You mean These*? They're mainly an attempt to solve the 'drunk people pissing everywhere' issue that requires expensive cleanup, i.e. a cost-saving rather than a philanthropic gesture.
*The only reason I didn't use the clip set to the Thunderbirds March was because it didn't show the complete raise-lower sequence. It is truly unfortunate that they do not actually play this when activated.
Except for extremely drought-common countries, or areas where pests destroy crops before they can be harvested, etc. Those famine-stricken regions would probably be rather happy to have GM food rather than no food at all.
Just because those particular batches are safe doesn't lessen the possibility of random genes collecting in other organisms and working together in completely unforeseen ways.
Metal Gear Solid has a lot to answer for in it's portrayal of genetics. Unless the 'other organisms' you're talking about are the same species as the ones that have been modified (because genes are transmitted sexually, they're not a disease that can be caught like Salmonella or a chemical that can accumulate like DDT), and that whatever genes modified and working fine in one organism of the species will somehow act totally and wildly differently in another organism of the same species, I'd say your worries are unfounded.
Iran spoofed GPS signals and tricked the drone to land, undamaged, where they wanted it to land. What prevents someone them from doing the same (or far worse) with Homeland Security drones in the US?
I am sure the MAFIAAs lawyers can argue that their song is not derived from your database.
Though woe betide you if your algorithm happens to generate a song that is already held by them. Because of course that is totally different and you owe them a billion dollars.
Not even that really. The Shuttle was a compromise between two programs: one for a cheap reusable launcher, and one for a craft that could be launched in one orbit, cross track itself over the soviet union and then back again to land. Dumping this cross-track requirement onto the shuttle crippled the program to achieving the original launcher goals, and the damn thing never did go sneaking over the USSR anyway! Thing sort of went thus: The shuttle design was meant to launch a lot, and thus amortise the up-front costs over many launches to launch cheap. The Air Force wanted to get in on this cheap launcher, but needed it to do some Other Stuff. The up-front costs rose. The increased cost meant fewer launches, and the design changes meant fewer launches. The cost per launch rose dramatically.
Not quite that simple. For the first 2 years of HDD life, that is only true above 45C. Below that, there was a correlation of failure with cooler temperatures, with the most reliable temperature being 45C! Above this, there was a rapid rise in the failure rate, though at the maximum temperature of 50C, the failure rate was similar to 25-30C. With older (3-4 yr old) drives, temperature than became a factor. The report itself concluded:
In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that datacenter or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives. We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.
What makes a locked-down video game player that has to be jailbroken better than an Android PMP that respects the user's choice to obtain software from unknown, possibly hobbyist, sources?
1) It has buttons. You want to play any game with an interaction method more complicated than "poke the thing"? A touchscreen is no good.
2) Built-in high-compatibility emulators for PSP and PSX
3) Unusually nice screen (I've seen plenty of cheap PMPs using TN panels)
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
RAM can be whatever colour you want, it's really just black because the aircraft it's coated onto usually try to only fly at night, because it makes them harder to spot visually.
What the heck is that grill thing on top, but too far past that wide nose to be a sensor grill, and it's not an air intake either, unless if was cut from an old car radiator.
The intake grill is likely to provide wide-aspect IR stealth: unless you're looking from straight ahead, you won't be able to directly view the heat of the engine intake. Much more compact and much more efficient than a dog-leg intake path, which is worth the effectiveness tradeoff for such a small craft. It might even give some degree of RADAR stealth, but there's not much size reference, so I can't tell much about the grill aperture.
Cyber warfare implies they took control of it. Not impossible, but let's just say I highly doubt it. Maybe it was electronic warfare and they jammed the control signals. Far more likely, but don't even try and convince me that something that freaking huge for a drone doesn't have a backup plan involving an inertial compass and software to return it to a safe location if it's GPS gets jammed.
If I were intending to capture a remotely piloted drone, I'd watch it like a hawk until it make a course change in the direction I wished it to fly (implying it was under manual control at that moment), then hit it with all the ramming watts I could. If the initial manoeuvre was indeed remotely initiated rather than being part of a stored flightplan, and if the jamming started before it could be switched back from direct manual control to on-board decision, then it could conceivably continue flying it's last trajectory until it ran out of fuel. It implies a huge degree luck and exploiting of a bug (not assuming a loss of contact meant enemy action rather than systems failure and not providing the autonomy to make that decision onboard), and would probably be best supplemented by combining the jamming with high-power spoofed location signals, but it seems doable.
Renewables are renewable as long as you don't take into account mining, refining, construction, transportation, and useful lifetime. A solar cell, for example, requires a lot of infrastructure to bring a lot of esoteric elements from around the globe and turn them into something that may generate useful amounts of power for maybe 2 decades (less, if it gets replaced early).
Comparing garden-variety sand to the highly purified, monocrystalline, carefully doped silicon used in chip fabs is like grabbing a lump of charcoal and claiming graphene is just lying around.
No I use my phone for phone calls (along with maybe 4 apps, none of which make fart noises or pretend to look like a lighter). If I want to play a non-touch-screen game (i.e. anything that doesn't consist of "poke the thing that lights up") I'll take something with actual buttons on.
Yeah, do that scene in Star Trek where Spock walks into the lift from one part of the ship and walks back out in another. Without a green screen they'd have had to have an acutual elevator.
You underestimate the ingenuity of SFX artists. Take the elevator sequence in Men in Black, when J first arrives at the MiB headquarters proper. They walk into an elevator, the elevator descends, and they walk out, all in one travelling shot with no room for hiding transitions between sets with cuts. But they didn't build an elevator, it's just a room with a door at either end and some moving lights to give the illusion of movement. But even with that knowledge, go back and watch the scene, and try and convince your brain that the elevator is not moving.
Personally, I've seen very little CG that comes close to looking as good as even half-decent miniature work. As an example; to model a nice, real looking explosion in CG takes a phenomenal amount of effort with physics simulation of the debris, optical simulation of light filtering through the smoke, etc. With miniature effects, you put some dirt on a squib and use a higher frame rate. In-camera effects work a hell of a lot better than CG in almost all cases, because instead of having to simulate every physical process going on you can just use the actual physical processes going on. Of course eschewing CG entirely is silly, but it's definitely become overused to the point of "we'll do that in post" becoming a mantra, and "slap on some greebles" has been substituted for putting actual effort into designs.
The last decent science fiction film I saw was Contagion, and the only CG in that was on monitors. Moon also had some really nice miniature work and set design (though also some really glaring plot holes).
Finally, when you don't have to render your frames individually, you can greatly increase the framerate without a commensurate huge increase in time and budget. The best thing about cinemas installing stereo 3D projectors is that it also means that by default they've installed 48fps or 96fps 2D projectors.
Do NOT hold your breath in the case of sudden decompression. Rapid decompression is entirely survivable if you're recompressed within a minute or two, but holding your breath results in some very nasty damage to your lungs (essentially, your alveoli burst) that would not otherwise occur if you exhaled.
And if you read the specs in question, they indicate that that is NOT sufficient, and physical destruction, degaussing, or surface abrasion is necessary.
Nope. They indicate that Secure Erase is sufficient, and explicitely state that one pass is sufficient. Let me provide some quotes:
[...] for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged. Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared and purged by one overwrite using current available sanitization technologies.
Degaussing, and executing the firmware Secure Erase command (for ATA drives only), are acceptable methods for purging.
Operating on bits is all well and good, but identifying those bits in the first place is the problem. It's difficult enough reassembling a previously functional HDD that has merely had it's platters misaligned (I've yet to hear of a successful example), let alone doing so while trying to to guess the previous state of each domains, a completely nontrivial problem. Imagine taking a large canvas with a complex painting on it. Unravel each thread in the canvas, chop them up and rearrange them, then bleach them and paint them all black. Now try and recover the painting. This is a trivial amount of data compared to trying to reconstruct the contents of a modern HDD.
Because in order to join many forces, including the Met, you pretty much have to go through the Specials unless you're transferring from another force.
No, the Secure Erase command is one, and only one, pass. And it's a 0-pass That's it. That's all that's needed. No multiple passes, no randomised passes, those things are unnecessary and a waste of time.
except that the NSA seems to think that one pass ISNT enough
Wrong. The NSA supports only two methods of HDD purging: Secure erase, and degaussing (and, of course, physical destructive methods that are often preceded by purging). See NIST 800-88 4 and 800-14.
HDDerase should do. There may be other software that can send the command (it's part of the ATA command set). Remember, if you're using a SATA drive, to set your motherboard controller to 'IDE' or 'compatibility' mode, rather than AHCI.
you also don't need an MFM. just a sensitive head that tells you actual field strength instead of high-bit/low-bit values.
Unfortunately, that's what your HDD head is already doing The idea that recovering erased data is like doing an analogue read of a digital area died over a decade ago. To read any sort of residual field in the domain, you need a method if reading that is more sensitive than the best HDD head, more accurate than the best HDD head (because you might not be able to count on location and tracking data still being valid, especially if the platters have been separated), but still maintain a high enough read speed that scanning a disc doesn't take months or years (as a prerequisite, this pretty much means it must be fully automated). Such a tool doesn't yet exist that combines all of these aspects, largely because the best tiny magnetometers we can produce are already in HDD read heads.
I aimed low: you're trying to tell if that tiny patch of grey next to all those other tiny patches of grey is grey enough that it could have been a darker or lighter grey before. 10 seconds may be sufficient for a reasonable guess of it's current state, but the previous state is the goal.
a devastating leak could be affected with the release of as little as 64,000 bits, or 8kB-- which even by your estimates is doable in a short period of time. It is not necessary to recover everything off of the entire disk in order to cause harm.
But to find that 64kb, you would need to image vast swathes of the disc (if single platter), or the entire disc (if multi-platter). Plus you'd need to know exactly what that 64kb was beforehand, or you'd still be having to image the entire disc to find it.
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You mean These*? They're mainly an attempt to solve the 'drunk people pissing everywhere' issue that requires expensive cleanup, i.e. a cost-saving rather than a philanthropic gesture.
*The only reason I didn't use the clip set to the Thunderbirds March was because it didn't show the complete raise-lower sequence. It is truly unfortunate that they do not actually play this when activated.
we have food that we can grow now that isn't GM
Except for extremely drought-common countries, or areas where pests destroy crops before they can be harvested, etc. Those famine-stricken regions would probably be rather happy to have GM food rather than no food at all.
Just because those particular batches are safe doesn't lessen the possibility of random genes collecting in other organisms and working together in completely unforeseen ways.
Metal Gear Solid has a lot to answer for in it's portrayal of genetics.
Unless the 'other organisms' you're talking about are the same species as the ones that have been modified (because genes are transmitted sexually, they're not a disease that can be caught like Salmonella or a chemical that can accumulate like DDT), and that whatever genes modified and working fine in one organism of the species will somehow act totally and wildly differently in another organism of the same species, I'd say your worries are unfounded.
Iran spoofed GPS signals and tricked the drone to land, undamaged, where they wanted it to land. What prevents someone them from doing the same (or far worse) with Homeland Security drones in the US?
About 11,500 km.
I am sure the MAFIAAs lawyers can argue that their song is not derived from your database.
Though woe betide you if your algorithm happens to generate a song that is already held by them. Because of course that is totally different and you owe them a billion dollars.
The shuttle was brilliant in it's moment
Not even that really. The Shuttle was a compromise between two programs: one for a cheap reusable launcher, and one for a craft that could be launched in one orbit, cross track itself over the soviet union and then back again to land. Dumping this cross-track requirement onto the shuttle crippled the program to achieving the original launcher goals, and the damn thing never did go sneaking over the USSR anyway!
Thing sort of went thus: The shuttle design was meant to launch a lot, and thus amortise the up-front costs over many launches to launch cheap. The Air Force wanted to get in on this cheap launcher, but needed it to do some Other Stuff. The up-front costs rose. The increased cost meant fewer launches, and the design changes meant fewer launches. The cost per launch rose dramatically.
In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that datacenter or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives. We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.
Study available here.
What makes a locked-down video game player that has to be jailbroken better than an Android PMP that respects the user's choice to obtain software from unknown, possibly hobbyist, sources?
1) It has buttons. You want to play any game with an interaction method more complicated than "poke the thing"? A touchscreen is no good.
2) Built-in high-compatibility emulators for PSP and PSX
3) Unusually nice screen (I've seen plenty of cheap PMPs using TN panels)
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
Citizen! It's always the Commie Mutant Traitors!
What the heck is that grill thing on top, but too far past that wide nose to be a sensor grill, and it's not an air intake either, unless if was cut from an old car radiator.
The intake grill is likely to provide wide-aspect IR stealth: unless you're looking from straight ahead, you won't be able to directly view the heat of the engine intake. Much more compact and much more efficient than a dog-leg intake path, which is worth the effectiveness tradeoff for such a small craft. It might even give some degree of RADAR stealth, but there's not much size reference, so I can't tell much about the grill aperture.
Cyber warfare implies they took control of it. Not impossible, but let's just say I highly doubt it. Maybe it was electronic warfare and they jammed the control signals. Far more likely, but don't even try and convince me that something that freaking huge for a drone doesn't have a backup plan involving an inertial compass and software to return it to a safe location if it's GPS gets jammed.
If I were intending to capture a remotely piloted drone, I'd watch it like a hawk until it make a course change in the direction I wished it to fly (implying it was under manual control at that moment), then hit it with all the ramming watts I could. If the initial manoeuvre was indeed remotely initiated rather than being part of a stored flightplan, and if the jamming started before it could be switched back from direct manual control to on-board decision, then it could conceivably continue flying it's last trajectory until it ran out of fuel. It implies a huge degree luck and exploiting of a bug (not assuming a loss of contact meant enemy action rather than systems failure and not providing the autonomy to make that decision onboard), and would probably be best supplemented by combining the jamming with high-power spoofed location signals, but it seems doable.
Renewables are renewable as long as you don't take into account mining, refining, construction, transportation, and useful lifetime. A solar cell, for example, requires a lot of infrastructure to bring a lot of esoteric elements from around the globe and turn them into something that may generate useful amounts of power for maybe 2 decades (less, if it gets replaced early).
Comparing garden-variety sand to the highly purified, monocrystalline, carefully doped silicon used in chip fabs is like grabbing a lump of charcoal and claiming graphene is just lying around.
No I use my phone for phone calls (along with maybe 4 apps, none of which make fart noises or pretend to look like a lighter). If I want to play a non-touch-screen game (i.e. anything that doesn't consist of "poke the thing that lights up") I'll take something with actual buttons on.
Yeah, do that scene in Star Trek where Spock walks into the lift from one part of the ship and walks back out in another. Without a green screen they'd have had to have an acutual elevator.
You underestimate the ingenuity of SFX artists. Take the elevator sequence in Men in Black, when J first arrives at the MiB headquarters proper. They walk into an elevator, the elevator descends, and they walk out, all in one travelling shot with no room for hiding transitions between sets with cuts. But they didn't build an elevator, it's just a room with a door at either end and some moving lights to give the illusion of movement. But even with that knowledge, go back and watch the scene, and try and convince your brain that the elevator is not moving.
Personally, I've seen very little CG that comes close to looking as good as even half-decent miniature work. As an example; to model a nice, real looking explosion in CG takes a phenomenal amount of effort with physics simulation of the debris, optical simulation of light filtering through the smoke, etc. With miniature effects, you put some dirt on a squib and use a higher frame rate. In-camera effects work a hell of a lot better than CG in almost all cases, because instead of having to simulate every physical process going on you can just use the actual physical processes going on. Of course eschewing CG entirely is silly, but it's definitely become overused to the point of "we'll do that in post" becoming a mantra, and "slap on some greebles" has been substituted for putting actual effort into designs.
The last decent science fiction film I saw was Contagion, and the only CG in that was on monitors. Moon also had some really nice miniature work and set design (though also some really glaring plot holes).
Finally, when you don't have to render your frames individually, you can greatly increase the framerate without a commensurate huge increase in time and budget. The best thing about cinemas installing stereo 3D projectors is that it also means that by default they've installed 48fps or 96fps 2D projectors.
Hold your breath first, though.
Do NOT hold your breath in the case of sudden decompression. Rapid decompression is entirely survivable if you're recompressed within a minute or two, but holding your breath results in some very nasty damage to your lungs (essentially, your alveoli burst) that would not otherwise occur if you exhaled.
And if you read the specs in question, they indicate that that is NOT sufficient, and physical destruction, degaussing, or surface abrasion is necessary.
Nope. They indicate that Secure Erase is sufficient, and explicitely state that one pass is sufficient. Let me provide some quotes:
[...] for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged. Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared and purged by one overwrite using current available sanitization technologies.
Degaussing, and executing the firmware Secure Erase command (for ATA drives only), are acceptable methods for purging.
Operating on bits is all well and good, but identifying those bits in the first place is the problem. It's difficult enough reassembling a previously functional HDD that has merely had it's platters misaligned (I've yet to hear of a successful example), let alone doing so while trying to to guess the previous state of each domains, a completely nontrivial problem.
Imagine taking a large canvas with a complex painting on it. Unravel each thread in the canvas, chop them up and rearrange them, then bleach them and paint them all black. Now try and recover the painting. This is a trivial amount of data compared to trying to reconstruct the contents of a modern HDD.
Because in order to join many forces, including the Met, you pretty much have to go through the Specials unless you're transferring from another force.
when was the last time anyone did something like that here?
1980. It didn't go too well for the DRFLA chaps though.
No, the Secure Erase command is one, and only one, pass. And it's a 0-pass That's it. That's all that's needed. No multiple passes, no randomised passes, those things are unnecessary and a waste of time.
except that the NSA seems to think that one pass ISNT enough
Wrong. The NSA supports only two methods of HDD purging: Secure erase, and degaussing (and, of course, physical destructive methods that are often preceded by purging). See NIST 800-88 4 and 800-14.
HDDerase should do. There may be other software that can send the command (it's part of the ATA command set). Remember, if you're using a SATA drive, to set your motherboard controller to 'IDE' or 'compatibility' mode, rather than AHCI.
you also don't need an MFM. just a sensitive head that tells you actual field strength instead of high-bit/low-bit values.
Unfortunately, that's what your HDD head is already doing The idea that recovering erased data is like doing an analogue read of a digital area died over a decade ago. To read any sort of residual field in the domain, you need a method if reading that is more sensitive than the best HDD head, more accurate than the best HDD head (because you might not be able to count on location and tracking data still being valid, especially if the platters have been separated), but still maintain a high enough read speed that scanning a disc doesn't take months or years (as a prerequisite, this pretty much means it must be fully automated). Such a tool doesn't yet exist that combines all of these aspects, largely because the best tiny magnetometers we can produce are already in HDD read heads.
10 seconds for one bit seems awfully high
I aimed low: you're trying to tell if that tiny patch of grey next to all those other tiny patches of grey is grey enough that it could have been a darker or lighter grey before. 10 seconds may be sufficient for a reasonable guess of it's current state, but the previous state is the goal.
a devastating leak could be affected with the release of as little as 64,000 bits, or 8kB-- which even by your estimates is doable in a short period of time. It is not necessary to recover everything off of the entire disk in order to cause harm.
But to find that 64kb, you would need to image vast swathes of the disc (if single platter), or the entire disc (if multi-platter). Plus you'd need to know exactly what that 64kb was beforehand, or you'd still be having to image the entire disc to find it.