"Postscript: I use methanol, rather than ethanol because ethanol fuel cells are noticalby more difficult (== expensive), and producing methonal from biomass uses wood and other indigestable matter. Generating ethanol requires sugars, i.e. food."
Besides, ethanol powered cars are probably a violation of open container laws.:)
"Switching over to Hydrogen definitely changes oil politics... the Middle East would ease back into irrelevancy,"
No, it won't. Cracking water requires energy (as much energy as you get by burning hydrogen and making water), and since 70% of US power plants are still fossil-fuel powered...
We could still do that by building boku nuclear power plants (fat chance), but third world nations don't have that option, so most of the world will still be married to Saudi Arabia.
So? So is carbon, but that doesn't mean the price of diamonds are going to fall through the floor any time soon.
"There are many interesting ways people may be able to produce it."
Actually, that first page right there made me laugh. The little flow chart, where they produce H2 from C3H6O3? They neglected to point out what happens to the carbon and oxygen atoms after you take out the H2: It becomes carbon monoxide. One carbon monoxide molecule for every hydrogen molecule, meaning it produces 14 times as much CO as H2 by mass.
"An important thing to remember is that one big generator powered by hydrocarbons is much more efficiend than thousands of little ones"
But you still can't get around the laws of thermodynamics. The energy that comes from burning hydrogen is from the process of breaking the bonds in H2O (a very endothermic process), so sayeth the First Law. And you're never going to get as much energy out of the hydrogen as you put into it, so sayeth the Second Law. Conclusion: It would be cheaper and more efficient to skip the hydrogen middle man altogether.
The only way a hydrogen economy can be appreciably more environment-friendly than what we have now is if we use nuclear power to crack the water. And that won't happen in the US any time soon for obvious reasons (unless Bush delivers on what he said about building more nuke plants).
"Power plants are more efficient than your car engine (typically twice as efficient)."
Part of that is scale, but part of that is the use of the diesel cycle as opposed to the gasoline-powered otto cycle (which realisticly can't be anywhere near as efficient as a diesel engine).
"Oil is not universally cheap. I pay 4-5x more for petrol than you do. I think Europe has a similar high price for oil."
You're confusing "price of extratcting, transporting, and refining oil" with "taxes on oil."
"Dense cities cannot cope with pollution from fuel-burning cars. A perfect example is your own LA. Moving the pollution away is good for the city even if it doesn't greatly help the planet."
In other words, you're not actually solving the problem, just hiding it. Much like LA's water problem.
"Hot rock and solar are my personal bets for the future of electricity production; both have potential to be cheaper than fuel-burning plants."
Geothermal requires very specific geology. In the US, that geology is generally only found in National Parks, and the green lobby won't allow anything built in there.
Solar doesn't pollute the atmosphere, but it requires square miles of land to be clear-cut in order to produce a reasonable amount of electricity, a footprint bigger than fossil fuel plants by orders of magnitude.
The article you linked to makes no mention of where you actaully get the hydrogen. The only real way we know of getting the stuff is by cracking water. And the energy required to crack hydrogen out of water is about the same amount of energy you'd get by burning the resulting hydrogen (pesky first law of thermodynamics). In fact, the energy to crack water is a little more than the energy you'd get from the hydrogen (pesky second law of thermodynamics). You're going to need somemething to produce the energy to crack that water, and right now that "something" is "fossil fuels," for the simple reason that the energy to extract coal and oil is disgustingly small compared to the enery you get by burning it (since the "squeezing and heating over the course of several million years" part was already done for us).
The only feasable way for that hydrogen economy to work in a gren way is to build huge nuclear reactors to power the cracking process. And we already know what most people think about nuclear power.
Electricity - production by source: fossil fuel: 71% hydro: 7% other: 2% (2000) nuclear: 20%
"Look a little bit further (or back, a couple of days ago on/.) and you see that electricity is a good step between the way you turn a natural source of energy and the movement you want in your vehicle."
Yes, they do it in trains all the time. But they still use diesel engines to turn the generators because fossil fuels are about as good as you're going to get when it comes to "energy needed to find" versus "energy from use" ratios. Solar and wind have their places, but first you need to lay waste to a few square miles of wilderness to get enough open land to produce a reasonable amount of power. Hydroelectric is alright (if it's nearby), but even ignoring the "think about the fish!" non-green aspects, you're still going to end up with square miles of land under water that wasn't submerged before. Hydrogen sounds nice until you realize how much power is needed to crack water to begin with (power that ends up coming from fossil fuels). "Alternate" fuel sources for cars really just pass the onus of polluting off to somebody else.
The only real way to power cars with a minimal impact on the environment is with either geothermal/OTEC/etc (which depends more on geography than does hydro) power plants or nuclear.
They don't. What they intend to do is interpose themselves between an advertiser and MSN's captive audience. They want to send other peoples' spam. For profit.
First, let me just start with the qualfier "I Am Not A Physicst."
"Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey."
Except it can only get stretched so far until you run into the brick wall that is quantum mechanics. Space-time isn't infinitely smooth, and the finer a view of it you get, the less uniform it is.
This is why physics gets all weird at the infinitessimal center of a black hole, because "infinitessimal" shouldn't be possible.
"space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole."
Except that relativity tells us that light is always moving 3E8 m/s faster than that. Even an observer in that space that's getting stretched to the breaking point would measure light as going 3E8 m/s away from him.
"What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
As you pass through the event horizon, the entire sky would shrink until all you saw was a single point of light in the direction directly away from the center. All light that passes through the event horizon gets pulled towards the center, and unless its journey from its source to the center of the black hole is intercepted by your head, you'd never see it. It would get deflected towards the center of the black hole before it had a chance to reach your retinae.
"An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump"
You're forgetting about the space being taken up by you. As the space you occupy gets stretched out, so do you. And you can only get stretched out so far before you're torn apart (the old quantum mechanics bit again). That finite mass being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume is you.
"In other words, something like the current universe."
Our universe looks uniform in any direction we look. The view inside a black hole would be a whole lot of nothing in the sky except for that point directly away from the center of the black hole.
"Automated call machines were banned for exactly the same reason."
Unless they're operated by political campaigns. I don't even want to think about all the times "George Bush" called here during the Louisiana senate run-off last year...
"When you login, you can access your startup folder."
We're not talking about Windows terminal emulation (or even Telnet) here. Logging in remotely through SMB involves browsing specific network shares, whether from the GUI or command line. Unless you specifically give your startup folder its own share, accessing it involves digging through the directory structure.
\\localhost\C$\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
And you can only do that if you know that there is a hidden share named "C$" to begin with.
A small minority of Windows users even know they have a Startup folder. Fewer know how to set up an SMB share. Fewer still understand the Windows directory structure enough to know that "desktop" and "start menu" are just directory names in "My Computer", not the other way around. Conclusion: the worm is going through the default shares.
"uninformed, unintelligent, or just trying to be smart?"
IANAL, but I sincerely doubt that interpretation of the fourth amendment would last five minutes in court. It doesn't say "unless they get somebody else to do it for them." Heck, it doesn't even say that only the US federal and state governments are the only ones prohibited from unreasonable searches and seizures. Even the average ambulance chaser would jump all over that one.
"Unbind network sharing from your external tcp/ip settings."
It's a shame there's no easy way to get rid of Messenger service (ie. "net send") spam the same way. I was surprised that I still got some, even after disabling both sharing and the SMB client on my outbound connection. I ended up disabling the service, but there should be a better way...
"if your admin password is blank, then blamo - full access to your machine."
XP won't let local accounts in remotely if their password is blank, at least not by default.
Solution: Put that in as your new password, but hit ^H an arbitrary number of times before setting it.
My friends did something similar in the dorm networks for our SMB workgroup. Every name they could think of ended up with three or four workstations joining who we didn't know. So they changed our workgroup to "_________" all underscores minus the last two. You can't see how many underscores are there when they're all blended together, and nobody figured out what we did. No more problems with uninvited guests.
"XP does not show the user accounts unless you set it up for the family stuff. My XP machines in my domains don't show any user names."
That's because you have it in a domain, using domain accounts. If you're not in a domain, the default local log-in method is that "family stuff" you're talking about.
However, you are right; I was wrong about the default behavior. Instead of a user log-in, a default XP Home install will automatically log you in to the default account "Owner," an admin account with no password(!!!!!).
On the other hand, unless XP is being installed by an MCSE-in-a-box, it's relatively easy to make XP look identical to Windows 2000. And let's face it: You're going to be altering the default install anyway if you're going to do anything resembling real networking. And that goes for Linux as well.
"Please tell me how it's MS's fault that people pick easy to guess passwords?"
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault for making both partitions and the system directory shares by default. How the hell else would the worm get access to the StartUp folder? The people most vulnerable don't even know where that particular directory is, let alone how to share it.
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault to make XP users members of the Administrators group by default (the only ones who can access those default shares).
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault that XP doesn't even bother asking for a password for a new (admin!) user account unless the account is made the old-fashioned Win2k way.
The "shiney new" way XP handles user accounts by default is almost as bad as 95/98/Me. By default, all system users are listed at the log-in screen for you to pick. One of them has a password? Move on down to the next in the list. Odds are at least one of them doesn't have a password and yet has admin privileges.
True, no self-respecting XP user would have anything to do with the accounts script in the Control Panel, but the better method of dealing with user accounts is both counter-intuitive ("Performance and Maintenance?" But "User Accounts" is right there!) and practically hidden (Performance & Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management (Local) -> Local Users and Groups), at least as far as former 95/98/Me users are concerned.
No, this is a design flaw in XP, part of Microsoft's attempts to dumb down the NT kernel for the home user. Perhaps MSFT wouldn't have to spend so much money on patching these security holes if they instead spent a little capital on trying to educate users a little about (extremely) basic user accounts security. This current "security hole" has been around since NT 3.1 and hasn't been that much of a problem until Microsoft decided to give everybody admin rights by default.
Slashdot Mirror
"Postscript: I use methanol, rather than ethanol because ethanol fuel cells are noticalby more difficult (== expensive), and producing methonal from biomass uses wood and other indigestable matter. Generating ethanol requires sugars, i.e. food."
:)
Besides, ethanol powered cars are probably a violation of open container laws.
"Switching over to Hydrogen definitely changes oil politics... the Middle East would ease back into irrelevancy,"
No, it won't. Cracking water requires energy (as much energy as you get by burning hydrogen and making water), and since 70% of US power plants are still fossil-fuel powered...
We could still do that by building boku nuclear power plants (fat chance), but third world nations don't have that option, so most of the world will still be married to Saudi Arabia.
"Hydrogen is very abundant in nature."
So? So is carbon, but that doesn't mean the price of diamonds are going to fall through the floor any time soon.
"There are many interesting ways people may be able to produce it."
Actually, that first page right there made me laugh. The little flow chart, where they produce H2 from C3H6O3? They neglected to point out what happens to the carbon and oxygen atoms after you take out the H2: It becomes carbon monoxide. One carbon monoxide molecule for every hydrogen molecule, meaning it produces 14 times as much CO as H2 by mass.
Come on, people, this is chem 101 stuff here...
"An important thing to remember is that one big generator powered by hydrocarbons is much more efficiend than thousands of little ones"
But you still can't get around the laws of thermodynamics. The energy that comes from burning hydrogen is from the process of breaking the bonds in H2O (a very endothermic process), so sayeth the First Law. And you're never going to get as much energy out of the hydrogen as you put into it, so sayeth the Second Law. Conclusion: It would be cheaper and more efficient to skip the hydrogen middle man altogether.
The only way a hydrogen economy can be appreciably more environment-friendly than what we have now is if we use nuclear power to crack the water. And that won't happen in the US any time soon for obvious reasons (unless Bush delivers on what he said about building more nuke plants).
"The Hindenberg just had a big Hydrogen balloon that wasn't being depleted"
It wasn't just a big bag of hydrogent, it was a big bag of hydrogen painted with solid rocket fuel.
Think about it: How else do you get a zeppelin to go up in a brilliant fireball when hydrogen burns clear?
"Power plants are more efficient than your car engine (typically twice as efficient)."
Part of that is scale, but part of that is the use of the diesel cycle as opposed to the gasoline-powered otto cycle (which realisticly can't be anywhere near as efficient as a diesel engine).
"Oil is not universally cheap. I pay 4-5x more for petrol than you do. I think Europe has a similar high price for oil."
You're confusing "price of extratcting, transporting, and refining oil" with "taxes on oil."
"Dense cities cannot cope with pollution from fuel-burning cars. A perfect example is your own LA. Moving the pollution away is good for the city even if it doesn't greatly help the planet."
In other words, you're not actually solving the problem, just hiding it. Much like LA's water problem.
"Hot rock and solar are my personal bets for the future of electricity production; both have potential to be cheaper than fuel-burning plants."
Geothermal requires very specific geology. In the US, that geology is generally only found in National Parks, and the green lobby won't allow anything built in there.
Solar doesn't pollute the atmosphere, but it requires square miles of land to be clear-cut in order to produce a reasonable amount of electricity, a footprint bigger than fossil fuel plants by orders of magnitude.
The article you linked to makes no mention of where you actaully get the hydrogen. The only real way we know of getting the stuff is by cracking water. And the energy required to crack hydrogen out of water is about the same amount of energy you'd get by burning the resulting hydrogen (pesky first law of thermodynamics). In fact, the energy to crack water is a little more than the energy you'd get from the hydrogen (pesky second law of thermodynamics). You're going to need somemething to produce the energy to crack that water, and right now that "something" is "fossil fuels," for the simple reason that the energy to extract coal and oil is disgustingly small compared to the enery you get by burning it (since the "squeezing and heating over the course of several million years" part was already done for us).
The only feasable way for that hydrogen economy to work in a gren way is to build huge nuclear reactors to power the cracking process. And we already know what most people think about nuclear power.
"That is if your electricity power plant is using fossils fuels."
/.) and you see that electricity is a good step between the way you turn a natural source of energy and the movement you want in your vehicle."
From the CIA World Factbook:
Electricity - production by source:
fossil fuel: 71%
hydro: 7%
other: 2% (2000)
nuclear: 20%
"Look a little bit further (or back, a couple of days ago on
Yes, they do it in trains all the time. But they still use diesel engines to turn the generators because fossil fuels are about as good as you're going to get when it comes to "energy needed to find" versus "energy from use" ratios. Solar and wind have their places, but first you need to lay waste to a few square miles of wilderness to get enough open land to produce a reasonable amount of power. Hydroelectric is alright (if it's nearby), but even ignoring the "think about the fish!" non-green aspects, you're still going to end up with square miles of land under water that wasn't submerged before. Hydrogen sounds nice until you realize how much power is needed to crack water to begin with (power that ends up coming from fossil fuels). "Alternate" fuel sources for cars really just pass the onus of polluting off to somebody else.
The only real way to power cars with a minimal impact on the environment is with either geothermal/OTEC/etc (which depends more on geography than does hydro) power plants or nuclear.
""Photons, whether they are light photons, radio photons, or gamma-ray photons, simply do not interfere with one another,""
I see somebody skipped out on their physics lab on "Michelson-Morley interferomoter" day. I wonder how he thinks we measured the speed of light...
Except Philips is the same company cracking down on CD-A encryption.
Et tu, Philips?
Will they use Death Row inmates to model the new clothing?
"Why the fuck does m$ need to spam?"
They don't. What they intend to do is interpose themselves between an advertiser and MSN's captive audience. They want to send other peoples' spam. For profit.
First, let me just start with the qualfier "I Am Not A Physicst."
"Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey."
Except it can only get stretched so far until you run into the brick wall that is quantum mechanics. Space-time isn't infinitely smooth, and the finer a view of it you get, the less uniform it is.
This is why physics gets all weird at the infinitessimal center of a black hole, because "infinitessimal" shouldn't be possible.
"space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole."
Except that relativity tells us that light is always moving 3E8 m/s faster than that. Even an observer in that space that's getting stretched to the breaking point would measure light as going 3E8 m/s away from him.
"What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
As you pass through the event horizon, the entire sky would shrink until all you saw was a single point of light in the direction directly away from the center. All light that passes through the event horizon gets pulled towards the center, and unless its journey from its source to the center of the black hole is intercepted by your head, you'd never see it. It would get deflected towards the center of the black hole before it had a chance to reach your retinae.
"An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump"
You're forgetting about the space being taken up by you. As the space you occupy gets stretched out, so do you. And you can only get stretched out so far before you're torn apart (the old quantum mechanics bit again). That finite mass being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume is you.
"In other words, something like the current universe."
Our universe looks uniform in any direction we look. The view inside a black hole would be a whole lot of nothing in the sky except for that point directly away from the center of the black hole.
I'm pretty sure we'd know if we were inside one.
I'm more curious about the donut hole. If you could cut across it, you get to go faster than light.
Of course, the trick would be figuring out how to go "that-a-way."
"Automated call machines were banned for exactly the same reason."
Unless they're operated by political campaigns. I don't even want to think about all the times "George Bush" called here during the Louisiana senate run-off last year...
"but what if the call originates in... say... Tijuana? Ott(a)wa? Bombay?"
Yeah! What happens if the telemarketer calls from some stinking armpit of a third world nation like Canada?
"I still can't believe that a legislature actually passed a reasonably effective and useful law, despite the opposition of lobbying groups!"
Because the law has a loophole for political campaigning, and in the end that's all they really care about.
"When you login, you can access your startup folder."
We're not talking about Windows terminal emulation (or even Telnet) here. Logging in remotely through SMB involves browsing specific network shares, whether from the GUI or command line. Unless you specifically give your startup folder its own share, accessing it involves digging through the directory structure.
\\localhost\C$\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
And you can only do that if you know that there is a hidden share named "C$" to begin with.
A small minority of Windows users even know they have a Startup folder. Fewer know how to set up an SMB share. Fewer still understand the Windows directory structure enough to know that "desktop" and "start menu" are just directory names in "My Computer", not the other way around. Conclusion: the worm is going through the default shares.
"uninformed, unintelligent, or just trying to be smart?"
You tell me.
IANAL, but I sincerely doubt that interpretation of the fourth amendment would last five minutes in court. It doesn't say "unless they get somebody else to do it for them." Heck, it doesn't even say that only the US federal and state governments are the only ones prohibited from unreasonable searches and seizures. Even the average ambulance chaser would jump all over that one.
"Unbind network sharing from your external tcp/ip settings."
It's a shame there's no easy way to get rid of Messenger service (ie. "net send") spam the same way. I was surprised that I still got some, even after disabling both sharing and the SMB client on my outbound connection. I ended up disabling the service, but there should be a better way...
"if your admin password is blank, then blamo - full access to your machine."
XP won't let local accounts in remotely if their password is blank, at least not by default.
They're there in XP Pro, but not in XP Home.
Solution: Put that in as your new password, but hit ^H an arbitrary number of times before setting it.
My friends did something similar in the dorm networks for our SMB workgroup. Every name they could think of ended up with three or four workstations joining who we didn't know. So they changed our workgroup to "_________" all underscores minus the last two. You can't see how many underscores are there when they're all blended together, and nobody figured out what we did. No more problems with uninvited guests.
"XP does not show the user accounts unless you set it up for the family stuff. My XP machines in my domains don't show any user names."
That's because you have it in a domain, using domain accounts. If you're not in a domain, the default local log-in method is that "family stuff" you're talking about.
However, you are right; I was wrong about the default behavior. Instead of a user log-in, a default XP Home install will automatically log you in to the default account "Owner," an admin account with no password(!!!!!).
On the other hand, unless XP is being installed by an MCSE-in-a-box, it's relatively easy to make XP look identical to Windows 2000. And let's face it: You're going to be altering the default install anyway if you're going to do anything resembling real networking. And that goes for Linux as well.
"Please tell me how it's MS's fault that people pick easy to guess passwords?"
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault for making both partitions and the system directory shares by default. How the hell else would the worm get access to the StartUp folder? The people most vulnerable don't even know where that particular directory is, let alone how to share it.
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault to make XP users members of the Administrators group by default (the only ones who can access those default shares).
Please tell me how it's not Microsoft's fault that XP doesn't even bother asking for a password for a new (admin!) user account unless the account is made the old-fashioned Win2k way.
The "shiney new" way XP handles user accounts by default is almost as bad as 95/98/Me. By default, all system users are listed at the log-in screen for you to pick. One of them has a password? Move on down to the next in the list. Odds are at least one of them doesn't have a password and yet has admin privileges.
True, no self-respecting XP user would have anything to do with the accounts script in the Control Panel, but the better method of dealing with user accounts is both counter-intuitive ("Performance and Maintenance?" But "User Accounts" is right there!) and practically hidden (Performance & Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management (Local) -> Local Users and Groups), at least as far as former 95/98/Me users are concerned.
No, this is a design flaw in XP, part of Microsoft's attempts to dumb down the NT kernel for the home user. Perhaps MSFT wouldn't have to spend so much money on patching these security holes if they instead spent a little capital on trying to educate users a little about (extremely) basic user accounts security. This current "security hole" has been around since NT 3.1 and hasn't been that much of a problem until Microsoft decided to give everybody admin rights by default.