Fucking shit, the US government is completely crackpot paranoid.
To quote an old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
Sure the Russians are trying to bollux up the system and create discord in America. That's always been their operating plan. It costs almost nothing, disrupts what they see as their historical enemy, and as a result increases their influence in Europe.
For them, it's a win-win strategy. Even if it's explicitly pointed out, half the people in the US won't even believe it because they hate the government so much to start with.
If we don't want to be vulnerable to cyber warfare, then maybe we shouldn't race to put every single object in our house and every single piece of our critical infrastructure on the internet, then.
It will only get worse with robotic self-driving cars and robotic everything else.
I don't like to talk bad about the labors of perhaps good engineers, but it did seem there were some issues with the design of this mission.
Landing on a comet had never been done before, and the engineers didn't even know what the surface looked like, much less that it had this amazing double shape and rugate surface.
There are two approaches to doing something that's never been done before: (1) Try something and see what the problems are, (2) Think out every possible trouble area that might manifest, and make sure that you can deal with that. Approach 2 sounds much better, but when you take that approach, the vast majority of problems you're designing to deal with are ones that don't actually occur, and as a result the engineering cost is much, much higher.
They designed a lander that would operate on batteries in the worst case, and would stick to the surface with their harpoon and operate on solar arrays in the best case. They got the worst case-- and, because they designed it to operate even in the worst case of landing in an adverse location at a bad orientation, they got data.
They did good. And they got good engineering information to use on later missions.
Google should absolutely not "choose to cut them a break".
I don't know the context of the word "should" here.
When Google doesn't show legitimate links to content people search for, some fraction of these people will go elsewhere for their search engine. Google is winning the search-engine wars precisely because when people search using Google, they expect Google to have what they search for.
From Google's point of view, since it's pretty clear that WB is not going to go after them for not removing their own links to their own material, they absolutely should not remove those search results.
In some societal context, where "should" means "ought to teach them a lesson,' possibly they should. But Google has no reason to do that, it pisses off users, pisses off advertisers (I assume WB advertises), and doesn't help them
...Buy more explosives checkers, and get ones so sensitive they'll detect the explosives inside a firearm cartridge loaded inside a gun. Don't look for the metal. Look for the cartridge.
In any system, there are always two complementary failure modes. We call these "type 1" and "type 2" errors. For example, a switch can fail open (does not conduct when it should conduct) or closed (conducts when it is not supposed to conduct).
For a detector, the error types are "false negative", failing to detect an explosive that is there, and "false positive"-- detecting an explosive when one is not there.
It's easy to make a detective super sensitive. Of course, this means that the false positive rate will be astronomical.
It's a pretty fascinating article. I do suggest reading the actual article, instead of just the slashdot summary, which slightly emphasized the anti-Assange parts and doesn't go into a lot of the rest of the article, which does go into other things.
But, here was one section that I found interesting: a leak that apparently WikiLeaks didn't publish:
WikiLeaks was just getting started in 2006 when Mr. Assange, an Australian national, sent a mission statement to potential collaborators. One of his goals, he said, was to help expose “illegal or immoral” behavior by governments in the West. Mr. Assange made clear, though, that his main focus lay elsewhere. “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia,” he wrote.
Shortly after releasing the war logs in 2010, Mr. Assange threatened to make good on that promise. WikiLeaks, he told a Moscow newspaper, had obtained compromising materials “about Russia, about your government and your businessmen.”
But Mr. Assange’s life was soon upended. On Nov. 20 of that year, an international warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, which he denies. Eight days later, WikiLeaks’ release of a cache of State Department cables cast unvarnished — and unwelcome — light on the United States’ diplomatic relationships.
...Mr. Assange, asked soon after by Time magazine whether he still planned to expose the secret dealings of the Kremlin, reiterated his earlier vow. “Yes indeed,” he said.
But that promised assault would not materialize. Instead, with Mr. Assange’s legal troubles mounting, Mr. Putin would come to his defense....One day after Mr. Assange’s arrest, the Russian president appeared at a news conference with the French prime minister. Brushing off a questioner who suggested that the diplomatic cables portrayed Russia as undemocratic, Mr. Putin used the opportunity to bash the West.
Wait, what? In 2010 WikiLeaks was going to publish materials “about Russia, about your government and your businessmen”... but never did? What happened to that leak?
Well, if it violates the theory of relativity, anything could happen, I guess.
The guy ("scientist"?), Roger Shawyer, who invented it claims that it's actually due to the theory of relativity that it works.
Yes, but their test results explicitly falsified that theory.
They tested this. The device (was claimed to) produce thrust whether or not it had the asymmetry that Shawyer claimed was required by his theory
...I'm not a physicist, so I can't speak to whether his explanation makes sense.
For me, even when there seemed to be some effect, it was simply far, far too small. Well within experimental noise - and certainly nothing you're going to propel anything anywhere with.
Yep. When part of their original paper stated "our test set up was so sensitive we could see noise due to waves in Galveston Bay twenty miles away!", my reaction was "omigod, that's a very bad thing," rather than the "wow, they made a great sensor" reaction I think they were looking for.
Fact is, if you want to make big scientific leaps, you gotta do it with a well managed government corporation. If you want to make incremental technical improvements mischaracterised by a brilliant propagandist, you give the job to Musk.
I do have to point out that SpaceX is a government contractor, so it has been doing both the "well managed government corporation" route and the private contractor route. The Falcon-9 was funded by NASA; designed and built under a NASA contract, and had mandatory NASA oversight on key milestones-- at the time they won the NASA contract to design Falcon-9, their success record for launches was one success in four tries.
I'll be interested in seeing the results. So far, each release of test results has falsified all the previous work, but with the conclusion "well, even though we didn't replicate previous results, there's still a little bit left that we can't explain."
The trouble is, all of that remains true if you have anti-virus software installed. Your odds might be slightly better overall, but AV software doesn't catch everything....
The advantage of AV is it will eventually catch the malware, unless you wipe and reinstall. Sure, it might have been on there for years but eventually you will get it. That's a little better at least than never catching it at all.
Exactly. Sooner or later, most viruses are found and their characteristics added into the AV software.
We are all aware that technical solutions for social problems don't work. People will write down their passwords, because they have too many.
It's been shown that writing down your password is pretty much the safest thing you can do. If I can't write it down, I can guarantee my password is going to have to be something like puppydogN, and I'm going to use the same one on every single system because I can't memorize fifty different passwords and remember which one goes with which login.
What pisses me off most are the a$$holes in computer security who are now making me change my passwords to a new one every 90 days. Nobody has ever shown that this makes anything safer.
Hey don't knock it. This experiment didn't accomplish anything that will get us any closer to Mars. But it did accomplish its primary goal of getting NASA a week of good PR.
Since pretty much nobody-- outside of a few people who are already space fans-- has paid any attention at all to this, due to almost no NASA publicity whatsoever, I don't think that this was a major goal.
I'm not sure why they just ran the simulation for 1 year, though. It typically takes about 1.4 years for the planetary alignment needed for a return.
Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
And the knowledge that if anything went wrong the "experiment" could be ended in a matter of minutes.
This is true of every simulation, of course. When a pilot flies a Boeing 777 simulator, they don't die if the simulator crashes. When the army does wargame exercises, the red team doesn't die when their side gets bombed.
That's why they're called "simulations".
The Bechdel test is a perfect way to judge the portrayal of woman, for example most porn movies pass the test.
Most porn movies fail the test. The test is absurdly simple: to pass, a movie must (1) have at least two named female characters, who (2) have at least one conversation with each other, (3) that is not about men.
Most (non-gay) porn movies pass part 1, very few pass part 2, and pretty much none pass part 3.
Actually, Houston was chosen because land was cheap, and because of the proximity of the site to the canal passage to the Gulf of Mexico, to allow shipping large rocket boosters to the cape by barge.
Of course, they ended up not manufacturing large rocket boosters at Johnson, so that turned out to be unnecessary and irrelevant. You might suggest that this requirement, that the site have barge accessibility to the Atlantic, was put in place for no reason other than to make the Texas site competitive. But, who would argue that?
I do have to say I loved the old days, way way back in 2005, when people left their wifi unlocked as a matter of course, and if you needed a connection anywhere you happened to be, you could just open your laptop and grab any of the dozen open networks.
Those good old days of cyberanarchistic freedom, gone forever now, I guess, but still fondly remembered.
There is some possibility that the sun may, at some time in the future, enter another sunspot minimum similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645 to about 1715. But we're not in one now.
Actually, there was a recent development in modelling the sun, which (if I recall correctly) resulted in a model of the sunspot cycle that has a high-90s percentage match to the historical data. (The key was to model it as TWO dynamos rather than one.)
Also (again, if I recall correctly) the new model predicted that we were going into something that looked like a new Maunder Minimum, with this cycle being weak and the next one nearly nonexistent.
(Sorry I can't dig up the reference right now. Only got a couple minutes left to post.)
I might note that the work only modeled three solar cycles, and has not (as far as I've seen) yet gone through peer review (the paper that the new article is about is a conference presentation.)
There is some possibility that the sun may, at some time in the future, enter another sunspot minimum similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645 to about 1715. But we're not in one now. Sunspot count peaked at about 150 this cycle, which is lower than usual. But it's not even approaching coming near the Maunder minimum, which had single-digit sunspot counts
Slashdot Mirror
Fucking shit, the US government is completely crackpot paranoid.
To quote an old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
Sure the Russians are trying to bollux up the system and create discord in America. That's always been their operating plan. It costs almost nothing, disrupts what they see as their historical enemy, and as a result increases their influence in Europe.
For them, it's a win-win strategy. Even if it's explicitly pointed out, half the people in the US won't even believe it because they hate the government so much to start with.
It will only get worse with robotic self-driving cars and robotic everything else.
I don't like to talk bad about the labors of perhaps good engineers, but it did seem there were some issues with the design of this mission.
Landing on a comet had never been done before, and the engineers didn't even know what the surface looked like, much less that it had this amazing double shape and rugate surface.
There are two approaches to doing something that's never been done before: (1) Try something and see what the problems are, (2) Think out every possible trouble area that might manifest, and make sure that you can deal with that. Approach 2 sounds much better, but when you take that approach, the vast majority of problems you're designing to deal with are ones that don't actually occur, and as a result the engineering cost is much, much higher.
They designed a lander that would operate on batteries in the worst case, and would stick to the surface with their harpoon and operate on solar arrays in the best case. They got the worst case-- and, because they designed it to operate even in the worst case of landing in an adverse location at a bad orientation, they got data.
They did good. And they got good engineering information to use on later missions.
Google should absolutely not "choose to cut them a break".
I don't know the context of the word "should" here.
When Google doesn't show legitimate links to content people search for, some fraction of these people will go elsewhere for their search engine. Google is winning the search-engine wars precisely because when people search using Google, they expect Google to have what they search for.
From Google's point of view, since it's pretty clear that WB is not going to go after them for not removing their own links to their own material, they absolutely should not remove those search results.
In some societal context, where "should" means "ought to teach them a lesson,' possibly they should. But Google has no reason to do that, it pisses off users, pisses off advertisers (I assume WB advertises), and doesn't help them
And what gives you confidence that the false positive rate would be as low as 10%?
...Buy more explosives checkers, and get ones so sensitive they'll detect the explosives inside a firearm cartridge loaded inside a gun. Don't look for the metal. Look for the cartridge.
In any system, there are always two complementary failure modes. We call these "type 1" and "type 2" errors. For example, a switch can fail open (does not conduct when it should conduct) or closed (conducts when it is not supposed to conduct).
For a detector, the error types are "false negative", failing to detect an explosive that is there, and "false positive"-- detecting an explosive when one is not there.
It's easy to make a detective super sensitive. Of course, this means that the false positive rate will be astronomical.
There seems to be a non-paywalled version of the article on "Alaska Dispatch News", for what it's worth:
http://www.adn.com/nation-world/2016/08/31/how-russia-often-benefits-when-julian-assange-reveals-the-wests-secrets/
It's a pretty fascinating article. I do suggest reading the actual article, instead of just the slashdot summary, which slightly emphasized the anti-Assange parts and doesn't go into a lot of the rest of the article, which does go into other things.
But, here was one section that I found interesting: a leak that apparently WikiLeaks didn't publish:
WikiLeaks was just getting started in 2006 when Mr. Assange, an Australian national, sent a mission statement to potential collaborators. One of his goals, he said, was to help expose “illegal or immoral” behavior by governments in the West. Mr. Assange made clear, though, that his main focus lay elsewhere. “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia,” he wrote. Shortly after releasing the war logs in 2010, Mr. Assange threatened to make good on that promise. WikiLeaks, he told a Moscow newspaper, had obtained compromising materials “about Russia, about your government and your businessmen.”
But Mr. Assange’s life was soon upended. On Nov. 20 of that year, an international warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, which he denies. Eight days later, WikiLeaks’ release of a cache of State Department cables cast unvarnished — and unwelcome — light on the United States’ diplomatic relationships.
...Mr. Assange, asked soon after by Time magazine whether he still planned to expose the secret dealings of the Kremlin, reiterated his earlier vow. “Yes indeed,” he said. But that promised assault would not materialize. Instead, with Mr. Assange’s legal troubles mounting, Mr. Putin would come to his defense. ...One day after Mr. Assange’s arrest, the Russian president appeared at a news conference with the French prime minister. Brushing off a questioner who suggested that the diplomatic cables portrayed Russia as undemocratic, Mr. Putin used the opportunity to bash the West.
Wait, what? In 2010 WikiLeaks was going to publish materials “about Russia, about your government and your businessmen”... but never did? What happened to that leak?
Wait, the VICTIMS lost money?
That's the definition of "victim", isn't it?
If they were unaffected, they're not victims.
Well, if it violates the theory of relativity, anything could happen, I guess.
The guy ("scientist"?), Roger Shawyer, who invented it claims that it's actually due to the theory of relativity that it works.
Yes, but their test results explicitly falsified that theory. They tested this. The device (was claimed to) produce thrust whether or not it had the asymmetry that Shawyer claimed was required by his theory
...I'm not a physicist, so I can't speak to whether his explanation makes sense.
I am a physicist. His explanation makes no sense.
For me, even when there seemed to be some effect, it was simply far, far too small. Well within experimental noise - and certainly nothing you're going to propel anything anywhere with.
Yep. When part of their original paper stated "our test set up was so sensitive we could see noise due to waves in Galveston Bay twenty miles away!", my reaction was "omigod, that's a very bad thing," rather than the "wow, they made a great sensor" reaction I think they were looking for.
Fact is, if you want to make big scientific leaps, you gotta do it with a well managed government corporation. If you want to make incremental technical improvements mischaracterised by a brilliant propagandist, you give the job to Musk.
I do have to point out that SpaceX is a government contractor, so it has been doing both the "well managed government corporation" route and the private contractor route. The Falcon-9 was funded by NASA; designed and built under a NASA contract, and had mandatory NASA oversight on key milestones-- at the time they won the NASA contract to design Falcon-9, their success record for launches was one success in four tries.
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/the-tale-of-falcon-1-5193845/?
Even more confusing, the actual Russian name for the rocket for years used to be simply "Number 7" ("Semyorka")
Underwhelmed.
I'll be interested in seeing the results. So far, each release of test results has falsified all the previous work, but with the conclusion "well, even though we didn't replicate previous results, there's still a little bit left that we can't explain."
Unless there is a bug which allows the passwords to be extracted... https://labs.detectify.com/201...
Good to know, but I do point out that the first line of that link says "Note: This issue has already been resolved and pushed to the Lastpass users."
I hope that they told users to change their saved passwords, though.
The trouble is, all of that remains true if you have anti-virus software installed. Your odds might be slightly better overall, but AV software doesn't catch everything. ...
The advantage of AV is it will eventually catch the malware, unless you wipe and reinstall. Sure, it might have been on there for years but eventually you will get it. That's a little better at least than never catching it at all.
Exactly. Sooner or later, most viruses are found and their characteristics added into the AV software.
We are all aware that technical solutions for social problems don't work. People will write down their passwords, because they have too many.
It's been shown that writing down your password is pretty much the safest thing you can do. If I can't write it down, I can guarantee my password is going to have to be something like puppydogN, and I'm going to use the same one on every single system because I can't memorize fifty different passwords and remember which one goes with which login.
What pisses me off most are the a$$holes in computer security who are now making me change my passwords to a new one every 90 days. Nobody has ever shown that this makes anything safer.
Hey don't knock it. This experiment didn't accomplish anything that will get us any closer to Mars. But it did accomplish its primary goal of getting NASA a week of good PR.
Since pretty much nobody-- outside of a few people who are already space fans-- has paid any attention at all to this, due to almost no NASA publicity whatsoever, I don't think that this was a major goal.
I'm not sure why they just ran the simulation for 1 year, though. It typically takes about 1.4 years for the planetary alignment needed for a return.
Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
And the knowledge that if anything went wrong the "experiment" could be ended in a matter of minutes.
This is true of every simulation, of course. When a pilot flies a Boeing 777 simulator, they don't die if the simulator crashes. When the army does wargame exercises, the red team doesn't die when their side gets bombed. That's why they're called "simulations".
The Bechdel test is a perfect way to judge the portrayal of woman, for example most porn movies pass the test.
Most porn movies fail the test. The test is absurdly simple: to pass, a movie must (1) have at least two named female characters, who (2) have at least one conversation with each other, (3) that is not about men.
Most (non-gay) porn movies pass part 1, very few pass part 2, and pretty much none pass part 3.
Actually, Houston was chosen because land was cheap, and because of the proximity of the site to the canal passage to the Gulf of Mexico, to allow shipping large rocket boosters to the cape by barge.
Of course, they ended up not manufacturing large rocket boosters at Johnson, so that turned out to be unnecessary and irrelevant. You might suggest that this requirement, that the site have barge accessibility to the Atlantic, was put in place for no reason other than to make the Texas site competitive. But, who would argue that?
Those good old days of cyberanarchistic freedom, gone forever now, I guess, but still fondly remembered.
There is some possibility that the sun may, at some time in the future, enter another sunspot minimum similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645 to about 1715. But we're not in one now.
Actually, there was a recent development in modelling the sun, which (if I recall correctly) resulted in a model of the sunspot cycle that has a high-90s percentage match to the historical data. (The key was to model it as TWO dynamos rather than one.)
Also (again, if I recall correctly) the new model predicted that we were going into something that looked like a new Maunder Minimum, with this cycle being weak and the next one nearly nonexistent.
(Sorry I can't dig up the reference right now. Only got a couple minutes left to post.)
You're referring to this one, I think: http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and...
I might note that the work only modeled three solar cycles, and has not (as far as I've seen) yet gone through peer review (the paper that the new article is about is a conference presentation.)
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56530521e4b0c307d59bbe97/t/56af97fda3360cecbfe34b0e/1454348294881/?format=750w
That's a lot of text to essentially say nothing.
I see you're new here. Welcome to slashdot.