"You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge? Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true. Incredible. "
That is a good point, and you put it well. Many times security by obscurity is just fine, if the threat is low enough, and the obscurity is high enough.
But some cloud technologists insist data center failures are not cloud failures.
I have heard this before. Back when the phone company touted four or five nines reliability, and my office phone service died, I was always told that the reason for the failure meant it didn't counr against 5 nines. (For example, if you can call out, but no one can call in, it doesn't count, apparently. You can, after all, still reach 911.)
So, I always take claims of near perfection with a large grain of salt.
When I was in the Government, replacing local computing resources with centralized resources was always pushed as a cost-saving move, and always cost more money. Always.
Remember, there is no competition in the Government cloud. (Having one big mainframe somewhere was the 20th Century version of cloud computing.)
To make a ring, you need lots of small junk. Some Moons would be highly useful, as they are good targets to be hit by meteors or even stuff blasted off of other Moons, making lots of junk & debris.
Make enough debris, and you will in short order have a ring. If the Earth's Moon formed in a collision with a Mars-sized object, it is an excellent bet that the Earth had a nice ring system after that collision, but it obviously didn't last.
All of the large planets in this solar system have rings. They all have lots of Moons, and lots of debris. Whether they have always looked more or less the same as they do now is unknown.
Here's a way to think about it. Jupiter weighs about 1000 times the Earth. The Sun weighs about a million times the Earth. A billion Earths is thus about a 1000 Solar masses. If you put that inside the solar system, there wouldn't be a solar system, at least, not for long.
This diffuse ring is likely the source of the "two-faced" Iapetus - the leading side of Iapetus is blackened by the ring much like a car windshield can be blackened by running into insects. The material is presumably coming from Phoebe, another moon of Saturn, probably from impacts on that body.
I suspect that this is not the whole story, however. The particles in the ring are thought to be very small - but the dark splotches are hundreds of meters across. The ring may be braided (some of the others are), so that it can deliver a blast of particles, like a hose, on certain spots, but even that is not enough. Phoebe and the new ring are in retrograde orbits, thus collisions of this material with the prograde Iapetus will be "head-on" and fairly energetic, about 5 km / sec. So, it's not just that dark sticky stuff is plopping down onto the surface - the velocities are too high. It may be that a reaction with the surface, heating followed by the formation of something like black tar, is responsible for what we are seeing. If the current slow state of space exploration continues to hold it will probably be decades or more before we find out for sure.
I know dozens of people who own Macs, and I can't think of any who own PCs. (Some might have one in their basement or closet.) Or, do they mean at the office ?
Some of them run bootcamp or something like that from time to time, but this is so discrepant from the 85% that I suspect something with this survey.
What really worries me about cloud data storage is, can you delete it ?
I would assume not.
I am not being snarky, and I have no evidence, but I would assume anything written to the cloud will be available to anyone with any interest and persuasion to get it. Persuasion in this case include both court orders and anything available to a national intelligence service.
That has happened on Earth too. We call it Fallout.
I am not kidding. A surface nuclear burst in the megaton range will vaporize millions of tons of rock and soil. This material will cool, condense, and and fall as little pebbles or hail. In this case, it's radioactive, but otherwise the physics is the same.
The Sun has been very quiet recently, so this is not surprising. Now that the Sunspots are back and the Sun is getting more active, I would expect things to go back to normal.
Well, yes, that was an attempt at humor. A poor one, but it was all I had at the moment.
Although, I have been in several offices that had windows that were put behind barriers of some sort, so you couldn't see through them. It would be easy to forget that you had to paint those too.
Since 100 GHz is a 3 mm wave, and 200 GHz a 1.5 mm wave, they much have fairly small (100 micron) aluminum oxide particles in the paint.
Now, the paint will also stop any lower frequencies (longer wavelengths). However, these waves will go through any open holes in the paint that are much larger than a quarter of a wavelength or so - such as doors and windows. (Cell phones typically have wavelengths of about a meter to 10 cm - these low frequencies will also refract around household objects, while mm waves are much more line of sight.) So, I predict that in many cases the cell phone will work, while the "see through wall" technology will not. Of course, you'll have to make sure not to put what you are trying to hide in front of a window - or to get a very fine-meshed window screen.
They said it, but I have to wonder. Resonant generally means you have a dimension of order a wavelength. The paint particles are much smaller than the wavelength, so it sounds to me as if they are simply building a Faraday Cage, but with metallic paint, not aluminum foil or metal sheeting.
Note, if you are going to do this, you need to avoid holes the size of a wavelength / 4 or bigger - a few cm for WiFi (12 cm waves). If you like windows you should also put a fine wire mesh on them.
Why not enforce the existing laws instead of allowing politicians to pat themselves on the back for passing a popular law that is redundant?
You don't understand. That wouldn't allow the police to stop and search people because they thought they saw a phone in their hand. That power is never redundant.
You forgot to mention that Liddy Dole, as Secretary of Transportation, was largely responsible for the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. I remember her pushing the 21 year old drinking age, yes, in heavy collaboration with MADD, during the first Reagan administration, a period when this country seemed besotted with stupid ideas.
I think that a fusion propulsion system might be much easier to do than a fusion power system. (For one thing, in a propulsion system you want to eject waste products out the back,) That, alas, also implies that the money being but into ITER will not help us much with propulsion, which no one seems to be pushing except a small group at the U of Wisconsin.
Slashdot Mirror
"You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Incredible. "
(Woody Allen, Sleeper, 1973)
The GPL3 has terms that I believe literally every developer I have ever talked to is not happy about. This is why we went with BSD.
All my Dell boxes run Linux.
That is a good point, and you put it well. Many times security by obscurity is just fine, if the threat is low enough, and the obscurity is high enough.
But some cloud technologists insist data center failures are not cloud failures.
I have heard this before. Back when the phone company touted four or five nines reliability, and my office phone service died, I was always told that the reason for the failure meant it didn't counr against 5 nines. (For example, if you can call out, but no one can call in, it doesn't count, apparently. You can, after all, still reach 911.)
So, I always take claims of near perfection with a large grain of salt.
When I was in the Government, replacing local computing resources with centralized resources was always pushed as a cost-saving move, and always cost more money. Always.
Remember, there is no competition in the Government cloud. (Having one big mainframe somewhere was the 20th Century version of cloud computing.)
Not gonna happen.
The guillotine, remotely, conceivably possible. Disconnection of service, no.
Too bad that most Western law insists that the law apply equally to everyone.
This seems relevant somehow :
La loi, dans un grand souci d'égalité, interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France.
The President of the French Republic is not going to have his Internet service disconnected. I may not know much, but I know that.
To make a ring, you need lots of small junk. Some Moons would be highly useful, as they are good targets to be hit by meteors or even stuff blasted off of other Moons, making lots of junk & debris.
Make enough debris, and you will in short order have a ring. If the Earth's Moon formed in a collision with a Mars-sized object, it is an excellent bet that the Earth had a nice ring system after that collision, but it obviously didn't last.
All of the large planets in this solar system have rings. They all have lots of Moons, and lots of debris. Whether they have always looked more or less the same as they do now is unknown.
Here's a way to think about it. Jupiter weighs about 1000 times the Earth. The Sun weighs about a million times the Earth. A billion Earths is thus about a 1000 Solar masses. If you put that inside the solar system, there wouldn't be a solar system, at least, not for long.
The Moon, in it's orbit, never engages in spirals. In fact, its orbit (as seen from the Sun, or any outside point of reference) is always convex.
This diffuse ring is likely the source of the "two-faced" Iapetus - the leading side of Iapetus is blackened by the ring much like a car windshield can be blackened by running into insects. The material is presumably coming from Phoebe, another moon of Saturn, probably from impacts on that body.
I suspect that this is not the whole story, however. The particles in the ring are thought to be very small - but the dark splotches are hundreds of meters across. The ring may be braided (some of the others are), so that it can deliver a blast of particles, like a hose, on certain spots, but even that is not enough. Phoebe and the new ring are in retrograde orbits, thus collisions of this material with the prograde Iapetus will be "head-on" and fairly energetic, about 5 km / sec. So, it's not just that dark sticky stuff is plopping down onto the surface - the velocities are too high. It may be that a reaction with the surface, heating followed by the formation of something like black tar, is responsible for what we are seeing. If the current slow state of space exploration continues to hold it will probably be decades or more before we find out for sure.
I know dozens of people who own Macs, and I can't think of any who own PCs. (Some might have one in their basement or closet.) Or, do they mean at the office ?
Some of them run bootcamp or something like that from time to time, but this is so discrepant from the 85% that I suspect something with this survey.
What really worries me about cloud data storage is, can you delete it ?
I would assume not.
I am not being snarky, and I have no evidence, but I would assume anything written to the cloud will be available to anyone with any interest and persuasion to get it. Persuasion in this case include both court orders and anything available to a national intelligence service.
Same thing, just for different species.
That has happened on Earth too. We call it Fallout.
I am not kidding. A surface nuclear burst in the megaton range will vaporize millions of tons of rock and soil. This material will cool, condense, and and fall as
little pebbles or hail. In this case, it's radioactive, but otherwise the physics is the same.
The Sun has been very quiet recently, so this is not surprising. Now that the Sunspots are back and the Sun is getting more active, I would expect things to go back to normal.
Well, yes, that was an attempt at humor. A poor one, but it was all I had at the moment.
Although, I have been in several offices that had windows that were put behind barriers of some sort, so you couldn't see through them. It would be easy to forget that you had to paint those too.
It's not WiFi they are protecting against - its "see through walls" mm waves that this will be especially effective against.
From the article :
"I'm working on a material that can absorb a larger range of frequencies. We are capable of making a paint that can absorb over 200 gigahertz."
This will stop Through-the-Wall Surveillance Technology cold.
Since 100 GHz is a 3 mm wave, and 200 GHz a 1.5 mm wave, they much have fairly small (100 micron) aluminum oxide particles in the paint.
Now, the paint will also stop any lower frequencies (longer wavelengths). However, these waves will go through any open holes in the paint that are much larger than a quarter of a wavelength or so - such as doors and windows. (Cell phones typically have wavelengths of about a meter to 10 cm - these low frequencies will also refract around household objects, while mm waves are much more line of sight.) So, I predict that in many cases the cell phone will work, while the "see through wall" technology will not. Of course, you'll have to make sure not to put what you are trying to hide in front of a window - or to get a very fine-meshed window screen.
They said it, but I have to wonder. Resonant generally means you have a dimension of order a wavelength. The paint particles are much smaller than the wavelength, so it sounds to me as if they are simply building a Faraday Cage, but with metallic paint, not aluminum foil or metal sheeting.
Note, if you are going to do this, you need to avoid holes the size of a wavelength / 4 or bigger - a few cm for WiFi (12 cm waves). If you like windows you should also put a fine wire mesh on them.
Why not enforce the existing laws instead of allowing politicians to pat themselves on the back for passing a popular law that is redundant?
You don't understand. That wouldn't allow the police to stop and search people because they thought they saw a phone in their hand. That power is never redundant.
You forgot to mention that Liddy Dole, as Secretary of Transportation, was largely responsible for the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. I remember her pushing the 21 year old drinking age, yes, in heavy collaboration with MADD, during the first Reagan administration, a period when this country seemed besotted with stupid ideas.
I think that a fusion propulsion system might be much easier to do than a fusion power system. (For one thing, in a propulsion system you want to eject waste products out the back,) That, alas, also implies that the money being but into ITER will not help us much with propulsion, which no one seems to be pushing except a small group at the U of Wisconsin.
Anything that happened that recently, will happen again. Maybe we can nudge it along.