Emulate the x86 hardware too? This is starting to remind me of a stack of turtles.
Been there, done that. I used to work at a company that had an x86 emulating something 68k-based emulating a PDP-11 emulating some custom hardware that controlled a fatigue-testing machine. These days, I think they're using something x86-64 based running a DOSBox derivative, so they've added an x86-emulation layer to things.
The IO layer also has a bit of emulation going on: a USB connection emulating a parallel port emulating a proprietary interface.
-78 C? I don't think I'd trust anything with moving parts in those conditions. Materials don't behave the way you expect in extreme cold: steel cables become brittle, lubricants freeze and shatter, thermal contraction messes with tolerances, and everything gets coated with ice.
The best passwords I've found are sentences translated into passwords. For example:
My phone number is 555-234-2344 : Mp#i555-234-2344 I live at 2202 Park Street : Il@2202PSt Four score and seven years ago : 4Sa7ya...
Why not just use the whole damn sentence? Random alphanumerics give you about six bits of entropy per character, while English prose gives roughly 1.5 bits per character. Compare:
"4Sa7ya": 36 bits of entropy "Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent an new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.": 268 bits of entropy, and it's easier to remember.
This doesn't fix the problem, it just slows down the attacker. Statistical analysis of the delay will still tell the attacker exactly how long it took to check the password.
The correct fix is:
if passwordcheck(password)=false then run_a_delay_loop_until_it_takes_as_long_as_a_success()
I've read the "igniting the atmosphere" paper and seen the calculations, and the conclusion (paraphrased) is essentially: "In order to ignite a sustained nuclear reaction of the atmosphere, our measurements of certain properties of the atmosphere and our estimates for the temperature of a nuclear explosion need to be off by several orders of magnitude, and all the errors need to be in the same direction." Since all the required values were within or just barely outside the error bars of the experimental values, they couldn't rule out the possibility of ignition.
from what I gather nowadays tor and freenet are the more popular places. I doubt one has to browse the tor onion sites for long to find the material in question, and freenet... I remember finding the stuff in the indexsite in the very beginning, although I'm not aware of how freenet is doing right now. Needless to say, that I don't need to check to know that an anonymous network is going to carry that kind of material in plain open sight.
A few years back, the communications protocol used by Freenet was changed, effectively splitting the network in two. You were on what is now the Freenet 0.5 part of the network: the site operators tended to be unbelievably libertarian, so everything was organized in the public indexes. The new Freenet 0.7 network is different: because of the nature of Freenet, it's impossible to exclude child pornography (or prove that it's available), but there's an informal social contract that the public indexes will not index child pornography.
I think that the world has enough arable land to feed its inhabitants; and if enough people would volunteer their time, or their money which could be used to hire other people, we would have that food grown, easily.
The world has enough food to feed everyone. Right now.
The problem is one of logistics. By the time that food gets to the people who need it, much of it has spoiled, been eaten by pests, or been sold by corrupt middlemen. A few well-placed revolutions and a few tens of billions of dollars invested in infrastructure, and starvation would be a thing of the past.
Basically, the Patriot missile system is a farce, it exists solely to provide jobs for Massachusetts and a steady supply of pork for its senators and congressmen.
The Patriot was designed as a high-altitude anti-aircraft system. When used against the intended targets, it's been very successful. What happened in the first Gulf War was that, on paper, it looked like the Patriot system could intercept ballistic missiles, so it was deployed as an anti-Scud system. Needless to say, the real-world performance didn't match the paper performance, and they've been trying to make up the difference ever since.
But when looking for a new car you get certain feelings about certain brands. When you're looking at a chevy truck you'll get a feeling that its really solid (Like a Rock!) that Ford looks like its durable (Ford Tough!) and when you look at a mazda you'll get the feeling that this car has really got some pep (zoom! zoom!).
Maybe you do. I don't.
It might be the fact that I see maybe a hundredth as many ads as the typical person, but my impressions of products are shaped more by cultural osmosis than by marketing slogans (American automakers don't make quality vehicles; Japanese automakers know quality, but never got the hang of pickup trucks).
So the.02 received from the machine is probably negligible, unless it really is significantly concentrated in certain places on the skin.
That's the whole point of the article: if the radiation were deposited uniformly throughout the entire volume of your body, it would be an 0.02 microsievert dose. However, the technique they're using concentrates the radiation in the upper layers of the skin. The actual dose is at least two orders of magnitude higher, but nobody knows just how high.
There are a surprising number of people who think that the best contribution they can make is to take a low-quality snapshot of their penis and upload it to Commons.
Fucking idiot. I love the 2nd amendment as much as the next guy but you don't reach for the gun over a goddamn speeding ticket. Here's an idea, how about the good citizens of AZ vote the morons out of office who passed the bill to install these things?
Sometimes I think governmental stupidity comes from the chairs the people sit in, rather than from the individuals involved. The city I used to live in went through three iterations of councilmembers trying to turn the largest city park into a golf course. Every two years we'd turf out the old set and elect new members who, as part of their platform, promised not to turn the park into a golf course, and every time, they'd vote in favor of turning the park into a golf course, requiring a voter initiative on the off-year ballot to cancel the project.
After the third time, the voters amended the city charter to include a clause forbidding the park to be turned into a golf course. The council still commissions a study on turning the park into a golf course every other year, but at least they can no longer follow through on it.
Why is it that no one ever thinks about the materials that will be needed to switch to solar? Solar panels don't work so well at night and require some sort of batteries. Currently lithium batteries appear to be the wave of the future. Do you think that the lithium for the batteries can be grown on trees? Right now the demand for lithium is fairly low compared to what it will be if the world goes solar. Since Bolivia currently has half of the worlds lithium, who do you think will become the next Saudi in the great solar revolution?
For things like grid-wide power storage, the wave of the future is pumped-storage hydroelectricty. No, it's not as sexy as huge banks of lithium batteries, but it's a proven technology that nobody can hold a monopoly on. All you need to set it up is a hill, a pump-generator, and a few million cubic meters of water.
That's an impressive-looking explosion, sure, but unless it goes off in physical contact with the tank, it's not going to do more than shake the tank up a bit. Explosions follow the path of least resistance, and in the vincinity of a tank, that means most of the force of the shockwave will flow around the tank, while the armor will absorb the rest. The inverse square law also comes into play here: most of the energy of the explosion isn't even moving towards the tank in the first place.
Anti-tank warheads get around this through various means. HEAT warheads use a shaped charge to focus the entire force of the explosion into a very small space, while HESH warheads apply the shockwave directly into the armor, and APCR and APDS warheads dispense with the explosive entirely, instead using a small, high-density projectile to try to penetrate the armor.
A destroyer is a small unarmored ship generally designed to protect a task force from one particular threat, such as aircraft, missiles, or submarines. Sinking one is no big deal, and the military regards them as expendable.
A battleship is a large, heavily armored ship with massive offensive firepower, which historically would act as the core of a task force. The citadel armor of a battleship is generally enough to protect it against its own shells (for final-generation battleships, this is generally about a 2000-pound warhead), and sinking one is a very difficult task. Battleships have been considered obsolete since World War II, so it's unlikely that cruise missiles have been tested against them.
With movies, now, you shell out $12 a person, and of course you aren't by yourself but with a friend, S.O., etc, so it's really $24. But then you want popcorn and drinks, so actually it's $40. And if that's not enough, it's not interactive at all, and 2.5 hours later the experience is permanently over. Yet nobody bats an eye.
Tell them to spend 50% more on something that lasts orders of magnitude longer, is permanent, and can even be resold to recoup some of the loss and people start freaking out. I seriously don't get it.
That's not how market economics work. You don't determine if something is overpriced by comparing it to the price of something else. You determine if something is overpriced by reducing the price and seeing if your profits go up. By that standard, videogames are grossly overpriced. Look at the results when one of the games on Steam was dropped from $60 to $15: income went up 14-fold, earning the company more money than it did on launch day.
... as currently assumed by man. Why can't there exist something with simular properties?
Any substance with similar properties is likely to be a small molecule, simply because large molecules tend to be solid at low temperatures while dissociating or reacting violently at high temperatures. There are few enough stable arrangements of small numbers of atoms that scientists have done a basic investigation of most or all of them, and only a few have properties similar to water: polar, with a wide liquid range and a habit of dissolving most substances. Of them, only water melts under pressure -- the rest solidify under pressure, which rather discourages the formation of large liquid bodies.
Why don't we see more of these? I remember watching a show nearly 20 yrs ago about a self-driving car running on a 486 processor. They had video of it driving and everything, looked like it did very well. Now we have quad core processors for less than $200 and we still don't have self driving cars. What happened?
Self-driving on a closed course at low speeds is easy. I've seen a 486-powered car as well, and it was cruising along at the blazing-fast speed of ten miles per hour, navigating by a camera update every five seconds.
Self-driving in the real world is a much harder problem. Remember the DARPA Grand Challenge? It took two tries to get a vehicle that could avoid the static hazards of a desert course, still at low speeds. Dealing with the dynamic hazards of a real highway, such as idiot drivers and wild animals, while moving fast enough that you don't get rear-ended, is much harder.
The BBC interviewed a group who represent workers who cleaned up the Chernobyl accident. Whilst 30 workers died immediately, 15000 relief workers died and 50,0000 workers were left invalid.
Died over what time period? I've seen similar numbers (20,000 out of 200,000 died over a 24-year period), but if you assume a typical workforce age distribution and look at life-expectancy numbers for eastern Europe during that time period, 10% deaths is actually below what you'd expect for such a group of people. I don't disagree that many people were left with chronic health problems from the accident, but that doesn't seem to have translated into large numbers of deaths.
5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.
You're working from an invalid assumption here. Chernobyl was a unenriched-uranium reactor -- in fact, many of the design decisions that contributed to the severity of the disaster, such as the large size of the core and the lack of containment, stem from the decision to fuel it with unenriched uranium. I wouldn't expect the core to contain more than a few grams of plutonium, as any plutonium produced during operation will fission almost immediately.
The bulk of the released material is in the form of short-lived fission products and uranium oxides. Fission products are intensely radioactive for a few hours to weeks, so it's possible to avoid exposure by evacuating the area and avoiding places (such as lakes and streams) that accumulate the materials until the radiation dies down. Uranium oxides don't bioaccumulate, and although they remain radioactive for millions to billions of years, their long half-life means they don't emit much radiation.
Plutonium is dangerous because the body incorporates it into the bone structure, and it has a half-life long enough to bioaccumulate but short enough to emit significant radiation. However, as noted above, the Chernobyl reactor didn't contain much, if any, plutonium.
What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Never.
You're confusing the two bombs. The "five out of six safety mechanisms" (actually five out of approximately twelve arming steps) bomb is the one they recovered, because one of those arming steps caused the bomb's parachute to deploy. The other bomb only had one of the arming steps take place (the "bomb has left the airplane" switch was activated), so the parachute didn't deploy, and the bomb hit the ground so hard the plutonium core separated from the conventional explosives.
As for why the bombs have parachutes, it's so the airplane dropping the bomb can get far enough away to survive before the bomb reaches detonation altitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Been there, done that. I used to work at a company that had an x86 emulating something 68k-based emulating a PDP-11 emulating some custom hardware that controlled a fatigue-testing machine. These days, I think they're using something x86-64 based running a DOSBox derivative, so they've added an x86-emulation layer to things.
The IO layer also has a bit of emulation going on: a USB connection emulating a parallel port emulating a proprietary interface.
-78 C? I don't think I'd trust anything with moving parts in those conditions. Materials don't behave the way you expect in extreme cold: steel cables become brittle, lubricants freeze and shatter, thermal contraction messes with tolerances, and everything gets coated with ice.
Why not just use the whole damn sentence? Random alphanumerics give you about six bits of entropy per character, while English prose gives roughly 1.5 bits per character. Compare:
"4Sa7ya": 36 bits of entropy
"Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent an new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.": 268 bits of entropy, and it's easier to remember.
Yes, because every currency abbreviation is three letters long. It makes formatting tabular data much easier.
This doesn't fix the problem, it just slows down the attacker. Statistical analysis of the delay will still tell the attacker exactly how long it took to check the password.
The correct fix is:
if passwordcheck(password)=false then
run_a_delay_loop_until_it_takes_as_long_as_a_success()
So *one* of the dozens of security measures was broken. There's a reason why it's called "defense in depth".
I've read the "igniting the atmosphere" paper and seen the calculations, and the conclusion (paraphrased) is essentially: "In order to ignite a sustained nuclear reaction of the atmosphere, our measurements of certain properties of the atmosphere and our estimates for the temperature of a nuclear explosion need to be off by several orders of magnitude, and all the errors need to be in the same direction." Since all the required values were within or just barely outside the error bars of the experimental values, they couldn't rule out the possibility of ignition.
A few years back, the communications protocol used by Freenet was changed, effectively splitting the network in two. You were on what is now the Freenet 0.5 part of the network: the site operators tended to be unbelievably libertarian, so everything was organized in the public indexes. The new Freenet 0.7 network is different: because of the nature of Freenet, it's impossible to exclude child pornography (or prove that it's available), but there's an informal social contract that the public indexes will not index child pornography.
The initial investment needed is in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's also merely the largest modern airship. The Graf Zeppelin was three times longer, and most of the interwar airships were similarly large.
The world has enough food to feed everyone. Right now.
The problem is one of logistics. By the time that food gets to the people who need it, much of it has spoiled, been eaten by pests, or been sold by corrupt middlemen. A few well-placed revolutions and a few tens of billions of dollars invested in infrastructure, and starvation would be a thing of the past.
The Patriot was designed as a high-altitude anti-aircraft system. When used against the intended targets, it's been very successful. What happened in the first Gulf War was that, on paper, it looked like the Patriot system could intercept ballistic missiles, so it was deployed as an anti-Scud system. Needless to say, the real-world performance didn't match the paper performance, and they've been trying to make up the difference ever since.
Maybe you do. I don't.
It might be the fact that I see maybe a hundredth as many ads as the typical person, but my impressions of products are shaped more by cultural osmosis than by marketing slogans (American automakers don't make quality vehicles; Japanese automakers know quality, but never got the hang of pickup trucks).
That's the whole point of the article: if the radiation were deposited uniformly throughout the entire volume of your body, it would be an 0.02 microsievert dose. However, the technique they're using concentrates the radiation in the upper layers of the skin. The actual dose is at least two orders of magnitude higher, but nobody knows just how high.
There are a surprising number of people who think that the best contribution they can make is to take a low-quality snapshot of their penis and upload it to Commons.
Sometimes I think governmental stupidity comes from the chairs the people sit in, rather than from the individuals involved. The city I used to live in went through three iterations of councilmembers trying to turn the largest city park into a golf course. Every two years we'd turf out the old set and elect new members who, as part of their platform, promised not to turn the park into a golf course, and every time, they'd vote in favor of turning the park into a golf course, requiring a voter initiative on the off-year ballot to cancel the project.
After the third time, the voters amended the city charter to include a clause forbidding the park to be turned into a golf course. The council still commissions a study on turning the park into a golf course every other year, but at least they can no longer follow through on it.
For things like grid-wide power storage, the wave of the future is pumped-storage hydroelectricty. No, it's not as sexy as huge banks of lithium batteries, but it's a proven technology that nobody can hold a monopoly on. All you need to set it up is a hill, a pump-generator, and a few million cubic meters of water.
That's an impressive-looking explosion, sure, but unless it goes off in physical contact with the tank, it's not going to do more than shake the tank up a bit. Explosions follow the path of least resistance, and in the vincinity of a tank, that means most of the force of the shockwave will flow around the tank, while the armor will absorb the rest. The inverse square law also comes into play here: most of the energy of the explosion isn't even moving towards the tank in the first place.
Anti-tank warheads get around this through various means. HEAT warheads use a shaped charge to focus the entire force of the explosion into a very small space, while HESH warheads apply the shockwave directly into the armor, and APCR and APDS warheads dispense with the explosive entirely, instead using a small, high-density projectile to try to penetrate the armor.
What is a "destroyer battleship"?
A destroyer is a small unarmored ship generally designed to protect a task force from one particular threat, such as aircraft, missiles, or submarines. Sinking one is no big deal, and the military regards them as expendable.
A battleship is a large, heavily armored ship with massive offensive firepower, which historically would act as the core of a task force. The citadel armor of a battleship is generally enough to protect it against its own shells (for final-generation battleships, this is generally about a 2000-pound warhead), and sinking one is a very difficult task. Battleships have been considered obsolete since World War II, so it's unlikely that cruise missiles have been tested against them.
That's not how market economics work. You don't determine if something is overpriced by comparing it to the price of something else. You determine if something is overpriced by reducing the price and seeing if your profits go up. By that standard, videogames are grossly overpriced. Look at the results when one of the games on Steam was dropped from $60 to $15: income went up 14-fold, earning the company more money than it did on launch day.
Any substance with similar properties is likely to be a small molecule, simply because large molecules tend to be solid at low temperatures while dissociating or reacting violently at high temperatures. There are few enough stable arrangements of small numbers of atoms that scientists have done a basic investigation of most or all of them, and only a few have properties similar to water: polar, with a wide liquid range and a habit of dissolving most substances. Of them, only water melts under pressure -- the rest solidify under pressure, which rather discourages the formation of large liquid bodies.
Self-driving on a closed course at low speeds is easy. I've seen a 486-powered car as well, and it was cruising along at the blazing-fast speed of ten miles per hour, navigating by a camera update every five seconds.
Self-driving in the real world is a much harder problem. Remember the DARPA Grand Challenge? It took two tries to get a vehicle that could avoid the static hazards of a desert course, still at low speeds. Dealing with the dynamic hazards of a real highway, such as idiot drivers and wild animals, while moving fast enough that you don't get rear-ended, is much harder.
Died over what time period? I've seen similar numbers (20,000 out of 200,000 died over a 24-year period), but if you assume a typical workforce age distribution and look at life-expectancy numbers for eastern Europe during that time period, 10% deaths is actually below what you'd expect for such a group of people. I don't disagree that many people were left with chronic health problems from the accident, but that doesn't seem to have translated into large numbers of deaths.
You're working from an invalid assumption here. Chernobyl was a unenriched-uranium reactor -- in fact, many of the design decisions that contributed to the severity of the disaster, such as the large size of the core and the lack of containment, stem from the decision to fuel it with unenriched uranium. I wouldn't expect the core to contain more than a few grams of plutonium, as any plutonium produced during operation will fission almost immediately.
The bulk of the released material is in the form of short-lived fission products and uranium oxides. Fission products are intensely radioactive for a few hours to weeks, so it's possible to avoid exposure by evacuating the area and avoiding places (such as lakes and streams) that accumulate the materials until the radiation dies down. Uranium oxides don't bioaccumulate, and although they remain radioactive for millions to billions of years, their long half-life means they don't emit much radiation.
Plutonium is dangerous because the body incorporates it into the bone structure, and it has a half-life long enough to bioaccumulate but short enough to emit significant radiation. However, as noted above, the Chernobyl reactor didn't contain much, if any, plutonium.
But it's not thousands dead. It's 56.
Never.
You're confusing the two bombs. The "five out of six safety mechanisms" (actually five out of approximately twelve arming steps) bomb is the one they recovered, because one of those arming steps caused the bomb's parachute to deploy. The other bomb only had one of the arming steps take place (the "bomb has left the airplane" switch was activated), so the parachute didn't deploy, and the bomb hit the ground so hard the plutonium core separated from the conventional explosives.
As for why the bombs have parachutes, it's so the airplane dropping the bomb can get far enough away to survive before the bomb reaches detonation altitude.