Many, many years ago my boss was in Washington DC doing some intensive marketing and I was in San Diego trying to keep his operation on track. Since the stuff he needed was proprietary, we tried encrypting our messages (on DARPANET as I recall) for a while. That lasted about three days. Technically, it worked fine. Pragmatically, it was a monumental PITA.
The likelihood of a 9-track tape actually reading back was never very high. But you can make your backup even more secure by encrypting the data with an unknown random key prior to writing it.
My fear is that they will take away the steering wheel, gear shift and brakes and give me some gawdawful touch screen interface that is almost impossible to use. That's annoying on an entertainment device. It's likely to be dangerous or lethal in a vehicle control system.
Might be OK if I only have to use it once or twice a year.
But of course automotive engineers are far too clever to do that. Rig...............ht.
> With proper use of beacons, signs and temporary signals, I don't see why not. For example, officers could be supplied with special batons, similar to those used by ground crews at airports.
Of course. Or maybe the car will simply assume that any human looking artifact standing there waving at traffic in a certain way is an authority whose signals are to be followed. And maybe that'll work fine. It's going to take a number of years to sort out. But it will be more years than some folks assume because there are so many contingencies to deal with. And it'll be fewer than others assume.
> I just don't see one of those self driving things backing up across 4 lanes of street with normal traffic on it, and then down an alley.
What's the problem? A properly programmed computer can almost certainly do that. And the fact that it has tied up traffic for sixteen blocks in both directions won't bother it a bit. It doesn't care if people are swearing at and waving tireirons. It's a computer.
"Handling emergencies is usually where the greatest skill and training is required."
Yes, if the emergency is black ice, or a gaping hole is opening in the road ahead, or logs are falling off a truck in front of you. But in those cases, the computer is probably going to have to deal with the emergency because there isn't time to switch control over to the driver.
I think maybe an "emergency" from the computer's point of view is a situation it has no clear guidelines to deal with. e.g. the map says there is an off-ramp 100 meters ahead and the route says to take it. But all that is visible is snow. Lots of snow. So what the computer presumably will do is slow to a stop, consult the driver somehow, and call 911 if the driver says to do so.
I sort of think this is new ground and it's going to take a while to sort out the optimum ways for autonomous vehicles to catagorize and handle unexpected situations..
The draft regulation looks OK to me for now, but I do hope the plan to revisit it every year or three
Doesn't matter if they forgot or tried, but their defenses were flawed by a misspelling, or misunderstanding, or a semicolon that should have been a colon. Truth is that trying to secure information on computers connected to the Internet of Horrors is roughly equivalent to stashing your wealth in a huge paper tent guarded by an elderly german shepard who has been sedated and two winos who have provided themselves with a liberal supply of cheap booze.
Folks, this internet thing really does have enormous potential. And it will always be useful for broadcasting and reference work and cat videos. But it's way too complex to provide a reliable vehicle for financial information, personal data, or command and control of most infrastructure. No amount of frantic patching, blaming someone else, and trying to administer remote computers with unknown configurations is going to fix that. This sucker just can't do what "they" want it to do. At least not safely.
What's the answer? I haven't a clue. But acknowledging that there is a problem is probably a good first step.
Jail for those who view proscribed web sites? What could possibly go wrong?
Well, how about the obvious thing that HTML links typically do not display the actual link, but rather a terse description? Your neighbor's dog barks all night? Send him a link to "Free Porn, and lot's of it" that actually links to violent.deathtoalinfidels.sa. Be sure and wave and smile brightly when he is carted off to the big house. Then call animal control and complain that with your neighbor in jail, the dog will not be adequately cared for.
Then there's that first amendment thing (not that we americans pay all that much attention it). Possibly someone should slip Posner a false link to one of the many sites displaying the US constitution.
Exactly: The gasoline engine thing was an additional potential problem. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that analyzing the situation is exacerbated by all car mongers including VW fudging reported gas mileage as much as they think they can get away with. (Gas mileage varies pretty much in step with CO2 emissions) In which case this would be VW deciding that any liberties they took in dealing with gas mileage/CO2 from their gasoline ingines are mostly acceptably close to industry norms.
Lloyds did manage to get into significant financial trouble in the mid 1990s leading (surprise) a lawsuit and eventually to a substantial restructuring of its business practices.
The 'recruit to dilute' fraud allegations were heard in court in 2000 in the case Sir William Jaffray & Ors v. The Society of Lloyd's (see first instance judgment) and the appeal was heard in 2002. On each occasion the allegation that there had been a policy of "recruit to dilute" was rejected; however, at first instance the judge described the Names as "the innocent victims [...] of staggering incompetence" and at appeal the court found (see appeal judgment) that representations that Lloyd's had a rigorous auditing system were false ([item 376 of the judgment:] [...] the answer to the question [...] whether there was in existence a rigorous system of auditing which involved the making of a reasonable estimate of outstanding liabilities, including unknown and unnoted losses, is no. Moreover, the answer would be no even if the word 'rigorous' were removed.)
In my experience, the modern world -- like reality -- is highly overrated.
And then there's the problem that the game is rigged. You're gonna lose no matter what you do. The best you can do probably is to lose without too much grief, pain, and aggravation. (But getting back on topic, it's not clear to me that systemd minimizes any of those things).
I'm not a big fan of man in space with current technology. But I feel compelled to point out that artificial satellites including the ISS cope with pretty much the selfsame temperature ranges that will be experienced on the moon without all that much difficulty. The longest lived active satellite seems to be Oscar-7 which has been in orbit for something like 40 years and is apparently still functional when its solar cells are in sunlight. (The battery died in 1981).
That said, what possible point is there to a lunar colony? The South Pole is much more accessible and i don't see long lines of people demanding to be allowed to homestead a place where the all time record high temperature is 10F (-12.3C) even though there is actually breathable air at the South Pole.
I actually agree with much of that. Assuming you can find suitable material, the problems of getting it back to near earth cheaply are probably tractable. Especially if you are patient and use "free" solar radiation for your energy sources. But getting the payload near Earth with an optimum velocity vector may turn out to be a tricky problem that'll take a long time to work out.
"If they're shaped and sized properly you can have a stable reentry with minimal ablative burnoff and remain relatively intact after impact (too small and they'll burnup too much; too large and they'll explode too much on impact)"
That, however is, I think, vastly oversimplified. You also need to worry about differential heating causing your payload to break up into roughly a zillion pieces which then burn up. I believe that's the fate of most reasonable sized objects encountering the Earth. And you need for the thing to come down where you can recover it (i.e. not over the 73% of the planet covered by ocean). And not on top of somebody's cow, house, car or kid. On top of which, if your asset lands in someone's peach orchard, it will probably turn out to be his or her asset after the courts adjucate. And there's the issue of liability if something goes wrong and the damn thing explodes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) and flattens a county or two.
I think all those problems can eventually be solved, but the obvious solutions involve expending a lot of non-free energy (e.g. reaction mass, transport vehicles) and the less obvious ones are likely to take a very long time to perfect.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if you could point to some meteorites showing veins of gold, or platinum, or rare earths or indeed anything. As far as I know there aren't any. But I'm not an expert on meteorites
Yes nickel-iron meteorites are enhanced in some heavy elements. e.g. Indium. But it appears, nowhere near as much as the most concentrated terrestrial ores. My $2000-3000 value includes about $100 worth of heavy metals Gold, Platium Group, etc. The rest is the value of the nickel and iron.
Well, yeah. Someday.. Maybe. But sixty years into the space age, progress is slow. So space mining may well not happen for centuries. Moreover, my cocktail napkin says that the ore value of a 1000kg chunk of typical nickel-iron meteorite is probably around USD $2000-$3000 at current prices. (The curiousity value is much higher, so the first few might fetch a LOT of bucks). AFAICS, at the moment we couldn't even get 1000kg down from earth orbit in an orderly fashion for $20000-$30000 much less the $200-$300 per tonne that would be needed to make commercial exploitation practical
Moreover, the idea that there even are veins of material in asteroids enhanced in various elements is less than certain. It seems to me that most of the differentiating processes that result in "loads" with high concentrations of minerals on Earth probably wouldn't be present in asteroids. And certainly not for the same timespan. But maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe there are other concentrating processes that work on low gravity rocks.
And maybe this thing might have some utility right here on Earth.
If you don't allow Javascript, you do lose some stuff like spellchecking most (all?) mapping services. OTOH, the idea that I can trust web sites I know nothing about to download and run safely obscure little programs on my computer has always struck me as demented.
One thing about Snowden's recommendations though. There does need to be some balance between security and pragmatism. If, for example, all your financial information is on your hard drive (and its backups -- you Do have backups, right?) and you are squashed like a bug in a freeway crash, your executor is going to have one hell of a problem probating your estate if he or she doesn't know your password(s).
Well yes. There's a lot written. But there are a horrendous number of loose ends in ALL of them. If I understand correctly, they can't even get a computer model to actually assemble a moon of the correct size in the right place after a modelled collision. Given the... ahem... flexibility... computer modelling, that in itself is a pretty huge difficulty.
Which volatile elements are you thinking of? The two very light gases -- Hydrogen and Helium -- are gone as significant atmospheric components. Is that a surprise? Why? The next most massive volatiles -- ammonia, methane, water are still around? Or were you thinking about the moon? I vaguely recall that there is an issue with the volatile gases there not matching expectations, but I don't recall (if I ever knew) the details..
As I understand it, the composition of the two bodies is quite similar. In fact that's the primary reason that the collision theory was formulated. In the collision theory, they moon is composed primarily of material blasted from the Earth by the collision. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Why couldn't it have been a combination of water from the proto earth and asteroids and comets later on?"
Seems like substantial water contributions from comets would almost certainly have to be the case unless we somehow totally misunderstand the nature and composition of comets or assume that they somehow avoid ever impacting the Earth.
Thanks to plate tectonics, We don't have much direct information on the early stages of the the Earth's history. But I've never understood why it was assumed that (much of) the Earth's water hasn't been there since our planet coalesced. Of course, I've also never understood the necessity to invoke an improbable planetary collision to explain the moon. It's not like binary pairs of large objects are rare in the universe.
And even if the water did come entirely from cometary impacts after formation, why would that preclude lots of other watery planets? Are comets assumed to be rare in other planetary systems? Why?
OTOH, Genesis also says that the stars and planets weren't created until the third day (Genesis 1:14). That doesn't jibe with the rather abundant evidence that he/she/it left laying around about the age and evolutionary course of the Universe.
Nothing against the Genesis creation story. On the whole, it's not all that bad a fit to Astronomy, Geology, Paleontology. For a collection of what seems to be complete nonsense, try the Great Flood as described in Genesis chapters 6 thru 9.
Let me suggest that if you wish to believe in God, that's certainly your option. But if you wish to believe that the Bible is literally true and completely accurate, you must seriously consider the notion that God was a totally incompetent copy editor who managed to bungle the task of making the description of creation, etc match the physical evidence.
The architecture of terminal emulators is pretty bizarre once you get past the surface. Mostly it amounts to some pretty capable PC keyboard/screen variant emulating a less capable and kind of weird device that was probably designed three or four decades ago and hasn't been built in this century. Last I checked Amazon carried one -- count them, one -- model of terminal,
Terminal emulators differ in memory usage, speed, navigation, which keys are passed to the applications, character support, clipboard support, and a dozen other things that might affect a specific user. Then there are the terminal profiles used to map the keyboard onto the imaginary terminal. My 10 year old Linux PC with Slackware 12.1 came with 2615 profiles. which is really about 2614 more than it needs. Which to choose...
It's usually possible to fix many (not all) terminal peculiarities like HOME and END keys not working. But it's not especially fun to do so.
So, IMHO, the best terminal emulator is the first one you find that does what you need.
I'd also suggest that the OP probably is smart enough to figure out on his/her own that a larger monitor might help. Probably lacks either the cash or the room for a big screen. Or both
Reading glasses might help, and they're cheap. (At least in the US). But they tend to focus uncomfortably close to the screen
One thing that might help in some cases is selecting all the text of interest (Edit, Select all). That sometimes helps with the preposterous low contrast color schemes that many web site designers seem to think are stylish. (My belief is that most web page designer are to some extent insane). At least it will probably convert white backgrounds to some dark(er) color.
Also, many monitors used to have contrast/intensity controls. Can they be adjusted? Does that introduce other problems?
Slashdot Mirror
Many, many years ago my boss was in Washington DC doing some intensive marketing and I was in San Diego trying to keep his operation on track. Since the stuff he needed was proprietary, we tried encrypting our messages (on DARPANET as I recall) for a while. That lasted about three days. Technically, it worked fine. Pragmatically, it was a monumental PITA.
The likelihood of a 9-track tape actually reading back was never very high. But you can make your backup even more secure by encrypting the data with an unknown random key prior to writing it.
My fear is that they will take away the steering wheel, gear shift and brakes and give me some gawdawful touch screen interface that is almost impossible to use. That's annoying on an entertainment device. It's likely to be dangerous or lethal in a vehicle control system.
Might be OK if I only have to use it once or twice a year.
But of course automotive engineers are far too clever to do that. Rig...............ht.
> With proper use of beacons, signs and temporary signals, I don't see why not. For example, officers could be supplied with special batons, similar to those used by ground crews at airports.
Of course. Or maybe the car will simply assume that any human looking artifact standing there waving at traffic in a certain way is an authority whose signals are to be followed. And maybe that'll work fine. It's going to take a number of years to sort out. But it will be more years than some folks assume because there are so many contingencies to deal with. And it'll be fewer than others assume.
> I just don't see one of those self driving things backing up across 4 lanes of street with normal traffic on it, and then down an alley.
What's the problem? A properly programmed computer can almost certainly do that. And the fact that it has tied up traffic for sixteen blocks in both directions won't bother it a bit. It doesn't care if people are swearing at and waving tireirons. It's a computer.
"Handling emergencies is usually where the greatest skill and training is required."
Yes, if the emergency is black ice, or a gaping hole is opening in the road ahead, or logs are falling off a truck in front of you. But in those cases, the computer is probably going to have to deal with the emergency because there isn't time to switch control over to the driver.
I think maybe an "emergency" from the computer's point of view is a situation it has no clear guidelines to deal with. e.g. the map says there is an off-ramp 100 meters ahead and the route says to take it. But all that is visible is snow. Lots of snow. So what the computer presumably will do is slow to a stop, consult the driver somehow, and call 911 if the driver says to do so.
I sort of think this is new ground and it's going to take a while to sort out the optimum ways for autonomous vehicles to catagorize and handle unexpected situations..
The draft regulation looks OK to me for now, but I do hope the plan to revisit it every year or three
Doesn't matter if they forgot or tried, but their defenses were flawed by a misspelling, or misunderstanding, or a semicolon that should have been a colon. Truth is that trying to secure information on computers connected to the Internet of Horrors is roughly equivalent to stashing your wealth in a huge paper tent guarded by an elderly german shepard who has been sedated and two winos who have provided themselves with a liberal supply of cheap booze.
Folks, this internet thing really does have enormous potential. And it will always be useful for broadcasting and reference work and cat videos. But it's way too complex to provide a reliable vehicle for financial information, personal data, or command and control of most infrastructure. No amount of frantic patching, blaming someone else, and trying to administer remote computers with unknown configurations is going to fix that. This sucker just can't do what "they" want it to do. At least not safely.
What's the answer? I haven't a clue. But acknowledging that there is a problem is probably a good first step.
Jail for those who view proscribed web sites? What could possibly go wrong?
Well, how about the obvious thing that HTML links typically do not display the actual link, but rather a terse description? Your neighbor's dog barks all night? Send him a link to "Free Porn, and lot's of it" that actually links to violent.deathtoalinfidels.sa. Be sure and wave and smile brightly when he is carted off to the big house. Then call animal control and complain that with your neighbor in jail, the dog will not be adequately cared for.
Then there's that first amendment thing (not that we americans pay all that much attention it). Possibly someone should slip Posner a false link to one of the many sites displaying the US constitution.
How many smart lightbulbs does it take to screw a customer?
Exactly: The gasoline engine thing was an additional potential problem. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that analyzing the situation is exacerbated by all car mongers including VW fudging reported gas mileage as much as they think they can get away with. (Gas mileage varies pretty much in step with CO2 emissions) In which case this would be VW deciding that any liberties they took in dealing with gas mileage/CO2 from their gasoline ingines are mostly acceptably close to industry norms.
Me, I'll keep refusing to buy this stuff knowing full well it's likely to have huge security and privacy issues.
Trouble is that you'll end up shopping at Goodwill because all the new stuff is "smart" (something of a misnomer I agree).
And eventually, you won't even be able to find a dumb TV in the thrift stores.
For some reason, this process is known as "progress"
I can't think why.
Lloyds did manage to get into significant financial trouble in the mid 1990s leading (surprise) a lawsuit and eventually to a substantial restructuring of its business practices.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
from the wikipedia article:
"get with the modern world, loser"
In my experience, the modern world -- like reality -- is highly overrated.
And then there's the problem that the game is rigged. You're gonna lose no matter what you do. The best you can do probably is to lose without too much grief, pain, and aggravation. (But getting back on topic, it's not clear to me that systemd minimizes any of those things).
I'm not a big fan of man in space with current technology. But I feel compelled to point out that artificial satellites including the ISS cope with pretty much the selfsame temperature ranges that will be experienced on the moon without all that much difficulty. The longest lived active satellite seems to be Oscar-7 which has been in orbit for something like 40 years and is apparently still functional when its solar cells are in sunlight. (The battery died in 1981).
That said, what possible point is there to a lunar colony? The South Pole is much more accessible and i don't see long lines of people demanding to be allowed to homestead a place where the all time record high temperature is 10F (-12.3C) even though there is actually breathable air at the South Pole.
I actually agree with much of that. Assuming you can find suitable material, the problems of getting it back to near earth cheaply are probably tractable. Especially if you are patient and use "free" solar radiation for your energy sources. But getting the payload near Earth with an optimum velocity vector may turn out to be a tricky problem that'll take a long time to work out.
"If they're shaped and sized properly you can have a stable reentry with minimal ablative burnoff and remain relatively intact after impact (too small and they'll burnup too much; too large and they'll explode too much on impact)"
That, however is, I think, vastly oversimplified. You also need to worry about differential heating causing your payload to break up into roughly a zillion pieces which then burn up. I believe that's the fate of most reasonable sized objects encountering the Earth. And you need for the thing to come down where you can recover it (i.e. not over the 73% of the planet covered by ocean). And not on top of somebody's cow, house, car or kid. On top of which, if your asset lands in someone's peach orchard, it will probably turn out to be his or her asset after the courts adjucate. And there's the issue of liability if something goes wrong and the damn thing explodes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) and flattens a county or two.
I think all those problems can eventually be solved, but the obvious solutions involve expending a lot of non-free energy (e.g. reaction mass, transport vehicles) and the less obvious ones are likely to take a very long time to perfect.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if you could point to some meteorites showing veins of gold, or platinum, or rare earths or indeed anything. As far as I know there aren't any. But I'm not an expert on meteorites
Yes nickel-iron meteorites are enhanced in some heavy elements. e.g. Indium. But it appears, nowhere near as much as the most concentrated terrestrial ores. My $2000-3000 value includes about $100 worth of heavy metals Gold, Platium Group, etc. The rest is the value of the nickel and iron.
Well, yeah. Someday .. Maybe. But sixty years into the space age, progress is slow. So space mining may well not happen for centuries. Moreover, my cocktail napkin says that the ore value of a 1000kg chunk of typical nickel-iron meteorite is probably around USD $2000-$3000 at current prices. (The curiousity value is much higher, so the first few might fetch a LOT of bucks). AFAICS, at the moment we couldn't even get 1000kg down from earth orbit in an orderly fashion for $20000-$30000 much less the $200-$300 per tonne that would be needed to make commercial exploitation practical
Moreover, the idea that there even are veins of material in asteroids enhanced in various elements is less than certain. It seems to me that most of the differentiating processes that result in "loads" with high concentrations of minerals on Earth probably wouldn't be present in asteroids. And certainly not for the same timespan. But maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe there are other concentrating processes that work on low gravity rocks.
And maybe this thing might have some utility right here on Earth.
If you don't allow Javascript, you do lose some stuff like spellchecking most (all?) mapping services. OTOH, the idea that I can trust web sites I know nothing about to download and run safely obscure little programs on my computer has always struck me as demented.
One thing about Snowden's recommendations though. There does need to be some balance between security and pragmatism. If, for example, all your financial information is on your hard drive (and its backups -- you Do have backups, right?) and you are squashed like a bug in a freeway crash, your executor is going to have one hell of a problem probating your estate if he or she doesn't know your password(s).
Well yes. There's a lot written. But there are a horrendous number of loose ends in ALL of them. If I understand correctly, they can't even get a computer model to actually assemble a moon of the correct size in the right place after a modelled collision. Given the ... ahem ... flexibility ... computer modelling, that in itself is a pretty huge difficulty.
Which volatile elements are you thinking of? The two very light gases -- Hydrogen and Helium -- are gone as significant atmospheric components. Is that a surprise? Why? The next most massive volatiles -- ammonia, methane, water are still around? Or were you thinking about the moon? I vaguely recall that there is an issue with the volatile gases there not matching expectations, but I don't recall (if I ever knew) the details..
"Earth and the Moon have different compositions"
As I understand it, the composition of the two bodies is quite similar. In fact that's the primary reason that the collision theory was formulated. In the collision theory, they moon is composed primarily of material blasted from the Earth by the collision. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Why couldn't it have been a combination of water from the proto earth and asteroids and comets later on?"
Seems like substantial water contributions from comets would almost certainly have to be the case unless we somehow totally misunderstand the nature and composition of comets or assume that they somehow avoid ever impacting the Earth.
Thanks to plate tectonics, We don't have much direct information on the early stages of the the Earth's history. But I've never understood why it was assumed that (much of) the Earth's water hasn't been there since our planet coalesced. Of course, I've also never understood the necessity to invoke an improbable planetary collision to explain the moon. It's not like binary pairs of large objects are rare in the universe.
And even if the water did come entirely from cometary impacts after formation, why would that preclude lots of other watery planets? Are comets assumed to be rare in other planetary systems? Why?
OTOH, Genesis also says that the stars and planets weren't created until the third day (Genesis 1:14). That doesn't jibe with the rather abundant evidence that he/she/it left laying around about the age and evolutionary course of the Universe.
Nothing against the Genesis creation story. On the whole, it's not all that bad a fit to Astronomy, Geology, Paleontology. For a collection of what seems to be complete nonsense, try the Great Flood as described in Genesis chapters 6 thru 9.
Let me suggest that if you wish to believe in God, that's certainly your option. But if you wish to believe that the Bible is literally true and completely accurate, you must seriously consider the notion that God was a totally incompetent copy editor who managed to bungle the task of making the description of creation, etc match the physical evidence.
The architecture of terminal emulators is pretty bizarre once you get past the surface. Mostly it amounts to some pretty capable PC keyboard/screen variant emulating a less capable and kind of weird device that was probably designed three or four decades ago and hasn't been built in this century. Last I checked Amazon carried one -- count them, one -- model of terminal,
Terminal emulators differ in memory usage, speed, navigation, which keys are passed to the applications, character support, clipboard support, and a dozen other things that might affect a specific user. Then there are the terminal profiles used to map the keyboard onto the imaginary terminal. My 10 year old Linux PC with Slackware 12.1 came with 2615 profiles. which is really about 2614 more than it needs. Which to choose ...
It's usually possible to fix many (not all) terminal peculiarities like HOME and END keys not working. But it's not especially fun to do so.
So, IMHO, the best terminal emulator is the first one you find that does what you need.
I'd also suggest that the OP probably is smart enough to figure out on his/her own that a larger monitor might help. Probably lacks either the cash or the room for a big screen. Or both
Reading glasses might help, and they're cheap. (At least in the US). But they tend to focus uncomfortably close to the screen
One thing that might help in some cases is selecting all the text of interest (Edit, Select all). That sometimes helps with the preposterous low contrast color schemes that many web site designers seem to think are stylish. (My belief is that most web page designer are to some extent insane). At least it will probably convert white backgrounds to some dark(er) color.
Also, many monitors used to have contrast/intensity controls. Can they be adjusted? Does that introduce other problems?