* Posts by Captain Thyratron

367 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2008

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Smart meters pose hacker kill-switch risk, warn boffins

Captain Thyratron

Isolated?

Isolated 'til Joe Hacker brings a shovel, a wire stripper, and a laptop, sure.

Captain Thyratron

Thinking too small, man.

Sure, but you still have to go there to do that, and you can't use that to, say, remotely overcharge some poor bastard, steal somebody's credentials and abuse them for free power, or systematically shut off electrical service to most of a city. It's harder to get caught and standing beside your meter with a loaded rifle will not protect you in the least.

Captain Thyratron

It's not that it's electronic.

The problem isn't that it's electronic. The problem is that it's on a network that is necessarily no further than a few meters from the fingers of tens of millions of people, and that it creates a /massive/ incentive for somebody to figure out a way to break into that network.

It is a ubiquitous, physically indefensible, extremely high-value target. Is it not wiser to avoid this situation altogether than to try to solve an expensive and ultimately insoluble problem that doesn't need to exist?

Intel debuts hella-zippy optical future

Captain Thyratron

Simple solution.

Some standard will probably arise that uses fiber-optic cabling for data and a few copper wires for power, sort of like how 13W3 video used three coaxial cables for color channels and ten copper wires for other miscellaneous signals. This won't get rid of copper wires--just reduce how many we need and free it up for other things. (Of course, big power lines already use aluminum instead in order to save weight.)

UAE sees security threat in BlackBerrys

Captain Thyratron

Do they really?

No government that is less rational than a robotic Vulcan ought to be trusted with the power to intrude upon the private communications of any citizen it chooses, because that is a great, terrible, and easily abused power, and to place it in the hands of a government not fit to wield it reasonably is about as wise as placing a submachine gun in the hands of a mentally unstable six-year-old, except that, in the worst possible case, at least the six-year-old will run out of ammunition quickly. That in mind, is the government of the United Arab Emirates--or any country on Earth, for that matter, even the ones where Wahhabism *isn't* popular--rational enough to wield such power?

If you're worried about espionage or something similar that might somehow threaten the sovereignty of your country, then pencils, paper, one-time pads, and ordinary shortwave news radios should be the things that keep you up at night. If, on the other hand, you think that police should have such power just to stop drug dealers, then maybe you should take a moment to think about your country's drug policy.

Foxconn India closes factory as 250 workers fall ill

Captain Thyratron

bzzzzzz...

Let's not forget that India has a pretty mean mosquito problem. This is a country where DDT is getting less popular /because it isn't good enough at killing the mosquitos/.

US legalizes jailbroken iPhones

Captain Thyratron

Perish the thought.

Then I guess that'll put the kibosh on this whole business of jailbreaking iPhones, won't it?

Captain Thyratron

But of course.

Obviously, the implied solution is for every student to buy a copy. I mean license. How dare you get through high school without paying proper dues to the publisher who bought the rights to your assignment!

Captain Thyratron

At what cost?

Welcome to a negligible fraction of DMCA takedown notices. Amazon's same DRM powers also let them take away ebooks you foolishly thought you bought. Besides, isn't it a little bit crooked that those work whether or not the accusation is true? Take a stroll through Title 17 U.S.C. some time. It's not a pretty place these days. I suspect that many of the clauses therein are only allowed to exist because most of the population which is legally bound to obey them does not know about it. I didn't know how bad it was until I read it myself.

I also wish to add that authors are among the most vocal critics of the DMCA and DRM--partly because of their unfortunate effect on book sales. Books have historically been one of the most freely shared forms of media, and are the very origin of the concept of fair use--which the DMCA quite plainly shits all over. How many books have you found out about because somebody lent it to you? Books spread because their readership spreads them and thereby encourages others to get their own in hardcopy, because nothing feels quite as nice to read as a book in your hands--not to mention the little touches of clever typography that you tend to lose with ebooks. I mean, compare the Principia Discordia to its PDF analogue. I'm still ordering the thing in hardcopy because somebody lent it to me once and it's just way better than the PDF. DRM-infested texts have proven so unpopular with customers that many ebook publishers no longer bother; for example, O'Reilly's ebook sales more than double after they dumped DRM.

In fact, it's quite common for authors to put up at least part of a work entirely for free, then advertise that the entire thing is going to be a book. Sometimes, to make the thing more attractive, the author will add material to the book that's not on the website, but often it goes both ways; for example, both the internet version and the printed version of James Lileks' _The Gallery of Regrettable Food_ have things that are not in the other; the same is probably true of _Interior Desecrations_ and, in any case, everybody I know who's bought either had already read the majority of the material on the internet--and they bought them anyway. Alternatively, putting things on the website that aren't in the book encourages more people to visit the website. It works nicely both ways, and it's a popular tactic these days. Sometimes an author will put up a few books or a few chapters and then put the full version in print; if you really liked reading it, will you flinch at the idea of spending a few dollars to have the whole thing in your hands? And that's a thing to note--books usually just aren't very expensive unless the're rare*. If the price is right, more people will pay it.

I recall it created quite a stir when it became known that _Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby_ was going to be made into a proper printed book; I remember Ruby hackers waiting, salivating with one hand in their wallets, /to buy something that they already read for free/. Why? Because then they could own it; because then they could have it; because then it could be /theirs/. You don't get to do that with those obnoxious ebooks, software, and other media that you cannot own but merely license.

Authors want people to read their work--not shun it because it's bound in something nobody wants that tries to prevent people from treating books like books, and part of that is sharing them with your friends. When you buy a book, you /own/ it, and that's an awful nice thing these days, isn't it?

*Or they're recently published editions of textbooks, which obey their own horrifying system of economics because students have little or no choice in what they buy or for how much. I should be brief; that's a whole other hideous story. But who wants to pirate three hundred pages of poorly-worded calculus problems when it's $20 used anyway?

Captain Thyratron

Now that's comedy.

I hate the smell of doublethink in the morning. It smells like...MPAA lawyers. On the other hand, I love to see the bastards squirm.

IBM's zEnterprise 196 CPU: Cache is king

Captain Thyratron

That is partially true.

IBM will charge out the ass for nearly every aspect of the things, but maintenance and power are relatively cheap compared to an equivalently powerful quantity of, say, Dell servers--ESPECIALLY power (and HVAC). (IBM might charge enough for service contracts that maybe you're right abount maintenance.)

The >$1E6 acquisition cost and horrifying expense of software licenses and initial cost of the service contract, handy as it may be, just scares off most people. If, however, you can afford that, it is probably cheaper in the long run. Even if it isn't cheaper (and I cannot imagine an equivalent quantity of x86 servers saving money on power and ventilation no matter what kind kind of toad I lick), it is certainly more reliable and better at running a hair under full capacity for ten years straight. Most workloads do not require that much reliability, but for those that do...well, I'm glad mainframes exist. They can use ALL of their muscle ALL of the time, which is something that a generic x86 server running Linux is not going to do. No, it's going to start to choke before it even reaches 90% continuous utilization, and it'll probably break and have to be taken down for maintenance. It probably doesn't have things like hot-swappable memory and processors.

I like it that things like credit cards and air traffic control still work right.

Spitzer 'scope spots Buckyballs in spaaace

Captain Thyratron

That's quite a find.

It's amazing what atoms can do if you let them float around in space and react with each other for several billion years. Eventually they might accumulate on young planets and give rise to creatures that post comments to threads like this one.

In all seriousness, it's pretty neat that somebody found buckministerfullerenes out there. While the argument that they're resilient and can stand up to cosmic radiation is pretty convincing, I'm still kind of amazed somebody found them. I mean, somebody figured out all of those modes of vibration and the emission/absorption spectra, without knowledge of which this discovery would have been rather more difficult, if not practically impossible. The fanciest spectroscopy I ever got up to was observing the split in the Balmer alpha line of hydrogen caused by the additional presence of deuterium. These guys are a century ahead of me.

Captain Thyratron

Yawn.

Falling through the atmosphere of Neptune, possibly.

Microsoft's ARM deal fuels hope of a chilled-out Xbox

Captain Thyratron
Black Helicopters

No good as Faraday cages.

They're actually terrible at attenuating RF because they're just domes--the bottom part is wide open, and the whole thing isn't even grounded. In some bands, they provide a few dB of antenna gain. Some guy tested this out once with a fancy network analyzer and some antennas.

Some of the bands in which the hats provided gain were government bands, too...

Zuckerberg: I'm 'quite sure' I own Facebook

Captain Thyratron

The case of Bastard v. Bastard.

Whoever wins, I'm glad I went to the trouble of getting rid of my Facebook account. At least, I /appear/ to have gotten rid of it. You can tell they don't want to give up potentially profitable user data when the tell you that you have to go for twenty days after the account is closed without logging in for it to actually go away--if, indeed, it does. You know, just in case you change your mind.

4chan flings faeces at Gawker

Captain Thyratron

/b/ is the power of stupid people in large groups.

Oi weh, what passes for hacking these days. These kids'll be in for a surprise if they ever earn the ire of the real thing.

/b/ used to be kind of a cool place. People posted lots of neat stuff there back in the day, and the entire point behind forcing people to post anonymously was that it emphasized content instead of identity, which should have discouraged identity politics and egotistical dick-waving.

I guess the reputation of the place attracted the wrong kind of people, though--the people who thought /b/ was about being cool or something and wanted to be cool themselves--and they have made their unfortunate mark on the culture of /b/. Whereas, previously, puffing up one's feathers and trying to look cool was frowned upon and invited derision, it's now become acceptable as long as enough other people are doing it at the same time, and as long as the purpose is to make yourself feel better by finding something to attack with a group of like-minded idiots. Even if forced anonymity discourages the direct stroking of one's ego in public, those users disappointed by the erstwhile lack of egotistical dick-waving may now satisfy themselves with /b/'s new culture of herd mentality and trying to be cool by being a dick to people. They've harnessed the power of stupid people in large groups, to the detriment of the internet at large, and they're proud of it.

Since most of the people who weren't obsessed with trying to be cool have since left for greener pastures (the greenest probably being 420chan, though there are several), it's about all that /b/ has to be proud of. The other boards on 4chan are not as bad, but have nonetheless absorbed some of /b/'s lamentable culture.

UK Skylon spaceplane set for engine test in '3-4 years'

Captain Thyratron
Headmaster

Hint.

It's not a closed system.

Captain Thyratron

NASA is a self-licking ice cream cone.

What's wrong with them? They have no reason to be anything other than a slow-moving, risk-averse bureaucracy. NASA has been a pretty worthless organization ever since the Soviet Union stopped existing. Now the only thing that motivates them is self-preservation; taking risks like actually doing stuff is dangerous and requires that someone, somewhere, swallow the pill bureaucrats dread most: Responsibility for something. Thus, it is in their best interest to do as little as they can while still securing funding from Congress. Isn't that what anybody would do if they thought they could get away with claiming that they needed $35bn to do something we already did in the sixties?

By the way, the Ares rockets, along with the lest of the Constellation project, are getting the axe. There were a few pretty good articles about it here, in fact. Obama and company decided the price wasn't right and that they'd rather support people who have every reason to get payloads into space safely and yet more efficiently and cheaply than NASA: Commercial firms that lose high-paying customers if they screw up.

Captain Thyratron

Because they couldn't.

Probably because the American space program makes the American arms industry look expedient and efficient by comparison.

Dell warns on spyware infected server motherboards

Captain Thyratron

The same way the ground affects a building.

System firmware operates at such a low level that, frequently, it can do things to the OS that the latter can do nothing about. Beware anything that may, under any circumstance, have unimpeded access to memory. For example, I happen to remember there being a cute little hack for Openboot PROM systems*. Basically, you figure out where your shell's process resides in memory, look at the system headers to learn where the UID is, jump into the firmware console, change the UID to 0, resume execution of the OS, and find yourself sitting in front of a root shell. (Of course, this requires access to the system console and the absence of a PROM password.) Of course, this is just an example of what sort of things the firmware can get away with. I would not expect the aforementioned method to be very closely analogous to what malicious firmware might do, since malicious firmware would not do well to rely on anybody pressing stop+A or similar. No, there's an easier way than that.

You mention that Linux goes out of its way to control the hardware directly, but it has to /boot/ at some point. As anybody knows who's ever had occasion to type "init=/bin/sh" or invoked a conversational boot in VMS, operating systems are (necessarily) quite vulnerable to anything that can interact with the booting process. I would think that this would be the first line of attack for malicious firmware.

*Here: http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=53&id=9

Raptor over Blighty: Watch the stealth fighter in infrared

Captain Thyratron

Taking air superiority for granted?

An adversary may well be a hole in the wall whose military hardware is out of date, but some of that equipment may nonetheless include operational fighter jets, like the one that sank the HMS Sheffield.

Oakland green lights 'industrial' marijuana cultivation

Captain Thyratron

Oh, goody.

What a funny country I live in. We give children plain, straight methamphetamine (trade name Desoxyn, FDA-approved to treat ADHD), we pickle our livers with the metabolic products of ethanol, and we think, rightly, that it's your own business if you decide you're crazy enough to roll up a datura flower and smoke it; yet we're afraid of /this/ stuff and it's a big deal that somebody might be able to grow plain old Mary Jane industrially in California without being tossed in the pokey for the rest of his life. I guess drugs are only bad if they're /fun/.

I expected California would be the nucleation site, so to speak, for this sort of thing to get started legitimately. It's probably all the hippies and the rumors of incredible dope coming from that state that compelled me to make such a prediction.

I, for one, look forward to the improvement in quality. If there's one thing America does well, it's agriculture. I also look forward to convincing lots of alcoholics to take up something fun that won't encourage them to smash any of my dishes or vomit on any of my furniture. By comparison, the worst messes potheads have ever made in my house have been a few dirty dishes.

Cops taser Somerset chap's nether regions

Captain Thyratron

It's a weapon. Treat it with respect.

Police who are trained to carry and use firearms tend not to whip them out for anything trivial, since shooting people is generally considered a big deal. Tasers, on the other hand, are not treated with the same respect as guns, which I guess is why some police see it fit to point them at people during traffic stops.

As anybody knows who was introduced to firearm safety at any point in their lives, you should not point a weapon at somebody unless you are at least considering shooting them with it.

Captain Thyratron

Really?

It is quite likely /because/ they do not carry guns (and were thus probably not trained to carry guns) that they do not show the proper respect for other point-and-click interfaces. A taser in the hands of somebody who doesn't know how to handle a gun is asking for trouble, because now he's got something almost as dangerous plus the silly idea that, if something goes wrong, it won't cause more than pain. Wouldn't it be better to get the idea in one's head that someone could die when you pull the trigger? Isn't that the less dangerous way of thinking?

Captain Thyratron

Perhaps.

Or, possibly, it happens plenty:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1294974/Bungling-armed-police-fired-guns-accidentally-110-TIMES-3-years.html

110 accidental gunshots (if an admittedly suspicious source is to be believed*) between less than seven thousand authorized firearms officers in three years is pretty bad, if you ask me.

*Actual number may be closer to \sqrt{7655 \pi} e^{99i}.

Captain Thyratron

It looks fast, so it must be speeding.

The funny thing (for some values of funny) is that a lot of cops think just like you do. I will give an example of something that actually happened once.

Suppose two cars are driving on a road whose posted speed limit is thirty-five miles per hour. One of them is driving at fifty miles per hour. Who gets busted and has to pay a fine to the city?

The guy in the BMW who, while minding his own business and doing nothing wrong, got passed by someone who was driving at fifty miles per hour.

Captain Thyratron

Curious, that.

A BMW is mentioned and a swarm of people start commenting like it's a thread about Apple products. I'm glad we're all so mature that we're past the stage of applying flippant judgements to people based on what car they drive or what computer they use or whatever.

Futurologist warns of malevolent dust menace

Captain Thyratron

Let's try to design one!

I'm going to be really nice and suppose that the antennas on these things have an effective area of a millimeter squared. They're dust, after all, and even that's pretty big for dust; perhaps most of the size is the antenna, or else it isn't going to make very good dust. It's got to be tiny enough to float around like dust, so I'll just suppose that the antenna is this fluffy conductive thing rather larger than the actual device. Also, let's hope that that size is still small enough for the things to be fairly inconspicuous. Let's see what happens when we try to transmit a signal over a distance of ten centimeters, which is pretty reasonable if we consider that these things might rely on one another à la Zigbee for getting information around, thereby compensating for each robot's short range; additionally, let's suppose that, somehow, by virtue of some damned incredible energy source, these little specks of dust are capable of transmitting a microwatt of power; bear in mind that the little dust robot has to keep this up at least for a few hours to be useful. I think these specifications and conditions are pretty generous, and perhaps overoptimistic beyond what reality can justify. Nonetheless, bear with me.

Antenna gain G is related to effective area A_eff by

G = \frac{4 \pi}{\lambda^2} A_eff

Let's suppose that the wavelength is about as big as the antenna. This is pretty generous, of course--most hams make do with less, and generally half a wavelength or even less is just fine. Put in the numbers, then, using the assumed effective area, and the gain you get is four pi. I wish to note that I have made radio contacts halfway across North America with quite less antenna gain than that, so I don't think it's such a terrible number. For the record, the wavelength here corresponds to a frequency of about three terahertz. Well, this is the future, so let's pretend that this kind of thing is cheap to make on a scale of less than a millimeter--Stranger things have happened. Remember, most of the size is some bizarre, lightweight antenna, or the stuff will be more like dirt than dust and won't disperse well.

Well, let's plug this all into the Friis transmission formula, which relates received power to transmitted power:

\frac{P_r}{P_t} = G_t G_r \left( \frac{\lambda}{4 \pi R} \right)^2

P is power, G is gain, R is distance (ten centimeters), and the subscripts t and r stand for transmitted and received, respectively. I like working in MKS units, so that's what you're going to get.

The answer we get is

\frac{P_r}{P_t} = 1 x 10^{-4}

This is a dimensionless number, since it's watts divided by watts. Bearing in mind that the transmitted power is one microwatt--remember, this is a speck of dust--the received power is

P_r = P_t (1 X 10^{-4}) = 1 X 10^{-10} W

or one hundred picowatts. This is reasonable for a good receiver to pick up--provided, of course, that we really can get a dust speck to transmit a microwatt of power for a long enough time to be useful.

So far, thanks to some rather generous handwaving on my part, the little dust robots appear to be theoretically viable, albeit not by a very comfortable margin and entirely depending on some things that might not be true. However, anyone with a background in electrical engineering is likely to point out that I have entirely neglected noise, polarization, and probability of bit error. In a perfectly noise-free environment, the described dust-robots might be able to work, provided that the necessary computing hardware is willing to share that dust speck with a one-microwatt transmitter and the associated power source; if you wish to dismiss this notion as fantasy, I won't be angry. You're probably right. By comparison, today's absolutely most efficient microcontrollers manage to consume ten or twenty times that in sleep mode. Now, what happens when we add a hundred-milliwatt jamming source to the room, plus whatever noise floor you'd get if terahertz-range transmitters were so common that you could fit one in a speck of dust? Some futuristic terahertz-range analogue of a really zippy wireless access point could do a number on the poor things. Also, an engineer of any sort will point out that I have said nothing of what these things might cost. Suddenly, the dust robots have plummeted from their lofty perch of theoretical viability and fallen unceremoniously into the filthy gutter of lousy ideas that looked good in theory.

If I've made any errors in arithmetic, let me know. I must warn that my memory of antenna theory is a little rusty and that I've not eaten breakfast today, so it's entirely possible that I made some terrible three-orders-of-magnitude mistake somewhere. However, let's bear in mind that there are already much better ways to spy on people. For example, it has been demonstrated that signals produced by keyboards allow a nearby malicious party with a cheap antenna to recover keystrokes. See here, for example:

http://www.itworld.com/security/64193/researchers-find-ways-sniff-keystrokes-thin-air

No silly dust required.

Captain Thyratron

I was just about to say that.

Between antenna gain/effective area for the frequencies a thing like that can reasonably use and the power they can reasonably transmit, the Friis transmission formula is starting to look pretty grim.

Top Solaris developer flees Oracle

Captain Thyratron

Yep.

I dare say I saw that coming long ago.

OpenSolaris will suffocate because it is too small to survive outside of Oracle and because Oracle considers it a waste of resources; meanwhile, mainstream Solaris will join the ranks of those operating systems which retreated into the high end and died there, quietly and profitably.

Captain Thyratron

Bravo indeed.

While Sun did plenty of things to drive themselves into the ground, like spending upwards of five billion dollars on unnecessary acquisitions and failing for no adequately explained reason to get two major chip designs out the door on time (or at all), and while a hell of a lot of self-licking lollipops needed to be fired, I do not think OpenSolaris is much to blame for it. No, I think that's one of the few things they were doing right--attracting the attention of developers to a free Unix that's actually good. It is never bad to secure the loyalty of tens of thousands of hackers.

While it is plenty profitable for Solaris to be nothing more than the boot loader for Oracle's money-printing database, that sort of thing will just make sure that Solaris ends up like OpenVMS--making a few hundred million dollars a year while the world forgets it exists and it slowly disappears from the face of the Earth. Users think about what they use, and many a good OS has died for lack of such exposure. How many people out there know that the OS that pretty much invented kernel-level clustering and whose clusters can demonstrably survive the destruction of a data center with high explosives is still around and processing financial transactions? Nobody knows and nobody cares. A small hobbyist community is still alive and kicking--I still have a couple of CD-ROMs from it, in fact--and most of the people who read this site have probably never seen a DCL prompt in their lives, and likely never will. Is that really a good way to manage an OS project?

As somebody who uses OpenVMS now and then, I don't like where this business with Solaris is going. It is much too familiar.

Captain Thyratron

Ain't looking forward to that.

It'll be the OS equivalent of moving to Mexico. Do we really want that?

Fortunately, there are still the BSDs, so I don't have to move to Mexico.

Patch Tuesday sounds death knell for Win XP SP2

Captain Thyratron

About as stable as actinium.

It goes about as long as astatine does before flying into little radioactive pieces, even if left in the dark undisturbed.

A friend of mine who was using Windows ME called me over once to show me something. He was posting a message to Livejournal, and noticed that his check-boxes and the arrows on his drop-down menu were tilted diagonally. Oh, sure, you might try to blame the application, but the application merely asks the Windows API for a check-box or a drop-down menu, and it gets what it gets.

That machine does not run Windows ME anymore; he put up with it for longer than anybody else I've known, but that little incident was persuasive enough. It is a curious coincidence that, ever since he dumped Windows ME, the friend in question has never again seen check-boxes or arrows on drop-down menus tilted diagonally.

Ballmer: Windows Mobile lost a 'whole generation'

Captain Thyratron

That'll be a good show.

What could possibly go wrong?

iPhone 4 burns, hurts owner

Captain Thyratron

$1500, eh?

If you are sure of the value of the fine, could you be bothered to dig up the value of X and an explanation of why it is a length, noting that microns are a unit of length? For that matter, how about the law governing the aforestated fine, evidence of which I cannot seem to find anywhere?

China renews Google's internet licence

Captain Thyratron

I liked your post.

Could you just get rid of everything after the third sentence? I think it flows better that way.

El Reg marks Steve Jobs for termination

Captain Thyratron

Silly man.

Replace the "X" with a set of iron sights. I'd pay a couple of bucks to see that comment.

If this is enough to get him excited, I wonder what he thought about all the pictures of bullets with "Obama" written on them that made their rounds on 4chan in 2008.

SCO rises from the dead (again)

Captain Thyratron

The thing that should not be.

It's a perpetual motion machine of litigation--lawsuits about lawsuits about lawsuits and so forth. With fascinated horror and disgust, we behold an abomination that does not appear to make physical sense; we keep trying to find the hidden battery cable (or source of money, as the case may be.)

Captain Thyratron

Don't do it!

The ingredients of the worst kind of eternal life.

Captain Thyratron

US tort law: Worse than the Necronomicon.

If only I could come up with a suitable conclusion to this couplet.

Captain Thyratron

Only the lawyers know.

Maybe, somewhere deep in the hideous, convoluted, maddening depths of American tort law, there is a clause like:

Appeals may continue until they have lost their comedic value.

Captain Thyratron

Immortal orphan zombie?

Indeed, the troublesome thing is an orphan zombie that gets adopted by init but still doesn't go away. (I imagine that is usually a bug.) Reminds me of the dumbest thing I ever saw happen in Solaris: The print listener service failed in such a way that one of its constituent processes became an immortal orphan zombie, and SMF would not allow me to restart the service because that process was still there. It must have been caused by a kernel bug, because it shouldn't be possible. It was like that for months until, eventually, the problem was solved by a power failure.

Alas, SCO would still be there if the power went out.

New dinosaur dubbed 'Mojoceratops' - 'over a few beers'

Captain Thyratron

It's good precisely because it sounds strange.

It's handy that way because it provides an unambiguous and nearly systematic means of naming taxa. It's useful precisely because it's made of words from ancient forms of languages that are both well-known and rarely used. You get lots of words to use to name things, most of which haven't been used for anything else since toilets were still considered a really nifty and innovative idea. You're not going to encounter something like "Pogonomyrmex barbatus" in everyday speech; thus, when you hear it or read it, you know immediately that it's almost certainly the name of a species, and you can look it up and find out rather quickly that it's a a certain species of red harvester ant--not three or four species, and probably not a manufacturer of plumbing fixtures.

When you say Diplodocus, I know you're talking about a genus of dinosaur. If I didn't, I'd know you were talking about a genus of /something/ and I'd find out quickly that it's a dinosaur. If you said "Frank", you could be talking about all sorts of things. It'd be confusing, and you could have saved yourself some trouble by just naming the genus in classical Greek. Any old, arcane, but well-documented language people don't use much most places would do; I suppose old Persian, Akkadian, Sanskrit, ancient Hebrew, or classical Chinese would probably suffice as well.

FLYING CAR, full hover, fairly quiet, offered to US Marines

Captain Thyratron

See, I like things as they are now.

To drive a car, you need a driver's license. To fly an aircraft, you need a pilot's license. At first, I started writing up a long list of good reasons why we do things that way, and why this business of "flying cars for the everyman" is foolish and doomed to fail, but it's been done to death and there's very little I can add that hasn't been repeated ad nauseam. I will append one thing, though: If you don't like the price of fuel now, you're in for a rude suprise if enough people start flying their cars to work instead of driving them. Let's not forget that flying is harder than moving on the ground. It just requires more energy to push enough air to stay aloft, unless you have some kind of lighter-than-air craft that just likes to be up there. (Everybody's got garage space for that, right?)

But let's remember that this is a military vehicle. In fact, it's a pretty neat one. Unfortunately, the article seems to spend most of its time playing around with this silly fantasy of flying cars being feasible and popular when, for several reasons (most, if not all of which, ought to be covered elsewhere), that's a stupid idea. Military hardware is not cheap to operate. The purpose of this thing isn't to provide you a good and convenient way to get to work. It's to give soldiers more mobility. They don't care if this thing is any good for getting to Burger King or whatever, nor should they. That's not what it's for. That's what your car is for, and your car is /better at it/. Using a flying vehicle for the things we do with cars is a wasteful, inefficient, and probably dangerous thing to do. Yeah, I know it's cool and all, but that's really the only merit of it.

Why we love to hate Microsoft

Captain Thyratron

Well, this is what I would ask of them.

Oh, that's a very good question. Well, I say they'd have to offer something comparable with what I've already got.

This is what I want and what, at present, I have:

A choice of several free, open-source operating systems, which are designed to be delved into, understood, hacked upon, and generally used;

A native SSH server (Cygwin is a hideous third-party bolt-on and does not count);

Command-line shells which are powerful enough and straightforward enough to be applicable to any aspect of system administration;

Filesystems like ZFS;

X11 forwarding over SSH;

An API that isn't nauseating;

An environment which encourages respect for abstraction in software and which makes doing it right easy;

An environment that makes it simple to write things that interface with hardware;

An environment which I can bend in any way I wish to suit my needs.

Well, obviously I'm going to be a difficult customer because I'm already satisfied with what I have (and it and several alternatives are free.) Meanwhile, these people want to sell me something. They're up against a satisfied customer and a price that's difficult to beat. Surely they must offer something extra!

Well, here's what they've got that I don't have already:

Software licenses and the accompanying madness of "intellectual property";

Software that treats me pre-emptively as a criminal;

Software that is designed to be opaque so that it does not scare users, rather than to be understood;

An operating system which you are not supposed to fix, but which you are supposed to reboot now and then in the hope that the problem will simply go away;

An environment which, for the sake of not scaring users, instead railroads them into doing things in some manner that a focus group somewhere decided is easiest for them and which, in general, is designed with the thought in mind that I do not know what is best for myself;

Sufficient concern for security problems that I should not even view any website whose name ends with with ".ru", ".hk", or ".cn";

An operating system with such a dearth of basic functionality that things like SSH servers are usually provided by third-party software.

Alas, that simply won't do. I guess I'm just a difficult customer. I guess I would at least be pretty amused if Microsoft offered MinWin to the public and let people build an OS on top of that. It might end up like a poor man's OpenVMS, which would be kind of neat.

Government lunatic magnet goes live

Captain Thyratron

vee did it for zee lulz

Wouldn't it be funny if the site were a trolling project being run by neo-fascists who wanted to prove, in humiliating fashion, that people are unfit to govern themselves (ergo that they must have laws made for them)?

What the site in question needs are well-reasoned comments which, by virtue of not being stupid, would not serve that end.

Google: Flash stays on YouTube, and here's why

Captain Thyratron

Called it.

I saw the title of the article and figured it would be something about Google wanting to embed ads in YouTube videos. I guess I could have saved myself the effort of reading it, amused as I was by Google's fairly frank admission of this.

Follow the money: An ad company serving up videos through the medium of Flash, whose design is driven by is use in advertising, so that they can put ads in the videos. Come for the video of a fox jumping on a trampoline, stay fEXCUSE ME SIR BUT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY SHOES?

Tesla IPO successful: Stock up 40% on day one

Captain Thyratron

Now if only they could be cheaper.

An accessory that, unfortunately, costs about as much as a brand-new pickup truck.

Captain Thyratron

Back of the envelope/discarded printout.

The biggest problem this thing has is battery power.

I think an issue of EE times once claimed that gasoline has eighty times the energy density of a good lithium-ion battery. When I worked it out on paper (comparing gasoline, at 32 MJ/L and about 0.72 kg/L) to the Tesla Roadster's battery (190.8MJ at 450kg), I get that gasoline is about a hundred times better; however, much of the mass of the Roadster's battery pack is wiring and other materials, so that number has to be high.

Let's be generous, then, and say that (a) Lithium-ion battery technology has gotten a lot better and that (b) only half the mass of the battery pack is batteries. A stretch, but a good upper limit to energy density: Gasoline is somewhere north of fifty times the energy density of lithium ion batteries. So here I've derived the obvious: The best electric car battery on the market has terrible energy density.

(My gas tank holds 17 US liquid gallons, which is about 64.3 liters. I get a little over two 2GJ assuming 32MJ/L. This is about ten times the energy that the Tesla's battery pack holds, and weighs a tenth as much when full.)

The cost per megajoule of gasoline and of electricity at residential rates where I live are about the same. I went to my local electric cooperative's website and found that they're charging a residential rate of $0.0925/kWh, or a little over $0.025/MJ. By comparison, gasoline here currently costs about $2.70 per gallon, which is about $0.022/MJ--slightly less. However, the electric motors Tesla uses are, the company claims, something like 85-92 percent efficient, which is a lot more than any present-day gasoline engine* can manage.

So, as it stands, gasoline has vastly superior energy density, far more energy fits in your car at once, the cost per unit energy is currently about the same, and a gasoline-powered car doesn't lose any appreciable energy capacity over time unless somebody poked a hole in the tank, whereas batteries have to be replaced (at least $20,000 for a new Tesla battery pack, assuming that Tesla has worked out some awesome deal where they get lithium-ion cells at less than wholesale price) every few years. The battery is the biggest impediment to electric cars, and always has been. Electric car designs date back to the 19th century, and in that entire history, Tesla is probably the closest thing to a commercially successful product--and it's still lost over $200 million. The saving grace here is the efficiency of the electric motors (whose design Tesla has catered to the purpose). Then again, some of that gain will probably go away by having 450kg of battery sitting in your car. I guess there's also the additional incentive of feeling "environmentally friendly", which appears to be something for which people will pay a lot of money* (when they are not thinking about the disposal process of a 450kg lithium-ion battery that has to be replaced every few years, anyway.)

*Especially since the emissions regulations craze of the 1980s. Before that, it was not uncommon to see cheap consumer cars being sold that beat forty miles per gallon. Mind you, these were still somewhere well south of a third Tesla's claimed efficiency.

**Look at how much a Prius costs. If you want low TCO, buy a Jeep or something.

Power line tech could crash aircraft and shut down the Archers

Captain Thyratron

Use it for what it's for.

The power grid is designed to be a power grid. This is quite at odds with being a computer network. The frequency response of every part of it is focused on the efficient transmission of low audio-frequency waveforms; you just don't get to do that *and* effectively transmit signals in the tens of megahertz range with the same hardware. It ain't the right tool for the job of data transmission, and making it the right tool for the job would probably just make it more expensive and less suitable for its intended purpose.

Water goes through water lines. Gas goes through gas lines. Power goes through power lines. Communications go through communications networks. We do it that way because it works better that way.

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