Do you really think that the creators of these "tools" aren't going to leave SOME way of getting back into them? To prevent them from being used against their own systems?
"Did you really think you could use my own spell against me, Potter?" -Severus Snape "HP: THBP"
Only on Slashdot could a guy who had the Comedian Tag try to get it back by being funny and get modded insightful.
Likewise, only on Slashdot could someone get their angst on by begging the moderators to mod them Troll for challenging them over that same try at being a comedian.
Apparently this fellow hasn't heard of the Sawfish?
The Sawfish is powered by electric motors, sports eight video camera eyes as well as sonar, and uses “biodegradable and vegetable oil-based hydraulic fluids.” Triton estimates that British Colombia alone has five billion board feet of salvageable lumber submerged underwater and that the number could exceed 100 billion board feet worldwide. The estimated value of these some odd 300 million submerged trees is $50 billion. (From Treehugger)
Also, commercial grade cannabis-the kind that doesn't get you high when you smoke it-can provide 42% of our current lumber needs by eliminating the need to use lumber for paper products. Not to mention the other commercial products you get from it, such as clothing, food and solvents for use in paints, thinners and other industrial processes. To top it all off, you get several crops per season, rather than one crop per every two decades.
So anyone saying "peak lumber" should just paste a cutout of Glenn Beck on their face and call it done.
Would this be a fundamental flaw of the TOR network? If you don't know who's controlling the exit nodes, then you will never know if the information you send is truly secure.
One of the things we were trained for in the Navy-and something in which I got an abject lesson-is "Trust but verify". I "trusted" my senior petty officer when he told me that he'd secured the transmitters when we went to go raise the antennas. When I got back to radio to restore the "secured" transmitters, I found them happily pouring out 1000 watts of power with each ping, which were coming 2-3 per second.
My "Link-11 Sunburn" taught me that very important lesson: Trust but verify.
If you can't verify the network yourself, then don't trust it. Make sure the information you send over it can't be traced back to you in any way. Good luck with that, but do your best anyway.
Every single time I see one of these "revolutionary" new "cars", they ALL have the exact same characteristics that look like they were designed by Douglas Adams.
1. Made from some ultra-light material that has NO crash protection value whatsoever.
2. NO inside space, whatsoever.
3. NO practical applications, whatsoever.
Lemme tell you what I want to see in an electric car?
1. Must be able to carry 3 screaming kids. 2. Must be able to carry said screaming kids with 1 weeks worth of groceries in the back, 500 pounds of beach toys, or 500 pounds of ski gear. 3. Must be able to SAFELY carry 1 & 2 while traveling along the Long Island Distressway on a Friday afternooon in August, and a Sunday afternoon on the Throggs Neck Bridge in February. 4. Must be able to make it from Manhattan to either Hunter Mountain or Cooper's Beach while meeting criteria 1,2 and 3.
If you can make an electric car that can do THAT, you'll be the wealthiest person on the face of the planet.
A friend of mine just signed up with Comcast at his new apartment? I warned him that Comcast has the WORST reputation in the US, but he just shrugged.
He pays for business access, rather than private home access. It's another $40 per month, but there's higher bandwidth, servers are allowed, no traffic shaping, no throttling of Bittorrent protocols, and best of all, NO CAP.
His theory-and it seems to hold-is that if you're going to cough up the dosh for a business account, then you know what you're getting into with such things, so they don't care if the RIAA/MPAA shows up at your door.
I suppose, but I think it's just the extra $40 that turns their head.
One of my gmail addresses was getting 95 spams per 24 hour period. I forgot to log in via the webportal over the weekend, and was simply downloading via Mailwasher and Thunderbird, so the spam folder filled rapidly.
By the time I checked it, there were some 350 spams in there from Friday night to Monday afternoon. That number had been holding steady for the last week, but today?
Just five. The interesting thing is that I was only seeing about 20 or 30 a day up until 2 weeks ago, then everything surged bigtime.
My guess is the operators saw the shutdown coming and stepped up their operations to boost infection rates prior to packing up shop and moving elsewhere.
In the 50's, my mom was a nurse, and the most powerful weapon the hospital had at the time were the penicillins. It was a miracle, and it saved hundreds of people in the hospital she worked in.
But mom saw the danger. She warned the doctors, "Don't overuse them, the bugs will get used to it." She used to pester the doctors about it non-stop, but she was a woman and a nurse. What did she know? She also warned them that using too much would wipe out all the good bugs and make things worse for the patient.
Sure enough, one patient got overdosed and their gut flora were wiped out. After trying to figure out what to do with a patient that was dying of starvation and dehydration from the lack of good gut bugs, they gave them "shit soup" through a nasal tube. The doctors were "amazed" at their recovery. Duh?!
Mom watched the doctors start prescribing antibiotics for everything. By the time she left in the late sixties, she was already seeing antibiotic resistant staph that plowed through penicillin like it was candy.
Dad was a landscaper, and he saw the same thing with weed killers, fertilizers and bug spray. Sure, it killed the weeds one year, but they always came back, stronger than before. It used to be you could wipe out all the Japanese beetles in the cherry tree with half an ounce of Malathion in two gallons of water, and the stench wasn't so bad. Now you have to use two, sometimes three ounces, since only a half ounce made the bugs stoned, but little else. And lemme tell you, Southampton mosquitoes are among some of the most heavily sprayed, since the rich people don't like getting bitten.
Now they're impossible to kill.
We've known about this for at least 75 years or more, we've just chosen to ignore it because it's easier and more profitable to think in the short term, and hope the bill never comes.
Well guess what. The bill is on the table, and now we gotta cough up.
I would imagine firefighting principles from naval vessels would be about5 as relevant as those from residential suburban firefighting.
From the perspective of putting the fire out, yes, you'd be quite correct. There is not WAY you're going to put THAT out with AFFF alone. You wouldn't be able to use explosives, either, since that only works on isolated well heads. You'd get an instant re-flash from the white-hot metal and burning debris after the detonation.
But from the perspective of keeping the rig afloat, the principles are exactly the same.
1. Establish fire boundaries.
1a. Place personnel at those boundaries to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent areas. Cooling bulkheads with short bursts of water to keep them from melting or breaching.
1b. Establish secondary fire boundaries and smoke boundaries. You need a buffer zone that's safe to send relief fire fighters, and also a place to fall back if the primary boundaries fail.
2. Establish flooding boundaries.
2a. Figure out where the water used to fight the fire OR maintain the boundaries is going, where it's going to collect, and how to get it out of there. If the space is small and low to the ship's center of gravity, filling it up won't jeopardize stability. If it's a big space, then you have to pump out the water you use to fight the fires.
2b. Maintain those flooding boundaries. Bring in more pumps, establish hose lines, get the eductors working and get all that water overboard asap. If you don't, the ship will list to one side and make things even more difficult, or possibly capsize the ship. Or even worse, if the water is trapped at the primary fire boundary, it'll start to boil and kill off the fire fighters.
From what I can see in the pictures, it looks like that procedure failed at #1a. There was nobody to fight the fire at all, everyone evacuated. And by the time any fire fighters might have arrived, the "primary boundary" was most likely the ocean itself.
So the theory and practice are exactly the same, it's just that there was nobody around to implement it. And even if there were, I don't know if they'd be able to. That was a HOT fire.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.
If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors, s-type eductors and just plain mops and buckets.
I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.
But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.
The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.
Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.
This thing went *BOOM* in a way it's not supposed to go boom.
Tilapia are herbivorous, so you can feed them plant waste. You can almost feed them by fertilizing the water they live in, since they'll eat anything that grows in the water. They're great for controlling aquatic weeds, too. There's a reason tilapia are chosen to be raised on organic veggie farms? You can just recycle the veggie waste right into the shredder and into the tanks.
FTA: "...a means to save the animal from overfishing and possible extinction have been found. "
Actually, it's cheaper and better to simply stop fishing for them altogether for a few years. Just leave them alone and they'll come back reasonably quick, if you haven't, y'know, BUILT OVER their spawning beds or anything.
On the one hand, if you're playing around without wearing a condom, then you're a Darwin Award. On the other hand, this could be exceptionally nasty in third world nations, especially in places where condoms aren't available or expensive. Now it's Nature's Reset Button. And if the people are listening to a religious restriction, saying condom use is against their faith, now we're back to the Darwin angle.
Plus, any dude with access to the database can hack together an SQL query to find out which houses have a total water usage under a gallon over the past three days and know who's not home.
If they've got the brains and resources to know how to do this, then chances are VERY good that they're also smart enough to know that robbery is a bad idea that doesn't pay very well. Someone like that is much more likely to try and rootkit someone's wireless router whether they're home or not, then steal their bank details.
And if you're worried about a government agency trying to find out if you're home or not so they can install bugs, then you're either in bigger trouble than you know, or you should be wearing a tin-foil hat.
I tried that once with my cellphone? It did seal it very well.
Except the plastic ended up squashing all the buttons, including the power button, which turned it off. I tried letting a little air in, but then you couldn't hear or be heard. It was a nice try, but failed.
I cannot call up the Gawker article unless I go through a proxy outside the US. I can get to gawker.com, but I cannot call up the article. http://bit.ly/cOqlAU
Looking at the source code, I don't even get an HTML header. It's completely blank. Zip. Nada. I can look at any other Gawker article except that one.
Also, the Norwegian newspaper, www.skup.no is down hard. I tried via proxy, no joy. I checked out www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com and sure enough, it's dead.
The thing they didn't cover very much, is the one thing that is actually most important: hygiene.
Bacteria and especially fungi absolutely thrive under pressure, and a mild case of Athlete's Foot can rapidly become severe, even hazardous as the infection gets worse. Fungal infections were one of the most serious problems onboard the previous endeavors, as they were impossible to eradicate once established in the living areas. Bacterial infections were even more dangerous, as the partial pressure ratio of gases in the atmosphere-and also the bloodstream-effectively doubles, giving the bugs plenty of fuel.
They did touch on the hygiene issue with the shower, but didn't say why other than the obvious reasons? But if you're going to live underwater, under more than one atmosphere, hygiene becomes absolutely vital.
In the past, when this sort of thing has been suggested, the cries of "vigilante" and "lawlessness" were cried from the highest mountaintops, and the lowest swamps of the Internet. And anyone who actually DID anything was pilloried and run out of town on a rail.
[sarcasm] What changed, I wonder? [/sarcasm]
Now that the losses are in the hundreds of millions, in several dozen different currencies, those same voices seem to have lost their enthusiasm.
A friend once made the observation that no big-time, fast-track success story in the world of IT ever makes it without doing something that gets them into serious hot water at least once. Once they do that, they offer a bunch of mea culpas, make a few donations here and there, then make bank. (The slow-track success stories don't usually fit that theory.)
This is a bit different, seeing as he's already made bank, and it's a skeleton coming out of the closet, but I still think he'll get off easy.
Remember, it's not how much justice you can get, it's how much you can afford.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that the creators of these "tools" aren't going to leave SOME way of getting back into them? To prevent them from being used against their own systems?
"Did you really think you could use my own spell against me , Potter?" -Severus Snape "HP: THBP"
Only on Slashdot could a guy who had the Comedian Tag try to get it back by being funny and get modded insightful.
Likewise, only on Slashdot could someone get their angst on by begging the moderators to mod them Troll for challenging them over that same try at being a comedian.
"See the earth below,
Soon to make a crater!
Blue sky, black death,
I’m off to meet my maker!"
Apparently this fellow hasn't heard of the Sawfish?
The Sawfish is powered by electric motors, sports eight video camera eyes as well as sonar, and uses “biodegradable and vegetable oil-based hydraulic fluids.” Triton estimates that British Colombia alone has five billion board feet of salvageable lumber submerged underwater and that the number could exceed 100 billion board feet worldwide. The estimated value of these some odd 300 million submerged trees is $50 billion. (From Treehugger)
Also, commercial grade cannabis-the kind that doesn't get you high when you smoke it-can provide 42% of our current lumber needs by eliminating the need to use lumber for paper products. Not to mention the other commercial products you get from it, such as clothing, food and solvents for use in paints, thinners and other industrial processes. To top it all off, you get several crops per season, rather than one crop per every two decades.
So anyone saying "peak lumber" should just paste a cutout of Glenn Beck on their face and call it done.
Would this be a fundamental flaw of the TOR network? If you don't know who's controlling the exit nodes, then you will never know if the information you send is truly secure.
One of the things we were trained for in the Navy-and something in which I got an abject lesson-is "Trust but verify". I "trusted" my senior petty officer when he told me that he'd secured the transmitters when we went to go raise the antennas. When I got back to radio to restore the "secured" transmitters, I found them happily pouring out 1000 watts of power with each ping, which were coming 2-3 per second.
My "Link-11 Sunburn" taught me that very important lesson: Trust but verify.
If you can't verify the network yourself, then don't trust it. Make sure the information you send over it can't be traced back to you in any way. Good luck with that, but do your best anyway.
Every single time I see one of these "revolutionary" new "cars", they ALL have the exact same characteristics that look like they were designed by Douglas Adams.
1. Made from some ultra-light material that has NO crash protection value whatsoever.
2. NO inside space, whatsoever.
3. NO practical applications, whatsoever.
Lemme tell you what I want to see in an electric car?
1. Must be able to carry 3 screaming kids.
2. Must be able to carry said screaming kids with 1 weeks worth of groceries in the back, 500 pounds of beach toys, or 500 pounds of ski gear.
3. Must be able to SAFELY carry 1 & 2 while traveling along the Long Island Distressway on a Friday afternooon in August, and a Sunday afternoon on the Throggs Neck Bridge in February.
4. Must be able to make it from Manhattan to either Hunter Mountain or Cooper's Beach while meeting criteria 1,2 and 3.
If you can make an electric car that can do THAT, you'll be the wealthiest person on the face of the planet.
A friend of mine just signed up with Comcast at his new apartment? I warned him that Comcast has the WORST reputation in the US, but he just shrugged.
He pays for business access, rather than private home access. It's another $40 per month, but there's higher bandwidth, servers are allowed, no traffic shaping, no throttling of Bittorrent protocols, and best of all, NO CAP.
His theory-and it seems to hold-is that if you're going to cough up the dosh for a business account, then you know what you're getting into with such things, so they don't care if the RIAA/MPAA shows up at your door.
I suppose, but I think it's just the extra $40 that turns their head.
One of my gmail addresses was getting 95 spams per 24 hour period. I forgot to log in via the webportal over the weekend, and was simply downloading via Mailwasher and Thunderbird, so the spam folder filled rapidly.
By the time I checked it, there were some 350 spams in there from Friday night to Monday afternoon. That number had been holding steady for the last week, but today?
Just five. The interesting thing is that I was only seeing about 20 or 30 a day up until 2 weeks ago, then everything surged bigtime.
My guess is the operators saw the shutdown coming and stepped up their operations to boost infection rates prior to packing up shop and moving elsewhere.
In the 50's, my mom was a nurse, and the most powerful weapon the hospital had at the time were the penicillins. It was a miracle, and it saved hundreds of people in the hospital she worked in.
But mom saw the danger. She warned the doctors, "Don't overuse them, the bugs will get used to it." She used to pester the doctors about it non-stop, but she was a woman and a nurse. What did she know? She also warned them that using too much would wipe out all the good bugs and make things worse for the patient.
Sure enough, one patient got overdosed and their gut flora were wiped out. After trying to figure out what to do with a patient that was dying of starvation and dehydration from the lack of good gut bugs, they gave them "shit soup" through a nasal tube. The doctors were "amazed" at their recovery. Duh?!
Mom watched the doctors start prescribing antibiotics for everything. By the time she left in the late sixties, she was already seeing antibiotic resistant staph that plowed through penicillin like it was candy.
Dad was a landscaper, and he saw the same thing with weed killers, fertilizers and bug spray. Sure, it killed the weeds one year, but they always came back, stronger than before. It used to be you could wipe out all the Japanese beetles in the cherry tree with half an ounce of Malathion in two gallons of water, and the stench wasn't so bad. Now you have to use two, sometimes three ounces, since only a half ounce made the bugs stoned, but little else. And lemme tell you, Southampton mosquitoes are among some of the most heavily sprayed, since the rich people don't like getting bitten.
Now they're impossible to kill.
We've known about this for at least 75 years or more, we've just chosen to ignore it because it's easier and more profitable to think in the short term, and hope the bill never comes.
Well guess what. The bill is on the table, and now we gotta cough up.
I would imagine firefighting principles from naval vessels would be about5 as relevant as those from residential suburban firefighting.
From the perspective of putting the fire out, yes, you'd be quite correct. There is not WAY you're going to put THAT out with AFFF alone. You wouldn't be able to use explosives, either, since that only works on isolated well heads. You'd get an instant re-flash from the white-hot metal and burning debris after the detonation.
But from the perspective of keeping the rig afloat, the principles are exactly the same.
1. Establish fire boundaries.
1a. Place personnel at those boundaries to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent areas. Cooling bulkheads with short bursts of water to keep them from melting or breaching.
1b. Establish secondary fire boundaries and smoke boundaries. You need a buffer zone that's safe to send relief fire fighters, and also a place to fall back if the primary boundaries fail.
2. Establish flooding boundaries.
2a. Figure out where the water used to fight the fire OR maintain the boundaries is going, where it's going to collect, and how to get it out of there. If the space is small and low to the ship's center of gravity, filling it up won't jeopardize stability. If it's a big space, then you have to pump out the water you use to fight the fires.
2b. Maintain those flooding boundaries. Bring in more pumps, establish hose lines, get the eductors working and get all that water overboard asap. If you don't, the ship will list to one side and make things even more difficult, or possibly capsize the ship. Or even worse, if the water is trapped at the primary fire boundary, it'll start to boil and kill off the fire fighters.
From what I can see in the pictures, it looks like that procedure failed at #1a. There was nobody to fight the fire at all, everyone evacuated. And by the time any fire fighters might have arrived, the "primary boundary" was most likely the ocean itself.
So the theory and practice are exactly the same, it's just that there was nobody around to implement it. And even if there were, I don't know if they'd be able to. That was a HOT fire.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.
If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors, s-type eductors and just plain mops and buckets.
I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.
But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.
The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.
Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.
This thing went *BOOM* in a way it's not supposed to go boom.
"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." - Ulysses S. Grant
Actually, I was going to go a bit farther back than that, but yours works too.
Geeks live for this sort of crap, so don't try it.
You will lose.
Tilapia are herbivorous, so you can feed them plant waste. You can almost feed them by fertilizing the water they live in, since they'll eat anything that grows in the water. They're great for controlling aquatic weeds, too. There's a reason tilapia are chosen to be raised on organic veggie farms? You can just recycle the veggie waste right into the shredder and into the tanks.
FTA: "...a means to save the animal from overfishing and possible extinction have been found. "
Actually, it's cheaper and better to simply stop fishing for them altogether for a few years. Just leave them alone and they'll come back reasonably quick, if you haven't, y'know, BUILT OVER their spawning beds or anything.
I can't really decide, here.
On the one hand, if you're playing around without wearing a condom, then you're a Darwin Award. On the other hand, this could be exceptionally nasty in third world nations, especially in places where condoms aren't available or expensive. Now it's Nature's Reset Button. And if the people are listening to a religious restriction, saying condom use is against their faith, now we're back to the Darwin angle.
Either way, you're screwed.
Plus, any dude with access to the database can hack together an SQL query to find out which houses have a total water usage under a gallon over the past three days and know who's not home.
If they've got the brains and resources to know how to do this, then chances are VERY good that they're also smart enough to know that robbery is a bad idea that doesn't pay very well. Someone like that is much more likely to try and rootkit someone's wireless router whether they're home or not, then steal their bank details.
And if you're worried about a government agency trying to find out if you're home or not so they can install bugs, then you're either in bigger trouble than you know, or you should be wearing a tin-foil hat.
My wife said "they should put up a web interface to so you can see how much electricity you're using"
Wait...you're on Slashdot, yet you have a wife? And she's a geek too?
That's awesome, but isn't that like, one of the signs of the Apocalypse?
I tried that once with my cellphone? It did seal it very well.
Except the plastic ended up squashing all the buttons, including the power button, which turned it off. I tried letting a little air in, but then you couldn't hear or be heard. It was a nice try, but failed.
Sarris: What you fail to realize, is that with your shields down, my ship will tear through yours like tissue paper!
Jason: Yes. But what you fail to realize is that my ship is dragging MINES!
I cannot call up the Gawker article unless I go through a proxy outside the US. I can get to gawker.com, but I cannot call up the article. http://bit.ly/cOqlAU
Looking at the source code, I don't even get an HTML header. It's completely blank. Zip. Nada. I can look at any other Gawker article except that one.
Also, the Norwegian newspaper, www.skup.no is down hard. I tried via proxy, no joy. I checked out www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com and sure enough, it's dead.
Something wicked this way comes.
The thing they didn't cover very much, is the one thing that is actually most important: hygiene.
Bacteria and especially fungi absolutely thrive under pressure, and a mild case of Athlete's Foot can rapidly become severe, even hazardous as the infection gets worse. Fungal infections were one of the most serious problems onboard the previous endeavors, as they were impossible to eradicate once established in the living areas. Bacterial infections were even more dangerous, as the partial pressure ratio of gases in the atmosphere-and also the bloodstream-effectively doubles, giving the bugs plenty of fuel.
They did touch on the hygiene issue with the shower, but didn't say why other than the obvious reasons? But if you're going to live underwater, under more than one atmosphere, hygiene becomes absolutely vital.
In the past, when this sort of thing has been suggested, the cries of "vigilante" and "lawlessness" were cried from the highest mountaintops, and the lowest swamps of the Internet. And anyone who actually DID anything was pilloried and run out of town on a rail.
[sarcasm] What changed, I wonder? [/sarcasm]
Now that the losses are in the hundreds of millions, in several dozen different currencies, those same voices seem to have lost their enthusiasm.
A friend once made the observation that no big-time, fast-track success story in the world of IT ever makes it without doing something that gets them into serious hot water at least once. Once they do that, they offer a bunch of mea culpas, make a few donations here and there, then make bank. (The slow-track success stories don't usually fit that theory.)
This is a bit different, seeing as he's already made bank, and it's a skeleton coming out of the closet, but I still think he'll get off easy.
Remember, it's not how much justice you can get, it's how much you can afford.