Maybe the current energy problem in california will have some good long term effects after all.
Nah. If it were just a price issue, it might help. But the proximate cause was a political decision to deregulate supply in an amazingly broken way, so most people see it as primarily a political problem.
It doesn't help that most americans, including most american politicians and reporters, equate conservation with sacrifice. Hint: if you keep a desktop running 24x7 but only use the console a few hours a day, "xset +dpms; xset dpms 1200 3600 7200", will reduce the total power use by more than half.
I'm convinced that high prices are the only thing that will get my neighbors to think about conservation and efficiency. I'd like to see a $10/gallon hike in the gas tax, with income tax cuts so there is no net change in gov't revenue. But politically, we can't do it -- maybe OPEC will probably hike the price for us.
During the successful December assembly of the International Space Station Zarya
and Unity modules by the crew of STS-88, three EVAs were required to connect
cables, install and deploy antennas, and various other chores. During these EVAs
at least five objects were released, either intentionally or accidentally. However, like
virtually all debris generated during human space flights, the orbital lifetimes are
estimated to be very short, a few months or less. In fact, one of the debris had
already decayed by 14 December.
EVAs have long been a source of short-lived orbital debris, including the discarded
airlock of Voskhod 2, Ed White's thermal glove during Gemini 4, a screwdriver
from STS-51 I, and literally hundreds of debris which originated during EVAs
from the Salyut and Mir space stations. Mir alone has generated over 300 debris
objects during its 13-year flight, the majority appearing after EVAs. However, only
one of all these debris was still in orbit at the end of the year.
So, yes, there is, or at least was, a glove in orbit. (I remember reading about it the first time I read about the space junk problem -- there was a poster in my classroom about the time around 1980).
Also, these small pieces of debris in LEO don't cause a long-term problem -- there's enough atmosphere that far out to make the orbits decay. Even something as big as the ISS needs to burn fuel to maintain its orbit. Space junk in geosynchronous orbit lasts a lot longer.
I actually did the calculation correctly, and then decided to post the version I did (which actually calculates the expected number of events) because I thought it was easier to explain. And, I knew the error I introduced by approximating was unimportant, given the uncertainty in my input numbers and that my goal of evaluating NASA's calculation. But I guess I've now forfeited the high ground when I complain about journalistic oversimplification.
The article says there are 74 satellites in the constellation, and it lists four types of parts which are likely to survive. Of these, the "structural bracket" sounds like something there will be several of, so say there are 7 pieces per satellite. That's 518 pieces.
Now, the area of the earth is about 5.6e+15 square feet, and the population is about 6e+9 people. Assume each person takes occupies 7 sq ft, without overlap. Then 0.00075% of the earth's surface is covered by people. Multiply that by 518 chances and you get about 1 in 257.
An interesting variation: assume that each person has a 100 sq ft region in which impacts could kill or injure them, e.g. by knocking the roof in or scattering debris. These regions cover 0.01% of the globe. There's about 1 chance in 18 that one of the pieces will hit one region.
I assumed that the re-entries were uniformly distributed; the NASA study assumed that the re-entries were untargeted -- presumably NASA excluded the polar regions which aren't under the orbits. And they may have made different assumptions about area occupied by each person and number of pieces per satellite.
In fact, my guess is that this "study" was done by one person in an hour or so, mostly spent looking through the Iridium parts lists. "memo" is probably a more accurate term.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, these odds drop by 2-3 orders of magnitude if the satellites can hit a target the size of the pacific.
Alot of deaths happen after a hurricane not only during.
True. But most of those deaths are due to how widespread the infrastructure damage is. When the damage is very localized, the rest of the community is functioning normally and emergency resources -- ambulances, telco repair folks, whatever -- can be borrowed from neighboring areas. This is a major reason tornados don't have many deaths after the storm is over. Iridium impact damage would be so localized that these indirect casualties would be negligible compared to direct casualties.
This leakage is real, and it is a problem, and I look forward to Iridium's demise because of it. But it's not what Iridium flares are. The term "Iridium flare" refers, as the poster indicated, to visible spectrum sunlight reflected by the satellites.
I imagine that the few "mission critical" systems the DoD has are written in house, by programmers with high security clearance, so that the Department knows the source very well.
For the really specialized systems, this is almost true -- they generally aren't written in-house, but the're written by on contract by specialist houses (e.g. divisions of Raytheon and Boeing) where most people have clearances. And the terms of the contract do give DoD rights to the source.
But that's the battle management systems. The logistics guys in the next building are probably using Oracle and windows. The VPN may have unusual encryption modules. If the data is classified, which isn't certain, it's probably only secret, not top secret or beyond. And more than a few battles have been lost by a lack of food, ammunition, spare parts, and such.
The systems that aren't mission critical are the servers for the base's softball league and for the troops to send email to their parents. There's a lot more of that than you would think.
How about urging people NEVER to click on attachments, unless you've explicitly asked for
them?
I get lots of attachments I didn't ask for -- mostly work-related stuff from co-workers in stupid MSOffice formats. And most copies of prolin, melissa, and their ilk will come from co-workers. It's awfully hard to teach users to tell the difference.
A large part of the problem is that it's possible to mislead windows users about the file type. The mail client needs to provide the user with accurate file type information -- i.e. how the OS will treat the file if you click on it. It should also provide a suspiciousness indication
and probably require a confirmation for suspect types.
Except, who authorized it? Did the people it was scanning authorize it? It probably has a (mostly) innocent purpose, but
the machine's name doesn't necessairly mean anything:)
If you're an athome customer, you probably authorized it (and more) by signing the contract.
The scans are roughly daily, and they only check the NNTP port.
These RF tags have readable range of like 6 feet with a large transmitter. They're the same kind that gets taken off of clothing when you purchase it. It is borderline impossible to read the tags from thirty yards away through at least one wall. Now, if you let people walk up to you and scan you with a wand that's your business, but you really don't have room to complain there.
Let me point out that most of your clothes -- not to mention your wallet -- are normally well within 6 feet of the floor, and usually much closer to the frames of the doors you walk through. And the system has to be able to catch things as they go by, or they'd be useless for conveyor belts. A human with a wand will not be needed.
So, here's the scenario: some clearinghouse -- doubleclick is a likely suspect -- arranges with merchants to put scanners on their doorframes, and on their checkout counters. The clearinghouse can then link together
different items of your clothing
the (postal) address which received a coupon you once carried, but didn't use
the stores you frequent and the items you buy
the places you travel
the people you hang out with and exchange gifts with
So, as you walk into a store, the salesdroid will know
who you are and where you live
when you last visited their competitor
whether you're likely to buy something big or browse and leave empty handed
the size, brand, and age of your underwear
These things are effectively cookies for meatspace. Like cookies, the question is whether or not they're used in a way that allows cross-company correlation.
Web servers can't read your registry, plain and simple. The only possible way is if you ran an ActiveX control or an executable(scripting languages can't do this) that accessed the registry, but if you did that, it would be your own fault.
It's either your fault or the fault of your OS vendor.
Some ActiveX controls are marked as "safe for scripting". IE will allow javascript to use these controls. And at least two controls which were marked as safe should not have been. That's how the kak worm works.
Sure, we know what all the large mammals are, and we have some remnant of most of them we could extract DNA from. But entymologists estimate that 90% of the currently living species of insects aren't yet known to science. Similar numbers hold for most groups of invertebrates, plants, and microbes. That makes it mighty hard to collect the necessary samples.
Evolution has no intent and no concept of good and bad outcomes. There's nothing in evolution or natural selection which says whether or not a species should survive. (In the moral sense of the word "should" -- the predictive sense is another matter.) Evolution is quite useless as a basis for making moral judgements or deciding what to value. It simply doesn't address -- or allow -- questions of what should happen or what was planned.
(weren't cut out to is a curious choice of phrase -- suggesting that species were made using a cookie cutter, a fabric pattern, or by some analogous process. It strongly suggests an intentional act of creation and hence an actor.)
Humans who chose to do resurrections like this cannot make this choice based on some value system derived from evolution. There's no evolutionary plan for them to help or mess up. They make the decisions for the same reasons all animals make all their decisions -- either they want the result or they want some expected consequence of the result.
Decartes has been shipping for a year or two, and robots with similar or greater capabilities have been available commercially for 5 years. Some are programmable in C and have roughly the computing power of an apple ][ or an atari 2600. Try robotstore or arrick.
It's probably a CAN network, not a token ring network. CAN (Controller area network) networks are strange and cool. The packet headers describe the content, (e.g. battery voltage is...), and there are no addresses. The interface chips are tiny and cheap, and made to talk to minimal microcontrollers. Packets are short 29 (or 11 in old versions) bits of header and 0-8 bytes of data. The network is supposed to work, albeit at reduced data rates, if either of the two wires is open or shorted to v+ or ground.
For a pointing device which doesn't require use of the hands, check out eye control. It's a camera which watches an eyeball and figures out where you're looking. Expect to pay a couple thousand dollars, and don't expect them to ship a linux driver.
I don't believe information gleamed from sequencing a chunk of genetic code should be patentable.
What I'm talking about *is* the unique creation of a sequence of genetic code.
There are some patents being filed on artificially created genes, but the vast majority of patents on genes are on naturally occuring genes. The only originality claim the "inventor" can make is that s/he was the first to sequence the gene.
Do a search for recent news on the Human Genome Project, and you'll find that a couple companies are rushing to sequence as many human genes as they can before government-funded researchers get there. They're doing this so they can patent the genes. You are undoubtedly using a few patented genes -- and many patent-pending genes -- as you read this. That's the absurd part.
Almost all civil law could be rewritten in a single sentence, with a massive improvement to the legal system and corresponding improvements in accessibility, affordability, fairness and justice:
It is a breach of civil law to commit any act against another person which most reasonable people would consider to be unacceptable, and the person who commits that act may be required by a court of law to pay reasonable compensation to the person they have wronged.
Law could certainly be simplified a bunch, and stated with plainer language and in more generality that it usually is. But it can't be simplified that much -- law should contain general statements of what is acceptible.
Different reasonable people can have different ideas of what is acceptible in a situation. Ideally, society has a discussion about it, and if people can agree afterward, they write down what they agreed to and why to remind themselves later. (If someone doesn't agree later, the discussion can be re-opened.)
That's what law is at its best. The messy stuff comes in when people can't reach an agreement after the discussion, but there's a practical need to resolve the question one way or another.
Yeah, they're a bit cheaper than most PC-104 stuff. But why didn't they make their boards PC-104 compatible? It would make the products vastly more flexible -- would it add that much to the cost?
I use a Kensington Turbo Mouse (that's "Expert Mouse" to those of you in the PC world), and it works great in MacOS and LinuxPPC both (though I have yet to figure out how to make the fourth button do anything on the Linux side; I'd like to map it to a double-click if that's at all possible).
I've had one of these sitting on a shelf unused for three years now because I couldn't get the buttons working. I'm not thinking about the 4th button -- I've never been able to get more than 2 distinct mouse signals out of it. (It acts like a 2-button MS mouse with two left and two right buttons.) How do you get it to send anything interesting? I'd appreciate any pointers.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. If it were just a price issue, it might help. But the proximate cause was a political decision to deregulate supply in an amazingly broken way, so most people see it as primarily a political problem.
It doesn't help that most americans, including most american politicians and reporters, equate conservation with sacrifice. Hint: if you keep a desktop running 24x7 but only use the console a few hours a day, "xset +dpms; xset dpms 1200 3600 7200", will reduce the total power use by more than half.
I'm convinced that high prices are the only thing that will get my neighbors to think about conservation and efficiency. I'd like to see a $10/gallon hike in the gas tax, with income tax cuts so there is no net change in gov't revenue. But politically, we can't do it -- maybe OPEC will probably hike the price for us.
my guess is another two weeks, so put me down for
2001-04-03 19:47:30
During the successful December assembly of the International Space Station Zarya and Unity modules by the crew of STS-88, three EVAs were required to connect cables, install and deploy antennas, and various other chores. During these EVAs at least five objects were released, either intentionally or accidentally. However, like virtually all debris generated during human space flights, the orbital lifetimes are estimated to be very short, a few months or less. In fact, one of the debris had already decayed by 14 December.
EVAs have long been a source of short-lived orbital debris, including the discarded airlock of Voskhod 2, Ed White's thermal glove during Gemini 4, a screwdriver from STS-51 I, and literally hundreds of debris which originated during EVAs from the Salyut and Mir space stations. Mir alone has generated over 300 debris objects during its 13-year flight, the majority appearing after EVAs. However, only one of all these debris was still in orbit at the end of the year.
So, yes, there is, or at least was, a glove in orbit. (I remember reading about it the first time I read about the space junk problem -- there was a poster in my classroom about the time around 1980).
Also, these small pieces of debris in LEO don't cause a long-term problem -- there's enough atmosphere that far out to make the orbits decay. Even something as big as the ISS needs to burn fuel to maintain its orbit. Space junk in geosynchronous orbit lasts a lot longer.
I actually did the calculation correctly, and then decided to post the version I did (which actually calculates the expected number of events) because I thought it was easier to explain. And, I knew the error I introduced by approximating was unimportant, given the uncertainty in my input numbers and that my goal of evaluating NASA's calculation. But I guess I've now forfeited the high ground when I complain about journalistic oversimplification.
Now, the area of the earth is about 5.6e+15 square feet, and the population is about 6e+9 people. Assume each person takes occupies 7 sq ft, without overlap. Then 0.00075% of the earth's surface is covered by people. Multiply that by 518 chances and you get about 1 in 257.
An interesting variation: assume that each person has a 100 sq ft region in which impacts could kill or injure them, e.g. by knocking the roof in or scattering debris. These regions cover 0.01% of the globe. There's about 1 chance in 18 that one of the pieces will hit one region.
I assumed that the re-entries were uniformly distributed; the NASA study assumed that the re-entries were untargeted -- presumably NASA excluded the polar regions which aren't under the orbits. And they may have made different assumptions about area occupied by each person and number of pieces per satellite.
In fact, my guess is that this "study" was done by one person in an hour or so, mostly spent looking through the Iridium parts lists. "memo" is probably a more accurate term.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, these odds drop by 2-3 orders of magnitude if the satellites can hit a target the size of the pacific.
True. But most of those deaths are due to how widespread the infrastructure damage is. When the damage is very localized, the rest of the community is functioning normally and emergency resources -- ambulances, telco repair folks, whatever -- can be borrowed from neighboring areas. This is a major reason tornados don't have many deaths after the storm is over. Iridium impact damage would be so localized that these indirect casualties would be negligible compared to direct casualties.
This leakage is real, and it is a problem, and I look forward to Iridium's demise because of it. But it's not what Iridium flares are. The term "Iridium flare" refers, as the poster indicated, to visible spectrum sunlight reflected by the satellites.
For the really specialized systems, this is almost true -- they generally aren't written in-house, but the're written by on contract by specialist houses (e.g. divisions of Raytheon and Boeing) where most people have clearances. And the terms of the contract do give DoD rights to the source.
But that's the battle management systems. The logistics guys in the next building are probably using Oracle and windows. The VPN may have unusual encryption modules. If the data is classified, which isn't certain, it's probably only secret, not top secret or beyond. And more than a few battles have been lost by a lack of food, ammunition, spare parts, and such.
The systems that aren't mission critical are the servers for the base's softball league and for the troops to send email to their parents. There's a lot more of that than you would think.
I get lots of attachments I didn't ask for -- mostly work-related stuff from co-workers in stupid MSOffice formats. And most copies of prolin, melissa, and their ilk will come from co-workers. It's awfully hard to teach users to tell the difference.
A large part of the problem is that it's possible to mislead windows users about the file type. The mail client needs to provide the user with accurate file type information -- i.e. how the OS will treat the file if you click on it. It should also provide a suspiciousness indication and probably require a confirmation for suspect types.
If you're an athome customer, you probably authorized it (and more) by signing the contract.
The scans are roughly daily, and they only check the NNTP port.
That's a mechanism for recording who has voted. (everyone who is registered and can no longer vote)
They may know that the pair of Levi's was purchased (or otherwise associated with) your credit card, though existing privacy laws may prevent that.
If you carry a piece of junk mail in your pocket -- or if you did last week at the mall -- they'll know what address it was mailed to.
And why wouldn't they link the scan data with pictures from a the camera you walked in front of?
Let me point out that most of your clothes -- not to mention your wallet -- are normally well within 6 feet of the floor, and usually much closer to the frames of the doors you walk through. And the system has to be able to catch things as they go by, or they'd be useless for conveyor belts. A human with a wand will not be needed.
So, here's the scenario: some clearinghouse -- doubleclick is a likely suspect -- arranges with merchants to put scanners on their doorframes, and on their checkout counters. The clearinghouse can then link together
- different items of your clothing
- the (postal) address which received a coupon you once carried, but didn't use
- the stores you frequent and the items you buy
- the places you travel
- the people you hang out with and exchange gifts with
So, as you walk into a store, the salesdroid will knowThese things are effectively cookies for meatspace. Like cookies, the question is whether or not they're used in a way that allows cross-company correlation.
It's either your fault or the fault of your OS vendor.
Some ActiveX controls are marked as "safe for scripting". IE will allow javascript to use these controls. And at least two controls which were marked as safe should not have been. That's how the kak worm works.
The postmaster may be innocent of spamming per se, but they are guilty of providing an open relay for spammers.
Sure, we know what all the large mammals are, and we have some remnant of most of them we could extract DNA from. But entymologists estimate that 90% of the currently living species of insects aren't yet known to science. Similar numbers hold for most groups of invertebrates, plants, and microbes. That makes it mighty hard to collect the necessary samples.
(weren't cut out to is a curious choice of phrase -- suggesting that species were made using a cookie cutter, a fabric pattern, or by some analogous process. It strongly suggests an intentional act of creation and hence an actor.)
Humans who chose to do resurrections like this cannot make this choice based on some value system derived from evolution. There's no evolutionary plan for them to help or mess up. They make the decisions for the same reasons all animals make all their decisions -- either they want the result or they want some expected consequence of the result.
Decartes has been shipping for a year or two, and robots with similar or greater capabilities have been available commercially for 5 years. Some are programmable in C and have roughly the computing power of an apple ][ or an atari 2600. Try robotstore or arrick.
It's probably a CAN network, not a token ring network. CAN (Controller area network) networks are strange and cool. The packet headers describe the content, (e.g. battery voltage is ...), and there are no addresses. The interface chips are tiny and cheap, and made to talk to minimal microcontrollers. Packets are short 29 (or 11 in old versions) bits of header and 0-8 bytes of data. The network is supposed to work, albeit at reduced data rates, if either of the two wires is open or shorted to v+ or ground.
see this article
For a pointing device which doesn't require use of the hands, check out eye control. It's a camera which watches an eyeball and figures out where you're looking. Expect to pay a couple thousand dollars, and don't expect them to ship a linux driver.
What I'm talking about *is* the unique creation of a sequence of genetic code.
There are some patents being filed on artificially created genes, but the vast majority of patents on genes are on naturally occuring genes. The only originality claim the "inventor" can make is that s/he was the first to sequence the gene.
Do a search for recent news on the Human Genome Project, and you'll find that a couple companies are rushing to sequence as many human genes as they can before government-funded researchers get there. They're doing this so they can patent the genes. You are undoubtedly using a few patented genes -- and many patent-pending genes -- as you read this. That's the absurd part.
It is a breach of civil law to commit any act against another person which most reasonable people would consider to be unacceptable, and the person who commits that act may be required by a court of law to pay reasonable compensation to the person they have wronged.
Law could certainly be simplified a bunch, and stated with plainer language and in more generality that it usually is. But it can't be simplified that much -- law should contain general statements of what is acceptible.
Different reasonable people can have different ideas of what is acceptible in a situation. Ideally, society has a discussion about it, and if people can agree afterward, they write down what they agreed to and why to remind themselves later. (If someone doesn't agree later, the discussion can be re-opened.)
That's what law is at its best. The messy stuff comes in when people can't reach an agreement after the discussion, but there's a practical need to resolve the question one way or another.
Yeah, they're a bit cheaper than most PC-104 stuff. But why didn't they make their boards PC-104 compatible? It would make the products vastly more flexible -- would it add that much to the cost?
I've had one of these sitting on a shelf unused for three years now because I couldn't get the buttons working. I'm not thinking about the 4th button -- I've never been able to get more than 2 distinct mouse signals out of it. (It acts like a 2-button MS mouse with two left and two right buttons.) How do you get it to send anything interesting? I'd appreciate any pointers.