ICE needs be abolished and turned back into its 2 constituent agencies. The combination has proven to be dangerous to the health of the Internet and the public.
My understanding is that this is purely about ease of use of getting through firewalls, NATs and PATs. Everything passes HTTP, and there is no other transport protocol (not even UDP over port 80) for which that is true.
XanaduSpace's entire concept seems to be predicated on the assumption that all linked content is immediately available and immutable
In my understanding (which could be wrong) the assumption is that all nked content is immediately available and mutable, which in some ways could be worse. (In other words, if you change something you wrote, he thinks that all references to it should change too.
As an option, that might be cool, but as a feature it sounds like a bug.
Sounds like he is an "idea" guy (he is not a programmer). "Oh, I have a great idea. Now the easy part; implementing it!" Apparently Ted Nelson was considered the King of Vaporware back in 1995... just to give you some background.
And I believe that it is all still vaporware today.
His idea is that you don't link references, you link text itself. So, if you wrote a document referencing a document I wrote, and I changed mine, yours would automatically change too. Sounded really cool back in the '80's.
We are retiring our fleet and will be hitching rides on Russian shuttles over the next 4 years. While I do think private and commercial space flight will play a major role in future space flight, I think NASA Is a bit optimistic in thinking that we'll have private rockets in place by 2015. I suspect we'll still be riding on Russian shuttles well past 2015.
First, they're not shuttles, they are Soyuz's (one use re-entry vehicles).
Second, there is Space X and its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Unless things blow up (literally), I think that US astronauts will be flying on SpaceX iron by ~ 2015.
I was around at the time. Von Braun and all of the original space enthusiasts (German and American) were retired. Most of the Apollo middle tier of engineers and scientists were let go. (I remember PhD's pumping gas in Cocoa Beach near the Cape in '73 or '74.) Nerva was canceled. Manned Venus flyby was canceled. It is true that LBJ was not a space enthusiast, and the Democratic Congress certainly went along with all of this, and even pushed for some of it, but all of this happened on Nixon's watch.
Note that while the Shuttle was built, the Space Transportation System that the Shuttle was intended for was not, leaving the shuttle a glorified truck and a technological dead end.
A little digging, and I found that one of these people was Nicholas Alkemade (from 18,000 feet) and another was Alan Magee (from 22,000 feet). While Alkemade hit deep woods, Alan Magee actually hit the glass roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station, which broke his fall.
There were a few people who left their planes at high altitude (10,000 feet or higher) in World War II and survived without a chute. If I remember correctly, they all landed in deep forests with thick underbrush and deep snow, each of which slowed them, and they also had major injuries, and so needed prompt medical attention. And, it was very rare.
So, your odds are probably something like 1:1000 to 1:10,000 or so over land; not good, but also not zero.
Also, to fall from 30,000 to 10,000 feet (10 km to 3 km) would take about 40-60 seconds (drag is low up there). You are not going to either asphyxiate or freeze to death in that short a time.
Apollo 8 was rushed and sent to the Moon (the first manned test of a Saturn V went to lunar orbit, not staying in Earth orbit), specifically to beat a manned Soviet lunar flyby planned with the Zond spacecraft. (I.e., the Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 missions were swapped; the reasons for this were kept secret at the time.) As we beat both Zond and the Soviet lunar landing program (Zond was more or less flight ready, with 2 unmanned test flights, the landing program, not so much) before the Soviets actually flew any people to or around the Moon, the Soviets were able to pretend that they didn't have a manned lunar program, which made it possible for the Nixon administration to kneecap manned space flight a few years later. NASA and the US have never recovered from that, and the USA has (to be blunt) never really done much with manned space flight since.
Arguably, if Apollo 8 had stayed in Earth orbit, Alexei Leonov would have commanded the first mission to circle the Moon, the "space race" would have extended to lunar operations, and humanity would probably have multiple bases on Mars at this moment.
So ? You can already assume that I am on the planet. If I increase the search area to 200 msec, you won't be able to be much more precise than that. I don't see how a geolocation to "Earth" is doing you any good.
Note that it is not enough that there is a "landmark" router physically near you, it also has to be near you from a network topology sense. It doesn't help geolocation much if the museum next door has a landmark router if the peering point between your networks is 1000 km away.
Now, if you are in a city on a major ISP, this is likely not to be problem. If, on the other hand, you are out in the country, then there is unlikely to be a landmark router near, and if there is one, it is quite possibly on a different network, with a peering point many miles away. For example, many university extension campuses connect back to the main University NREN, and all Internet traffic then goes through one or two "GigaPOPs" in the state. So, even if there is a university extension next door, it is likely to help with geolocation much.
So, I predict that this will not be good to anything like 1 km accuracy away from major cities.
Well, if you are going to introduce an arbitrary delay to foil geolocation, it should certainly be a random delay.
However, I think that even a constant delay (or a tunnel) would still work pretty well.
Suppose I am using a tunnel, and the tunnel delay is 20 msec, and the tunnel end point is in Boston. Now, they can certainly find out that the lowest latency is for a probe from Boston, and so Boston is "closer" to me than LA or Seattle or Washington. But, they cannot be sure that this means that
- I am in Boston and injecting 20 msec of constant delay or - I am somewhere else (say in upper Vermont) and my network routing goes through Boston (with or without injecting an arbitrary delay), and it just happens that there is not a "landmark" router near me. - I am 20 msec from Boston and using a tunnel.
Given that 20 msec (one way) spans the continent, and that a 40 msec round trip delay is not perceptible in VOIP, it seems that this could hide you pretty effectively.
Also, note that it would be pretty trivial to vary the latency in a software tunnel.
Seems like this would be easy to counteract (although at the kernel hack level). All you would have to do is introduce a 30-50 msec time variable delay into all new packet sends (i.e., ICMP responses, first packet of a TCP session, etc.).
In fact, if you encrypt everything, you may get these sorts of delays "for free."
Also, this will not work well if you are using encrypted tunnels or VPNs to access the web. Your delay then is (tunnel delay) + (tunnel end point to attacker delay) + (encryption delays), so you seem a good deal further away than you really are.
When I hear of Interpol, I think of Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and how the organization they ran avoided hunting Nazi war criminals for years because those were "political" crimes.
There was probably some of that, but I know that they were specifically worried about flash blindness, which makes it impossible to function (except blindly) for a while. Retinal scaring (from the UV or the visible) I believe is only a problem if you are looking directly at the fireball, whereas I have heard that you can get flash blindness from a nuke even facing away with your eyes closed and your arm over your eyes. See, e.g., http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects13.shtml for a little more.
The main consequence of the Chernobyl accident is thyroid cancer in children, some of whom were not yet born at the time of the accident. Following the vapour explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor, radioactive iodine was released and spread in the surrounding area. Despite measures taken, children in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, were exposed to radiation in the weeks following the accident , particularly by consuming milk from pastured cows and leafy vegetables that had been contaminated with radioactive iodine.
Radioactive Iodine has a half-life of 8 days, so it is the immediate exposure that is the problem here. Unfortunately, the Japanese government took 3 days after the Iodine exposure was publicly announced (and, presumably, more days after they knew about it), to ban the eating of contaminated spinach (a "leafy vegetable") and dairy milk. Worse, when the iodine contamination was first made public, Mr. Yukio Edano, Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, urge calm, saying that the contaminated food posed "no immediate threat." What weasel words - these cancers will take months to years to develop, so there is indeed no "immediate" threat. He should have urged people not to drink milk or vegetables from the affected area, instead.
Here is some more information about the risk from Iodine-131 at Fukushima. This is a problem particularly for children as their bodies take up the Iodine - similar doses don't cause problems for mature adults.
The Venter approach is something akin to taking a library, putting the whole thing through a paper shredder, and trying to figure out how many languages there were in the library from a statistical analysis of the groupings of the letters on each piece of paper. It is marvelous, but it has its limits.
If there were true aliens among us (microscopic organisms that did not use DNA for genetics), the Venter approach would not see them. I do not know of a good way to luck for such creatures, but I wish someone would figure one out, and apply it to something like Venter's samples.
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ICE needs be abolished and turned back into its 2 constituent agencies. The combination has proven to be dangerous to the health of the Internet and the public.
Why has BlueRay failed to catch on ? DRM.
It was not made to satisfy needs and desires of the customer, it was made to satisfy the desires of content-owning corporations.
Longer than that. Was it the Book of Common Prayer that refers to "Dark Satanic Mills?"
That was William Blake, in the poem "And did those feet in ancient time," (also known as "Jerusalem").
There is some argument that the "dark, satanic mills" he refers to were churches, not factories.
My understanding is that this is purely about ease of use of getting through firewalls, NATs and PATs. Everything passes HTTP, and there is no other transport protocol (not even UDP over port 80) for which that is true.
XanaduSpace's entire concept seems to be predicated on the assumption that all linked content is immediately available and immutable
In my understanding (which could be wrong) the assumption is that all nked content is immediately available and mutable, which in some ways could be worse. (In other words, if you change something you wrote, he thinks that all references to it should change too.
As an option, that might be cool, but as a feature it sounds like a bug.
Sounds like he is an "idea" guy (he is not a programmer). "Oh, I have a great idea. Now the easy part; implementing it!" Apparently Ted Nelson was considered the King of Vaporware back in 1995... just to give you some background.
And I believe that it is all still vaporware today.
His idea is that you don't link references, you link text itself. So, if you wrote a document referencing a document I wrote, and I changed mine, yours would automatically change too. Sounded really cool back in the '80's.
The press release is a little breathless. Astronomers have been using CCDs for 20 years now.
We are retiring our fleet and will be hitching rides on Russian shuttles over the next 4 years. While I do think private and commercial space flight will play a major role in future space flight, I think NASA Is a bit optimistic in thinking that we'll have private rockets in place by 2015. I suspect we'll still be riding on Russian shuttles well past 2015.
First, they're not shuttles, they are Soyuz's (one use re-entry vehicles).
Second, there is Space X and its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Unless things blow up (literally), I think that US astronauts will be flying on SpaceX iron by ~ 2015.
I was around at the time. Von Braun and all of the original space enthusiasts (German and American) were retired. Most of the Apollo middle tier of engineers and scientists were let go. (I remember PhD's pumping gas in Cocoa Beach near the Cape in '73 or '74.) Nerva was canceled. Manned Venus flyby was canceled. It is true that LBJ was not a space enthusiast, and the Democratic Congress certainly went along with all of this, and even pushed for some of it, but all of this happened on Nixon's watch.
Note that while the Shuttle was built, the Space Transportation System that the Shuttle was intended for was not, leaving the shuttle a glorified truck and a technological dead end.
And there was also Ivan Chisov, from 22,000 into a snowy ravine. He was flying again in 3 months.
A little digging, and I found that one of these people was Nicholas Alkemade (from 18,000 feet) and another was Alan Magee (from 22,000 feet). While Alkemade hit deep woods, Alan Magee actually hit the glass roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station, which broke his fall.
Amazingly, neither was that critically injured.
There were a few people who left their planes at high altitude (10,000 feet or higher) in World War II and survived without a chute. If I remember correctly, they all landed in deep forests with thick underbrush and deep snow, each of which slowed them, and they also had major injuries, and so needed prompt medical attention. And, it was very rare.
So, your odds are probably something like 1:1000 to 1:10,000 or so over land; not good, but also not zero.
Also, to fall from 30,000 to 10,000 feet (10 km to 3 km) would take about 40-60 seconds (drag is low up there). You are not going to either asphyxiate or freeze to death in that short a time.
Apollo 8 was rushed and sent to the Moon (the first manned test of a Saturn V went to lunar orbit, not staying in Earth orbit), specifically to beat a manned Soviet lunar flyby planned with the Zond spacecraft. (I.e., the Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 missions were swapped; the reasons for this were kept secret at the time.) As we beat both Zond and the Soviet lunar landing program (Zond was more or less flight ready, with 2 unmanned test flights, the landing program, not so much) before the Soviets actually flew any people to or around the Moon, the Soviets were able to pretend that they didn't have a manned lunar program, which made it possible for the Nixon administration to kneecap manned space flight a few years later. NASA and the US have never recovered from that, and the USA has (to be blunt) never really done much with manned space flight since.
Arguably, if Apollo 8 had stayed in Earth orbit, Alexei Leonov would have commanded the first mission to circle the Moon, the "space race" would have extended to lunar operations, and humanity would probably have multiple bases on Mars at this moment.
If you are just now hearing about Cliff Stoll, get off my lawn!
But not before I tell you about these investment opportunities in blocked Nigerian accounts !
So ? You can already assume that I am on the planet. If I increase the search area to 200 msec, you won't be able to be much more precise than that. I don't see how a geolocation to "Earth" is doing you any good.
Note that it is not enough that there is a "landmark" router physically near you, it also has to be near you from a network topology sense. It doesn't help geolocation much if the museum next door has a landmark router if the peering point between your networks is 1000 km away.
Now, if you are in a city on a major ISP, this is likely not to be problem. If, on the other hand, you are out in the country, then there is unlikely to be a landmark router near, and if there is one, it is quite possibly on a different network, with a peering point many miles away. For example, many university extension campuses connect back to the main University NREN, and all Internet traffic then goes through one or two "GigaPOPs" in the state. So, even if there is a university extension next door, it is likely to help with geolocation much.
So, I predict that this will not be good to anything like 1 km accuracy away from major cities.
Well, if you are going to introduce an arbitrary delay to foil geolocation, it should certainly be a random delay.
However, I think that even a constant delay (or a tunnel) would still work pretty well.
Suppose I am using a tunnel, and the tunnel delay is 20 msec, and the tunnel end point is in Boston. Now, they can certainly find out that the lowest latency is for a probe from Boston, and so Boston is "closer" to me than LA or Seattle or Washington. But, they cannot be sure that this means that
- I am in Boston and injecting 20 msec of constant delay or
- I am somewhere else (say in upper Vermont) and my network routing goes through Boston (with or without injecting an arbitrary delay), and it just happens that there is not a "landmark" router near me.
- I am 20 msec from Boston and using a tunnel.
Given that 20 msec (one way) spans the continent, and that a 40 msec round trip delay is not perceptible in VOIP, it seems that this could hide you pretty effectively.
Also, note that it would be pretty trivial to vary the latency in a software tunnel.
Seems like this would be easy to counteract (although at the kernel hack level). All you would have to do is introduce a 30-50 msec time variable delay into all new packet sends (i.e., ICMP responses, first packet of a TCP session, etc.).
In fact, if you encrypt everything, you may get these sorts of delays "for free."
Also, this will not work well if you are using encrypted tunnels or VPNs to access the web. Your delay then is (tunnel delay) + (tunnel end point to attacker delay) + (encryption delays), so you seem a good deal further away than you really are.
So, who was bribed to make this change ?
When I hear of Interpol, I think of Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and how the organization they ran avoided hunting Nazi war criminals for years because those were "political" crimes.
What more do you need to say ?
There was probably some of that, but I know that they were specifically worried about flash blindness, which makes it impossible to function (except blindly) for a while. Retinal scaring (from the UV or the visible) I believe is only a problem if you are looking directly at the fireball, whereas I have heard that you can get flash blindness from a nuke even facing away with your eyes closed and your arm over your eyes. See, e.g., http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects13.shtml for a little more.
The brief pulse of extremely bright light from a nuclear explosion would cause "flash blindness," which sounds like the same thing.
That's why everyone was always putting on goggles in the old newsreels about nukes.
The radioactive iodine is almost certain to cause cancers and mortality in Japanese children in coming years.
From the IAEA staff report "Thyroid Cancer Effects in Children" :
The main consequence of the Chernobyl accident is thyroid cancer in children, some of whom were not yet born at the time of the accident. Following the vapour explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor, radioactive iodine was released and spread in the surrounding area. Despite measures taken, children in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, were exposed to radiation in the weeks following the accident , particularly by consuming milk from pastured cows and leafy vegetables that had been contaminated with radioactive iodine.
Radioactive Iodine has a half-life of 8 days, so it is the immediate exposure that is the problem here. Unfortunately, the Japanese government took 3 days after the Iodine exposure was publicly announced (and, presumably, more days after they knew about it), to ban the eating of contaminated spinach (a "leafy vegetable") and dairy milk. Worse, when the iodine contamination was first made public, Mr. Yukio Edano, Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, urge calm, saying that the contaminated food posed "no immediate threat." What weasel words - these cancers will take months to years to develop, so there is indeed no "immediate" threat. He should have urged people not to drink milk or vegetables from the affected area, instead.
Here is some more information about the risk from Iodine-131 at Fukushima. This is a problem particularly for children as their bodies take up the Iodine - similar doses don't cause problems for mature adults.
The Venter approach is something akin to taking a library, putting the whole thing through a paper shredder, and trying to figure out how many languages there were in the library from a statistical analysis of the groupings of the letters on each piece of paper. It is marvelous, but it has its limits.
If there were true aliens among us (microscopic organisms that did not use DNA for genetics), the Venter approach would not see them. I do not know of a good way to luck for such creatures, but I wish someone would figure one out, and apply it to something like Venter's samples.