> Depending on the license, if they release a software that depends on it, they could be required to release the code.
They're required to release the software to people for whom they've provided the binaries. It doesn't have to be public; it doesn't have to be made available to anyone else. And it can be dual-licensed, which many projects are.
> Don't forget though, Ben Franklin is someone who never had his liberty or his safety threatened.
The signatories of the Declaration of Independence felt that their liberty, and safety, were indeed threatened by a remote and dangerous monarchy. After signing it, Mr. Franklin most certainly was at risk of capture and execution for treason against the British Empire, much as Mr. Snowden is at risk of prosecution if he returns to US soil.
> It's a problem that doesn't come up very often, is unlikely to ever come up in a hydrogen car (especially a fuel cell one like in the article due to nothing being very hot)
And I'm afraid this is part of the point. Hydrogen embrittlement also occurs at low temperatures. It's the high pressure containers that seem to suffer the worst problems, not relatively low pressure systems made out of relatively cheap steel, and not some of the finer steels such as
> It would probably also utterly horrify you that I have used hydrogen under a bit over atmospheric pressure as a furnace
Not a bit. It's the high pressure and various metals, including many steels, used for high pressure that seem to have real problems with hydrogen embrittlement. You can avoid it with some pretty expensive steels, or not using high pressures of hydrogen.
Again, _this does not solve the transport problem_. The car's local tanks can be made expensively. The storage units for a day's or week's hydrogen supply at a refilling station, or the pipes or transport vehicles to move it, are a very different technological problem. One can't take experience from, say, the Haber process and simply it works well for miles of pipe or remote, exposed, long-duration storage tanks.
The idea that "these fuel containers are solid" and have hydrogen embedded in a safer, non-pressurized object is appealing, but does not yet work well. I've seen no evidence that it will _ever_ work well. For viability, hydrogen fuels need _much_ higher unit density and much less mass of transport compared to mass of hydrogen transported to be viable. They need to roughly double the amount of hydrogen/unit mass they can currently hold to be considered viable. I'm looking at the US Department of Energy charts at https://books.google.com/books...
I am sorry to rain on the parade of alternative fuel sources, but one can't simply describe problems as solved when they've not been.
> The passwords are salted and hashed so they're not gonna be digging out rainbow tables and getting passwords.
No, they can merely apply brute force guessing techniques to verify password guesses. I've seen no hint that the distributed work and very effective ruleset of Alec Moffett's old "crack" password guessing utility have ever yielded less than 10% of any DES or now 3DES based list of hashed passwords.
There are also refugees deathly frightened of their old governments tracking and killing them, and especially for those fleeing genocidal or religious persecution. We saw it before with Rwandan refugees, where the Tutsis were murdered wholesale by Hutus. We saw it Iraq, where the Kurds were slaughtered in the Anfal cmpaign, and refugees _were_ hunted in exile. Even in the US, centralized documentation as found in the records of citizenship applications and birth records was used against the Nisei, citizens with Japanese ancestors who were sent wholesale to concentration camps during WW II.
The point that hydrogen generated this way is still used elsewise is interesting and wasn't in the Haber process article you point to. Thank your for pointing it out. Is the resulting hydrogen kept in long term storage, or used still hot and mixed with methane from the catalytic chamber? If it's still hot and mixed, then it wasn't kept in pure form for storage.
That's the point I'm trying to get across now: just because it's used safely and effectively in quite temporary conditions that differ profoundly in temperature and chemical conditions, doesn't eliminate the storage and transportation problems. That's quite a different claim than "it's a solved problem because the Haber process produces hydrogen", which is what you seemed to say by bringing up the Haber process.
It also does not mean the problem is a solved one. because of a single new technological innovation or parallel technology. The problem may be tractable, but that requires cooperation from the laws of chemistry and physics: they do not care about Gant charts and quarterly progress planning charts.
I';m afraid you're leaving out details. The Haber process you linked to was used, _at first_, for hydrogen generation but was switched to methane fairly quickly.The hydrogen is consumed locally quite quickly by the ongoing reaction. The vessels handling the catalytic reactions are exposed to it, but those are active reaction chambers, not storage vessels, and they're at relatively high temperatures and pressures. I would not expect embrittlement at such temperatures and pressures.
Morbid obesity is a real health risk for many American children. Whether cause or effect, it's correlated with diabetes, heart trouble, and sleep apnea, to name only a few conditions that can kill a child.
> It's also paradoxical. Cold weather should speed up the metabolism,
Why? Some extra calories for shivering or thermal control seems reasonable. But for most species, winter is a time of low food intake and much reduced activity. Species of both mice and gut microbes that don't optimize food consumption in the cold are at a real evolutionary handicap compared to species that can do so successfully.
Why don't these scientists study some humans who live in cold places
Because getting complete diatary and lifestyle control of small lab animals is much cheaper and faster than doing so for humans. And dissecting to examine their intestinal walls, in detail, is something most human study guidelenes would prevent.
"Electrolysis of water" requires pure water or the system tends to get corroded and plates or degrades the electrodes very quickly with large scale electrolysis. For hydrogen refueling, you still need a stable local reposotory. And local electrolysis is notoriously inefficient, so many of the energy and potential fiscal benefits get wasted. "Reforming of natural gas" is just taking a fairly efficient fuel and wasting energy converting its physical form. Even relatively modest local storage suffers from the leakage and metal storage embrittlement problems.
A combination of efficiently used technologies may reduce the losses to a manageable level, but I'm afraid there is a lot of handwaving in progress for hydrogen fuel-based vehicles and portable energy.
A hydrogen based vehicle economy needs some inexpensive, safe way to ship the fuel in bulk. In most models, this means miles of pipes for getting it to homes or to vehicle fuel centers, and those tend to leak very, very easily. The "carbon fiber" tanks for portable use all seem to have a metal liner, which is how they keep the hydrogen in, because as I mentioned, carbon fiber [composites] tend to leak hydrogen.
The metal liner means the liner is subject to embrittlement. I can certainly believe the carbon fiber composite shell provides vital mechanical reinforcement to the metal liner, multi-layer and multi-material solutions can work well. But the carbon fiber [composite] shell, by itself, would leak like a sieve.
> While i dont like the idea of a backdoor either, the "evidence they need" is every piece of info they can get
"All the evidence they need" is a forced confession, obtained by torture and without any assurance of the validity or source of the evidence. Poor evidence obtained forcibly is precisely why the fifth amendment was created, partly to help ensure proper provenance for the evidence, and to prevent "fishing expeditions" where forced testimony to avoid a false accusation could be used to gather evidence for some other conviction. That is an old trick used against political protest and against those engaged in public protest throughout legal history.
> If you're saying FBI can compel features intended to backdoor the security measures, then you're establishing the legal principle of forced backdoors.
It's been done before. The US encryption policies effectively enforce poor quality encryption as the default standard for many applications. The "80-bit maximum SSL key" policy was just such a policy.
> The problem for the Iranians wasn't the revolution, but the hijacking of the revolution by the Islamists.
Revolutions are almost always hijacked, usually by the most fanatical of the revolutionaries. It's _amazing_ that US politics were so thoughtful and cautious in the first 30 years after the American Revolution.
That's great, if you've been permitted the resources to set up PXE boot and keep track of assets to install the images only where you have licenses. Unfortunately, getting all the doctor's laptops and home machines that come in via VPN connections updated can be a nightmare. And if the patch isn't already in the image, you can be re-infected by within minutes after re-activation. I'm not trying to say that it's an insoluble problem: Isolating such an infected network and setting up "DMZ's" or "demilitarized zones" for introducing and re-activating isolated services is a good start. But it's not something you can just flip a switch and recover from.
This is also where a good manager hides their network and systems people in a room and guards the door to keep upset staff off their backs while they clean up the mess. It's also where that manager publishes the progress and keeps the staff from being harassed every five minutes with people screaming "My 12 year old can do better than this!" and opening up big security holes just to get their particular task done.
> their own countrymen into heroes for taking sides in someone else's civil war.
You mean like joining the French Foreign Legion? Or the covert support the US provided to Saigon before the Vietnam War became official? Or the roughly 100,000 US mercenaries currently working in Iraq?
I think you're confused, but perhaps because I didn't go into enough detail for people who've not looked closely at it. We're also looking back into physics and electronics training required long ago in my career, when learning computers involved building them from bare components and involved learning the limitations of transistors themselves.
A typical digital circuit is tied to ground and power, and tied to input and output circuitry. When current is drawn from ground, and power, to change output signal states, you get power droop and ground bounce because the power lines and ground lines or power planes and ground planes, themselves have capicatance, inductance, resistance, and impedance. The larger the number of output signals being driven and the larger the number of output signals switching state, the more current is being demanded from ground and from power lines. Providing some local reservoir of change at power line voltages, coupled much more closely to the power lines than the power supply itself or the net capacitance between the entire local ground plane and the entire local power plane, helps "decouple" this highly localized current drain from the overall power supplies. This is why they're called "decoupling" capacitors. Also, with modern FET based systems, the amount of current drawn to switch the state of a lot of FET's driven by a modern digital circuit in a high frequency circuit changing state many times per second can be quite large. Without that local reservor of charge provided by a local capacitor which sits directly on the power leads, next to the relevant circuit, the current will have to be drawn from the signal lines all the way back to the main power supply.
This way lies feedback loops and unexpected digital signal failures as a set of registers all draw current at the same time and drop the local power supply lines before the avlid volatages needed for the digital circuits to perform as expected, but only when a lot of signals switch *at the same time* to a different state. This can be _nightmarish_ to debug: it doesn't show up in simulation unless your simulations are _very_ sophisticated, and it doesn't show up at lower frequency testing. It shows up at high frequency, at the worst possible moments, in high frequency operations when you don't have _time_ to error check every output in a low latency signal processing schema, and it starts showing up erratically dependent on the actual number of signal lines changing at any moment.
I used to encounter it in low-cost electronics, and I can still remember encountering it as circuits switched from discrete components to surface mount, and designers were overruled in their demands for local decoupling capacitors in the circuit board designs. And yes, I can remember correcting such issues by finding the designer, comparing old and later board designs, and realizing that sets of local small ceramic capacitors had been been replaced with single, larger, polar capacitors which simply could not do the job.
Yes. It is. Starting with a copy of "dban", downloaded on a Linux laptop in a local coffee house and applied to to our disks, or using a slimple live Debian or CentOS or even OpenBSD DVD image, can be a start. But getting anything _alive_ that can handle patient data, however, can be pretty iffy. Windows machines can be re-infected in the process of re-installatiion in an infested local environment. Dealing with several hundred such systems that handle doctor's schedules, patients care plans, or handle prescriptions and billing and correspondence and mortgages and health insurance records is an absolute nightmare.
Can you burn your own home to the ground and rebuild from scratch? Certainly. Can you do this with a hospital without kill anyone who regularly scheduled kidney medicine, who is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday, or who needs immunization records or simply needs allergy records before transferring schools? That is a nightmare.
You think you're kidding. I must now recommend the television show "Rocket City Rednecks" a bunch of good ol' boys including several NASA engineers who explored numerous engineering challenges. The "use a Winnebago to test recycling and living enclosed for a Mars mission" episode was splendid fun. The need for much more beer than expected for the water recycling was priceless, as was the "don't put the water recycler too close to the driver's seat" lesson.
The show was wonderful, and like Mythbusters explored very real science and engineering tasks in a "what can we find in the parts bin" fashion. the official website is http://channel.nationalgeograp... .
> exceedingly intelligent, physically fit, mentally well-adjusted white man
The "white man" comes from passing all the training courses. However, they're also going to need to be _small_. Any extra hight adds up to many thousands if not millions of dollars in oxygen consumption, foodl consumption, and the fuel and resources to support them over the course of a many year mission. They'll also probably be male because it's much easier to put a simply condom based catheter on a man for the plumbing in a space suit.
Slashdot Mirror
> Depending on the license, if they release a software that depends on it, they could be required to release the code.
They're required to release the software to people for whom they've provided the binaries. It doesn't have to be public; it doesn't have to be made available to anyone else. And it can be dual-licensed, which many projects are.
> Don't forget though, Ben Franklin is someone who never had his liberty or his safety threatened.
The signatories of the Declaration of Independence felt that their liberty, and safety, were indeed threatened by a remote and dangerous monarchy. After signing it, Mr. Franklin most certainly was at risk of capture and execution for treason against the British Empire, much as Mr. Snowden is at risk of prosecution if he returns to US soil.
> It's a problem that doesn't come up very often, is unlikely to ever come up in a hydrogen car (especially a fuel cell one like in the article due to nothing being very hot)
And I'm afraid this is part of the point. Hydrogen embrittlement also occurs at low temperatures. It's the high pressure containers that seem to suffer the worst problems, not relatively low pressure systems made out of relatively cheap steel, and not some of the finer steels such as
> It would probably also utterly horrify you that I have used hydrogen under a bit over atmospheric pressure as a furnace
Not a bit. It's the high pressure and various metals, including many steels, used for high pressure that seem to have real problems with hydrogen embrittlement. You can avoid it with some pretty expensive steels, or not using high pressures of hydrogen.
Again, _this does not solve the transport problem_. The car's local tanks can be made expensively. The storage units for a day's or week's hydrogen supply at a refilling station, or the pipes or transport vehicles to move it, are a very different technological problem. One can't take experience from, say, the Haber process and simply it works well for miles of pipe or remote, exposed, long-duration storage tanks.
The idea that "these fuel containers are solid" and have hydrogen embedded in a safer, non-pressurized object is appealing, but does not yet work well. I've seen no evidence that it will _ever_ work well. For viability, hydrogen fuels need _much_ higher unit density and much less mass of transport compared to mass of hydrogen transported to be viable. They need to roughly double the amount of hydrogen/unit mass they can currently hold to be considered viable. I'm looking at the US Department of Energy charts at https://books.google.com/books...
I am sorry to rain on the parade of alternative fuel sources, but one can't simply describe problems as solved when they've not been.
Git, hosted at Github.
If you mean a "web publishing system", then Wordpress has a reasonable history of being one. But that doesn't make it a CMS.
> The passwords are salted and hashed so they're not gonna be digging out rainbow tables and getting passwords.
No, they can merely apply brute force guessing techniques to verify password guesses. I've seen no hint that the distributed work and very effective ruleset of Alec Moffett's old "crack" password guessing utility have ever yielded less than 10% of any DES or now 3DES based list of hashed passwords.
There are also refugees deathly frightened of their old governments tracking and killing them, and especially for those fleeing genocidal or religious persecution. We saw it before with Rwandan refugees, where the Tutsis were murdered wholesale by Hutus. We saw it Iraq, where the Kurds were slaughtered in the Anfal cmpaign, and refugees _were_ hunted in exile. Even in the US, centralized documentation as found in the records of citizenship applications and birth records was used against the Nisei, citizens with Japanese ancestors who were sent wholesale to concentration camps during WW II.
The point that hydrogen generated this way is still used elsewise is interesting and wasn't in the Haber process article you point to. Thank your for pointing it out. Is the resulting hydrogen kept in long term storage, or used still hot and mixed with methane from the catalytic chamber? If it's still hot and mixed, then it wasn't kept in pure form for storage.
That's the point I'm trying to get across now: just because it's used safely and effectively in quite temporary conditions that differ profoundly in temperature and chemical conditions, doesn't eliminate the storage and transportation problems. That's quite a different claim than "it's a solved problem because the Haber process produces hydrogen", which is what you seemed to say by bringing up the Haber process.
It also does not mean the problem is a solved one. because of a single new technological innovation or parallel technology. The problem may be tractable, but that requires cooperation from the laws of chemistry and physics: they do not care about Gant charts and quarterly progress planning charts.
I';m afraid you're leaving out details. The Haber process you linked to was used, _at first_, for hydrogen generation but was switched to methane fairly quickly.The hydrogen is consumed locally quite quickly by the ongoing reaction. The vessels handling the catalytic reactions are exposed to it, but those are active reaction chambers, not storage vessels, and they're at relatively high temperatures and pressures. I would not expect embrittlement at such temperatures and pressures.
Morbid obesity is a real health risk for many American children. Whether cause or effect, it's correlated with diabetes, heart trouble, and sleep apnea, to name only a few conditions that can kill a child.
> It's also paradoxical. Cold weather should speed up the metabolism,
Why? Some extra calories for shivering or thermal control seems reasonable. But for most species, winter is a time of low food intake and much reduced activity. Species of both mice and gut microbes that don't optimize food consumption in the cold are at a real evolutionary handicap compared to species that can do so successfully.
Why don't these scientists study some humans who live in cold places
Because getting complete diatary and lifestyle control of small lab animals is much cheaper and faster than doing so for humans. And dissecting to examine their intestinal walls, in detail, is something most human study guidelenes would prevent.
"Electrolysis of water" requires pure water or the system tends to get corroded and plates or degrades the electrodes very quickly with large scale electrolysis. For hydrogen refueling, you still need a stable local reposotory. And local electrolysis is notoriously inefficient, so many of the energy and potential fiscal benefits get wasted. "Reforming of natural gas" is just taking a fairly efficient fuel and wasting energy converting its physical form. Even relatively modest local storage suffers from the leakage and metal storage embrittlement problems.
A combination of efficiently used technologies may reduce the losses to a manageable level, but I'm afraid there is a lot of handwaving in progress for hydrogen fuel-based vehicles and portable energy.
A hydrogen based vehicle economy needs some inexpensive, safe way to ship the fuel in bulk. In most models, this means miles of pipes for getting it to homes or to vehicle fuel centers, and those tend to leak very, very easily. The "carbon fiber" tanks for portable use all seem to have a metal liner, which is how they keep the hydrogen in, because as I mentioned, carbon fiber [composites] tend to leak hydrogen.
The metal liner means the liner is subject to embrittlement. I can certainly believe the carbon fiber composite shell provides vital mechanical reinforcement to the metal liner, multi-layer and multi-material solutions can work well. But the carbon fiber [composite] shell, by itself, would leak like a sieve.
It also doesn't hold hydrogen well. The microspaces between the fibers usually let hydrogen out quite easily.
I've done them. Like good password policies, the upfront cost is often refused.
> While i dont like the idea of a backdoor either, the "evidence they need" is every piece of info they can get
"All the evidence they need" is a forced confession, obtained by torture and without any assurance of the validity or source of the evidence. Poor evidence obtained forcibly is precisely why the fifth amendment was created, partly to help ensure proper provenance for the evidence, and to prevent "fishing expeditions" where forced testimony to avoid a false accusation could be used to gather evidence for some other conviction. That is an old trick used against political protest and against those engaged in public protest throughout legal history.
> If you're saying FBI can compel features intended to backdoor the security measures, then you're establishing the legal principle of forced backdoors.
It's been done before. The US encryption policies effectively enforce poor quality encryption as the default standard for many applications. The "80-bit maximum SSL key" policy was just such a policy.
> The problem for the Iranians wasn't the revolution, but the hijacking of the revolution by the Islamists.
Revolutions are almost always hijacked, usually by the most fanatical of the revolutionaries. It's _amazing_ that US politics were so thoughtful and cautious in the first 30 years after the American Revolution.
That's great, if you've been permitted the resources to set up PXE boot and keep track of assets to install the images only where you have licenses. Unfortunately, getting all the doctor's laptops and home machines that come in via VPN connections updated can be a nightmare. And if the patch isn't already in the image, you can be re-infected by within minutes after re-activation. I'm not trying to say that it's an insoluble problem: Isolating such an infected network and setting up "DMZ's" or "demilitarized zones" for introducing and re-activating isolated services is a good start. But it's not something you can just flip a switch and recover from.
This is also where a good manager hides their network and systems people in a room and guards the door to keep upset staff off their backs while they clean up the mess. It's also where that manager publishes the progress and keeps the staff from being harassed every five minutes with people screaming "My 12 year old can do better than this!" and opening up big security holes just to get their particular task done.
> their own countrymen into heroes for taking sides in someone else's civil war.
You mean like joining the French Foreign Legion? Or the covert support the US provided to Saigon before the Vietnam War became official? Or the roughly 100,000 US mercenaries currently working in Iraq?
They had one against the amazingly corrupt Shah of Iran in 1979. This is the result.
Revolutions don't always bring benefits to the local people or to the world, as a whole, except in the very short term.
I think you're confused, but perhaps because I didn't go into enough detail for people who've not looked closely at it. We're also looking back into physics and electronics training required long ago in my career, when learning computers involved building them from bare components and involved learning the limitations of transistors themselves.
A typical digital circuit is tied to ground and power, and tied to input and output circuitry. When current is drawn from ground, and power, to change output signal states, you get power droop and ground bounce because the power lines and ground lines or power planes and ground planes, themselves have capicatance, inductance, resistance, and impedance. The larger the number of output signals being driven and the larger the number of output signals switching state, the more current is being demanded from ground and from power lines. Providing some local reservoir of change at power line voltages, coupled much more closely to the power lines than the power supply itself or the net capacitance between the entire local ground plane and the entire local power plane, helps "decouple" this highly localized current drain from the overall power supplies. This is why they're called "decoupling" capacitors. Also, with modern FET based systems, the amount of current drawn to switch the state of a lot of FET's driven by a modern digital circuit in a high frequency circuit changing state many times per second can be quite large. Without that local reservor of charge provided by a local capacitor which sits directly on the power leads, next to the relevant circuit, the current will have to be drawn from the signal lines all the way back to the main power supply.
This way lies feedback loops and unexpected digital signal failures as a set of registers all draw current at the same time and drop the local power supply lines before the avlid volatages needed for the digital circuits to perform as expected, but only when a lot of signals switch *at the same time* to a different state. This can be _nightmarish_ to debug: it doesn't show up in simulation unless your simulations are _very_ sophisticated, and it doesn't show up at lower frequency testing. It shows up at high frequency, at the worst possible moments, in high frequency operations when you don't have _time_ to error check every output in a low latency signal processing schema, and it starts showing up erratically dependent on the actual number of signal lines changing at any moment.
I used to encounter it in low-cost electronics, and I can still remember encountering it as circuits switched from discrete components to surface mount, and designers were overruled in their demands for local decoupling capacitors in the circuit board designs. And yes, I can remember correcting such issues by finding the designer, comparing old and later board designs, and realizing that sets of local small ceramic capacitors had been been replaced with single, larger, polar capacitors which simply could not do the job.
Yes. It is. Starting with a copy of "dban", downloaded on a Linux laptop in a local coffee house and applied to to our disks, or using a slimple live Debian or CentOS or even OpenBSD DVD image, can be a start. But getting anything _alive_ that can handle patient data, however, can be pretty iffy. Windows machines can be re-infected in the process of re-installatiion in an infested local environment. Dealing with several hundred such systems that handle doctor's schedules, patients care plans, or handle prescriptions and billing and correspondence and mortgages and health insurance records is an absolute nightmare.
Can you burn your own home to the ground and rebuild from scratch? Certainly. Can you do this with a hospital without kill anyone who regularly scheduled kidney medicine, who is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday, or who needs immunization records or simply needs allergy records before transferring schools? That is a nightmare.
You think you're kidding. I must now recommend the television show "Rocket City Rednecks" a bunch of good ol' boys including several NASA engineers who explored numerous engineering challenges. The "use a Winnebago to test recycling and living enclosed for a Mars mission" episode was splendid fun. The need for much more beer than expected for the water recycling was priceless, as was the "don't put the water recycler too close to the driver's seat" lesson.
The show was wonderful, and like Mythbusters explored very real science and engineering tasks in a "what can we find in the parts bin" fashion. the official website is http://channel.nationalgeograp... .
> exceedingly intelligent, physically fit, mentally well-adjusted white man
The "white man" comes from passing all the training courses. However, they're also going to need to be _small_. Any extra hight adds up to many thousands if not millions of dollars in oxygen consumption, foodl consumption, and the fuel and resources to support them over the course of a many year mission. They'll also probably be male because it's much easier to put a simply condom based catheter on a man for the plumbing in a space suit.