Can't any amount of power move the ISS just at a slower rate?
Kind of. It has to boost altitude, on average, more than 200 meters per day, just to keep up. Over and above that, yes anything will do.
There is also a scheduling issue. Currently they burn chemical thrusters every month for a couple hours. That means no "microgravity environment" for less than 1% of the time. That is OK, 99% of the time is good enough for experiments, etc. Now, if the fancy new vasmir can only boost 400 meters per 24 hours of continuous operation, then just to keep up with atmospheric drag, it absolutely must run 1/2 of the time, meaning you only get that fancy microgravity environment for 1/2 of the time. Also with respect to maintenance and reliability, that means it has to be operational about half the time or better. And finally, a 1% of the time activity means direct astronaut operation/intervention is possible, but there is not the staffing to baby sit a low thrust engine literally half the time, so it has to be highly automated.
"Reboost mode is necessary because the Station's large cross-section and low altitude causes its orbit to decay due to atmospheric drag at an average rate of 0.2 km/day (0.1 n mi/day)."
That ship traveled the distance of about ~50 galaxies in 10,000 years. According to scientists there's about 3 million LYs between each galaxy, so the ship covered that's 150 million lightyears. FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe.
You remember that scene from "the wrath of khan" where Spock said Kahns behavior indicated two dimensional thinking, so Kirk maneuvered in the third dimension to sneak up on him? As a side issue, the entire ST world seems to be two dimensional and in addition all ships and lifeforms share the same "up" dimension, which makes it weirdly unwatchable after you notice it...
You can quite easily travel over a one dimensional path 150 units long, in a three dimensional cube 50 units on a side, assuming the galaxies aren't all lined up conveniently in a straight line...
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
Such an old, tired slashdot meme.
Netcraft confirms, in soviet russia, with natalie portman, MP3s will never become popular because they don't have paper media artistic covers and special liner notes to interact with, and needless to say they are very taxing to listen to because they don't have that "vacuum tube" sound. Also all music listeners interact with their paper media, just like ALL readers scrawl in their books.
The difference with RL is that Blizzard will never bail The Big Guild going bankrupt because too many wipes/enchantments/etc etc..., but RL governments had to.
Regarding "had to", that is because in RL the equivalent of "The Big Guild" owns the equivalent of "Blizzard". If WoW allowed the players to purchase their own government, like we do in real life, then it would be a fair comparison.
So scraping is not possible, unless they want to snail mail spam me, which apparently is far too much work as I have never had postal spam resulting from it.
Lucky you... Until I renewed for like 10 years, and was annually renewing, for a few months around renewal time I got postal junk mail try superficially to "renew" but it was actually a transfer request.
"In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with the company for practices such as transferring domain registrations to their service under the guise of domain renewal, a practice known as domain slamming, and having hidden fees. Despite this action, the company still sends mass direct mail to consumers resembling invoices with "domain name expiration notice" in bold print."
Ever since I heard this talk, and learned that the flu vaccine is actually a random guess each year, I don't bother with it. I'm young, strong, and tough and very very unlikely to die, I figure.
And, if you're extremely old, and almost dead from emphysema, etc, the flu won't remove many days from your lifespan anyway, maybe a week or two at most, sucks but its true. The only people whom benefit from a flu vaccination might be the small fraction of children whom might have lost decades of lifespan, except for the roughly equally small fraction whom have a "negative reaction", and except for the media having programed the drones to believe vaccines cause autism despite the considerable medical evidence to the contrary, so the kids aren't getting vaccinated.
So that leaves... big pharma executives... as the only people whom benefit from the flu vaccination hype industry?
People who bother to get flu shots do so because they are more at risk of catching the flu (regardless of the type)?
Or, people who get flu shots are more likely to engage in risky behavior around people with a different type of flu because they mistakenly believe vaccination against disease A is 100% effective against disease B? Never underestimate the ability of those in the left 10% of the bell curve to screw up...
If they can make batteries that charge in a few minutes (or hell, 30 seconds) I wouldn't mind at all if the battery only lasts 6 hours under heavy use. Put some research into that.
No, they'll never do that. The problem isn't chemistry or volume but energy transfer.
OK, the fine article was talking about 1500 milliamp-hour batteries. So, a huge simplification, but that is an energy storage of 1500 milliamps for one hour. There are 60 minutes in a hour, or, rephrased, that battery holds 90000 milliamp-minutes of energy. Standard SI prefix conversion, that's 90 amp-minutes of energy.
Unless its a perpetual motion device (which would be a very handy thing to have around) what goes in equals what goes out. Draw out 90 amp-minutes, its going to require 90 amp-minutes to recharge, or a little more due to inefficiency. So, to shove 90 amp-minutes of energy into a battery in 30 seconds, would take an average current of 180 amps.
Mosey on down to yer local home depot, or other fine retailer of electrician supplies, and ask for a piece of electrical cable capable of passing 200 amps or so, depending on the clerk's competence and local electrical codes, they'll probably suggest 2/0 gauge copper per NEC standards, which vaguely resembles a copper wire rope the diameter of yer thumb. You'll need two such cables, one for positive and one for negative. Then for a good time ask them for very durable connector capable of handling 200 amps, and you'll probably get an anderson powerpole which is roughly the size of an 8-track tape, somewhat bigger than the entire phone you're trying to charge in 30 seconds. You might have seen those connectors on electric forklifts and their chargers...
For extra fun, consider the wattage of that charger. 180 amps at maybe 4 volts is a healthy 720 watts, roughly the power draw of a one horsepower motor, or perhaps a small microwave oven. I would NOT want to be nearby when that bad boy shorts out or otherwise fails!
If he spent 331*8 hours, then it's absolutely inexcusable.
Agree completely, since 365-331 equals 34 total days off all year, minus then ten or so standard holidays, implies he worked full time absolutely every single day except for holidays and three weeks vacation. Sounds unlikely that someone so burned out could produce anything at all regardless of what he did in the office, much less lose tens of thousands of dollars of productivity due to his little hobby...
No kidding. Its such journalist speak I couldn't figure out what it was talking about.
I think the journalist might have been trying to explain group velocity dispersion aka chromatic dispersion. In a nutshell the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, but in any material it varies a wee tiny bit by frequency, and there is no such thing as a truely monochromatic light source, although we can get pretty close. Work arounds for that problem are VERY OLD NEWS but journalists are always so gullible...
The projects that were alive back then, and now, are obviously more mature, thus would have fewer bugs. Unless you believe in spontaneous generation of bugs at a constant rate in unchanged code (in my experience, actually not too unbelievable for old C++ compiled by the newest G++ due to specification drift)
Please provide a citation with either the name of the authority who notified you of the new classification status, or whatever relevant information is required to get an authenticated document confirming this statement. Otherwise, you're seriously lacking in credibility and/or taking an enormous risk posting this publicly. Or you're just plain nuts.
"These combination locks were installed on Minuteman ICBMs in the 1960s. However, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha worried that in times of need, the codes would not be available, so they quietly decided to set them to 00000000; checking this combination was even present on the launch checklists. This was not changed until 1977.[1] In 2007 the British Government revealed that its nuclear weapons were not equipped with Permissive Action Links.[2]"
Of course, I've read about a U.S. system where there is a UHF radio antenna on certain missile silos, and if communication is cut to that silo, the antenna becomes active.
Yes you heard that because you watched the fictional movie "wargames" circa 1980.
A better design is to install some kind of like that would permit the weapon to go boom... you could call it a "permissive action link". Then pseudo-secretly set the activation code to all zeros so it may as well be a copper jumper cable. It would work basically like the Soviet "secret" that is not really news, anyway. Now that would be a story, wouldn't it?
Pretty good, except for thinking "the key" must be the little bit of key data stored by the vanish system.
What you could do, is concatenate your "real" secret key, maybe just some low entropy english text like "I love cowboy neal" with the Vanish key. Then feed that thru a nice oneway hash. Then use the hashed value as the encryption key.
Probably your crypto algorithm can tolerate a key that is predictable dictionary english text. Maybe not. If not, now you have an interesting way to distribute a unique salt with each encrypted file. Interesting in that the salt value MIGHT disappear permanently. Maybe.
It won't be less secure than just putting the salt value in the subject line of the email. But, having it disappear MIGHT improve security.
I have no idea if Vanish does this, but it seems like an obvious next step to consider. I only put about 5 minutes thought into it, so maybe it won't work. But the idea of an attempt at a disappearing salt is fun idea to think about.
But does this *really* invalidate this type of attack? It seems it just adds another p2p protocol on it, and it would still be as vulnerable as before. Only difference seems to be that the current tool just doesn't work at the moment. Approach would still be the same.
I think the UW folks are reading slashdot and editing their page as we speak. The page now includes the quote:
This revised prototype, which distributes keys across both the Vuze DHT and OpenDHT, invalidates this attack. This is because OpenDHT has a closed-access model as opposed to an open-access model like Vuze, which is what drives the current attack. In addition, we are working to further strengthen Vanish from two angles:
So, Vanish people, I know you're listening, please respond to my being unclear how a closed-access model prevents the attack as opposed to just makes it a wee bit harder for small weak opponents, not so much impact to bigger ones.
Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators
I've been involved in this field for about 15 years. The funniest misconception I've run into, time and time again, is that an unmaintained UPS, unmaintained battery bank, unmaintained transfer switch, and unmaintained generator will somehow act as magical charms so as to be more reliable than the commercial power they are supposedly backing up. And yes I've been involved in numerous power failure incidents (dozens) at numerous companies, and only experienced two incidents of successful backup of commercial power loss.
Transfer switches that don't switch. Generators that don't start below 50 degrees. Generators with empty fuel tanks staffed by smirking employees with diesel vehicles. When you're adding capacity to battery string A, and the contractor shorts out the mislabeled B bus while pulling cable for the "A" bus.
Experience shows that if a companies core competency is not running power plants, they would be better off not trying to build and maintain a small electrical power plant. Microsoft has conditioned users to expect failure and unreliability, use that conditioning to your advantage... the users don't particularly care if its down because of a OS patch or a loss of -48VDC...
Powerplants use this frequently, it's a great idea until the amount of warm water discharged begins affecting the discharge site. I can't imagine a data center requiring the amount of cooling that a powerplant would need.
Typical coal plants run around 40% efficient, top of the line natural gas plants run around 60% efficient. Within some rounding errors, the data center will dump about as much heat as its fractional share of the power plant that feeds it.
I'm sure you can stick the second ear bud somewhere else....perhaps in the ear of your scantily clad model?
Based on your comment, I had high hopes before I clicked on the article. What I saw in the article wasn't quite what you implied I'd see, although that is quite the plunging neckline on that gentleman's shirt.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't any amount of power move the ISS just at a slower rate?
Kind of. It has to boost altitude, on average, more than 200 meters per day, just to keep up. Over and above that, yes anything will do.
There is also a scheduling issue. Currently they burn chemical thrusters every month for a couple hours. That means no "microgravity environment" for less than 1% of the time. That is OK, 99% of the time is good enough for experiments, etc. Now, if the fancy new vasmir can only boost 400 meters per 24 hours of continuous operation, then just to keep up with atmospheric drag, it absolutely must run 1/2 of the time, meaning you only get that fancy microgravity environment for 1/2 of the time. Also with respect to maintenance and reliability, that means it has to be operational about half the time or better. And finally, a 1% of the time activity means direct astronaut operation/intervention is possible, but there is not the staffing to baby sit a low thrust engine literally half the time, so it has to be highly automated.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080213164432/http://pdlprod3.hosc.msfc.nasa.gov/D-aboutiss/D6.html
"Reboost mode is necessary because the Station's large cross-section and low altitude causes its orbit to decay due to atmospheric drag at an average rate of 0.2 km/day (0.1 n mi/day)."
Next time you're pitching a script, put STAR in the title name somewhere, it'll go far!
Remember The Last Starfighter? No? Didn't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
That ship traveled the distance of about ~50 galaxies in 10,000 years. According to scientists there's about 3 million LYs between each galaxy, so the ship covered that's 150 million lightyears. FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe.
You remember that scene from "the wrath of khan" where Spock said Kahns behavior indicated two dimensional thinking, so Kirk maneuvered in the third dimension to sneak up on him? As a side issue, the entire ST world seems to be two dimensional and in addition all ships and lifeforms share the same "up" dimension, which makes it weirdly unwatchable after you notice it...
You can quite easily travel over a one dimensional path 150 units long, in a three dimensional cube 50 units on a side, assuming the galaxies aren't all lined up conveniently in a straight line...
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
Such an old, tired slashdot meme.
Netcraft confirms, in soviet russia, with natalie portman, MP3s will never become popular because they don't have paper media artistic covers and special liner notes to interact with, and needless to say they are very taxing to listen to because they don't have that "vacuum tube" sound. Also all music listeners interact with their paper media, just like ALL readers scrawl in their books.
I'd like to add that printing out most books cost more in paper/ink(toner) than actually purchasing the book.
Not the case for textbooks! I have seen 200 page textbooks running over 50 cents per page.
The difference with RL is that Blizzard will never bail The Big Guild going bankrupt because too many wipes/enchantments/etc etc..., but RL governments had to.
Regarding "had to", that is because in RL the equivalent of "The Big Guild" owns the equivalent of "Blizzard". If WoW allowed the players to purchase their own government, like we do in real life, then it would be a fair comparison.
So scraping is not possible, unless they want to snail mail spam me, which apparently is far too much work as I have never had postal spam resulting from it.
Lucky you... Until I renewed for like 10 years, and was annually renewing, for a few months around renewal time I got postal junk mail try superficially to "renew" but it was actually a transfer request.
Specifically I got endless junk from DROA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Registry_of_America
"In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with the company for practices such as transferring domain registrations to their service under the guise of domain renewal, a practice known as domain slamming, and having hidden fees. Despite this action, the company still sends mass direct mail to consumers resembling invoices with "domain name expiration notice" in bold print."
Ever since I heard this talk, and learned that the flu vaccine is actually a random guess each year, I don't bother with it. I'm young, strong, and tough and very very unlikely to die, I figure.
And, if you're extremely old, and almost dead from emphysema, etc, the flu won't remove many days from your lifespan anyway, maybe a week or two at most, sucks but its true. The only people whom benefit from a flu vaccination might be the small fraction of children whom might have lost decades of lifespan, except for the roughly equally small fraction whom have a "negative reaction", and except for the media having programed the drones to believe vaccines cause autism despite the considerable medical evidence to the contrary, so the kids aren't getting vaccinated.
So that leaves... big pharma executives ... as the only people whom benefit from the flu vaccination hype industry?
People who bother to get flu shots do so because they are more at risk of catching the flu (regardless of the type)?
Or, people who get flu shots are more likely to engage in risky behavior around people with a different type of flu because they mistakenly believe vaccination against disease A is 100% effective against disease B? Never underestimate the ability of those in the left 10% of the bell curve to screw up...
If they can make batteries that charge in a few minutes (or hell, 30 seconds) I wouldn't mind at all if the battery only lasts 6 hours under heavy use. Put some research into that.
No, they'll never do that. The problem isn't chemistry or volume but energy transfer.
OK, the fine article was talking about 1500 milliamp-hour batteries. So, a huge simplification, but that is an energy storage of 1500 milliamps for one hour. There are 60 minutes in a hour, or, rephrased, that battery holds 90000 milliamp-minutes of energy. Standard SI prefix conversion, that's 90 amp-minutes of energy.
Unless its a perpetual motion device (which would be a very handy thing to have around) what goes in equals what goes out. Draw out 90 amp-minutes, its going to require 90 amp-minutes to recharge, or a little more due to inefficiency. So, to shove 90 amp-minutes of energy into a battery in 30 seconds, would take an average current of 180 amps.
Mosey on down to yer local home depot, or other fine retailer of electrician supplies, and ask for a piece of electrical cable capable of passing 200 amps or so, depending on the clerk's competence and local electrical codes, they'll probably suggest 2/0 gauge copper per NEC standards, which vaguely resembles a copper wire rope the diameter of yer thumb. You'll need two such cables, one for positive and one for negative. Then for a good time ask them for very durable connector capable of handling 200 amps, and you'll probably get an anderson powerpole which is roughly the size of an 8-track tape, somewhat bigger than the entire phone you're trying to charge in 30 seconds. You might have seen those connectors on electric forklifts and their chargers...
For extra fun, consider the wattage of that charger. 180 amps at maybe 4 volts is a healthy 720 watts, roughly the power draw of a one horsepower motor, or perhaps a small microwave oven. I would NOT want to be nearby when that bad boy shorts out or otherwise fails!
If he spent 331*8 hours, then it's absolutely inexcusable.
Agree completely, since 365-331 equals 34 total days off all year, minus then ten or so standard holidays, implies he worked full time absolutely every single day except for holidays and three weeks vacation. Sounds unlikely that someone so burned out could produce anything at all regardless of what he did in the office, much less lose tens of thousands of dollars of productivity due to his little hobby...
I though "NSFW" meant "National Science Foundation Websites"?
"National Science Foundation Websurfers"
No kidding. Its such journalist speak I couldn't figure out what it was talking about.
I think the journalist might have been trying to explain group velocity dispersion aka chromatic dispersion. In a nutshell the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, but in any material it varies a wee tiny bit by frequency, and there is no such thing as a truely monochromatic light source, although we can get pretty close. Work arounds for that problem are VERY OLD NEWS but journalists are always so gullible...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_dispersion#Group_and_phase_velocity
Sure, it looks pretty but it's also huge, heavy,
Oh now no need to make fun of Maximum PC's website ... Oh, wait, were you talking about the PC case?
You want to interact with your bank with a richer GUI than just text messages.
You mean, like show pictures of coins and bills for people whom are uneducated enough to not understand numerals or arithmetic?
People are pissed off about it because they know that once bureaucrats run health care, they run your life.
Who runs healthcare now? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Survivorship bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
The projects that were alive back then, and now, are obviously more mature, thus would have fewer bugs. Unless you believe in spontaneous generation of bugs at a constant rate in unchanged code (in my experience, actually not too unbelievable for old C++ compiled by the newest G++ due to specification drift)
Wouldn't most people who would NEED a supercomputer be able to build one much more cheaply using a dozen workstations.
This is a simplification, but is more or less correct:
Xeon FSB width 128 bits by 1.333 GHz equals 170 Gigabits/sec bandwidth between processors.
Commodity ethernet between commodity workstations, 1 Gigabit/sec bandwidth between processors.
If your application runs on 1/170th the interprocessor bandwidth, agreed, it would be cheaper. If not, then it's not a relevant comparison.
Please provide a citation with either the name of the authority who notified you of the new classification status, or whatever relevant information is required to get an authenticated document confirming this statement. Otherwise, you're seriously lacking in credibility and/or taking an enormous risk posting this publicly. Or you're just plain nuts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link
"These combination locks were installed on Minuteman ICBMs in the 1960s. However, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha worried that in times of need, the codes would not be available, so they quietly decided to set them to 00000000; checking this combination was even present on the launch checklists. This was not changed until 1977.[1] In 2007 the British Government revealed that its nuclear weapons were not equipped with Permissive Action Links.[2]"
Of course, I've read about a U.S. system where there is a UHF radio antenna on certain missile silos, and if communication is cut to that silo, the antenna becomes active.
Yes you heard that because you watched the fictional movie "wargames" circa 1980.
A better design is to install some kind of like that would permit the weapon to go boom... you could call it a "permissive action link". Then pseudo-secretly set the activation code to all zeros so it may as well be a copper jumper cable. It would work basically like the Soviet "secret" that is not really news, anyway. Now that would be a story, wouldn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link
Pretty good, except for thinking "the key" must be the little bit of key data stored by the vanish system.
What you could do, is concatenate your "real" secret key, maybe just some low entropy english text like "I love cowboy neal" with the Vanish key. Then feed that thru a nice oneway hash. Then use the hashed value as the encryption key.
Probably your crypto algorithm can tolerate a key that is predictable dictionary english text. Maybe not. If not, now you have an interesting way to distribute a unique salt with each encrypted file. Interesting in that the salt value MIGHT disappear permanently. Maybe.
It won't be less secure than just putting the salt value in the subject line of the email. But, having it disappear MIGHT improve security.
I have no idea if Vanish does this, but it seems like an obvious next step to consider. I only put about 5 minutes thought into it, so maybe it won't work. But the idea of an attempt at a disappearing salt is fun idea to think about.
But does this *really* invalidate this type of attack? It seems it just adds another p2p protocol on it, and it would still be as vulnerable as before. Only difference seems to be that the current tool just doesn't work at the moment. Approach would still be the same.
I think the UW folks are reading slashdot and editing their page as we speak. The page now includes the quote:
This revised prototype, which distributes keys across both the Vuze DHT and OpenDHT, invalidates this attack. This is because OpenDHT has a closed-access model as opposed to an open-access model like Vuze, which is what drives the current attack. In addition, we are working to further strengthen Vanish from two angles:
So, Vanish people, I know you're listening, please respond to my being unclear how a closed-access model prevents the attack as opposed to just makes it a wee bit harder for small weak opponents, not so much impact to bigger ones.
Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators
I've been involved in this field for about 15 years. The funniest misconception I've run into, time and time again, is that an unmaintained UPS, unmaintained battery bank, unmaintained transfer switch, and unmaintained generator will somehow act as magical charms so as to be more reliable than the commercial power they are supposedly backing up. And yes I've been involved in numerous power failure incidents (dozens) at numerous companies, and only experienced two incidents of successful backup of commercial power loss.
Transfer switches that don't switch. Generators that don't start below 50 degrees. Generators with empty fuel tanks staffed by smirking employees with diesel vehicles. When you're adding capacity to battery string A, and the contractor shorts out the mislabeled B bus while pulling cable for the "A" bus.
Experience shows that if a companies core competency is not running power plants, they would be better off not trying to build and maintain a small electrical power plant. Microsoft has conditioned users to expect failure and unreliability, use that conditioning to your advantage... the users don't particularly care if its down because of a OS patch or a loss of -48VDC...
Powerplants use this frequently, it's a great idea until the amount of warm water discharged begins affecting the discharge site. I can't imagine a data center requiring the amount of cooling that a powerplant would need.
Typical coal plants run around 40% efficient, top of the line natural gas plants run around 60% efficient. Within some rounding errors, the data center will dump about as much heat as its fractional share of the power plant that feeds it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant
I'm sure you can stick the second ear bud somewhere else. ...perhaps in the ear of your scantily clad model?
Based on your comment, I had high hopes before I clicked on the article. What I saw in the article wasn't quite what you implied I'd see, although that is quite the plunging neckline on that gentleman's shirt.