Has anyone else noticed that zero G is a constant PITA for nearly all space applications?
A short list includes:
Human health (bones, muscles, fluid accumulation etc) Environment (air flow, hygeine) Fluids in general (measuring, pumping) Going to the toilet (or john)
And lots of others.
I have a question: Why aren't we putting some effort into artificial gravity? I mean centrifuge effects - not Star Trek. After all, we're expending all this effort into individual engineering solutions for each problem. If we had AG of some sort, wouldn't that remove the need for that?
What they're planning is to engineer the bacteria so that it commits apoptosis (programmed cell death) when the time is right. Better cream cheese. What they *won't* tell anyone is that it's also the engineered to splice the apoptosis sequence to human DNA. Then, when the time is right, a massive marketing campaign will force the enemy to eat nothing but cream cheese and...
I actually read TFA and some of the reactions to it. Or should I say "overreactions"?
As I understand it, someone put up a site taking the piss out of a political candidate, but in a (possibly) libelous way. He had it taken down. I asked myself the question "would I do that if someone put up a similar site about me?" Answer: "Yes".
There are some differences, of course. First, I'm not a politician (God, forbid!) Second, I have nothing to hide (well, nothing that would interest you lot, anyway. Oh, wait - this is/.)
If it were really that damaging, it would be the dumbest thing to close it down and draw even more attention to it. I hadn't even heard that Canada was having elections (nor did I care).
I'm not kidding with the subject header. AM I missing something?
"...for the earth to be fysically destroyed, you would need a *very* big boulder."
Even bigger than you think. Current theory (speculation/whatever) says that the Earth-Moon system was created a few billion years ago when something the size of Mars smacked into the (pre) Earth. And it still wasn't destroyed - just changed a bit.
Of course, if that happened now even the bacteria would be *severely* upset about it.
I always worry when these kinds of press releases come out. They always overdo it and spoil the impact.
True, it is a significant step in terms of scale and they way they have overcome the interfacing problems *and* maintain the culture medium is pretty snazzy. But...
Exciting testbed for pharmaceutical research? Nah!
Setting aside the fact that it's not human tissue; the interactions between neurons is massively complex. The culture medium (which keeps the cells alive) is, by necessity not anything like the infrastructure which keeps the cells alive in a living organism, so it will interfere with many of the more subtle interactions. And those subtle interactions make all the difference when it comes to developing drugs.
It's still interesting and a good step in the right direction but they overhyped it. Someone is looking for more grant money.
I left the UK in 2001 (just before 9/11) to escape crippling taxes and what I saw as an increasingly oppressive government. I considered two possibilities; the USA and Italy. My wife persuaded (OK, ORDERED) me that Italy was the best bet. On the face of it, at the time, it was the lesser choice. But now...
Forget the taxes, I'm still better off - I'd be even better off in the States, but it's the other thing that concerns me.
Since I've been here I've watched (from a safe distance) a dramatic reduction of the rights someone living in a democracy should expect, both in the UK and the US. Why are you allowing it to happen?
What *really* gets me is - why is it happening? I've asked this question on/. before. It's obviously nothing to do with terrorists and so forth.
It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering making a tin foil helmet.
PS. Yes, I know similar laws are being considered here, but we have one major advantage. We just say "AAh, F*ck off!" (And that includes the police).
"But just in case someone comes by with a pair of tweezers, you'd better run DBAN before shooting your drive, as I don't think it's an option afterwards."
No, not usually.
However, it's not really the type of data that's the problem. It's a question of who you *don't* want to access it. So you can do anything from a straight overwrite of partition table for someone who doesn't know about computer all the way to putting it on top of a nuke and detonating it (the nuke, not the disk) for *serious* experts.
I've had a little experience with disk forensics experts and what they can recover is *amazing*.
They're using s/w to select which data might be worth examining.
WTF!!
The whole point of these probes is to gather raw(ish) information so that we can gain some insight. The only way it would be reasonable to cut out data is if we *know* that it's irrelevant. Do we? The article doesn't say so.
And if they're complaining about the amount of time it takes to process the raw data - who said that a data feed which includes so many unknowns was going to be easy?!
One of my mentors at school (an amazingly talented man) pointed out to me that with enough energy, there is virtually nothing you can't do if you can can apply the energy the way you want. Efficiency doesn't matter if you have enough.
On the moon, it's a matter of taking the differences in environment (from Earth) and turning them to your advantage. So, for example:
Solar energy: No problem - no atmosphere, no clouds etc.
Nuclear energy: Fission. A lot of the weight of an Earth bound nuclear reactor is shielding and safety equipment which is (quite rightly) mandatory. On the moon? "Oh hell, the reactor's melted down. Good thing we sited it 100Km from the base". BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
Nuclear Energy: Fusion. A tricky one, but are we "decades" away? Probably not - a lot of effort is going into this one. And, didn't I hear that the moon has significant traces of He3? Or have I been reading too much Ben Bova?
Cooling: No problem. Do you know how *cold* it is in the shadows on the moon?
" I'd find them rather boring if they didn't "talk funny"."
Hmm.. Thank you - I think.
I'm English and I speak with so-called "received pronunciation" - essentially no regional accent. (No, not like the Queen) and this reminds me of a conversation I had with an American friend. It went something like this:
F: "...AND you talk funny"
Me: "Oh, really? What language are we speaking at the moment?"
1. I am a UNIX sysadmin.* I'm paranoid. My worst fear is "Am I paranoid enough?" 2. The only really secure system is one that's been turned off, buried in concrete 100 meters deep, surrounded by 1,000 armed guards... and a minefield. Even then, I wouldn't be sure.
Anyone who believes in some magical security of some software deserves everything they get. Get real! Security (even for *NIX systems) is a dynamic thing. If you're tasked with securing a M$ system - you have my sympathies, but at least you know that one.
* - OK - for those who know me, yeah, yeah - I'm really a biochemist.
Well, I can't speak for "them", but our firewall saves *every* packet that passes through it for security reasons (don't ask - it's a client thing). It's mirrored, but I dug my heels in when they wanted backups.. Why?
We ran a trial period to look at the issues (who wouldn't?) What we found was this: (Hops over to firewall to get the stats..)
Over the 4 week trial period we captured 521Gb of data. Since we had only allocated 500Gb for the whole thing - this was worrying.
BTW - we use a full-duplex satellite link 'cos DSL isn't available in this part of Italy and also it has a *ridiculously* wide bandwith. We don't really care about latency. Well, some of my staff who would rather be playing Quake probably mind..
Sorry - I digress.
My point is: We are a company which is geared towards storing and processing very large amounts of data (>120 Tb). We use the internet to access various DBs for our work. We're not what one would call a large organisation. But there are plenty like us and many more even *bigger*! And this is just corporate use.
So, how the hell is *any* ISP expected to store even the most trivial details of IP transactions run through it? Just "FTP from here to there"? What use is that?
If we're struggling to deal with saving this type of transaction data for ourselves (with our storage capacity) I can guarantee that the "powers-that-be" haven't got a snowball in hell's chance of retaining anything useful.
"It's not a "fairly standard application" that we all take for granted. It's Google, a big corporation, openly and freely providing one of their major software applications for Linux (albeit using Wine). This does NOT happen very often, and we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it! It's NOT just a "regular" software release."
But it is!
Many other large corporations have thrown their weight behind FOSS to one degree or another. What makes this so different?
And by the way... "we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it" I think not! The furthest I would go is "Nice one - kudos to you"
No, you don't. Wine runs "out of the box" without any additions from Microsoft.
They have their own versions of dll's and the like. It's an emulator rather than a virtual machine.
Unfortunately, WINE doesn't work very well with more obscure applications (for example, I tried running some poker s/w - no go). Though it does have quite an impressive list of things that *do* work - 4097 to date (see http://appdb.winehq.org/).
I suspect that they are one of the many developers out there who have been a victim of the Microsoft policy of obfuscation and changing API's to thwart anyone else but the chosen (and usually expensive) few.
I don't get it. Why announce a fairly standard application on/.? Surely Freshmeat would be a better forum? And the other stuff about reporting bugs and submitting updates to other FOSS projects is hardly new, either.
Don't get me wrong - I'm always happy to see new contributions to the cause, but this makes me a bit uneasy, somehow.
First off, I use Linux on all my systems (BioTech) - except for the Sun kit (and some of that, too). I've been using it since the early 90's and I believe that it's a great O/S. BUT...
The real killer is that in one important sense, Linux is now like Windows for me... I'm locked in. Windows won't do what I need, Open/NetBSD would be OK for firewalls, file servers and the like, but not for the workstations.
I have to say that I'm getting rather uneasy about its stability/usability recently. The real crunch came when we updated some of our workstations to SuSE 10 (2.6.13-15). It simply ain't as good. Our opteron/X86-64 systems have *big* problems with 32/64 bit issues and our SATA systems have *awful* performance under load. Added to this is my gut feel that something is going wrong somewhere (backed by 25 years of experience with UNIX/Solaris/Linux/Whatever). AND solving problems by reconfiguring the kernel isn't half as easy as it used to be.
I remember my reaction when Linus announced the change to the versioning system. It was "Uh-Oh!"
I know that Linux development isn't a democracy as such and that I and many others are in a weak position because we don't contribute much except for the occasional bug report. But is there any formal(ish) way we, as end users, can make our feelings felt? And, if not, how can we set it up?
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone else noticed that zero G is a constant PITA for nearly all space applications?
A short list includes:
Human health (bones, muscles, fluid accumulation etc)
Environment (air flow, hygeine)
Fluids in general (measuring, pumping)
Going to the toilet (or john)
And lots of others.
I have a question: Why aren't we putting some effort into artificial gravity? I mean centrifuge effects - not Star Trek. After all, we're expending all this effort into individual engineering solutions for each problem. If we had AG of some sort, wouldn't that remove the need for that?
Just my 2 pennies worth.
Don't you see? It's the military!
What they're planning is to engineer the bacteria so that it commits apoptosis (programmed cell death) when the time is right. Better cream cheese. What they *won't* tell anyone is that it's also the engineered to splice the apoptosis sequence to human DNA. Then, when the time is right, a massive marketing campaign will force the enemy to eat nothing but cream cheese and...
I have to go, I can hear black helicopters.
I actually read TFA and some of the reactions to it. Or should I say "overreactions"?
/.)
As I understand it, someone put up a site taking the piss out of a political candidate, but in a (possibly) libelous way. He had it taken down. I asked myself the question "would I do that if someone put up a similar site about me?" Answer: "Yes".
There are some differences, of course. First, I'm not a politician (God, forbid!) Second, I have nothing to hide (well, nothing that would interest you lot, anyway. Oh, wait - this is
If it were really that damaging, it would be the dumbest thing to close it down and draw even more attention to it. I hadn't even heard that Canada was having elections (nor did I care).
I'm not kidding with the subject header. AM I missing something?
(Yeah, yeah - besides a brain)
"...for the earth to be fysically destroyed, you would need a *very* big boulder."
Even bigger than you think. Current theory (speculation/whatever) says that the Earth-Moon system was created a few billion years ago when something the size of Mars smacked into the (pre) Earth. And it still wasn't destroyed - just changed a bit.
Of course, if that happened now even the bacteria would be *severely* upset about it.
Spelling Nazi alert: You mean "physically".
I always worry when these kinds of press releases come out. They always overdo it and spoil the impact.
True, it is a significant step in terms of scale and they way they have overcome the interfacing problems *and* maintain the culture medium is pretty snazzy. But...
Exciting testbed for pharmaceutical research? Nah!
Setting aside the fact that it's not human tissue; the interactions between neurons is massively complex. The culture medium (which keeps the cells alive) is, by necessity not anything like the infrastructure which keeps the cells alive in a living organism, so it will interfere with many of the more subtle interactions. And those subtle interactions make all the difference when it comes to developing drugs.
It's still interesting and a good step in the right direction but they overhyped it. Someone is looking for more grant money.
Disclaimer: Yes, I *am* a biochemist.
No, that is another Italy.
And they also say "F*ck off!" to stupid laws.
I don't mean to knock America, but really!
/. before. It's obviously nothing to do with terrorists and so forth.
I left the UK in 2001 (just before 9/11) to escape crippling taxes and what I saw as an increasingly oppressive government. I considered two possibilities; the USA and Italy. My wife persuaded (OK, ORDERED) me that Italy was the best bet. On the face of it, at the time, it was the lesser choice. But now...
Forget the taxes, I'm still better off - I'd be even better off in the States, but it's the other thing that concerns me.
Since I've been here I've watched (from a safe distance) a dramatic reduction of the rights someone living in a democracy should expect, both in the UK and the US. Why are you allowing it to happen?
What *really* gets me is - why is it happening? I've asked this question on
It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering making a tin foil helmet.
PS. Yes, I know similar laws are being considered here, but we have one major advantage. We just say "AAh, F*ck off!" (And that includes the police).
"But just in case someone comes by with a pair of tweezers, you'd better run DBAN before shooting your drive, as I don't think it's an option afterwards."
No, not usually.
However, it's not really the type of data that's the problem. It's a question of who you *don't* want to access it. So you can do anything from a straight overwrite of partition table for someone who doesn't know about computer all the way to putting it on top of a nuke and detonating it (the nuke, not the disk) for *serious* experts.
I've had a little experience with disk forensics experts and what they can recover is *amazing*.
They're using s/w to select which data might be worth examining.
WTF!!
The whole point of these probes is to gather raw(ish) information so that we can gain some insight. The only way it would be reasonable to cut out data is if we *know* that it's irrelevant. Do we? The article doesn't say so.
And if they're complaining about the amount of time it takes to process the raw data - who said that a data feed which includes so many unknowns was going to be easy?!
Sheesh!
(Red face)
Oops! Totally correct.
(Grovels in abject apology).
disclaimer: I hadn't had my first coffee.
I think this should be modded up.
One of my mentors at school (an amazingly talented man) pointed out to me that with enough energy, there is virtually nothing you can't do if you can can apply the energy the way you want. Efficiency doesn't matter if you have enough.
On the moon, it's a matter of taking the differences in environment (from Earth) and turning them to your advantage. So, for example:
Solar energy: No problem - no atmosphere, no clouds etc.
Nuclear energy: Fission. A lot of the weight of an Earth bound nuclear reactor is shielding and safety equipment which is (quite rightly) mandatory. On the moon? "Oh hell, the reactor's melted down. Good thing we sited it 100Km from the base". BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
Nuclear Energy: Fusion. A tricky one, but are we "decades" away? Probably not - a lot of effort is going into this one. And, didn't I hear that the moon has significant traces of He3? Or have I been reading too much Ben Bova?
Cooling: No problem. Do you know how *cold* it is in the shadows on the moon?
etc etc.
" I'd find them rather boring if they didn't "talk funny"."
Hmm.. Thank you - I think.
I'm English and I speak with so-called "received pronunciation" - essentially no regional accent. (No, not like the Queen) and this reminds me of a conversation I had with an American friend. It went something like this:
F: "...AND you talk funny"
Me: "Oh, really? What language are we speaking at the moment?"
F: "English!"
Me: "And what nationality am I?"
F: (Seeing the trap) "Err.. English."
Me: "So, who is the one talking funny?"
F: "F*ck off!"
"Human respiration produces H2O as a waste product"
No, it doesn't.
Respiration (human or otherwise) produces carbon dioxide. (No, anaerobic bacteria do not "respire" - so there)
The water in our breath is just from evaporation from the lungs, which need to be wet to help the gas exchange.
Very true.
And there's a very nasty fire hazard associated with it, too. Remember Apollo 1?
It's hardly news.
Just to state my position:
1. I am a UNIX sysadmin.* I'm paranoid. My worst fear is "Am I paranoid enough?"
2. The only really secure system is one that's been turned off, buried in concrete 100 meters deep, surrounded by 1,000 armed guards... and a minefield. Even then, I wouldn't be sure.
Anyone who believes in some magical security of some software deserves everything they get. Get real! Security (even for *NIX systems) is a dynamic thing. If you're tasked with securing a M$ system - you have my sympathies, but at least you know that one.
* - OK - for those who know me, yeah, yeah - I'm really a biochemist.
Well, I can't speak for "them", but our firewall saves *every* packet that passes through it for security reasons (don't ask - it's a client thing). It's mirrored, but I dug my heels in when they wanted backups.. Why?
We ran a trial period to look at the issues (who wouldn't?) What we found was this:
(Hops over to firewall to get the stats..)
Over the 4 week trial period we captured 521Gb of data. Since we had only allocated 500Gb for the whole thing - this was worrying.
BTW - we use a full-duplex satellite link 'cos DSL isn't available in this part of Italy and also it has a *ridiculously* wide bandwith. We don't really care about latency. Well, some of my staff who would rather be playing Quake probably mind..
Sorry - I digress.
My point is: We are a company which is geared towards storing and processing very large amounts of data (>120 Tb). We use the internet to access various DBs for our work. We're not what one would call a large organisation. But there are plenty like us and many more even *bigger*! And this is just corporate use.
So, how the hell is *any* ISP expected to store even the most trivial details of IP transactions run through it? Just "FTP from here to there"? What use is that?
If we're struggling to deal with saving this type of transaction data for ourselves (with our storage capacity) I can guarantee that the "powers-that-be" haven't got a snowball in hell's chance of retaining anything useful.
Even if the collection of the data was justified.
Even if there was any way they could process it.
"It's not a "fairly standard application" that we all take for granted. It's Google, a big corporation, openly and freely providing one of their major software applications for Linux (albeit using Wine). This does NOT happen very often, and we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it! It's NOT just a "regular" software release."
But it is!
Many other large corporations have thrown their weight behind FOSS to one degree or another. What makes this so different?
And by the way...
"we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it"
I think not! The furthest I would go is "Nice one - kudos to you"
No, I was uneasy because /. seems to be a strange place to announce such a thing.
So strange that I wonder why.
And... Why the abuse?
No, you don't. Wine runs "out of the box" without any additions from Microsoft.
They have their own versions of dll's and the like. It's an emulator rather than a virtual machine.
Unfortunately, WINE doesn't work very well with more obscure applications (for example, I tried running some poker s/w - no go). Though it does have quite an impressive list of things that *do* work - 4097 to date (see http://appdb.winehq.org/).
I suspect that they are one of the many developers out there who have been a victim of the Microsoft policy of obfuscation and changing API's to thwart anyone else but the chosen (and usually expensive) few.
I hadn't noticed that.
/.?" a bit more pertinent, I think.
This makes my question of "Why announce it on
I don't get it. Why announce a fairly standard application on /.? Surely Freshmeat would be a better forum? And the other stuff about reporting bugs and submitting updates to other FOSS projects is hardly new, either.
Don't get me wrong - I'm always happy to see new contributions to the cause, but this makes me a bit uneasy, somehow.
So do I. But I have AMRAAM missiles on my "Super Highway" version.
Haven't the British and French teams who designed and built Concorde got the best experience?
I went and had a look at the ESA site. Then I noticed this:
"Note to editors:
The Huygens probe landing was the most distant touch-down ever made by a human-built spacecraft."
Errr... "human-built?" Do they know something we don't?
First off, I use Linux on all my systems (BioTech) - except for the Sun kit (and some of that, too). I've been using it since the early 90's and I believe that it's a great O/S. BUT...
The real killer is that in one important sense, Linux is now like Windows for me... I'm locked in. Windows won't do what I need, Open/NetBSD would be OK for firewalls, file servers and the like, but not for the workstations.
I have to say that I'm getting rather uneasy about its stability/usability recently. The real crunch came when we updated some of our workstations to SuSE 10 (2.6.13-15). It simply ain't as good. Our opteron/X86-64 systems have *big* problems with 32/64 bit issues and our SATA systems have *awful* performance under load. Added to this is my gut feel that something is going wrong somewhere (backed by 25 years of experience with UNIX/Solaris/Linux/Whatever). AND solving problems by reconfiguring the kernel isn't half as easy as it used to be.
I remember my reaction when Linus announced the change to the versioning system. It was "Uh-Oh!"
I know that Linux development isn't a democracy as such and that I and many others are in a weak position because we don't contribute much except for the occasional bug report. But is there any formal(ish) way we, as end users, can make our feelings felt? And, if not, how can we set it up?