So going from one cave to the next is ok. Going from one house to the next is ok. Going from one city to the next is ok. Going from one continent to the next is ok. But work toward going from one planet to another... HELL NO??? That's right. There are fundamental differences between moving different distances on the same planet, and moving to different planets. And colonisation... don't get me started!!;)
If you have a better plan than the one in action involving space stations and the craft they are using (poorly) to make this happen, then by all means, put it into action. Otherwise, shut up. You misunderstand -- I don't think we can, or should try, to colonise other planets. At a stretch, I can conceive of circumstances where putting a small crew on Mars could be useful and cool and in some sense "worth it". (I don't think we're there now, not when NASA are cutting science budgets on existing, funded rovers or other unmanned missions.
If you are one of those people who thinks that the development of the bicycle, the automobile, the boat, and the plane were all great ideas, but we should stop when crossing the boundary of space, stick with living in the basement. That is what I think, exactly. (Not so sure about the jet turbine though. Mass air travel is, let's say, a double-edged sword.)
Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do something.
Must not care about frittering valuable resources away on pointless flag-waving exercises to keep the pork-hungry defence industry and adolescent males (of all ages) happy that the world of Star Trek is only a matter of working out the engineering.Or as the Register just put it:
Nobel-winning boffin slams ISS, manned spaceflight
'Infantile fixation on putting people into space'
Or to put it another way, and answer the question implicitly posed by the headline: your chances are effectively nil. Or null. Or undef, if you speaka da Perl.
Seriously. 50 people a year in the UK win the national lottery, and the odds of a single ticket winning are so large as to be effectively infinite over a normal human lifetime (assuming you're not buying tens of thousands of tickets every week.)
It's been almost a decade since I decided to start working towards infosec rather than web development. Finally, this year, I'm earning slightly more than I was back in 1998. (Admittedly I was massively overpaid then - it was the bubble! in central London! and I could write Perl,/and/ read it!:)
)
So bring on the new attacks, the more determined villains, the organised crime groups. It's the closest thing to a job for life i'LL ever have.
How do I not tolerate your beliefs? I'm not advocating rounding up the delusionists are marching them off to death-camps. I just disagree with their opinions.
If so much ice has melted already, have the ocean water levels risen any appreciable amount?
Yes - appreciable in the sense of "measurable"; whether you think the present rise (about 20cm in the last century) is significant depends on how bad a 200 year storm-surge / flood event would be where you live. I've seen a picture of the London Embankment (along the Thames) at a spring low tide, showing where the original early Victorian wall came to, and the subsequent 6 foot or so of additional height that's had to be added since then (alas can't google it up right now.)
Here's the IPCC predictions for sea-level rise under various emission scenarios this century. A significant number of climatologists believe these numbers are significantly over-optimistic; I've seen figures of 15-25m (ie. 45 - 75 feet.) Obviously those scenarios would pretty much wipe out world civilisation as it is today, due to the loss of massive amounts of capital (all the human settlements closer than that to sea-level, which is a very large fraction), infrastructure and especially shipping disruptions.
Ironically, deep-sea oil and gas rigs float, so would be unaffected (except for the refining and distribution networks being wiped out, I suppose.)
It has the potential to be incredibly lucrative, yes. Less so if we get a 5m rise in sea-level in the next few decades - a wild idea which has suddenly started to look terribly mainstream in the climate modeling community in the last 5-10 years. How many ports capable of handling proper ocean-going container and bulk carrier vessels are sited at or very slightly above sea-level? Yes, that's right. That means the port and shipping facilities (eg: shipyards) will be unusable (and there's no way to defend against that sort of sea-level rise with locks and sea-walls and the like; the engineering just won't work, it's cheaper to build a new port somewhere else.) Hmmm, I guess that will mean the end of international shipping and thus trade.
This is shaping up to be a really interesting century.
Yes, the world is getting warmer. Everyone agrees with that basic statement. Now tell me _why_ it's because of Mankind. We already have geological proof that the world gets hotter and colder in cycles and we are (geologically speaking) getting out of an ice age.
Hey, why not ask a climatologist (or six)?
That's an excellent paper. If you've heard the "skeptic" canard along the lines of "but the temperature in teh historical proxy records starts rising before the CO2 starts to increase" -- which is completely correct - please take the trouble to read and understand the description of the albedo-flip feedback cycle. That's right, this means that things are much worse than the IPCC thinks.
No, wait, he's a crank. He works for that hotbed of liberal tree-huggers, NASA!
Final one for the depressingly high number of skeptic loonies and ignoramuses who always come out of the wordwork on these stories: are you really saying that George Bush and Arnold Schwartzenegger are both suckers who have fallen for bad silence peddled by some sort of environmentalist illuminati? really? Cos even Dubya has now officially accepted the basic, uncontroversial amongst actual scientists, IPCC-version models are accurate (and this is anthropogenic warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions). You did know that didn't you?
There are plenty of very intelligent religionists.
Whatever it is you think intelligence is, any person who profoundly believes something for which there is no evidence, and in fact a ginormous mountain of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, doesn't have it -- doubly so if they're smart enough to be able to get themselves a university degree, read books and express themselves articulately. A congenital idiot who believes in god can be excused. Someone with the ability to actually understand the evidence, yet persists in clinging to the indefensible, is a fool of the first order.
At the low end, there's not a great deal of difference beyond the value of the brand (which is non-zero: how many replies do job ads for "network engineer, min 4 years experience with Linux based routers" get vs. "cisco-based routers"? )
At pretty much anything above the branch office level, however, there's a huge difference. The two biggies are the backplane, and the ability to support proper linecards with offload routing processors. When you have a fat high-end device in your network core with 8 16-way OC3 linecards, there's just no way the standard PC architecture can keep up. The PC architecture jus isn't designed to shift massive amounts of IO, twiddle bits on a zillion and one packets per second, then route them out a different interface.
This was widely publicized (amongst the loose communities of Cisco users, anyway) back around the time the original post was made. Hey, that would have been... 18th August!:)
To be fair, there IS a story here, which is that Cisco only just acknowledged this officially.
Service Provider types (the operators of routers whose successful attack would actually affect anyone in the real world) have been well aware of this. But as others have pointed out, if you don't trust your admins, and you're not running proper logging and a proper audit trail of admin sessions already, you've got bigger problems than this.
Here's the thing that bothers me about nuclear power. They pretty much have to be sited on rivers or the coast to get water for cooling. The IPCC says we could be looking at 4-6m sea level rise in teh next century (they're not saying that's certain, they're saying it's a probability under particular CO2 emission scenarios.) Hansen says it's more like 15-25m, though the difference is fairly academic for sites at sea-level on the coast or on tidal rivers. So, how many of today's nuclear power stations will be under water in 100 years' time? And what level of probability - 5%? 1%??
Only idiots or the ignorant would claim, say, 1m rise is less than a 1% probability over the next century. All today's nuclear plants will still be there then - I should know, I within 25 miles of one of the first attempts to decommission an end-of-life facility, and it's a century-long process (and ends up with a 100' concrete sarcophagus holding the reactor core.) But say it's only 1%. A 1% chance of 10% of the world's installed reactors being under water is too much - much too much.
signature-based a/v is dead. It can only protect you from threats spotted by the a/v company earlier than yesterday evening. The Storm crew are turning out dozens of variants a day. The window of vulnerability is plenty big enough for the attackers.
Just connecting an unpatched Windows box directly to the internet is enough. It belongs to a hacker in very short order. Untrue since XP SP2 comes with the firewall on by default. You may not have noticed but this thing isn't a network worm, it's a trojan that relies on idiot end-users triggering it to infect a new host.
PS I'm a Linux / GNU user. The big issue in malware spreading these days is client-side bugs -- Internet Explorer has been the biggy for the last few years but everything else has similarly exploitable bugs - from plugins/extensions like Flash to stand-alone apps like RealPlayer, Quicktime, winamp, yadda yadda. And Linux multimedia apps are as prone to such bugs as Windows ones. (Disclaimer: I'm paid to worry about targeted attacks. When the attacker is actively after one of our Linux-using admins, they're actually more likely to succeed with an Open Office doc exploit or trajan'd jpeg file than with a network server exploit. My employer gets a lot of worry for their money. )
The rovers normally do a sun stare (through thick h-a filters I believe) to measure tau, the fraction of sunlight that's making it through the atmosphere. Here's a mosaic of those sun stares from the last month or so, corrected to show the light as it would actually appear to the rover. The dramatic darkening of the sun is obvious. The feat of building rovers that not only live (at time of writing) thirteen times over their design lifetime, but survive on less than half the power that was originally expected to kill them both stone-dead, is going to be a legend in unmanned spaceflight for a long time to come... (For the last 3 years, those of us following the rovers on a daily basis believed the official line that less than 280Wh/day would mean bricked rover after a couple of days. The minimum Oppy received was 128 W/h - and (thanks partly for the nice warm summer weather) it didn't even trip the emergency heaters which come on at 39*C below.
Kudos to Emily Lakdawala of the Planetary Society, who got an awesome congrats note from Jim Bell, the MER imaging lead.
The untold story of the MER rovers is the triumphant vindication of Steve Squyres' then unprecedented decision to allow the raw imagery to be automatically thrown up on the net virtually as they came in - so that in some cases, the amateur mosaics, panoramas and other post-processed images were sometimes out before the official JPL team had even seen the raw data. Indeed someone even wrote an application specifically to pull down, process and render the raw data. (Yeah, it's GPL'd:) )
If there's one thing Orion definitely won't be, it's "a new kind of spaceship". It's the same fundamental design used by every other manned vehicle with the exception of the STS and Buran (which sadly never made a manned flight), all the way back to Vostok-1.
Slashdot Mirror
'Infantile fixation on putting people into space'
Seriously. 50 people a year in the UK win the national lottery, and the odds of a single ticket winning are so large as to be effectively infinite over a normal human lifetime (assuming you're not buying tens of thousands of tickets every week.)
Which "slightly more stable than XP Vista OS" would that be? I'm sure there would have been an announcement here if such a thing were to be released.
Incidentally, you're mistaken.
So bring on the new attacks, the more determined villains, the organised crime groups. It's the closest thing to a job for life i'LL ever have.
tl;dr
Yes - appreciable in the sense of "measurable"; whether you think the present rise (about 20cm in the last century) is significant depends on how bad a 200 year storm-surge / flood event would be where you live. I've seen a picture of the London Embankment (along the Thames) at a spring low tide, showing where the original early Victorian wall came to, and the subsequent 6 foot or so of additional height that's had to be added since then (alas can't google it up right now.)
Here's the IPCC predictions for sea-level rise under various emission scenarios this century. A significant number of climatologists believe these numbers are significantly over-optimistic; I've seen figures of 15-25m (ie. 45 - 75 feet.) Obviously those scenarios would pretty much wipe out world civilisation as it is today, due to the loss of massive amounts of capital (all the human settlements closer than that to sea-level, which is a very large fraction), infrastructure and especially shipping disruptions.
Ironically, deep-sea oil and gas rigs float, so would be unaffected (except for the refining and distribution networks being wiped out, I suppose.)
This is shaping up to be a really interesting century.
A reasonable question. Here is the answer.
No, wait, he's a crank. He works for that hotbed of liberal tree-huggers, NASA!
Here's the National Snow and Ice Data Center's latest map of Arctic sea-ice extent (w/e 10th September 2007), showing the average extent from 1980-2000 at this time of year. (context and the latest data will be here tomorrow..) This will be updating tomorrow (Monday) afternoon with the latest week's data. Normally sea-ice reaches it's minimum extent at the end of September, so we're not at the bottom of the 2007 season yet.
Final one for the depressingly high number of skeptic loonies and ignoramuses who always come out of the wordwork on these stories: are you really saying that George Bush and Arnold Schwartzenegger are both suckers who have fallen for bad silence peddled by some sort of environmentalist illuminati? really? Cos even Dubya has now officially accepted the basic, uncontroversial amongst actual scientists, IPCC-version models are accurate (and this is anthropogenic warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions). You did know that didn't you?
What do you know, that Dubya doesn't?
Whatever it is you think intelligence is, any person who profoundly believes something for which there is no evidence, and in fact a ginormous mountain of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, doesn't have it -- doubly so if they're smart enough to be able to get themselves a university degree, read books and express themselves articulately. A congenital idiot who believes in god can be excused. Someone with the ability to actually understand the evidence, yet persists in clinging to the indefensible, is a fool of the first order.
At pretty much anything above the branch office level, however, there's a huge difference. The two biggies are the backplane, and the ability to support proper linecards with offload routing processors. When you have a fat high-end device in your network core with 8 16-way OC3 linecards, there's just no way the standard PC architecture can keep up. The PC architecture jus isn't designed to shift massive amounts of IO, twiddle bits on a zillion and one packets per second, then route them out a different interface.
If your cable runs look like this then you are not going to be using PC hardware, believe me.
Juniper are a good alternative to Cisco, though. There is now finally some competition.
To be fair, there IS a story here, which is that Cisco only just acknowledged this officially.
Service Provider types (the operators of routers whose successful attack would actually affect anyone in the real world) have been well aware of this. But as others have pointed out, if you don't trust your admins, and you're not running proper logging and a proper audit trail of admin sessions already, you've got bigger problems than this.
2007 arctic sea-ice is an unprecedented 20% smaller than the previousrecord low year - 2005.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-macdonald13jul13,1,4424613.story?coll=la-news-comment&ctrack=1&cset=true *shrug*
Only idiots or the ignorant would claim, say, 1m rise is less than a 1% probability over the next century. All today's nuclear plants will still be there then - I should know, I within 25 miles of one of the first attempts to decommission an end-of-life facility, and it's a century-long process (and ends up with a 100' concrete sarcophagus holding the reactor core.) But say it's only 1%. A 1% chance of 10% of the world's installed reactors being under water is too much - much too much.
signature-based a/v is dead. It can only protect you from threats spotted by the a/v company earlier than yesterday evening. The Storm crew are turning out dozens of variants a day. The window of vulnerability is plenty big enough for the attackers.
PS I'm a Linux / GNU user. The big issue in malware spreading these days is client-side bugs -- Internet Explorer has been the biggy for the last few years but everything else has similarly exploitable bugs - from plugins/extensions like Flash to stand-alone apps like RealPlayer, Quicktime, winamp, yadda yadda. And Linux multimedia apps are as prone to such bugs as Windows ones. (Disclaimer: I'm paid to worry about targeted attacks. When the attacker is actively after one of our Linux-using admins, they're actually more likely to succeed with an Open Office doc exploit or trajan'd jpeg file than with a network server exploit. My employer gets a lot of worry for their money. )
The untold story of the MER rovers is the triumphant vindication of Steve Squyres' then unprecedented decision to allow the raw imagery to be automatically thrown up on the net virtually as they came in - so that in some cases, the amateur mosaics, panoramas and other post-processed images were sometimes out before the official JPL team had even seen the raw data. Indeed someone even wrote an application specifically to pull down, process and render the raw data. (Yeah, it's GPL'd :) )
kind (n): (1) a category of things distinguished by some common characteristic or quality;...
If there's one thing Orion definitely won't be, it's "a new kind of spaceship". It's the same fundamental design used by every other manned vehicle with the exception of the STS and Buran (which sadly never made a manned flight), all the way back to Vostok-1.