We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they
are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to
win...
I have this quote on my wall. Helps with those days when the studies get tough.
If you've seen From the Earth to the Moon,
the footage of that quote is at the beginning of each episode.
these days no politician would dare make a speech like JFK did.
Already done. President Bush (the senior) challenged the nation to land a man on Mars by 2015. Neil Armstrong issued a similar challenge a year ago on the 30th anniversary of the lunar landings.
Unfortunately, that's not enough. In 1961 there was an unusual combination of a charismatic leader (Kennedy), a clear goal (the moon), and a hated arch-rival (the USSR) to generate the required political will.
If single stage to orbit technologies become a reality, thereby dramatically reducing launch costs, my opinion is that we will see privately funded expeditions to the moon within our lifetimes, much like we see privately funded expeditions to Everest, the south pole, and elsewhere today. NASA be damned.
I disagree with the statement that the non-intels of the world need to band together for
protection, AMD is, in my opinion, every bit as good if not better then our precious pentium cranking
friends.
I agree that AMD has an excellent product. However,
the ashbin of history is filled to the brim with products that had superior technology at the time, but were defeated by a competitor with better marketing (take Betamax, OS/2, and CP/M for instance).
Against Intel's market share and marketing engine (such as the Intel Inside campaign), AMD is doing the prudent thing by forging strategic alliances, rather than waiting for the computing public to recognize them as a superior provider.
So somebody's trying to manipulate the system in order to artificially inflate a meaningless number in a database! How shocking! (Score=5, Insightful)
Re:RMS is on the right track here
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
MS is trying to paint FSF and the GPL as dangerous, and RMS responds with a sensible, calm,
reasonable, and friendly document that is 100% positive information.
On the contrary. The FAQ defines the GPL in as broad language as possible, defines proprietary software as "ethically tainted", and encourages developers to pressure others to release under GPL. I read this as fanning the flames, possibly giving MS ammunition.
So this is how to get things done at Slashdot ...
on
MS VP Speech Online
·
· Score: 3
We tried not to run this, but
there are too many submissions to ignore.
Can we have a pool, Dad?
Can we have a pool, Dad?
Can we have a pool, Dad?
Can we have a pool, Dad?
Can we have a pool, Dad?
Can we have a pool, Dad?... and so forth.
IANAL but the problem is that speech which incites someone to commit a crime is an exception to the first amendment.
The crucial argument to me is that there are non-criminal uses to DeCSS (such as playing DVDs under Linux). I accept the argument that a program designed with harm in mind could be enjoined (such as a program which cracked into and disabled air traffic control systems).
What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in
its most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form? The
only one that jumped out at me is making a backup copy in case the
original is destroyed. But perhaps there are others.
I don't mean to troll... but I find the argument that fair use requires the uncorrupted original
somewhat weak. When you listen to music off your CD player, you aren't examining each of the bits individually, and even some mild amplifier noise doesn't significantly corrupt the signal. As well, when you watch a DVD on your television, the conversion from MPEG to NTSC loses a lot of information. So, in practice, there is quite a bit of corruption of the original information in the forms we normally take it, and it's not a far leap to claim that fair use can encompass this corruption.
There is no radical new application on
the horizon for the microchip to cause its continued spread at such a great rate.
The converse of Moore's law is that a constant amount of computing power gets drastically cheaper with time. Perhaps there isn't much market for a 10 GHz microprocessor, but there is probably a market for a 150 MHz Pentium-equivalent microcontroller, if one could be had for $20 or less. For the immediate future, Moore's law means proliferation of computers, not necessarily dramatic new technology.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi raised the following objection to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (as distinct from extraterrestrial life):
It should take about 1-10 million years for an intelligent race to colonize a space the size of our galaxy, even without faster-than-light travel. (The argument is exponential - we form n colonies, then they form n colonies each, and so on.) Since this is a tiny fraction of the age of the galaxy, there should be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence everywhere. So, where is everybody?
One could say that perhaps other forms of intelligent life dislike exploration, or that they don't interfere in the affairs of other civilizations, or that they leave no trace of their presence. But the one data point we have (humanity) is keen on exploration, isn't shy at all about interfering in the affairs of others, and is pretty bad at cleaning up after itself.
This is being accepted by a growing number of SETI researchers, who believe (somewhat controversially) that humanity is the most advanced form of life in our own galaxy, at least.
Freshly minted BSEE grads from universities are normally stuck into either tech support or sales as their first, entry-level position.
Naturally, nobody does four years of engineering with visions of answering phone calls from people who can't figure out how to plug in their mouse, so these people try their darnedest to move out of support and into design-level jobs.
The talented people in tech support generally get noticed - and promoted out. The less talented generally get stuck in tech support. The Peter principle at work.
Say I can buy a server with probability of failure
p = 0.001. I desire a probability of failure no greater than 0.000005 (i.e., 99.9995% reliable).
So, I buy two servers, and hack something that detects when one goes down and brings up the other one. Probability of failure is now p^2 = 0.000001 (plus epsilon - accounting for a failure of the auto-detector), which beats the spec
Do I have any bids? Or perhaps I should GPL my solution.
In Canada, the effectiveness of cable depends on the company providing it. The
Rogers@Home service is a mess, from all user accounts - slower than dialup at peak times. Other providers are doing reasonably well. Personally, I use the competing ADSL service, which I have found to be reliable.
My concern with cable is privacy. Essentially the network is structured as a LAN which you share, unsecured, with all your neighbors. Nobody has been talking about encryption or privacy for these systems, and it wouldn't be too hard in principle to spy on the packets flying through the system. The story goes that when the system was first introduced, if you were using Windows you could see all your neighbors' shared directories on your Network Neighborhood.
For the interest of Slashdot readers, national governments, and any other interested organization, I am posting instructions on how to fake a moon landing and not get caught for 30 years.
Before the Landing
Put out a request for tenders for a contract to build the lunar hardware to major aerospace companies. It would be pretty obvious after the fact that no one had built your launchers and landers.
In the contracts, give a specification that would lead the 10,000 engineers who work on the project to reasonably believe that the equipment could be used to land on the moon. Engineers are smart people; they could easily spot holes in your assumptions if you make the requirements less stringent than they have to be. If it were obvious that the hardware couldn't land on the moon, you would be caught.
Have the hardward manufactured and delivered. Again easy to spot if this wasn't done, especially for a Saturn V-class rocket and related assemblies.
In summary: You would actually have to build stuff that would probably be able to land a man on the moon, with all the associated expenses.
During the missions:
You will actually have to launch the thing you contracted to build. You could launch something else -- but why bother? We've already established that you have to build a moon rocket, and you'd have to pay off everyone who was involved in its destruction and substitution. Besides, it would be big news, so news organizations would want to film the launch of the big rocket.
So, the capsule could be suborbital, or stay in orbit, and the rest of the mission could be faked, right? Wrong. Antennas around the world will be tracking the radio signals from the capsule, including the continuous telemetry feeds.
Something would have to go to the moon, on a realistic lunar trajectory, or this would be immediately spotted by legions of radio astronomers and HAM radio amateurs around the world, many of whom have advanced signal processing available to them (like Doppler analysis, etc.). They would also be able to tell the difference between a lunar trajectory and a different orbit, like a geosynchronous orbit, because of the moon's particular position in the sky.
So, the capsule has to go to the moon. Does it have to orbit? Yes. The capsule must stay in the vicinity of the moon for several days (again checked by those with large radio antennas). The only foolproof way to do that is to orbit.
So, the capsule has to orbit. Does it have to land? Yes. While in orbit, the capsule can't communicate with Earth from the far side of the moon. Yet a lander must be able to send continuous telemetry to the Earth. It would be pretty obvious fakery to have the "lander"'s telemetry fade out at the same time as the capsule's.
Does it have to come back? Yes; for the same trajectory reason. The return trajectory could be tracked.
Does the capsule/lander have to be manned? Not necessarily, but there would be many complications if it weren't. You would have to be able to carry on ground/capsule communications in a realistic manner even though the communications from the capsule would have to be recorded and beamed back (because your radio is being monitored). The "astronauts" would be unable to perform any diagnostic tasks aboard the spacecraft (because they're not aboard it), so the entire flight control team would have to be in on the hoax (dozens, even hundreds, of people to pay off).
In summary: You would have to actually send something to the moon, which may as well be manned.
After the Landing
Bring back tons of "moon rocks" and other materials for analysis by independent scientists around the world. These rocks could not be obviously of terrestrial origin, implying some exotic materials science (or creative geology). Either that or pay off anyone who comes in contact with the "lunar samples".
And if you're NASA - do this seven times, with one of the seven attempts turning into a remarkably realistic failure.
The upshot: It's equally easy and expensive to actually land a man on the moon than fake it convincingly. Furthermore, the evidence for fakery would not be found in trivial forms of evidence, like photographs, but in more obvious places, like contracts, accounting, radio monitoring, and the lunar samples themselves.
How would you design a filesystem for a storage device with 1 TB or more? It seems to me that the directory tree concept would become unwieldy, too much stuff would get lost.
Above 1 TB, with multiple processes interacting on the data, it would seem to me that the storage device would start to look like a mini-Internet. Perhaps the "domains" and "search engines" concept could be used. Or is there a better way to design such a filesystem from the ground up?
Can someone please explain why this is important? As far as I can tell, mail works just fine the way it is. What deficiencies are the new proposals trying to address?
And, in particular, how will they change my life and/or the way I use mail?
Are the proposed changes merely cosmetic, or do they address any fundamental issues?
Interesting.
I've seen the same thing in the EE program at my university; quite a number of kids go into engineering because they think it will get them a decent job, with little real aptitude for the technical nature of the work.
Perhaps, much like the {MC, GM, LS}AT in other professional programs, there should be an aptitude test for technologically-oriented programs as a condition of admission.
These kind of people would love to be the subject of a honeypot study, if for
no other reason then getting the chance to see that their childish actions have had an effect on
somebody. Crackers want to be perceived as disruptive and a threat; they want to look "cool"
and dangerous and mysterious. Why encourage these people by giving them the kind of attention
they're looking for?
For one thing, the study results are expressed in generalities in terms of hacker tactics. How excited can a person become about being a statistic? I can't see someone seeking attention by publicly defacing web sites becoming overly enamored with the idea of being treated as an anonymous lab rat.
I understand the need to find out cracking techniques. But this kind of stuff is hardly secret by
now; I don't see any reason to continue useless navel-gazing "studies" of cracker behavior.
How else do you propose to discover new cracking techniques, or examine cracking tactics?
It seems to me that honeynets are an excellent opportunity to both conduct reconnaissance on crackers and validate security models in a practical environment. As the article states, black hat ingenuity should never be underestimated, and I can't see what is to be gained by being complacent about security. According to your argument, if we ignore the problem, it will go away. Attention is not the only thing these guys are seeking; some of them mean to do real harm, and we can't tell the difference a priori.
The reactor casing is also a problem
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 2
Spent fuel is not the only problem. The reactor casing and shielding become radioactive as a result of exposure to neutron bombardment. Not as bad as the fuel, but not the sort of thing you'd want in the county dump, either.
Incidentally, except in some exotic cases, this is also a problem for controlled fusion reactions, which generate a lot of energetic neutrons.
When controlled fission was developed in the 50's, there was rampant speculation that every home would be fitted with a fission plant, and that clean, reliable energy would be available on demand, at such low cost that it would be "too cheap to meter". (There were all kinds of other "Atoms for Peace" projects proposed, such as using nuclear bombs to excavate artificial harbours and divert rivers.)
The problem is that any kind of practical fission produces isotopes which give off a tremendous amount of radiation and which have to be buried for thousands of years. The site has been slashdotted, but I can't imagine that they've found a way around this problem.
Imagine the fun when a curious six-year-old takes Daddy's screwdriver and tries to see how the basement fission plant works.
Think about what they're saying: "We challenge you to find a way to break our cipher. But if you succeed you can't tell anyone how you did it."
I could claim to have broken the cipher, and under the DMCA no one could legally verify my claim.
A more important point is lost here: the only secret about a cryptographic system is whether it can be broken. The fact that it has been cracked is now public news, so the SDMI's cipher should be considered insecure, DMCA or no DMCA.
As an aside, the solar system is actually a chaotic system, so the simulator would likely lose accuracy outside of plus/minus a few thousand years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL but wouldn't that violate freedom of association?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win ...
I have this quote on my wall. Helps with those days when the studies get tough.
If you've seen From the Earth to the Moon, the footage of that quote is at the beginning of each episode.
these days no politician would dare make a speech like JFK did.
Already done. President Bush (the senior) challenged the nation to land a man on Mars by 2015. Neil Armstrong issued a similar challenge a year ago on the 30th anniversary of the lunar landings.
Unfortunately, that's not enough. In 1961 there was an unusual combination of a charismatic leader (Kennedy), a clear goal (the moon), and a hated arch-rival (the USSR) to generate the required political will.
If single stage to orbit technologies become a reality, thereby dramatically reducing launch costs, my opinion is that we will see privately funded expeditions to the moon within our lifetimes, much like we see privately funded expeditions to Everest, the south pole, and elsewhere today. NASA be damned.
I disagree with the statement that the non-intels of the world need to band together for protection, AMD is, in my opinion, every bit as good if not better then our precious pentium cranking friends.
I agree that AMD has an excellent product. However, the ashbin of history is filled to the brim with products that had superior technology at the time, but were defeated by a competitor with better marketing (take Betamax, OS/2, and CP/M for instance).
Against Intel's market share and marketing engine (such as the Intel Inside campaign), AMD is doing the prudent thing by forging strategic alliances, rather than waiting for the computing public to recognize them as a superior provider.
So somebody's trying to manipulate the system in order to artificially inflate a meaningless number in a database! How shocking! (Score=5, Insightful)
MS is trying to paint FSF and the GPL as dangerous, and RMS responds with a sensible, calm, reasonable, and friendly document that is 100% positive information.
On the contrary. The FAQ defines the GPL in as broad language as possible, defines proprietary software as "ethically tainted", and encourages developers to pressure others to release under GPL. I read this as fanning the flames, possibly giving MS ammunition.
We tried not to run this, but there are too many submissions to ignore.
Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? ... and so forth.
Unless the MPAA sells you CSS, wouldn't you have to perform the illegal act of reverse engineering CSS in order to build a clone for your own use?
IANAL but the problem is that speech which incites someone to commit a crime is an exception to the first amendment.
The crucial argument to me is that there are non-criminal uses to DeCSS (such as playing DVDs under Linux). I accept the argument that a program designed with harm in mind could be enjoined (such as a program which cracked into and disabled air traffic control systems).
What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in its most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form? The only one that jumped out at me is making a backup copy in case the original is destroyed. But perhaps there are others.
I don't mean to troll ... but I find the argument that fair use requires the uncorrupted original
somewhat weak. When you listen to music off your CD player, you aren't examining each of the bits individually, and even some mild amplifier noise doesn't significantly corrupt the signal. As well, when you watch a DVD on your television, the conversion from MPEG to NTSC loses a lot of information. So, in practice, there is quite a bit of corruption of the original information in the forms we normally take it, and it's not a far leap to claim that fair use can encompass this corruption.
There is no radical new application on the horizon for the microchip to cause its continued spread at such a great rate.
The converse of Moore's law is that a constant amount of computing power gets drastically cheaper with time. Perhaps there isn't much market for a 10 GHz microprocessor, but there is probably a market for a 150 MHz Pentium-equivalent microcontroller, if one could be had for $20 or less. For the immediate future, Moore's law means proliferation of computers, not necessarily dramatic new technology.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi raised the following objection to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (as distinct from extraterrestrial life):
It should take about 1-10 million years for an intelligent race to colonize a space the size of our galaxy, even without faster-than-light travel. (The argument is exponential - we form n colonies, then they form n colonies each, and so on.) Since this is a tiny fraction of the age of the galaxy, there should be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence everywhere. So, where is everybody?
One could say that perhaps other forms of intelligent life dislike exploration, or that they don't interfere in the affairs of other civilizations, or that they leave no trace of their presence. But the one data point we have (humanity) is keen on exploration, isn't shy at all about interfering in the affairs of others, and is pretty bad at cleaning up after itself.
This is being accepted by a growing number of SETI researchers, who believe (somewhat controversially) that humanity is the most advanced form of life in our own galaxy, at least.
The Peter principle is named after the guy who first espoused it - not for some generic guy named "Peter".
Freshly minted BSEE grads from universities are normally stuck into either tech support or sales as their first, entry-level position.
Naturally, nobody does four years of engineering with visions of answering phone calls from people who can't figure out how to plug in their mouse, so these people try their darnedest to move out of support and into design-level jobs.
The talented people in tech support generally get noticed - and promoted out. The less talented generally get stuck in tech support. The Peter principle at work.
Say I can buy a server with probability of failure p = 0.001. I desire a probability of failure no greater than 0.000005 (i.e., 99.9995% reliable).
So, I buy two servers, and hack something that detects when one goes down and brings up the other one. Probability of failure is now p^2 = 0.000001 (plus epsilon - accounting for a failure of the auto-detector), which beats the spec
Do I have any bids? Or perhaps I should GPL my solution.
In Canada, the effectiveness of cable depends on the company providing it. The Rogers@Home service is a mess, from all user accounts - slower than dialup at peak times. Other providers are doing reasonably well. Personally, I use the competing ADSL service, which I have found to be reliable.
My concern with cable is privacy. Essentially the network is structured as a LAN which you share, unsecured, with all your neighbors. Nobody has been talking about encryption or privacy for these systems, and it wouldn't be too hard in principle to spy on the packets flying through the system. The story goes that when the system was first introduced, if you were using Windows you could see all your neighbors' shared directories on your Network Neighborhood.
For the interest of Slashdot readers, national governments, and any other interested organization, I am posting instructions on how to fake a moon landing and not get caught for 30 years.
Before the Landing
During the missions:
After the Landing
And if you're NASA - do this seven times, with one of the seven attempts turning into a remarkably realistic failure.
The upshot: It's equally easy and expensive to actually land a man on the moon than fake it convincingly. Furthermore, the evidence for fakery would not be found in trivial forms of evidence, like photographs, but in more obvious places, like contracts, accounting, radio monitoring, and the lunar samples themselves.
How would you design a filesystem for a storage device with 1 TB or more? It seems to me that the directory tree concept would become unwieldy, too much stuff would get lost.
Above 1 TB, with multiple processes interacting on the data, it would seem to me that the storage device would start to look like a mini-Internet. Perhaps the "domains" and "search engines" concept could be used. Or is there a better way to design such a filesystem from the ground up?
Can someone please explain why this is important? As far as I can tell, mail works just fine the way it is. What deficiencies are the new proposals trying to address? And, in particular, how will they change my life and/or the way I use mail? Are the proposed changes merely cosmetic, or do they address any fundamental issues?
Interesting. I've seen the same thing in the EE program at my university; quite a number of kids go into engineering because they think it will get them a decent job, with little real aptitude for the technical nature of the work. Perhaps, much like the {MC, GM, LS}AT in other professional programs, there should be an aptitude test for technologically-oriented programs as a condition of admission.
These kind of people would love to be the subject of a honeypot study, if for no other reason then getting the chance to see that their childish actions have had an effect on somebody. Crackers want to be perceived as disruptive and a threat; they want to look "cool" and dangerous and mysterious. Why encourage these people by giving them the kind of attention they're looking for?
For one thing, the study results are expressed in generalities in terms of hacker tactics. How excited can a person become about being a statistic? I can't see someone seeking attention by publicly defacing web sites becoming overly enamored with the idea of being treated as an anonymous lab rat.
I understand the need to find out cracking techniques. But this kind of stuff is hardly secret by now; I don't see any reason to continue useless navel-gazing "studies" of cracker behavior.
How else do you propose to discover new cracking techniques, or examine cracking tactics? It seems to me that honeynets are an excellent opportunity to both conduct reconnaissance on crackers and validate security models in a practical environment. As the article states, black hat ingenuity should never be underestimated, and I can't see what is to be gained by being complacent about security. According to your argument, if we ignore the problem, it will go away. Attention is not the only thing these guys are seeking; some of them mean to do real harm, and we can't tell the difference a priori.
Spent fuel is not the only problem. The reactor casing and shielding become radioactive as a result of exposure to neutron bombardment. Not as bad as the fuel, but not the sort of thing you'd want in the county dump, either.
Incidentally, except in some exotic cases, this is also a problem for controlled fusion reactions, which generate a lot of energetic neutrons.
This is not news.
When controlled fission was developed in the 50's, there was rampant speculation that every home would be fitted with a fission plant, and that clean, reliable energy would be available on demand, at such low cost that it would be "too cheap to meter". (There were all kinds of other "Atoms for Peace" projects proposed, such as using nuclear bombs to excavate artificial harbours and divert rivers.)
The problem is that any kind of practical fission produces isotopes which give off a tremendous amount of radiation and which have to be buried for thousands of years. The site has been slashdotted, but I can't imagine that they've found a way around this problem.
Imagine the fun when a curious six-year-old takes Daddy's screwdriver and tries to see how the basement fission plant works.
Are these people being serious?
Think about what they're saying: "We challenge you to find a way to break our cipher. But if you succeed you can't tell anyone how you did it." I could claim to have broken the cipher, and under the DMCA no one could legally verify my claim.
A more important point is lost here: the only secret about a cryptographic system is whether it can be broken. The fact that it has been cracked is now public news, so the SDMI's cipher should be considered insecure, DMCA or no DMCA.
The same system is used to calculate the present position of the Cassini probe, as well as the present position of the Mars Odyssey probe.
As an aside, the solar system is actually a chaotic system, so the simulator would likely lose accuracy outside of plus/minus a few thousand years from now.