Posts by Greg Trocchia

The Deal Killer

"A lot has change since, not least the recent acquisitions by Microsoft in the security marketplace that mean that Redmond has more expertise this time around. That doesn't mean that Microsoft Security Essentials will succeed, of course, just that lack of corporate resources will not be an issue for Microsoft Security Essentials."

What is the issue, to me anyway, is the "validation" and attendant WGA (which I consider malware in and of itself) that is "bundled" with MSE. So long as WGA remains part of the package, I won't even be tempted to give it a try. I will just stick with Avast for my Windows anti-virus needs, it is free too and I have been happy with it.

The silver lining here is that to the extent that MSE succeeds, it will probably do so by squeezing McAfee and Norton. Free anti-malware might be tempting to their users, whereas folks like me already have that and, did I mention, no WGA.

Mixed emotions

As it happens, Peter King represents my district, which makes for a study in mixed emotions. Bad- this guy is speaking, in part, on my behalf, yuck. Good- I have the opportunity to extract revenge at the ballot box for things like this (I vote in each and every election). Bad- my previous opportunities to extract revenge have (thus far anyway) been without effect. Good- in this instance, anyway, Mr. King's efforts have been similarly without effect.

@Wade Burchette

One of the reasons I write as many comments as I do to the Reg is to combat what I perceive as anti-American bias. In order to do this credibly, when a valid criticism comes up I have to readily admit that the US is "doin' it wrong". At the very least, if a critique is spot on then one should STFU rather than issue a lame defense. This is *definitely* one such occasion. Your defense is so lame that I would like to think it is all a put on (but hey, we all know that 'Mericans are irony challenged, right?).

I can add to what Marodi contributed by attesting that physical science classes in American universities (at least the ones I went to) have used SI exclusively for decades, and since the textbooks I used were popular ones, I can be confident that this must have been common practice at the time. A shudder goes down my spine when I think about having to have done my Physics major without good old metric units, it was hard enough without having to remember and apply all sorts of silly conversion factors. So long as you stay in SI, most of the conversion factors go away.

There was an attempt to convert the US to metric during the Carter Administration, but the forces of inertia were too strong and, IMO, Carter and company were too feckless to force the issue, unfortunately. Part of the resistance comes from the very real costs that transitioning imposes. The other part of the problem is mental inflexibility: as long as you continue to "think" in English units and convert to SI then you once again have all sorts of conversion factors that you have to worry about. Once you get to the point where you can leave things in meters or kilograms or whatever you are much better off, but getting there takes some adjusting.

@Murray Pearson: But, I might point out, 1M = 100cm, 1kg = 1000g, and seconds are the same in either system as you are well aware, not too hard to go from one to the other. And 10^7erg = 1Joule, my point being even if you have to look it up or figure it out, applying the conversion is simple to do. Now let's say I was measuring things in inches and ounces and wanted to find out the energy required for something, getting there would be considerably more of a headache I would assert.

@Sarah Bee

No need to feel sick (or to blame the Mexicans) if you are willing to trust Wikipedia on this one:

"The name burrito possibly derives from the appearance of a rolled up wheat tortilla, which vaguely resembles the ear of its namesake animal, or from bedrolls and packs that donkeys carried."

Mine is the one with the steak sandwich in the pocket.

Just to fill you in

@ Cameron Colly

No lunar conspiracy theory fodder here, the radiation they are seeking to characterize is cosmic ray (= long duration stay problem). The Apollo missions did not last long enough for this to be a problem, but if you are thinking about doing a lunar base where astronauts will spend months outside the Van Allen belts, protection against cosmic rays becomes much more important.

@Mike Richards

They discarded the LM in the upper atmosphere (along with the service module) for Apollo 13, the Wikipedia page on Apollo 13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13) even has a picture of the reentry.

@AC (bunch of idiots...)

Leaving aside the ignorance of the fact that the Russians have already, in fact, "done it first" (some of their Kosmos satellites were powered by nuclear reactors, Kosmos 954 causing a bit of a diplomatic oopsie when it came down in northern Canada) trying to chide NASA to be more aggressive in developing space nuclear power is hardly idiotic. For any trip to the outer solar system, nuclear power is pretty much necessary (sun power drops off as distance from the sun squared making solar panels unwieldy and chemical power just doesn't have the needed oomph), for power needs larger than an RTG (nuclear battery) can supply, this pretty much leaves you with a reactor as the only way of supplying the energy needed.

Reactors are a compact, low mass, source of power in large quantity. If you pair this with a very efficient, but power hungry, reaction motor like VASIMR (a type of engine that I am rather impressed with) and you could end up *decreasing* the radiation exposure of a crew on a Mars mission, for example. How does using a reactor _decrease_ radiation exposure, you may ask?

Simple, first you make sure there is an adequate shield between the crew and the reactor and then a powerful enough VASIMR could decrease the needed flight time from months down to weeks, which (in turn) cuts down the Cosmic Ray exposure which could otherwise be a serious radiation hazard for the crew. Space testing a reactor design is an important thing to do before we can once again venture beyond Low Earth Orbit.

@Eddy Ito

I have yet to see an election for national office where there are only two candidates running, maybe for local or county office, but never for Congress, Senate, and certainly not for President. Now there may be only two candidates with a chance of winning (one candidate, in some circumstances), but that doesn't matter. The purpose of voting in an election is not to guess who will win the election, it is to record your own preferences.

A protest vote for a non-major party candidate is a way of showing disaffection with the offerings of the major parties. When I have been dissatisfied with what was on offer, I happily entered such a vote, something I heartily recommend to anyone else similarly displeased. I have always been able to find a third party that I could stomach voting for (no need to vote for folks as distasteful as the BNP) and if there was ever a situation where there wasn't one... well, there is always the write-in route. If enough people start registering their disapproval of major party candidates in this fashion I am sure that this fact would not go unnoticed. The Jolly Roger because the Pirate Party sounds like one I could vote for when casting a protest vote.

@Dani Eder

"Your choices are a tug or booster that gets you quickly out of the radiation zone, and then heads back by aerobraking for the next trip, or the astronauts wait on the ground or in orbit until the main ship is high enough, then ride a capsule quickly out to join it."

<Pedant>

I don't think you be able to do a pure aerobrake to get back. If you are above the Van Allen Belts you will be in such a hard vacuum that any reasonably sized aerobrake will have next to no effect on your orbit. Fortunately, since you no longer have a human crew to worry about, you can use one of those efficient-but-slow-accelerating electric drives to return to LEO. Alternatively, you could use a burn from your high-thrust drive to lower your perigee to where you _can_ make use of aerobraking for the rest of your maneuvering.

That said, I agree with the rest of your points about the usefulness of having a pace to do on orbit assembly (Von Braun was right, IMO) and about it being a good idea for any spacecraft with humans on it to spend as little time as is practical within the Van Allen Belts, for which purpose it is handy to have a reusable tug.

</Pedant>

@AC 13:44

"Consensus is not what drives discovery."

But scientific consensus is what validates discovery, you don't appear to understand this crucial part of the functioning of science. In science maverick opinions come up regularly, most of them wrong. How does one separate the ones that are wrong (e.g. phlogiston, spontaneous generation, Lamarckian inheritance) from those that aren't (e.g. plate tectonics, the existence of black holes, quantum theory)? The scientific mavericks argue their case with the other scientists in the field (who, in turn, argue back) and everyone looks for more data to bolster their case then, eventually, the preponderance of evidence will be so strong on one side or the other that a CONSENSUS will emerge on who was right.

Einstein's theory of Relativity, to use one of your examples, only became an accepted part of Physics when his prediction of the effects of the Sun's gravity on starlight was confirmed so convincingly that the Physics community came to a consensus that it was correct. As far as quantum theory goes, Einstein's contribution (for which he won his Nobel Prize) was not in the formulation of quantum, but as a contributor to the then-emerging consensus in favor of quantum theory. Specifically, Einstein pointed out that the hither-to mysterious photo electric effect could be easily explained by assuming the quantization of energy states of the electrons involved (the work function).

@Steve Swann

The reason that Helium 3 is of such interest is not as a shielding material, rather it is as a fuel. Deuterium/Tritium fusion (the type that researchers are trying to achieve) has a drawback, one of the products of the fusion is a neutron. Thus, a working D/T fusion reactor will put out hard neutron radiation, causing all the surrounding materials to become radioactive. The upshot of this is that while there might not be the same spent fuel problems you have with a fission reactor, there is the same problem of decommissioning. In each case years of neutron bombardment will cause the reactor innards to become a highly radioactive.

Helium 3, OTOH, can fuse in a reaction that does not produce neutrons as a fusion product. Thus, while an operating reactor using Helium 3 will put out radiation, when shut down there should be little residual radiation to deal with- unlike fission or D/T fusion plants, which remain "hot" whether operating or not. As a further bonus, instead of the neutrons you get from D/T, you get protons when using Helium 3. The reason that this is a bonus is that a moving proton constitutes a type of electrical current and it is possible use this to get electricity (a current of moving electrons) in a more direct manner than by heating water and using the resulting steam to turn a generator.

Unfortunately, as with so many things in life, there is a catch (in fact there are two big catches in this case). The first is the scarcity of Helium 3 on Earth that you have already mentioned. The second thing is that Helium 3 fusion is far more challenging to achieve than D/T fusion, which itself has been frustrating fusion researchers for decades.

Whether or not Helium 3 becomes an important part of our energy future, the Moon is a natural place to start whenever you want to build serious infrastructure beyond the Earth. The reason is the lower gravity (escape velocity requires less than 1/20 the energy needed from Earth's surface) and absence of atmosphere on the Moon combined with the proximity of the Moon. Lifting material in bulk from the Moon should inherently cost a fraction of what it does from Earth, once the set up on the Moon to do the job becomes operative. In addition, any technological advance which would lessen the cost of lifting Earth material should be equally applicable to the Moon, so this advantage should be quite robust. While space exploration may or may not involve a return to the Moon, doing space development (as distinct from said exploration) will pretty much necessitate going back there.

@Charles Manning

Freedom of speech is, most assuredly, *not* overrated I would contend. So far as the matter at hand goes: The anti-circumvention portions of the DMCA are a particularly egregious part of a (mostly) misbegotten law. In addition to every other argument which can be brought to bear against anti-circumvention, there is the fact that enacting laws that a substantial number of people do not accept as legitimate breeds contempt for the rule of law in general, a loss all the way around.

Then there is the fact that reverse engineering can be a fair-use exception to anti-circumvention under US law, the bone of contention being whether this applies in this specific case. Even if this were found not to be the case, it would still be a huge (and, IMO, unwarranted) assumption, to suggest that this allows muzzling of a discussion of potential methodologies that might be used for circumvention.

Although IANAL, my layman's view of US Constitutional jurisprudence is that the Supreme Court strictly scrutinizes when free speech may be curtailed. The upshot of this is to tend to limit permissible cases of free speech abridgment to when speech becomes action (or at least quasi action). For this reason, your first 2 examples would likely pass muster, by trying to induce panic or by making a threat of violence, it seems clear to me that you are acting as much or more than you are speaking, and acting in a criminal fashion to boot.

I would take exception to your third example. Mouthing pro-nazi slogans at a Holocaust memorial is beyond insulting and distasteful, evil would work as a characterization for me. That said, it is not likely to be something for which one can arrest the speaker (nor should it be, IMO). It might get the nazi ejected from the memorial if shouted loud enough to be a disturbance (or merely if heard, if the memorial is a private one, where the 1st Amendment doesn't constrain the owners of the memorial to suffer an overt nazi on their property).

This isn't just my opinion, BTW, there is a fairly famous Supreme Court case which comes very close to this: National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. To summarize, the Nazis wanted to be able to hold a march through the (predominantly Jewish, including Holocaust Survivors) neighborhood of Skokie. The Supreme Court ruled that they could not be forbidden to do so (they never did actually hold the march, although they did hold 3 rallies nearby, at their initial venue of choice).

Perhaps things are different in the UK, but here in the US, where the litigation is taking place, abridging free speech is not something the courts sign on to readily. It is my hope that this will continue to be the case.

Wrong poster boy for CEO pay restraint

The problem with a flat statement like "And CEO pay is, indeed, reaching ludicrous levels." and .. "seeing as how their average compensation totaled $10.4m", from the point of view of the shareholders is that there are some CEOs who are worth every penny of that and more (but, admittedly, way fewer than those who *think* they are worth it). I would argue on the basis of historical record, that Steve Jobs was one, something I think that even Apple-haters would have to agree.

To get from a place where Apple was visibly circling the drain and seemed headed to a future of, at best, irrelevance to its current enviable position of dominating several markets (iPod, iTunes) and being in a strong (iPhone), or at least resurgent (Macbook, iMac), position in most of the rest is an extraordinary accomplishment. Moreover, it is an accomplishment that are well worth the Gulfstream jet, all the options, not to mention the lavish $1 annual Salary that Jobs has been taking home since 1997.

If the above is not sufficiently convincing, consider the following: Apple shares fell by about ~10% upon the announcement of Jobs' medical leave of absence. Since Apple is capitalized at around $100 Billion, that alone is roughly $10 Billion worth of difference to Apple shareholders, a sum that dwarfs the total compensation paid to Jobs, directly or indirectly.

Given that this is a target rich environment for finding CEO (and their associated management teams) who have "added" negative value, in massive quantity, to the company they have been running (AIG, Washington Mutual, and Northern Rock are just a few of the instances which come to mind), it seems rather inappropriate to select one of the rare CEOs (and associated management teams) who have been demonstrably worth the money as a poster boy for CEO excess.

@Why Not

The "why not" is simple, it is better to be safe than sorry, even if it costs a bit more. Given the amount of motivation and the resources of would-be attackers (these are nation states we are talking about, and not small ones either) I would suggest that the system cannot be made secure enough. I have seen too many systems that seemed secure fall to a to a clever attack to trust that we will be able to lock down SCADA tightly enough that it is completely resistant to assault.

Then too, there is the factor that the more secure a system is, the more of a Pain in the A** it is to use. Do you really use select tough passwords for your accounts, use a different password for each account, change passwords frequently, and refrain from having a list of your passwords for all the different accounts? I would be very surprised if you could truthfully answer yes to all of these, human beings are just not mentally equipped to be able to keep track of all the required passwords without taking a shortcut somewhere despite the fact that this weakens the protection that the passwords provide.

Let me give you a concrete example from history: the Venona decrypts were made possible because generating a new one-time pad was so much effort that someone in the Soviet crypto section couldn't be bothered and reused a previously used one (this being a big crypto no-no, they are called one-time pads for a good reason). This lapse allowed western cryptanalysts to decode some of the messages to and from the spy networks in place in the US and elsewhere, revealing the extent of Soviet penetration during the years leading up to the Cold War (while the USSR was the ostensible ally of the US and UK) as well as outing particular individuals as spies.

Linking SCADA systems to a publicly accessible network, and especially to the internet is, IMO, just an invitation to come pwn us. The principle is simple: you can't hack what you don't have access to. Deviating from this principle just because it may be more expensive to do things that way is fundamentally unsound (and connecting SCADA systems to the internet without even *trying* to harden them is, I think we can all agree, breathtakingly, culpably, stupid).

@Robert Hill

First off, in the context of orbital mechanics "free-fall" does not connote losing altitude. Orbits allow you to do what Douglas Adams suggested in "Hitchhikers Guide": "The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." When in orbit, you are constantly falling around the Earth and, hence, missing it and this is the essence of free-fall.

As for the explicit statement that the orbit is "currently decreasing at 190 meters per day". The key word in the phrase is "currently" as in before the ion engines are fired for real (as opposed to test firing) in order to do the needed station keeping. The implication is that once the engines are continually firing, they will be enough to keep the orbit from degrading any further so long as they remain operational

That said, I will agree that the phrasing in the article does not exactly help one to parse it correctly.

More terms from SF

Off the top of my head there is "cyberspace", from Gibson's Neuromancer and "flashmob" which came from Niven. You also have not just the name, but the concept of a countdown which was invented as a tension heightening method in Fritz Lang's film "Frau im Mond" and was picked up by the rocket scientists (some of the key figures in the German VfR were associated with the film, Lang hired Herman Oberth himself to build a real rocket as PR for the film, but he wasn't able to produce a flyable rocket on the needed schedule) as a useful way of sequencing the events leading up to a rocket launch.

As to the "scattergun approach" of SF, this is due to the goal of SF not being to predict THE future, but rather to posit a plausible future in which to set the story. To the extent that the elements of this future are indeed plausible, it is not surprising that some of those elements, or something very like them, come to pass. An additional feature aiding this process is that since a lot of folks who make a career in technologically related field are (again, unsurprisingly) attracted to reading/watching SF, some of the devices/concepts depicted there become inspirations for their efforts. What reading SF does is not to tell you what will happen so much as to prepare you for what might happen.

This is a place government could help

There is a classic catch 22 concerning new technology in space, everyone wants to have better tech available for their birds, but nobody wants to fly anything but space-proven hardware. This is understandable considering the megabucks it takes to buy a launch (it is my understanding that the rule-of-thumb in space business is that the payload tends to be about the same price tag as the ride you are using to put it in space, so the whole package is now 2*megabucks). With so much at stake, the imperative is to leave as little as possible to chance, as recent events underline:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/24/oco_launch_failure/

By being willing to flight test new technology, government space programs (be they civil, as in NASA, or military, as in DARPA) can get some of the maximum bang for their buck by proving out technology that both they and everyone else can get to use. Note that this gives you the classic definition of a "public good" (non-rivaled and non-excludable) where government involvement makes the most sense. I would also note that this is not without recent precedent, from 1998 to 2001, NASA operated Deep Space 1, whose primary purpose was to prove out new technology (it was successful at this, several of the technologies it pioneered have since been used on other missions). High specific impulse drives like this are particularly important because they can give an exponential improvement in what you can get from a given amount of reaction mass. We need more of this.

@ jake

I did the math and here are my results. According to my calculator 2^256 is ~ 1.15 * 10^77 and according to this graph ( http://tiny.cc/8cf5b ), the output of the Sun since formation is of the order of 10^45 joules, so let's call it 10^46 joules during its lifetime to be generous. By dividing the 10^46 joules by the more than 10^77 digits previously calculated, I get an "energy budget" of 8.6 *10 ^ -32 joules per digit or more than 10 orders of magnitude less than the ~kT limit on irreversible computing for erasing a single bit. So it looks to me as if AC had it right, even counting up through *each* of the 2^256 digits is a task of surpassing difficulty.

@AC (Meager?)

>>It is spelt Meagre!

It _isn't_ spelled that way if you happen to be American. I realize that the Reg is based in the UK, but the particular author of this piece, if you care to look, happens to be in San Francisco. Just because we spell words differently on the other side of the Atlantic does not mean that our preferred spelling is *wrong*, a presumption I am starting to find annoying. I am quite happy to accept that folks in the UK prefer to spell the word as "meagre" (even if it is less phonetic in that spelling) and have no desire you to compel you to change your preference, I urge you to extend us the same courtesy.

@Luther Blissett

You don't have "plasma drives" in your bathroom unless you have some REALLY unusual candles. Combustion flame != plasma as plasma requires that at least some of the electrons of the plasma constituents have been stripped away, this kind of ionization tends imply really high energy, the kind you just don't get by burning something. VASIMR uses RF to provide that energy and magnetic fields to contain the plasma, something that no physical material is up to doing.

An advantage of doing this is that you can get very high exhaust velocities. The delta V for a rocket, which is essentially a measure of how fast you can get the rocket moving before it runs out of fuel, scales linearly with exhaust velocity and with the log of the amount fuel compared to everything else on the rocket (which explains why exhaust velocity is so important, it is *much* easier to get speed from more exhaust velocity than by increasing the amount of fuel). This is why Dr. Chang Diaz can talk about 39 day trip times: with loads of delta V: you are not restricted to the easier to do, but much slower (closer to 9 months than a little over one month) Hohman transfer orbit. An additional advantage of having delta V to burn (so to speak) is that you don't have to launch during a specific, relatively narrow, window of time or wait two years for the window to recur as dictated by the math of Hohman transfer. You can tailor your trajectory according to when you want to leave instead of tailoring your launch dates to your trajectory.

An additional nice thing about VASIMR, compared to other high exhaust velocity engines (e.g. ion engines) is that you can "gear" the engine, trading some exhaust velocity for more thrust or thrust for exhaust velocity to help optimize performance for a desired mission. As you may be able to tell, I am rooting for Dr Chang Diaz to succeed, I think VASIMR is a very handy type of engine to have space qualified.