Linux/unix had the concept of su years before Microsoft thought of it; and it is a built in process to the operating system, not an afterthought.
Do you have a citation wrt your claims about rogue processes faking gksudo? "see:Ubuntu" is not enough. Windows systems can be attacked and compromised by code that injects into the windows kernel itself thru web browsers; I haven't seen any creditable evidence yet that system processes in linux can be compromised the same way. Userland, certainly, although exploits such as that are still very rare; but that doesn't compromise the system.
I do tech support for both windows and linux desktop systems, so I would be very interested in any information you can come up with.
Without automation, without robotic proxies, we won't be able to deal with the challenges we face exploring the solar system.
But without humans, we won't be exploring; just doing research from a distance.
Both are necessary. We need to develop both in tandem, rather than arguing about which is more important.
Not to gainsay you, but we should think of robots as extensions of tools we are already using.
We already use unmanned satellites to provide us with information that manned satellites would have been too expensive for the same capabilities. We use robotic explorers to investigate environments that are so hostile to us that it takes a couple more orders of magnitude of cost to send humans to.
Robots are extensions of our senses and capabilities, that is their best use, but extensions into environments that we will explore ourselves, some day.
All these arguments about manned vs unmanned miss the real point.
Not to mention the seldom understood but often talked about fact that we would have been relying on the Russians for transport to the ISS for at least half a decade under the Constellation program anyway.
When it comes to educating people, redundancy is important.
As in every other field, it's not the tools you have, it's your skill in using them.
What's really hilarious about that is it's something that every nerd should know instinctively. Tools are, after all, what we build our lives around...;-)
(Poking fun at myself is always fun. Out of all the things I own, the only thing that outmasses my science fiction book collection is my tool collection; right around 4500 kg right now, and they all have seen use.)
I guess I'm an old school geek, tho. My kitchen collection comes in a paltry third.
Plus, you don't get an oportunity to flash a rentacop every day;)
And for the rest of his post, Insightful.
Airport security is ridiculous. If some fundamentalist asshat out there wants to take out a plane, there innumerable ways to do so, many if not most of which are not detectable by any methodology that we can dream up that doesn't violate the right to privacy we have so completely that even the sheeple will stand on their hind legs and complain.
The best part is that this story plays nicely with one opinion about such institutions, popular here and there - that working for any sort of security or law enforcement agency appeals to people who need to compensate for their emotional or intellectual insecurity.
That is because they lack both imagination and guts. Oh, and so do the citizens who elect them. Pretty sad end game for the country that prides itself (not entirely accurately) on a "pioneer heritage". Ftah.
You'd also need to figure out how to dispose of your rock tailings in such a way that they don't produce a giant abrasive cloud around the asteroid you want to work on
Control your tailings output, and use solar collectors to fuse it into aggregate masses you can use for mass shielding. That's just one idea. You could also collect it and use it in rocket engines if it's fine enough, although that would likely require more energy input than it's worth.
In any case, any cloud that it formed around the asteroid you are working on would eventually be pushed away from the asteroid by the solar wind.
So to do this, you'd have to ship a really large amount of equipment to said asteroid - solar collectors, electricity distribution and storage systems, rock-digging/grinding equipment, microwave machines, electrolysis equipment, hydrogen/oxygen distribution and storage systems, etc, etc.
Or, you ship up the mining/refining equipment, and the machining shops to build the rest. We build these things on earth in automated factories, no reason why we can't adapt our techniques to do so in space. Difficult, massive investment, yes. Half baked fantasy, no.
Whether or not landing on asteroids is easy (I have my doubts - their motion is likely to be at least somewhat chaotic),
*snort* Where do you get "chaotic" from? Even NEA's that pass close enough to earth to have their orbits changed frequently are still trackable, and the changes in their orbits predictable enough to put any number of spacecraft within a few m/s delta V range of them. We are in the process - underfunded, but still doing it - of trying to improve our tracking of NEAs anyway.
Ah, can finally answer. For some reason haven't been able to reply to anything today, just hangs.
I'm aware of how slow radiative transfer is, I aced every physics class I took twenty years ago... The way around that isn't using a coolant transfer system - unless you are really in a hurry, that's how we have to do it here on earth - it's to shield a large mass from solar input, put a lot of radiative fins (or anything else with more surface area, there are lots of ways to do this) until it's cooled down, then use that as your heat sink and storage. Yeah, it takes time - but this is a project that would take decades to come to fruition anyway, the first time one does it...
If one has an entire asteroid to work with - assuming you can stabilize or stop it's spin, which is difficult but not impossible (takes time, agreed, but if you are mining the thing then you have the mass to use as propellant and the energy to accelerate it, and if it's a small one maybe a half a km in diameter that's not as much as one would think given the time for it to work) then you have your heat sink and storage.
Shielding an asteroid from solar input just requires reflective mylar - lots of it - and some mechanism to keep the mylar shield in place, but that's no different an engineering problem than constructing a solar sail is (easier, actually, as you don't have to compensate for acceleration greater than your solar input imparts, and you have a mass to anchor it to that has negligible gravity)
Anyway, that's just another engineering problem. Most of the specifics were worked out decades ago. We already know how to produce liquid hydrogen and oxygen on earth, and that's a lot damned harder to do, considering the surrounding environment has enormously higher material convection problems. As I pointed out elsewhere, mining asteroids doesn't require any real breakthrough technology, just scaling up what we already know how to do, and solving some other problems such as vacuum welding and adapting existing mining techniques to the environment (no need for astronauts, not for NEA mining, although a few people on site to fix problems the robots can't would be nice. I'd volunteer:-) )
You do make some good points. But the point I was trying to make is that it's actually easier to produce and store liquid hydrogen and oxygen in solar orbit than it is to do it on earth, given that the environment is working mostly for us and not against us.
You know, it's fun to talk about this stuff - don't get the chance to often nowadays, but I remember hashing all this out with classmates in college more than twenty years ago, and when we were doing it then we were relying on many articles and much research that had already been done. Four of us spent the better part of a semester doing this and got a good grade on the paper, too, in an engineering class.
What aggravates me is that our government programs - and many people who should have already thought about it- are just starting to think about this in a serious manner, and the media treats like it's new, and it just plain isn't. Hell, Jerry Pournelle did a good treatment of this in his book A Step Farther Out, and that was many decades ago. Despite the opinions of many people on this website, he is not stupid.
I was also very disappointed in the responses to this article. I guess there just aren't that many people frequenting slashdot anymore who have any experience in thinking this problem out.
News For Nerds. What's more nerdy than mining asteroids? (Ipads, online porn, mythbusters, etc, bleh...)
Not saying I know more than anyone else, but I have been thinking about this for more than a quarter of a century. My life took a different path, but I still think about this a lot, and read a lot, and dream a lot.
I think it's a damned shame that our country (or species, the US is hardly alone) is so busy contemplating it's na
Tools, guns, and garden space / greenhouses. Passive solar for heating the house... (electricity is really a luxury when you're talking about basic survival). Ammunition and the means to make your own. Etc.
Cooling things in space is easy. Shield your storage from the sun, put radiator panels on it, and eventually it will get down to a temperature somewhat close to the microwave background of the universe, about 4K, depending on what other radiative sources you can't shield it from. The more radiative surface area you have, the faster it'll cool down.
We could do it with current technology. It's just rockets and mining equipment on a massive scale.
Sure, there are problems to be worked out (I can think of a few dozen right off the top of my head, but these are elsewhere on the web and it'd be a waste of time to list them here) but it's not like we would have to invent some entirely new technology just to get a start at it.
Sigh.
Sooner or later we have to start thinking about this seriously. The resources on this planet are not infinite* and if we continue to expand in numbers and ambition as a species we have to start utilizing what's out there.
* We could strip mine the entire surface of the planet, that might get us another half a thousand years or maybe more, but where would we put the people and the farms?
I'm starting to wonder if intelligent species often don't get past the technology stage because, as put so wonderfully in a movie I once saw, "A person is smart. People [in herds] are stupid, panicky, irrational animals."
Come on now, these concepts have been bandied about for literally decades. I read about this when I was a kid more than three decades ago.
The mineral wealth contained in the asteroids of the solar system is literally incalculable. It's been estimated that one mid-size near earth asteroid (say a few km in diameter) of the proper composition probably contains enough metals to supply the world's demand for decades. It's all out there for the taking, along with plenty of free energy, and it's not at the bottom of steep gravity wells.
Yeah, it is rather difficult to get to them, and mining even one would require a massive investment in time and resources and take decades to accomplish. But the potential returns/benefit of doing so are enormous.
I know that Jerry Pournelle is not liked here, in general - those of you around in the earlier part of this last decade understand why - but he said it well, once: "We could turn Earth into a park, and have all the metals and energy we need, and more."
If we really want to move into space and establish a permanent presence there, we should start by learning how to use the resources already there.
Sigh.
Oh, and water makes an excellent fuel. One can either split it using solar energy into hydrogen and oxygen, or use it as reaction mass by running it thru a nuclear reactor. Also water - even water out there in comets and asteroids - is likely to contain deuterium and tritium, as well; if we ever manage to figure out fusion (we will eventually, I believe)...
Lets see here, thanks to the DMCA we now have judges wasting their time on victimless crimes, record companies still screwing artists and a rush of high-tech jobs out of the US.
Yeah, some things haven't changed much in the last few decades, have they.
The DMCA wasn't the cause of all that, just another horrific side effect, one that made things even worse.
Yes, a human in orbit could certainly see that something was different about that section of swamp. The angle subtended by the dam, and the difference between the flooded area and it's surroundings, would be fairly easy to discern by unaided vision alone.
However it's not likely that it would be spotted at this point in time, as the only orbital flights that would pass over the area are likely to be the ISS (not sure about this), possibly MIR during it's time in orbit, and perhaps some orbital Russian and shuttle flights. It's not very likely that anyone on those flights would have the time to be doing enough earth-gazing to have spotted something like this.
Photographic imaging from orbit lets people on the ground, with much more time (also training) to look for things like this. This is also a somewhat transient phenomenon - not likely that this complex of beaver dams was there even ten years ago - and that makes it even harder to spot without imaging.
What would be a more interesting comparison would be how much water is retained by the dams, beaver made or no. I have the feeling humans would win that one, given that we deliberately build our dams in order to retain as much water as possible. But given that the beavers are doing this with mud, sticks and rocks with their teeth and paws, instead of concrete, steel, and bulldozers, from a strict engineering standpoint given their primitive (and certainly not as organized or directed) efforts, I think that what they have done is still pretty dam-ed impressive.
Not necessarily. The vast majority of life out there utilizes their environment in that respect, but doesn't modify it (their local environment might change as a result of their activity, that isn't the same thing as deliberately modifying it.)
Furthermore, just because the human species has been the first on this planet to do so on a very large scale, does not mean that it might not have happened eventually with other species, especially given the huge explosion in evolution of intelligence over the last few millions of years in many species. Including beavers;-)
(This article made me wonder what a lot of wet lowlands might have looked like from space back when beavers were a lot larger and more numerous. I'd be willing to bet that beaver dam complexes such as this were much more common. Sadly, we'll probably never know. )
Slashdot Mirror
Linux/unix had the concept of su years before Microsoft thought of it; and it is a built in process to the operating system, not an afterthought.
Do you have a citation wrt your claims about rogue processes faking gksudo? "see:Ubuntu" is not enough. Windows systems can be attacked and compromised by code that injects into the windows kernel itself thru web browsers; I haven't seen any creditable evidence yet that system processes in linux can be compromised the same way. Userland, certainly, although exploits such as that are still very rare; but that doesn't compromise the system.
I do tech support for both windows and linux desktop systems, so I would be very interested in any information you can come up with.
SB
Well said, Doc.
Without automation, without robotic proxies, we won't be able to deal with the challenges we face exploring the solar system.
But without humans, we won't be exploring; just doing research from a distance.
Both are necessary. We need to develop both in tandem, rather than arguing about which is more important.
Not to gainsay you, but we should think of robots as extensions of tools we are already using.
We already use unmanned satellites to provide us with information that manned satellites would have been too expensive for the same capabilities. We use robotic explorers to investigate environments that are so hostile to us that it takes a couple more orders of magnitude of cost to send humans to.
Robots are extensions of our senses and capabilities, that is their best use, but extensions into environments that we will explore ourselves, some day.
All these arguments about manned vs unmanned miss the real point.
SB
Not to mention the seldom understood but often talked about fact that we would have been relying on the Russians for transport to the ISS for at least half a decade under the Constellation program anyway.
When it comes to educating people, redundancy is important.
SB
Citation, please ;-)
SB
As in every other field, it's not the tools you have, it's your skill in using them.
What's really hilarious about that is it's something that every nerd should know instinctively. Tools are, after all, what we build our lives around... ;-)
(Poking fun at myself is always fun. Out of all the things I own, the only thing that outmasses my science fiction book collection is my tool collection; right around 4500 kg right now, and they all have seen use.)
I guess I'm an old school geek, tho. My kitchen collection comes in a paltry third.
OB: "an itsy bitsy tiny weeny yellow polka dotted weeny"....
SB
Homemade bread?
Full cavity search.
SB
Eh, for this, at least, a funny:
Plus, you don't get an oportunity to flash a rentacop every day ;)
And for the rest of his post, Insightful.
Airport security is ridiculous. If some fundamentalist asshat out there wants to take out a plane, there innumerable ways to do so, many if not most of which are not detectable by any methodology that we can dream up that doesn't violate the right to privacy we have so completely that even the sheeple will stand on their hind legs and complain.
Mod this post redundant, because it is...
SB
The best part is that this story plays nicely with one opinion about such institutions, popular here and there - that working for any sort of security or law enforcement agency appeals to people who need to compensate for their emotional or intellectual insecurity.
Addendum.
SB
With a vacuum straw, silly.
SB
That is because they lack both imagination and guts. Oh, and so do the citizens who elect them. Pretty sad end game for the country that prides itself (not entirely accurately) on a "pioneer heritage". Ftah.
SB
Just another reason why the chinese will beat us to it. There's never such a thing as too many chinese restaurants ;=)
(Good thing, too, too many of them in the US nowadays are following our business models; crap food, fast, cheap, filling...)
SB
You'd also need to figure out how to dispose of your rock tailings in such a way that they don't produce a giant abrasive cloud around the asteroid you want to work on
Control your tailings output, and use solar collectors to fuse it into aggregate masses you can use for mass shielding. That's just one idea. You could also collect it and use it in rocket engines if it's fine enough, although that would likely require more energy input than it's worth.
In any case, any cloud that it formed around the asteroid you are working on would eventually be pushed away from the asteroid by the solar wind.
So to do this, you'd have to ship a really large amount of equipment to said asteroid - solar collectors, electricity distribution and storage systems, rock-digging/grinding equipment, microwave machines, electrolysis equipment, hydrogen/oxygen distribution and storage systems, etc, etc.
Or, you ship up the mining/refining equipment, and the machining shops to build the rest. We build these things on earth in automated factories, no reason why we can't adapt our techniques to do so in space. Difficult, massive investment, yes. Half baked fantasy, no.
Whether or not landing on asteroids is easy (I have my doubts - their motion is likely to be at least somewhat chaotic),
*snort* Where do you get "chaotic" from? Even NEA's that pass close enough to earth to have their orbits changed frequently are still trackable, and the changes in their orbits predictable enough to put any number of spacecraft within a few m/s delta V range of them. We are in the process - underfunded, but still doing it - of trying to improve our tracking of NEAs anyway.
SB
Ah, can finally answer. For some reason haven't been able to reply to anything today, just hangs.
I'm aware of how slow radiative transfer is, I aced every physics class I took twenty years ago... The way around that isn't using a coolant transfer system - unless you are really in a hurry, that's how we have to do it here on earth - it's to shield a large mass from solar input, put a lot of radiative fins (or anything else with more surface area, there are lots of ways to do this) until it's cooled down, then use that as your heat sink and storage. Yeah, it takes time - but this is a project that would take decades to come to fruition anyway, the first time one does it...
If one has an entire asteroid to work with - assuming you can stabilize or stop it's spin, which is difficult but not impossible (takes time, agreed, but if you are mining the thing then you have the mass to use as propellant and the energy to accelerate it, and if it's a small one maybe a half a km in diameter that's not as much as one would think given the time for it to work) then you have your heat sink and storage.
Shielding an asteroid from solar input just requires reflective mylar - lots of it - and some mechanism to keep the mylar shield in place, but that's no different an engineering problem than constructing a solar sail is (easier, actually, as you don't have to compensate for acceleration greater than your solar input imparts, and you have a mass to anchor it to that has negligible gravity)
Anyway, that's just another engineering problem. Most of the specifics were worked out decades ago. We already know how to produce liquid hydrogen and oxygen on earth, and that's a lot damned harder to do, considering the surrounding environment has enormously higher material convection problems. As I pointed out elsewhere, mining asteroids doesn't require any real breakthrough technology, just scaling up what we already know how to do, and solving some other problems such as vacuum welding and adapting existing mining techniques to the environment (no need for astronauts, not for NEA mining, although a few people on site to fix problems the robots can't would be nice. I'd volunteer :-) )
You do make some good points. But the point I was trying to make is that it's actually easier to produce and store liquid hydrogen and oxygen in solar orbit than it is to do it on earth, given that the environment is working mostly for us and not against us.
You know, it's fun to talk about this stuff - don't get the chance to often nowadays, but I remember hashing all this out with classmates in college more than twenty years ago, and when we were doing it then we were relying on many articles and much research that had already been done. Four of us spent the better part of a semester doing this and got a good grade on the paper, too, in an engineering class.
What aggravates me is that our government programs - and many people who should have already thought about it- are just starting to think about this in a serious manner, and the media treats like it's new, and it just plain isn't. Hell, Jerry Pournelle did a good treatment of this in his book A Step Farther Out, and that was many decades ago. Despite the opinions of many people on this website, he is not stupid.
I was also very disappointed in the responses to this article. I guess there just aren't that many people frequenting slashdot anymore who have any experience in thinking this problem out.
News For Nerds. What's more nerdy than mining asteroids? (Ipads, online porn, mythbusters, etc, bleh...)
Not saying I know more than anyone else, but I have been thinking about this for more than a quarter of a century. My life took a different path, but I still think about this a lot, and read a lot, and dream a lot.
I think it's a damned shame that our country (or species, the US is hardly alone) is so busy contemplating it's na
canned food and ammunition.
Tools, guns, and garden space / greenhouses. Passive solar for heating the house... (electricity is really a luxury when you're talking about basic survival). Ammunition and the means to make your own. Etc.
SB
Cooling things in space is easy. Shield your storage from the sun, put radiator panels on it, and eventually it will get down to a temperature somewhat close to the microwave background of the universe, about 4K, depending on what other radiative sources you can't shield it from. The more radiative surface area you have, the faster it'll cool down.
Vacuum is an excellent insulator.
SB
Half baked?
We could do it with current technology. It's just rockets and mining equipment on a massive scale.
Sure, there are problems to be worked out (I can think of a few dozen right off the top of my head, but these are elsewhere on the web and it'd be a waste of time to list them here) but it's not like we would have to invent some entirely new technology just to get a start at it.
Sigh.
Sooner or later we have to start thinking about this seriously. The resources on this planet are not infinite* and if we continue to expand in numbers and ambition as a species we have to start utilizing what's out there.
* We could strip mine the entire surface of the planet, that might get us another half a thousand years or maybe more, but where would we put the people and the farms?
I'm starting to wonder if intelligent species often don't get past the technology stage because, as put so wonderfully in a movie I once saw, "A person is smart. People [in herds] are stupid, panicky, irrational animals."
SB
Come on now, these concepts have been bandied about for literally decades. I read about this when I was a kid more than three decades ago.
The mineral wealth contained in the asteroids of the solar system is literally incalculable. It's been estimated that one mid-size near earth asteroid (say a few km in diameter) of the proper composition probably contains enough metals to supply the world's demand for decades. It's all out there for the taking, along with plenty of free energy, and it's not at the bottom of steep gravity wells.
Yeah, it is rather difficult to get to them, and mining even one would require a massive investment in time and resources and take decades to accomplish. But the potential returns/benefit of doing so are enormous.
I know that Jerry Pournelle is not liked here, in general - those of you around in the earlier part of this last decade understand why - but he said it well, once: "We could turn Earth into a park, and have all the metals and energy we need, and more."
If we really want to move into space and establish a permanent presence there, we should start by learning how to use the resources already there.
Sigh.
Oh, and water makes an excellent fuel. One can either split it using solar energy into hydrogen and oxygen, or use it as reaction mass by running it thru a nuclear reactor. Also water - even water out there in comets and asteroids - is likely to contain deuterium and tritium, as well; if we ever manage to figure out fusion (we will eventually, I believe)...
SB
Lets see here, thanks to the DMCA we now have judges wasting their time on victimless crimes, record companies still screwing artists and a rush of high-tech jobs out of the US.
Yeah, some things haven't changed much in the last few decades, have they.
The DMCA wasn't the cause of all that, just another horrific side effect, one that made things even worse.
SB
There's also a large voting contingent from the states between East and West, as well.
Not saying that the midwest has any more common rationality in politics than either end, probably less, actually...
SB
(I'm a taxpayer in the US)
Perhaps we should time our revolutions to coincide... might be more effective that way ;-))
(nonviolent as well, but well aware of the fact that eventually it will become so)
SB
Thanks! Saved me some time...
Dam, that area has better satellite imaging resolution than the town I live in; can barely pick out individual trees in our local imaging. Figures.
SB
Who lives downstream of this wonder? Probably more beavers...
(and a few fishermen, hunters, disgruntled international terrorists and others who have excellent reasons to put up with the mosquito population...)
SB
Yes, a human in orbit could certainly see that something was different about that section of swamp. The angle subtended by the dam, and the difference between the flooded area and it's surroundings, would be fairly easy to discern by unaided vision alone.
However it's not likely that it would be spotted at this point in time, as the only orbital flights that would pass over the area are likely to be the ISS (not sure about this), possibly MIR during it's time in orbit, and perhaps some orbital Russian and shuttle flights. It's not very likely that anyone on those flights would have the time to be doing enough earth-gazing to have spotted something like this.
Photographic imaging from orbit lets people on the ground, with much more time (also training) to look for things like this. This is also a somewhat transient phenomenon - not likely that this complex of beaver dams was there even ten years ago - and that makes it even harder to spot without imaging.
Did that answer your question? ;-)
SB
What would be a more interesting comparison would be how much water is retained by the dams, beaver made or no. I have the feeling humans would win that one, given that we deliberately build our dams in order to retain as much water as possible. But given that the beavers are doing this with mud, sticks and rocks with their teeth and paws, instead of concrete, steel, and bulldozers, from a strict engineering standpoint given their primitive (and certainly not as organized or directed) efforts, I think that what they have done is still pretty dam-ed impressive.
SB
You have to in order to reproduce and eat.
Not necessarily. The vast majority of life out there utilizes their environment in that respect, but doesn't modify it (their local environment might change as a result of their activity, that isn't the same thing as deliberately modifying it.)
Furthermore, just because the human species has been the first on this planet to do so on a very large scale, does not mean that it might not have happened eventually with other species, especially given the huge explosion in evolution of intelligence over the last few millions of years in many species. Including beavers ;-)
(This article made me wonder what a lot of wet lowlands might have looked like from space back when beavers were a lot larger and more numerous. I'd be willing to bet that beaver dam complexes such as this were much more common. Sadly, we'll probably never know. )
SB