That said isn't getting weapons grade Pu or U the most difficult part of building a nuclear bomb? I'm not talking about the highly refined Fission-fusion-fission 50Mt or man-portable devices. But given a modest budget and the internets it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a Manhatten-project era nuclear device...assuming you had sufficient quantity of enriched material.
Yes and no. For a gun-type nuclear weapon, the hard part is getting the highly-enriched uranium (or laboratory-grade plutonium, but there isn't enough laboratory-grade plutonium in the world to make even one bomb). Design could be done by any university physics graduate in a few weeks, and assembly could be done in a decently-equipped garage machine shop.
However, the vast majority of uranium in the world is moderately-enriched reactor-grade uranium (which is useless in bombs), and the missing weapons use weapons-grade plutonium (which requires an implosion-type detonation system). Designing an implosion device requires extensive computer simulation (or do it Manhattan Project-style, with tens of thousands of man-hours spent cranking away on mechanical calculators), and assembly requires making carefully-shaped blocks of explosives.
I know this was just a joke, but I should point out that the punishment from downloading is generally just a monetary fine in a civil lawsuit, where as the punishment of the physical theft carries a criminal conviction that goes on your record. The up front monetary fine may be smaller for the physical theft, but the criminal record aspect has a cost of its own.
Let's say I walk into the local store, stuff two dozen DVDs down my pants, and get arrested as I waddle out of the store. Since the total value of the merchandise is less than $750, it's a gross misdemeanor and I'm facing no more than a year in prison and a fine of no more than $5000, plus whatever consequences a record for third-degree theft carries.
Let's say I download two dozen DVDs from a P2P service. I'm sued, the case goes to trial, and the plaintiff is awarded damages. The minimum is $750 x 24 = $18000, the maximum is $7,200,000, and historical record shows that the likely award is $1,920,000. I don't know about you, but two million dollars is more after-tax money than I'm likely to see in the rest of my life. I don't know what the dollar cost of a criminal record is, but it can't be more than my total potential future income.
The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin. Since wind resistance increases as the square of velocity, you get the most benefit at high speeds -- a parachute big enough to work at landing speeds would take up most of the mission's mass budget. This is why every Mars lander does either aerobrake->parachute->retrorocket or aerobrake->parachute->airbags.
It can be compressed much further than that. Studies on adult remedial education programs have shown that, even for people who managed to miss childhood schooling entirely, elementary-school math can be taught in a week, with most people able to learn it in a single day of dedicated instruction.
Exchange rates between pounds and dollars are a bit tricky. Sure, 500 pounds will get you $750 at the bank, but, especially when dealing with high-tech stuff, 500 pounds will buy you about the same amount as 500 dollars.
More significantly, long-term storage would run you $0.10 per byte per month. Those extra two bytes times 100,000 records times 20 date fields would run the bank a half-million dollars a year in increased data archiving costs.
Interesting claim, considering that these drives don't meet any of my needs. My computers fall into two categories: those that need 1-2GB of disk space, and those that need multiple terabytes of disk space. For the former, I can stick a $15 CompactFlash card in a $5 adapter; for the latter, spinning disks are still over an order of magnitude cheaper for the same capacity.
I don't expect this situation to change in the next five years.
Actually, one of the most dangerous uses of statistics is exactly predicting with them inappropriately. Curve fitting is especially prone to this error- attempting to make any predictions outside of the central mass of the points used to *produce* the curve is completely bogus, and yet people do it all the time.
Actually, you can predict outside your data set. The rule of thumb is that for a dataset that produces a simple curve (say, an exponential or linear fit), you can extrapolate up to 10% of the width of your dataset on either side (eg. given world population data from 1900 to 2000, you can extrapolate the population in 2010 or 1890). The problem is that people tend to extrapolate much further out than that (say, predicting the population in 2100).
"In-hospital complications" are things like life-threatening infections, uncontrollable internal bleeding, and the occasional dead patient. I don't know about you, but given the choice between wearing a diaper and wearing a body bag, I know which I'd pick.
It's OK because you can't step out of the sandbox. If the guest OS running the DNS server gets compromised, the compromise code can't step out of its sandbox and attack the guest OS running the webserver, or reach into the guest OS running the Active Directory server and grab the password list.
An attack that can break out of a virtual machine is a much, much bigger problem than one that stays contained inside the VM. If a guest gets compromised, you restart it from a known-clean state. If the host gets compromised, you need to clean out and restart everything.
I've got a map with an inconsistent projection: based on the one landmark that's survived to the modern day (a river running through the middle of the map), the scale is consistent across the map, but the east half of the map appears to be aligned with geographic north, while the west half is aligned with magnetic north. How would you handle that?
3) Make insurance cover emergency and substantial care only. Have high deductible and medical savings accounts.
You would get a higher standard of health and better value for your money by having insurance only cover preventive medicine. If insurance only covers substantial and emergency care, people will put off treatment until it falls into one of those categories.
(Which costs more: a MMR vaccine, or a month in the quarantine ward of a hospital being treated for severe measles? Under your plan, which is cheaper for the patient?)
The cost is not kilobytes and pennies, it's time. Watching "List of Pokemon" for vandalism is much easier than keeping an eye on 700+ individual articles; similarly, many of Wikipedia's policies are designed around making it possible for a small number of people to handle a large number of articles.
You forget something - getting the password for a user account is only step 1.
So you now check into that account every day to see what comes up - and "damn - the passwords been changed!"
Once a determined attacker gets in, their first priority is securing their access -- installing rootkits and backdoors, and using local exploits to crack other accounts and systems. This is why the only safe thing to do once someone's broken in is to format and restore from known clean media: you need to get rid of any possible alternate ways of accessing the system.
So it depends on their definition of relatively... Is that a household kitchen magnet (which would do little damage to most magnetic sensitive components once removed from the chip)? Or is it a 0.5T magnet (that's relatively weak compared to most MRI magnets and would likely saturate most magnetic sensitive components to the point of failure)?
Once the solder melts, it should be possible to shape it using a refrigerator magnet -- molten solder simply doesn't have much viscosity or structural strength. You don't need to worry, though: melting it is done by inductive heating, which requires a strong time-varying magnetic field.
How weak are we talking about here? I wouldn't want my chips to become desoldered just because they were exposed to an electromagnetic field. The article didn't mention any thing about that.
It works through induction heating, which requires a time-varying magnetic field. It's perfectly safe to use refrigerator magnets to stick things to your computer case, but you might have trouble using these new chips in the computer's speakers.
Doesn't matter how big the volume is. It only matters how much data changes every day. Even if it takes days to sync up the first time, as long as only a few GBs changes, subsequent backups will go plenty fast.
Based on my ISP's transfer restrictions, the initial sync of my home storage server would take just over a year and a half. Even if I were to saturate the upstream bandwidth (and risk getting my account canceled), the sync would take about eight months.
Except he doesn't want your alternate solution. He wants the solution he requested. If you don't know of a way to do it, then move on.
Except that odds are he doesn't want the solution he requested. Odds are, he wants to accomplish some higher-level task, and has prematurely decided that writing bits directly to a hard drive platter is how to do so.
I frequent a Macintosh programming forum. It's very common for people to ask "how do I do X?" (the usual formulation is "how do I get another program's window?"), where the correct answer is "you can't". After a few days of back-and-forth, it usually develops that X is a low-level step in accomplishing some higher-level task in Windows, and the question the person wanted to ask is about something quite doable on MacOS, such as "How do I send synthesized keystrokes to another program?" or "how do I hide another program?".
My phone has survived being thrown across the room at least once (the wall needed repairs). It's a twenty-year-old land-line phone, so it's much bigger and a good bit more durable than modern cell phones.
It's also survived coffee spills, young children, and being shipped across the country at the bottom of a box of office supplies, but I'd expect any phone to be able to deal with those.
Compcache is a project (still under development, only available in Staging) creates RAM-based block devices (/dev/ramzswapX) which are used as swap disks. Pages swapped to this virtual device are compressed to a smaller size. Part of your RAM is used as usually, and another part (the size is configurable) is used to save compressed pages, increases the amount of RAM you can use in practice.
Everything old is new again, I guess. Back in the day, there was a MacOS extension that did exactly this, called "RamDoubler". It was notorious for causing problems with badly-behaved programs -- the first step in any troubleshooting list was "Turn off RamDoubler".
Interesting thought. Can you get your home owner's/renter's insurance to compensate you for your lost CD collection?
Yes. Loss or damage of physical possessions up to a certain dollar amount is covered (with exceptions: flooding due to natural disaster is one of them -- I'd need to buy flood insurance for that, but because of where I live, floods aren't exactly a worry).
Can you get them to compensate you for the lost iTunes collection?
No. Loss of data due to software and/or hardware malfunctions is not covered by my renter's insurance. The electronics coverage section has a clause explicitly stating this.
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Yes and no. For a gun-type nuclear weapon, the hard part is getting the highly-enriched uranium (or laboratory-grade plutonium, but there isn't enough laboratory-grade plutonium in the world to make even one bomb). Design could be done by any university physics graduate in a few weeks, and assembly could be done in a decently-equipped garage machine shop.
However, the vast majority of uranium in the world is moderately-enriched reactor-grade uranium (which is useless in bombs), and the missing weapons use weapons-grade plutonium (which requires an implosion-type detonation system). Designing an implosion device requires extensive computer simulation (or do it Manhattan Project-style, with tens of thousands of man-hours spent cranking away on mechanical calculators), and assembly requires making carefully-shaped blocks of explosives.
Let's say I walk into the local store, stuff two dozen DVDs down my pants, and get arrested as I waddle out of the store. Since the total value of the merchandise is less than $750, it's a gross misdemeanor and I'm facing no more than a year in prison and a fine of no more than $5000, plus whatever consequences a record for third-degree theft carries.
Let's say I download two dozen DVDs from a P2P service. I'm sued, the case goes to trial, and the plaintiff is awarded damages. The minimum is $750 x 24 = $18000, the maximum is $7,200,000, and historical record shows that the likely award is $1,920,000. I don't know about you, but two million dollars is more after-tax money than I'm likely to see in the rest of my life. I don't know what the dollar cost of a criminal record is, but it can't be more than my total potential future income.
The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin. Since wind resistance increases as the square of velocity, you get the most benefit at high speeds -- a parachute big enough to work at landing speeds would take up most of the mission's mass budget. This is why every Mars lander does either aerobrake->parachute->retrorocket or aerobrake->parachute->airbags.
But what if they were researching a way to make them more resistant to Vitamin D deficiency at high latitudes?
How much of the problem is in the phrasing, and how much is in the research itself?
It can be compressed much further than that. Studies on adult remedial education programs have shown that, even for people who managed to miss childhood schooling entirely, elementary-school math can be taught in a week, with most people able to learn it in a single day of dedicated instruction.
Exchange rates between pounds and dollars are a bit tricky. Sure, 500 pounds will get you $750 at the bank, but, especially when dealing with high-tech stuff, 500 pounds will buy you about the same amount as 500 dollars.
More significantly, long-term storage would run you $0.10 per byte per month. Those extra two bytes times 100,000 records times 20 date fields would run the bank a half-million dollars a year in increased data archiving costs.
Interesting claim, considering that these drives don't meet any of my needs. My computers fall into two categories: those that need 1-2GB of disk space, and those that need multiple terabytes of disk space. For the former, I can stick a $15 CompactFlash card in a $5 adapter; for the latter, spinning disks are still over an order of magnitude cheaper for the same capacity.
I don't expect this situation to change in the next five years.
The RIAA hasn't.
Actually, you can predict outside your data set. The rule of thumb is that for a dataset that produces a simple curve (say, an exponential or linear fit), you can extrapolate up to 10% of the width of your dataset on either side (eg. given world population data from 1900 to 2000, you can extrapolate the population in 2010 or 1890). The problem is that people tend to extrapolate much further out than that (say, predicting the population in 2100).
No, you're the one missing the point: Even though the gold in this vault has been replaced with pyrite, the gold in the next vault over is still fine.
"In-hospital complications" are things like life-threatening infections, uncontrollable internal bleeding, and the occasional dead patient. I don't know about you, but given the choice between wearing a diaper and wearing a body bag, I know which I'd pick.
It's OK because you can't step out of the sandbox. If the guest OS running the DNS server gets compromised, the compromise code can't step out of its sandbox and attack the guest OS running the webserver, or reach into the guest OS running the Active Directory server and grab the password list.
An attack that can break out of a virtual machine is a much, much bigger problem than one that stays contained inside the VM. If a guest gets compromised, you restart it from a known-clean state. If the host gets compromised, you need to clean out and restart everything.
I've got a map with an inconsistent projection: based on the one landmark that's survived to the modern day (a river running through the middle of the map), the scale is consistent across the map, but the east half of the map appears to be aligned with geographic north, while the west half is aligned with magnetic north. How would you handle that?
You would get a higher standard of health and better value for your money by having insurance only cover preventive medicine. If insurance only covers substantial and emergency care, people will put off treatment until it falls into one of those categories.
(Which costs more: a MMR vaccine, or a month in the quarantine ward of a hospital being treated for severe measles? Under your plan, which is cheaper for the patient?)
The cost is not kilobytes and pennies, it's time. Watching "List of Pokemon" for vandalism is much easier than keeping an eye on 700+ individual articles; similarly, many of Wikipedia's policies are designed around making it possible for a small number of people to handle a large number of articles.
Once a determined attacker gets in, their first priority is securing their access -- installing rootkits and backdoors, and using local exploits to crack other accounts and systems. This is why the only safe thing to do once someone's broken in is to format and restore from known clean media: you need to get rid of any possible alternate ways of accessing the system.
Once the solder melts, it should be possible to shape it using a refrigerator magnet -- molten solder simply doesn't have much viscosity or structural strength. You don't need to worry, though: melting it is done by inductive heating, which requires a strong time-varying magnetic field.
It works through induction heating, which requires a time-varying magnetic field. It's perfectly safe to use refrigerator magnets to stick things to your computer case, but you might have trouble using these new chips in the computer's speakers.
Based on my ISP's transfer restrictions, the initial sync of my home storage server would take just over a year and a half. Even if I were to saturate the upstream bandwidth (and risk getting my account canceled), the sync would take about eight months.
Except that odds are he doesn't want the solution he requested. Odds are, he wants to accomplish some higher-level task, and has prematurely decided that writing bits directly to a hard drive platter is how to do so.
I frequent a Macintosh programming forum. It's very common for people to ask "how do I do X?" (the usual formulation is "how do I get another program's window?"), where the correct answer is "you can't". After a few days of back-and-forth, it usually develops that X is a low-level step in accomplishing some higher-level task in Windows, and the question the person wanted to ask is about something quite doable on MacOS, such as "How do I send synthesized keystrokes to another program?" or "how do I hide another program?".
NTFS uses a limited form of block suballocation: if the file is small enough, the file data can share a block with the metadata.
My phone has survived being thrown across the room at least once (the wall needed repairs). It's a twenty-year-old land-line phone, so it's much bigger and a good bit more durable than modern cell phones.
It's also survived coffee spills, young children, and being shipped across the country at the bottom of a box of office supplies, but I'd expect any phone to be able to deal with those.
Everything old is new again, I guess. Back in the day, there was a MacOS extension that did exactly this, called "RamDoubler". It was notorious for causing problems with badly-behaved programs -- the first step in any troubleshooting list was "Turn off RamDoubler".
Yes. Loss or damage of physical possessions up to a certain dollar amount is covered (with exceptions: flooding due to natural disaster is one of them -- I'd need to buy flood insurance for that, but because of where I live, floods aren't exactly a worry).
No. Loss of data due to software and/or hardware malfunctions is not covered by my renter's insurance. The electronics coverage section has a clause explicitly stating this.