Gravitational attraction is proportional to mass (and distance). Assuming that the pulsar is fairly typical, that means its between 1 and 2 solar masses; couple mass and velocity and you get momentum, which, unless I am mistaken, is the more common term for the energy you are talking about.
The central body must be able to exert a force great enough to overcome the momentum of the unattached body. For it to have a chance of doing this, it must necessarily be more massive than the pulsar, probably substantially.
Since we can't know the initial relative velocity (or even if there was one) we have to judge by the known variables; the relative masses. Is the central body massive enough to have picked up an object as heavy as a pulsar?
It's the easiest way to determine if it is possible that the pulsar was captured, or whether it must have formed there.
Politically, though, we can't even use breeder reactors to reduce our nuclear waste stockpiles, more less start trying to launch satellites full of nukes. The inevitable EMP would cause problems near earth as well.
It'd be a waste to shut it down anyway. The DARPA budget is tiny compared to the military budget as a whole, and new technology has a better chance of making a difference than another couple of fighter planes.
Not at all. If one is loose, all you need is a sufficiently massive body, and the right vector of approach. Obviously if the pulsar is moving at an extreme relative velocity, or if it is more massive than the object its passing, it is unlikely to fall into orbit.
But anything can be pulled into a gravitational orbit if the central body is massive enough. Most pulsars aren't more than one or 2 solar masses, and stars can generally exist up to around 5 solar masses...Bigger than that, and you get a black hole.
Meh. I paid off some wicked bad karma, no doubt, but it could always have been worse. And it's never as bad dealing with it as it is having to watch someone else deal with it.
I agree, and I'm not advocating the sort of crazy crap they seem to be trying to prosecute under...There are plenty of harassment laws in other states; they need to pass one, and, in the meantime, sue that bitch into poverty with civil law, where there is a vast amount of precedent for this sort of thing.
"Intentional Infliction of Severe Emotional Distress" is a common tort, and I've always wondered why a civil suit wasn't brought against the perp for this offense.
Some states have applicable laws: "Sandy's Law" in Mass has a maximum penalty of 10 years, which would be reasonably appropriate.
I hate it when people pull that shit. "My childhood was so rough, no one else has any room to complain." My childhood was hilariously rough, I mean like a joke. You name, it I had it. Seen a parent killed in front of you? Check. Have an alcoholic parent? I had three counting various step parents. Broken home? See above. Physical abuse? I got shot by stepfather #2 when I was 13, and it didn't even seem that bad in comparison to some of the other stuff.
I didn't come out of that thinking everyone who didn't have it rough was a pussy. I've seen people completely ripped up by stuff that I saw so commonly it wouldn't have even registered.
Everyone takes things differently. Some people will fold under a hit that other people won't even notice. That's just a fact, and there's no special virtue in being the sort of asshole who can just shrug it off. In my own case it makes me extremely angry when someone goes out of their way to smash up someone who can't take it.
In this case there is no question that this girl was intentionally persecuted, and that that persecution lead to her death. Obviously she wasn't mentally tough, but that doesn't mean those who persecuted her deserve to get off.
The Air Force's notion of a covert op is bombing someone using a stealth bomber. If they start that sort of computer attack, it'll almost certainly be part of a more general strike, and the ability to "deny responsibility" in that situation is worthless.
The military has a problem with the sort of gifted rule breakers who are good at this stuff...They aren't geared toward using them. That's the whole reason we have organizations like the CIA.
Trying to use automated tools is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to see them do, but automated tools are of limited utility these days. Maybe one day computer systems will achieve some sort of "normal" configuration, where one size will fit all, but I don't see that happening for years.
My home machine takes innumerable hits from scripts trying automated attacks; 95% of them are trying to exploit software I'm not running. The ones that actually have it right still have a very low rate of trying attacks that could possibly succeed.
Some random hacker in China wouldn't care that they had to run an automated attack against 10,000,000 machines to infect 1,000, but that won't cut it in war. You need trained people. Those people need amazing resources.
This? This is a joke. That money could be better spent by not buying pre-hacked security appliances.
I still think it's a poor choice. Botnets are clunky, they're unreliable, and they're hard to maintain. Why do something like that when you can just install a piece of legit software on every government owned computer in the country.
Hell, you could distribute it to the patriotic masses and have them install it on their own machines.
The dumb thing is, we've already proven that we are the world leader in unleashing the "hard kill" smackdown on information infrastructure.
Just putting effort into the software side would only add to that threat, and doing what the NSA does and just smirking and saying, "That's classified" when anyone asks them about their cyber crap would only make the threat more credible.
This is like watching some script kiddie waltz into an IRC channel and start swaggering. You know people are going to sneer, and you know someone is going to take a shot at them.
I suspect the NSA, CIA, and FBI are already drawing all the top talent (that is willing to work for the government). If the Air Force wants a piece of that, they need to not make amateurish PR statements.
If you wanted to work for the best Air Force, and an air force was making statements about "Whirlygigs, and multi-gun biplanes" it wouldn't really thrill you.
That doesn't bother me; games can be a legitimate training tool, and paying for the tool, then making it available to the public is acceptable. It doesn't even bother me when they use it to recruit.
What bothers me is when they do something that's just flat boneheaded, and clearly the result of someone in the chain of command who doesn't know crap about anything, shooting his mouth off and making policy.
If they want to do the whole "cyberwar" thing, they need to take it seriously, and put people in charge who have the faintest fucking CLUE about what they're supposed to be doing.
The whole botnet thing just shows how absurdly out of touch they are. A botnet is a tool created by a bunch of guys who have limited computer resources in a bid to increase those resources.
Why the fuck would the United States Air Force want a botnet, when they could have the real thing? A tightly integrated computer network with near unlimited bandwidth, satellites, super computers, massive clustering, and secure, integrated control.
Botnet. Jesus. Someone take the freaking tech magazines away from the air force brass before they start doing social networking or some crap.
Sounds like the Air Force already has an overabundance of tools working for it.
Tools? Seriously? Any toolset is going to have to be constantly adaptable, and is going to fall victim to the same problem as all other computer security stuff: it's obsolete almost as soon as its written.
They'd be better building a strong infrastructure, and recruiting top talent than trying to build some kind of software package, presumably to be manned by some kind of enlisted man script kiddie.
Even then, they're going to get the same kind of penetration as everyone else. 20%, 30% maybe, on a good day. You can't even rely on vendors to insert backdoors; the best choice for that would be microsoft, and adding a backdoor to Windows would be redundant in most cases.
I can't imagine multiple development teams running under completely different chains of command syncing their release cycles. What happens when one runs behind? Does it delay the rest?
I can see the benefits with regards to the software that is common to most linux distros, but I can't see all those companies ever working together that closely.
Nothing on that scale happens instantly. In the case of a supernova, it takes a couple of minutes, which is damn near instant in something that took billions of years to form.
Anyway it's not "still going on" in the sense that you mean. It exploded 140 years ago (relative, all you morons, to us) and right now we're looking at the bits flying off into space at 5% of the speed of light. That "stage" of the explosion will take millennia to subside.
Shrug. I thought it was a bad idea (I think the response time and the overhead will end up making it less profitable in the long run), but it's my job to do that sort of thing. Hell, I got brought in on it because the whole mess had fallen behind schedule, and I kicked it back on schedule even when I could have delayed implementation by dragging my feet.
I'm not going to say I agonized about it, because I didn't. I have my job, and I do it. Jobs aren't a god-given right. You have to work to find work, and you have to have skills. I think most of my friends will have little trouble coming up with something new; they are talented.
I'm sure someone is going to Godwin this with some, "The Nazi gas chamber guys had jobs too" because that's the correlation they draw in their tiny minds. They'd have been protesting outside Henry Ford's plants decrying his destruction of the horse and buggy whip industries. When the computer came along it destroyed the industry for typists and secretaries; was it a bad thing?
Slashdot is chock full of libertarians until someone talks about jobs going away, and then everyone is a die hard socialist.
It's called competition, and you know what? It's going to take jobs regardless of who you vote for...Fighting supply and demand is like fighting gravity. Other people in other countries want to do the work for less? They're going to get jobs.
Trying to vote people into office who will protect your industry with regulations and tariffs is as likely to destroy the industry as anything else; witness american textiles, american steel, and the travesty that is the american auto industry.
IT is plenty general. The worlds not going to stop using computers any time soon. You got to experience the birth pangs of an industry, and it sucks, but there is no industry where there is no foreign competition and no industry that doesn't have boom/bust cycles.
You want a sad work experience? I just coded the infrastructure to outsource ~100 graphic artists, some of whom were my friends. Life sucks, wear a helmet.
Jesus. Get a job where people give you respect, where you're not asked to rectify other people's idiocy 24 hours a day, and where you get to get a little exercise, see the sun occasionally.
This is seriously one of the stupidest discussions I've ever seen on/. Every post is either repeating something from the article, making a pedantic loser comment on the "140 years" line, or explaining to the morons the whole concept of "Frame of Reference."
It's what I'd expect from a society where people prank call a scientific conference. Nice one, guys.
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Gravitational attraction is proportional to mass (and distance). Assuming that the pulsar is fairly typical, that means its between 1 and 2 solar masses; couple mass and velocity and you get momentum, which, unless I am mistaken, is the more common term for the energy you are talking about.
The central body must be able to exert a force great enough to overcome the momentum of the unattached body. For it to have a chance of doing this, it must necessarily be more massive than the pulsar, probably substantially.
Since we can't know the initial relative velocity (or even if there was one) we have to judge by the known variables; the relative masses. Is the central body massive enough to have picked up an object as heavy as a pulsar?
It's the easiest way to determine if it is possible that the pulsar was captured, or whether it must have formed there.
Lot of space geeks are enamoured of the Orion.
Politically, though, we can't even use breeder reactors to reduce our nuclear waste stockpiles, more less start trying to launch satellites full of nukes. The inevitable EMP would cause problems near earth as well.
It'd be a waste to shut it down anyway. The DARPA budget is tiny compared to the military budget as a whole, and new technology has a better chance of making a difference than another couple of fighter planes.
Not at all. If one is loose, all you need is a sufficiently massive body, and the right vector of approach. Obviously if the pulsar is moving at an extreme relative velocity, or if it is more massive than the object its passing, it is unlikely to fall into orbit.
But anything can be pulled into a gravitational orbit if the central body is massive enough. Most pulsars aren't more than one or 2 solar masses, and stars can generally exist up to around 5 solar masses...Bigger than that, and you get a black hole.
Meh. I paid off some wicked bad karma, no doubt, but it could always have been worse. And it's never as bad dealing with it as it is having to watch someone else deal with it.
I agree, and I'm not advocating the sort of crazy crap they seem to be trying to prosecute under...There are plenty of harassment laws in other states; they need to pass one, and, in the meantime, sue that bitch into poverty with civil law, where there is a vast amount of precedent for this sort of thing.
"Intentional Infliction of Severe Emotional Distress" is a common tort, and I've always wondered why a civil suit wasn't brought against the perp for this offense.
Some states have applicable laws: "Sandy's Law" in Mass has a maximum penalty of 10 years, which would be reasonably appropriate.
I hate it when people pull that shit. "My childhood was so rough, no one else has any room to complain." My childhood was hilariously rough, I mean like a joke. You name, it I had it. Seen a parent killed in front of you? Check. Have an alcoholic parent? I had three counting various step parents. Broken home? See above. Physical abuse? I got shot by stepfather #2 when I was 13, and it didn't even seem that bad in comparison to some of the other stuff.
I didn't come out of that thinking everyone who didn't have it rough was a pussy. I've seen people completely ripped up by stuff that I saw so commonly it wouldn't have even registered.
Everyone takes things differently. Some people will fold under a hit that other people won't even notice. That's just a fact, and there's no special virtue in being the sort of asshole who can just shrug it off. In my own case it makes me extremely angry when someone goes out of their way to smash up someone who can't take it.
In this case there is no question that this girl was intentionally persecuted, and that that persecution lead to her death. Obviously she wasn't mentally tough, but that doesn't mean those who persecuted her deserve to get off.
Our moral high ground is low enough right now that an official botnet wouldn't lower it much.
I'm against it mostly because I think it's just a foolish waste of money that will only breed ill-will and accomplish nothing, or next to nothing.
The Air Force's notion of a covert op is bombing someone using a stealth bomber. If they start that sort of computer attack, it'll almost certainly be part of a more general strike, and the ability to "deny responsibility" in that situation is worthless.
The military has a problem with the sort of gifted rule breakers who are good at this stuff...They aren't geared toward using them. That's the whole reason we have organizations like the CIA.
Trying to use automated tools is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to see them do, but automated tools are of limited utility these days. Maybe one day computer systems will achieve some sort of "normal" configuration, where one size will fit all, but I don't see that happening for years.
My home machine takes innumerable hits from scripts trying automated attacks; 95% of them are trying to exploit software I'm not running. The ones that actually have it right still have a very low rate of trying attacks that could possibly succeed.
Some random hacker in China wouldn't care that they had to run an automated attack against 10,000,000 machines to infect 1,000, but that won't cut it in war. You need trained people. Those people need amazing resources.
This? This is a joke. That money could be better spent by not buying pre-hacked security appliances.
I still think it's a poor choice. Botnets are clunky, they're unreliable, and they're hard to maintain. Why do something like that when you can just install a piece of legit software on every government owned computer in the country.
Hell, you could distribute it to the patriotic masses and have them install it on their own machines.
The dumb thing is, we've already proven that we are the world leader in unleashing the "hard kill" smackdown on information infrastructure.
Just putting effort into the software side would only add to that threat, and doing what the NSA does and just smirking and saying, "That's classified" when anyone asks them about their cyber crap would only make the threat more credible.
This is like watching some script kiddie waltz into an IRC channel and start swaggering. You know people are going to sneer, and you know someone is going to take a shot at them.
I suspect the NSA, CIA, and FBI are already drawing all the top talent (that is willing to work for the government). If the Air Force wants a piece of that, they need to not make amateurish PR statements.
If you wanted to work for the best Air Force, and an air force was making statements about "Whirlygigs, and multi-gun biplanes" it wouldn't really thrill you.
That doesn't bother me; games can be a legitimate training tool, and paying for the tool, then making it available to the public is acceptable. It doesn't even bother me when they use it to recruit.
What bothers me is when they do something that's just flat boneheaded, and clearly the result of someone in the chain of command who doesn't know crap about anything, shooting his mouth off and making policy.
If they want to do the whole "cyberwar" thing, they need to take it seriously, and put people in charge who have the faintest fucking CLUE about what they're supposed to be doing.
The whole botnet thing just shows how absurdly out of touch they are. A botnet is a tool created by a bunch of guys who have limited computer resources in a bid to increase those resources.
Why the fuck would the United States Air Force want a botnet, when they could have the real thing? A tightly integrated computer network with near unlimited bandwidth, satellites, super computers, massive clustering, and secure, integrated control.
Botnet. Jesus. Someone take the freaking tech magazines away from the air force brass before they start doing social networking or some crap.
Sounds like the Air Force already has an overabundance of tools working for it.
Tools? Seriously? Any toolset is going to have to be constantly adaptable, and is going to fall victim to the same problem as all other computer security stuff: it's obsolete almost as soon as its written.
They'd be better building a strong infrastructure, and recruiting top talent than trying to build some kind of software package, presumably to be manned by some kind of enlisted man script kiddie.
Even then, they're going to get the same kind of penetration as everyone else. 20%, 30% maybe, on a good day. You can't even rely on vendors to insert backdoors; the best choice for that would be microsoft, and adding a backdoor to Windows would be redundant in most cases.
I can't imagine multiple development teams running under completely different chains of command syncing their release cycles. What happens when one runs behind? Does it delay the rest?
I can see the benefits with regards to the software that is common to most linux distros, but I can't see all those companies ever working together that closely.
Nothing on that scale happens instantly. In the case of a supernova, it takes a couple of minutes, which is damn near instant in something that took billions of years to form.
Anyway it's not "still going on" in the sense that you mean. It exploded 140 years ago (relative, all you morons, to us) and right now we're looking at the bits flying off into space at 5% of the speed of light. That "stage" of the explosion will take millennia to subside.
Shrug. I thought it was a bad idea (I think the response time and the overhead will end up making it less profitable in the long run), but it's my job to do that sort of thing. Hell, I got brought in on it because the whole mess had fallen behind schedule, and I kicked it back on schedule even when I could have delayed implementation by dragging my feet.
I'm not going to say I agonized about it, because I didn't. I have my job, and I do it. Jobs aren't a god-given right. You have to work to find work, and you have to have skills. I think most of my friends will have little trouble coming up with something new; they are talented.
I'm sure someone is going to Godwin this with some, "The Nazi gas chamber guys had jobs too" because that's the correlation they draw in their tiny minds. They'd have been protesting outside Henry Ford's plants decrying his destruction of the horse and buggy whip industries. When the computer came along it destroyed the industry for typists and secretaries; was it a bad thing?
If I knew that I wouldn't still be working IT!
Slashdot is chock full of libertarians until someone talks about jobs going away, and then everyone is a die hard socialist.
It's called competition, and you know what? It's going to take jobs regardless of who you vote for...Fighting supply and demand is like fighting gravity. Other people in other countries want to do the work for less? They're going to get jobs.
Trying to vote people into office who will protect your industry with regulations and tariffs is as likely to destroy the industry as anything else; witness american textiles, american steel, and the travesty that is the american auto industry.
Ironically I work in IT, and I just wrote the automation to outsource a bunch of artists.
Computers can be done overseas, but it requires all kinds of infrastructure and education. Art though? There are good artists all over the world.
IT is plenty general. The worlds not going to stop using computers any time soon. You got to experience the birth pangs of an industry, and it sucks, but there is no industry where there is no foreign competition and no industry that doesn't have boom/bust cycles.
You want a sad work experience? I just coded the infrastructure to outsource ~100 graphic artists, some of whom were my friends. Life sucks, wear a helmet.
Jesus. Get a job where people give you respect, where you're not asked to rectify other people's idiocy 24 hours a day, and where you get to get a little exercise, see the sun occasionally.
Why would I want to pass that down to my kids?
And I'm posting because there is no "Moron" mod.
/. Every post is either repeating something from the article, making a pedantic loser comment on the "140 years" line, or explaining to the morons the whole concept of "Frame of Reference."
This is seriously one of the stupidest discussions I've ever seen on
It's what I'd expect from a society where people prank call a scientific conference. Nice one, guys.