Posts by Wzrd1 2274 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2012
*My* data sources and encryption is secure. That said, I don't trust you enough to provide you security.
Of course, I don't trust myself and require second and tertiary physical oversight.
Security rule one, trust no one. Not even oneself, as all are known for moments of immense stupidity.
Considering the number of phish messages/posts and various other attacks, I have to agree.
I've had to clean my wife's account three times, her computer twice.
Formatted and reloaded after a fixed period of no traffic that was untoward, which would be pretty much anything beyond java, adobe and my update server.
As the US government has contracts with multiple providers for their data, the easiest being providing keys, erm, big fat fucking deal, facebook! Just another PR ploy.
Shit, Skype sold off keys to multiple nations, as was reported three or so years ago.
Google has a contract with the US DoD.
Oh! Facebook doesn't. Can't be served a warrant either, since they're on Mars or something.
"Though these vulnerabilities have been subsequently patched, the researchers are not confident in the continuing integrity of the femtocell as an architecture. This is because the hardware can never be totally locked down by the vendor, and so there will always be some kind of exploit, they reckon."
By their principle, no platform, be it desktop, server, router, switch or other device is worthy and should be abandoned, as *no* device is totally locked down by the vendor and any that might be would be rejected for security reasons.
So, as we can't trust anyone on anything, we should abandon all electronic communication.
Or gain a small sense of reality.
That would be the only proper way to spoof GPS. If you only spoof one satellite, some software will ignore the wildly erroneous reading and most software will gripe about not "seeing" the rest of the constellation.
The only thing these student did was prove the technology of GPS and the inverse square law. Who'd have thought that a few watts right next to an antenna could overpower a 26 watts 21000km away?
Damn, but people go off over the dumbest shit.
"I genuinely do feel sorry for the solar energy adopters who will shortly find out that their $60,000 array is just as vulnerable to CME induced power surges as the power grid."
Interesting! So, those short little panels will have induced currents that are the same as miles of power lines?
Didn't think so.
It all depends on the strength of the GM storm, the period of spikes and even the home wiring, assuming the transfer switch is thrown to off mains mode when the storm strikes.
"Plus for added points, the majority of grid tied systems won't work without mains so even if their solar setup weathers the storm intact they will need to wait until the mains comes back up before they can do anything."
Every system I've reviewed had full offline capability. It wouldn't do to be capable of generating power, but in the dark with the neighbors when some idiot workman fouled the power lines for the neighborhood. If nothing else, it'd be lousy for sales.
Ever since I was military and dependent upon good satellite communications, I have been on space weather mailing lists and especially solar/geomagnetic storm warning lists.
I'll know long before that news presenter's staff figures out what that warning actually means.
Hence, my mains will be disconnected and all equipment also properly disconnected and the cords either removed or stowed in a manner to not reinforce electromagnetic pulses from a major geomagnetic storm.
I was thinking much the same thing about magnetically shielded spacecraft. Beats making the bloody things out of metal thick enough to rival WWII battleships to shield against radiation and even induced radiation from particles striking the metal.
If an EM component that isn't a simple relatively static magnetic field can add to the protection, that makes the entire thing far more likely to be practical and less expensive in terms of mass.
"However, I too am looking at colour laser."
Don't waste the money. The Phaser wax jet/solid ink units are cheaper to operate in the long run and deliver photographic quality for images.
The wax ink takes up less storage space than a toner-drum unit as well.
The only inkjet I'd ever buy would be a plotter.
"We only use a printer now for absolute emergencies and deliveries..."
I pretty much only print a resume and most often, new photographs of my grandkids to hang on the wall. The resume goes through my well preserved HP LJ5N, the photographs through my well preserved Xerox Phaser 8500N, though I still have a Canon CP800 hidden under my chair for wallet size photographs.
"I should have twigged, even back then, seeing how the old 9-pin one was better constructed than the later 24-pin one."
Hehe, I remember having my ancient three head dot matrix printer sitting on the same printer stand with an Epson 24 pin dot matrix printer.
After a few pages, the Epson was summarily dumped onto the floor by the bruiser sharing the printer stand.
Paper jams? That thing crushed and shredded any paper residue. Dump a bit of isopropyl about to clean it every few months or so and life was good.
Ribbon? Who needs ribbons? It embossed the paper anyway!
Then, there was the old Xerox high capacity laser printer, went through reams of paper. Used a bit of toner, which went into a vast hopper, no fancy cartridges or disposable drums. The only real item that was truly like one of today's consumables were the microswitches, which did fail far more often than anything else in that bruiser.
Bloody thing had the torque of a donkey engine too!
Oh, well. If I need dead trees, I either use my classic HP LJ5N or my Xerox Phaser wax ink printer today. Some prick stole my three head dot matrix while I was deployed. :/
"I was trying to get a new grad to write a gcode parser.
Tried to explain it was just a plotter language for CNC machines - blank looks
Like HPGL - blanck looks
For a pen plotter - blank looks
Searched wiki for a picture of a pen plotter = amazed look"
Funny thing, if I concentrate on it for a bit, I can quite likely still manually code the things. Those most certainly were the good old days!
"But, in this case, this is NOT enough to do the job. You've got to scale it up. You need to build a Model T, not a Saturn V."
I disagree. To develop effective and efficient fusion, you need to build a Saturn V from hell on steroids, someone will then add improvements to make a Model T fusion plant later.
First, get the damned thing working, then tune it and scale it down.
Nuclear warheads taught us that lesson quite effectively, if you ever look at the size of the first models, then modern equivalents.
"As a scientist I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Throwing money/resources and the best brains at tricky problems most certainly can produce stunning results. Just look at the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space programme as examples in support of this argument."
I suspect you're too close to see how your argument failed.
Both were extensions or purely military programs. The NASA programs were part of ICBM research, which is why governments worry when certain, erm, problematic nations become capable of putting a satellite in orbit. If you can do that, you're a short step from an ICBM.
Apollo was purely a Cold War challenge between the US and USSR. Once the point was firmly driven home, the Apollo program was cancelled.
In short, if research isn't about blowing shit up or otherwise killing people, it doesn't get priority funding.
Which is why Smallpox was cured, as the USSR had weaponized it, but dialysis hasn't advanced much in decades and still only approximates 12% of human kidney function and that poorly.
Why we have drones that can travel around the world, loitering about in one place for a while, then returning back to the US, but we still don't have a cure for HIV infection.
Why we can monitor all e-mail communications in the nation of one's choice, but can't stop a humble trojan horse or worm, but can trash centrifuges with said humble worm.
Why we still rely on boiling water to generate electrical or most other power, yet can EMP a power grid into oblivion.
I can go on all day with examples of destruction being a priority over beneficial technologies, I'm retired military and observed at great length.
"Why don't Bill Gates, Warren Buffett et al. each chuck a couple of billion of their personal wealth into the pot and just get the job done?"
Do you mean like they've repeatedly done in other projects?
You're awfully keen on spending other people's money!
You obviously are a contractor.
Just as there's one really minor problem with MSR units, true, lose power, they shut down.
Starting them is a cast iron bitch though, or more accurately, cast salt bitch, as one has to find a way to remelt that solidified salt. It's the same problem with liquid metal reactors.
If I were heading that project, we'd not be using silly traveling wave units, but seeing about a more condensed sized thorium reactor, with a small separator for the radioisotopes that poison the reaction until they decay into a useful isotope again.
'Earth produces Hydrocarbons as a by-product of fission, see "Fracturing the Fossil Fuel Fable".'
What a fascinating thought! So, Hydrocarbons are not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of Mercury and Actinium!
Small hint: Carbon is one of the end states of nucleosynthesis in stars, along with Oxygen and Nitrogen. Stars that go supernova can produce heavier elements, such as Iron and heavier.
The Actinium series decays ultimately to Actinium, which is stable.
The Radium series decays ultimately to Mercury, which is stable.
The Neptunium series decays ultimately to Titanium, which is stable.
The Thorium series decays ultimately to Lead, which is stable.
Note the dearth of hydrogen, which is not a product of fission or carbon, which is also not a product of fission.
This is only physics 101 stuff, taught in high school!
First, "Because of the lengthy scientific publishing cycle there aren't yet any published papers, but the results were so clear - and so important - that the scientists aboard the ship were happy to reveal them publicly."
No peer review, no full review of the data collected, but already a conclusion that is so happily embraced by El Reg. Well, we can guess who is contributing to the income of said publication.
Issues with the study:
"The gas outlets off Spitsbergen lie approximately at a depth which marks the border between stability and
dissolution."
Problematic already on two points:
1: They're measuring at an equilibrium point that can vary seasonally or even with changes in current, not slightly below the equilibrium point for methane hydrate, something that has been rather well studied and the properties well enough understood.
2: Small sample size, only one region was studied, more study over varying areas needs to be conducted to gain a more complete picture. That is especially true considering the fault above.
El Reg's conclusion is also faulty, as for the above reasons and the well established reason that methane hydrate is already well known to dissolve and disperse seasonally throughout the world, it's the amount and timing that is critical. Add in the known issue of arctic accumulation of methane that is a normal factor in the region due to the action of weather, again, more study is necessary.
Even then, El Reg further compounds their error by assuming that any action performed now is useless, for bad is bad equally. So, by El Reg's reasoning, if I have a pot on the stove catch fire, I should do nothing, as there is already a fire. Simple common sense tells one, as has fire science has proved, putting out that small fire prevents it from becoming worse. Such as when one's house then catches fire and burns to the ground.
In short, preventing bad from becoming worse. Something El Reg's contributors do not wish to mention, as such may interfere with their short term profit.
And I say El Reg for a reason, the author of the story had to have the story reviewed and approved for publication. Repeated stories that contradict dozens to hundreds of other research papers being so heavily trumpeted here display a general trend that can only be ascribed to being the benefactor of certain deep pocketed special interests.
So, because nothing in the entire world is 100% safe, safety should be abandoned?!
Risk analysis should never be performed because the worst is inevitable?
Fortunately, history has proved you wrong. Both from the aspect of decreasing traffic accident fatalities in the various classes of motor vehicle accidents and in nuclear power, where western designed reactors only melted down twice, with only one having a significant release of radioactivity due to cracked concrete due to a massive earthquake, loss of power due to a poorly designed backup power system that remained susceptible to a tsunami and operator incompetence.
Aircraft caused fatalities have also decreased, indeed, a recent crash of a Boeing 777 had two fatalities, where if a Boeing 707 had crashed, there would have been hundreds of fatalities. All secondary to a culture of safety involved in the design and construction of modern aircraft.
In your world vision, we'd not have safety glass, accepting decapitations of motorists, melted down first generation nuclear power plants causing a large part of the Earth to be uninhabitable and aircraft that still explode in the sky during thunderstorms or smear the passengers down the runway when a tire fails or even explode when a window fails due to pressurization causing square window holes to split.
If it's all the same to you, I'll reject the lack of a safety culture, risk analysis and mitigation of risks.
"...give up their unnecessary and usurious public tax-money welfare..."
Let's examine gasoline prices in the US, Canada and most of the EU. Then, notice how the US and Canada subsidize oil prices, the EU does not.
How much are they paying for gasoline in Germany these days?
The problem isn't that of not desiring to exploit resources, it is one of desiring safe exploitation. I happen to personally know people whose wells, their only source of water, has been compromised with natural gas mixed with the water from the aquifer. These wells have been in service for literally generations with no problem until the fracking crew arrived, drilled and then hydraulically fractured the borehole.
I do complain about nuclear reactors on the basis of sustainability, as the highly contaminated waste is long lived. I do, however, desire thorium reactors, which can "burn" said waste to leave waste that only lasts a maximum of a century or so, rather than the tens of thousands of years for current waste.
The true question is one of a risk-benefit analysis. What we instead have in place is a drill baby drill culture, safety and environmental impact be damned.
Smooth move. Corporate attorneys operate off of billable hours. So, neither attorney gets paid at all until the case is resolved.
Which only gives the ability for a company to indefinitely delay proceedings to avoid paying at all while the poor populace lose attorneys who are unpaid and harder to replace, whereas the corporation just keeps retaining new attorneys and paying their billable hours after the plaintiffs die off of old age, give up or can't retain an attorney.
Which would leave the victims to only one recourse: violence.
"So you think the mud volcano would have happened if the drilling company hadn’t made the hole in the first place."
To be highly technical, in a way yes. In a few thousand years or so, the carbonic acid would have etched away enough of the stone layer between the surface and the CO2-H2O laden soil layer below that stone layer.
But, when one directly causes that which should have been delayed by millennial numbers, one most certainly has precipitated a disaster.
Regardless of how much one attempts to muddy the water.
"We don't know yet, because there have been so few cases of proven harm due to fracing. I'm ignoring things like methane emerging from taps connected directly to boreholes through methane bearing rock."
I have to call bullshit on that one. I've been in some of the homes involved that now have natural gas, aka methane, in their water. Both before the fracking started and after.
Before, they had fine mineral water pumped up from their well. After, an effervescent mixture of natural gas and water.
Another site had fracking mud overflow its reservoir, flow downhill, killing all plants in its path to sterilize the pond at the bottom of the hill. Said pond was stocked annually, but nothing survives in that pond today, regardless of effort.
The drilling company proclaims to all who care to listen that it wasn't their drilling mud, which is well documented to contain various heavy metals and other toxic substances that the mud didn't cause the kill off of both the trail that the mud tool, six feet on either side of the flow or the pond itself.
Must've been that tap into methane bearing rock or something else mythical.
But, all know better than those who have personally witnessed these things and do happen to understand the science involved.
Fracking is largely done for natural gas in totally different rock formations and most certainly not in highly geologically active regions, in particular, not in regions lousy with volcanoes.
Prior studies showed that there was a layer of rock between the CO2 laden mud area and the surface. Once that rock layer was breached, the pressure from the CO2 would force the mud out of the borehole and there is precious little one can do to either prevent such a flow or staunch it.
Of course, the new study conflicts with the six prior studies, so obviously the single new paper, all done on a mathematical, theoretical basis trumps all analysis performed upon the very structures involved that used samples returned through the borehole, as well as various imaging methods is correct.
Or something.
Either way you slice it, the authors managed to publish and not die.
I've long had this thing. *I* back up my shit. Not somebody else, as I have no clue what they do during and after said backup.
What that means in the real world is, sensitive financial documents are backed up locally to RAID at a minimum storage in my own home. At work, the same or more. SAN gets backed up to SAN, second SAN gets backed up to warm site SAN.
That is true at work as well as at home. The difference between home and work being, my porn collection is worthy of sacrifice, my financials are not, so the latter get backed up. But both start being stored on a RAID 5 minimum storage unit. Backed up to a twin, with different lot numbers for the individual devices.
I'd decline in favor of one with one of the engineers. I'd get far more fascinating information in the history, as well as a lot more respect for the efforts to keep the thing running.
For, I am of the "better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it school". Blame if on personal military experience many times over.
So, I'll depart remembering 35 dead, sniffing a bit over the 36th in derision.
There is an upside to such a system, where science is repressed and mathematics are considered evil.
After all, if the majority of the populace believe that, there would be nobody to repair the nuclear arsenal, as they'd be unable to comprehend how to fix the damnable things.
Further, the internet itself would cease to operate effectively in such an ill educated land, much to the general relief of the majority of the world.
So, a smaller sibling of Earth got smacked hard and died.
Earth got smacked harder, but being larger, hence, hardier, Earth survived.
Initially, I was considering rejection, based upon the current Earth's and Mars magnetic field, but then, I considered the mass of each and reconsidered.
Less massive, cool faster. Geomagnetic field dies sooner. Remnant of atmosphere is erased sooner.
No Barsoom here, move on.
"...but unfortunately we destroyed it in the process."
Not going to happen in the case of Europa, with kilometers of ice between the vacuum and the oceans beneath.
But, it can read temperatures, listen for sounds of Europaquakes, listen for vulcanism, listen to icequakes, measure chemicals, etc.
"I note that the US, having recently re-invented the Grand Slam as their 'Massive Ordnance Penetrator' (MOP) GBU-57A/B, are trying to fit a void-sensing fuse to the weapon, enabling it to go off when it arrives in an air gap. Face-palm time..."
The problem is, the US designs and trains for the last war that it fought. Operative in this case is a desert war, where what was penetrated wasn't rock, but loads of sand, which disperse shockwaves quickly.
Of course, during Gulf War I, the US had to kludge up bombs made out of howitzer barrels to use as penetrators.
Never said we were bright, only highly enthusiastic. And eventually do the right thing, after trying everything else first.
If I were hunting a live T-rex, I'd have no problems doing it on foot. I'd see it coming from a long way off and a .50 cal Barrett is most certainly the great equalizer.
That said, I doubt I'll ever even hear about a live T-rex, let alone find a reason to have to hunt such an impossible thing.
Quite true. This Mac that I'm using has only one problem.
A defective keyboard-chair interface.
Oops, it's not defective, I don't click yes on things that behave strangely. I also don't open documents that I'm not expecting. Or go to strange websites.
Which explains why I'm never on Facebook, one cannot get stranger than that!
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