Most people are completely unprepared with respect to the amount of water needed.
That's because it depends on where you hike. Often in the UK the problem is not lack of water but rather too much, coming at you horizontally, as you stroll across the Pennines trying to avoid sinking up to your neck in a peat bog. I grew up in Yorkshire and it was amazing the number of times you'd hear about school trips, mainly form the south, having to be rescued from the tops of the Pennines because they had brought clothes more appropriate for a stroll along a beach.
So I never understood why all the info I'd heard about US hiking went on and on about taking enough water until I went on a truly spectacular day hike in Yosemite and realized that the heat and low humidity make a huge difference. The problem is filtering out the sensible advice from all the insanely over cautious "now you can't sue me" type of advice that you are bombarded with. Even the NPS is guilty of this - go to Carlsbad caverns and you'll be given a severe talking to and several warnings if you try to walk down - in the event it is a smooth, tarmac path a few km long presenting absolutely zero challenge other than low levels of illumination...but to hear them talk you'd have thought we'd signed up to scale Everest.
It's not "breaking into" a router since you've not bothered to change the password, so they just walked through the door you never closed behind them.
That's actually a good analogy. If a neighbour notices that you left your front door wide open with the keys in it and they lock the door and put the keys through the letter box can you sue them for it - of course not! (at least I hope not, although who can tell nowadays...)
Why update at all? There are still legacy systems using FORTRAN and probably COBOL as well. While there are C#, Java, PHP developers all over the place I imagine that finding a developer to maintain a legacy system is extremely hard. Of course that means there will not be many jobs out there for you but the pool of qualified applicants will be extremely small.
A UK citizen who used a similar backdoor (typed the default password) to get into a US computer
...AND downloaded private files. The last part means that McKinnon's actions were substantially different to Verizon's. While the crime was committed on UK-soil and should be prosecuted there to preserve our sovereignty (and if the US don't like that they should not allow their machines to connect to a British network) it was a crime under UK law. There is the potential for gaol time involved or at least compulsory mental treatment.
He said [slashdot.org] he disabled administrative access from outside.
Given the level of competence he has displayed I frankly suspect that he failed to do that correctly or, if he did, he probably ended up blocking access from outside the ISP subnet.
Finally, even disregarding all that, even if he was stupid and careless, they can't just access the router if he didn't explicitly give them the right in a contract somewhere.
He probably did - there is usually some clause somewhere where you agree to let them take action to prevent security breaches or some such. Failing that there is always a clause which lets them disconnect incorrectly configured hardware which poses a risk to the network which this arguably does. So would you advocate disconnecting the router and sending letter that customers have to reconfigure the default password before it will be allowed to reconnect? It's hard to see how anyone can complain about their actions. There is no private data stored on the router nor did they change any setting beyond the minimum needed to secure it. This is the sort of thing that a sysadmin does for you and that people usually say "thank you" for.
The higher education in USA is the best in the world. People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Lets just pause for a moment and think about that statement. Ask the people who have travelled from their home countries to the US to go to university whether they wanted to go to the US to get a quality higher education. Since the person is (a) in the US, (b) is going to university there and (c) has not left then a relatively large fraction might be inclined to answer that they did indeed want to go to the US to get an education...especially since they had to go through US immigration to get there.
I take it that you are a product of the system you are claiming is so good? If so there is excellent evidence that it teaches you how to be extremely ironic.
...the program brought money and prestige to the university.
Money, perhaps but prestige? Really? People think that Texas A&M is a prestigious university because it has a good sports team? Call me boring but when looking at universities in the UK I was far more interested in their academics and could not care less about how well their sports teams were doing or even whether they had one. I can understand that the sport facilities i.e. the ability to participate in, not just watch, sports are important criteria for some but if you want to have a good sports team nearby why not just go to a university near a professional team? It would be a stupid criteria for selecting a university but at least the university wouldn't be encouraging it!
Rather than report on the missy one why not report on one of the stories far more relevant to Slashdot (Open Source, discipline without thinking etc.) which is arguably funnier because the teacher is more deserving of the treatment and which is brilliant at the end in that it might have actually reminded the teacher what is really important.
The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
There are not many channels in which the Tevatron will be competitive with the LHC after the first data run assuming that we get the expected amount of data. The only advantages which the Tevatron has are a far better understood detectors and a larger luminosity sample but the first is lost with time (as ATLAS/CMS analyse and understand their detector data better) and the second is hard to significantly improve on given their already large data sample. The far higher energy of the LHC means that once the first data run is collected it will be very hard for the Tevatron to continue to compete with new physics. To give you an idea of the advantage a higher energy gives simply increasing the Tevatron energy from 1.8 TeV to 1.96 TeV (i.e. 10%) increased the number of top quark pairs produced by ~40%. The LHC energy is 350% that of the Tevatron so it is hard to see how they will be competitive with typical new, high energy phenomena after the first LHC run.
If you want misleading names how about Exabyte tapes? In terms of performance they actually stored about a billion times less than their name suggested. If Intel followed suit we'd have an Exahertz or Gigacore CPU range.
I will have to pay more attention to system requirements of games for a while.
If the matrix of CPU clock speed/costs/cores is too hard to figure out now how long will it be before you cannot easily tell whether your machine meets the system requirements for a game? Those requirements will, eventually, be written in terms which make it hard to understand whether your machine meets the specs or not.
Some PCI slots are still needed to "future-proof" your machine. For example if you get a machine now and next year find that most external HDs come with USB3 you may want some way to add a USB3 port to your machine.
...to their feigned surprise [apple.com] that the iPhone signal bar calculation was heavily weighted to make the iPhone look like a strong performer.
Why would they do this deliberately - it makes no sense. The iPhone has been getting grief as a phone because it kept having reception issues. Far better to calculate the bars properly and then have customers blame the mobile provider instead of the phone manufacturer....at least if you are that phone manufacturer!
Ah ok in that case there is a more serious problem: it was not funny.
Arguing over a trifle like SI units was the core of the joke.
If units are such a trifle then I take it you would have no problem if your employer paid you the same number of cents as they currently pay in dollars....after all surely you wouldn't argue over such a trifle as units would you? It would be a hilarious joke, no?
Each photon of light exerts 0.090718474 grams of pressure
A gram is a unit of mass, not force and certainly not pressure. In addition the SI unit of mass is the kilogram, not gram. The unit you are looking for is newtons per square metre....although you might have been forgiven for saying just newtons since the summary messed that up and called it a pressure instead of a force.
The figure of 0.0002 pounds of pressure per photon is off by a vast degree.
It's also off by a couple of dimensions. A pound is a unit of force not a unit of pressure. If they are going to use medieval units they could at least get it right and quote it in pounds per square cubit...or even newtons per square metre if they wanted 95% of the planet to understand what they were on about.
You would not be crushed. Your body largely consists of fluids, which are hardly compressible.
However, as you point out gases become toxic at high pressure and so the technique used for deep dives is a rigid suit to maintain a lower pressure environment around the diver. No such suit can survive to such depths hence you would be crushed by the suit collapsing around you and compressing your chest cavity.
My assumption in saying you will be crushed is because I assumed you would be using a pressurized suit because this will get you deeper than pressurized gases. Only an idiot would try to use SCUBA to dive to those depths because of the toxic effects of the gases under pressure.
If they can dive 7000 feet, then they could reach the BP wellhead.
Read this. The depth is measured relative to the cave mouth and the deepest cave involved a 46m dive at the bottom. You cannot dive 2000+m all the way in water because the pressure will be ~200 times atmosphere and you will be crushed. Since air is ~1,000 less dense a 2,000m heigh drop in air is about the same as being under 2m of water which is why cavers and potholers can make it to such depths but deep sea divers cannot.
He is a Nobel Laureate. If that does not help him out then the extra boost for being a cabinet secretary is probably not going to be much extra help.
True...but I hope there are some ethical safeguards in place between him and funding decisions for DoE grants. Having someone scientifically qualified in government is great, having them actively pursuing their research program while in an office that decides which research to fund is potentially dangerous. Presumably he can set budgets for the different research areas and influence those who adjudicate grants?
Just to be very clear - I am not in any way at all suggesting that he has acted inappropriately and there may well be adequate safeguards and procedures in place. However this is an unusual situation and if those safeguards are not there I can see it leading to trouble. In political office it is not enough to just behave correctly - you have to be able to show that you behaved correctly.
...now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it.
It's not just the complexity of modern devices though - it is also that manufacturers now go out of their way to prevent people fix, modifying, learning etc. from things they make in order to prevent you from either improving on it or doing things with it that they do not want you to. When manufacturers actively stop you from 'playing' with their devices the result is not only that it is harder to "fix" it but you also risk breaking the device....and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment. Hence rather than innovate creatively they just use the device as told.
Of course the above only applies to electronic devices but, as the newest and most capable tools we have these are the ones most likely to motivate creative and intelligent people to play with them because they can, in general, do so much more with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people are completely unprepared with respect to the amount of water needed.
That's because it depends on where you hike. Often in the UK the problem is not lack of water but rather too much, coming at you horizontally, as you stroll across the Pennines trying to avoid sinking up to your neck in a peat bog. I grew up in Yorkshire and it was amazing the number of times you'd hear about school trips, mainly form the south, having to be rescued from the tops of the Pennines because they had brought clothes more appropriate for a stroll along a beach.
So I never understood why all the info I'd heard about US hiking went on and on about taking enough water until I went on a truly spectacular day hike in Yosemite and realized that the heat and low humidity make a huge difference. The problem is filtering out the sensible advice from all the insanely over cautious "now you can't sue me" type of advice that you are bombarded with. Even the NPS is guilty of this - go to Carlsbad caverns and you'll be given a severe talking to and several warnings if you try to walk down - in the event it is a smooth, tarmac path a few km long presenting absolutely zero challenge other than low levels of illumination...but to hear them talk you'd have thought we'd signed up to scale Everest.
It's not "breaking into" a router since you've not bothered to change the password, so they just walked through the door you never closed behind them.
That's actually a good analogy. If a neighbour notices that you left your front door wide open with the keys in it and they lock the door and put the keys through the letter box can you sue them for it - of course not! (at least I hope not, although who can tell nowadays...)
Why update at all? There are still legacy systems using FORTRAN and probably COBOL as well. While there are C#, Java, PHP developers all over the place I imagine that finding a developer to maintain a legacy system is extremely hard. Of course that means there will not be many jobs out there for you but the pool of qualified applicants will be extremely small.
A UK citizen who used a similar backdoor (typed the default password) to get into a US computer
He said [slashdot.org] he disabled administrative access from outside.
Given the level of competence he has displayed I frankly suspect that he failed to do that correctly or, if he did, he probably ended up blocking access from outside the ISP subnet.
Finally, even disregarding all that, even if he was stupid and careless, they can't just access the router if he didn't explicitly give them the right in a contract somewhere.
He probably did - there is usually some clause somewhere where you agree to let them take action to prevent security breaches or some such. Failing that there is always a clause which lets them disconnect incorrectly configured hardware which poses a risk to the network which this arguably does. So would you advocate disconnecting the router and sending letter that customers have to reconfigure the default password before it will be allowed to reconnect? It's hard to see how anyone can complain about their actions. There is no private data stored on the router nor did they change any setting beyond the minimum needed to secure it. This is the sort of thing that a sysadmin does for you and that people usually say "thank you" for.
The higher education in USA is the best in the world. People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Lets just pause for a moment and think about that statement. Ask the people who have travelled from their home countries to the US to go to university whether they wanted to go to the US to get a quality higher education. Since the person is (a) in the US, (b) is going to university there and (c) has not left then a relatively large fraction might be inclined to answer that they did indeed want to go to the US to get an education...especially since they had to go through US immigration to get there.
I take it that you are a product of the system you are claiming is so good? If so there is excellent evidence that it teaches you how to be extremely ironic.
...the program brought money and prestige to the university.
Money, perhaps but prestige? Really? People think that Texas A&M is a prestigious university because it has a good sports team? Call me boring but when looking at universities in the UK I was far more interested in their academics and could not care less about how well their sports teams were doing or even whether they had one. I can understand that the sport facilities i.e. the ability to participate in, not just watch, sports are important criteria for some but if you want to have a good sports team nearby why not just go to a university near a professional team? It would be a stupid criteria for selecting a university but at least the university wouldn't be encouraging it!
Rather than report on the missy one why not report on one of the stories far more relevant to Slashdot (Open Source, discipline without thinking etc.) which is arguably funnier because the teacher is more deserving of the treatment and which is brilliant at the end in that it might have actually reminded the teacher what is really important.
The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
There are not many channels in which the Tevatron will be competitive with the LHC after the first data run assuming that we get the expected amount of data. The only advantages which the Tevatron has are a far better understood detectors and a larger luminosity sample but the first is lost with time (as ATLAS/CMS analyse and understand their detector data better) and the second is hard to significantly improve on given their already large data sample. The far higher energy of the LHC means that once the first data run is collected it will be very hard for the Tevatron to continue to compete with new physics. To give you an idea of the advantage a higher energy gives simply increasing the Tevatron energy from 1.8 TeV to 1.96 TeV (i.e. 10%) increased the number of top quark pairs produced by ~40%. The LHC energy is 350% that of the Tevatron so it is hard to see how they will be competitive with typical new, high energy phenomena after the first LHC run.
If you want misleading names how about Exabyte tapes? In terms of performance they actually stored about a billion times less than their name suggested. If Intel followed suit we'd have an Exahertz or Gigacore CPU range.
I will have to pay more attention to system requirements of games for a while.
If the matrix of CPU clock speed/costs/cores is too hard to figure out now how long will it be before you cannot easily tell whether your machine meets the system requirements for a game? Those requirements will, eventually, be written in terms which make it hard to understand whether your machine meets the specs or not.
Some PCI slots are still needed to "future-proof" your machine. For example if you get a machine now and next year find that most external HDs come with USB3 you may want some way to add a USB3 port to your machine.
...to their feigned surprise [apple.com] that the iPhone signal bar calculation was heavily weighted to make the iPhone look like a strong performer.
Why would they do this deliberately - it makes no sense. The iPhone has been getting grief as a phone because it kept having reception issues. Far better to calculate the bars properly and then have customers blame the mobile provider instead of the phone manufacturer....at least if you are that phone manufacturer!
The linked techcrunch article sure does have some pretty pictures
Exactly, which is rather ironic given that the article states:
Basically, they’re rooms where no waves (sound or electromagnetic) can reflect off of anything
Clearly EM waves with a wavelength ~475nm seem to have no trouble being reflected.
It was just a joke.
Ah ok in that case there is a more serious problem: it was not funny.
Arguing over a trifle like SI units was the core of the joke.
If units are such a trifle then I take it you would have no problem if your employer paid you the same number of cents as they currently pay in dollars....after all surely you wouldn't argue over such a trifle as units would you? It would be a hilarious joke, no?
Each photon of light exerts 0.090718474 grams of pressure
A gram is a unit of mass, not force and certainly not pressure. In addition the SI unit of mass is the kilogram, not gram. The unit you are looking for is newtons per square metre....although you might have been forgiven for saying just newtons since the summary messed that up and called it a pressure instead of a force.
The figure of 0.0002 pounds of pressure per photon is off by a vast degree.
It's also off by a couple of dimensions. A pound is a unit of force not a unit of pressure. If they are going to use medieval units they could at least get it right and quote it in pounds per square cubit...or even newtons per square metre if they wanted 95% of the planet to understand what they were on about.
In a cave? ;-)
The situation is hypothetical: if you attempted to dive to 2km using the current best-depth diving equipment you would be crushed, not poisoned.
You would not be crushed. Your body largely consists of fluids, which are hardly compressible.
However, as you point out gases become toxic at high pressure and so the technique used for deep dives is a rigid suit to maintain a lower pressure environment around the diver. No such suit can survive to such depths hence you would be crushed by the suit collapsing around you and compressing your chest cavity.
I assumed a rigid suit which gets you deeper than gases - so you have a choice of being crushed later or poisoned sooner.
My assumption in saying you will be crushed is because I assumed you would be using a pressurized suit because this will get you deeper than pressurized gases. Only an idiot would try to use SCUBA to dive to those depths because of the toxic effects of the gases under pressure.
If they can dive 7000 feet, then they could reach the BP wellhead.
Read this. The depth is measured relative to the cave mouth and the deepest cave involved a 46m dive at the bottom. You cannot dive 2000+m all the way in water because the pressure will be ~200 times atmosphere and you will be crushed. Since air is ~1,000 less dense a 2,000m heigh drop in air is about the same as being under 2m of water which is why cavers and potholers can make it to such depths but deep sea divers cannot.
He is a Nobel Laureate. If that does not help him out then the extra boost for being a cabinet secretary is probably not going to be much extra help.
True...but I hope there are some ethical safeguards in place between him and funding decisions for DoE grants. Having someone scientifically qualified in government is great, having them actively pursuing their research program while in an office that decides which research to fund is potentially dangerous. Presumably he can set budgets for the different research areas and influence those who adjudicate grants?
Just to be very clear - I am not in any way at all suggesting that he has acted inappropriately and there may well be adequate safeguards and procedures in place. However this is an unusual situation and if those safeguards are not there I can see it leading to trouble. In political office it is not enough to just behave correctly - you have to be able to show that you behaved correctly.
...now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it.
It's not just the complexity of modern devices though - it is also that manufacturers now go out of their way to prevent people fix, modifying, learning etc. from things they make in order to prevent you from either improving on it or doing things with it that they do not want you to. When manufacturers actively stop you from 'playing' with their devices the result is not only that it is harder to "fix" it but you also risk breaking the device....and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment. Hence rather than innovate creatively they just use the device as told.
Of course the above only applies to electronic devices but, as the newest and most capable tools we have these are the ones most likely to motivate creative and intelligent people to play with them because they can, in general, do so much more with them.