I think that by suspending these tickets, they are fueling the fear/suspicion that such a virus could go in and fake evidence of speeding. Sure, in theory a virus could have a dual payload: On consumer and business PCs it encrypts the data and asks for a fee. But when it finds itself on a roadside speeding camera it will start to fake photos of speeding vehicles. Right!
Realistically, worst case, the evidence of the speeding vehicles has been lost. Then the tickets that you've already sent should be followed by: "It seems that due to a technical glitch we lost the evidence of your speeding. Lets just say we are very much convinced that you were speeding, but when it would come before a judge we can't legally prove it. Let this be a warning. You can forget about the fine this time. We'll make sure it doesn't happen again. That is: Us losing the evidence."
There are two things that could be important. One is power density and the other is energy density. You could express these in a per-volume measure, but in this case per-weight is important. Similarly, in this case, it is the ENERGY density that matters.
For perspective, Tesla optimizes their batteries for energy density. But still they get an impressive power-density. IT seems they hit the power-limit when you do a ludicrous mode 0-60MPH. So the 0-60 time improves when you go from 85kWh to 100kWh: not only do you have a larger energy capacity, but also more power.
Looking for numbers for a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I found an article by Deepak P Dubai that claims 2 mWh/cm^3. That would be 7.2 J/cm^3. I have a 10Ah 22V battery that weighs 1.2kg. If I assume a density of about 1g/cm^3, I get 666J/cm^3 for that battery. Almost a difference of a factor of 100.
Really I could see the gap closing , but not by a factor of 100 in a few years.
If your plane has a glide ratio of 1:60, and weighs 1600kg then to fly 40000km, you need 40.10^6/60*1600 = 11GJ of energy. If your plane has 200m^2 of solar panels with 45kW peak output, you have to realize that the sun is shining on the wrong side of your panels (and the earth is likely in the way) half the time. Also even when it's on the right side, it won't be perpendicular. You can't turn your panels to the sun because you're using them as a wing too. So you can only expect a about 25% of peak power over longer periods (more than a day). So, in five days you get 5*24*3600s*11.5kW = 4.9GJ of energy. from the solar panels...
There is a factor of two of discrepancy between the back-of-the-envelope and what they say they will achieve. Twice as efficient solar panels? I don't think so. This 45kW/200m^2 is already state-of-the-art. Getting two times more wing surface means you won't be able to fly as fast, and it's going to be a challenge to keep the weight at 1600kg. Talking about speed, 40000 km in 5 days means 333 km/h. or 92m/s. Gliding at 1:60 means you need to make up for 1.5m per second, or 1600*9.8*1.5 = 24kW. About twice what you can expect from your solar panels. But if we take 200m^2 of wing area, and 8kg/m^2 of wingloading, you'll fly at 10m/s at sea level. Fly at 25% atmospheric pressure 13km? you'll go twice as fast. They want to go 92m/s or 4.6 times faster. You need about 21 times less wing-area to fly 92m/s at 13km height. That's not going to happen.
The numbers for weight, wing surface and flying speed at sealevel were taken from "solar impulse". The 1:60 glide ratio is a "good sailplane". Note that such a sailplane won't have props sticking out, or pods to house motors.
It could be that they manage to improve their average speed enormously by using the jetstream. Not sure if it will make up for the big difference in energy requirements....
What Feynman realized (see comments above), is that it takes some practice to develop your sense of smell to the level that dogs are capable of. We have been trained to IGNORE most smells.
I'm a bit over-sensitive to cigarette smoke. I had an intern a long time ago who smoked in the train coming to work. Back then my company was located inside my home. So one day I say: I smell him coming... I look out of the window... nobody there. Huh? I was wrong? So I look again, and there he is, turning into the street!
Actually, there is another smell-related thing that most people do not realize. I was something like 4 years old when I performed the following science experiment: After some "number two", my mother remarked "Whoa, that smells foul!". I realized that I was socially programmed to affirm that as if I could confirm her statement, while in fact my brain was starting to program itself, "ok this is what's considered foul smell". I overruled the instinct and thought to myself, "smells nice, smells nice!".
So.. To this day there is a specific toilet odor that I do not find unpleasant.
Right! Besides the party trick, in the 1960'ies Feynman was aware of the discovery published now: Humans can (with a bit of training) smell almost as good as dogs.
One of the important things for evolution is cycles.
If you have a primitive lifeform ready-to-evolve, but the food that it uses to grow is too sparse to sustain a growing population, everybody dies. Game over.
If you have a primitive lifeform and the environment is just perfect for these lifeforms, they will explode to a uniform big soup of life, but as everybody lives, there is not really an incentive to evolve. Sure there might be competition, but the genes that are slightly better will not overpower the whole population. They might gain a bigger share than initially, but they will not take over the whole group.
For evolution to happen, the situation needs to be "plentiful" at some points in time, and scarce in others. This is what happens when you have a moon that runs around the planet every 30 days, inducing a tide every 12 hours, causing more and less light during the night in a 30 day cycle, a slightly tilted rotation of the planet. 24hour days, seasons. 11 year solar cycle.
This causes a large sample of individuals to arise during plentiful times. Then when things get really harsh, the better individuals survive and the others die off.
Do you think that there is an HP marketing-engineering meeting where the engineers say: we measured the battery lifetime as 3 hours under best-case conditions.... And that at the end of the meeting "ok, we've agreed to market this machine as having 8 hours of battery life"?
No!
What happens is the engineers come into the meeting saying they got 3 hours under real-life conditions. The marketing guys say that the competition got 4 or 5 hours, can't they tweak something. So the engineers tweak something and manage to run a test at 4 or 5 hours. So now the marketing guys know they can pressure the engineers to come up with a better number. So they press on. And finally they get a number that can be rounded to 8 hours.
The idea is that when the wind is blowing from say 280, you take off from 280R, coordinated by the tower like normal, and everybody lands on 280L again coordinated like normal. What does it mean to land on 280L? It means that you land on the point where the runway points at wind direction 280, and the "L" means that you land Left of the center of the circle.
Just a couple of weeks ago I asked my colleague if he got an Email I knew he was CC-ed on. "Nope didn't see it".
On inspection we found that the sending company had installed DKIM and SPF and set them to "don't warn, simply refuse the mail".
This was something like paypal or ebay where this came from. Sure, they have big infrastructure which is difficult to get right, but also they should have a big team capable of getting things right.....
it is difficult to get things right. Lots of stuff is being sent automatically from "unattended mailboxes". Any bounces or warnings during the testing phase are going nowhere....
Imagine you have a sixyearold who doesn't want to go to school, so he hides the car keys. This morning he hid the keys in the honey pops box. So you decide to put an alarm on the honey pops. Not the fruitloops next to them, not the sugar bowl, not the fridge! Thousands of other places to hide the item, but you put an alarm on the ONE spot he used this time (And you tell him about the alarm!).
This is very similar to how this "FIX" affects the CIA from "hiding the keys" again.
It is wrong to publish about this issue calling this a "FIX".
A "fix" would pose a significant barrier to entry, or at least close this one issue that would allow entry.
Well if you want to be a pendant, it works better if you are correct.
So the 5V on my arduino is a measure of its ESD tolerance? Bullshit!
In datasheets, they specify ESD tolerance as a voltage: A standardized capacitor (with a specified capacity, ESR and possibly ESL) is charged to the indicated voltage and the device is supposed to tolerate the discharge.
There is a fundamental law that batteries have to follow.
The energy that is stored has to be able to come back out. So, if you short the electrodes, all that stored energy may be released in a short amount of time. Unless your energy density is very low (i.e. below usable) that will heat up your battery on short notice. There is not much you can do about that.
The thing is I do things that are WAY more risky on a daily basis. Like everybody. I'll take the risk of "being above ground when an asteroid takes a shot at us" over "driving to work" any day.
> the close call highlights the dangers of asteroids.
One: Nothing happened. So how dangerous was this? If it HAD hit, maybe several hundred people would've visited hospitals and some windows woudl have had to be replaced.
Two: The danger is teaching people "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, what if an asteroid kills us?". That is dangerous. A really BIG asteroid killed the dinosaurs. These small ones are nothing to worry about. Let's assume this thing is aiming for earth, but hits randomly somewhere inside the moon's orbit. The earth has a radius of about 6000km, the moon's orbit about 300000km. A ratio of 50, so the chances of hitting earth are 1/2500. The people making a stir about these things are the ones that stand to gain employment from scaring the general public about this.
Let me get this straight..... Meteosat images 500 million square kilometers some 16 times a day, and this satelite does a whopping 680 thousand per day....
The number only becomes impressive when you include resolution figures. (Meteosat is pretty low-res).
I have a 24V 10Ah 10C Lithium battery. Sold as multicopter battery. It weighs about a kg. (1200g IIRC, but lets round that to make the math easier).
100A*24V = 2.4kW. That's 8 times worse than the 20kW/kg for the metal scraps battery. As the power density is important for flying things, this would be great for flying.....
As to the energy densigty, I have 24V * 10Ah = 240Wh in about a kg. They have only 20Wh/kg. They are worse than my battery by a factor of 12....
The "better" counter to the original argument is that not all bugs are memory overruns.
Back in the early nineties I was reading the manual page for the daemon that would send a message to a terminal when a mail message came in. I concluded, from the "published specs" that I could trick it to do "nasty" things. And that turned out to work.
This is an example where no overrun, just the published actions of a program lead to a security issue.
When you write a program that needs to print the primes up to a certain number, you can easily create a formal proof that your program program is correct.
But when your program is say "apache", that needs to interact with many different browsers on one side, and interpret PHP scripts that interact with databases, this formal proof becomes impossible. Similarly, you cannot write a formal spec for the interaction with the user in for example, a web browser.
Even though both examples I put forward today (web server and web browser) didn't exist back then, I've held this opinion for thirty years (spring 1987).
Suppose this "overcharging" happens to say 5% of the customers and say 10% of them simply pay up? My guess is that this would account for a shitload of cash.
There I actively performed the firmware update myself. The new firmware rejected the non-original cartridges. After a few tests the 123inkt-support team said: "well then, it seems your cartridge is broken". So they send me a new one, I returned the old one, and since then I've been printing again. (I was going to say something like "happily", but for honesty I must leave that out....)
After googling around a bit. stories about running a bash shell on windows pop up.
It isn't "running Linux" on windows. That would imply that there is a Linux kernel running that actually manages hardware. This impression of "running on hardware" is enhanced by the slashdot summary.
None of this. Windows is simply providing those Linux system calls that allows commandline apps to run. A story then mentioned that servers would not run. That's odd: When "bash" runs and say applications like ping, ssh and telnet, you'd have to go to great lengths to prevent another app like "apache" from running.
But if what I hear is true, this is only useful for the most basic of things, no graphical capabilities. I might be an old fart that uses the commandline a lot, but that becomes useful in combination with a bunch of graphical tools that display what I need to know on a graphical screen.
As to security: the implied trick of running a linux kernel that also has access to the windows block devices is very prone to bugs and security issues. But all that is not the case: It's just another program running in an operating system, using a slightly different set of API calls. If the emulated Linux system calls end up calling windows-internal stuff AFTER the "permissions checking" that normal windows calls would do then you have a problem. It tells a lot about how badly windows is layered.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that by suspending these tickets, they are fueling the fear/suspicion that such a virus could go in and fake evidence of speeding. Sure, in theory a virus could have a dual payload: On consumer and business PCs it encrypts the data and asks for a fee. But when it finds itself on a roadside speeding camera it will start to fake photos of speeding vehicles. Right!
Realistically, worst case, the evidence of the speeding vehicles has been lost. Then the tickets that you've already sent should be followed by: "It seems that due to a technical glitch we lost the evidence of your speeding. Lets just say we are very much convinced that you were speeding, but when it would come before a judge we can't legally prove it. Let this be a warning. You can forget about the fine this time. We'll make sure it doesn't happen again. That is: Us losing the evidence."
There are two things that could be important. One is power density and the other is energy density. You could express these in a per-volume measure, but in this case per-weight is important.
Similarly, in this case, it is the ENERGY density that matters.
For perspective, Tesla optimizes their batteries for energy density. But still they get an impressive power-density. IT seems they hit the power-limit when you do a ludicrous mode 0-60MPH. So the 0-60 time improves when you go from 85kWh to 100kWh: not only do you have a larger energy capacity, but also more power.
Looking for numbers for a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I found an article by Deepak P Dubai that claims 2 mWh/cm^3. That would be 7.2 J/cm^3.
I have a 10Ah 22V battery that weighs 1.2kg. If I assume a density of about 1g/cm^3, I get 666J/cm^3 for that battery. Almost a difference of a factor of 100.
Really I could see the gap closing , but not by a factor of 100 in a few years.
If your plane has a glide ratio of 1:60, and weighs 1600kg then to fly 40000km, you need 40.10^6/60*1600 = 11GJ of energy.
If your plane has 200m^2 of solar panels with 45kW peak output, you have to realize that the sun is shining on the wrong side of your panels (and the earth is likely in the way) half the time. Also even when it's on the right side, it won't be perpendicular. You can't turn your panels to the sun because you're using them as a wing too. So you can only expect a about 25% of peak power over longer periods (more than a day). So, in five days you get 5*24*3600s*11.5kW = 4.9GJ of energy. from the solar panels...
There is a factor of two of discrepancy between the back-of-the-envelope and what they say they will achieve. Twice as efficient solar panels? I don't think so. This 45kW/200m^2 is already state-of-the-art. Getting two times more wing surface means you won't be able to fly as fast, and it's going to be a challenge to keep the weight at 1600kg.
Talking about speed, 40000 km in 5 days means 333 km/h. or 92m/s. Gliding at 1:60 means you need to make up for 1.5m per second, or 1600*9.8*1.5 = 24kW. About twice what you can expect from your solar panels.
But if we take 200m^2 of wing area, and 8kg/m^2 of wingloading, you'll fly at 10m/s at sea level. Fly at 25% atmospheric pressure 13km? you'll go twice as fast. They want to go 92m/s or 4.6 times faster. You need about 21 times less wing-area to fly 92m/s at 13km height. That's not going to happen.
The numbers for weight, wing surface and flying speed at sealevel were taken from "solar impulse". The 1:60 glide ratio is a "good sailplane". Note that such a sailplane won't have props sticking out, or pods to house motors.
It could be that they manage to improve their average speed enormously by using the jetstream. Not sure if it will make up for the big difference in energy requirements....
What Feynman realized (see comments above), is that it takes some practice to develop your sense of smell to the level that dogs are capable of. We have been trained to IGNORE most smells.
I'm a bit over-sensitive to cigarette smoke. I had an intern a long time ago who smoked in the train coming to work. Back then my company was located inside my home. So one day I say: I smell him coming... I look out of the window... nobody there. Huh? I was wrong? So I look again, and there he is, turning into the street!
Actually, there is another smell-related thing that most people do not realize. I was something like 4 years old when I performed the following science experiment: After some "number two", my mother remarked "Whoa, that smells foul!". I realized that I was socially programmed to affirm that as if I could confirm her statement, while in fact my brain was starting to program itself, "ok this is what's considered foul smell". I overruled the instinct and thought to myself, "smells nice, smells nice!".
So.. To this day there is a specific toilet odor that I do not find unpleasant.
Right!
Besides the party trick, in the 1960'ies Feynman was aware of the discovery published now: Humans can (with a bit of training) smell almost as good as dogs.
They probably just proved a correlation between riding the bike to work and "less heartattacks".
This could very well be caused by the (already) healthy people choosing to ride the bike to work....
One of the important things for evolution is cycles.
If you have a primitive lifeform ready-to-evolve, but the food that it uses to grow is too sparse to sustain a growing population, everybody dies. Game over.
If you have a primitive lifeform and the environment is just perfect for these lifeforms, they will explode to a uniform big soup of life, but as everybody lives, there is not really an incentive to evolve. Sure there might be competition, but the genes that are slightly better will not overpower the whole population. They might gain a bigger share than initially, but they will not take over the whole group.
For evolution to happen, the situation needs to be "plentiful" at some points in time, and scarce in others. This is what happens when you have a moon that runs around the planet every 30 days, inducing a tide every 12 hours, causing more and less light during the night in a 30 day cycle, a slightly tilted rotation of the planet. 24hour days, seasons. 11 year solar cycle.
This causes a large sample of individuals to arise during plentiful times. Then when things get really harsh, the better individuals survive and the others die off.
Do you think that there is an HP marketing-engineering meeting where the engineers say: we measured the battery lifetime as 3 hours under best-case conditions.... And that at the end of the meeting "ok, we've agreed to market this machine as having 8 hours of battery life"?
No!
What happens is the engineers come into the meeting saying they got 3 hours under real-life conditions. The marketing guys say that the competition got 4 or 5 hours, can't they tweak something. So the engineers tweak something and manage to run a test at 4 or 5 hours. So now the marketing guys know they can pressure the engineers to come up with a better number. So they press on. And finally they get a number that can be rounded to 8 hours.
GPS, tunnel through the sky. IMHO the only option. VFR landing? Out of the question.
On the adjacent taxiway of course!
That is bullshit.
The idea is that when the wind is blowing from say 280, you take off from 280R, coordinated by the tower like normal, and everybody lands on 280L again coordinated like normal. What does it mean to land on 280L? It means that you land on the point where the runway points at wind direction 280, and the "L" means that you land Left of the center of the circle.
Just a couple of weeks ago I asked my colleague if he got an Email I knew he was CC-ed on. "Nope didn't see it".
On inspection we found that the sending company had installed DKIM and SPF and set them to "don't warn, simply refuse the mail".
This was something like paypal or ebay where this came from. Sure, they have big infrastructure which is difficult to get right, but also they should have a big team capable of getting things right.....
it is difficult to get things right. Lots of stuff is being sent automatically from "unattended mailboxes". Any bounces or warnings during the testing phase are going nowhere....
Imagine you have a sixyearold who doesn't want to go to school, so he hides the car keys. This morning he hid the keys in the honey pops box. So you decide to put an alarm on the honey pops. Not the fruitloops next to them, not the sugar bowl, not the fridge! Thousands of other places to hide the item, but you put an alarm on the ONE spot he used this time (And you tell him about the alarm!).
This is very similar to how this "FIX" affects the CIA from "hiding the keys" again.
It is wrong to publish about this issue calling this a "FIX".
A "fix" would pose a significant barrier to entry, or at least close this one issue that would allow entry.
Well if you want to be a pendant, it works better if you are correct.
So the 5V on my arduino is a measure of its ESD tolerance? Bullshit!
In datasheets, they specify ESD tolerance as a voltage: A standardized capacitor (with a specified capacity, ESR and possibly ESL) is charged to the indicated voltage and the device is supposed to tolerate the discharge.
But voltage in itself has nothing to do with ESD.
There is a fundamental law that batteries have to follow.
The energy that is stored has to be able to come back out. So, if you short the electrodes, all that stored energy may be released in a short amount of time. Unless your energy density is very low (i.e. below usable) that will heat up your battery on short notice. There is not much you can do about that.
Absolutely!
The thing is I do things that are WAY more risky on a daily basis. Like everybody. I'll take the risk of "being above ground when an asteroid takes a shot at us" over "driving to work" any day.
> the close call highlights the dangers of asteroids.
One: Nothing happened. So how dangerous was this? If it HAD hit, maybe several hundred people would've visited hospitals and some windows woudl have had to be replaced.
Two: The danger is teaching people "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, what if an asteroid kills us?". That is dangerous. A really BIG asteroid killed the dinosaurs. These small ones are nothing to worry about. Let's assume this thing is aiming for earth, but hits randomly somewhere inside the moon's orbit. The earth has a radius of about 6000km, the moon's orbit about 300000km. A ratio of 50, so the chances of hitting earth are 1/2500. The people making a stir about these things are the ones that stand to gain employment from scaring the general public about this.
> but shit too many problems??
You should see a doctor about that.
Let me get this straight..... Meteosat images 500 million square kilometers some 16 times a day, and this satelite does a whopping 680 thousand per day....
The number only becomes impressive when you include resolution figures. (Meteosat is pretty low-res).
I have a 24V 10Ah 10C Lithium battery. Sold as multicopter battery. It weighs about a kg. (1200g IIRC, but lets round that to make the math easier).
100A*24V = 2.4kW. That's 8 times worse than the 20kW/kg for the metal scraps battery. As the power density is important for flying things, this would be great for flying.....
As to the energy densigty, I have 24V * 10Ah = 240Wh in about a kg. They have only 20Wh/kg. They are worse than my battery by a factor of 12....
Somthing fishy here.
The "better" counter to the original argument is that not all bugs are memory overruns.
Back in the early nineties I was reading the manual page for the daemon that would send a message to a terminal when a mail message came in. I concluded, from the "published specs" that I could trick it to do "nasty" things. And that turned out to work.
This is an example where no overrun, just the published actions of a program lead to a security issue.
When you write a program that needs to print the primes up to a certain number, you can easily create a formal proof that your program program is correct.
But when your program is say "apache", that needs to interact with many different browsers on one side, and interpret PHP scripts that interact with databases, this formal proof becomes impossible. Similarly, you cannot write a formal spec for the interaction with the user in for example, a web browser.
Even though both examples I put forward today (web server and web browser) didn't exist back then, I've held this opinion for thirty years (spring 1987).
Suppose this "overcharging" happens to say 5% of the customers and say 10% of them simply pay up? My guess is that this would account for a shitload of cash.
There I actively performed the firmware update myself. The new firmware rejected the non-original cartridges. After a few tests the 123inkt-support team said: "well then, it seems your cartridge is broken". So they send me a new one, I returned the old one, and since then I've been printing again. (I was going to say something like "happily", but for honesty I must leave that out....)
After googling around a bit. stories about running a bash shell on windows pop up.
It isn't "running Linux" on windows. That would imply that there is a Linux kernel running that actually manages hardware. This impression of "running on hardware" is enhanced by the slashdot summary.
None of this. Windows is simply providing those Linux system calls that allows commandline apps to run. A story then mentioned that servers would not run. That's odd: When "bash" runs and say applications like ping, ssh and telnet, you'd have to go to great lengths to prevent another app like "apache" from running.
But if what I hear is true, this is only useful for the most basic of things, no graphical capabilities. I might be an old fart that uses the commandline a lot, but that becomes useful in combination with a bunch of graphical tools that display what I need to know on a graphical screen.
As to security: the implied trick of running a linux kernel that also has access to the windows block devices is very prone to bugs and security issues. But all that is not the case: It's just another program running in an operating system, using a slightly different set of API calls. If the emulated Linux system calls end up calling windows-internal stuff AFTER the "permissions checking" that normal windows calls would do then you have a problem. It tells a lot about how badly windows is layered.