlements there).
However global warming is a real threat for reasons which never get any press:
1) Most of our big cities are on coasts for reasons of commerce. Rising water levels would be a major threat to many of our largest cities around the world. Maybe it won't kill lots of people, but it *will* cause vast amounts of property loss. Some countries (like the Maldives) could be entirely submerged! Imagine what sea levels a few feet higher would do in Florida!
2) It *will* cause economic and short-term damage while things adjust. Also note that many ski areas in Europe are having trouble surviving now due to rising snow levels. This is just one small example of the sorts of things which will happen. We don't know what will happen with global weather patterns, but it is possible that the great agricultural power houses in the US and EU could be replaced by others elsewhere in the world (like South America, Africa, etc).
There are many other environmental threats which may cause a greater threat of mass death, but what surprises me about global warming is that the main damage which is threatened is economic and yet business interests oppose doing anything about the problem. This is a long-term threat to wealth, especially here in the US, and also in places like the Netherlands.
Governments can spin anything to that. See the purported link between software piracy and terrorism.
You have to understand that astronomy is central to agriculture. If you get your calendar wrong, you have problems growing things. Hence most ancient agrarian people tended to put a lot of emphasis on astronomy. In Egypt, the year was measured from the rising of Sirius at dusk because this was a good predictive measure of when the Nile would flood.
The next bit has to do with the sorts of gods one would believe in. Well, if you are agriculturally centric, you have weather, land, the sun, and possibly the stars. Hence one tends to have gods of rain and storm, fertility gods an goddesses, divinification of the sun, and the whole thing tied into the stars.
My guess is that Stonehenge was an astronomical monument which was also a place of worship relating to the celestial forces relating to agriculture (weather, sun, stars) and possibly a place of worship as relates to the whole agrarian concept of natural order in totality (hence including the fertility/land gods and goddesses.
Could this relate to an early idea of healing? I suppose. Is that its central focus? I doubt it.
Obsidian scalples are actualyl used for some forms of eye surgery and are mass-produced for that purpose.
What started out as a necessary maintenance programming excersize (regarding SQL-Ledger) turned into a full-time development project (LedgerSMB) where we realized that the former program (SQL-Ledger) was almost a perfect textbook of what not to do. Not that I would ever send a beginner into that codebase-- they will create more bugs than they solve. However, maintenance programming on our new code and architecture ought to be a lot easier and more useful.
As you start getting out into the committers and greater community, you see that most of the geeks end up married and happy. In fact, I think that the reason why most of us are not in the dating game is because we are married or otherwise in committed relationships
This being said, the one thing that does make a love life difficult involves schedules, deadlines, and death marches. I can remember in the early days of LedgerSMB, when we were trying to get critical inherited security problems fixed, that I would work until late at night (maybe midnight every night for two weeks), and Chris Murtagh would work even harder. And he has 3 kids!
So while there are some tradeoffs, I think the geeks who really can't get a girlfriend (or for the lady-geeks out there, a boyfriend) are really in a tiny minority.
The problem is we should be working towards community-developed open source projects, rather than proprietary and commercial products which happen to be available under open source licenses. In many ways, this represents a step back rather than forward.
A big bundle of twisted pair looks too much spaghetti code. Coax code can have the same problems but is not as bad.
No word yet on options for fiber, twisted pair, etc.
That also shows how much difficulty HIPAA imposed for how little gain....
The state department is said to be considering adding various other carnivorous birds to the list as well.