First of all, what the heck would you do if the car got totalled? You'd contaminate dozens of miles of the Interstate, and even if you survived, you'd die an agonizing death from radiation poisoning or cancer.
There are other problems as well. For example, do you intend to power your car just with the energy generated from radioactive decay? If so, I hate to break it to you, but there's not a whole lot to use. It's doubtful that you could use that power to move a car, expecially the large one you would need.
In fact, the only way you could do this would be if you converted an 18-wheeler with trailer. Put a true fission reactor in the trailer, complete with boilers and cooling system, and run wires from the trailer to the truck itself, where you would have a large electric motor. Sinmply converting an old jalopy as a "tinkering project" would not work. Not to mention, for this nuclear-powered 18-wheeler, you'd need a commercial driver's licence.
Of course, the fact that you'd essentiall have a whole 18-wheeler trailer filled with radioactive metals and contaminated water means a couple things. First, you would have to have thick lead wall all over the thing - how a top speed of 30mph sound. The fact you'd have a huge amount of power is irrelevent - the other problems involved with moving that much mass at that much speed (brakes, transmission, etc) are formidable. And frankly, I wouldn't want you driving fast in this behemoth anyway.
Remember what I said about your entire trailer being filled with radioactive-contaminated water? Let me ask you this: How often does your car radiator spring a leak? Not often, true, but it has happened to you, hasn't it? In a nuclear power plant, there are hundreds of people checking every valve and in constant control. Your reactor will have one controller - yourself -and you will be driving while trying to control the reactor.
If you want a bad$%# truck, get a SmarTruck with missile launchers and whatnot.
If you were very careful, and used some sort of rubbing alchohol or acetone to remove the tape, this might work. The problem is that by the time you pay for the tape and the nail polish remover, it's probably cheaper and easier just to buy a condom.
Why bother with "real" nukes?
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 2
It's a lot easier to just take a small quantity of plutonium or uranium (one of the more radioactive isotopes, of course), strap it on to a convention explosive (fertilizer, nitroglycerin, even gunpowder could do) and make it go boom. You now have some very nasty stuff spread over a wide area, and spreading wider. You also can have a reasonable initial boom, depending on how much conventional explosive you use.
The advantage of this method is that you don't need as much restricted material as for a true nuke, and it requires much less skill. Unlike with a true atomic bomb, you don't need to build the bomb all that precisely, as long as you wire the fuses or whatever properly. I forget whether I read this on Slashdot or NewScientist, sorry.
That storing all the world's weapons-grade plutonium in one place is a really, really bad idea? Disregarding for the moment attempted theft, what if there's some sort of accident. There'd be enough plutonium for a pretty big bang.
There's a good reason most countries don't store all their plutonium in one place.
"By 2010, you will carry a card that encodes your entire DNA sequence."
So let me get this straight...instead of insurance companies having to look through hundreds of pages of medical records to screw you, they'll be able to do it with one handy card? Wow.
We are ABOVE a third-world city street. Directly below us, the SmarTruck is zooming along at 75mph. Most of the traffic (animals, bikes, cars) is pulled over, but the SmarTruck is being pursued by four cop cars, and a helicopter. All are firing at the SmarTruck.
We SWITCH views to INSIDE the SmarTruck, our perspective is that of the proverbial bug on the windshield looking into the car. We see the Driver, a US Army enlisted man. In the passenger seat, but edging almost into the driver's seat is a Scantily-Clad Bond-Type Woman. Blonde, sexy, etc.
Woman: They're firing at us! We're going to die!
Army guy: (laughes) That'll be the day...
We see the Army Guy manipulating controls on the dash. After each button is pressed, we switch views to SEE: An oil slick and tacks spilling out of the rear bumper, and the cop cars skidding out of control. The laser turret pops out, and shoots down the helicopter. An approaching squad of evil-looking soldiers is exposed to tear gas and grenade volleys. We SWITCH back to the car.
Woman: Oh John, you saved out lives!
Army Guy: I never go out without protection.
The Woman starts to remove her shirt as we fade out to a montage of scenes of the SmarTruck in action.
Narrator: Be an army of one. Join today.
(end of ad)
Please note, it was not my intention to give offense. This is a simple spoof of US Army ads and James Bond movies. If I have given offense, I sincerely apologize.
I never throw out an old machine. Even an old 386 with 4 megs of RAM and no hard drive can boot a floppy-disk Linux proxy server or router. If it's a 486, it can run the QNX demo, and you have a nice little internet kiosk. If the computer doesn't have a network card or modem, you ca always boot a single-disk linux and use it to run Seti@home or D.net.
Incidentally, my high school's voice-mail system runs on a 486SX 25 mhz machine, and runs perfectly.
I think quantining is a wise decision, just in terms of the benefit when compared to the cost. Say there's a one in a billion chance that there may be something nasty in a Mars rock. That may be way off, so call it one in 5 billion, or ten, or whatever floats your boat.
Anyway, when you consider the cost of sending a probe to Mars and returning a sample to Earth, the cost of quarantine is a comparative drop in the bucket. It't a bit more hassle and expense, granted, but not much compared to the entire project. Why not be on the safe side? Better to have a quarantine and not need it...
Message found in copy of Flatland was poor
on
Flatterland
·
· Score: 2
"Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was a decent enough short story, but the geometry was rather messy. The flatlanders had a small amount of depth, for Pete's sake!
"Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there."
I agree with you, but how do we make sure that the government doesn't try to crack encrypted email without a warrant? You state that if you are in your home, you have an expectation of privacy, and so any searches require a warrant from a judge. You also say that if you encrypt an email, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The logical corrolary of this is that any attempted crack of the email should require a warrant.
This brings me right back to the point I made in my original post. There is no oversight ensuring that any attempts to crack encrypted email do receive a warrant. Even if you encrypt, and have an expectation of privacy, there's no guarantee that the person authorizing a crack of the email answers directly to an elected official, as a judge does (sort of).
What disturbs me most about Echelon is that there is no public accountability whatsoever, or even an admission to the public that Echelon exists.
Consider: In the United States, a warrant is needed for a phone wiretap, video surveillance, seaches, etc. These warrants have to be approved by a judge - that's public accountability. The judge is a public official appointed by elected officials - wiretaps and searches are authorized by a person only one step away from elected officials who are directly responsible to the people.
Echelon isn't like that. There are no warrants, we have no idea who approves an Echelon search, and there is no accountability to the people, because the people don't know which elected officials, if any, have oversight. If a governor appoints a judge who makes boneheaded decisions about warrants, the public can refuse to re-elect the governor. How does the public know who to NOT vote for if a mistake is made with Echelon? How does the public even know if a mistake has been made?
The worst part of all is that the US government refuses to even admit the dang thing exists, and without such an admission, there's nothing even the ACLU can do. How do you force the government to disclose something that "doesn't exist"?
Microsoft would be foolish not to take advantage of this chance to bascially force the entire UK onto windows. I mean, this is an entire country, for crying out loud - the British government practically begged for this to happen. And of course, this is a perfect demo for.NET
As for why Blair & Co went along with this, it was probably a combination of factors:
1.) They probably believed (correctly) that the majority of home computer owners use some version of Windows.
2.) Microsoft, realizing how many copies of windows they could "convince" British citizens to buy by having it by required for the web site, was probably willing to take massive losses on the site itself. They probably underbid everyone else in existance.
3.) The British government is a group of politicians, not webmasters. They probably believed everything M$ told them about how great IE is. I mean, when has a giant American corporation ever lied?
4.) Microsoft has massive manpower resources. They probably were able to get it done faster than any competitors.
As much as I dislike the fact that this is happening,I have to admit microsoft could not have done this scam better. Hat's off, guys.
We need standards and homogeniety on the Internet so that everyone's browsers, plugins etc can view more or less the same web page. The problem is that no one can every agree out of the goodness of their hearts to adopt a given standard. As a result, we have corporations imposing standards on the Internet as they see fit - but I think we'd be even worse off if they didn't, and I needed to have 12 browsers installed just to read Slashdot:-).
As for the effect of corporations on American politics, I agree their donations to politicians are making them corporate puppets, but what can be done? Any politician who tries to get true campaign reform (Bradley, McCain) can never is squashed by candidates with a lot more money with which to fund ad and smear campaigns. That extra cash comes from the corporations, of course.
The problem, in other words, is that as long as Americans continue to depend on high-powered ad ad campaigns instead of educating themselves about the issues, the candidate with the largest ad budget will always win, and the candidate with the largest ad budget will be the one with the most corporate backing.
I hate to say it, but leave the companies alone
on
Make Way for Fiber
·
· Score: 1
In my opinion, even though these fiber lines are being run by for-profit companies, and are not free to access, it is still in the public interest that these lines be placed. If we ever want the Internet to be able to do things like internet-controlled manufacturing, surgery, or simply true high-quality, lag-free video, it's going to need a high-speed backbone. Fiber provides that, and will provide benefits ultimately to all of us.
Therefor, it is my opinion that the government should use its right of eminent domain to allow those lines to be laid along the railroad tracks without any sort of settlement being needed to private citizens. There is precedent for this - power and phone lines are sometimes laid using eminent domain.
Spam! in my inbox all day
It's the best.
Thinking about bandwidth,
sending angry emails now.
Spam! Filtering it out,
keep it a-way from me!
The Internet is there
to send you Spam now.
The Spam is there to make you say "ow!"
Reading all my spam-mail, wondering if I'm a junkie now. Spam!
With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic.
won't lots more antimatter be needed for Oort?
on
Antimatter Propulsion
·
· Score: 2
ICANN II uses 140 nanograms of antimatter for a thirty-day run, but if we want constant acceleration/deceleleration (and I assume we do, so it can reach the Oort Cloud in fifty years), won't it need a lot more antimatter? 140 times 12 gives you the amount of antimatter used in a year, 1680 nanograms. Multiply that by fifty, and you get 84000 nanograms. That still may not sound like a lot, but that's actually a respectable bang - look at the web page mentioned in this news post. Could someone check me, and see if I'm wrong?
Sourceforge really should provide more details about how security was breached. They probably are reasoning that if they give details, other people will do the same thing. However, anyone who's interested in this sort of nonsense probably already knows.
So, why not let the legitimate Sourceforge users have a bit more information about what happened? Perhaps some of the users might have an idea for a fix, or at least a way to protect their own work. Heck, we don't even know the nature of the breach, do we? Was data stolen? Corrupted? What? Inquiring minds have a legitimate need to know.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, what the heck would you do if the car got totalled? You'd contaminate dozens of miles of the Interstate, and even if you survived, you'd die an agonizing death from radiation poisoning or cancer.
There are other problems as well. For example, do you intend to power your car just with the energy generated from radioactive decay? If so, I hate to break it to you, but there's not a whole lot to use. It's doubtful that you could use that power to move a car, expecially the large one you would need.
In fact, the only way you could do this would be if you converted an 18-wheeler with trailer. Put a true fission reactor in the trailer, complete with boilers and cooling system, and run wires from the trailer to the truck itself, where you would have a large electric motor. Sinmply converting an old jalopy as a "tinkering project" would not work. Not to mention, for this nuclear-powered 18-wheeler, you'd need a commercial driver's licence.
Of course, the fact that you'd essentiall have a whole 18-wheeler trailer filled with radioactive metals and contaminated water means a couple things. First, you would have to have thick lead wall all over the thing - how a top speed of 30mph sound. The fact you'd have a huge amount of power is irrelevent - the other problems involved with moving that much mass at that much speed (brakes, transmission, etc) are formidable. And frankly, I wouldn't want you driving fast in this behemoth anyway.
Remember what I said about your entire trailer being filled with radioactive-contaminated water? Let me ask you this: How often does your car radiator spring a leak? Not often, true, but it has happened to you, hasn't it? In a nuclear power plant, there are hundreds of people checking every valve and in constant control. Your reactor will have one controller - yourself -and you will be driving while trying to control the reactor.
If you want a bad$%# truck, get a SmarTruck with missile launchers and whatnot.
"Just avoid using as a condom"
If you were very careful, and used some sort of rubbing alchohol or acetone to remove the tape, this might work. The problem is that by the time you pay for the tape and the nail polish remover, it's probably cheaper and easier just to buy a condom.
It's a lot easier to just take a small quantity of plutonium or uranium (one of the more radioactive isotopes, of course), strap it on to a convention explosive (fertilizer, nitroglycerin, even gunpowder could do) and make it go boom. You now have some very nasty stuff spread over a wide area, and spreading wider. You also can have a reasonable initial boom, depending on how much conventional explosive you use.
The advantage of this method is that you don't need as much restricted material as for a true nuke, and it requires much less skill. Unlike with a true atomic bomb, you don't need to build the bomb all that precisely, as long as you wire the fuses or whatever properly. I forget whether I read this on Slashdot or NewScientist, sorry.
That storing all the world's weapons-grade plutonium in one place is a really, really bad idea? Disregarding for the moment attempted theft, what if there's some sort of accident. There'd be enough plutonium for a pretty big bang.
There's a good reason most countries don't store all their plutonium in one place.
And you know, that really isn't a bad idea. :-)
"By 2010, you will carry a card that encodes your entire DNA sequence." So let me get this straight...instead of insurance companies having to look through hundreds of pages of medical records to screw you, they'll be able to do it with one handy card? Wow.
We are ABOVE a third-world city street. Directly below us, the SmarTruck is zooming along at 75mph. Most of the traffic (animals, bikes, cars) is pulled over, but the SmarTruck is being pursued by four cop cars, and a helicopter. All are firing at the SmarTruck.
We SWITCH views to INSIDE the SmarTruck, our perspective is that of the proverbial bug on the windshield looking into the car. We see the Driver, a US Army enlisted man. In the passenger seat, but edging almost into the driver's seat is a Scantily-Clad Bond-Type Woman. Blonde, sexy, etc.
Woman: They're firing at us! We're going to die!
Army guy: (laughes) That'll be the day...
We see the Army Guy manipulating controls on the dash. After each button is pressed, we switch views to SEE: An oil slick and tacks spilling out of the rear bumper, and the cop cars skidding out of control. The laser turret pops out, and shoots down the helicopter. An approaching squad of evil-looking soldiers is exposed to tear gas and grenade volleys. We SWITCH back to the car.
Woman: Oh John, you saved out lives!
Army Guy: I never go out without protection.
The Woman starts to remove her shirt as we fade out to a montage of scenes of the SmarTruck in action.
Narrator: Be an army of one. Join today.
(end of ad)
Please note, it was not my intention to give offense. This is a simple spoof of US Army ads and James Bond movies. If I have given offense, I sincerely apologize.
I never throw out an old machine. Even an old 386 with 4 megs of RAM and no hard drive can boot a floppy-disk Linux proxy server or router. If it's a 486, it can run the QNX demo, and you have a nice little internet kiosk. If the computer doesn't have a network card or modem, you ca always boot a single-disk linux and use it to run Seti@home or D.net.
Incidentally, my high school's voice-mail system runs on a 486SX 25 mhz machine, and runs perfectly.
aren't there?
I think quantining is a wise decision, just in terms of the benefit when compared to the cost. Say there's a one in a billion chance that there may be something nasty in a Mars rock. That may be way off, so call it one in 5 billion, or ten, or whatever floats your boat.
Anyway, when you consider the cost of sending a probe to Mars and returning a sample to Earth, the cost of quarantine is a comparative drop in the bucket. It't a bit more hassle and expense, granted, but not much compared to the entire project. Why not be on the safe side? Better to have a quarantine and not need it...
"Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was a decent enough short story, but the geometry was rather messy. The flatlanders had a small amount of depth, for Pete's sake!
I have a copy of Alice in Quantumland, and I can say without hyperbole that it should replace most high school freshman physics texts.
"Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there."
I agree with you, but how do we make sure that the government doesn't try to crack encrypted email without a warrant? You state that if you are in your home, you have an expectation of privacy, and so any searches require a warrant from a judge. You also say that if you encrypt an email, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The logical corrolary of this is that any attempted crack of the email should require a warrant.
This brings me right back to the point I made in my original post. There is no oversight ensuring that any attempts to crack encrypted email do receive a warrant. Even if you encrypt, and have an expectation of privacy, there's no guarantee that the person authorizing a crack of the email answers directly to an elected official, as a judge does (sort of).
What disturbs me most about Echelon is that there is no public accountability whatsoever, or even an admission to the public that Echelon exists.
Consider: In the United States, a warrant is needed for a phone wiretap, video surveillance, seaches, etc. These warrants have to be approved by a judge - that's public accountability. The judge is a public official appointed by elected officials - wiretaps and searches are authorized by a person only one step away from elected officials who are directly responsible to the people.
Echelon isn't like that. There are no warrants, we have no idea who approves an Echelon search, and there is no accountability to the people, because the people don't know which elected officials, if any, have oversight. If a governor appoints a judge who makes boneheaded decisions about warrants, the public can refuse to re-elect the governor. How does the public know who to NOT vote for if a mistake is made with Echelon? How does the public even know if a mistake has been made?
The worst part of all is that the US government refuses to even admit the dang thing exists, and without such an admission, there's nothing even the ACLU can do. How do you force the government to disclose something that "doesn't exist"?
Microsoft would be foolish not to take advantage of this chance to bascially force the entire UK onto windows. I mean, this is an entire country, for crying out loud - the British government practically begged for this to happen. And of course, this is a perfect demo for .NET
As for why Blair & Co went along with this, it was probably a combination of factors:
1.) They probably believed (correctly) that the majority of home computer owners use some version of Windows.
2.) Microsoft, realizing how many copies of windows they could "convince" British citizens to buy by having it by required for the web site, was probably willing to take massive losses on the site itself. They probably underbid everyone else in existance.
3.) The British government is a group of politicians, not webmasters. They probably believed everything M$ told them about how great IE is. I mean, when has a giant American corporation ever lied?
4.) Microsoft has massive manpower resources. They probably were able to get it done faster than any competitors.
As much as I dislike the fact that this is happening,I have to admit microsoft could not have done this scam better. Hat's off, guys.
We need standards and homogeniety on the Internet so that everyone's browsers, plugins etc can view more or less the same web page. The problem is that no one can every agree out of the goodness of their hearts to adopt a given standard. As a result, we have corporations imposing standards on the Internet as they see fit - but I think we'd be even worse off if they didn't, and I needed to have 12 browsers installed just to read Slashdot :-).
As for the effect of corporations on American politics, I agree their donations to politicians are making them corporate puppets, but what can be done? Any politician who tries to get true campaign reform (Bradley, McCain) can never is squashed by candidates with a lot more money with which to fund ad and smear campaigns. That extra cash comes from the corporations, of course.
The problem, in other words, is that as long as Americans continue to depend on high-powered ad ad campaigns instead of educating themselves about the issues, the candidate with the largest ad budget will always win, and the candidate with the largest ad budget will be the one with the most corporate backing.
In my opinion, even though these fiber lines are being run by for-profit companies, and are not free to access, it is still in the public interest that these lines be placed. If we ever want the Internet to be able to do things like internet-controlled manufacturing, surgery, or simply true high-quality, lag-free video, it's going to need a high-speed backbone. Fiber provides that, and will provide benefits ultimately to all of us.
Therefor, it is my opinion that the government should use its right of eminent domain to allow those lines to be laid along the railroad tracks without any sort of settlement being needed to private citizens. There is precedent for this - power and phone lines are sometimes laid using eminent domain.
I don't mind the 110v, but the lack of wireless standards is irritating as heck.
Spam! in my inbox all day
It's the best.
Thinking about bandwidth,
sending angry emails now.
Spam! Filtering it out,
keep it a-way from me!
The Internet is there
to send you Spam now.
The Spam is there to make you say "ow!"
Reading all my spam-mail, wondering if I'm a
junkie now. Spam!
With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic.
ICANN II uses 140 nanograms of antimatter for a thirty-day run, but if we want constant acceleration/deceleleration (and I assume we do, so it can reach the Oort Cloud in fifty years), won't it need a lot more antimatter? 140 times 12 gives you the amount of antimatter used in a year, 1680 nanograms. Multiply that by fifty, and you get 84000 nanograms. That still may not sound like a lot, but that's actually a respectable bang - look at the web page mentioned in this news post. Could someone check me, and see if I'm wrong?
ICANN II just uses 140 nanograms. I wouldn't want it dropped on my house, but it won't vaporize a continent.
That's a good point. Nice sig, by the way. :-)
The crackers might have used an alternative such as IP spoofing to gain access.
I was unable to find any kernal flaws in Win2k. However, the software bundled with Win2k, including WMP, is full of security flaws. I stand corrected.
Sourceforge really should provide more details about how security was breached. They probably are reasoning that if they give details, other people will do the same thing. However, anyone who's interested in this sort of nonsense probably already knows.
So, why not let the legitimate Sourceforge users have a bit more information about what happened? Perhaps some of the users might have an idea for a fix, or at least a way to protect their own work. Heck, we don't even know the nature of the breach, do we? Was data stolen? Corrupted? What? Inquiring minds have a legitimate need to know.