Re: Perhaps customers don't think PA is offering value any more
Yes, but it's all water under the dam now, though. Or maybe over the bridge.
(You think it's a mixed metaphor? Is a bear Catholic?)
346 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2014
...or a little under a zepto-fortnight (zFn).
(I realize hyphens are not usually added after SI prefixes, but "zeptofortnight" looks like letter salad to me. If it makes the meaning clearer, I'm putting a hyphen in, no matter what the pedants say.)
Well, I've just wasted quadrillions of femtoseconds on this. Time to move on.
You nerd-sniped me. JPL provides a really good ephemeris generator (for spacecraft and natural objects) at
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/
By default, distances are given in AU.
The speed of light is 299792.458 km/s. There are 24*60*60 = 86400 seconds in a day. There are 149597870.7 km in an astronomical unit (AU).
So the distance we're looking for is (299792.458*86400/14959787.7) = 173.1446 AU, about five times further out than Pluto.
Select "Voyager 1" and start running ephems for various time frames, and you get that distance at the time given in the subject line.
(I did this thinking that there was a decent chance that I'd say "it'll reach that distance on date X, but be back within that distance at this slightly later date, then cross it for good a bit later." It's receding from the sun at about 17 km/s, but the earth orbits the sun at about 30 km/s. Right now, and for the next few months, we're catching up to it and the Earth-Voyager 1 distance is decreasing. But it only decreases between late January and late April; the overall trend is, unsurprisingly, toward greater distance.)
What you are missing is a man-in-the-middle attack on the key exchange, performed by pico-Mallory
Not missing; I was mis-remembering. You're right; this remains subject to MITM. Back to the drawing board...
Okay, Alice and Bob are just going to have to have a shared private key, imprinted on the CPU and TPM at the factory. My initial thought was that it'd be a pain for each CPU and each TPM to have a unique number built into it. However, Intel® and some other CPUs have had serial numbers burnt into them (and perhaps still do, for use with the ME?) So it may not be infeasible.
Or, I suppose you could use Diffie-Hellman only once, the first time the TPM and CPU communicate. If somebody accesses your laptop after that and inserts the Raspberry Pi/Mallory, the TPM and CPU can say : we already have a shared secret, and we aren't telling you what it is.
All of this, of course, just makes things more difficult rather than impossible to break. As has been repeatedly mentioned, if you don't have physical security, somebody can figure their way around whatever cleverness you've done. (Which isn't an excuse for making it easy to break.)
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it seems like the usual case where Alice (=CPU) and Bob (=TPM) wish to communicate without Eve or Mallory (=Raspberry Pico) able to learn anything useful. The CPU and TPM use, say, Diffie-Hellman to get a shared private key, and the TPM sends the passphrase encrypted with that key. Eve/Mallory sees lots of data going to and fro, but nothing from which a passphrase can be practicably extracted.
As noted, there are several benefits. We test out our ability to gather tracking data quickly to figure out where and when the object is going to hit. For small objects (all we've seen so far), we can tell people when to step outside and see a bright meteor. (Those images were taken by an amateur astronomer who got the first measurements for the object after the discover.)
For a bigger object -- say, the ~17-m diameter one that hit Chelyabinsk a while back -- we can get more warning and tell people to crack open their windows. (Most of the injuries from Chelyabinsk were from shattered glass.) Unfortunately, the Chelyabinsk rock came from the direction of the sun, resulting in a grand total of zero minutes of warning. We do, at present, miss most of these objects. Though until 2008, we'd missed 100% of them.
For a still bigger object -- say, one large enough to survive going through the upper atmosphere and big enough to damage a town or city -- we get a few days or weeks of warning, and can say : crack open your windows and maybe you should just arrange to be someplace else when it hits. The time and latitude/longitude of impact will be very precisely known, to within dozens of meters and a fraction of a second.
To give due credit, ESA's Meerkat system also monitors for impacts and predicted this one. And I think the first public mention that this would be impacting was here, on the Minor Planet Mailing List, rather than from either of these services. That post was important for notifying amateur observers throughout Europe, about a dozen of whom dropped the objects they'd been observing and switched to this one. They supplied the bulk of the tracking data... in fact, looking through the list of observatories that tracked the object, I don't think any of the follow-up tracking was done by professional observers (except by Krisztián Sárneczky, the gent in Hungary who discovered it). Those amateurs are the reason we knew exactly where and when it would come in.
A big reason these small impactors matter is that sometimes, meteorites are found. We can see lots of rocks in the sky and have collected plenty on the ground, but you aren't often able to associate one with the other. Three out of four go into the water. For this one, meteorites west of Berlin have already been found. (Warning, it's a Faecebook link. I was able to look at it without a FB account, though.) I'd think if they found some this quickly, more bits will be found.
(5) At least some auditing of paper ballots ("do the paper ballots match what the machines told us?") occurs. Maybe pick a few boxes at random after the election, possibly allowing the political parties to pick some as well.
No objections to your 1 through 4, of course. But while I consider myself a skilled programmer, I wouldn't trust my own code without running basic sanity checks of this sort. Don't tell anyone, but even my code sometimes has bugs in it. (Not often, of course.)
I should note that while I thought of (5) long ago, I've since read similar proposals elsewhere, and I gather that at least some US states are considering such measures. The only downside I could see to it would be that you couldn't demagogue election fraud quite as easily.
Who would want a toaster that could last a hundred years ? Who would pay the price for such a thing ?
An interesting analysis of why modern toasters don't last as long as "old fashioned" ones did :
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/your-toaster-will-eventually-fail/
From that article : "...It seems that modern toasters are the kitchen equivalent of printers—everything in the category is pretty crappy."
Nice! I didn't know it would do that.
I'd say picking that date as the switchover is a minority choice, though. The astronomy code I wrote has the switchover in October 1582, when the Catholic world of that era dropped ten days. I think Turkey didn't switch until 1923.
man cal
says that unless you specify a country code, ncal
tries to guess the switch date from the local environment or falls back to September 2, 1752. This was when Great Britain and her colonies switched to the Gregorian Calendar.
So if some of our fellow commentards run cal 09 1752
and say "so what?", that's why.
> HP LaserJet 6MP
Friends of ours had one. They were Mac users; many years back, Apple decided nobody would be using something that old. They offered it to me; I used it up until it finally went to Hardware Heaven a year or two ago. Truly a workhorse.
The only other bit of HP hardware I have is an HP-15C. Our local recycling center has a "gift shop" if you have stuff somebody else might use, and somebody had left a 15C there, in excellent shape. I'd never have been able to afford one when I was a pimply youth.
But come to think of it, I've never purchased HP gear. And given the issues with the current stuff, it looks unlikely that I ever will.
> Just because he says he believes doesn't mean in private that he believes.
Admittedly quite possible, and I suspect many idiotic ideas espoused by our leaders are for public consumption. For example, you hear often about Republicans praising He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-While-Eating in public, then privately complaining about him. But from what I've read, it would appear that Mike Johnson is a true believer.
> But isn't Speaker just two sudden deaths away from becoming POTUS?
Which means we're currently looking at the possibility of President Mike Johnson. A man who believes the universe is 6000 years old, created on 23 Oct 4004 BC at 9:00 AM Garden of Eden time, and who would not stand out, intellectually, in the fish tank of a dentist's waiting room. It's hard to imagine there's an alternative to President Elon Musk who would be even worse, but you could argue that's what we have right now.
My mind upon considering the above -- >
And here in the northeastern US, it's raining. Not sure for what event El Reg ran this quite accurate assessment of the correlation of clouds with interesting astronomical events, but it's lined up with my experiences all too well.
On 2024 April 08, the path of a total solar eclipse will pass a couple hours' drive north of me. I am not inclined to believe in long-range weather forecasts of the "it will be raining on day X four months from now". But I might make an exception here.
I'm writing this post on a laptop (Toshiba Satellite) with an RJ11 modem port and three USB ports. (Not that I've had occasion to use the former. I'm not even sure any current Linux would support it. I'm not sure what I'd use it for in 2023; it has an RJ45 port as well, and WiFi.)
Long-time Dvorak user here, since 1994. I don't think you could get a keyboard labelled in Dvorak at the time, so I learned to touch-type without looking at the keys. Even had a labelled keyboard been available, I sometimes have to use somebody else's machine with a xWERTx keyboard; I can switch their computer to Dvorak and type away happily. (Though I sometimes forget to switch it back, leading to a "why is my keyboard producing gibberish?" inquiry... fortunately, my wife and my mother, the usual inquirers, have learned how to switch back to their favored QWERTY layout.)
Another minor advantage : I was looking around for a decent second-hand ergonomic keyboard, and saw some for sale with Korean layouts. Not an obstacle if you aren't looking at the keys anyway.
I think if you read the first of phuzz's links, you'll see that (given certain idealized assumptions and a modest amount of handwaving) you can minimize the component count by choosing a base close to e. Given the currently available integers, that would make ternary optimal.
And if you live in a jurisdiction where the Biblical value of π = 3 is accepted, then ternary has yet another advantage.
> BSD is for experts
I've tried a few variants of BSDs over the years and always ran into problems (I'm almost entirely a Linux user and have never gotten along well with Macs). I tried GhostBSD a couple of years back, and... it Just Worked. I think I could install it for my aged mother (who runs Xubuntu) and she'd not notice the difference much (she mostly just runs Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libre Office anyway).
I tried it out of curiosity and because I write software that I need to compile and test on a variety of OSes. I've not tried this latest version yet, but am looking forward to doing so.
Of course, my anecdote is not data. The machines on which I run GhostBSD have wired Internet access and generic, somewhat elderly hardware. Neither your experience nor mine can be generalized all that far. Many people actually like Windows... seems weird to me, but de gustibus non disputandum est (and such preferences really do come down to taste).
> Not everything is about the thing that you happen to care about.
I expect that for the Congresscritters, in this case, it is all about what they care about. If you're a Republican, you worry that law enforcement will turn up more stuff on Trump, and/or turn into an instrument of left-wing, Dogless Socialism oppressing freedom-loving Americans. If you're a Democrat, you can be reasonably concerned that the second Trump administration would use law enforcement on its opposition to ensure permanent political power. Bipartisan agreement, for mirror-image reasons.
Yes, they're different lengths. A metric hour is 0.1 day. (Used briefly in France after the Revolution, though I can't imagine it got a _lot_ of use.) 10 metric hours per day, 100 metric minutes per metric hour, 100 metric seconds per metric minute.
Still doesn't work out, though. 6 kilometers in a metric hour would be about 1.5 miles/imperial hour.
Not sure why you're being downvoted here.
This should certainly be useful for (for example) solar-electric (ion drive) propulsion, such as was used for the Dawn mission. Spacecraft using this usually have lots (and lots) of solar panels. Lower-mass panels means more payload or more power or some of each. There are probably some other space-based applications that could profit from having more or lower-mass solar power.
I've never been able to accurately assign blame to a cosmic ray for a problem in my code. I have been able to blame the full moon for a software issue, though.
Excel has been a day off since 1900 Feb 29. Most of us are aware that 1900 was not actually a leap year; Microsoft, apparently, was not.
I'm not sure if that means that Spreadsheet Day is today, or was two days ago.
Don't believe a word of it, unfortunately.
(33) Polyhymnia has gotten a rash of publicity recently. Some nuclear physicists did some theoretical computations of the density of extremely high-Z nuclei (well beyond the currently known transuranic elements), and found that in an expected further "island of stability", you'd get extreme densities. All quite plausible.
They then uncritically accepted some of the really high estimates for asteroid densities. Formally, the density for (33) Polyhymnia is 75.28 +/- 9.71 gm/cm^3. However, the nature of computing asteroid masses is that you sometimes get fluke results that are either negative or obviously way too high. You need to report these so that people understand that any asteroid mass value has to be treated with caution. But it appears to have misled our nuclear physicist colleagues. (Asteroid sizes are usually determined with decent accuracy; it's the masses that are very hard to get.)
(I am the author of a program that is used, among other things, to determine asteroid masses based on their perturbations of other asteroids. The recent publicity didn't go over well with those of us in the asteroid research community. There are some very solid mass determinations out there, but this wasn't one of them.)
They have been imaged several times on their way out. In this image, the telescope was tracking on Psyche and its booster, which is why all the stars are trailed. Psyche is the fainter of the two dots at center. They were both about 190000 km away (roughly half the distance to the moon).
And a Romanian astronomer got this video of the booster (Psyche was too faint to show up in this one) a bit later and slightly further out.
(The images were not made "just for fun", though that was a part of it. JPL will do an excellent job of tracking the spacecraft, but our knowledge of where the booster is going comes from images of this sort. In particular, we'd like to be able to identify it if the asteroid-hunting surveys catch it again in a few years; we find "mystery" objects returning from heliocentric orbit every now and then.)
The general sentiment here is that this survey must be complete rubbish. I lean in that direction, and certainly hope it is, but...
I remember that after 9/11, most of my fellow USAians were perfectly happy to give up liberty in the pursuit of "security". Core values we supposedly had of a right to a fair trial, freedom from surveillance, etc. were merrily discarded. (As they had been fifty years earlier during the McCarthy era. And somewhat so during the post-WW1 Red Scare.)
The Chinese government has almost total control of what their citizens know about, of the sort Western politicians can (thus far) only dream of. I doubt most Chinese people think that they, personally, need to be surveilled. But they may be convinced that everybody else on the planet needs to be surveilled.
"if we've learned anything about AI chatbots, it's that theory is a very poor guide to practice..."
More generally : in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they aren't.
(I do realize that some people have no really practical choice but to use Microsoft software*. Articles such as these make me very relieved that it's been a long time since I've been in that group.)
(*) I was going to write 'Microsoft products'. But I actually do like my Microsoft natural keyboard. Even Satan has his good days.
https://www.census.gov/popclock/world states that the current world population is a bit over eight billion, with some other sites going to 8.1 billion. So we have about eight billion humans, only 7 billion of whom have (real or simulated) brains... well, that does sometimes seem about right.
I similarly found that map familiar. I think it's the "World Data Bank II" (or maybe III) dataset. I used it in an early version of my astronomy software for maps such as this one . It was a very useful dataset. It's not all that detailed, but it's quite easy to make maps from it.
I have put the data for WDB on my site (about 1.2 MBytes compressed, 4.7 MBytes uncompressed). Its only real downside is that it dates back to 1992 and must have been based on older data, which is why you don't see (for example) boundaries within the former Soviet Union, and East and West Germany have a border between them.
> Afterwards the managed thanked me and said it was very useful talking to a real user, rather than someone just testing the application.
I'm a one-man band (write, test, sell the software, which is used by -- among others -- observers at telescopes looking for asteroids.) I talk a lot with users and sometimes _think_ I've gotten things right.
But I remember the first time I actually went up on the mountain for a night of observing and saw my software in use and how they actually did what they do, and realized just how many stupid things I'd done. Many weren't things anybody had complained about; I just hadn't realized that people were doing X because they didn't see superior option Y. Or in other cases, that adding an option Z would be a truly excellent idea.
i wholeheartedly concur with your point about the utility of talking with real users. I'd add to that that it's amazingly helpful to _watch_ real users in action.
> What does it matter?
In a sense, you're right, but I'd still be curious. Manufacturers often self-certify, so they have the relevant testing gear around and it mostly sits unused until you release your next product. I could imagine somebody checking out what the competition's phones do.
If so, I'd see it as a good thing. It doesn't seem government agencies can keep up with the testing, and self-certification is apt to be iffy if nobody checks your work.
Thank you. Your reply (and a few others on Stack Exchange) suggest that at the very least, I need not fear borking the car. (I was reasonably sure that removing the fuse or wrapping the antenna in tinfoil would be safe. After all, Nissan has to assume that you'll sometimes lose the cell signal. But it's good to see that others have done this successfully.)
> You many not have to worry if it's really old
Yup, I read about some folks with the 3G versions complaining that they couldn't connect to their car. (There actually _are_ some uses for being able to do so : set the car to start heating/cooling a bit before you get into it, for example, while it's still charging. Not enough to make me willing to accept the surveillance.) Anyway... my vehicle is fairly new.
The thought did occur to me that the antenna ought to be accessible. Apparently, these cars have a TCU (telemetry control unit); some comments suggest I may be able to justt pull out a fuse, which is well within my limited vehicle repair skills. As you note, further research is required... I'm finding depressingly little on "how to shut off telemetry" and too much of "how do I get the telemetry to work". But the latter is giving me ideas on the former.
I tend to drive vehicles as long as possible, aided by an excellent mechanic. But when our last car died, I bought a used... Nissan Leaf.
It's actually pretty good, as a car. If you could disable all the "helpful extras" and have it be a battery connected to motors connected to wheels, sort of like a yestercentury car except using electricity instead of hydrocarbons, it'd be Just Fine.
I'd really like to just wrap some tinfoil around whatever transmitter/receiver our surveillance state overlords have implemented. (Or snip a wire or two, or whatever else would do the job.) I'm a software guy, though. Any commentards have thoughts about how you'd fix this monstrosity?
About three decades ago, I quit my day job and wrote a desktop planetarium software for DOS, then moved it to Windows. When it came time to do a Linux version, I tried simply running the program under Wine. There were a few bugs, almost all of which turned out to be "me" problems (bugs I'd made that had somehow gone undetected on "real" Windows). Fixing these and working around the few remaining Wine issues, I effectively had the desired Linux version of my program, with very little effort.
The required changes were roughly at the level I've encountered when Microsoft created a new fork of Windows (a few changes required for Vista, then for Win7, etc.) You do have the problem that vendors will make those fixes for a Microsoft fork of Windows, but will rarely make them for Wine.
Note that this was about ten years back. Wine has improved a fair bit since then.
If you have source code, Wine is an excellent idea. I'd recommend it just for the ability to catch bugs. I've had decent success with closed-source code on Wine, but when it fails, there's less you can do to fix/work around it.
I learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard with the Biblical method ("seek and ye shall find"). When I developed carpal tunnel, I switched to Dvorak(*) and did so touch-typing. Nearly thirty years later, I still touch-type on Dvorak, but have to look at the keyboard for QWERTY.
(*) The carpal tunnel went away and hasn't come back. However, I also switched to an ergonomic keyboard and better chair/desk at the same time (the carpal tunnel was really bad and treatments limited back then), so I don't really know if it helped. The switchover did raise my typing speed immensely, though,
The James Webb telescope is already at L2
Also Spektr-RG (Russian-ESA collaboration X-ray/gamma-ray telescope) and Gaia (ESA spacecraft getting very exact measurements of the positions, motions, and distances of about a billion stars). All three spacecraft stay roughly opposite the sun in the sky, but can wander around dozens of degrees from that point. Every few months, they have to apply small maneuvers to stay "balanced" at L2, similarly to how you might move to keep a yard/metre-stick balanced on your palm.
Anyway... the spacecraft in question have lots of room to play in; there's no risk of a collision.
(I'm aware of all this because my day job is with the asteroid surveys. In images, these objects are about the same brightness and have motions similar to near-earth asteroids. So we have to keep track of them, plus some spacecraft in lower Earth orbits. We've had a few instances where spacecraft were "discovered" and briefly thought to be asteroids... in fact, I'm currently in the process of adding Euclid and its Falcon 9 booster to the list of objects we check.)
I switched to Dvorak decades ago in hopes of relieving severe carpal tunnel(*). The keyboard has US keycaps, and I can switch between QWERTY, Dvorak, and Russian layouts. Which does puzzle my wife and daughter briefly on the rare occasions that they need to use my computer, until they remember to set the QWERTY layout.
Converting 'password1' to 'кфжжбыщр1' is another benefit.
(*) The carpal tunnel went away. But I also switched to a split keyboard and a more ergonomic desk, so I don't really know what did the trick.