A big issue here though is that the right-wing viewpoint is usually "This is forbidden! We will NEVER change that!".
I remember a class exercise I had in school, admittedly a Catholic school, where we tasked with writing rules for a group of people marooned on an island. We were to create rules for people to follow on creating a new society from effectively nothing. So we get into small groups and debate on what those rules might be. Just about everyone came up with rules like no murder, no stealing, no lying, and perhaps a few other common rules. After the exercise the instructor showed the parallels between what we came up with and the Ten Commandments. This stuck with me because it took a handful of teenagers about a half hour to agree on some very basic things that cannot change or our fictional island society falls apart.
Being as this was a bunch of children making the rules in a very short time we didn't get to more complex issues like keeping families together, sexual restraint, taxation, and so on. There are some things that must me forbidden and never change or the fabric of society falls apart. One thing that has been shown to be dangerous to society is having people without some restraint on who they have sex with.
That said, should prostitution be illegal? I don't think so. What we should not do though is normalize it. Having multiple sexual partners messes with people's minds. We have a need to pair up. If people want to "try out" a partner before marriage then that might not be a bad thing. If sleeping around gets to be a habit though then we start seeing problems.
The Companion Guild from Firefly might not be so bad. The companions in the guild had certain protections in law and by policies in the guild. Even then in the series you saw the one main character that was a companion wanting to find a life partner. In one episode the prostitutes not in the guild even had a code of conduct and a group that protected them from abuse. They had effectively recreated a guild of their own.
It's one thing to have in law the legalization of prostitution and another laws regulating how "houses of ill repute" should be run. There's just some things the government should not do. Running a whore house is something the government should not do. California tried this with the pornographic film industry, requiring the use of condoms, requiring testing for AIDS, and so on. All it did was drive the industry out of state and underground. They had the best intentions but I think we all know where that road leads.
Interesting as the Space Shuttle was, it was an engineering mistake, it was basically launching a crewed space station and then landing it each time.
The Space Shuttles were basically a fleet of space stations. One thing I wondered about is if NASA couldn't just launch one or more into space with the intention to not land them. They couldn't stay there forever, of course. At end of life the orbiter could be allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. If they really wanted to save it then repair it in orbit and land it with a return crew. Since it would never fly again then that opens options to land in an unconventional manner, not on a runway, to make the landing easier/cheaper/whatever. Such as a sea landing and just let it sink once the crew were recovered.
Then I realized that the public relations of allowing for the destruction of these iconic spacecraft would be more than NASA could bear. There were only three craft left that had gone to space. At the time they were retired the craft were considered suitable for flight only after considerable expense on craft that had already been flown well beyond their intended lifespan. Getting them to fly on even a one way trip would likely cost a lot of money for little benefit.
Perhaps what NASA should have done is make the retirement in orbit part of the planned uses of the craft from the start. They built six of them. As each new one was built they could have retired older ones in orbit as small space stations. Convert the payload space as a larger living space before retirement. Keep them useful as space stations before everything wore out and the technology became embarrassingly out of date.
SpaceX's approach, with both the reusable rocket and the inexpensive capsule intended for use in the limited time between the ground and the station, and then the station and the ground, makes a lot of sense. Hopefully they'll get man-rating soon.
In a way they've turned the Space Shuttle idea upside down. They reuse the booster stage and have one time use of the orbiter. SpaceX got to learn from NASA's mistakes. Too bad NASA couldn't learn from their own mistakes.
NASA needs to take on a different role in space. They should not be launching spacecraft, only provide government oversight and research. They need to act more like the FAA. The FAA provides oversight on private aircraft, they don't offer flights to people. NASA should let private industry launch payloads to space, not compete with them.
Also, I note that you did not confirm that your organization had outside penetration testing done. That right there proves that your organization doesn't know how to write secure software. Please tell me what hardware we're talking about so I can avoid it.
I can assure you that the organization I worked for does know how to write secure software. You cannot buy these devices as they were built for a specific use and even saying the name of the project might be a security violation. I was not knowledgeable of all the design and testing involved because everything was need to know. I had general ideas on their ultimate use, the cases they were put in, the kind of wire or radio used, and so on. I know that there were tamper switches on the cases because those signal lines had to be handled. I didn't know everything about the hardware just like the people that designed the cases didn't know everything about the software. After we were done with our own internal testing everything was handed over to the customer for their own testing. It's quite possible there was penetration testing but no one thought I needed to know. I could say a lot about what was done but you don't need to know.
The point is, and you admit to it, that not having the source code will slow down an attack. We can debate how much but knowing it will slow down an attack is sufficient to go through the effort of keeping certain design choices secret.
jeez.. if you don't set a target then nothing will be done.
There's a name for governments that dictate what people can and cannot buy, that's a dictatorship. The government can set goals all they like. I have a problem when they start telling people what to do to meet that goal.
I saw an interview with Dr. Stephen Boyd, a research chemist, where he was talking about his battery research. He had government funding to do research on the next generation of iron chemistry batteries, until he didn't. One day the government funds disappeared. If the government wants people to buy electric cars then they need to fund the research into making them cheaper.
Rise in prices because of a rise in demand? that's contrary the more common adage, the more you make the less they cost..
Huh? I think you are very confused. There is no contradiction.
"The factories will move to developing nations if banned from Europe or wherever." - move where?
There's something like 200 nations on this planet, pick one.
And stop selling cars into europe, india, china etc? thats a big loss of market if they keep building old tech.
Make cars cheap enough and you have billions of customers all over the world.
I had a college roommate that bought a car for something like $500. Insurance and license was next to nothing because it was a cheap tin box on wheels. Being a little 4 cylinder engine that he just drove around town, and once in a while on a longer trip to visit family, the fuel cost very little. You are not going to find an electric car with a total cost of ownership that low for a long time.
Cheap cars are old cars and there are not enough old electric cars that the poor are going to see an electric car with a lower total cost of ownership than a gasoline burner. Maybe you can find a used electric car for $10,000. I know I can go to any dealer and find a used car for less than $3000. $10,000 - $3000 = $7000 for operating costs. $7000 / $3 per gallon at 30 miles per gallon means 70,000 miles of driving. If it cost nothing to run the electric that's a lot of miles someone would have to drive before the cost of ownership evens out.
1) The bad part of smaller cars is that a smaller car will always be less safe than a larger car, all else equal. Can a car be made safer than a larger car? Yes. What happens though with mandates for greater fuel efficiency cars must be made lighter. Adding safety features to a car, like airbags, adds weight. We've hit a point where we can't have cheaper, lighter, and safer year after year. Now we must choose two.
2) If you've never heard of people complain on the environmental impact of natural gas cars then I can't help you. I did a quick Google search and found plenty.
3) Again, if you've never heard of people claiming that we can run the world on corn ethanol then I can't help you.
4) I see you are thinking logically. The complaints on heavy metal contamination from car batteries is not always logical. What I am expecting is another round of shrill screams on how we are ruining the environment and killing people with these batteries. It's not all that common now, just wait though. It will happen shortly after electric cars start to become mainstream.
5) Go back and read what I wrote. I said we should always look for something better. The complaint is that the "greenies" demand immediate adoption of the next big thing. Trading in a gasoline car for a natural gas car, even though it'd cut CO2 emissions in half, is not good enough. Only getting an electric car would satisfy them. What will no doubt follow, just like we've seen to many times before, is when the next thing comes along then everyone must immediately scrap their electric car for whatever that next big thing might be. Not only can these people not be satisfied but technological advancement has got to a point of diminishing returns. We can cut our CO2 emissions in half only so many times before the reductions become meaningless.
It's a distinction with an enormous difference -- around 90% difference, which is the proportion of vehicles which are not replaced every year.
So, you are saying that the difference is that instead of replacing all cars, new and old, is distinct from replacing only new cars sold? Cars wear out and get replaced. I recall the typical lifespan of a car is about 10 years. I don't know if that was an average, median, half life, or whatever, or if it wasn't 12 years or 8. My point is that banning ownership of all petroleum cars versus merely banning the sale of new petroleum cars is a difference of perhaps a decade of CO2 emitting cars on the roads. Whether it's 5, 15, or 25 years I don't see this happening.
As for the volumes... The Netherlands buys about 400K vehicles per year.
But it's not just the Netherlands doing this. If you read the article (yes, I know this is Slashdot) then you'd know that UK, France, China, and other nations have similar plans. That's a lot of electric cars.
Let's view this from an economics perspective, basic supply and demand. As governments demand their subjects buy electric cars there will be a rise in demand, and therefore prices. Demand for petroleum goes down, and so would it's prices. These governments may be successful in converting their jurisdiction to electric cars but the rest of the world will still be driving petroleum cars. In fact the rate of people buying these cars might accelerate since existing manufacturing capability for engines just doesn't go away, they'll be looking for new markets. With lower fuel prices more people can afford them.
This isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things. The oil will still be burned. This cannot be legislated away. It's not like it takes advanced technology to make an internal combustion engine either, we've been mass producing them for a century now. The factories will move to developing nations if banned from Europe or wherever.
The only sure way to stop people from burning petroleum is to give them something better. Right now electric cars sell largely on government mandates and people wanting to show off their concern for the environment. There are very real physical limitation that will keep electric vehicles from outperforming cars that burn hydrocarbons. Only when, or if, electric vehicles can provide a greater value to a large majority of people will they replace internal combustion engines.
We have politicians that think they can legislate the color of the sky. They will have to learn that they can't. Also, we need people that don't run to the government to solve all our problems. If you want to see electric cars replace petroleum cars then make an electric car a product that people would want to buy instead.
The systems I was referring to did in fact have sealed boxes where if tampering was detected the memory was wiped. The communications the devices were meant to protect would still be down an unsecured wire or transmitted by radio. If the encryption used was known then that means much less resources would be needed to break it, brute force or otherwise.
More generally though by keeping code secret, even on publicly available software, you'd be forcing a state funded actor to put the resources to decompiling the code. The code would then have to be examined for vulnerabilities. By handing over the original code there's much more information to work with. There would be comments, variable names, and so many other clues that make it readable and therefore much easier to look for a vulnerability. Sure, they'll still have the code either way but there's no obligation to hand it over on a silver platter.
It would need to be some kind of jam-proof locking mechanism.
I've seen door locks that use magnets to secure the door. The idea is that the lock has no moving parts and anyone with tools to defeat the magnet (it's a powerful magnet) has tools to destroy the door. A power outage may be a problem but that's either not common enough to matter or managed with whatever backup electricity you'd want to have anyway for the security system. A thief capable of inducing a power outage to defeat the locks and the cameras is capable of doing anything they please, you can only do so much.
Even then, the thief could lock the box and return later to retrieve the parcel from the porch.
Just instruct the driver to not leave the package in an unsecured area. Also, a thief with enough foreknowledge to lock the box and come back later to pick it up before the homeowner can retrieve it could pull some other stunts just as easily. Just be in the front yard trimming bushes, raking leaves, washing windows, or whatever else a homeowner might reasonably do outside while waiting for a package. When the package comes the thief can greet the driver pretending to be the homeowner, or the homeowner's son/daughter/groundskeeper/whatever, and convince the driver to hand the package over instead of putting it in the lock box. If there's no camera to catch the thief messing with the lock box or picking up the package then what's to keep them from being so bold as to simply wait for the delivery?
Is it just propaganda and conspiracy theory? Let's look at the past, starting when cars started to be "evil", which to be seems to be about the time that there was an effort to remove lead from gasoline. I'm not saying that removing lead from gasoline was bad, I see little evidence to suggest this practice should have continued once we realized the risks it posed. What it did though was seemingly start a cascade of events.
We got our unleaded gasoline, that's good. Then came smaller, more efficient cars. At the same time came improvements in designing safer cars with crumple zones and reinforced passenger cabins. I'm not sure if the two were related in that the smaller cars become more dangerous and the car makers had to compensate for the lack of mass to keep people safe, or just that cars were generally unsafe and this became more apparent as more people got cars on increasingly crowded roads. Bigger cars are inherently safer but smaller cheaper cars mean greater freedom and quality of life. That's good, bad, or indifferent, depending on your point of view.
Then comes natural gas. This didn't catch on too much in some places of the USA but I remember in California and Texas seeing filling stations that offered natural gas. You'd see city transit buses proudly displaying signs on how clean these new natural gas cars ran. The mood on that shifted real quick. Natural gas got real cheap, and gasoline prices rose, and people started to actually buy natural gas fueled vehicles. When people started to actually buy them then natural gas became "bad".
Then we get to what the GPP stated, bio-fuel becoming the new hotness. Then people found out that biodiesel likes to gel up in the cold. Ethanol would suck the humidity out of the air in the summer and into the fuel tank, and then when the weather got cold enough for it to freeze they'd hear blocks of ice sliding around in fuel tank. The bio-fuels were just generally expensive and lower energy density compared to petroleum fuels.
After decades of this roller coaster ride of different kinds of fuels and cars coming into favor and then becoming what's going to get us all killed would it not be natural to at some point step back, look at the pattern, and think we might see another twist and turn? Nothing will satisfy these people. Nothing will ever be "enough" because there will always be something better later. The "better" will always be something just out of reach but close enough we can see it clearly. Once it's something we can actually touch, and use, then it's no longer "new". This looking for something better is as natural as seeing the roller coaster. We should always look for something better. What we should not do is call people murderers because the car they have is not as "green" as the new hotness.
I fully expect someone to claim current batteries are polluting our precious bodily fluids with heavy metals. Once something "better" comes along the current battery technology that was going to save us all from certain death becomes poison that will kill us all.
Calm down people. We'll survive this if we all don't panic.
Says volumes about how much he believes in the security of his own software.
I worked on secure systems before. It was common to use well documented algorithms for encryption. The mathematics showed the encryption to be secure. The implementation would be trivial rewrites of the encryption, so not any different than anything open source. We'd pair the encryption we had with open source implementations to assure we did it correctly.
One thing we could not do was reveal our code. In fact even mentioning which encryption we used was considered a security violation. This was done to deny an attacker as much information as possible for an attack. Sure, the code was likely very secure, but we weren't under any kind of obligation to give attackers anything that could make their life of snooping into the communications easier.
There is still a possibility that someone might be able to prove the encryption we used was not as secure as previously believed. We'd still enjoy security by obscurity. The assumption was that if the encryption was flawed then attackers would still have to go through the effort to find out if we used the flawed encryption or not. This buys time to fix the problem.
Most encryption is based on the idea of creating a key with enough bits that any brute force attack would have to try all the combinations to break. By keeping the algorithm a secret then we have effectively added a few more bits to the key. That adds that much more time to an attack.
Then there is the matter of intellectual property and industrial espionage. By sharing the code with the government there is a possibility of something unique and valuable being revealed to a potential competitor to copy and sell, or possibly patent and claim infringement on the original authors. Maybe the rights to the code would hold up in court but that still means the expense of going to court.
Here's how I see that panning out. The tax on the gas cars will raise the price. Whether it's a percentage or a flat rate per car the price will become invisible in time, people just won't notice it much like how people don't think much about a sales tax. The same will happen for the electric vehicles, any subsidy on their sale will become invisible to the buyer.
To further cover up the tax on gas cars the car makers will do one of two things. They could make cheaper cars, where the engine is a bit smaller, the seats and stereo not as nice, and so on. They could alternatively make it more expensive with more powerful engines, fancy electronics, and so on. With the more expensive car a flat fee looks small, and any percentage tax on such vehicles is made up for in a car that goes real fast.
Let's face it, electric cars are just more expensive. This would be even more apparent if comparing this to cars that were stripped down to the most basic of a car with just four wheels and a seat. If some leap in technology makes this not true then this falls apart, and people buy electric cars because they are cheap, not because they are "green". At that point the subsidy becomes just paying people to buy cars.
So, people looking for a cheap car will buy the gas car because as it is right now there is no electric car cheaper than a gas car. This cheap car is taxed to pay someone to buy an expensive electric car. These people have enough money to buy whatever car they want. They might buy the electric car because they want to be "green", or maybe because the subsidy means they can now afford leather seats with integrated heating and cooling instead of the cheaper cloth seats.
Congratulations, you have now created a wealth redistribution system that taxes the poor to pay rich people to buy luxury cars.
Growing up on a farm in the US Midwest we had this room we called a "porch". Now it would more likely, and more accurately, be called a "mud room". It was a small unheated room on the house where one door would go to the outside and another to the kitchen. In this room was a closet for coats and boots, a large couch like bench where the seat would flip up to reveal storage space where we kept toys for outdoor play, and just generally storage for stuff of little real value. It would have been trivial to have a lock on the outside and inside doors to create a space where people could enter this room but not the rest of the house.
It seems mud rooms have fallen out of fashion and people just have the door to the outside open directly into their heated spaces. Perhaps a sign of the times of more efficient heating where the need to conserve the heat with this "air lock" of a room is deemed unneeded and inconvenient.
I'd like a house with this air lock of a room as I think it'd save energy and leave a place I could have where deliveries could be made and not left out where it could be seen. I could lock this room normally so as to prevent people from wandering in to steal my coats and boots but leave it unlocked for deliveries. If the delivery driver was kind enough to lock the door after dropping off the box then that would keep people from stealing deliveries too.
No fancy electronics needed. No unlocked doors to my living space. There is a problem of perhaps someone getting into the first "air lock" door and now having plenty of time out of sight to break into the inner door but then this is the same problem of leaving any door unlocked, put in cameras to deter this and to potentially catch anyone in the act of breaking and entering. Maybe put an electronic lock on the outer door that can be unlocked remotely, or just a simple keypad lock that allows for temporary key codes and give the code to the delivery driver.
Oh, and it saves energy too.
The idea of giving someone access to a key to open a car so the delivery item can be put in the trunk of a car is already solved with these internet connected remotes. Opening a trunk with your smartphone is a solved problem.
They want to make all cars be "emission free" in less than 15 years? That's not happening. Electric cars are a tiny fraction of a percent of all cars now. There just is not enough supply right now to meet this demand, and increasing production is not easy. Legislating this doesn't change basic economics.
This is going to fail badly. This is a bunch of feel good legislation that will blow up in their faces.
Let me guess, because the data comes from the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association it cannot be trusted? I tried to find similar data from someone that might be more neutral on the topic. Why could that be? Perhaps because wind and solar aren't that safe.
Also, you didn't answer my question before. It should be easy enough to find. What is the price of solar power at midnight in Michigan? In January? I found the price for nuclear, about 16 cents per kilowatt hour. https://www.eia.gov/state/rank...
If what I say is bullshit then perhaps you can provide something that proves me wrong. Nuclear power is the safest, most reliable, energy source we have with a carbon footprint and cost as low as wind, solar, or hydro. Or do I have to Google that for you too?
No need to worry about replying. I base the success of a troll on how much it pisses off the reader. And since I know you've been dying to see the reply to your last post, then I know you read this, and now you're fuming.
Why would I be "fuming"? I'm laughing my ass off.
You want to insult POTUS? Whatever. He's a carnival barker in a trucker hat and a cheap suit.
Different A/C here.
I'm sure it is.;^)
But that's ok. Just put the cock back in your mouth and pretend you never saw this post. You'll be better off.
No, I can't ignore this. I'm having too much fun. Go ahead, insult me some more. I'm sure you have something better than a homophobic slur. Tell me my mom is fat. Tell me about my genitalia. Insult my intelligence. I could use the entertainment.
Why would one accident cause a rule change in a highly monitored competition? The answer is in the question, because a lot of people are watching.
One goal of the competition is to get people on board with electric vehicles (solar power is one way to induce a limit on the electrical energy consumption) and having drivers getting injured is bad PR. Just generally people getting injured is bad PR when you have college students competing, doesn't matter if that competition is a spelling bee or football game.
A three wheeled vehicle is provably unstable if the "wrong" wheel is lost. It's just human nature to want to fix a known weakness, especially when the solution has such a small cost. I've seen these vehicles up close, including the one that was wrecked, and these are not safe vehicles. Requiring them to have four wheels removes a now provably unsafe failure mode in vehicles that are already not great on safety. There were other close calls that induced rule changes, what happened here though was an injured driver and total loss of the vehicle. Not making a rule change afterward would have been a major PR failure, it would put the future of the competition at risk of having competitors no longer willing to enter. Running the non-zero risk of a similar accident happening again would be an ambulance chasing lawyer's dream.
There are hundreds of nuclear power plants operating on Earth right now. We know how to build them to produce power safely, reliably, and cheaply.
You keep saying that, but the evidence runs contrary to your claim.
My claims of nuclear power being safer, more reliable, and cheaper than solar can be proven with a few minutes on Google. Perhaps the point on being cheaper is debatable if one lives in a sunny location like Arizona but not everyone enjoys having that much sun. (Then again, I've talked to people that lived in Arizona and they didn't always "enjoy" that much sun.)
Tell me something, what is the price of solar power at midnight in Michigan? In January? No need to be precise, the nearest cent per kilowatt hour will do.
It's not commercially viable to reprocess nuclear waste any more than it is to produce it in the first place.
It's been done in France for a very long time now. It's failed in the USA since the government banned it for so long and it's real hard to compete with the government facilities that can rely on an endless supply of taxpayers' money to cover up their poor management.
Did I say that ice ages didn't happen? No, I will admit they did happen. What doesn't happen is runaway warming or cooling. We see warm periods and cold periods. Judging from what evidence we have of the past it's not the warm periods we should fear, it is the cold.
Warm periods brought human migration, prosperity, population growth, and generally what we consider human civilization. Cold periods bring disease, starvation, and generally destruction of civilization.
If Earth was capable of runaway global warming then we'd have seen it long ago like on Venus, or rather not see it, because we'd be dead. If Earth was capable of runaway cooling then Earth would have dry ice glaciers like Mars. There's natural mechanisms that bounds the temperature rise and fall, both the rate and the extremes. Warming periods is something that humanity can handle because we can still grow food. We might see breweries change to wineries, like what we saw in England and Ireland in the last warm period. Cold periods, especially ice ages, are bad.
I don't fear global warming. I say this because of historical records show them to be good for humanity. I also say this because the politicians that talk about global warming don't seem to be taking this seriously. They'll try to induce fear on sea level rise while buying beach front property. They'll say we all need to reduce our carbon footprint and then fly to Hawaii for vacation. They'll claim we need to switch to "green" energy while holding up licenses for nuclear power plants.
I'll take global warming seriously when the politicians do. Actions speak louder than words.
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A big issue here though is that the right-wing viewpoint is usually "This is forbidden! We will NEVER change that!".
I remember a class exercise I had in school, admittedly a Catholic school, where we tasked with writing rules for a group of people marooned on an island. We were to create rules for people to follow on creating a new society from effectively nothing. So we get into small groups and debate on what those rules might be. Just about everyone came up with rules like no murder, no stealing, no lying, and perhaps a few other common rules. After the exercise the instructor showed the parallels between what we came up with and the Ten Commandments. This stuck with me because it took a handful of teenagers about a half hour to agree on some very basic things that cannot change or our fictional island society falls apart.
Being as this was a bunch of children making the rules in a very short time we didn't get to more complex issues like keeping families together, sexual restraint, taxation, and so on. There are some things that must me forbidden and never change or the fabric of society falls apart. One thing that has been shown to be dangerous to society is having people without some restraint on who they have sex with.
That said, should prostitution be illegal? I don't think so. What we should not do though is normalize it. Having multiple sexual partners messes with people's minds. We have a need to pair up. If people want to "try out" a partner before marriage then that might not be a bad thing. If sleeping around gets to be a habit though then we start seeing problems.
The Companion Guild from Firefly might not be so bad. The companions in the guild had certain protections in law and by policies in the guild. Even then in the series you saw the one main character that was a companion wanting to find a life partner. In one episode the prostitutes not in the guild even had a code of conduct and a group that protected them from abuse. They had effectively recreated a guild of their own.
It's one thing to have in law the legalization of prostitution and another laws regulating how "houses of ill repute" should be run. There's just some things the government should not do. Running a whore house is something the government should not do. California tried this with the pornographic film industry, requiring the use of condoms, requiring testing for AIDS, and so on. All it did was drive the industry out of state and underground. They had the best intentions but I think we all know where that road leads.
Dammit, now I have to watch Firefly again.
Interesting as the Space Shuttle was, it was an engineering mistake, it was basically launching a crewed space station and then landing it each time.
The Space Shuttles were basically a fleet of space stations. One thing I wondered about is if NASA couldn't just launch one or more into space with the intention to not land them. They couldn't stay there forever, of course. At end of life the orbiter could be allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. If they really wanted to save it then repair it in orbit and land it with a return crew. Since it would never fly again then that opens options to land in an unconventional manner, not on a runway, to make the landing easier/cheaper/whatever. Such as a sea landing and just let it sink once the crew were recovered.
Then I realized that the public relations of allowing for the destruction of these iconic spacecraft would be more than NASA could bear. There were only three craft left that had gone to space. At the time they were retired the craft were considered suitable for flight only after considerable expense on craft that had already been flown well beyond their intended lifespan. Getting them to fly on even a one way trip would likely cost a lot of money for little benefit.
Perhaps what NASA should have done is make the retirement in orbit part of the planned uses of the craft from the start. They built six of them. As each new one was built they could have retired older ones in orbit as small space stations. Convert the payload space as a larger living space before retirement. Keep them useful as space stations before everything wore out and the technology became embarrassingly out of date.
SpaceX's approach, with both the reusable rocket and the inexpensive capsule intended for use in the limited time between the ground and the station, and then the station and the ground, makes a lot of sense. Hopefully they'll get man-rating soon.
In a way they've turned the Space Shuttle idea upside down. They reuse the booster stage and have one time use of the orbiter. SpaceX got to learn from NASA's mistakes. Too bad NASA couldn't learn from their own mistakes.
NASA needs to take on a different role in space. They should not be launching spacecraft, only provide government oversight and research. They need to act more like the FAA. The FAA provides oversight on private aircraft, they don't offer flights to people. NASA should let private industry launch payloads to space, not compete with them.
Also, I note that you did not confirm that your organization had outside penetration testing done. That right there proves that your organization doesn't know how to write secure software. Please tell me what hardware we're talking about so I can avoid it.
I can assure you that the organization I worked for does know how to write secure software. You cannot buy these devices as they were built for a specific use and even saying the name of the project might be a security violation. I was not knowledgeable of all the design and testing involved because everything was need to know. I had general ideas on their ultimate use, the cases they were put in, the kind of wire or radio used, and so on. I know that there were tamper switches on the cases because those signal lines had to be handled. I didn't know everything about the hardware just like the people that designed the cases didn't know everything about the software. After we were done with our own internal testing everything was handed over to the customer for their own testing. It's quite possible there was penetration testing but no one thought I needed to know. I could say a lot about what was done but you don't need to know.
The point is, and you admit to it, that not having the source code will slow down an attack. We can debate how much but knowing it will slow down an attack is sufficient to go through the effort of keeping certain design choices secret.
A "standard" Belgium? As opposed to what? An "imperial" Belgium?
jeez.. if you don't set a target then nothing will be done.
There's a name for governments that dictate what people can and cannot buy, that's a dictatorship. The government can set goals all they like. I have a problem when they start telling people what to do to meet that goal.
I saw an interview with Dr. Stephen Boyd, a research chemist, where he was talking about his battery research. He had government funding to do research on the next generation of iron chemistry batteries, until he didn't. One day the government funds disappeared. If the government wants people to buy electric cars then they need to fund the research into making them cheaper.
Rise in prices because of a rise in demand? that's contrary the more common adage, the more you make the less they cost..
Huh? I think you are very confused. There is no contradiction.
"The factories will move to developing nations if banned from Europe or wherever." - move where?
There's something like 200 nations on this planet, pick one.
And stop selling cars into europe, india, china etc? thats a big loss of market if they keep building old tech.
Make cars cheap enough and you have billions of customers all over the world.
I had a college roommate that bought a car for something like $500. Insurance and license was next to nothing because it was a cheap tin box on wheels. Being a little 4 cylinder engine that he just drove around town, and once in a while on a longer trip to visit family, the fuel cost very little. You are not going to find an electric car with a total cost of ownership that low for a long time.
Cheap cars are old cars and there are not enough old electric cars that the poor are going to see an electric car with a lower total cost of ownership than a gasoline burner. Maybe you can find a used electric car for $10,000. I know I can go to any dealer and find a used car for less than $3000. $10,000 - $3000 = $7000 for operating costs. $7000 / $3 per gallon at 30 miles per gallon means 70,000 miles of driving. If it cost nothing to run the electric that's a lot of miles someone would have to drive before the cost of ownership evens out.
You do understand that's the system that we have now, right?
Yes. It's a bad idea here and now, and it will be a bad idea in the future in other nations.
1) The bad part of smaller cars is that a smaller car will always be less safe than a larger car, all else equal. Can a car be made safer than a larger car? Yes. What happens though with mandates for greater fuel efficiency cars must be made lighter. Adding safety features to a car, like airbags, adds weight. We've hit a point where we can't have cheaper, lighter, and safer year after year. Now we must choose two.
2) If you've never heard of people complain on the environmental impact of natural gas cars then I can't help you. I did a quick Google search and found plenty.
3) Again, if you've never heard of people claiming that we can run the world on corn ethanol then I can't help you.
4) I see you are thinking logically. The complaints on heavy metal contamination from car batteries is not always logical. What I am expecting is another round of shrill screams on how we are ruining the environment and killing people with these batteries. It's not all that common now, just wait though. It will happen shortly after electric cars start to become mainstream.
5) Go back and read what I wrote. I said we should always look for something better. The complaint is that the "greenies" demand immediate adoption of the next big thing. Trading in a gasoline car for a natural gas car, even though it'd cut CO2 emissions in half, is not good enough. Only getting an electric car would satisfy them. What will no doubt follow, just like we've seen to many times before, is when the next thing comes along then everyone must immediately scrap their electric car for whatever that next big thing might be. Not only can these people not be satisfied but technological advancement has got to a point of diminishing returns. We can cut our CO2 emissions in half only so many times before the reductions become meaningless.
It's a distinction with an enormous difference -- around 90% difference, which is the proportion of vehicles which are not replaced every year.
So, you are saying that the difference is that instead of replacing all cars, new and old, is distinct from replacing only new cars sold? Cars wear out and get replaced. I recall the typical lifespan of a car is about 10 years. I don't know if that was an average, median, half life, or whatever, or if it wasn't 12 years or 8. My point is that banning ownership of all petroleum cars versus merely banning the sale of new petroleum cars is a difference of perhaps a decade of CO2 emitting cars on the roads. Whether it's 5, 15, or 25 years I don't see this happening.
As for the volumes... The Netherlands buys about 400K vehicles per year.
But it's not just the Netherlands doing this. If you read the article (yes, I know this is Slashdot) then you'd know that UK, France, China, and other nations have similar plans. That's a lot of electric cars.
Let's view this from an economics perspective, basic supply and demand. As governments demand their subjects buy electric cars there will be a rise in demand, and therefore prices. Demand for petroleum goes down, and so would it's prices. These governments may be successful in converting their jurisdiction to electric cars but the rest of the world will still be driving petroleum cars. In fact the rate of people buying these cars might accelerate since existing manufacturing capability for engines just doesn't go away, they'll be looking for new markets. With lower fuel prices more people can afford them.
This isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things. The oil will still be burned. This cannot be legislated away. It's not like it takes advanced technology to make an internal combustion engine either, we've been mass producing them for a century now. The factories will move to developing nations if banned from Europe or wherever.
The only sure way to stop people from burning petroleum is to give them something better. Right now electric cars sell largely on government mandates and people wanting to show off their concern for the environment. There are very real physical limitation that will keep electric vehicles from outperforming cars that burn hydrocarbons. Only when, or if, electric vehicles can provide a greater value to a large majority of people will they replace internal combustion engines.
We have politicians that think they can legislate the color of the sky. They will have to learn that they can't. Also, we need people that don't run to the government to solve all our problems. If you want to see electric cars replace petroleum cars then make an electric car a product that people would want to buy instead.
The systems I was referring to did in fact have sealed boxes where if tampering was detected the memory was wiped. The communications the devices were meant to protect would still be down an unsecured wire or transmitted by radio. If the encryption used was known then that means much less resources would be needed to break it, brute force or otherwise.
More generally though by keeping code secret, even on publicly available software, you'd be forcing a state funded actor to put the resources to decompiling the code. The code would then have to be examined for vulnerabilities. By handing over the original code there's much more information to work with. There would be comments, variable names, and so many other clues that make it readable and therefore much easier to look for a vulnerability. Sure, they'll still have the code either way but there's no obligation to hand it over on a silver platter.
It would need to be some kind of jam-proof locking mechanism.
I've seen door locks that use magnets to secure the door. The idea is that the lock has no moving parts and anyone with tools to defeat the magnet (it's a powerful magnet) has tools to destroy the door. A power outage may be a problem but that's either not common enough to matter or managed with whatever backup electricity you'd want to have anyway for the security system. A thief capable of inducing a power outage to defeat the locks and the cameras is capable of doing anything they please, you can only do so much.
Even then, the thief could lock the box and return later to retrieve the parcel from the porch.
Just instruct the driver to not leave the package in an unsecured area. Also, a thief with enough foreknowledge to lock the box and come back later to pick it up before the homeowner can retrieve it could pull some other stunts just as easily. Just be in the front yard trimming bushes, raking leaves, washing windows, or whatever else a homeowner might reasonably do outside while waiting for a package. When the package comes the thief can greet the driver pretending to be the homeowner, or the homeowner's son/daughter/groundskeeper/whatever, and convince the driver to hand the package over instead of putting it in the lock box. If there's no camera to catch the thief messing with the lock box or picking up the package then what's to keep them from being so bold as to simply wait for the delivery?
What good is a padlock if you don't have the key or combination to open it?
Seriously man, why overcomplicate things?
Because adding complexity means justifying buying toys.
Is it just propaganda and conspiracy theory? Let's look at the past, starting when cars started to be "evil", which to be seems to be about the time that there was an effort to remove lead from gasoline. I'm not saying that removing lead from gasoline was bad, I see little evidence to suggest this practice should have continued once we realized the risks it posed. What it did though was seemingly start a cascade of events.
We got our unleaded gasoline, that's good. Then came smaller, more efficient cars. At the same time came improvements in designing safer cars with crumple zones and reinforced passenger cabins. I'm not sure if the two were related in that the smaller cars become more dangerous and the car makers had to compensate for the lack of mass to keep people safe, or just that cars were generally unsafe and this became more apparent as more people got cars on increasingly crowded roads. Bigger cars are inherently safer but smaller cheaper cars mean greater freedom and quality of life. That's good, bad, or indifferent, depending on your point of view.
Then comes natural gas. This didn't catch on too much in some places of the USA but I remember in California and Texas seeing filling stations that offered natural gas. You'd see city transit buses proudly displaying signs on how clean these new natural gas cars ran. The mood on that shifted real quick. Natural gas got real cheap, and gasoline prices rose, and people started to actually buy natural gas fueled vehicles. When people started to actually buy them then natural gas became "bad".
Then we get to what the GPP stated, bio-fuel becoming the new hotness. Then people found out that biodiesel likes to gel up in the cold. Ethanol would suck the humidity out of the air in the summer and into the fuel tank, and then when the weather got cold enough for it to freeze they'd hear blocks of ice sliding around in fuel tank. The bio-fuels were just generally expensive and lower energy density compared to petroleum fuels.
After decades of this roller coaster ride of different kinds of fuels and cars coming into favor and then becoming what's going to get us all killed would it not be natural to at some point step back, look at the pattern, and think we might see another twist and turn? Nothing will satisfy these people. Nothing will ever be "enough" because there will always be something better later. The "better" will always be something just out of reach but close enough we can see it clearly. Once it's something we can actually touch, and use, then it's no longer "new". This looking for something better is as natural as seeing the roller coaster. We should always look for something better. What we should not do is call people murderers because the car they have is not as "green" as the new hotness.
I fully expect someone to claim current batteries are polluting our precious bodily fluids with heavy metals. Once something "better" comes along the current battery technology that was going to save us all from certain death becomes poison that will kill us all.
Calm down people. We'll survive this if we all don't panic.
Says volumes about how much he believes in the security of his own software.
I worked on secure systems before. It was common to use well documented algorithms for encryption. The mathematics showed the encryption to be secure. The implementation would be trivial rewrites of the encryption, so not any different than anything open source. We'd pair the encryption we had with open source implementations to assure we did it correctly.
One thing we could not do was reveal our code. In fact even mentioning which encryption we used was considered a security violation. This was done to deny an attacker as much information as possible for an attack. Sure, the code was likely very secure, but we weren't under any kind of obligation to give attackers anything that could make their life of snooping into the communications easier.
There is still a possibility that someone might be able to prove the encryption we used was not as secure as previously believed. We'd still enjoy security by obscurity. The assumption was that if the encryption was flawed then attackers would still have to go through the effort to find out if we used the flawed encryption or not. This buys time to fix the problem.
Most encryption is based on the idea of creating a key with enough bits that any brute force attack would have to try all the combinations to break. By keeping the algorithm a secret then we have effectively added a few more bits to the key. That adds that much more time to an attack.
Then there is the matter of intellectual property and industrial espionage. By sharing the code with the government there is a possibility of something unique and valuable being revealed to a potential competitor to copy and sell, or possibly patent and claim infringement on the original authors. Maybe the rights to the code would hold up in court but that still means the expense of going to court.
Here's how I see that panning out. The tax on the gas cars will raise the price. Whether it's a percentage or a flat rate per car the price will become invisible in time, people just won't notice it much like how people don't think much about a sales tax. The same will happen for the electric vehicles, any subsidy on their sale will become invisible to the buyer.
To further cover up the tax on gas cars the car makers will do one of two things. They could make cheaper cars, where the engine is a bit smaller, the seats and stereo not as nice, and so on. They could alternatively make it more expensive with more powerful engines, fancy electronics, and so on. With the more expensive car a flat fee looks small, and any percentage tax on such vehicles is made up for in a car that goes real fast.
Let's face it, electric cars are just more expensive. This would be even more apparent if comparing this to cars that were stripped down to the most basic of a car with just four wheels and a seat. If some leap in technology makes this not true then this falls apart, and people buy electric cars because they are cheap, not because they are "green". At that point the subsidy becomes just paying people to buy cars.
So, people looking for a cheap car will buy the gas car because as it is right now there is no electric car cheaper than a gas car. This cheap car is taxed to pay someone to buy an expensive electric car. These people have enough money to buy whatever car they want. They might buy the electric car because they want to be "green", or maybe because the subsidy means they can now afford leather seats with integrated heating and cooling instead of the cheaper cloth seats.
Congratulations, you have now created a wealth redistribution system that taxes the poor to pay rich people to buy luxury cars.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Growing up on a farm in the US Midwest we had this room we called a "porch". Now it would more likely, and more accurately, be called a "mud room". It was a small unheated room on the house where one door would go to the outside and another to the kitchen. In this room was a closet for coats and boots, a large couch like bench where the seat would flip up to reveal storage space where we kept toys for outdoor play, and just generally storage for stuff of little real value. It would have been trivial to have a lock on the outside and inside doors to create a space where people could enter this room but not the rest of the house.
It seems mud rooms have fallen out of fashion and people just have the door to the outside open directly into their heated spaces. Perhaps a sign of the times of more efficient heating where the need to conserve the heat with this "air lock" of a room is deemed unneeded and inconvenient.
I'd like a house with this air lock of a room as I think it'd save energy and leave a place I could have where deliveries could be made and not left out where it could be seen. I could lock this room normally so as to prevent people from wandering in to steal my coats and boots but leave it unlocked for deliveries. If the delivery driver was kind enough to lock the door after dropping off the box then that would keep people from stealing deliveries too.
No fancy electronics needed. No unlocked doors to my living space. There is a problem of perhaps someone getting into the first "air lock" door and now having plenty of time out of sight to break into the inner door but then this is the same problem of leaving any door unlocked, put in cameras to deter this and to potentially catch anyone in the act of breaking and entering. Maybe put an electronic lock on the outer door that can be unlocked remotely, or just a simple keypad lock that allows for temporary key codes and give the code to the delivery driver.
Oh, and it saves energy too.
The idea of giving someone access to a key to open a car so the delivery item can be put in the trunk of a car is already solved with these internet connected remotes. Opening a trunk with your smartphone is a solved problem.
They want to make all cars be "emission free" in less than 15 years? That's not happening. Electric cars are a tiny fraction of a percent of all cars now. There just is not enough supply right now to meet this demand, and increasing production is not easy. Legislating this doesn't change basic economics.
This is going to fail badly. This is a bunch of feel good legislation that will blow up in their faces.
So far, you haven't provided any evidence whatsoever, only made a bunch of unfounded claims, so there's nothing to refute.
You mean like you made unfounded claims? How you provided no evidence? Is it that hard to click on the link I gave and then click on the results?
https://www.iaea.org/sites/def...
https://www.fool.com/investing...
Let me guess, because the data comes from the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association it cannot be trusted? I tried to find similar data from someone that might be more neutral on the topic. Why could that be? Perhaps because wind and solar aren't that safe.
Also, you didn't answer my question before. It should be easy enough to find. What is the price of solar power at midnight in Michigan? In January? I found the price for nuclear, about 16 cents per kilowatt hour.
https://www.eia.gov/state/rank...
You mean like this:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=is+nuclea...
If what I say is bullshit then perhaps you can provide something that proves me wrong. Nuclear power is the safest, most reliable, energy source we have with a carbon footprint and cost as low as wind, solar, or hydro. Or do I have to Google that for you too?
No need to worry about replying. I base the success of a troll on how much it pisses off the reader. And since I know you've been dying to see the reply to your last post, then I know you read this, and now you're fuming.
Why would I be "fuming"? I'm laughing my ass off.
You want to insult POTUS? Whatever. He's a carnival barker in a trucker hat and a cheap suit.
Different A/C here.
I'm sure it is. ;^)
But that's ok. Just put the cock back in your mouth and pretend you never saw this post. You'll be better off.
No, I can't ignore this. I'm having too much fun. Go ahead, insult me some more. I'm sure you have something better than a homophobic slur. Tell me my mom is fat. Tell me about my genitalia. Insult my intelligence. I could use the entertainment.
Why would one accident cause a rule change in a highly monitored competition? The answer is in the question, because a lot of people are watching.
One goal of the competition is to get people on board with electric vehicles (solar power is one way to induce a limit on the electrical energy consumption) and having drivers getting injured is bad PR. Just generally people getting injured is bad PR when you have college students competing, doesn't matter if that competition is a spelling bee or football game.
A three wheeled vehicle is provably unstable if the "wrong" wheel is lost. It's just human nature to want to fix a known weakness, especially when the solution has such a small cost. I've seen these vehicles up close, including the one that was wrecked, and these are not safe vehicles. Requiring them to have four wheels removes a now provably unsafe failure mode in vehicles that are already not great on safety. There were other close calls that induced rule changes, what happened here though was an injured driver and total loss of the vehicle. Not making a rule change afterward would have been a major PR failure, it would put the future of the competition at risk of having competitors no longer willing to enter. Running the non-zero risk of a similar accident happening again would be an ambulance chasing lawyer's dream.
There are hundreds of nuclear power plants operating on Earth right now. We know how to build them to produce power safely, reliably, and cheaply.
You keep saying that, but the evidence runs contrary to your claim.
My claims of nuclear power being safer, more reliable, and cheaper than solar can be proven with a few minutes on Google. Perhaps the point on being cheaper is debatable if one lives in a sunny location like Arizona but not everyone enjoys having that much sun. (Then again, I've talked to people that lived in Arizona and they didn't always "enjoy" that much sun.)
Tell me something, what is the price of solar power at midnight in Michigan? In January? No need to be precise, the nearest cent per kilowatt hour will do.
It's not commercially viable to reprocess nuclear waste any more than it is to produce it in the first place.
It's been done in France for a very long time now. It's failed in the USA since the government banned it for so long and it's real hard to compete with the government facilities that can rely on an endless supply of taxpayers' money to cover up their poor management.
Did I say that ice ages didn't happen? No, I will admit they did happen. What doesn't happen is runaway warming or cooling. We see warm periods and cold periods. Judging from what evidence we have of the past it's not the warm periods we should fear, it is the cold.
Warm periods brought human migration, prosperity, population growth, and generally what we consider human civilization. Cold periods bring disease, starvation, and generally destruction of civilization.
If Earth was capable of runaway global warming then we'd have seen it long ago like on Venus, or rather not see it, because we'd be dead. If Earth was capable of runaway cooling then Earth would have dry ice glaciers like Mars. There's natural mechanisms that bounds the temperature rise and fall, both the rate and the extremes. Warming periods is something that humanity can handle because we can still grow food. We might see breweries change to wineries, like what we saw in England and Ireland in the last warm period. Cold periods, especially ice ages, are bad.
I don't fear global warming. I say this because of historical records show them to be good for humanity. I also say this because the politicians that talk about global warming don't seem to be taking this seriously. They'll try to induce fear on sea level rise while buying beach front property. They'll say we all need to reduce our carbon footprint and then fly to Hawaii for vacation. They'll claim we need to switch to "green" energy while holding up licenses for nuclear power plants.
I'll take global warming seriously when the politicians do. Actions speak louder than words.