Safety may cost money, but recklessness doesn't necessarily save you money.
Neither of the shuttle accidents were caused by design flaws or by skimping on safety equipment. They were caused by arrogant managers ignoring engineers who said "it isn't safe to operate the vehicle this way." (whether that be launching in cold weather known to cause seal problems or landing after an impact to the heat shield)
There's a difference between designing a perfectly safe vehicle and operating a normal vehicle safely.
To extend your car analogy, what NASA managers have done twice now is similar to driving a bus with balding tires at high speed in the rain because they were too pressured by schedule to drive under safe conditions and too embarrassed to ask someone to look at the tires for them. It has nothing to do with safety equipment or safety testing and everything to do with overconfidence.
The difference is that, if someone drives a bus like that and hydroplanes into a tree, killing all their passengers, they get arrested. NASA just gets to hire more bureaucrats.
What the study showed is that Mars lacks the large deposits of carbonate rocks that would be expected from the presence of large, longstanding bodies of water like oceans. So, Mars was not "watery." This is what the BBC was talking about.
This is not the same thing as saying that Mars never had liquid water on its surface. On the contrary, the study revealed carbonate in the Martian dust, which may have formed by the interaction of liquid water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is what space.com was talking about.
On the other hand, the carbonate could also have formed by the direct interaction of atmospheric water and carbon dioxide with the dust. That's why space.com points out that "Bandfield cautioned [that] the results are not 100 percent conclusive in proving the existence of liquid water."
Perhaps more significantly, however, the study shows that large amounts of carbon dioxide are locked up in these carbonates, which points to a thicker atmosphere in the Martian past, which may have been better able to support liquid water on the surface.
In fact, Bandfield (one of the authors of the study) also says elsewhere about the study:
"Mars appears to have locked up its atmosphere in minerals until it reached the point where the process largely stopped because liquid water ceased to exist at regional to global scales at the surface."
This study does not end the debate about water on Mars, and I don't think it's too strong an assertion to say that this study (among others) have hinted at liquid water on the dusty planet."
Are we talking about bacteria that might survive the interstellar trip and all its radiation [...] he former seems like a very low risk
First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.
Second, we already have an example of bacteria surviving on a space probe. Some Streptococcus mitis survived Surveyor 3's trip from the Earth to the Moon and the two and a half years of exposure to vacuum, temperature extremes, and radiation between when it landed in April, 1967 and when the Apollo 12 astronauts took some parts of Surveyor 3 back home in November, 1969.
Given our very small sample size of spacecraft returned for analysis and the fact that one showed surviving bacteria, I don't think one can qualify the risk of bacterial survival as "very low." When dealing with a situation in which a single bacterial spore could compromise the ecosystem of an entire moon, it pays to be cautious.
Never underestimate the bacterium -- it's been through more shit than you can imagine;)
By this definition, we mean the capacity to learn, to be instructed in tasks and incorporate ideas into itself and understand commands without detail, but without sentience or self awareness, never having emotions or being able to make fully independant decisions about freedom, what to do for itself. [...] Employees, especially blue collar, farmers, manufacturing and the like, could be mass produced [...] Wars fought by machines [...]
Whoa whoa whoa... that's quite a leap there. Mass production factory work and crop harvesting is one thing -- the work is fairly predictable, and therefore easily automated by machines without independent decision-making. That's why it's already being done.
However, on the battlefield, you'll be hard-pressed to convince the enemy to behave predictably: "could you please wear these ID badges so that our robot soldiers will be able to target you?" How will your robot soldiers know what to do in an unexpected situation if they don't have any independent decision-making capabilities?
Soldiering is a tricky business that requires both creativity and independent decision making. We spend a lot of money honing those skills in our soldiers.
On the other hand, having less-intelligent machines around to help the soldiers by carrying stuff or maybe firing on designated targets is not a bad idea. That's why we already have those. If we could make them as mobile and durable as humans, that would be something.
There's likely to be a lot of future in telepresence, but we're still going to want humans in the loop, pulling the trigger. We're already seeing some of that trend with UAVs.
In any case, it doesn't seem like what you are suggesting is a radical departure from where we're already going. Automated machines will get cheaper and gradually replace more and more unskilled workers. But there are still a lot of skilled jobs. You can only get so far without independent decision making.
wouldn't "accidental casualties" be even clearer than "collateral damage"?
RTFA -- "casualties" does not encompass damage to buildings and equipment, which is part of "collateral damage". Such damage was specifically mentioned in the article:
In addition to providing more safety to soldiers and civilians on the ground, the new, low collateral damage munitions will also minimize the rebuilding that is needed after a war.
After all, most people (including myself) don't know that collateral = accidental.
RTFD. "collateral" != "accidental"
"accidental" would not be appropriate -- collateral damage may be unfortunate, but it is not always unanticipated. When you carpet-bomb a city and civilians get killed and schools get destroyed, I don't think you can say "oops -- that was accident," because such damage, though not your primary goal, was unavoidable, and you knew it and bombed the city anyway. Instead, you'd call it collateral, in the sense that it is "1 a : accompanying as secondary or subordinate : CONCOMITANT b : INDIRECT"
I agree with the AC, even though I hadn't thought about it this way before -- the phrase "collateral damage" is precisely correct for what the military types are trying to describe. If that doesn't fit with your preconceptions of what those words mean, maybe those are what need to be examined.
You're assuming they'll still let you buy the CD for cash. Who knows to what extremes of inconvenience they will drive the customer in their paranoid crusade against piracy?
They already sell CDs that don't play. If customers will put up with that, what's wrong with a little background check, licensing contract, and registration before you can get your hands on a CD that still won't play? People will put up with all sorts of lame tricks if you put a positive spin on them. And for the ones that don't, you can blame the lost sales on piracy!
"I'm sorry, but you have to be a member of the Giant Corporate Record Store Club before you can purchase the latest hits at our deep-discount prices."
"Now available exclusively with your GCRSC card, the latest album at 60% off the arbitrary list price! Bring a copy of this ad and you get a $2 rebate!"
Honestly, they could burn you a custom-watermarked CD with your ID number ("personalized service!") and still make a ridiculous profit. Actually, it doesn't even matter if they make a profit, since they can complain the extra costs were caused by piracy and lobby the government to subsidize them (with actual cash or just more protectionist legislation like the DMCA).
Now, if only we could subsidize the big record companies not to produce, like we do with the farmers, that would be something.:)
You will notice that even Clinton's record surplus started declining in 2000
Actually, the graph may look that way, but it is more an artifact of the (rather large) sampling interval and the use of a line chart rather than a bar chart (which would have been less misleading, given the sampling interval).
In other words, it looks like there is a declining line at the end of Clinton's term, but that's because you're connecting a very high dot in Clinton's last year (2000) to a lower dot in Bush's first (2001).
For the data from which the graph was generated, go to the source.
That sort of functionality was present in "efm", the file manager for Enlightenment 0.17, before they yanked it so they could waste the past three years or so re-writing everything from scratch and putting wrapper libraries around stuff (then re-writing those wrapper libraries). (OK, so I'm bitter -- yesterday's joke opened up old wounds.)
Anyway, it had other cool features. You could execute commands in the window as well. For instance, type "make" and it would pop up an xterm with make running in it. You could type "*.mp3" and all the mp3s in the directory would be highlighted. It seemed like it was going to be a really good synthesis of command line and GUI.
You can probably still get out of CVS, but since everything is constantly being re-written from scratch, I'm not sure if it's worth the time trying to find stable points in all the various libraries and components.
Right. They should pay money to open a support incident and then spend hours or days on the phone talking to techs who have no idea what they are talking about.
Emailing linux-kernel with a bug report is one thing, but most commercial vendor bug reporting is such a pain in the neck that only the really desperate engage in it.
It's also wrong because this bug is in ethernet frame padding, not in IP padding. Your firewall shouldn't be leaking that layer 2 stuff anyway -- this is only exploitable on the local network. Now, if your firewall also has this bug, it could leak data to machines on the network segment of its external interface, but that's another matter, and an attacker a few hops away isn't likely to get anything useful.
From the initial @stake advisory:
It is important to note that the attacker must be on the same ethernet network as the vulnerable machine to receive the ethernet frames.
seems to me that he was pretty explicit in stating that "family and friends have come to rely on me".
Doesn't sound much like a job in IT to me, or that he has much of a choice about it. What's he supposed to do? Request a transfer to a new family? Tell them to hire a professional IT guy?
Leave it to those of us who enjoy tinkering, and playing with new technologies.
I take it you're volunteering to go over to my mom's house and help her the next time she has a problem? Thanks. She can pay you in comments about how you're not sitting up straight enough or alternate forms of nagging currency.:)
I've often found keystroke loggers on machines (amongst other stuff), and he's risking some serious compromising.
Good point, and always one worth keeping in mind. It's always good to treat systems and networks like bags at the airport (have they been under your control since the time they were packed?). However, perhaps he was using:
1) his laptop, or
2) OPIE, S/Key, or some other one-time-password solution (and checking the SSH key of the remote end).
Have you ever heard of this problem on current pay phones?
If you're actually having an emergency, and someone is standing nearby, on the phone or not, they are more likely to call 911 for you or attempt to assist you than to stand there and stare at you while you bleed to death.
My point was that the primary motivation behind laws regulating motor vehicle use is not so much saving us from ourselves as it is saving innocent bystanders from us.
Nowhere did I attempt to say that the anti-cell-phone laws are a good way to fulfill that motivation or that I think cell phone use is dangerous. If I have meant to say either of those things, I would have.
Why should my tax money go to help someone loser make a free phone call?
Uhh.... who said anything about free calls? They're called pay phones for a reason, you know.
If you're OK with installing and maintaining phones that can call 911 for free, why not also let people put money in them to call other numbers while the phones would otherwise just be sitting around, doing nothing? They'd be hooked up to the phone network anyway, since a dedicated line to the 911 call center would be needlessly expensive.
Sure, maybe those pay calls would be in some sense "subsidized phone calls", but much less so that a car ride just about anywhere is a "subsidized car ride." Somehow I doubt that the cost of subsidizing pay phones would ever come close to that of the massive pork barrel that is the federal-aid highway system (or that we'd ever invade Kazakhstan to secure our chromium supply for those cool little keypad buttons).
That, of course, is the original poster's point -- that perhaps pay phones should be considered a part of the public infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Safety may cost money, but recklessness doesn't necessarily save you money.
Neither of the shuttle accidents were caused by design flaws or by skimping on safety equipment. They were caused by arrogant managers ignoring engineers who said "it isn't safe to operate the vehicle this way." (whether that be launching in cold weather known to cause seal problems or landing after an impact to the heat shield)
There's a difference between designing a perfectly safe vehicle and operating a normal vehicle safely.
To extend your car analogy, what NASA managers have done twice now is similar to driving a bus with balding tires at high speed in the rain because they were too pressured by schedule to drive under safe conditions and too embarrassed to ask someone to look at the tires for them. It has nothing to do with safety equipment or safety testing and everything to do with overconfidence.
The difference is that, if someone drives a bus like that and hydroplanes into a tree, killing all their passengers, they get arrested. NASA just gets to hire more bureaucrats.
What the study showed is that Mars lacks the large deposits of carbonate rocks that would be expected from the presence of large, longstanding bodies of water like oceans. So, Mars was not "watery." This is what the BBC was talking about.
This is not the same thing as saying that Mars never had liquid water on its surface. On the contrary, the study revealed carbonate in the Martian dust, which may have formed by the interaction of liquid water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is what space.com was talking about.
On the other hand, the carbonate could also have formed by the direct interaction of atmospheric water and carbon dioxide with the dust. That's why space.com points out that "Bandfield cautioned [that] the results are not 100 percent conclusive in proving the existence of liquid water."
Perhaps more significantly, however, the study shows that large amounts of carbon dioxide are locked up in these carbonates, which points to a thicker atmosphere in the Martian past, which may have been better able to support liquid water on the surface.
In fact, Bandfield (one of the authors of the study) also says elsewhere about the study:
This study does not end the debate about water on Mars, and I don't think it's too strong an assertion to say that this study (among others) have hinted at liquid water on the dusty planet."
Are we talking about bacteria that might survive the interstellar trip and all its radiation [...] he former seems like a very low risk
;)
First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.
Second, we already have an example of bacteria surviving on a space probe. Some Streptococcus mitis survived Surveyor 3's trip from the Earth to the Moon and the two and a half years of exposure to vacuum, temperature extremes, and radiation between when it landed in April, 1967 and when the Apollo 12 astronauts took some parts of Surveyor 3 back home in November, 1969.
Given our very small sample size of spacecraft returned for analysis and the fact that one showed surviving bacteria, I don't think one can qualify the risk of bacterial survival as "very low." When dealing with a situation in which a single bacterial spore could compromise the ecosystem of an entire moon, it pays to be cautious.
Never underestimate the bacterium -- it's been through more shit than you can imagine
Once we have these machines, we can turn them to the challenge of pacifying [...] the world.
Heh.
By this definition, we mean the capacity to learn, to be instructed in tasks and incorporate ideas into itself and understand commands without detail, but without sentience or self awareness, never having emotions or being able to make fully independant decisions about freedom, what to do for itself.
[...]
Employees, especially blue collar, farmers, manufacturing and the like, could be mass produced
[...]
Wars fought by machines
[...]
Whoa whoa whoa... that's quite a leap there. Mass production factory work and crop harvesting is one thing -- the work is fairly predictable, and therefore easily automated by machines without independent decision-making. That's why it's already being done.
However, on the battlefield, you'll be hard-pressed to convince the enemy to behave predictably: "could you please wear these ID badges so that our robot soldiers will be able to target you?" How will your robot soldiers know what to do in an unexpected situation if they don't have any independent decision-making capabilities?
Soldiering is a tricky business that requires both creativity and independent decision making. We spend a lot of money honing those skills in our soldiers.
On the other hand, having less-intelligent machines around to help the soldiers by carrying stuff or maybe firing on designated targets is not a bad idea. That's why we already have those. If we could make them as mobile and durable as humans, that would be something.
There's likely to be a lot of future in telepresence, but we're still going to want humans in the loop, pulling the trigger. We're already seeing some of that trend with UAVs.
In any case, it doesn't seem like what you are suggesting is a radical departure from where we're already going. Automated machines will get cheaper and gradually replace more and more unskilled workers. But there are still a lot of skilled jobs. You can only get so far without independent decision making.
The answer lies within the article:
The best way to make the internet cheaper and faster is to eliminate all the superflouous junk traffic.
You could start by blocking port 80. Gopher has everything you need.
And now you're flaming the moderators. Looks like they were right, after all. :)
RTFA -- "casualties" does not encompass damage to buildings and equipment, which is part of "collateral damage". Such damage was specifically mentioned in the article:
After all, most people (including myself) don't know that collateral = accidental.
RTFD. "collateral" != "accidental"
"accidental" would not be appropriate -- collateral damage may be unfortunate, but it is not always unanticipated. When you carpet-bomb a city and civilians get killed and schools get destroyed, I don't think you can say "oops -- that was accident," because such damage, though not your primary goal, was unavoidable, and you knew it and bombed the city anyway. Instead, you'd call it collateral, in the sense that it is "1 a : accompanying as secondary or subordinate : CONCOMITANT b : INDIRECT"
I agree with the AC, even though I hadn't thought about it this way before -- the phrase "collateral damage" is precisely correct for what the military types are trying to describe. If that doesn't fit with your preconceptions of what those words mean, maybe those are what need to be examined.
You're assuming they'll still let you buy the CD for cash. Who knows to what extremes of inconvenience they will drive the customer in their paranoid crusade against piracy?
:)
They already sell CDs that don't play. If customers will put up with that, what's wrong with a little background check, licensing contract, and registration before you can get your hands on a CD that still won't play? People will put up with all sorts of lame tricks if you put a positive spin on them. And for the ones that don't, you can blame the lost sales on piracy!
"I'm sorry, but you have to be a member of the Giant Corporate Record Store Club before you can purchase the latest hits at our deep-discount prices."
"Now available exclusively with your GCRSC card, the latest album at 60% off the arbitrary list price! Bring a copy of this ad and you get a $2 rebate!"
Honestly, they could burn you a custom-watermarked CD with your ID number ("personalized service!") and still make a ridiculous profit. Actually, it doesn't even matter if they make a profit, since they can complain the extra costs were caused by piracy and lobby the government to subsidize them (with actual cash or just more protectionist legislation like the DMCA).
Now, if only we could subsidize the big record companies not to produce, like we do with the farmers, that would be something.
You poor, poor bastard.
And the debut of Unix 20 years ago.
Just to set the record straight, I think you mean more than 30 years ago, unless you're talking about the debut of XENIX.
You will notice that even Clinton's record surplus started declining in 2000
Actually, the graph may look that way, but it is more an artifact of the (rather large) sampling interval and the use of a line chart rather than a bar chart (which would have been less misleading, given the sampling interval).
In other words, it looks like there is a declining line at the end of Clinton's term, but that's because you're connecting a very high dot in Clinton's last year (2000) to a lower dot in Bush's first (2001).
For the data from which the graph was generated, go to the source.
That sort of functionality was present in "efm", the file manager for Enlightenment 0.17, before they yanked it so they could waste the past three years or so re-writing everything from scratch and putting wrapper libraries around stuff (then re-writing those wrapper libraries). (OK, so I'm bitter -- yesterday's joke opened up old wounds.)
Anyway, it had other cool features. You could execute commands in the window as well. For instance, type "make" and it would pop up an xterm with make running in it. You could type "*.mp3" and all the mp3s in the directory would be highlighted. It seemed like it was going to be a really good synthesis of command line and GUI.
You can probably still get out of CVS, but since everything is constantly being re-written from scratch, I'm not sure if it's worth the time trying to find stable points in all the various libraries and components.
Hasn't Red Hat stopped support of 6.2? Hmmmmm...
:)
Not until March 31st.
http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/
Of course, I didn't see an update to their 2.2 series kernels in the RHSA for the ptrace vulnerability...
I can send a manned mission to Neptune that will take 40 days to get there.
Then what are you still doing here?
Right. They should pay money to open a support incident and then spend hours or days on the phone talking to techs who have no idea what they are talking about.
Emailing linux-kernel with a bug report is one thing, but most commercial vendor bug reporting is such a pain in the neck that only the really desperate engage in it.
From the initial @stake advisory:
Doesn't sound much like a job in IT to me, or that he has much of a choice about it. What's he supposed to do? Request a transfer to a new family? Tell them to hire a professional IT guy?
I take it you're volunteering to go over to my mom's house and help her the next time she has a problem? Thanks. She can pay you in comments about how you're not sitting up straight enough or alternate forms of nagging currency.
I've often found keystroke loggers on machines (amongst other stuff), and he's risking some serious compromising.
Good point, and always one worth keeping in mind. It's always good to treat systems and networks like bags at the airport (have they been under your control since the time they were packed?). However, perhaps he was using:
1) his laptop, or
2) OPIE, S/Key, or some other one-time-password solution (and checking the SSH key of the remote end).
get real.
Have you ever heard of this problem on current pay phones?
If you're actually having an emergency, and someone is standing nearby, on the phone or not, they are more likely to call 911 for you or attempt to assist you than to stand there and stare at you while you bleed to death.
My point was that the primary motivation behind laws regulating motor vehicle use is not so much saving us from ourselves as it is saving innocent bystanders from us.
Nowhere did I attempt to say that the anti-cell-phone laws are a good way to fulfill that motivation or that I think cell phone use is dangerous. If I have meant to say either of those things, I would have.
Why should my tax money go to help someone loser make a free phone call?
Uhh.... who said anything about free calls? They're called pay phones for a reason, you know.
If you're OK with installing and maintaining phones that can call 911 for free, why not also let people put money in them to call other numbers while the phones would otherwise just be sitting around, doing nothing? They'd be hooked up to the phone network anyway, since a dedicated line to the 911 call center would be needlessly expensive.
Sure, maybe those pay calls would be in some sense "subsidized phone calls", but much less so that a car ride just about anywhere is a "subsidized car ride." Somehow I doubt that the cost of subsidizing pay phones would ever come close to that of the massive pork barrel that is the federal-aid highway system (or that we'd ever invade Kazakhstan to secure our chromium supply for those cool little keypad buttons).
That, of course, is the original poster's point -- that perhaps pay phones should be considered a part of the public infrastructure.
"Must cleanse ourselves- save us from ourselves!"
I think the idea is more like "save us from the distracted driver in the vehicle barreling towards us at 80 MPH."
That style of humor is getting a little forumlaic.
"getting a little formulaic?" The bit was formulaic twenty years ago when CIA plant Yakov Smirnoff was doing it and there *was* a Soviet Russia.
Now it's pure gold, and I can't get enough!
Only in America can you have a web site with non-stop Smirnoff ripoffs on current events of interest to nerds. What a country!