I'm not the one pretending Musk has a magic unicorn that can fix everything in the world. I'm the one pointing out the experts are already there, and they've already asked them.
I can also point out now that there's a reason the experts now have 8 kids out by NOT using your plan.
You can try and make it personal all you want, but the things I've said have held true about the rescue - your Elon Musk fantasies have been proven to be exactly that, unworkable ignorant fantasies.
It doesn't matter how many pieces you have, unless you can convince the US air force to gather it's entire fleet of C-17 galaxies from wherever they're spread across the globe, where in some cases they're already busy on humanitarian and resupply missions helping other people, you still can't shift something of that size and weight. Of course, you could do multiple trips, but something like the C-17 only has a flight range of 5000 miles, which is half the needed distance, and at a top speed of 500 mph, again, typical for that kind of transporter, you're looking at a 36 hr round trip in flight time alone, much less maintenance and refueling time. Even with a handful of these planes, splitting the kit up, is still going to take a hell of a long time, possibly just as long as sticking the thing pre-built on a cargo ship would take when all is said and done.
You still then have no helicopters that can shift anything of that size and wait even in pieces. Not to mention the time and added resources that disassembling the biggest and heaviest parts of the drilling machine would add to your plan.
You still need weeks, probably months to get it all into position even in the best case.
"Standard practice at most mine sites. I did some work on one once years ago, you might be surprised what these guys can do."
There's a substantial time difference, "you'd be surprised what these guys can do" isn't an argument, it's just bullshit. Clearance of rainforest for mining is just about always done with burning, but smoke from fires or potential runaway fires is the last thing these guys need to deal with on top of everything else. The next option, heavy equipment against risks collapse, an issue you're still entirely ignoring despite it being one of the single most important reasons heavy equipment isn't being favoured here, but even that could take weeks. So there's the manual option - again, months.
"Back to the mining thing, Elon may not be a miner, but you can bet his team have that background. Or do you think he assembled his team from from the UCLA class of 2016 Digging Holes But Only Under 1st World Cities?"
You basically think that if you can drive a truck for a living delivering goods across the country, then you can win Nascar/Formula 1. If you think the two things are comparable I don't know what to tell you - you don't even remotely know enough to be having this conversation - your complete ignorance of the fact you think you can just airlift a 1200 ton boring machine by helicopter in itself highlights that. To give a tech analogy, it's like saying if you can build Websites in node.js/React, you can write real time safety critical assembly. The two aren't even remotely comparable, the only thing we have in common here is "making a hole in the ground". The whole direction, terrain, type of rock, type of hazards, time available, support available are completely different.
"Details for the experts to work out."
This type of dismissal is precisely why you shouldn't be commenting - you're backing an argument with comments like this that highlight precisely why your argument is nonsense. Did you really not stop to consider that maybe the experts have already worked out those details and decided your plan isn't feasible? No? Well that's what's happened and that's why they're not going ahead with it.
"TFA only says that Musk has sent over an Engineering team to check it out. Maybe instead of sending experts on site they should've just made a decision based on Slashdot comments instead? That's how you get shit done!"
Again, the experts are already there. The fact you think only Elon Musk can provide experts shows a profound level of ignorance on your behalf. There are other experts in the world than Elon's staff you know, and some of them know far more about this type of rescue than anyone in Elon's employ ever will.
"No-one said that."
Yet it's the entire implication of your argument - that everyone else there so far hasn
Er, I think you need to learn quite a bit more about what you're talking about before trying to contribute further. I'm not sure you have the slightest idea what Musk's boring machine is like. It's 400ft long, 26ft in diameter, and weighs 1200 tons. What planes and helicopters do you think exist that can carry a 26ft diameter, 400ft long, 1200 ton boring machine? I hate to break it to you but there isn't a flying vehicle on earth that can shift that. Cargo ship and road transport is the only option.
"Standard practice for any dig"
Yes, where you have 1st world infrastructure and sufficient space and supporting equipment to get going. None of which is the case here, and so "standard" most definitely does not apply. Even if you can find a sufficiently level place to do this, you still have to spend weeks clearing away the rainforest and flattening the ground out. You then have to have the other digging equipment to even get the starter tunnel built, which in itself takes weeks. That's not quite the same as starting digging from an existing flat base back at home.
"None of this is new, we've had mining collapses and people have figured out how to dig them out. Asking one the world's leading tunnel digging companies for advice doesn't seem like a bad choice to me."
But again, this is the point. You're confusing digging a tunnel in a hot, dry, section of a 1st world country in bedrock, with trying to dig through a mountain in a 3rd world area where there's zero infrastructure. Sure Musk might have geology experts for his local geology back in the states, who understand the geology of the local area well, but that doesn't mean he has anyone who can and will be useful 9,000 miles away advising on a mountain they've never even fucking heard of before. Any geologist will need a lot of time and equipment to survey it before drilling, which they can't without diving, which means they'll need to get people diving in and out, which means... oh we're, right back where we are already.
You still have the question of how you prevent collapse or further flooding, no one has yet been able to explain how Musk's boring machine magically prevents that.
If digging is an option it'll have nothing to do with the type of boring Musk is doing, it'll have to do with the kind of equipment mining companies use, and yes, fortunately, Asia has plenty of this, and plenty more experience using it than Musk's Boring company do. Hard concept I know, but they even have their own billionaires like Mukesh Ambani who has a higher net worth than Musk if money is the issue.
Again, drilling through porous limestone on a mountain with often impassable terrain and poor infrastructure isn't remotely the same as digging down on your own well prepared starting point and setting a boring machine off in a straight line through bedrock. Musk's companies have exactly zero experience in the former, even if they're leading the way with the latter.
I'm not anti-Musk by any measure, he's doing a lot of good work IMO, but pretending he's the second coming of Christ, capable of fixing all the world's ills single handedly is a bit naive.
I think even with Musk's tunnel making endeavours it's of limited use.
You have to consider that his boring company starts off from a well prepared site with plenty of space, support staff and equipment as well as the logistics to shift bored out materials, most likely dealing with something nice and solid like bedrock.
In contrast here you have to somehow first get the boring kit 9,000 miles across the world, when you've done that you have to figure out how you drive it through dense jungle that have at best footpaths, at worst nothing at all. When you achieve that you have to figure out a) where you're drilling to, b) how the hell you're going to get the drilled material out, and c) how you prevent any kind of collapse, or prevent any breakthrough of a cavern holding water resulting in that water flooding the cavern you're trying to get to.
Even if you manage all that, I suspect it's not straightforward, you'll need experts in geology - shifting hard dry lumps of bedrock along a conveyor belt for example that you drill out is a whole different ballgame to shifting out wet silt covered limestone that's more likely to result in the kind of sludge that mechanical devices don't play well with.
But I think the first hurdle is problem enough - even if Elon could ship his stuff over, how long does it take? I'd have thought it'd take weeks to even get the kit over there, much less the support staff, and the site preparation to even begin drilling.
Wait what, so you're telling me you're not actually acting and you are actually this illiterate? That's.... fascinating.
I'm genuinely curious to see how you not understanding insinuation leads back to rescuing thai kids from caves and the risks of sedation, so don't let me detract from the actual subject any further - please, feel free to wrap it up and explain how it all comes back to the kids and the sedation. I can't wait to see how these two seemingly divergent subjects converge back together again, so I won't distract from the actual subject any further - go on, go for it, bring it all back together and back on topic.
I've got to admit, as trolling goes I'm trying to understand your angle. I mean, you're pretending to be a master of the English language whilst at the same time trying to pretend you don't understand basic concepts of the English language like insinuation, hyperbole, nuance, and context.
You should probably try and find a better angle, trying to claim to be smart at something whilst simultaneously playing dumb over it really just isn't working.
You've already tried the whole fallacy thing and that didn't really work either. Can I suggest you resort to angrily swearing now or something like that instead maybe?
The guy who takes a completely innocuous example of how sedatives are risky to administer and can easily turn fatal, especially if proper medical care isn't available to monitor recovery and turns it into a propaganda thread about how awesome the Russians are and how the other person knows nothing because they've never rescued a hostage, all of which is entirely relevant to the conversation but highlights a completely weird need to act as an entirely unprovoked propagandist for Russia.
Sorry Ivan, I think you've entirely missed the point of the discussion in your unnecessarily rabid defence of the Russian state. The point wasn't whether or not Russia did a good or bad job, the point was that you can't just knock people out and assume they'll wake up a-ok. It requires trained medical support to make sure people wake up, and even then it's not guaranteed, it simply increases the odds.
But for what it's worth, yes, I think it's pretty clear the operation was a colossal fuck up, and yes I do have a better plan, as would anyone who puts people's lives over and above state secrecy. It's pretty simple, if you're going to knock people out make fucking sure you tell the medical people how to maximise the chance of them waking up again, and if you don't want to spill secrets about the gas used, then get some people from the security services to guard and monitor and administer the antidote instead. Most of the hostages that died died after the terrorists were dead and the unconscious people had been moved out of the theatre simply because the medics didn't know how to revive them because they were given no information on how everyone had been rendered unconcious.
If, as is now commonly believed it's true that they used carfentanil then there's a commonly available antidote to this, that whilst not absolute in it's affects is most definitely better than nothing. Had the Russian ambulance crews been provided in with naloxone as soon as they started moving unconcious people out then they could've saved hundreds more. The fact is the death toll was so high because of nothing other than utter state incompetence.
I don't disagree that it wasn't an effective assault by Russian special forces, I do disagree that it can be called any kind of successful operation overall because it was the planning/follow up by Russian authorities in not ensuring the correct medical support was available that created a massively high death toll. To put it another way, most of the people who died, died well after the terrorists had been well and truly neutralised and their weapons neutralised, and really, once the terrorists are dead and their weapons are neutralised, then there shouldn't be much of an excuse for further casualties.
It was basically the equivalent of settings fire to a building full of hostages and hostage takers, having the fire burn the hostage takers to death then walking off without putting the fire out and instead letting it burn the hostages to death too. Normally resolving hostage situations isn't just about taking out the hostage takers, it's about maximising recovery of the hostages, which didn't happen here. There are ample interviews by medical staff who actually were there pointing out that they were just completely stonewalled when asking what they could do to maximise chances of recovery of the hostages.
It was the complete failure to enable administration of proper medical care that prevented that operation being a resounding success, and that's why it highlights the importance of ensuring proper medical staff availability with sufficient information and medical supplies to maximise the chance of recovery post-sedation, which was really the point of this discussion, rather than childish pro-Russian propaganda and flagrantly pathetic logical fallacies like "How many hostages have you rescued?".
A lot of people also do wreck dive because they feel wrecks are smaller than caves, and the layout is likely to be better known. I've entered ships hulls and that kind of thing, but have never been a fan of doing as some wreck divers do and diving into the ship - as most people know the hallways in a ship are typically much narrower and shorter than a typical hallway in a building. Navigating that when it may be at ab obscure angle (even upside down) which is disorientating, when you're wearing scuba gear, and when one kick or bump can stir up enough silt to prevent you seeing is easily as dangerous as cave diving.
But there's another risk - ships decay, that deck could be rusted and collapse on you at any moment. Other fun dangerous of wreck diving include everything from being freaked out by human remains, to unexploded ordnance. If you ever wondered what a person being caught in an explosion on a ship that subsequently sinks looks like 80 years later, look no further than Truk lagoon:
As diving goes I'd say wreck can be at least as dangerous as cave, if not more so. I'd gladly favour diving with crocodiles and sharks over deep cave, or deep wreck penetration any day, because at least you can learn croc/shark behaviour and it's almost entirely consistent. Caves/wrecks have too much going on you can't control. The decaying superstructure of a ship is simply a ticking timebomb.
There are a suprising number of diving adventures that have varying levels of elevated risk, such as diving hydro-thermal vents, or lava vents underwater, ice diving (you can actually get diving trips to dive under the north pole (~$24,000 last I checked), shark diving, crocodile diving, I understand there's a flooded nuclear missile silo somewhere in the states you can dive even. Then there are others that sound scary but aren't, for example in Iceland you can dive between the North American and European continental plates - it's actually incredibly impressive and one of the best dives I've done, but it's really fairly tame with the only actual risk being the fact that the water is 2c pretty much year around because it's all glacial runoff - if you ever want to know what full head equivalent of brain freeze feels like then jump in there. Probably the king of all sounds scary but isn't diving though is the typical night dive, that first jump and descent off a boat into sheer darkness with no orientation until everyone turns their torches on is horrifying, do it once though and you'll be addicted to diving at night.
Yep, if you ever do rescue diver training the first thing you're taught to evaluate is if the person you're rescuing is in panic or not, you never swim straight up to someone who is in trouble in the water because you first have to speak to them and find out what's wrong - if they don't respond it's because they're in panic. If you approach them when they're in panic they will climb up on you to try and get out of the water pushing you under and pushing you at risk. Of course, a non-panic'd diver can turn into one, so even if they respond to you and so aren't in panic it doesn't meant they won't be when you reach them. You're taught a number of ways to deal with this - approach leaning back with your feet out so you can kick them away if need be, put your regulator in if you have scuba gear on, if they grab you, descend underwater, they'll let go because the cause of their panic is not wanting to drown so the last thing they'll do is follow you under. In the water if they grab for you you can usually grab an arm and spin them around, if you can get behind them you can clasp their scuba tank with your knees and there's really fuck all they can do, make sure your buoyancy vest is inflated and you can sit their all day until they calm the fuck down, or pass out from over-exertion.
It's incredible what stupidity human survival mechanisms can lead to - have a look at my other post about the time I was narc'd, that too make me want to remove my kit because something in my head was telling me I couldn't breath and had to take my regulator out which isn't related to panic, but highlights quite how badly wrong the human brain can go when it's not functioning properly.
Of course panic underwater is even worse, if they reject their equipment there then that's when shit hits the fan. A typical reason that might happen is if someone gets tangled in fishing net. The right response is to just stop, and slowly untangle yourself, or use a dive knife which you should be carrying to cut yourself free. Many people will get into a flap, tangle more, panic, and then take their kit off and drown. In incidents where divers have died as a result of this kind of thing I understand it's not unusual to find them with their regulator out, and mask off.
Yep, that's what the Russians actually did in the Moscow Theatre siege, and 204 hostages, plus the 40 hijackers all died. The vast majority of the deaths weren't a result of the hijackers actions, but because the knockout gas put people to sleep permanently. This was exacerbated by the fact Russian special forces refused to give away any secrets about what the gas they used was, and so the medical staff attending just had no way to counteract it or revive people.
I'd say that's a fine case study for proving your point:
Long story short, yeah, you really need them to be lucid, and the effects of drugs that normally work fine above water may work completely differently underwater. Some side effects are obvious, some not so.
I learnt the hard way early on why you shouldn't even take decongestants when diving. I dived with a minor cold, but took some decongestants and assumed it would be okay. Of course, I still had mucus stuck in the holes in your palate as we tend to when we get colds. I descended to about 5 metres and couldn't clear the pain, so ascend, descended, same problem - a typical squeeze issue from trapped air and an inability to equalise the pressure in the air pocket. I descended a bit more to see if it cleared, by about 10 metres it had, so I continued the dive (a 40 metre dive, in 2c water in a quarry in the UK, in November, with about 1 metre visibility - don't ask). This was the first and only time I suffered nitrogen narcosis, I can't obviously say the decongestants were wholly to blame, I suspect they were a contributing factor but not the only factor. Nitrogen narcosis affects people in different ways, but for me, subconcious was telling me I couldn't breathe and I felt this overwhelming urge to take the regulator out my mouth so I could breathe, whilst I was conciously trying to fight that instinct and tell myself don't be fucking stupid, if you take it out you drown, calm down, keep breathing through it, your fine. Horrible feeling having to fight your own instincts to not drown, but nonetheless I made it through it okay by reminding myself I'm alive, breathing fine, a little bit cold but otherwise okay, keep going, all is good.
When I came back up I hit 10 metres and it started hurting near my palate again at the top of my mouth, so again descended to try and clear, went away, ascended, same problem at 10 metres. Running low on air I decided to try and ascend slowly, hurt for a few metres and again at 5 metres it eventually went away. Finished the dive, thought nothing of it.
Now I'm not really sure to this day why it only affected me in that 5 metre window, normally if you have a pressure equalisation issue it only gets worse if you keep going in the direction it started hurting in (i.e. up or down), but for whatever reason it did.
I didn't put two and two together as to the cause and effect until about 6 months later, but long story short after that dive I lost my sense of taste for about 3 months, and was scared shitless it was permanent. The doctors had no idea because I hadn't even remotely connected it to the idea it was to do with the diving, but essentially I'd damaged my palate and the worst part is, even chocolate was like eating tasteless mud, it's really the only way I can describe it - no sweatness, no real flavour at all, just flavourless melted chocolate.
So the lesson here is that even common medicines can increase your susceptibility to problems when diving, and things like valium I suspect have never really been trialled on divers (see my above linked post for the other physicological changes that could impact it), and that if you can't equalise, you can risk some really serious damage, so you have to be able to a) equalise and abort the dive if you can't, b) be lucid enough to make it clear you can't equalise.
Any dive training you do will absolutely and always iterate that you should never do it on medication precisely because almost all meds are untested under the physiological changes divers face, and because you need to be aware and conscious to immediately call out and react to problems because otherwise they'll often only get worse. The cave diving community take this sufficiently seriously that they have a rule- anyone can end a dive for any reason at any time, without question. This is precisely because everything from anxiety about a dive, through to illness,
The lines will be tied on to rock formations at various points and will run against the rock at others. If it was a straight line in open water that'd be fine, but in a cave you'll just spend more time trying to unhook it and hook it back on, which in zero visibility water, potentially wearing gloves is not the easiest thing to do without practice.
As a result of that, it's probably easier to just tie them to the diver in front and/or behind and tell them to use their hands to navigate the guide line.
My biggest concern with this would be how much research has been done into the effects of those drugs on people underwater.
People often don't realise quite how much of a profound effect the mammalian dive reflex can have on the human body, I can't honestly be arsed to find the study but I'm sure someone can if they can be bothered, but essentially they measured the heart rate of a bunch of free divers and a good proportion of them had their heart rate drop to 20 bpm, and incredibly, a tiny minority as low as 5 bpm whilst free diving.
I'd wager there's a risk therefore that a combination of the two could simply cause the heart to go into cardiac arrest.
That's before you factor in the other effects of diving too of course of which there are many - you end up with different gas mixes in the blood, on normal air mixes in a scuba tank you build up nitrogen, eventually this can reach toxic levels if you do a couple of deep dives in a row it's sufficient. To counteract this and allow people to do repetitive dives you can get gas blends in tanks with higher oxygen percentages, for recreational diving this usually means up to 40% oxygen. Tech diving has other blends, but I won't go into that. The problem with even higher oxygen blends is that they restrict your depth limit, because past a certain point with a great oxygen percentage you can suffer oxygen toxicity which will cause a seizure, something that's almost always deadly underwater. I probably should memorise the nitrox tables but I think if you have something like a 32% oxygen blend then you're at risk of oxygen poisoning and subsequent seizure at only about 30 metres or so.
But I digress, the point is that other changes happen too - capillaries get constricted at the outer regions of your body such as around your legs, as above, you have different amounts of nitrogen and oxygen in your blood stream. You potentially have a much higher level of stress, and so on and so forth. Is it still safe to take those drugs with all those things going on? It's certainly not safe to assume that drugs that work fine at sea level in normal conditions, are safe with the physiological changes that happen when diving.
But there's one other big problem, when diving you have to be able to equalise the pressure in your ears, if you don't do that you'll burst your ear drum and be in absolute agony. I'm not sure how you're going to do that if you're not lucid.
As a diver I can highlight a few dangers with this kind of diving:
1) Panic. If someone panics they lose all rationality, these means they will do things like reject their equipment, take their mask off, taking their breathing apparatus out, flap about and risk knocking any rescuers dive gear off. When you do rescue diver training one of the first things you're taught is that if someone is in panic to only approach if you believe you can restrain them, it's better to let them run out of energy, fall under, and pass out, then try and recover them once they're unconcious/drowning than it is to risk a rescue and get yourself knocked out by a flailing arm. There are tactics you can use to approach a panicing diver, such as approaching them underwater and removing their weights (so they can't descend), or approaching them from behind and controlling them by holding their tank where they can't reach you. The problem is, none of these approaches are any use in a tight cave. There have been plenty of recorded incidents over the years of even the skinniest, most petite young girls accidentally knocking even the strongest most experienced dive instructors for six as a result of panic.
2) Low visibility, due to the rainfall and porous nature of the rocks, there is quite a lot of silt in the water, that means visibility may be next to nothing at points, that's a perfect recipe for panic. When you start to do tech diving, one of the things you learn is to use shorter fins, and kick differently than you do open water cruising reefs watching turtles and stuff. You learn to kick in a way that limits stirring up silt, and in fact don't even kick at all if you can pull yourself along a guide line or something - getting the kids to avoid a natural tendancy to kick, or to kick using the right finning style if they do will in itself not be easy without significant practice. If they kick or flap they're just going to make visibility even worse.
3) Parts of the dive are 30 metres, whilst that's not massively deep for even fairly casual recreational diving, it's still ample depth to suffer effects like narcosis, which can cause anything from making someone deliriously happy, to deliriously stupid like with panic in rejecting equipment.
4) Some parts of the cave system are so narrow, the only way through is to take your equipment off, push it through, swim through, then put your equipment back on. Cave and tech divers in general usually have long hoses for this type of scenario so they can keep the regulator in whilst they do this, but keep your regulator in, or removing it and replacing it whilst de-kitting, and re-kitting when you reach the other side isn't something a beginner should ever attempt.
5) Air consumption. It's an hour dive, and an experienced diver can easily do an hour on a typical 12 litre tank, but these aren't experienced divers, the stress of the cold, dark, and tight passages, coupled with poor buoyancy and trim, and zero experience means these kids will be burning air like no tomorrow, and with parts at 30 metres this means they could trivially run out in as little as 30 minutes. That means at some point you need to switch their air supply.
6) Keeping track of them, the normal way to safely cave and wreck dive is to follow a guide line that you've tied and run through the system, this means the kids have to pull themselves along it for an hour. That's fine in itself but what if they lose it? If there's zero visibility due to silt then how do you find them again? You can tie them to an experienced diver with a buddy tether, but that's something else that can get tangled and create a crisis- if it gets tangled round the kids breathing apparatus it could accidentally pull it out and you might find all you have at the other side is a drowned kid. There won't be room at times to have someone swimming side by side with them.
7) Buoyancy control. It takes a while to get that right, get that wrong and serious accidents can occur. If you inflate your buoyancy vest too much you'll get an u
Wow, so after all that, after you made an absolute fool of yourself all you could come back with is accusing me of appeals to authority when that's been your entire basis of your argument?
You really don't like being wrong about things do you? I'm not surprised though, as that's basically what shit peddlers like you do for a living.
You'd need to integrate this with something like CCS to prevent even more pollutants being shit out into the atmosphere though no?
Not that I'm saying that isn't a viable solution, but for whatever reason CCS still seems to be very much in it's infancy despite being hyped for a couple of decades now.
Nope, I wave it away based on the fact it's an absolute travesty of journalism.
It's equivalent to me saying you're a child rapist. I've no idea who you are, I have no evidence, but according to you because someone said so on the internet then it must be true.
Um, some of our employees do go on speaking tours, so probably not the smartest riposte.
Given that they've often done so in collaboration with major tech companies such as Microsoft I'd wager they're far more authoritative than you, so telling me they don't know what DevOps is when all you can do is point to blogs and videos online and the like doesn't exactly help your cause.
Big tech has been keen to help financial services improve it's practices because many financial services companies have been slow to catch up with modern practices and tech. As we've been a leader in doing so it works well with us to support them so they can sell their services more easily to other financial services companies, and in turn they make changes for us in some of their offerings to support that - we were instrumental for example in getting Microsoft to build some additional data centres in the UK.
Perhaps if instead of lashing out like a child with attention deficit you articulated yourself with something less stupid in future you wouldn't have this problem. Instead we're stuck with your quote which inherently implies you think a firewall isn't a firewall if it allows outbound connections even if it denies unsolicited inbound connections:
"If your "firewall" lets applications punch holes out then you don't have a firewall."
It's not that I don't hear what you're saying, it's that I'm not sure how we make it a practical reality.
This is a classic scenario of if you leave the door unlocked does that make it okay to rob someone? Sure it means the home owner is asking for it, but it doesn't make the act of theft in itself legal or something that's acceptable. We should still act against people committing theft regardless.
So what you're effectively arguing is that rather than dealing with people acting illegaly, or at least in an anti-consumer manner, that it's upto every single internet user to become a technical expert in configuring and managing their firewall such that they explicitly whitelist every bit of outbound comms no? Even if we make that easy with a simple Allow/Deny dialog, then surely you realise companies will just exploit it with confusing names like "Important Windows System Analytics needs to access the internet." right?
That's really my point here - that yes, we need to get users back in control of their systems, but how do we do that in a practical way? and whilst we're trying to do that, I don't think that means that we shouldn't try and make vendors themselves more responsible.
At the end of the day a router blocking unsolicited inbound comms is still a firewall and people moving to this kind of firewall as standard was one of the single most important improvements in internet security in the history of the internet. The days of people being directly exploitable as is the case now were far worse, and even here we at least have anti-malware software to try and block the circumstances you describe. The biggest problem with it is the combined refusal of anti-malware vendors to treat analytics and/or spyware from "respectable" companies as malware which is really the problem here - if Redshell was reasonably flagged up as malware by anti-malware vendors because it's at least as intrusive as some of the things that real actual flagged malware like various tracking cookies that do get flagged track, we wouldn't even need to have this discussion as games developers wouldn't use it due to their software being permanently flagged as malware when a user attempts to install it.
If you do have a practical proposal that involves your average joe being both able and willing to whitelist or block all outbound comms I'd genuinely be interested to hear it, but otherwise the best we've got is to call out companies doing bad things with software and to pressure them to change.
What absolute nonsense, the default state of just about every consumer router is to block all unsolicited incoming communications, and allow outgoing connections (sometimes using UPnP) such that the response are not blocked based on stateful packet inspection.
This is sufficient and a huge step up for most classic attacks that are initiated from afar with no user interaction whatsoever such as those that plagued the internet through the 90s and early 00s. What it doesn't stop however are user initiated attacks where someone installs some malware, or runs a vulnerable piece of software such as an outdated browser that is exploited by a site they visit. In this case data extraction is indeed allowed. We could therefore do as you suggest and mandate that everyone that uses the internet has to be an expert in configuring their firewall so that they can explicitly choose what they communicate out to, or, we could just ask that companies stop exfiltrating data without permission, or without making it clear to the user ahead of installation that their software does that. One of those things is likely to fly with the general public, the other isn't, because some people actually want to get things done without spending their whole life configuring their firewall to only unblock certain ports, and whitelist certain sites as an when they need them. Your suggestion is the car analogy equivalent of only driving at 3mph in a car just to make sure you're at basically no risk of dying if you manage to crash rather than getting companies to make sure their cars are as safe as possible under typical usage in the first place.
So why would you try and "educate" someone on a topic you clearly know nothing about if you don't even understand that a firewall can still block unsolicited incoming connections (which are far and away the most threatening) even if it doesn't block outgoing connections, especially when that's the single most common configuration in the world? Normally people at least have a basic understanding of a topic before trying to act as an authority on it.
I think you're perhaps missing the crux of why this sort of thing annoys people. The issue is not that what you say is wrong, I absolutely agree that such analytics are useful regardless of whether it's a game or any other piece of software, and you're right they can be anonymised (though this is all too often reversible, but that's a different subject for a different day) .
The problem is that each and every time an application sends data from your system it's punching a hole out of your firewall to the wider net, and with so many applications doing this now it makes it hard for people to assure security - so whilst you say it's just anonymised data being sent out, anyone observing network traffic from their systems will see your application leaking data out to the internet even if it may only be a single player game for which there should be no reason to do this.
My personal preference therefore is if you are going to do things like this, is that you make it optional and turn it off by default. Too much software nowadays connects to the net for the benefit of the company and without the consumer's consent, and it makes it all too easy for Malware authors to mask data extraction from systems. There was a time where you would know exactly what was coming and going from your PC, and I get that that time is gone, but that doesn't mean that it's okay to keep making the problem worse.
So whilst you perceive it to be useful analytics (because it really is), the user perceives it to see you using their resources that they've paid for to to help your business at their expense by siphoning off data without them knowing.
My view: good software is clean software, it does nothing without your knowledge, installs no 3rd party components that do anything other than the bare minimum to let your piece of software run, and does not try to meddle with your system at an OS level. That means no DRM, no analytics, no forced registering an online account (unless it's part of online play in a game for example), no installing anything other than in it's own installation directory. If your software does anything more than that then it's right that users are going to be suspicious.
This is a classic case of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I get from your point of view that what you're doing you perceive to be harmless, but that's because you're writing it, you get to see the source code, and know what's collected. All the user sees is encrypted data being siphoned off their hard drive and being sent to an unknown server on the internet from a compiled, potentially obfuscated binary whose operations are protected by DRM that blocks any attempts to evaluate the applications operation at runtime.
You see how that might piss a user off even if it's harmless?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the one pretending Musk has a magic unicorn that can fix everything in the world. I'm the one pointing out the experts are already there, and they've already asked them.
I can also point out now that there's a reason the experts now have 8 kids out by NOT using your plan.
You can try and make it personal all you want, but the things I've said have held true about the rescue - your Elon Musk fantasies have been proven to be exactly that, unworkable ignorant fantasies.
"And it's one single piece right?"
It doesn't matter how many pieces you have, unless you can convince the US air force to gather it's entire fleet of C-17 galaxies from wherever they're spread across the globe, where in some cases they're already busy on humanitarian and resupply missions helping other people, you still can't shift something of that size and weight. Of course, you could do multiple trips, but something like the C-17 only has a flight range of 5000 miles, which is half the needed distance, and at a top speed of 500 mph, again, typical for that kind of transporter, you're looking at a 36 hr round trip in flight time alone, much less maintenance and refueling time. Even with a handful of these planes, splitting the kit up, is still going to take a hell of a long time, possibly just as long as sticking the thing pre-built on a cargo ship would take when all is said and done.
You still then have no helicopters that can shift anything of that size and wait even in pieces. Not to mention the time and added resources that disassembling the biggest and heaviest parts of the drilling machine would add to your plan.
You still need weeks, probably months to get it all into position even in the best case.
"Standard practice at most mine sites. I did some work on one once years ago, you might be surprised what these guys can do."
There's a substantial time difference, "you'd be surprised what these guys can do" isn't an argument, it's just bullshit. Clearance of rainforest for mining is just about always done with burning, but smoke from fires or potential runaway fires is the last thing these guys need to deal with on top of everything else. The next option, heavy equipment against risks collapse, an issue you're still entirely ignoring despite it being one of the single most important reasons heavy equipment isn't being favoured here, but even that could take weeks. So there's the manual option - again, months.
"Back to the mining thing, Elon may not be a miner, but you can bet his team have that background. Or do you think he assembled his team from from the UCLA class of 2016 Digging Holes But Only Under 1st World Cities?"
You basically think that if you can drive a truck for a living delivering goods across the country, then you can win Nascar/Formula 1. If you think the two things are comparable I don't know what to tell you - you don't even remotely know enough to be having this conversation - your complete ignorance of the fact you think you can just airlift a 1200 ton boring machine by helicopter in itself highlights that. To give a tech analogy, it's like saying if you can build Websites in node.js/React, you can write real time safety critical assembly. The two aren't even remotely comparable, the only thing we have in common here is "making a hole in the ground". The whole direction, terrain, type of rock, type of hazards, time available, support available are completely different.
"Details for the experts to work out."
This type of dismissal is precisely why you shouldn't be commenting - you're backing an argument with comments like this that highlight precisely why your argument is nonsense. Did you really not stop to consider that maybe the experts have already worked out those details and decided your plan isn't feasible? No? Well that's what's happened and that's why they're not going ahead with it.
"TFA only says that Musk has sent over an Engineering team to check it out. Maybe instead of sending experts on site they should've just made a decision based on Slashdot comments instead? That's how you get shit done!"
Again, the experts are already there. The fact you think only Elon Musk can provide experts shows a profound level of ignorance on your behalf. There are other experts in the world than Elon's staff you know, and some of them know far more about this type of rescue than anyone in Elon's employ ever will.
"No-one said that."
Yet it's the entire implication of your argument - that everyone else there so far hasn
Er, I think you need to learn quite a bit more about what you're talking about before trying to contribute further. I'm not sure you have the slightest idea what Musk's boring machine is like. It's 400ft long, 26ft in diameter, and weighs 1200 tons. What planes and helicopters do you think exist that can carry a 26ft diameter, 400ft long, 1200 ton boring machine? I hate to break it to you but there isn't a flying vehicle on earth that can shift that. Cargo ship and road transport is the only option.
"Standard practice for any dig"
Yes, where you have 1st world infrastructure and sufficient space and supporting equipment to get going. None of which is the case here, and so "standard" most definitely does not apply. Even if you can find a sufficiently level place to do this, you still have to spend weeks clearing away the rainforest and flattening the ground out. You then have to have the other digging equipment to even get the starter tunnel built, which in itself takes weeks. That's not quite the same as starting digging from an existing flat base back at home.
"None of this is new, we've had mining collapses and people have figured out how to dig them out. Asking one the world's leading tunnel digging companies for advice doesn't seem like a bad choice to me."
But again, this is the point. You're confusing digging a tunnel in a hot, dry, section of a 1st world country in bedrock, with trying to dig through a mountain in a 3rd world area where there's zero infrastructure. Sure Musk might have geology experts for his local geology back in the states, who understand the geology of the local area well, but that doesn't mean he has anyone who can and will be useful 9,000 miles away advising on a mountain they've never even fucking heard of before. Any geologist will need a lot of time and equipment to survey it before drilling, which they can't without diving, which means they'll need to get people diving in and out, which means... oh we're, right back where we are already.
You still have the question of how you prevent collapse or further flooding, no one has yet been able to explain how Musk's boring machine magically prevents that.
If digging is an option it'll have nothing to do with the type of boring Musk is doing, it'll have to do with the kind of equipment mining companies use, and yes, fortunately, Asia has plenty of this, and plenty more experience using it than Musk's Boring company do. Hard concept I know, but they even have their own billionaires like Mukesh Ambani who has a higher net worth than Musk if money is the issue.
Again, drilling through porous limestone on a mountain with often impassable terrain and poor infrastructure isn't remotely the same as digging down on your own well prepared starting point and setting a boring machine off in a straight line through bedrock. Musk's companies have exactly zero experience in the former, even if they're leading the way with the latter.
I'm not anti-Musk by any measure, he's doing a lot of good work IMO, but pretending he's the second coming of Christ, capable of fixing all the world's ills single handedly is a bit naive.
I think even with Musk's tunnel making endeavours it's of limited use.
You have to consider that his boring company starts off from a well prepared site with plenty of space, support staff and equipment as well as the logistics to shift bored out materials, most likely dealing with something nice and solid like bedrock.
In contrast here you have to somehow first get the boring kit 9,000 miles across the world, when you've done that you have to figure out how you drive it through dense jungle that have at best footpaths, at worst nothing at all. When you achieve that you have to figure out a) where you're drilling to, b) how the hell you're going to get the drilled material out, and c) how you prevent any kind of collapse, or prevent any breakthrough of a cavern holding water resulting in that water flooding the cavern you're trying to get to.
Even if you manage all that, I suspect it's not straightforward, you'll need experts in geology - shifting hard dry lumps of bedrock along a conveyor belt for example that you drill out is a whole different ballgame to shifting out wet silt covered limestone that's more likely to result in the kind of sludge that mechanical devices don't play well with.
But I think the first hurdle is problem enough - even if Elon could ship his stuff over, how long does it take? I'd have thought it'd take weeks to even get the kit over there, much less the support staff, and the site preparation to even begin drilling.
Wait what, so you're telling me you're not actually acting and you are actually this illiterate? That's.... fascinating.
I'm genuinely curious to see how you not understanding insinuation leads back to rescuing thai kids from caves and the risks of sedation, so don't let me detract from the actual subject any further - please, feel free to wrap it up and explain how it all comes back to the kids and the sedation. I can't wait to see how these two seemingly divergent subjects converge back together again, so I won't distract from the actual subject any further - go on, go for it, bring it all back together and back on topic.
I've got to admit, as trolling goes I'm trying to understand your angle. I mean, you're pretending to be a master of the English language whilst at the same time trying to pretend you don't understand basic concepts of the English language like insinuation, hyperbole, nuance, and context.
You should probably try and find a better angle, trying to claim to be smart at something whilst simultaneously playing dumb over it really just isn't working.
You've already tried the whole fallacy thing and that didn't really work either. Can I suggest you resort to angrily swearing now or something like that instead maybe?
Okay:
https://dictionary.cambridge.o...
The guy who takes a completely innocuous example of how sedatives are risky to administer and can easily turn fatal, especially if proper medical care isn't available to monitor recovery and turns it into a propaganda thread about how awesome the Russians are and how the other person knows nothing because they've never rescued a hostage, all of which is entirely relevant to the conversation but highlights a completely weird need to act as an entirely unprovoked propagandist for Russia.
i.e. you.
Sorry Ivan, I think you've entirely missed the point of the discussion in your unnecessarily rabid defence of the Russian state. The point wasn't whether or not Russia did a good or bad job, the point was that you can't just knock people out and assume they'll wake up a-ok. It requires trained medical support to make sure people wake up, and even then it's not guaranteed, it simply increases the odds.
But for what it's worth, yes, I think it's pretty clear the operation was a colossal fuck up, and yes I do have a better plan, as would anyone who puts people's lives over and above state secrecy. It's pretty simple, if you're going to knock people out make fucking sure you tell the medical people how to maximise the chance of them waking up again, and if you don't want to spill secrets about the gas used, then get some people from the security services to guard and monitor and administer the antidote instead. Most of the hostages that died died after the terrorists were dead and the unconscious people had been moved out of the theatre simply because the medics didn't know how to revive them because they were given no information on how everyone had been rendered unconcious.
If, as is now commonly believed it's true that they used carfentanil then there's a commonly available antidote to this, that whilst not absolute in it's affects is most definitely better than nothing. Had the Russian ambulance crews been provided in with naloxone as soon as they started moving unconcious people out then they could've saved hundreds more. The fact is the death toll was so high because of nothing other than utter state incompetence.
I don't disagree that it wasn't an effective assault by Russian special forces, I do disagree that it can be called any kind of successful operation overall because it was the planning/follow up by Russian authorities in not ensuring the correct medical support was available that created a massively high death toll. To put it another way, most of the people who died, died well after the terrorists had been well and truly neutralised and their weapons neutralised, and really, once the terrorists are dead and their weapons are neutralised, then there shouldn't be much of an excuse for further casualties.
It was basically the equivalent of settings fire to a building full of hostages and hostage takers, having the fire burn the hostage takers to death then walking off without putting the fire out and instead letting it burn the hostages to death too. Normally resolving hostage situations isn't just about taking out the hostage takers, it's about maximising recovery of the hostages, which didn't happen here. There are ample interviews by medical staff who actually were there pointing out that they were just completely stonewalled when asking what they could do to maximise chances of recovery of the hostages.
It was the complete failure to enable administration of proper medical care that prevented that operation being a resounding success, and that's why it highlights the importance of ensuring proper medical staff availability with sufficient information and medical supplies to maximise the chance of recovery post-sedation, which was really the point of this discussion, rather than childish pro-Russian propaganda and flagrantly pathetic logical fallacies like "How many hostages have you rescued?".
A lot of people also do wreck dive because they feel wrecks are smaller than caves, and the layout is likely to be better known. I've entered ships hulls and that kind of thing, but have never been a fan of doing as some wreck divers do and diving into the ship - as most people know the hallways in a ship are typically much narrower and shorter than a typical hallway in a building. Navigating that when it may be at ab obscure angle (even upside down) which is disorientating, when you're wearing scuba gear, and when one kick or bump can stir up enough silt to prevent you seeing is easily as dangerous as cave diving.
But there's another risk - ships decay, that deck could be rusted and collapse on you at any moment. Other fun dangerous of wreck diving include everything from being freaked out by human remains, to unexploded ordnance. If you ever wondered what a person being caught in an explosion on a ship that subsequently sinks looks like 80 years later, look no further than Truk lagoon:
https://dansdiveshop.ca/wp-con...
As diving goes I'd say wreck can be at least as dangerous as cave, if not more so. I'd gladly favour diving with crocodiles and sharks over deep cave, or deep wreck penetration any day, because at least you can learn croc/shark behaviour and it's almost entirely consistent. Caves/wrecks have too much going on you can't control. The decaying superstructure of a ship is simply a ticking timebomb.
There are a suprising number of diving adventures that have varying levels of elevated risk, such as diving hydro-thermal vents, or lava vents underwater, ice diving (you can actually get diving trips to dive under the north pole (~$24,000 last I checked), shark diving, crocodile diving, I understand there's a flooded nuclear missile silo somewhere in the states you can dive even. Then there are others that sound scary but aren't, for example in Iceland you can dive between the North American and European continental plates - it's actually incredibly impressive and one of the best dives I've done, but it's really fairly tame with the only actual risk being the fact that the water is 2c pretty much year around because it's all glacial runoff - if you ever want to know what full head equivalent of brain freeze feels like then jump in there. Probably the king of all sounds scary but isn't diving though is the typical night dive, that first jump and descent off a boat into sheer darkness with no orientation until everyone turns their torches on is horrifying, do it once though and you'll be addicted to diving at night.
Yep, if you ever do rescue diver training the first thing you're taught to evaluate is if the person you're rescuing is in panic or not, you never swim straight up to someone who is in trouble in the water because you first have to speak to them and find out what's wrong - if they don't respond it's because they're in panic. If you approach them when they're in panic they will climb up on you to try and get out of the water pushing you under and pushing you at risk. Of course, a non-panic'd diver can turn into one, so even if they respond to you and so aren't in panic it doesn't meant they won't be when you reach them. You're taught a number of ways to deal with this - approach leaning back with your feet out so you can kick them away if need be, put your regulator in if you have scuba gear on, if they grab you, descend underwater, they'll let go because the cause of their panic is not wanting to drown so the last thing they'll do is follow you under. In the water if they grab for you you can usually grab an arm and spin them around, if you can get behind them you can clasp their scuba tank with your knees and there's really fuck all they can do, make sure your buoyancy vest is inflated and you can sit their all day until they calm the fuck down, or pass out from over-exertion.
It's incredible what stupidity human survival mechanisms can lead to - have a look at my other post about the time I was narc'd, that too make me want to remove my kit because something in my head was telling me I couldn't breath and had to take my regulator out which isn't related to panic, but highlights quite how badly wrong the human brain can go when it's not functioning properly.
Of course panic underwater is even worse, if they reject their equipment there then that's when shit hits the fan. A typical reason that might happen is if someone gets tangled in fishing net. The right response is to just stop, and slowly untangle yourself, or use a dive knife which you should be carrying to cut yourself free. Many people will get into a flap, tangle more, panic, and then take their kit off and drown. In incidents where divers have died as a result of this kind of thing I understand it's not unusual to find them with their regulator out, and mask off.
Yep, that's what the Russians actually did in the Moscow Theatre siege, and 204 hostages, plus the 40 hijackers all died. The vast majority of the deaths weren't a result of the hijackers actions, but because the knockout gas put people to sleep permanently. This was exacerbated by the fact Russian special forces refused to give away any secrets about what the gas they used was, and so the medical staff attending just had no way to counteract it or revive people.
I'd say that's a fine case study for proving your point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I made a post about drugging them here which covers that kind of thing:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Long story short, yeah, you really need them to be lucid, and the effects of drugs that normally work fine above water may work completely differently underwater. Some side effects are obvious, some not so.
I learnt the hard way early on why you shouldn't even take decongestants when diving. I dived with a minor cold, but took some decongestants and assumed it would be okay. Of course, I still had mucus stuck in the holes in your palate as we tend to when we get colds. I descended to about 5 metres and couldn't clear the pain, so ascend, descended, same problem - a typical squeeze issue from trapped air and an inability to equalise the pressure in the air pocket. I descended a bit more to see if it cleared, by about 10 metres it had, so I continued the dive (a 40 metre dive, in 2c water in a quarry in the UK, in November, with about 1 metre visibility - don't ask). This was the first and only time I suffered nitrogen narcosis, I can't obviously say the decongestants were wholly to blame, I suspect they were a contributing factor but not the only factor. Nitrogen narcosis affects people in different ways, but for me, subconcious was telling me I couldn't breathe and I felt this overwhelming urge to take the regulator out my mouth so I could breathe, whilst I was conciously trying to fight that instinct and tell myself don't be fucking stupid, if you take it out you drown, calm down, keep breathing through it, your fine. Horrible feeling having to fight your own instincts to not drown, but nonetheless I made it through it okay by reminding myself I'm alive, breathing fine, a little bit cold but otherwise okay, keep going, all is good.
When I came back up I hit 10 metres and it started hurting near my palate again at the top of my mouth, so again descended to try and clear, went away, ascended, same problem at 10 metres. Running low on air I decided to try and ascend slowly, hurt for a few metres and again at 5 metres it eventually went away. Finished the dive, thought nothing of it.
Now I'm not really sure to this day why it only affected me in that 5 metre window, normally if you have a pressure equalisation issue it only gets worse if you keep going in the direction it started hurting in (i.e. up or down), but for whatever reason it did.
I didn't put two and two together as to the cause and effect until about 6 months later, but long story short after that dive I lost my sense of taste for about 3 months, and was scared shitless it was permanent. The doctors had no idea because I hadn't even remotely connected it to the idea it was to do with the diving, but essentially I'd damaged my palate and the worst part is, even chocolate was like eating tasteless mud, it's really the only way I can describe it - no sweatness, no real flavour at all, just flavourless melted chocolate.
So the lesson here is that even common medicines can increase your susceptibility to problems when diving, and things like valium I suspect have never really been trialled on divers (see my above linked post for the other physicological changes that could impact it), and that if you can't equalise, you can risk some really serious damage, so you have to be able to a) equalise and abort the dive if you can't, b) be lucid enough to make it clear you can't equalise.
Any dive training you do will absolutely and always iterate that you should never do it on medication precisely because almost all meds are untested under the physiological changes divers face, and because you need to be aware and conscious to immediately call out and react to problems because otherwise they'll often only get worse. The cave diving community take this sufficiently seriously that they have a rule- anyone can end a dive for any reason at any time, without question. This is precisely because everything from anxiety about a dive, through to illness,
The lines will be tied on to rock formations at various points and will run against the rock at others. If it was a straight line in open water that'd be fine, but in a cave you'll just spend more time trying to unhook it and hook it back on, which in zero visibility water, potentially wearing gloves is not the easiest thing to do without practice.
As a result of that, it's probably easier to just tie them to the diver in front and/or behind and tell them to use their hands to navigate the guide line.
My biggest concern with this would be how much research has been done into the effects of those drugs on people underwater.
People often don't realise quite how much of a profound effect the mammalian dive reflex can have on the human body, I can't honestly be arsed to find the study but I'm sure someone can if they can be bothered, but essentially they measured the heart rate of a bunch of free divers and a good proportion of them had their heart rate drop to 20 bpm, and incredibly, a tiny minority as low as 5 bpm whilst free diving.
I'd wager there's a risk therefore that a combination of the two could simply cause the heart to go into cardiac arrest.
That's before you factor in the other effects of diving too of course of which there are many - you end up with different gas mixes in the blood, on normal air mixes in a scuba tank you build up nitrogen, eventually this can reach toxic levels if you do a couple of deep dives in a row it's sufficient. To counteract this and allow people to do repetitive dives you can get gas blends in tanks with higher oxygen percentages, for recreational diving this usually means up to 40% oxygen. Tech diving has other blends, but I won't go into that. The problem with even higher oxygen blends is that they restrict your depth limit, because past a certain point with a great oxygen percentage you can suffer oxygen toxicity which will cause a seizure, something that's almost always deadly underwater. I probably should memorise the nitrox tables but I think if you have something like a 32% oxygen blend then you're at risk of oxygen poisoning and subsequent seizure at only about 30 metres or so.
But I digress, the point is that other changes happen too - capillaries get constricted at the outer regions of your body such as around your legs, as above, you have different amounts of nitrogen and oxygen in your blood stream. You potentially have a much higher level of stress, and so on and so forth. Is it still safe to take those drugs with all those things going on? It's certainly not safe to assume that drugs that work fine at sea level in normal conditions, are safe with the physiological changes that happen when diving.
But there's one other big problem, when diving you have to be able to equalise the pressure in your ears, if you don't do that you'll burst your ear drum and be in absolute agony. I'm not sure how you're going to do that if you're not lucid.
As a diver I can highlight a few dangers with this kind of diving:
1) Panic. If someone panics they lose all rationality, these means they will do things like reject their equipment, take their mask off, taking their breathing apparatus out, flap about and risk knocking any rescuers dive gear off. When you do rescue diver training one of the first things you're taught is that if someone is in panic to only approach if you believe you can restrain them, it's better to let them run out of energy, fall under, and pass out, then try and recover them once they're unconcious/drowning than it is to risk a rescue and get yourself knocked out by a flailing arm. There are tactics you can use to approach a panicing diver, such as approaching them underwater and removing their weights (so they can't descend), or approaching them from behind and controlling them by holding their tank where they can't reach you. The problem is, none of these approaches are any use in a tight cave. There have been plenty of recorded incidents over the years of even the skinniest, most petite young girls accidentally knocking even the strongest most experienced dive instructors for six as a result of panic.
2) Low visibility, due to the rainfall and porous nature of the rocks, there is quite a lot of silt in the water, that means visibility may be next to nothing at points, that's a perfect recipe for panic. When you start to do tech diving, one of the things you learn is to use shorter fins, and kick differently than you do open water cruising reefs watching turtles and stuff. You learn to kick in a way that limits stirring up silt, and in fact don't even kick at all if you can pull yourself along a guide line or something - getting the kids to avoid a natural tendancy to kick, or to kick using the right finning style if they do will in itself not be easy without significant practice. If they kick or flap they're just going to make visibility even worse.
3) Parts of the dive are 30 metres, whilst that's not massively deep for even fairly casual recreational diving, it's still ample depth to suffer effects like narcosis, which can cause anything from making someone deliriously happy, to deliriously stupid like with panic in rejecting equipment.
4) Some parts of the cave system are so narrow, the only way through is to take your equipment off, push it through, swim through, then put your equipment back on. Cave and tech divers in general usually have long hoses for this type of scenario so they can keep the regulator in whilst they do this, but keep your regulator in, or removing it and replacing it whilst de-kitting, and re-kitting when you reach the other side isn't something a beginner should ever attempt.
5) Air consumption. It's an hour dive, and an experienced diver can easily do an hour on a typical 12 litre tank, but these aren't experienced divers, the stress of the cold, dark, and tight passages, coupled with poor buoyancy and trim, and zero experience means these kids will be burning air like no tomorrow, and with parts at 30 metres this means they could trivially run out in as little as 30 minutes. That means at some point you need to switch their air supply.
6) Keeping track of them, the normal way to safely cave and wreck dive is to follow a guide line that you've tied and run through the system, this means the kids have to pull themselves along it for an hour. That's fine in itself but what if they lose it? If there's zero visibility due to silt then how do you find them again? You can tie them to an experienced diver with a buddy tether, but that's something else that can get tangled and create a crisis- if it gets tangled round the kids breathing apparatus it could accidentally pull it out and you might find all you have at the other side is a drowned kid. There won't be room at times to have someone swimming side by side with them.
7) Buoyancy control. It takes a while to get that right, get that wrong and serious accidents can occur. If you inflate your buoyancy vest too much you'll get an u
Wow, so after all that, after you made an absolute fool of yourself all you could come back with is accusing me of appeals to authority when that's been your entire basis of your argument?
You really don't like being wrong about things do you? I'm not surprised though, as that's basically what shit peddlers like you do for a living.
You'd need to integrate this with something like CCS to prevent even more pollutants being shit out into the atmosphere though no?
Not that I'm saying that isn't a viable solution, but for whatever reason CCS still seems to be very much in it's infancy despite being hyped for a couple of decades now.
Nope, I wave it away based on the fact it's an absolute travesty of journalism.
It's equivalent to me saying you're a child rapist. I've no idea who you are, I have no evidence, but according to you because someone said so on the internet then it must be true.
Um, some of our employees do go on speaking tours, so probably not the smartest riposte.
Given that they've often done so in collaboration with major tech companies such as Microsoft I'd wager they're far more authoritative than you, so telling me they don't know what DevOps is when all you can do is point to blogs and videos online and the like doesn't exactly help your cause.
Big tech has been keen to help financial services improve it's practices because many financial services companies have been slow to catch up with modern practices and tech. As we've been a leader in doing so it works well with us to support them so they can sell their services more easily to other financial services companies, and in turn they make changes for us in some of their offerings to support that - we were instrumental for example in getting Microsoft to build some additional data centres in the UK.
Do I need to phone your mother to fetch you your Ritalin?
Perhaps if instead of lashing out like a child with attention deficit you articulated yourself with something less stupid in future you wouldn't have this problem. Instead we're stuck with your quote which inherently implies you think a firewall isn't a firewall if it allows outbound connections even if it denies unsolicited inbound connections:
"If your "firewall" lets applications punch holes out then you don't have a firewall."
It's not that I don't hear what you're saying, it's that I'm not sure how we make it a practical reality.
This is a classic scenario of if you leave the door unlocked does that make it okay to rob someone? Sure it means the home owner is asking for it, but it doesn't make the act of theft in itself legal or something that's acceptable. We should still act against people committing theft regardless.
So what you're effectively arguing is that rather than dealing with people acting illegaly, or at least in an anti-consumer manner, that it's upto every single internet user to become a technical expert in configuring and managing their firewall such that they explicitly whitelist every bit of outbound comms no? Even if we make that easy with a simple Allow/Deny dialog, then surely you realise companies will just exploit it with confusing names like "Important Windows System Analytics needs to access the internet." right?
That's really my point here - that yes, we need to get users back in control of their systems, but how do we do that in a practical way? and whilst we're trying to do that, I don't think that means that we shouldn't try and make vendors themselves more responsible.
At the end of the day a router blocking unsolicited inbound comms is still a firewall and people moving to this kind of firewall as standard was one of the single most important improvements in internet security in the history of the internet. The days of people being directly exploitable as is the case now were far worse, and even here we at least have anti-malware software to try and block the circumstances you describe. The biggest problem with it is the combined refusal of anti-malware vendors to treat analytics and/or spyware from "respectable" companies as malware which is really the problem here - if Redshell was reasonably flagged up as malware by anti-malware vendors because it's at least as intrusive as some of the things that real actual flagged malware like various tracking cookies that do get flagged track, we wouldn't even need to have this discussion as games developers wouldn't use it due to their software being permanently flagged as malware when a user attempts to install it.
If you do have a practical proposal that involves your average joe being both able and willing to whitelist or block all outbound comms I'd genuinely be interested to hear it, but otherwise the best we've got is to call out companies doing bad things with software and to pressure them to change.
What absolute nonsense, the default state of just about every consumer router is to block all unsolicited incoming communications, and allow outgoing connections (sometimes using UPnP) such that the response are not blocked based on stateful packet inspection.
This is sufficient and a huge step up for most classic attacks that are initiated from afar with no user interaction whatsoever such as those that plagued the internet through the 90s and early 00s. What it doesn't stop however are user initiated attacks where someone installs some malware, or runs a vulnerable piece of software such as an outdated browser that is exploited by a site they visit. In this case data extraction is indeed allowed. We could therefore do as you suggest and mandate that everyone that uses the internet has to be an expert in configuring their firewall so that they can explicitly choose what they communicate out to, or, we could just ask that companies stop exfiltrating data without permission, or without making it clear to the user ahead of installation that their software does that. One of those things is likely to fly with the general public, the other isn't, because some people actually want to get things done without spending their whole life configuring their firewall to only unblock certain ports, and whitelist certain sites as an when they need them. Your suggestion is the car analogy equivalent of only driving at 3mph in a car just to make sure you're at basically no risk of dying if you manage to crash rather than getting companies to make sure their cars are as safe as possible under typical usage in the first place.
So why would you try and "educate" someone on a topic you clearly know nothing about if you don't even understand that a firewall can still block unsolicited incoming connections (which are far and away the most threatening) even if it doesn't block outgoing connections, especially when that's the single most common configuration in the world? Normally people at least have a basic understanding of a topic before trying to act as an authority on it.
I think you're perhaps missing the crux of why this sort of thing annoys people. The issue is not that what you say is wrong, I absolutely agree that such analytics are useful regardless of whether it's a game or any other piece of software, and you're right they can be anonymised (though this is all too often reversible, but that's a different subject for a different day) .
The problem is that each and every time an application sends data from your system it's punching a hole out of your firewall to the wider net, and with so many applications doing this now it makes it hard for people to assure security - so whilst you say it's just anonymised data being sent out, anyone observing network traffic from their systems will see your application leaking data out to the internet even if it may only be a single player game for which there should be no reason to do this.
My personal preference therefore is if you are going to do things like this, is that you make it optional and turn it off by default. Too much software nowadays connects to the net for the benefit of the company and without the consumer's consent, and it makes it all too easy for Malware authors to mask data extraction from systems. There was a time where you would know exactly what was coming and going from your PC, and I get that that time is gone, but that doesn't mean that it's okay to keep making the problem worse.
So whilst you perceive it to be useful analytics (because it really is), the user perceives it to see you using their resources that they've paid for to to help your business at their expense by siphoning off data without them knowing.
My view: good software is clean software, it does nothing without your knowledge, installs no 3rd party components that do anything other than the bare minimum to let your piece of software run, and does not try to meddle with your system at an OS level. That means no DRM, no analytics, no forced registering an online account (unless it's part of online play in a game for example), no installing anything other than in it's own installation directory. If your software does anything more than that then it's right that users are going to be suspicious.
This is a classic case of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I get from your point of view that what you're doing you perceive to be harmless, but that's because you're writing it, you get to see the source code, and know what's collected. All the user sees is encrypted data being siphoned off their hard drive and being sent to an unknown server on the internet from a compiled, potentially obfuscated binary whose operations are protected by DRM that blocks any attempts to evaluate the applications operation at runtime.
You see how that might piss a user off even if it's harmless?