False. The only way a customer cand stop the traffic from being sent to his computer is to disconnect the network connection, or power down the machine, so the ISP's equipment sees a dead line. But that kills ALL services, not just the offending one. The post you were replying to talked about how stopping the service (not the computer on which it runs) doesn't stop people from sending you the packets and that's absolutely true.
I wrote several negative replies about how it is unfair for the ISP to charge the customer for something the customer has no control over. I'd like to take a moment and give a counter - an example of the one way I can think of to do it that could be fair, without asking the ISP to foot the cost:
The problem, at it's root, is that the customer is helpless to prevent the offending traffic until after it has already been counted by the ISP. If you firewall the offending traffic away, that firewall still exists at a point further down the line than the ISP's bandwith counter - so you reject the incoming packets AFTER they've already been counted against you. That is the crux of my complaint about this system.
But, there is a possible solution: As part of the service, the ISP gives the customer access to some type of automated protocol whereby the customer can inform a program on the ISP as to what the customer would like firewalled, and the ISP implements it for the customer at a point BEFORE the traffic counter counts it. That puts the customer into a position where the customer CAN actually do something about the traffic, and can keep on top of it and respond to it. The customer could even set up a script that watches the usage and when it spikes to absurd levels it automatically informs the ISP to cut it off for a minute or so. Obviously, this solution is only good for more sophisticated customers, like businesses. It wouldn't work so well for the typical home user.
Firewalling doesn't solve the problem. By the time the packet reaches the ISP's customer, it's already been counted. Whether the customer replies to the request or denies it with negative feedback, or just ignores it - doesn't matter - it's already been passed through the ISP on the way to reach the customer, so they've already counted it.
If you hold the customer responsible, then people angry with that person can just drive up that person's cost by choosing to flood him.
No, it's actually WORSE than the junk fax example. If you are billed for all incoming TCP/IP traffic, then you get billed even for attempts you refuse to answer. That would be like turning your fax machine off, and still getting billed by the phone company each time someone tries to call the phone number even if your machine doesn't answer.
You shouldn't have to be subject to some jackass driving up your bill by flood-pinging you. Heck, that particualr jackass could even be hired by the ISP to do precisely that if they were unscrupulous.
Presumably you don't know how internet clients and servers work. (Or you do, in which case you are deliberately arguing in favor of an unfair billing practice.) A website is a server. It sits around waiting for clients to connect. The site maintainer cannot stop clients from trying to connect. The most the maintainer can do is refuse to reply to those connection attempts. That's it. He can even take his server down entirely and that doesn't stop people from trying to hit it anyway and sending him HTTP requests that never get answered. For an example of this, we run Apache and even so people still kept trying to send us HTTP requests designed to exploit Microsoft's IIS webserver. We firewalled those addresses off, but our firewall kept reporting that those requests were still coming in. We couldn't stop them - the most we could do is give them the silent treatment.
What you are advocating is like claiming that you should pay the phone compnany for every time someone calls your phone, even if you don't answer it, even if you leave it off the hook, even if you leave it unplugged.
Then I challenge you to explain how it actually is stoppable on the customer's end. It isn't. If some jackass is flooding me with traffic and my ISP lets it through, nothing I can do on my end can ever stop it. I can firewall it off, but that firewall is further down the line than the ISP's montoring devices, so the fact that I'm ignoring that inbound data is irrelevant - it's still measured by the ISP as having arrived at my house.
One end dangles into the atmosphere. It is subject to wind pushing on that end, and thus upsetting the object's orbit. If it is in geosynchronous orbit, it won't have the friction braking problem low-earth satellites do since the atmosphere will be moving with it, but any windstorms will throw it off balance. (If the wind blows west-to-east, the ladder's orbit speeds up a bit and the ladder is "thrown" upward. If the wind blows east-to-west, the ladder's orbit slows and it falls.)
Military spending and research spending are inseperable. For example, DARPA funded a research effort to create a distributed computer network that can survive the loss of some of it's nodes randomly to nuclear attack. And that network technology eventually spawned a civilian version that eventually let people debate topics on a blog like slashdot.
Good to see you admit it. Oh, wait, were you trying to be sarcastic and just said a truth by accident? Sorry.
The current group of terrorists are NOT going to be impressed with the US being able and willing to fund a research and engineering project. Quite the opposite, really, since they dislike the USA's economic influence. Remember what they picked for their prime target on September 11 - an economic headquarters.
Justice most emphatically does NOT lead to security if one or more of the factions involved is veheminently opposed to justice. The Arab world would not be satisfied by a just solution in Israel, since they would like to see every Israeli removed, and whatever wrongs their parents may have done to set up the state of Israel, the people who were born after that in Israel are not responsible for the fact that it is now their home.
Such conflicts over a new people moving into an area and taking it over from existing inhabitants can never be justly undone once one generation has passed. Once that happens, there are descendants who call the new place home who can't be held responsible for what their parents did to get there. It's the same story as the Protestants in Northern Ireland, the White Man in North America, the Saxons in England, The tartars in Russia, and so on.
A little statistics lesson for you: When the margin of error of the system is larger than the margin between the winner and the loser, then you never really know who won, no matter how many times the recount comes out the same. They are recounting data where the original data gathering method was inaccurate. We'll never know now, because Florida had such terrible vote gathering technology.
How to protect against the danger if it breaks.
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
One thing I'd like to know is whether any thought has been given to disaster-aversion should, unhappily, the thing fails and breaks or is deliberately sabotaged to break. It would be the world's biggest terrorist target. If you sever the ladder anywhere along its length, the delicate balance holding it in place is gone, and the section past the sever point is flung out to space, while the other section falls, slapping the earth around the equator.
So now instead of hearing about a news item one day after it's been reported elsewhere, it's one day minus twenty minutes. What's the big difference, and why pay for it?
I read comments that people stopped at the Longhorn section; there was lots of interesting stuff past that point.
I'm not in a position to deny that, since I was one of the people that stopped reading when he got to that point. All I was saying is that none of the examples you used illustrated your claim since they all occured before that point in the article where we stopped reading. There may very well have been salient points after that, but none of them were the examples you gave.
You are forgetting that for something like SuSE Linux, there are a lot more customers to absorb the up-front cost of getting the distribution together, making sure all the libraries are in place, recompiling every application for the platform, and so on. For PS2, everything needs to be recompiled. x86 binaries won't work, programs that assume x86 won't compile nicely without tweaking, and so on. And there will be fewer buyers to absorb that cost. If I was in the market for a cheap development platform for PS2, I would not mind paying $116.00 for having someone else go through all that effort. (For an individual package it's easy, but I don't want to do it for thousands of packages.)
They are also recouping the cost of providing the ability to put a hard drive in place, which typical PS2 users never use. (So you are subsidizing the cost of putting the IDE bus in there in the first place, and the USB port for the keyboard, and so on.)
So, if I read this correctly, there was a long window of time during which the government was aware of this hole and the public was not informed. This isn't a good thing, like they claim. What it means is that for those weeks the government had exclusive knowlege of how to root your machine. Do you trust them to use that knowlege responsibly (meaning, to have the integrety to refrain from using that knowlege at all)? I do not.
Most of that $200 is probably for the hardware that the kit comes with: A keyboard, mouse, 40 GB hard drive. Subtract the cost of those out of the total and the remaining cost is roughly on-par with a typical linux distro in a box.
The only real problem here is that they don't sell those hardware pieces as a kit without the linux distro.
That's exactly what NASA has decided to finally do. They're putting a reusable launch vehicle on hold [snip]
But that's not what I said. Use both re-usables and expendables, not put re-usables on hold. Expendables make sense when it's a one-way trip. But if we resign ourselves to only one-way trips, we limit the type of space exploitation possible. And that's true even with unmanned missions. A vehicle that's not designed to survive re-entry can't collect material and send it back to earth.
I am firmly convinced that the age where expendable vehicles are more cost-effective than reusables should be just a passing phase in these early days of space travel. But if people resign themselves to the current technology, and never even TRY to design cost effective reusables, then that "phase" will last forever, and that's just sad. Yes, the shuttle was a boondoggle, but you don't give up on a good idea just because the first attempt was a horrible implementation of that idea. (And I say the reason the shuttle is so expensive to operate is precisely because its expensive parts are all expendable, and the parts that are kept and re-used are the cheap parts. So it's not really a good exmample of a re-usable vehicle.)
Your complaint is not unique to reusable designs. Yes, if the claims are not actually met, then the cost estimate will be garbage. But if you are having a problem with people lying in their claims as to what their solution will be like, you have a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with the debate over re-usable versus expendable vehicles.
(Note, the space shuttle didn't live up to the claims not necessarily because the claims were lies, but because the claims were made for a different design, one that congress didn't let them build. Nasa did NOT claim that the more limited shuttle design they were actually allowed to build would have the same capabilities.)
Agreed, but to be fair, the entire life of the vehicle should be taken into account, not just some fixed amount of time. For example, if the rule was, "make the cheapest vehicle capable of 12 launches over one year", and the disposable solution was a rocket that cost M dollars to launch, it's total cost would be 12*M. But if a reusable vehicle cost 20*M to build, but only cost 1/5 * M on each individual launch, the reusable vehicle would look more expensive if you only look at the costs of one year, but if you look at using it for 2 years, the reusable vehicle is cheaper.
Thus whether the reusable vehicle is cheaper or more expensive depends entirely on whether it's lifespan is 1 year or 2 years.
Any fair comparasin should take this into account.
I'd be afraid of a space elevator. It would be too easy to sabotage it and cause a major world disaster when it slaps down. Sure, you can design it so that it "hovers" in place and doesn't need to be held up except to anchor it, but then a sabateur who manages to sever the elevator at anywhere along it's length ruins that balance - with everything further out than the sever point flinging out to space and everything further in than the sever point falling to wrap around the equator. The ideal way to do it for the most damage is to sever the elevator far out, near the outer endpoint, that way almost the whole length of it falls slowly at first, and wraps the planet more than once.
Most of the decceleration of the space shuttle when coming down to earth happened during the "burning" part of re-entry, during which the wings aren't really behaving like wings yet, and the object is braking (or "breaking", as the case may be) by virtue of the fact that it isn't down to terminal velocity yet. Once those wings start being used, most of the speed has already been bled off. The retro-rockets of a VTVL vehicle only need to be used to bleed off that last bit of extra speed from terminal velocity down to zero.
Remember, the Apollo and Soyuz capsules ride back to earth on mere parachutes.
Slashdot Mirror
False. The only way a customer cand stop the traffic from being sent to his computer is to disconnect the network connection, or power down the machine, so the ISP's equipment sees a dead line. But that kills ALL services, not just the offending one. The post you were replying to talked about how stopping the service (not the computer on which it runs) doesn't stop people from sending you the packets and that's absolutely true.
I wrote several negative replies about how it is unfair for the ISP to charge the customer for something the customer has no control over. I'd like to take a moment and give a counter - an example of the one way I can think of to do it that could be fair, without asking the ISP to foot the cost:
The problem, at it's root, is that the customer is helpless to prevent the offending traffic until after it has already been counted by the ISP. If you firewall the offending traffic away, that firewall still exists at a point further down the line than the ISP's bandwith counter - so you reject the incoming packets AFTER they've already been counted against you. That is the crux of my complaint about this system.
But, there is a possible solution: As part of the service, the ISP gives the customer access to some type of automated protocol whereby the customer can inform a program on the ISP as to what the customer would like firewalled, and the ISP implements it for the customer at a point BEFORE the traffic counter counts it. That puts the customer into a position where the customer CAN actually do something about the traffic, and can keep on top of it and respond to it. The customer could even set up a script that watches the usage and when it spikes to absurd levels it automatically informs the ISP to cut it off for a minute or so. Obviously, this solution is only good for more sophisticated customers, like businesses. It wouldn't work so well for the typical home user.
Firewalling doesn't solve the problem. By the time the packet reaches the ISP's customer, it's already been counted. Whether the customer replies to the request or denies it with negative feedback, or just ignores it - doesn't matter - it's already been passed through the ISP on the way to reach the customer, so they've already counted it.
If you hold the customer responsible, then people angry with that person can just drive up that person's cost by choosing to flood him.
No, it's actually WORSE than the junk fax example. If you are billed for all incoming TCP/IP traffic, then you get billed even for attempts you refuse to answer. That would be like turning your fax machine off, and still getting billed by the phone company each time someone tries to call the phone number even if your machine doesn't answer.
You shouldn't have to be subject to some jackass driving up your bill by flood-pinging you. Heck, that particualr jackass could even be hired by the ISP to do precisely that if they were unscrupulous.
Presumably you don't know how internet clients and servers work. (Or you do, in which case you are deliberately arguing in favor of an unfair billing practice.) A website is a server. It sits around waiting for clients to connect. The site maintainer cannot stop clients from trying to connect. The most the maintainer can do is refuse to reply to those connection attempts. That's it. He can even take his server down entirely and that doesn't stop people from trying to hit it anyway and sending him HTTP requests that never get answered. For an example of this, we run Apache and even so people still kept trying to send us HTTP requests designed to exploit Microsoft's IIS webserver. We firewalled those addresses off, but our firewall kept reporting that those requests were still coming in. We couldn't stop them - the most we could do is give them the silent treatment.
What you are advocating is like claiming that you should pay the phone compnany for every time someone calls your phone, even if you don't answer it, even if you leave it off the hook, even if you leave it unplugged.
Then I challenge you to explain how it actually is stoppable on the customer's end. It isn't. If some jackass is flooding me with traffic and my ISP lets it through, nothing I can do on my end can ever stop it. I can firewall it off, but that firewall is further down the line than the ISP's montoring devices, so the fact that I'm ignoring that inbound data is irrelevant - it's still measured by the ISP as having arrived at my house.
One end dangles into the atmosphere. It is subject to wind pushing on that end, and thus upsetting the object's orbit. If it is in geosynchronous orbit, it won't have the friction braking problem low-earth satellites do since the atmosphere will be moving with it, but any windstorms will throw it off balance. (If the wind blows west-to-east, the ladder's orbit speeds up a bit and the ladder is "thrown" upward. If the wind blows east-to-west, the ladder's orbit slows and it falls.)
Military spending and research spending are inseperable. For example, DARPA funded a research effort to create a distributed computer network that can survive the loss of some of it's nodes randomly to nuclear attack. And that network technology eventually spawned a civilian version that eventually let people debate topics on a blog like slashdot.
I most have lost my grasp on the clue...
Good to see you admit it.
Oh, wait, were you trying to be sarcastic and just said a truth by accident? Sorry.
The current group of terrorists are NOT going to be impressed with the US being able and willing to fund a research and engineering project. Quite the opposite, really, since they dislike the USA's economic influence. Remember what they picked for their prime target on September 11 - an economic headquarters.
Justice most emphatically does NOT lead to security if one or more of the factions involved is veheminently opposed to justice. The Arab world would not be satisfied by a just solution in Israel, since they would like to see every Israeli removed, and whatever wrongs their parents may have done to set up the state of Israel, the people who were born after that in Israel are not responsible for the fact that it is now their home.
Such conflicts over a new people moving into an area and taking it over from existing inhabitants can never be justly undone once one generation has passed. Once that happens, there are descendants who call the new place home who can't be held responsible for what their parents did to get there. It's the same story as the Protestants in Northern Ireland, the White Man in North America, the Saxons in England, The tartars in Russia, and so on.
The above post I made was meant for the parent of b-bagginses post. I replied to the wrong message.
A little statistics lesson for you: When the margin of error of the system is larger than the margin between the winner and the loser, then you never really know who won, no matter how many times the recount comes out the same. They are recounting data where the original data gathering method was inaccurate. We'll never know now, because Florida had such terrible vote gathering technology.
One thing I'd like to know is whether any thought has been given to disaster-aversion should, unhappily, the thing fails and breaks or is deliberately sabotaged to break. It would be the world's biggest terrorist target. If you sever the ladder anywhere along its length, the delicate balance holding it in place is gone, and the section past the sever point is flung out to space, while the other section falls, slapping the earth around the equator.
So now instead of hearing about a news item one day after it's been reported elsewhere, it's one day minus twenty minutes. What's the big difference, and why pay for it?
You are part of the problem. The short-sightedness of looking for immediate utility today is why the space program isn't going anyware.
I read comments that people stopped at the Longhorn section; there was lots of interesting stuff past that point.
I'm not in a position to deny that, since I was one of the people that stopped reading when he got to that point. All I was saying is that none of the examples you used illustrated your claim since they all occured before that point in the article where we stopped reading. There may very well have been salient points after that, but none of them were the examples you gave.
You are forgetting that for something like SuSE Linux, there are a lot more customers to absorb the up-front cost of getting the distribution together, making sure all the libraries are in place, recompiling every application for the platform, and so on. For PS2, everything needs to be recompiled. x86 binaries won't work, programs that assume x86 won't compile nicely without tweaking, and so on. And there will be fewer buyers to absorb that cost. If I was in the market for a cheap development platform for PS2, I would not mind paying $116.00 for having someone else go through all that effort. (For an individual package it's easy, but I don't want to do it for thousands of packages.)
They are also recouping the cost of providing the ability to put a hard drive in place, which typical PS2 users never use. (So you are subsidizing the cost of putting the IDE bus in there in the first place, and the USB port for the keyboard, and so on.)
So, if I read this correctly, there was a long window of time during which the government was aware of this hole and the public was not informed. This isn't a good thing, like they claim. What it means is that for those weeks the government had exclusive knowlege of how to root your machine. Do you trust them to use that knowlege responsibly (meaning, to have the integrety to refrain from using that knowlege at all)? I do not.
Most of that $200 is probably for the hardware that the kit comes with: A keyboard, mouse, 40 GB hard drive. Subtract the cost of those out of the total and the remaining cost is roughly on-par with a typical linux distro in a box.
The only real problem here is that they don't sell those hardware pieces as a kit without the linux distro.
You can use it to develop PS2 programs, not just play them.
That's exactly what NASA has decided to finally do. They're putting a reusable launch vehicle on hold [snip]
But that's not what I said. Use both re-usables and expendables, not put re-usables on hold. Expendables make sense when it's a one-way trip. But if we resign ourselves to only one-way trips, we limit the type of space exploitation possible. And that's true even with unmanned missions. A vehicle that's not designed to survive re-entry can't collect material and send it back to earth.
I am firmly convinced that the age where expendable vehicles are more cost-effective than reusables should be just a passing phase in these early days of space travel. But if people resign themselves to the current technology, and never even TRY to design cost effective reusables, then that "phase" will last forever, and that's just sad. Yes, the shuttle was a boondoggle, but you don't give up on a good idea just because the first attempt was a horrible implementation of that idea. (And I say the reason the shuttle is so expensive to operate is precisely because its expensive parts are all expendable, and the parts that are kept and re-used are the cheap parts. So it's not really a good exmample of a re-usable vehicle.)
Your complaint is not unique to reusable designs. Yes, if the claims are not actually met, then the cost estimate will be garbage. But if you are having a problem with people lying in their claims as to what their solution will be like, you have a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with the debate over re-usable versus expendable vehicles.
(Note, the space shuttle didn't live up to the claims not necessarily because the claims were lies, but because the claims were made for a different design, one that congress didn't let them build. Nasa did NOT claim that the more limited shuttle design they were actually allowed to build would have the same capabilities.)
Agreed, but to be fair, the entire life of the vehicle should be taken into account, not just some fixed amount of time. For example, if the rule was, "make the cheapest vehicle capable of 12 launches over one year", and the disposable solution was a rocket that cost M dollars to launch, it's total cost would be 12*M. But if a reusable vehicle cost 20*M to build, but only cost 1/5 * M on each individual launch, the reusable vehicle would look more expensive if you only look at the costs of one year, but if you look at using it for 2 years, the reusable vehicle is cheaper.
Thus whether the reusable vehicle is cheaper or more expensive depends entirely on whether it's lifespan is 1 year or 2 years.
Any fair comparasin should take this into account.
I'd be afraid of a space elevator. It would be too easy to sabotage it and cause a major world disaster when it slaps down. Sure, you can design it so that it "hovers" in place and doesn't need to be held up except to anchor it, but then a sabateur who manages to sever the elevator at anywhere along it's length ruins that balance - with everything further out than the sever point flinging out to space and everything further in than the sever point falling to wrap around the equator. The ideal way to do it for the most damage is to sever the elevator far out, near the outer endpoint, that way almost the whole length of it falls slowly at first, and wraps the planet more than once.
Most of the decceleration of the space shuttle when coming down to earth happened during the "burning" part of re-entry, during which the wings aren't really behaving like wings yet, and the object is braking (or "breaking", as the case may be) by virtue of the fact that it isn't down to terminal velocity yet. Once those wings start being used, most of the speed has already been bled off. The retro-rockets of a VTVL vehicle only need to be used to bleed off that last bit of extra speed from terminal velocity down to zero.
Remember, the Apollo and Soyuz capsules ride back to earth on mere parachutes.