Re: Question:
I know this one.
a, c and d.
Do I get a prize?
16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
BTW As I'm presuming most of you are not posting from within the US you are by NSA rules subhuman scum furriners, whose data they can study and mine at their leisure, not like American citizens.
Who'd they'd need to get one of their sister agencies abroad to trawl through instead.
Nothing too detailed just what you could use if for it the error bars on instrument X get too large.
Kepler has produced amazing results. Not just the worlds themselves but the statistics of how common they are. Kepler has looked at a lot of stars. Before this that number was somewhere between almost 0 (our Sun has them but no one else in the galaxy does) to 1 (every other sun has at least one).
Something tells me that because of Keplers high precision requirements there are surveys it can do ever with it's reduced mode.
Exciting time.
"It would either cost millions, or it would save millions, depending on how the weatherwane of the casino was turning."
Actually I've been around when one of these events happened.
And when the banksters call their lawyers the damages they will be suing for will always be losses IE profit their departs would have made.
Probably the only time in my life (or his) I'll see a Board member of an investment bank run up 4 flights of stairs.
"Only one hour of lost data from a catastrophic db failure?"
Since this is SaaS and t'Cloud the correct answer for the amount of downtime should be zero
This is a paid services, so hardware and software should be provisioned (and, oh yes, tested) to a level to support the customers paying for this service.
Fail is appropriate.
Up till now it's all been models.
I'm not sure how well they work at what I presume are very low and very large interacting magnetic fields.
Thumbs up for explaining how some of the signs of leaving the solar system could be detected and not others.
As a physicist observed about another debate "We are in a state of such confusion we will definitely learn something"
I guess this is part of the reason they used to transmit messages as 5 character alphanumeric groups.
One of the classics for Enigma was (IIRC) to look for fo "Heil Hitler" at the end of the message. Get a station that used that and you could nail it's entire output (if not it's whole network).
Likewise DESCrack had a mode where the processing elements would interrupt the control processor if they found something that looked "interesting". You might get a bunch of false positives but intuitively this is also the idea of non uniform entryopy.
As for wireless door looks.
Oh look another proprietary IE secret protocol that has not been subject to public scrutiny and turns out to not quite as secure as its makers claim.
So bottom line randomness is the enemy of compressability. So first randomize your files contents. I don't mean what a character means, I mean it's actual location in the file IE transmit the file out of order, and try to ensure no one knows what type of file is being transmitted in the first place. If it's known that this file is a Word or Excel document you already know it's structure. You've already got cribs
Frankly I'm very surprised this assumption is made.
"Too true, JS19. Whatever happened to 'need to know'?"
Exactly.
The helicopter footage I can sort of get but the diplomatic stuff? That should have been not just above his pay grade but his CO, their CO and probably several levels further.
In fact how does a DoD employee (well technically) have access to the State Dept at all?
I'm pretty sure there are people in the USG who spend their careers devising filling and access control systems to stop ensure some people can see stuff and other cannot.
So either stuff has been mis filed on an epic scale or they have done the government equivalent of Windows giving users "Administrator" privilege by default.
If so then all it takes is one person with time on their hands and curiosity to find out how far down the rabbit hole they can go.
The rest is history.
Fail for the USG doing this stuff in the first place and fail again for not securing it.
""The great thing is that we live in a democracy. If we don't like what NSA is doing, we can just get rid of the government and put in a different government," "
Because the American people voted to be spied upon in the first place, right, Larry?
Like f**k they did.
This was the work of the people behind the people who wrote THE PATRIOT Act and a group of high level Intelligence bureaucrats.
Because they could This is data fetishism. It's irrational.
"ot really. Take a look at a map of faults in CA. There are small ones all over the place and they are moving quasi-independently. There will be sheering problems along the length of the Hyperloop. This is not a big deal with a normal roadway, but trying to build a 613 km long low-pressure vessel on top of that seems kind of tricky."
Darn I think you've hit it's Achilles heel. Perhaps page 5 might give some guidance.
"A ground based high speed rail system is susceptible to Earthquakes and needs
frequent expansionjoints to deal with thermal expansion/contraction and
subtle, large scale land movement.
By building a system on pylons, where the tube is not rigidly fixed at any point,
you can dramatically mitigate Earthquake risk and avoid the need for expansion
joints. Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place two adjustable lateral
(XY) dampers and one vertical (Z) damper"
As long as those dampers have the range to accommodate those motions (and this thing is ever built) that should not be a major problem.
"A metal tube, with a partial vacuum, and capsules full of squashy humans travelling at 760mph, 30s apart through deserted countryside. It's not as if our gun-toting friends are known for say, taking pot shots at things...."
You are perhaps thinking of something with the thickness of air conditioning ducting?
Think again.
This stuff is 20-23mm thick. That's high pressure gas pipe thick. I suspect quite a lot of ammo will simply crumple if fired at it.
In a pipe that's either 7'4" or 10'10" wide it'll take a pretty big hole to depressurize a 700 km long pipe.
BTW If you want to work out the air volume rushing in keep in mind that the pressure difference would need to be about 1.4 atm to get choked, IE speed of sound airflow, so below 340m/s of air in rush speed.
How does that compare with the alternatives?
Well page 8 of the report says
$105 for HS rail taking 2:38
$158 by air 1:15
$115 by car 5:30 (30mpg with fuel at $4/gal)
Provided there is adequate parking and vehicle rental facilities at either end it sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Of course if some of those vehicles were battery powered and they got their charge from the surplus produced by the line....
Not hard vacuum, well below the milliTorr range. So relatively easy to create and maintain.
Sidesteps eminent domain because he plans to site next to Interstate 5.
1 track is more equal to a freeway lane than a conventional rail track, with its associated security fences etc.
Putting it on stilts mitigates the earthquake issue in CA and allows re boost if it slows down.
Small town don't have to be cut out of the loop as you could install Y joints (admittedly at very shallow angles) to allow them to join the path.
The joker in the pack is the software. We're looking at something like the Denver baggage handling system with the baggage carriers moving at M0.9. Anyone remember how well that worked out?
TBH I think it's a very clever idea and sidesteps the need for a working "Subterrene" but that SW issue is a biggie.
Musk has said he's not really interested in anything that either helps fund his trip to Mars or helps build the tech needed to get him there. I think this could help with the funding. The really attractive part of this is that it's incremental costs are low (relative to rail) once you've built the tube.
For the duration of a short drive and the price of a bus ticket (I'm guessing) you get a long journey done in a very short period of time.
BTW I've also learned that "Kantrowitz's limit" is why why drop a soda can into the end of an empty food tin it slides like an air piston. Interesting.
When one of them says something like "Drawing on our extensive expertise in this area" what they mean is "Drawing on our extensive phone book of sub contractors, individual contractors and competent ex-employees we will offer to throw a bone to on the condition they don't let on they don't actually work for us."
TUS major "skills" are in fact
Schoozing politicians and senior civil servants.
Powerpoint.
Drawing out the diagrams their assorted subbies will implement.
Failing to point out obvious problem so they can make serious money on the change requests EG EDS and the 2000+ change requests for. the CSA II system
"The Usual Suspects" remain the only viable (as in the only ones HMG "trusts" despite their track record of fu**ups) to do the job.
Option b). TUS set up a raft of pseudo SME's to snout up the work.
It's a commendable idea and might actually save taxpayers money.
But the devils is (as always) in the detail.
I think on that basis it's the other way around. Wind power "supplements" conventional generation.
Oddly I thought China had quite a lot of rivers. I'd have guessed micro hydro and biogas would have been better at the village level. Geothermal as well?
"My wife is Uruguayan and you'd never think, from looking, her family has been in South America since Uruguay's independence in the early 19th century."
Actually I was aware of this peripherally. When Peru elected a Peruvian of Japanese descent and of course Pinochets planned successor was one Eric Strosser, who did not sound particularly Spanish or Portugese (the other great colonial power in that area before the US decide to treat it as their back yard).
What was the old line about Argentinians? Dress like Italians, cook like the Spanish and think their English?
It's a bit more diverse than perhaps people think.
(Tall, upright European in a white suite but lives in Latin America. Hmmm)
Old Nazi war criminal?
NB given the involvement of the United Fruit company in payrolling soldiers to kill union activists (hence the term "Bannan republic.") who better to put in charge of the local operation?
IRL The Man from Del Monte says "Ja."
"The only things that will in theory be easy are those in byte compiled languages such as Java and .NET, but on the RT the underlying framework is just not there. .NET is only a small subset implemented and Java is non existent.
Runtime environments for C/C++ etc - again just not there. Microsoft didn't implement full Windows on RT. They implemented a subset of it, or rather an approximation of something looking like Windows that just runs Windows Store Apps, and nothing more."
And that is exactly my point.
What I was describing is what MS could have done and why it would have been fairly easy to do.
What you have described (very succinctly) is what they actually did
Which is to gut Windows and barely leave the name in tact.
That is deliberately making it more or less useless by stripping out core functionality. It's crap by design not accident, and you have to ask why?
The only sensible justification is to make ARM look bad. The equally likely explanation is MS is internally deeply dysfunctional as an organization and at some level people were convinced this was the right thing to do.
No I cannot devise a scenario where that makes any logical sense, but just being barking mad does not mean it did not happen.
I keep hearing either a)Great hardware, not good OS or b) OS is not really Windows compatible as you'd expect from such a device.
So blank the software and install a better OS.
Tricky for anyone but a hard core techie but what a challenge and what kudos for pulling it off?
As for the Outlook thing that could work given the high penetration of it into companies.
But are companies who bought WinRT tablets in the first place?
"Unfortunately this doesn't work well on Arm devices as they are 32 bit and the different chip architectures really get in the way :("
And that's kind of why you were voted town.
Which means your experience is long out of date.
As for ARM not running it well modern OS's (and that includes anything influenced by Unix) are about 90-95% written in a high level language. So the porting process is just a case of switching the compile option from x86 to ARM. Since ARM is the most common embedded architecture in the modern world, finding a bunch of good assembler programmers to build the underlying support (which they already have a template for) would be fairly straightforward also.
And of course the Common Runtime Environment, IE the VM that supports a lot of the interpreted systems that MS (EG Visual BASIC) and other 3rd party languages support is AFAIK also written in C or C++, as is the core of Office. MS are not stupid enough to write those things in anything interpreted.
In fact the only way MS can make such a clusterf**k of it was to develop a separate (or highly crippled) version of the code base.
So no, your view does not really hold up.
"Windows RT essentially forces companies to ditch their old legacy products moving to, for example, something web-based with perhaps the ability to have multiple different VPN setups. In essence a company would need to make itself less dependent on Windows to use Windows RT."
Interesting strategy.
Not good for MS of course.
No I don't have a problem with that.
In the wake of the Madrid rail bombings and not supported (or asked for) by the Spanish, despite their long history of fighting the ETA, perhaps because they knew what a real fascist dictatorship feels like.
Another little present from those wonderful civil servants at the Home Office.
Thank you so verymuch.
It seems if you want privacy and personal freedom destroyed electing an (allegedly) socialist government run by a lawyer is a pretty good idea.
"We'd like to spy on more of you more often, but we just don't have the facilities to do that in real time. Good thing we have lots of backup capacity so any of you step out of line we can just do a quick restore and see what you history says about you. Trust us, we're here for your safety."
Somehow I find my myself strangely unconvinced.
"This isn't about terrorism or targeted surveillance of specific subjects of interest: their own figures and a little common sense show this is a blanket trawl of any juicy tidbits."
Exactly
And remember the rest can always be archived for later "review" should you become a person they have become interested in.