There was a time when nearly every router could be hacked with admin/admin. Often username is ignored on the router, too, so all you needed to know is the default password is admin. This still is often the default password on many routers, but they often block access to wireless and non-LAN machines by default now, so it is definitely more difficult to hack than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember hacking my university router this way in the 1990s, and one of my fellow labbies put a packet sniffer on it. After stealing a bunch of passwords and looking at people's emails I think he felt guilty and alerted the administration of the security flaw. That was hardly the only security flaw we found and exploited. Quota was another fun one we found a bug with and removed the 10MB restriction we had so we could store more stuff.
Anyhow, just saying 'password' and 'admin' were first try brute force hacks dating back to the 1980s and modems and admin stuck with routers to this day.
3 months would be a joy. Try 35 days. I guess that was an improvement over our old policy of 30 days, but we also need a chipped ID badge and a machine generated PIN now. Apparently the 35 days was chosen because that is about the average time it takes to hack wifi with a brute force attack or something like that. Personally I think it was just made up numbers pushed to management based on a perceived threat.
Basically what it'd do is split manufacturing at best. US electronic manufacturing would pick up to avoid high tariffs, but the cost would be passed on to Americans as well. All other countries would continue the same with cheaper prices. I imagine there would be unscrupulous imports to avoid the tariffs, as well. It doesn't really solve a problem, either, as US profits are taxed in the US and foreign profits would still be deferred and could be used in manufacturing costs and thus avoid taxes, just like they are now.
ITER also most certainly won't solve fusion being a usable energy generator. One of the biggest power with the Tokamak design of ITER is it can only sustain the plasma for about 30 seconds. Stellerators have come back into the picture after falling out of favor in the 1970s because they can sustain the plasma for longer. Not enough is known about other designs yet to know how long they can sustain the reaction (for instance, Lockheed's High Beta Fusion Reactor
Actually, the US had already banned placing emergency backup generators in a place that could potentially flood years before the Fukushima disaster. If Japan had the same regulations as the US, the meltdown would've never happened. I don't know what changes the US did after the disaster, but the main failure of having no backup power certainly wouldn't have needed to be one of them.
It doesn't have to be. Most 4th generation designs are breeder reactors. Anything labeled fast reactor here is a breeder reactor that converts either thorium to fissile uranium or "nuclear waste" uranium to fissile plutonium. In layman's terms, they actually run on what conventional nuclear calls nuclear waste. Furthermore, they tend to burn long lived actinides, leaving much shorter lived waste. All of these reactors are most effective with on-site reprocessing, but given that being a proliferation concern, you can have once-through designs and do reprocessing at a single (or two - I believe the US had 2) secure facility, just like the US did in the 1970s.
In the US the towers were specifically designed with the possibility of an aircraft impact in mind, and even if the tower were breached, very little nuclear radiation would likely be emitted. Studies suggest the likelihood of an aircraft collision with a US tower actually causing a breach are infinitesimal. If the Belgian towers were designed around similar parameters, I doubt terrorists could breach them and I imagine car bombs wouldn't have much better luck.
If you mean dirty bombs, you'd need to steal nuclear waste (to get the short lived Actinides, mainly - the long lived ones probably won't do enough tissue damage unless you're very near the blast, as in smoking a cigarette is worse because those contain short lived and dangerous polonium) and separate out some of the shorter half life/more toxic parts to have an effective dirty bomb. Uranium itself in fissile/fertile form would be a terrible choice if you are looking at creating radiation related fatalities. Something like polonium would be vastly more effective. You'd also need to build a large conventional explosive, probably a fertilizer bomb, to actually spread it to any reasonable range.
TL;DR - obsolete reactors don't really help terrorists. You'd probably do more damage blowing up a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in a dirty bomb than stolen nuclear waste, though neither would be particularly effective.
I must be hard on laptops. ASUS laptop #1, 3 years, died twice during that time, third out of warranty (cause of death: GPU failure in all cases - bad set of nVidia cards). HP laptop, 2 years, died out of 1 year warranty (display and hard drive failure). Dell laptop, 2 years, died just out of warranty (power supply spiked, most internal hardware dead, caught fire). ASUS laptop #2, died 6 months in, fixed under warranty, died again 3 years in (GPU kept separating from its slot in the motherboard, eventually failed). ACER laptop, died in 2 years, just out of warranty (Hard disk, couldn't get Windows back on it without paying ACER to do it, not worth it because it was a cheap travel laptop).
Linux/XP desktop, formerly Windows 98, 16 years and counting. Still runs my backup server. Wife's desktop - ~8 years old currently Windows 7 (originally XP with free upgrade to Vista, if I recall correctly), has had motherboard/CPU/memory replaced 4 years ago and added drives. Had a recent power supply failure that fried the Windows drive, so reinstalling Windows on a new drive then I'll see what I can save. My current Desktop 3.5 years old, only GPU replaced, mainly to run modern games. CPU was fairly high end at the time and still valid for most.
The question is, is it any less safe to let the child stand at the bus stop unattended by a parent. This was always the case for me growing up because my parents left for work when my brother and I left for school. Sometimes other parents waited with their kids (sometimes letting us in to wait in a warm car), but for the most part it was a dozen kids standing alone at a bus stop.
I had no idea this was a thing, either. In the 1970s my mom was out the door by 6AM, my dad had to drop my brother off at pre-school and then go to work, so I walked a block up to my friend Patrick's house when my dad had to leave and played until the bus came or walked the half block from there to the school and played on the playground until the buses arrived. By first grade walking was not an option - my parents moved and school was 6 miles away. Also that K-6 school closed the next year, so I'd have been bused either way.
He assumes breeder reactors are only used to make nuclear bombs and ignores the fact that once through fuel cycles could avoid that. Also reprocessing can pull out isotopes needed by medical machines like MRIs. You could also do a once through, and then recycle fuel and do all reprocessing at an extremely secure single site. In fact, that is exactly what the US did at one time.
A breeder reactor isn't necessarily a bad thing. North Korea uses theirs to create plutonium for bomb-making, bred from fissile uranium, so sure that's bad. They could also siphon off protactinium to get fissile uranium. That said, Russia's BN-800 fast breeder reactor (same design as China) uses a once-through fuel cycle, making it useless for a nuclear or even dirty bomb until some of the stronger decaying particles are gone. The reactor is about 70% fuel efficient vs 99.5%. The downside is it is very expensive to build and the waste highly radioactive (without reprocessing), but for a much shorter time than conventional reactors.
If you just decide your facility is secure enough for reprocessing, the fuel cycle is 99.5% efficient and the waste is less radioactive than background radiation in 300 years.
I would agree, mainly because I think extended life technology is, honestly, 20-50 years away or possibly sooner (I mean, not with FDA approval, but I think anti-aging technology is getting close) and anything resembling a warp drive 100-200. And achieving near light speed is unnecessary if you can manipulate time-space. Wormholes and time bubbles, for instance, or even taking advantage of quantum uncertainty.
But we already are working on these - EM drive, Alcubierre drive, fusion and fission powered ion drives (30-40 days to mars), etc. Funding for this sort of thing may be low, but it still is out there. It wouldn't surprise me if we developed and sent a probe to Alpha Centauri and developed a technology that could beat it there.
That is assuming none of the recent breakthroughs in technology actually work. EM Drive, for instance. There are also flaws in the article. Conventional fission is 1% fuel efficient, but a breeder reactor with reprocessing is 99.5% fuel efficient. A fusion reactor like the one the Skunkworks is working on is also a possibility (because it would be small enough for a spaceship). There are already fusion and fission fast mars concepts as well that should work fine for interstellar travel.
That doesn't even touch on theoretical stuff like the Alcubierre drive, and wiki doesn't even have some of the workarounds to certain problems such as using metamaterials to divert Hawking radiation. There still are some other serious problems that need to be addressed with that one.
My thoughts afterward was the only parts I really disliked were the Deus Ex Machina ones. Rey gets forced to steal the Millennium Falcon and then just happens to run into Han Solo in a larger ship and he happens to be carrying giant one eyed tentacle monsters and happens to get boarded at that very moment by not one but two groups of bounty hunters and Rey accidentally releases the monsters... yeah, one coincidence is fine, chain these together and it is the mine cart ride in the Hobbit all over again - a sequence I walked out on because I was bored as shit and peed and got a popcorn and the damn thing was still running for another 10 minutes before there was another line of dialog. Sorry, but I wasn't all that interested in long, dialog-less action sequences even when I was a kid, but apparently there are kids that like that. Road runner's shorts were about as long as my attention span lasted.
You're also in late fall, which is a terrible time for solar generation in northern climates. Where I'm at there's also been a massive solar build-out, but nuclear is such a horrible, evil technology they built new coal plants and new natural gas plants instead. Yep, both natural gas and coal emit radiation in their waste, so thanks ignorant dumbfucks.
I've kind of been on the fence with electoral colleges, personally. They give some say to states with sparse populations because they least you can have is 3 right now (I seem to recall 2, but looked it up and everyone has at least 3). It also gives states with the most population the most say, so doesn't remove population as a factor. If you just went by popular vote, people in sparsely populated areas would feel they aren't properly represented.
I believe that ship has sailed in America, mainly because corporations control the election process. Corporations own the Presidential Committee on Debates and set a high threshold to keep third parties out and send out the talking points for the debates beforehand so there are no surprises (the push for open debates largely falls on deaf ears - opendebates.org has pushed for this for years). Corporations own the media and control the media through money from superPACs that they fund. Even Bernie Sanders realized that he had to affiliate with the Democratic party to even have a chance of being heard, much less winning. Once you join a party, you are bound to a base platform dictated by your corporate masters.
Corporations are also becoming too large again, with many behaving like monopolies and in some areas, are monopolies (Comcast, for instance). Where's Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
The other problem you have is people just voting for the party because doing anything else is throwing away your vote. The best way to fix that would be to have ranked choice voting or something similar, but that will never happen - the corporate overlords won't allow it as it would break their chokehold on the system they now completely control.
The problem is they don't think they are radicals and believe they are following the Qu'ran as it is written. If a Christians followed the Bible as written, we'd still have slavery and women would all be unlearned and obedient to their husband, as noted in both the Old and New Testaments. Also who would pick the radical sites? Christianity has radicals, too, like the Westboro Baptist Church. This sort of idea just opens the floodgates for censorship.
Every dictatorship has started by gathering information on every citizen. The US seems to want a dictatorship without the dictator, though. For instance, all of our recent presidents were or are heavily authoritarian and the ruling class is essentially an oligarchy.The one party system (sorry, but Republicans and Democrats are more alike than different in the whole scheme of things) gives the illusion of choice, but they tightly collude to eliminate any dissent. Look no further than the Commission on Presidential Debates if you don't believe that. A corporate controlled collusion designed to eliminate any third party from Presidential debates explicitly designed to eliminate "debate" from the debates. All topics are given to the candidate in advance, for instance. In the 1980s, debates were worth watching, now they are a pre-rehearsed charade.
In my city (not state, it varies statewide) both the cable company and the phone company have regulated monopolies to prevent overlapping infrastructure (power and gas have the same sort of deals). They both are charged a "monopoly fee" by the city that is passed on to citizens that use them (in the bill for landline phones or cable is literally a line item marked "monopoly fee"). Basically, my city is at fault for not allowing overlapping infrastructure for our shitty internet options. If you want anything faster than 7Mbits here, you have one choice - Comcast.
I think the first is what we would call the pipeline today and the second means parallel execution units. Using the word "functional units" for both is a bit confusing. Early RISC pipelines had 5 stages that are described in that link (and that brings back some memories - I remember studying it in college).
Funny thing is, I actually read the article to learn about what my first girlfriend's dad did - he was an engineer that worked on that thing (and yeah, she was a total nerd girl). I'm still Facebook friends with her, should point her to the article.
I would agree - if you installed the certificate, you've obeyed the law to the letter. Just because they didn't think of VPNs and such to work around the authority doesn't mean you are breaking the law, it means they did a shitty job of defining a law to control something and they didn't fully understand how it works. The US does this all the time. The US also seems to think it can write international law regulating the internet (most of these, like COPA were killed by the court system, at least).
And yeah, you could encrypt/decrypt in, say, javascript and entirely work around the bypass. You could probably entirely automate public and private key generation on both sides using a script.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed that for you:
The only things Microsoft makes that I want is money.
There was a time when nearly every router could be hacked with admin/admin. Often username is ignored on the router, too, so all you needed to know is the default password is admin. This still is often the default password on many routers, but they often block access to wireless and non-LAN machines by default now, so it is definitely more difficult to hack than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember hacking my university router this way in the 1990s, and one of my fellow labbies put a packet sniffer on it. After stealing a bunch of passwords and looking at people's emails I think he felt guilty and alerted the administration of the security flaw. That was hardly the only security flaw we found and exploited. Quota was another fun one we found a bug with and removed the 10MB restriction we had so we could store more stuff.
Anyhow, just saying 'password' and 'admin' were first try brute force hacks dating back to the 1980s and modems and admin stuck with routers to this day.
3 months would be a joy. Try 35 days. I guess that was an improvement over our old policy of 30 days, but we also need a chipped ID badge and a machine generated PIN now. Apparently the 35 days was chosen because that is about the average time it takes to hack wifi with a brute force attack or something like that. Personally I think it was just made up numbers pushed to management based on a perceived threat.
Basically what it'd do is split manufacturing at best. US electronic manufacturing would pick up to avoid high tariffs, but the cost would be passed on to Americans as well. All other countries would continue the same with cheaper prices. I imagine there would be unscrupulous imports to avoid the tariffs, as well. It doesn't really solve a problem, either, as US profits are taxed in the US and foreign profits would still be deferred and could be used in manufacturing costs and thus avoid taxes, just like they are now.
ITER also most certainly won't solve fusion being a usable energy generator. One of the biggest power with the Tokamak design of ITER is it can only sustain the plasma for about 30 seconds. Stellerators have come back into the picture after falling out of favor in the 1970s because they can sustain the plasma for longer. Not enough is known about other designs yet to know how long they can sustain the reaction (for instance, Lockheed's High Beta Fusion Reactor
Actually, the US had already banned placing emergency backup generators in a place that could potentially flood years before the Fukushima disaster. If Japan had the same regulations as the US, the meltdown would've never happened. I don't know what changes the US did after the disaster, but the main failure of having no backup power certainly wouldn't have needed to be one of them.
It doesn't have to be. Most 4th generation designs are breeder reactors. Anything labeled fast reactor here is a breeder reactor that converts either thorium to fissile uranium or "nuclear waste" uranium to fissile plutonium. In layman's terms, they actually run on what conventional nuclear calls nuclear waste. Furthermore, they tend to burn long lived actinides, leaving much shorter lived waste. All of these reactors are most effective with on-site reprocessing, but given that being a proliferation concern, you can have once-through designs and do reprocessing at a single (or two - I believe the US had 2) secure facility, just like the US did in the 1970s.
In the US the towers were specifically designed with the possibility of an aircraft impact in mind, and even if the tower were breached, very little nuclear radiation would likely be emitted. Studies suggest the likelihood of an aircraft collision with a US tower actually causing a breach are infinitesimal. If the Belgian towers were designed around similar parameters, I doubt terrorists could breach them and I imagine car bombs wouldn't have much better luck.
If you mean dirty bombs, you'd need to steal nuclear waste (to get the short lived Actinides, mainly - the long lived ones probably won't do enough tissue damage unless you're very near the blast, as in smoking a cigarette is worse because those contain short lived and dangerous polonium) and separate out some of the shorter half life/more toxic parts to have an effective dirty bomb. Uranium itself in fissile/fertile form would be a terrible choice if you are looking at creating radiation related fatalities. Something like polonium would be vastly more effective. You'd also need to build a large conventional explosive, probably a fertilizer bomb, to actually spread it to any reasonable range.
TL;DR - obsolete reactors don't really help terrorists. You'd probably do more damage blowing up a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in a dirty bomb than stolen nuclear waste, though neither would be particularly effective.
I must be hard on laptops. ASUS laptop #1, 3 years, died twice during that time, third out of warranty (cause of death: GPU failure in all cases - bad set of nVidia cards). HP laptop, 2 years, died out of 1 year warranty (display and hard drive failure). Dell laptop, 2 years, died just out of warranty (power supply spiked, most internal hardware dead, caught fire). ASUS laptop #2, died 6 months in, fixed under warranty, died again 3 years in (GPU kept separating from its slot in the motherboard, eventually failed). ACER laptop, died in 2 years, just out of warranty (Hard disk, couldn't get Windows back on it without paying ACER to do it, not worth it because it was a cheap travel laptop).
Linux/XP desktop, formerly Windows 98, 16 years and counting. Still runs my backup server.
Wife's desktop - ~8 years old currently Windows 7 (originally XP with free upgrade to Vista, if I recall correctly), has had motherboard/CPU/memory replaced 4 years ago and added drives. Had a recent power supply failure that fried the Windows drive, so reinstalling Windows on a new drive then I'll see what I can save.
My current Desktop 3.5 years old, only GPU replaced, mainly to run modern games. CPU was fairly high end at the time and still valid for most.
The question is, is it any less safe to let the child stand at the bus stop unattended by a parent. This was always the case for me growing up because my parents left for work when my brother and I left for school. Sometimes other parents waited with their kids (sometimes letting us in to wait in a warm car), but for the most part it was a dozen kids standing alone at a bus stop.
I had no idea this was a thing, either. In the 1970s my mom was out the door by 6AM, my dad had to drop my brother off at pre-school and then go to work, so I walked a block up to my friend Patrick's house when my dad had to leave and played until the bus came or walked the half block from there to the school and played on the playground until the buses arrived. By first grade walking was not an option - my parents moved and school was 6 miles away. Also that K-6 school closed the next year, so I'd have been bused either way.
He assumes breeder reactors are only used to make nuclear bombs and ignores the fact that once through fuel cycles could avoid that. Also reprocessing can pull out isotopes needed by medical machines like MRIs. You could also do a once through, and then recycle fuel and do all reprocessing at an extremely secure single site. In fact, that is exactly what the US did at one time.
A breeder reactor isn't necessarily a bad thing. North Korea uses theirs to create plutonium for bomb-making, bred from fissile uranium, so sure that's bad. They could also siphon off protactinium to get fissile uranium. That said, Russia's BN-800 fast breeder reactor (same design as China) uses a once-through fuel cycle, making it useless for a nuclear or even dirty bomb until some of the stronger decaying particles are gone. The reactor is about 70% fuel efficient vs 99.5%. The downside is it is very expensive to build and the waste highly radioactive (without reprocessing), but for a much shorter time than conventional reactors.
If you just decide your facility is secure enough for reprocessing, the fuel cycle is 99.5% efficient and the waste is less radioactive than background radiation in 300 years.
I would agree, mainly because I think extended life technology is, honestly, 20-50 years away or possibly sooner (I mean, not with FDA approval, but I think anti-aging technology is getting close) and anything resembling a warp drive 100-200. And achieving near light speed is unnecessary if you can manipulate time-space. Wormholes and time bubbles, for instance, or even taking advantage of quantum uncertainty.
But we already are working on these - EM drive, Alcubierre drive, fusion and fission powered ion drives (30-40 days to mars), etc. Funding for this sort of thing may be low, but it still is out there. It wouldn't surprise me if we developed and sent a probe to Alpha Centauri and developed a technology that could beat it there.
That is assuming none of the recent breakthroughs in technology actually work. EM Drive, for instance. There are also flaws in the article. Conventional fission is 1% fuel efficient, but a breeder reactor with reprocessing is 99.5% fuel efficient. A fusion reactor like the one the Skunkworks is working on is also a possibility (because it would be small enough for a spaceship). There are already fusion and fission fast mars concepts as well that should work fine for interstellar travel.
That doesn't even touch on theoretical stuff like the Alcubierre drive, and wiki doesn't even have some of the workarounds to certain problems such as using metamaterials to divert Hawking radiation. There still are some other serious problems that need to be addressed with that one.
My thoughts afterward was the only parts I really disliked were the Deus Ex Machina ones. Rey gets forced to steal the Millennium Falcon and then just happens to run into Han Solo in a larger ship and he happens to be carrying giant one eyed tentacle monsters and happens to get boarded at that very moment by not one but two groups of bounty hunters and Rey accidentally releases the monsters... yeah, one coincidence is fine, chain these together and it is the mine cart ride in the Hobbit all over again - a sequence I walked out on because I was bored as shit and peed and got a popcorn and the damn thing was still running for another 10 minutes before there was another line of dialog. Sorry, but I wasn't all that interested in long, dialog-less action sequences even when I was a kid, but apparently there are kids that like that. Road runner's shorts were about as long as my attention span lasted.
You're also in late fall, which is a terrible time for solar generation in northern climates. Where I'm at there's also been a massive solar build-out, but nuclear is such a horrible, evil technology they built new coal plants and new natural gas plants instead. Yep, both natural gas and coal emit radiation in their waste, so thanks ignorant dumbfucks.
> electoral college who don't have any obligation to side with the popular vote.
That isn't entirely true. There are states that require electoral colleges to vote for their candidate. It is also rare for an elector to vote outside of party lines. "Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of Electors have voted as pledged." Less than 1% have betrayed their party, so it would have to be an extremely tight race to matter.
I've kind of been on the fence with electoral colleges, personally. They give some say to states with sparse populations because they least you can have is 3 right now (I seem to recall 2, but looked it up and everyone has at least 3). It also gives states with the most population the most say, so doesn't remove population as a factor. If you just went by popular vote, people in sparsely populated areas would feel they aren't properly represented.
I believe that ship has sailed in America, mainly because corporations control the election process. Corporations own the Presidential Committee on Debates and set a high threshold to keep third parties out and send out the talking points for the debates beforehand so there are no surprises (the push for open debates largely falls on deaf ears - opendebates.org has pushed for this for years). Corporations own the media and control the media through money from superPACs that they fund. Even Bernie Sanders realized that he had to affiliate with the Democratic party to even have a chance of being heard, much less winning. Once you join a party, you are bound to a base platform dictated by your corporate masters.
Corporations are also becoming too large again, with many behaving like monopolies and in some areas, are monopolies (Comcast, for instance). Where's Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
The other problem you have is people just voting for the party because doing anything else is throwing away your vote. The best way to fix that would be to have ranked choice voting or something similar, but that will never happen - the corporate overlords won't allow it as it would break their chokehold on the system they now completely control.
The problem is they don't think they are radicals and believe they are following the Qu'ran as it is written. If a Christians followed the Bible as written, we'd still have slavery and women would all be unlearned and obedient to their husband, as noted in both the Old and New Testaments. Also who would pick the radical sites? Christianity has radicals, too, like the Westboro Baptist Church. This sort of idea just opens the floodgates for censorship.
Every dictatorship has started by gathering information on every citizen. The US seems to want a dictatorship without the dictator, though. For instance, all of our recent presidents were or are heavily authoritarian and the ruling class is essentially an oligarchy.The one party system (sorry, but Republicans and Democrats are more alike than different in the whole scheme of things) gives the illusion of choice, but they tightly collude to eliminate any dissent. Look no further than the Commission on Presidential Debates if you don't believe that. A corporate controlled collusion designed to eliminate any third party from Presidential debates explicitly designed to eliminate "debate" from the debates. All topics are given to the candidate in advance, for instance. In the 1980s, debates were worth watching, now they are a pre-rehearsed charade.
In my city (not state, it varies statewide) both the cable company and the phone company have regulated monopolies to prevent overlapping infrastructure (power and gas have the same sort of deals). They both are charged a "monopoly fee" by the city that is passed on to citizens that use them (in the bill for landline phones or cable is literally a line item marked "monopoly fee"). Basically, my city is at fault for not allowing overlapping infrastructure for our shitty internet options. If you want anything faster than 7Mbits here, you have one choice - Comcast.
I think the first is what we would call the pipeline today and the second means parallel execution units. Using the word "functional units" for both is a bit confusing. Early RISC pipelines had 5 stages that are described in that link (and that brings back some memories - I remember studying it in college).
Funny thing is, I actually read the article to learn about what my first girlfriend's dad did - he was an engineer that worked on that thing (and yeah, she was a total nerd girl). I'm still Facebook friends with her, should point her to the article.
I would agree - if you installed the certificate, you've obeyed the law to the letter. Just because they didn't think of VPNs and such to work around the authority doesn't mean you are breaking the law, it means they did a shitty job of defining a law to control something and they didn't fully understand how it works. The US does this all the time. The US also seems to think it can write international law regulating the internet (most of these, like COPA were killed by the court system, at least).
And yeah, you could encrypt/decrypt in, say, javascript and entirely work around the bypass. You could probably entirely automate public and private key generation on both sides using a script.