Keep in mind, scary as it is, you can count on one hand the number of conventional design bomb failures there have been worldwide on one hand. The US went years before a bomb didn't work. They didn't have computers or any good understanding of the physics of the things.
Its absolutely safe to assume that someone with enough fissionable material can *easily* build a bomb, and it WILL work on the first try. The US didn't start having any failures until they started pushing the lower limit of size and weight.
I suspect thats the primary thing that has kept a nuclear terrorist detonation from happening over the last few decades -- the smaller bombs that use less fissionable material necessarily have to be more precise. With a larger bomb you can have half the material not involved in the chain reaction, with small bombs you have to be a lot more efficient.
Just from my reading over the years, it seems the details of those weapon designs have been kept much more successfully secret, although there is enough hints out there around the classified designs to make guesses about them, use of hollow spheres of fuel in plutonium devices so the implosion can deliver more energy into it before compression begins, and things like that.
Its safe to say its an order of magnitude or two more complicated to produce the fissionable material than it is to detonate it. It took 10% of the electrical production of the entire US a year to produce the uranium for the first couple US bombs. The first US bomb, however, was cobbled together quickly with basic materials and duct tape, and it worked on the first try.
I sleep well at night knowing the real odds of being personally involved in that sort of attack, not because I think for a second its not eventually going to happen or because I have unrealistic hopes for how hard the problem is to solve for those who would want to do that.
Clearly you've never heard my 911. I just got an 800w amp just to get the stereo loud enough IN the car that I can hear it over the engine, since I have to wear ear plugs while I'm driving.
Its so loud, the kids in the ghetto boomin civics next to me wouldn't hear there stereos over it!
I don't have to define what I mean by OBD-II connections. If you're curious about it, the government has already defined it, zero gray area.
OBD-II is for emissions testing and reporting those problems, nothing else. What you call it is irrelavent to what it is. You can call spaghetti OBD-II and it doesn't mean your pasta can do engine diagnostics.
What other lines manufacturers choose to wire into the ISO connector is 100% irrelavent to OBD-II.
The rest of your post goes nowhere fast, but FYI, OnStar links into the manufacturer specific network within the car, which as I said in my post, the OBD-II subsystem is a VERY small subset of. For example, it taps into CAN busses on a number of cars. CAN is a standard networking protocol like ethernet, but the actual messages that get sent to the various ECUs in the car are different on every model.
You seem to have a passing knowledge of this, and either have your terminology wrong and you actually have done this, or you're just repeating stuff you've read.
Virtyally none of the diagnosic capabilities in modern cars are accessible via OBD-II.
Every manufacturer has proprietary networks built into the car of which OBD-II is a tiny emulation layer. Its designed for emissions testing and emissions related codes, nothing else.
You can't diagnose why your power locks aren't working with it, you can't diagnose why your HVAC controls aren't working. You can't read exhaust gas temperatures, or any other direct sensor outputs. You can't bleed ABS pumps with it, etc, etc, etc.
There are VERY few models you can get that sort of information about. Volkswagen/Audi group cars have some diagnostic software available, but virtually 100% of the information about what you can access and what sort of tests you can run have been reverse engineered, and is very incomplete. VAG also recently changed their protocols for newer cars to block those systems from working.
You may have watched mechanics sweat this stuff, but some of us sweat this stuff directly. This is coming from the direct experience of someone who both repairs cars and works for a internationally ranked professional racing team.
What kind of car was it? I didn't think any production cars since some limited Chevy vehicles in the late 80's used air/water intercoolers, and those didn't have diagnostic computers.
Porsche found out the hard way in 1972, if I recall correctly, about putting things that look like where one would put gas when its not for gas.
911's have always had the tank fill either on the drivers side fender on the classic 911's, or on the passenger side on the more recent ones.
In 1972 they got the brilliant idea to put the oil fill (these things take 2-3 gallons of oil at a time, and ones that are a little under the weather can burn a quart every 500 miles) behind something that looked an awful lot like a gas flap on the passenger side right behind the passenger door.
I don't think I need to explain what happens when you fill your engine's oil tank with gasoline. Suffice it to say its bad.
What the heck has happened to the caliber of readers on/. if "A lot of people are saying "salty water", but damn...microbes....it's just too much to hope for." is considered Insightful?
Its a reasonable comment to make, and I agree with it, but come ON. How is that insightful? That should imply it saying something interesting that perhaps the moderator didn't think of. Who here didn't think that same thing? Lets see a show of hands.
Pickles are green.
Now moderate me insightful.:)
Oh yeah, Martians are green too, so no moderating me off-topic.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think either rover had any instruments designed for detecting any form of life. Unless it was significantly bigger than a microbe and could be seen with the relatively low-power microscope on the rover, I suppose.
Ugh, these aren't viruses...
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Maybe a lot of/. readers are too young to remember real viruses, or to have played around/collected them, but its been a decade since a real infectuous virus has gone around.
If it can't infect any arbitrary EXE file, its not a virus, its a trojan or a worm, depending on wether or not its a moronic user or a security hole that allows it to enter the system.
You don't need to tell the police department you're going to test it, just call it, and stay on the line until a dispatcher picks up. Explain what you were doing, thank them, and hang up.
I never lie in my comments and I never lie about how few I write.:)
Example (these were choice comments a co-worker pulled out of my code a few years ago):/* This code wouldn't be here if our product managers didn't need to be beaten with a cluestick */
or// I'm pretty sure this code is borked, but I can't find where
or the classic// This code should never be called// Oops, I meant it should always be called.
I did have a VP tell me to rename a method one that he thought was inflamatory, though.
Correct, buy my tax money isn't being given carte blanche to corporations owning those roads. My money is, in fact, being taxed via fees given directly to these companies that are owning the results of the tax. Its not like these companies are kicking in their own investment dollars on those projects, you know.
If my tax dollars pay for roads and education, thats the government taking my money and reaping the benefits of it. While I have a problem with that as well, especially considering the huge amount of federal money given to states to maintain their roads to use your example, its a completely different topic of conversation.
This is about the government forcing me to pay money to service providers to maintain an artificial equality in service costs nationwide via the construction of large infrastructures that don't belong to us, the American people.
Lets put this in the language/. seems to understand. If your internet access bill, cable, DSL or modem, or student fees at college included a $10 tax payed directly to Microsoft for them to implement a program lending (not even giving) computers to public schools, would you be in support? Sure, kids may benefit, but you're paying $10 of your hard earned money to build a non-publically owned and non-publically controlled infrastructure by putting money directly into Microsoft's pocket.
Put it that way, and I bet you'd have a lot more people crying foul on here.
Yup, you might consider it narrow minded, but thats my viewpoint.
The cost of living in those areas are substantially less than in the cities and major metropolitan areas. The problem isn't the idea of people in those rural areas having Internet access or digital cable, its the assumption they make that they should pay the same as I do. Thats's BS, because the cost to provide the service to them might be 10x what mine is. So charge them $400 for their broadband connection. They're paying $2000 a month less in mortgage cost than I am, so I have no sympathy for them. If they don't like that, then they ought to take a good hard look at cheaper delivery methods. Satellite TV, longer range wireless Internet access, wireless phone service are all technologies that are far cheaper to deliver than the equivalent wired technologies. Remove the subsidies for the build out of these rediculous physical infrastructures, and all of that stuff would rapidly come in to fill the void, and remove a enormous source of corporate welfare in this country.
Example: China has 3G wireless phone service and internet access throughout most of the countryside. Why? Because it costs too damn much to run wires everywhere. They were intelligent about it. I've seen it with my own eyes -- people most Americans would consider peasants with satellite TV, and high speed internet access via their cell phones living in cinder block houses with no windows.
People in the country shouldn't suffer from lack of access, the rest of us just shouldn't pay for it, thats all I'm saying. The world was a different place than it was in the early 20th century, these 100 year old concepts of how to bring technology to the rural areas are antiquated and holding us back.
Slashdot Mirror
This sucks.
Go NASA?
Oooo a challange. Once the weather turns and I can get my 911 out of the garage, I'll see how quiet that garage can be!
;-)
Bet I can still set off the alarms of most of the cars I drive by
I have a window cube looking out in the direction of the building, and it never ceases to amaze me how ungodly ugly the building is.
And the worst part is my only other option is to look at my computer and do work, using this ungodly awful Windows system.
Unless I go fooz, I can't get away from looking at Gates' handiwork. Ugh
Keep in mind, scary as it is, you can count on one hand the number of conventional design bomb failures there have been worldwide on one hand. The US went years before a bomb didn't work. They didn't have computers or any good understanding of the physics of the things.
Its absolutely safe to assume that someone with enough fissionable material can *easily* build a bomb, and it WILL work on the first try. The US didn't start having any failures until they started pushing the lower limit of size and weight.
I suspect thats the primary thing that has kept a nuclear terrorist detonation from happening over the last few decades -- the smaller bombs that use less fissionable material necessarily have to be more precise. With a larger bomb you can have half the material not involved in the chain reaction, with small bombs you have to be a lot more efficient.
Just from my reading over the years, it seems the details of those weapon designs have been kept much more successfully secret, although there is enough hints out there around the classified designs to make guesses about them, use of hollow spheres of fuel in plutonium devices so the implosion can deliver more energy into it before compression begins, and things like that.
Its safe to say its an order of magnitude or two more complicated to produce the fissionable material than it is to detonate it. It took 10% of the electrical production of the entire US a year to produce the uranium for the first couple US bombs. The first US bomb, however, was cobbled together quickly with basic materials and duct tape, and it worked on the first try.
I sleep well at night knowing the real odds of being personally involved in that sort of attack, not because I think for a second its not eventually going to happen or because I have unrealistic hopes for how hard the problem is to solve for those who would want to do that.
Quick math lesson...
1988+25=2013
1979+25=2004
Crap, you just rubbed my face in how old I am.
*sigh*
Wait a second.
Its *illegal* in most cases to run software you brought home from work.
So how is that specifically a problem?
Clearly you've never heard my 911. I just got an 800w amp just to get the stereo loud enough IN the car that I can hear it over the engine, since I have to wear ear plugs while I'm driving.
Its so loud, the kids in the ghetto boomin civics next to me wouldn't hear there stereos over it!
I don't have to define what I mean by OBD-II connections. If you're curious about it, the government has already defined it, zero gray area.
OBD-II is for emissions testing and reporting those problems, nothing else. What you call it is irrelavent to what it is. You can call spaghetti OBD-II and it doesn't mean your pasta can do engine diagnostics.
What other lines manufacturers choose to wire into the ISO connector is 100% irrelavent to OBD-II.
The rest of your post goes nowhere fast, but FYI, OnStar links into the manufacturer specific network within the car, which as I said in my post, the OBD-II subsystem is a VERY small subset of. For example, it taps into CAN busses on a number of cars. CAN is a standard networking protocol like ethernet, but the actual messages that get sent to the various ECUs in the car are different on every model.
You seem to have a passing knowledge of this, and either have your terminology wrong and you actually have done this, or you're just repeating stuff you've read.
Again, some of us do this every day.
Virtyally none of the diagnosic capabilities in modern cars are accessible via OBD-II.
Every manufacturer has proprietary networks built into the car of which OBD-II is a tiny emulation layer. Its designed for emissions testing and emissions related codes, nothing else.
You can't diagnose why your power locks aren't working with it, you can't diagnose why your HVAC controls aren't working. You can't read exhaust gas temperatures, or any other direct sensor outputs. You can't bleed ABS pumps with it, etc, etc, etc.
There are VERY few models you can get that sort of information about. Volkswagen/Audi group cars have some diagnostic software available, but virtually 100% of the information about what you can access and what sort of tests you can run have been reverse engineered, and is very incomplete. VAG also recently changed their protocols for newer cars to block those systems from working.
You may have watched mechanics sweat this stuff, but some of us sweat this stuff directly. This is coming from the direct experience of someone who both repairs cars and works for a internationally ranked professional racing team.
Intercooler fluid? Is that like blinker fluid? ;-)
What kind of car was it? I didn't think any production cars since some limited Chevy vehicles in the late 80's used air/water intercoolers, and those didn't have diagnostic computers.
It'd be an interesting fact to know...
Thats why I wear pants, too.
Um, the MuVo is a 4G compact flash hard drive, not flash card.
Porsche found out the hard way in 1972, if I recall correctly, about putting things that look like where one would put gas when its not for gas.
911's have always had the tank fill either on the drivers side fender on the classic 911's, or on the passenger side on the more recent ones.
In 1972 they got the brilliant idea to put the oil fill (these things take 2-3 gallons of oil at a time, and ones that are a little under the weather can burn a quart every 500 miles) behind something that looked an awful lot like a gas flap on the passenger side right behind the passenger door.
I don't think I need to explain what happens when you fill your engine's oil tank with gasoline. Suffice it to say its bad.
What the heck has happened to the caliber of readers on /. if "A lot of people are saying "salty water", but damn...microbes....it's just too much to hope for." is considered Insightful?
:)
Its a reasonable comment to make, and I agree with it, but come ON. How is that insightful? That should imply it saying something interesting that perhaps the moderator didn't think of. Who here didn't think that same thing? Lets see a show of hands.
Pickles are green.
Now moderate me insightful.
Oh yeah, Martians are green too, so no moderating me off-topic.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think either rover had any instruments designed for detecting any form of life. Unless it was significantly bigger than a microbe and could be seen with the relatively low-power microscope on the rover, I suppose.
Maybe a lot of /. readers are too young to remember real viruses, or to have played around/collected them, but its been a decade since a real infectuous virus has gone around.
If it can't infect any arbitrary EXE file, its not a virus, its a trojan or a worm, depending on wether or not its a moronic user or a security hole that allows it to enter the system.
I'm not sure that was really that funny.
/. have a bizarre sense of humor.
Moderators on
You don't need to tell the police department you're going to test it, just call it, and stay on the line until a dispatcher picks up. Explain what you were doing, thank them, and hang up.
And it'll make hair grow on your palms.
Oh, did you mean at work?
Or the Chinese womens basketball team.
Anyone who saw them in the '96 olympics knows what I'm talkin' about.
I never lie in my comments and I never lie about how few I write. :)
/* This code wouldn't be here if our product managers didn't need to be beaten with a cluestick */
// I'm pretty sure this code is borked, but I can't find where
// This code should never be called // Oops, I meant it should always be called.
Example (these were choice comments a co-worker pulled out of my code a few years ago):
or
or the classic
I did have a VP tell me to rename a method one that he thought was inflamatory, though.
What the hell are you doing going through my mailbox?
Correct, buy my tax money isn't being given carte blanche to corporations owning those roads. My money is, in fact, being taxed via fees given directly to these companies that are owning the results of the tax. Its not like these companies are kicking in their own investment dollars on those projects, you know.
/. seems to understand. If your internet access bill, cable, DSL or modem, or student fees at college included a $10 tax payed directly to Microsoft for them to implement a program lending (not even giving) computers to public schools, would you be in support? Sure, kids may benefit, but you're paying $10 of your hard earned money to build a non-publically owned and non-publically controlled infrastructure by putting money directly into Microsoft's pocket.
If my tax dollars pay for roads and education, thats the government taking my money and reaping the benefits of it. While I have a problem with that as well, especially considering the huge amount of federal money given to states to maintain their roads to use your example, its a completely different topic of conversation.
This is about the government forcing me to pay money to service providers to maintain an artificial equality in service costs nationwide via the construction of large infrastructures that don't belong to us, the American people.
Lets put this in the language
Put it that way, and I bet you'd have a lot more people crying foul on here.
Yup, you might consider it narrow minded, but thats my viewpoint.
The cost of living in those areas are substantially less than in the cities and major metropolitan areas. The problem isn't the idea of people in those rural areas having Internet access or digital cable, its the assumption they make that they should pay the same as I do. Thats's BS, because the cost to provide the service to them might be 10x what mine is. So charge them $400 for their broadband connection. They're paying $2000 a month less in mortgage cost than I am, so I have no sympathy for them. If they don't like that, then they ought to take a good hard look at cheaper delivery methods. Satellite TV, longer range wireless Internet access, wireless phone service are all technologies that are far cheaper to deliver than the equivalent wired technologies. Remove the subsidies for the build out of these rediculous physical infrastructures, and all of that stuff would rapidly come in to fill the void, and remove a enormous source of corporate welfare in this country.
Example: China has 3G wireless phone service and internet access throughout most of the countryside. Why? Because it costs too damn much to run wires everywhere. They were intelligent about it. I've seen it with my own eyes -- people most Americans would consider peasants with satellite TV, and high speed internet access via their cell phones living in cinder block houses with no windows.
People in the country shouldn't suffer from lack of access, the rest of us just shouldn't pay for it, thats all I'm saying. The world was a different place than it was in the early 20th century, these 100 year old concepts of how to bring technology to the rural areas are antiquated and holding us back.