What's important about this is that it can quickly and automatically generate exploits given only OBJECT code - faster even than a good programmer could do it from source.
This negates the claim that hiding the source code increases security.
2) Patch Encryption: basically distributing the patch in an encrypted format, waiting until it is reasonable to assume that everyone has the patch, and then transmitting a decryption key to decrypt and apply the patch more or less "simultaneously".
This can make things worse:
The distribution of the patch alerts the bad guys to the existence of the bug.
- They can use their botnet infrastructure to get the key early and DDoS the key servers (possibly simultaneously, using the botnet to grab the key through the DDoS leaks). This may end up with a larger unpatched population when they deploy their exploit.
- If they can crack the encryption or break into the distribution mechanism and grab the key early, they can deploy the exploit while NOBODY is patched.
- If the existence of the patch alerts them to the existence and possibly to the location of a vulnerability, they may find it by other means before the key is released, again deploying an exploit while the whole population is unpatched.
3) Fast Patch Distribution: basically leveraging technologies like P2P to insure that patches are rolled out...well...fast.
This just changes the timescale and is subject to DoSing as well. It also (as others have pointed out) opens the opportunity to poison the torrent/whatever with fake or corrupted versions of the patch - installing their own back door if possible, delaying or halting the updating to widen their exploit window in any case.
Unless Microsoft starts using something like satellite technology and distributes a satellite receiver to every user of Windows, you'll always have to deal with lag for getting patches out.
Think of sysadmins as janitors. We pay you to wipe up the mess. It's not worth our while to invest in systems that don't create a mess as long as janitors are cheap enough to come with their electronic mops and buckets.
That works for small messes.
It doesn't work for somebody getting hold of the company's trade secrets, client list, bidding information, road map, and headhuntable employee names and pay scale.
It doesn't work for somebody cracking the information on the company accounts and transferring the cash reserves to themselves via untraceable paths.
It doesn't work for somebody destroying or corrupting the IT infrastructure - especially the databases - and taking the company out of business for days or forever, causing key employees to quit or be fired, etc.
It doesn't work for somebody corrupting industrial process control infrastructure and literally destroy plants and kill employees, or cause the company to build and ship defective products.
I could go on.
Cleaning up IT graffiti is one thing. Cleaning up IT nuclear strikes is quite another.
IMHO any corporate IT exec who treats malware like graffiti, rather than an early warning of something more serious, is negligent in his fiduciary duty to the shareholders and perhaps criminally negligent in his duty to protect the lives and health of the employees. (Pity that most of 'em do treat the threat in this way. B-( )
Distribute an encrypted patch, and then once all clients have downloaded it reveal the key, which is short and can be sent in a single network packet.
Which shifts the problem from distributing the update to distributing the key.
Of course this does have another advantage: Distributing the encrypted update also distributes notification that there WILL be a key, and can tell the users when. Then it becomes a race to get the key and apply the patch before the bad guys can get the key, generate, and deploy an exploit.
And the downside: The bad guys also know the patch is coming, and when. So they can use their existing botnet(s) to grab a key as soon as possible, then (or simultaneously) DDOS the key distribution mechanism while they generate and deploy the exploit. This makes things WORSE: A much larger fraction of the machines are vulnerable when the exploit deploys.
Still worse: If the bad guys crack the encryption, or manage to break in and grab the key early, they get to automatically generate and deploy an exploit while NOBODY has the fix. Oops!
Ditto even if they don't crack the patch - but the patche exposes that a vulnerability exists and perhaps what module has it, and they find and exploit the vulnerability before the key deploys.
= = = =
In a battle between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
Or distribute encrypted patches over the course of a day, then when you publish the key everyone can update
Which shifts the problem from distributing the update to distributing the key.
Of course this does have another advantage: Distributing the encrypted update also distributes notification that there WILL be a key, and can tell the users when. Then it becomes a race to get the key and apply the patch before the bad guys can get the key, generate, and deploy an exploit.
And the downside: The bad guys also know the patch is coming, and when. So they can use their existing botnet(s) to grab a key as soon as possible, then DDOS the key distribution mechanism while they generate and deploy the exploit. This makes things WORSE: A much larger fraction of the machines are vulnerable when the exploit deploys.
Still worse: If the bad guys crack the encryption, or manage to break in and grab the key early, they get to automatically generate and deploy an exploit while NOBODY has the fix. Oops!
Ditto even if they don't crack the patch - but the patches exposes that a vulnerability exists and perhaps what module has it, and they find and exploit the vulnerability before the key deploys.
= = = =
In a battle between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
Ion engines... make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current.
No it doesn't. It creates a MECHANICAL FORCE directed sideways to the current. It's the Faraday effect, which is what drives electric motors.
It's also how you can use the Hall effect to determine whether the majority current carrier is positive or negative: The carriers are accelerated toward the same side of the conductor, so the sign of the hall voltage tells you whether you have more + or - charge carriers.
(IIRC It's how they showed that Franklin guessed wrong when he assigned + and - to charges, leading to the sign of "classical current" and the points of arrows on semiconductor diagrams being opposite to the direction of electron flow.)
The demo "comes in for a landing" on a San Francisco street. The building imagery is texture-mapped onto the building volume models but the profiles of the cars are texture-mapped onto the ground.
Result: The cars are all "squashed flat" onto the street. Reduced to a layer of paint. Steel road-kill.
A great Earth Day gift for the eco-freaks of San Francisco. B-)
(And I bet Critical Mass members are grinning as well.)
Accessing a wireless network you're not authorized to be on is considered a felony terrorist act, punishable by 30 years in prison. (Even though it should be just a misdemeanor B&E at best if you do no damage.)
IMHO it should not be a crime at all for some configurations.
The computer-using community (pre-wireless) had a long history of using software as agents and protection settings as an expression of intent. (For instance: If a file was read-everybody, it was generally assumed it was OK to read it without asking. If it was read-protected it might be trivial for a super user to read it - but he'd generally ask permission first. Guest accounts with no password or password "guest" were assumed to be OK to use (providing you didn't hog the resources). And so on.)
Wireless routers have mechanisms to clearly express intent in this manner: They advertise their presence if that is enabled. DHCP explicitly hands out credentials when asked, again if it is enabled. WEP encryption is like the latch on a screen door: trivial to crack - but perfectly suitable for telling anybody trying to connect that they're supposed to ask a human for permission first.
The problem is that router manufacturers have been shipping routers configured so the screen door is unlatched and the welcome mat out - with no mention that there's an invisible screen door and welcome mat. So the legal system is (perhaps reasonably) ignoring the old convention and demanding explicit permission. Unfortunately it's also treating anybody who follows the old conventions as a masked and armed burglar, rather than putting any onus on the "property owner" to put up a fence, no trespassing sign, latch his screen door, or otherwise express that his intent is different from that advertised (at the top of its virtual lungs) by his WiFi access point.
I've tried "desktop Linuces" and found them all pretty clunky for the stuff I wanted to do.
I'd been in that boat as well. I switched to Linux (Red Hat) from Solaris for the Y2K upgrade and had been using various versions for desktop and laptop - mainly older ones - since. (And the company provides Gentoo-based desktops to engineers.) Yes, they were clunky - to progressively lessening degrees.
But last year I got a few days of non-crunch to migrate to a newer work laptop, and decided to try Ubuntu. And Gutsy came out the day after I committed to the move.
IMHO as of Ubuntu Gutsy, Linux is starting to hit its stride as a prime-time desktop/laptop OS. Hardware worked right off the bat: Graphics, mouse, WiFi,... Does everything I need in a laptop - including all the unix tricks I WANT in a laptop. (Could have run it out-of-the-jewel-case, but decided to hand-port my firewall settings from the older laptop rather than trust that tool. B-) ) Even plays DVDs if I grab the codecs. Updating - utilities and kernel - is painless and (once I approve it) automatic - and the stock installation includes the tool that checks periodically and alerts me when it's needed.
Still a few rough edges:
- Some of the Microsoft tools used at work refuse to talk to anything but IE.
- Tried to use the GNU replacement for Flash with the screen's closed drivers and it would hang the window system, so I had to switch to real Adobe.
- I haven't found the right set of DLLs added to WINE to support the Avaya softphone (for VoIPing my company desk phone to the vacation house). Darn thing wants to use the Jet database. (But it doesn't seem to work on all the Windows laptops either.)
- VPN doesn't want to work over the WiFi because of a bug: It's hardcoded to use the ETH0 interface, which is the wired one unless you hand-tweak a config file.
- And of course the standard issues with Open Office not QUITE supporting all the hidden features of Word.
Still, for me it's crossed the threshold. And I expect it to only get smoother from here.
Which is good: We just got merged and the new mothership insists on running encrypted filesystems and token-based authorization on laptops that they let connect to some of the corporate servers. Only supported on Windows by IT. Throw in the towel and move to Windows? But just in time comes Hardy - the next long-term supported release - with encrypted filesystem installs as a stock configuration. B-)
So Linux goes from 1% to 2%. Big deal. It isn't that hard (or notable) to get 1% or 2% of the market (or even 3% or 4%). If you have 45% of computer users, which is probably a billion people, and double that, that's something worth talking about.
Nothing times 2 is nothing but 1% times two in less than a year is huge. If it continues at that rate it gets to your 45% target in 3 1/2 years and has 2/3 of the market in 3 3/4.
Of course there are retarding effects as the market fraction increases which will make it fall back from the exponential. (It must eventually, since it can't go over 100%. B-) ) On the other hand, claiming a significant percentage turns the compatibility and social-networking effects in its favor.
Looking at kernel source makes me break out into a cold sweat.
Then it's a good thing Windows source code isn't open. I hear from people who've worked with it that reading it causes the release of several warmer bodily fluids.
I was listening to an interview with one of the techies who does load balancing on the UK's national grid who said that wind and solar (any form) give him the willies because they're so unreliable from minute-to-minute.
Which shows he doesn't understand statistics - and how they apply to the many relatively small generation devices involved in wind and solar. They don't all come up and down on the same minute, even with a storm blowing up or furling the mills of a dense wind farm or cloud-shading photovoltaic or photo-thermal generation sites.
In particular, if they're a lot of little guys with grid-tied renewable energy systems that do net-metering or other sell-back modes, they have essentially the same switch-on, switch-off characteristics as heating and air conditioning loads - except with sign reversed. (Solar tends to track air conditioning load pretty well - with a bit of phase lead that still puts its hump overlapping the air-conditioning load hump. Wind tends to track heating load - mainly because air motion increases heat transfer across insulation, though partly because cooler weather is associated with air motion from storms.)
So solar and wind generation actually HELP keep the load and generation matched on the average, while not being more of a problem than the essentially completely uncontrolled customer load switching.
(Or at least that's how I understand it. If this is wrong I'll be happy to see a description of how and why. Preferably with some real-world data or tested models.)
Wow, just look at those results! It was essentially a party roll call.
Notice that "Dr. No" also voted against it. Ron Paul is NOT going to base his vote on trying to improve or preserve election cheating.
That says to me that there's an issue with the Federal Government exceeding its constitutional authority by meddling in the states' election procedures (which ARE the (states' business), there's some "devil in the details" that makes it do the opposite of what it claims, or it's a feel-good-do-nothing bill that would raid the treasury and derail any REAL fix.
The last thing I want to see is more "election reform" that either makes the elections less accurate or gets enjoined and killed by the courts for a legitimate reason while REAL reform is headed off.
(Elections aren't about "fair". They're about heading off violence by predicting its results, well enough that the losers understand that violence won't reverse the loss. So it's very important that the election is both honest and visibly so.)
Hopefully things will slide a little further toward the "D" side next year, and we just might see bills like this made into law.
If any of my conjectures above is correct that's an outcome to be avoided.
Our galaxy's black hole, Sagittarius-A, is not considered active, although it does have some weak emissions, primarily at harmless infrared and radio wavelengths consistent with a very small accretion disc. The nearest star to the black hole is estimated to be about 70 times as far away from it as it would need to be for the gravitational forces to remove significant amounts of material from the star. It also has an orbital period of 15 years, so it would take a long time and a significant perturbance to fall significantly close. It doesn't seem likely at all that it would become active in the foreseeable future.
Of course the very center of a galaxy is a pretty busy area. So there's the possibility that a star, much farther out, has looped around another one and is on its way into the hole. Much like a comet being perturbed out of the Oort cloud or an asteroid getting perturbed into a hook around jupiter and dropping into the inner system. I imagine dumping a sun and its planets into the hole occasionally could cause a problem.
Orbital mechanics seems to be fractal, so I'd expect the core of a galaxy to have the same sort of issues with infalling stars, clouds, and clusters as the inner system of Sol has with comets. (And there IS that galactic cloud that's incoming...) If this is a general phenomenon, causing galaxies (or at least ours) to have a sterilizing flash every few million years, it could help to explain the Fermi paradox: We'd just be the first new lifeform since the last spring cleaning to develop to a radio-using tech level within radio range of our area.
There are a lot of galaxies like ours out there. Perhaps they can provide enough of a statistical sample to let us know how often such events can be expected.
So, since these huge frickin'... er... death beams... exit via the poles, wouldn't most of the planets in our galaxy be relatively safe from irradiation?
Unfortunately, the beams are so energetic that, this close to them, the percentage that scatters off the dense stars clusters and clouds near the core is still an issue.
I'd think of it as the difference between becoming a steam explosion and burning organics in a steel mill from having a crucible of molten iron dumped on you and being burned into a crispy critter by the infrared and splashed droplets from having one dumped on the guy next to you.
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
I've done that.
The particular calculator in question would spin madly, with the result digit dials working like a cross between an odometer and a clock movement, until you hit the button that aborts the process. (The abort apparently consisted of changing the divisor to a large number. It took close to a minute as the machine would do a trial subtraction, undo it, shift the register bar one to the left, and repeat until it got to the last digit.)
If you are an active EVE player, don't use the torrent links to download the source. CCP is monitoring the torrents and banning any accounts with matching IP addresses to any of the people using the torrent.
Well that will be great for any of their users who get a dynamic IP that was previously used to download the code.
Slashdot Mirror
What's important about this is that it can quickly and automatically generate exploits given only OBJECT code - faster even than a good programmer could do it from source.
This negates the claim that hiding the source code increases security.
2) Patch Encryption: basically distributing the patch in an encrypted format, waiting until it is reasonable to assume that everyone has the patch, and then transmitting a decryption key to decrypt and apply the patch more or less "simultaneously".
This can make things worse:
The distribution of the patch alerts the bad guys to the existence of the bug.
- They can use their botnet infrastructure to get the key early and DDoS the key servers (possibly simultaneously, using the botnet to grab the key through the DDoS leaks). This may end up with a larger unpatched population when they deploy their exploit.
- If they can crack the encryption or break into the distribution mechanism and grab the key early, they can deploy the exploit while NOBODY is patched.
- If the existence of the patch alerts them to the existence and possibly to the location of a vulnerability, they may find it by other means before the key is released, again deploying an exploit while the whole population is unpatched.
3) Fast Patch Distribution: basically leveraging technologies like P2P to insure that patches are rolled out...well...fast.
This just changes the timescale and is subject to DoSing as well. It also (as others have pointed out) opens the opportunity to poison the torrent/whatever with fake or corrupted versions of the patch - installing their own back door if possible, delaying or halting the updating to widen their exploit window in any case.
Unless Microsoft starts using something like satellite technology and distributes a satellite receiver to every user of Windows, you'll always have to deal with lag for getting patches out.
It's called "IP Multicast".
Does YOUR ISP support it?
Think of sysadmins as janitors. We pay you to wipe up the mess. It's not worth our while to invest in systems that don't create a mess as long as janitors are cheap enough to come with their electronic mops and buckets.
That works for small messes.
It doesn't work for somebody getting hold of the company's trade secrets, client list, bidding information, road map, and headhuntable employee names and pay scale.
It doesn't work for somebody cracking the information on the company accounts and transferring the cash reserves to themselves via untraceable paths.
It doesn't work for somebody destroying or corrupting the IT infrastructure - especially the databases - and taking the company out of business for days or forever, causing key employees to quit or be fired, etc.
It doesn't work for somebody corrupting industrial process control infrastructure and literally destroy plants and kill employees, or cause the company to build and ship defective products.
I could go on.
Cleaning up IT graffiti is one thing. Cleaning up IT nuclear strikes is quite another.
IMHO any corporate IT exec who treats malware like graffiti, rather than an early warning of something more serious, is negligent in his fiduciary duty to the shareholders and perhaps criminally negligent in his duty to protect the lives and health of the employees. (Pity that most of 'em do treat the threat in this way. B-( )
Distribute an encrypted patch, and then once all clients have downloaded it reveal the key, which is short and can be sent in a single network packet.
Which shifts the problem from distributing the update to distributing the key.
Of course this does have another advantage: Distributing the encrypted update also distributes notification that there WILL be a key, and can tell the users when. Then it becomes a race to get the key and apply the patch before the bad guys can get the key, generate, and deploy an exploit.
And the downside: The bad guys also know the patch is coming, and when. So they can use their existing botnet(s) to grab a key as soon as possible, then (or simultaneously) DDOS the key distribution mechanism while they generate and deploy the exploit. This makes things WORSE: A much larger fraction of the machines are vulnerable when the exploit deploys.
Still worse: If the bad guys crack the encryption, or manage to break in and grab the key early, they get to automatically generate and deploy an exploit while NOBODY has the fix. Oops!
Ditto even if they don't crack the patch - but the patche exposes that a vulnerability exists and perhaps what module has it, and they find and exploit the vulnerability before the key deploys.
= = = =
In a battle between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
Or distribute encrypted patches over the course of a day, then when you publish the key everyone can update
Which shifts the problem from distributing the update to distributing the key.
Of course this does have another advantage: Distributing the encrypted update also distributes notification that there WILL be a key, and can tell the users when. Then it becomes a race to get the key and apply the patch before the bad guys can get the key, generate, and deploy an exploit.
And the downside: The bad guys also know the patch is coming, and when. So they can use their existing botnet(s) to grab a key as soon as possible, then DDOS the key distribution mechanism while they generate and deploy the exploit. This makes things WORSE: A much larger fraction of the machines are vulnerable when the exploit deploys.
Still worse: If the bad guys crack the encryption, or manage to break in and grab the key early, they get to automatically generate and deploy an exploit while NOBODY has the fix. Oops!
Ditto even if they don't crack the patch - but the patches exposes that a vulnerability exists and perhaps what module has it, and they find and exploit the vulnerability before the key deploys.
= = = =
In a battle between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
Ion engines ... make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current.
No it doesn't. It creates a MECHANICAL FORCE directed sideways to the current. It's the Faraday effect, which is what drives electric motors.
It's also how you can use the Hall effect to determine whether the majority current carrier is positive or negative: The carriers are accelerated toward the same side of the conductor, so the sign of the hall voltage tells you whether you have more + or - charge carriers.
(IIRC It's how they showed that Franklin guessed wrong when he assigned + and - to charges, leading to the sign of "classical current" and the points of arrows on semiconductor diagrams being opposite to the direction of electron flow.)
TIE Fighter's, anyone? (Twin Ion Engine, for those of you who are not true geeks)
You mean it's NOT because they're shaped like bow ties?
Darn!
The demo "comes in for a landing" on a San Francisco street. The building imagery is texture-mapped onto the building volume models but the profiles of the cars are texture-mapped onto the ground.
Result: The cars are all "squashed flat" onto the street. Reduced to a layer of paint. Steel road-kill.
A great Earth Day gift for the eco-freaks of San Francisco. B-)
(And I bet Critical Mass members are grinning as well.)
Accessing a wireless network you're not authorized to be on is considered a felony terrorist act, punishable by 30 years in prison. (Even though it should be just a misdemeanor B&E at best if you do no damage.)
IMHO it should not be a crime at all for some configurations.
The computer-using community (pre-wireless) had a long history of using software as agents and protection settings as an expression of intent. (For instance: If a file was read-everybody, it was generally assumed it was OK to read it without asking. If it was read-protected it might be trivial for a super user to read it - but he'd generally ask permission first. Guest accounts with no password or password "guest" were assumed to be OK to use (providing you didn't hog the resources). And so on.)
Wireless routers have mechanisms to clearly express intent in this manner: They advertise their presence if that is enabled. DHCP explicitly hands out credentials when asked, again if it is enabled. WEP encryption is like the latch on a screen door: trivial to crack - but perfectly suitable for telling anybody trying to connect that they're supposed to ask a human for permission first.
The problem is that router manufacturers have been shipping routers configured so the screen door is unlatched and the welcome mat out - with no mention that there's an invisible screen door and welcome mat. So the legal system is (perhaps reasonably) ignoring the old convention and demanding explicit permission. Unfortunately it's also treating anybody who follows the old conventions as a masked and armed burglar, rather than putting any onus on the "property owner" to put up a fence, no trespassing sign, latch his screen door, or otherwise express that his intent is different from that advertised (at the top of its virtual lungs) by his WiFi access point.
I've tried "desktop Linuces" and found them all pretty clunky for the stuff I wanted to do.
... Does everything I need in a laptop - including all the unix tricks I WANT in a laptop. (Could have run it out-of-the-jewel-case, but decided to hand-port my firewall settings from the older laptop rather than trust that tool. B-) ) Even plays DVDs if I grab the codecs. Updating - utilities and kernel - is painless and (once I approve it) automatic - and the stock installation includes the tool that checks periodically and alerts me when it's needed.
I'd been in that boat as well. I switched to Linux (Red Hat) from Solaris for the Y2K upgrade and had been using various versions for desktop and laptop - mainly older ones - since. (And the company provides Gentoo-based desktops to engineers.) Yes, they were clunky - to progressively lessening degrees.
But last year I got a few days of non-crunch to migrate to a newer work laptop, and decided to try Ubuntu. And Gutsy came out the day after I committed to the move.
IMHO as of Ubuntu Gutsy, Linux is starting to hit its stride as a prime-time desktop/laptop OS. Hardware worked right off the bat: Graphics, mouse, WiFi,
Still a few rough edges:
- Some of the Microsoft tools used at work refuse to talk to anything but IE.
- Tried to use the GNU replacement for Flash with the screen's closed drivers and it would hang the window system, so I had to switch to real Adobe.
- I haven't found the right set of DLLs added to WINE to support the Avaya softphone (for VoIPing my company desk phone to the vacation house). Darn thing wants to use the Jet database. (But it doesn't seem to work on all the Windows laptops either.)
- VPN doesn't want to work over the WiFi because of a bug: It's hardcoded to use the ETH0 interface, which is the wired one unless you hand-tweak a config file.
- And of course the standard issues with Open Office not QUITE supporting all the hidden features of Word.
Still, for me it's crossed the threshold. And I expect it to only get smoother from here.
Which is good: We just got merged and the new mothership insists on running encrypted filesystems and token-based authorization on laptops that they let connect to some of the corporate servers. Only supported on Windows by IT. Throw in the towel and move to Windows? But just in time comes Hardy - the next long-term supported release - with encrypted filesystem installs as a stock configuration. B-)
So Linux goes from 1% to 2%. Big deal. It isn't that hard (or notable) to get 1% or 2% of the market (or even 3% or 4%). If you have 45% of computer users, which is probably a billion people, and double that, that's something worth talking about.
Nothing times 2 is nothing but 1% times two in less than a year is huge. If it continues at that rate it gets to your 45% target in 3 1/2 years and has 2/3 of the market in 3 3/4.
Of course there are retarding effects as the market fraction increases which will make it fall back from the exponential. (It must eventually, since it can't go over 100%. B-) ) On the other hand, claiming a significant percentage turns the compatibility and social-networking effects in its favor.
... you can always use a windows boot disk or cd and either use fdisk with the /mbr switch, or the recovery console to fix the master bot record.
Master bot record? I thought they only had those on the cluster servers in a bot nets. B-)
Looking at kernel source makes me break out into a cold sweat.
Then it's a good thing Windows source code isn't open. I hear from people who've worked with it that reading it causes the release of several warmer bodily fluids.
it was literally ironed out a week ago
So now we know what the the problem was: wrinkly chips.
Ruffles?
If you build your plant large enough to satisfy peak demand, throttling back is a matter of rotating or shrouding a few mirrors or PV panels.
Photovoltaics "throttle back" fine by just not drawing current from them.
I was listening to an interview with one of the techies who does load balancing on the UK's national grid who said that wind and solar (any form) give him the willies because they're so unreliable from minute-to-minute.
Which shows he doesn't understand statistics - and how they apply to the many relatively small generation devices involved in wind and solar. They don't all come up and down on the same minute, even with a storm blowing up or furling the mills of a dense wind farm or cloud-shading photovoltaic or photo-thermal generation sites.
In particular, if they're a lot of little guys with grid-tied renewable energy systems that do net-metering or other sell-back modes, they have essentially the same switch-on, switch-off characteristics as heating and air conditioning loads - except with sign reversed. (Solar tends to track air conditioning load pretty well - with a bit of phase lead that still puts its hump overlapping the air-conditioning load hump. Wind tends to track heating load - mainly because air motion increases heat transfer across insulation, though partly because cooler weather is associated with air motion from storms.)
So solar and wind generation actually HELP keep the load and generation matched on the average, while not being more of a problem than the essentially completely uncontrolled customer load switching.
(Or at least that's how I understand it. If this is wrong I'll be happy to see a description of how and why. Preferably with some real-world data or tested models.)
Wow, just look at those results! It was essentially a party roll call.
Notice that "Dr. No" also voted against it. Ron Paul is NOT going to base his vote on trying to improve or preserve election cheating.
That says to me that there's an issue with the Federal Government exceeding its constitutional authority by meddling in the states' election procedures (which ARE the (states' business), there's some "devil in the details" that makes it do the opposite of what it claims, or it's a feel-good-do-nothing bill that would raid the treasury and derail any REAL fix.
The last thing I want to see is more "election reform" that either makes the elections less accurate or gets enjoined and killed by the courts for a legitimate reason while REAL reform is headed off.
(Elections aren't about "fair". They're about heading off violence by predicting its results, well enough that the losers understand that violence won't reverse the loss. So it's very important that the election is both honest and visibly so.)
Hopefully things will slide a little further toward the "D" side next year, and we just might see bills like this made into law.
If any of my conjectures above is correct that's an outcome to be avoided.
People's legitimate activities are being hindered in a coercive manner by criminal activity on a massive scale. Large numbers of people are affected.
The problem is increasing.
Defensive strategies have failed.
Governments are unwilling or unable to take steps to apprehend and/or deter the perpetrators.
This is a classic example of the conditions that inspire vigilante action.
I wonder how much longer until we begin to see it.
Our galaxy's black hole, Sagittarius-A, is not considered active, although it does have some weak emissions, primarily at harmless infrared and radio wavelengths consistent with a very small accretion disc. The nearest star to the black hole is estimated to be about 70 times as far away from it as it would need to be for the gravitational forces to remove significant amounts of material from the star. It also has an orbital period of 15 years, so it would take a long time and a significant perturbance to fall significantly close. It doesn't seem likely at all that it would become active in the foreseeable future.
Of course the very center of a galaxy is a pretty busy area. So there's the possibility that a star, much farther out, has looped around another one and is on its way into the hole. Much like a comet being perturbed out of the Oort cloud or an asteroid getting perturbed into a hook around jupiter and dropping into the inner system. I imagine dumping a sun and its planets into the hole occasionally could cause a problem.
Orbital mechanics seems to be fractal, so I'd expect the core of a galaxy to have the same sort of issues with infalling stars, clouds, and clusters as the inner system of Sol has with comets. (And there IS that galactic cloud that's incoming...) If this is a general phenomenon, causing galaxies (or at least ours) to have a sterilizing flash every few million years, it could help to explain the Fermi paradox: We'd just be the first new lifeform since the last spring cleaning to develop to a radio-using tech level within radio range of our area.
There are a lot of galaxies like ours out there. Perhaps they can provide enough of a statistical sample to let us know how often such events can be expected.
So, since these huge frickin' ... er... death beams ... exit via the poles, wouldn't most of the planets in our galaxy be relatively safe from irradiation?
Unfortunately, the beams are so energetic that, this close to them, the percentage that scatters off the dense stars clusters and clouds near the core is still an issue.
I'd think of it as the difference between becoming a steam explosion and burning organics in a steel mill from having a crucible of molten iron dumped on you and being burned into a crispy critter by the infrared and splashed droplets from having one dumped on the guy next to you.
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
I've done that.
The particular calculator in question would spin madly, with the result digit dials working like a cross between an odometer and a clock movement, until you hit the button that aborts the process. (The abort apparently consisted of changing the divisor to a large number. It took close to a minute as the machine would do a trial subtraction, undo it, shift the register bar one to the left, and repeat until it got to the last digit.)
But does it run linux?
We'll know about four years after it's completed - when it gets done with the boot-up.
It works! It works! It works!
If you are an active EVE player, don't use the torrent links to download the source. CCP is monitoring the torrents and banning any accounts with matching IP addresses to any of the people using the torrent.
Well that will be great for any of their users who get a dynamic IP that was previously used to download the code.
I smell corporate suicide.