Could have been worse
The planet could have been knocked into a black hole in an intergalactic game of billiards
I'll get me coat. Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams
4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
I would have thought that the bigger the rock, the harder it would be to shatter into completely harmless debris anyway. If the rock is big, the chances of seriously large chunks capable of seriously spoiling plans for the weekend would be higher than with smaller stuff, quite apart from the gravitational re-accumulation. Nudging a rock out of a dangerous orbit always seemed the more sensible, if not necessarily easy, option than going in with all guns blazing (which is the default Hollywood option for any problem, it seems).
Icon, well, because an H-bomb will seem like a damp squib compared to a major asteroid strike.
I have an ASI178MM planetary camera with 6 Mpixel, 12 bits/pixel grey scale running 60 FPS uncompressed and pumping the data to a Samsung T5 500 GB extern SSD at 400-450 MB/s, grabbing some 250 GB of lunar data in under 20 minutes. I would love to have the ASI183MM (20-odd Mpixel) running at the same frame rate. I would capture more quickly, and need far fewer panes for full-resolution lunar mosaics. Perhaps a niche, but there must be more use cases
The problem isn't necessarily a scripting language inside a word processor or spreadsheet. After all, LaTeX allows all sorts of scripting (made very easy with the ifthen package), and I am not aware of any security issues with that. The problem is allowing scripts like this to do anything not related to the document itself. That is a security nightmare.
I remember years back when walking to the car with the kids (they must have been 5 and 6 at the time), and pointing at the bright red dot in the sky, telling them that that was planet Mars, and two little robotic cars built on earth were driving around there (Spirit was still up and running). They were astounded at the idea, and back home I had to show them pictures from Mars, and explain about rockets and robotics. Inspirational stuff from NASA once more!
I will raise a glass to the success of Opportunity, and all folks at NASA and elsewhere who contributed
Waiting until exploits are out there would also be hampered if we do not know what exploits to look for. Of course it makes sense to alert the manufacturer of the vulnerable hardware or software before going public, and there is a case for waiting some time before going public, but only telling the general public about serious threats LONG after discovery is simply not on.
Brilliant!!
I do however often feel that an incoming Airbus would be more easily avoided than that shit load of students cycling three abreast along the narrow bicycle path on the wrong side of the road as I cycle to work in the morning. The poor dears apparently find it too much of an effort to make a detour of AT LEAST TEN WHOLE METRES (shock horror) to cycle to their lecture halls on the right side of the road so as not to inconvenience other people.
</rant>
There are many complicating factors, many of which have been noted already. A point I haven't seen yet is the issue that maybe more of the code written in "old school" languages was written by older, more experienced coders, whereas the newer languages which might have better design of themselves are more likely to have been used by less experienced coder. Not sure if this can readily be tested, or whether it has an effect.
There is also the issue that compares to owners of safer cars tending to drive less safely, because they feel safe in their car. Likewise, I know that when I needed to program in assembly, way back when, I was FAR more careful about what I was doing, and checking and double checking my reasoning before even starting to write. Indeed, I was careful to limit the usage of assembly to an absolute minimum, to handle some hardware issues. Of course I managed to crash my machine a number of times (in the "good old" days of MS-DOS) a couple of times when testing the code, but the production code I delivered generally didn't cause any issues. "Back in the safety" of Pascal (the compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot), I relied much more on the compiler or run-time system giving me sensible error messages ("integer array index out of bounds" is SO much more useful than "segmentation fault"), than with either assembly or C. So maybe people writing code in "safe" languages don't pay as much attention to any remaining pitfalls as those who know they are walking in a minefield. I am not sure this is the case, but it might be worth considering.
Furthermore, quite apart from how difficult it is to fix things in brittle code, there is the issue of actually finding errors in poorly-written code, or hard to read languages. So number_of_bugs_FOUND != number_of_bugs_in_code.
Finally, I have had to write bug fixes that weren't fixes for bugs in MY code, but workarounds for problems either with a compiler or a run-time library that wasn't open source. I once was working on MS-Pascal code in which I knew the linked lists used had an even number of nodes. Therefore, if the "next" pointer in a node wasn't NIL, I could safely jump two nodes on, which in Pascal would read:
current := current^.next^.next;
which caused the program to crash. I replaced the above with:
current := current^.next;
current := current^.next;
so again, two jumps without NIL pointer test in between. This worked flawlessly. Clearly, the compiler couldn't handle the double indirection in the first version. I tried both versions on a different Pascal compiler, and both worked flawlessly. Again number_of_bug_FIXES != number_of_bugs
Oh, joy!! We “will have the best update experience based on our next generation machine learning model.”
isn't this just management speak for "we have given the computer a list of people who screamed blue murder loudest last time round, so please install updates in increasing order of dB plus number of obscenities used."
Alternatively, it might mean "go stick your head in a pig"
I'll be going. The one with the HHGTTG radio play cassette tapes in the pocket
After the FCC is built, no doubt they will want something even bigger. In astronomy, we have a related syndrome called "aperture fever" (and a tendency to run out of superlatives when thinking of names: what do we do after the Extremely Large Telescope? Outrageously Large Telescope? Obscenely Large Telescope? Humongous Telescope?). I wonder what they call it in particle physics? Circular fever?
Not so much bad, but more a wicked sense of humour, I would suggest.
Anyway, the only mild drawback I would see is that the Iron Maiden song is now playing in my mind on an endless loop. Quite like the song, and it is better than my mind for reasons best left uninvestigated hearing the aircraft engine on my flight back home distinctly playing "Jolene" by Dolly Parton for half of the trip. The other half it was playing Ozzy Osborne's "Crazy Train", so that was alright.
Besides, the smoke is also harmful to non-smokers. I have never smoked in my life*, being allergic to even small quantities of tobacco smoke (pot is even worse in that respect), so I am spared the difficulty of quitting. I will applaud anyone's effort to stop, however
* Tobacco, that is. I have smoked duck, chicken, salmon, mackerel and a few other species of fish. Whisky-marinated and cedar-wood-smoked salmon is to die for. Tobacco, by contrast is to die off