Recent Comments

Ever been stuck somewhere and needed a loo badly? We have maps of public toilets now. This service will help.

Be prepared to fight for it. This has been tried before.

In case of total society breakdown diabetics can makeshift their meds

An island created by a volcano located in the ring of fire can be found in the ring of fire?

Thanks for telling me, I wouldn't have worked that out!

This is an interesting idea and I had a good laugh at the inpired name.

Seems like the Airbnb logo would be a pretty good fit too; more-so than lodging, anyway.

One of my first jobs was as a janitor at a local university. I can indeed confirm that the women's stalls were worse than men's on average. I blame it on the hover (ew, that toilet looks gross, I'm not gonna sit my ass on that, I'll squat above the toilet and let fly...oops, now it's even more gross).

Good point, I guess I know which government's officials I need to bribe "lobby".

I guess it depends on whether Tonga can claim it, since it's in their territorial waters..

Can I just plant a lava proof flag and claim the island as my own? The nation of BIllshooter can finally arise!

Just *slowly* bond it to some oxygen. That works pretty well, in my experience.

Yes, but more problematic, it's such a small molecule that it's really, really hard to keep contained.

I wonder if it will let toilet owners rate the visitors, because some people have no respect for other people's things (especially women in public toilets, if my SO is to be believed)

I think it's a more viable option than the solar-powered drones or balloons that Google and Facebook are toying with, but they'll need the cash reserves of those two huge companies to make it workable.

Sounds like Elon Musk is following my advice:

Google Inc (GOOGL) Investing $1 Billion in SpaceX for Satellite Internet

http://www.stockwisedaily.com/google-inc-googl-investing-1-billion-in-spacex-for-satellite-internet/239068/

Google can certainly afford to throw away $1 billion, particularly if their announcement encourages several times as much private investment, getting the project off the ground and of course the company's inevitable bankruptcy won't bring the satellites back down, leaving a resource Google will continue to benefit from, indefinitely.

*clap* Good show!

n/t

Doesn't storing hydrogen inside a metal container embrittle the container?

No, but that means the bag has to be washed before it can be reused. Or thrown away.

But, It will be 20 x funnier if you fill the tubes with helium.

Edit: and maybe 20 x less explosive-ier.

64k should be enough for anyone..

That's $95,000,000 for the lawyers and $500 each for the class members, yay the US legal system!

Not to nit pick, but as we're talking programmers and engineers, shouldn't that be 65,535, not 64,000?

Here's hoping they don't settle.

Far better to see these companies dragged through the mud and made to pay a whole bunch more.

You might want to reread the small print before you sign...

With that much hydrogen we may as well convert cars to use H

You can go 4x faster if you fill the tunnel with hydrogen.

I also got a 4k monitor over the holidays. Try setting the system zoom setting to 200%. Some apps and webpages may not have full "retina" or "2x" support, but this site does at least. :)

Well, considering that peregrine falcons can reach 300 Kph+ it looks like they'd be easy prey.

In my defense, I had a horrible night of sleep wednesday night. Also, the font on this site is awfully small on my 4K monitor, and...

30 meters, 30 feet, it's all the same. This isn't rocket science, after all.

But in the end, this whole study seems like somebody trying to win an Ig Nobel prize. Birds crash into planes because the planes are moving too fast for them to get out of the way? Whodathunkit?

Well, the summary says 30 meters, so I'm guessing our wonderful education system here in the states taught him that a meter was a French word for foot. The 98 ft that immediately precedes it was obviously a french trick to take away our freedoms.

Walmart (which probably has a larger sample than anyone else) studied what happened when disposable plastic bags were banned in some locale (I forget where this was, but some city in California). They found that sales of packaged disposable plastic bags went up significantly -- apparently replacing all the Walmart plastic bags that had formerly been repurposed.

Point is, people still wind up using and disposing of the same quantity of plastic bags, whether they use the 'free' bags their groceries went into, or buy brand new plastic bags by the box. And the purchased bags are heavier plastic, rather less degradable than the store-type bags.

So banning plastic grocery bags produces no net gain to the environment, and likely produces a net loss (more nondegradeable material, more petroleum used).

Also, I've started to wonder if the store-type bags are now a cellulose-type plastic, since they fall apart at the slightest exposure to the elements.

Where do you see 30 ft?

30 ft must make them pretty vulnerable to things like peregrine falcons..

I could be mistaken, but I believe that a large part of the reason plastic bags aren't often recycled is because the volume of plastic is so low that there's very little point even trying, compared to recycling other plastics.

For some reason though, politicians seem to have latched on to plastic carrier bags as an environmental issue.

StoreDot-an Israeli technology company

There goes the Pipedot store name ;)

Flimsy single-use plastic bags are to be avoided. They contribute to litter and pollution -- a lot.
Re-use folding plastic crates. We've been using those for over a decade. Get a few sturdy ones .. never look back.

If they could implement this for a car, that would be quite impressive. I wonder how they deteriorate over charge cycles.

They didn't do a very good job then.

It is very hard, if not impossible to do a good job if all efforts are undermined by employees. And sure, you can padlock a computer, but there are limits, what a normal private company can do.

If it only last 5 hours won't that lead to a massive waste of energy?

I guess that's why the current use is to charge an underlying lithium battery.

Rockets are fine for landing in Mars gravity.

The rocket scientist being interviewed, strongly disagrees with your assessment...

e.g. "would likely destroy the vehicle."

Rockets are fine for landing in Mars gravity. They work for landing in Earth gravity too. The problem is that it's really expensive to send enough rocket fuel to Mars to land with rockets.

I know a company where all USB ports were glued shut. A few 'experts' opened their machines to circumvent this useless chicanery

They didn't do a very good job then. Computers are easy enough to padlock. Besides, you're obviously not talking about a secure network.

And there's nothing special about USB... ANY WAY you get data into a secure network, from the un-secured rest of the world, is an attack surface. DVD-Rs are just as vulnerable as USB thumb drives. Glue-shut all the ports you want, and you'll still need to exchange data, and however you do that will leave you open to attack.

You didn't read the article. The SCADA systems were on a different, firewall controlled network. That is not nearly enough to keep attackers out, for many reasons.

Oh yes, I know the reasons. At the very beginning of my career I worked for almost a year as system administrator for a small company. My first task? Make our net secure. We need a firewall. I did it. And then the complaints started:

"I can't do this, I can't do that. I NEED ftp, I NEED telnet.. no, ssh and scp is not enough ^{_{(I don't know how it works, I don't want to learn anything new)}}.

But...

No 'but'. You are only admin, I am very important person... Open the ports for me or go job hunting.

That's what I did.... both. No 'or'. The company does not exist anymore.So yes, security is never 100% free. You say one possible attack vector is a USB drive? I know a company where all USB ports were glued shut. A few 'experts' opened their machines to circumvent this useless chicanery with USB boards. Hey, the sys admins are paranoid a**holes with a god complex. Security is important, but not when it interferes with real work... and who can work without music from his personal mp3 collection on USB?

Of course I cannot say for sure that something like this happened in this steel mill, but I would not be surprised a bit. For years now, the most important attack vector isn't the hard- and software anymore, but the wetware.

You didn't read the article. The SCADA systems were on a different, firewall controlled network. That is not nearly enough to keep attackers out, for many reasons. The article explains the only sure way is an air gap... With ANY internet access at all, no matter how indirect, compromise is possible. An extreme example might be a DNS exploit, where any system on the control network only tried resolving a host name... Commands can similarly be relayed and data proxied over DNS.

Actually, I'd say an air gap is overrated though... The JC Penny breach wasn't over the internet, but instead required physical proximity as they broke-in over the WiFi network. Similarly, critical control systems need to be hardened against someone connecting a device with remote access capabilities... That could be a small WiFi router hidden somewhere, a cell phone connected to the network, a dial-up modem connected to a router, etc. Any one of those leaves an air-gapped network open to exploitation from outside attackers. You could insert a WiFi chip into a non-threatening looking USB mouse, and just leave it some place such a thing might have been accidentally dropped, and watch as it eventually gets connected, giving you a backdoor to an air-gapped network.

And don't forget Stuxnet... Completely air-gapped network, with tremendous physical security and paranoia. Still got penetrated by a worm on a USB thumb drive... which is how air-gapped networks get updates into their networks.

There simply is no easy answer to the problem.

I can see that, re-reading it. Likely reading comprehension fail on my part, sorry.

I think he means that, like the rest of us, he has a washing machine and dryer dedicated to cleaning cloth things. The cloth grocery bags just happen to fit that category.

You understand? I don't. Yes, it is understandable that no one wants to come to work at 2am t troubleshoot. But you also mentioned one solution: VPN. It is (or should be) a well known fact that embedded devices and industrial systems often suck at security. But this does not matter, if they are isolated behind a proper firewall/gateway. It may not be possible to upgrade the machinery, but the access to and from those systems should be under total control of the operating company.

Jeez, that ain't all that bad. I replaced a PBX (Intertel with Asterisk for the curious) that had a voicemail system running on OS/2 with its chassis on the floor beneath a water heater. Now that was an archaic piece of crud (or at least, somewhat caked in crud).

I understand how these control systems end up connected to the Internet. A few years ago in my process engineering job, I had the ability to VPN in and access our plant's control system. When someone calls at 2 in the morning, you don't want to come in to work to troubleshoot.