BrandonMarc

Merely by breathing for a year, everyone in the world inhales a measureable amount of radiation from atmospheric tests performed in the 1950s.

The article's sub-headings are fascinating reading by themselves.

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• The Russians Got Caught Because They Didn’t Compartmentalize Enough

• Russian Hackers May Have Leased Infrastructure From U.S. Providers Who Talked to Investigators

• Several Other Companies Must Also Have Talked to Investigators

• The U.S. (or a Partner) Likely Compromised At Least Two GRU Officers’ Computers

• The U.S. Government Is Very Good at Tracking Bitcoin

• The Government Captured DMs and Emails Between WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0; WikiLeaks Encouraged Misinformation About Source

• Whistleblower Reality Winner Is in Prison for Leaking Essentially the Same Information Now Being Used as Evidence Against Russian Officers

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# 5 should be very interesting to the HN community ...

Texas A&M's engineering program has a required course called Engineering Ethics. A portion of the course is devoted to analyzing the Challenger disaster.

During a late-night teleconference the night before the launch, the engineers pleaded with their managers not to launch. One decision maker was told, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat," and he reluctantly changed his mind (a decision he has regretted for decades, of course).

It's also telling that, after the decision was made to approve the launch, none of the engineers agreed to sign off.

https://www.engineering.com/Blogs/tabid/3207/ArticleID/170/c...

China has controlled the market on these for some time, using this control to its geopolitical advantage many a time. If Japan wants the right to merely compete in the market, they're in for a fight.

I have to wonder if a pilot is even necessary for this x-plane.

Hydrolox will always be a more efficient fuel, but it's a nightmare to store and manage, and destructive to engine components, fuel lines, storage tanks, and, well, everything it touches.

It may be tough to have a reusable hydrolox rocket that's efficient from a total cost of ownership perspective.

> For the first time in decades, NASA aeronautics is moving forward with the construction of a piloted X-plane

That plane doesn't look very pilot-able. How can the pilot see forward? I know it's an early render, but still ...

> Other cities in the country that aren't the big offenders that everyone complains about don't really have this problem.

True story. While the above is true for NYC, LA, Bay Area ... it's simply not true for Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio.

Sharks smell blood in the water.

We'll still be able to confidently say Virgin Galactic is only 6 months away from sending up paying passengers.

> For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought -- for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead right.

Too right. Hell, it's been nearly 50 years since the last Moon landing, and it's looking very unlikely we'll see that happen within the next few years.

What ever happened to SPHERES? Or, Int-Ball?

Welcome to the news business. Even your local TV station receives its news directly from businesses, who often send multiple versions of the script to fit different time allotments. This is where "PR consultants" come into play - highly paid networking people who have the inside-track to, say, Walt Mossberg, and for a fee will happily send him your story and any related materials in the hope he'll decide it's worthy of publishing in his brand. Whether or not money makes its way to the news entity, and how that factors into their decision of what to publish, is an open question ... I'll simply point out there are economic incentives at play, and leave it at that.

Macro vision ... Americans get news and updates from two sources:

- "news" entities like the paper, magazines, television news, and their related websites

- advertisements

Only in the latter is it obvious that the viewing audience is being sold a product. In the former, it's absolutely still true, it's just less obvious.

License plate scanning? Facial recognition? Cell phone tracking? Chemical / radiological sniffing?

Sure is odd to have a very public piece of infrastructure get erected over and over and yet not get an explanation about what it is.

I toured a capsule decades ago, in the ground below an air force base. The tech was very dated, however that also means it'd had plenty of time to be "debugged" shall we say. No uncertainty as to whether it works right.

Plus, being so dated, far less likely to get hacked. Might've been a joke.

Exactly. Exclude the counties with NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, etc, and it's a very different story. What works in Manhattan could never work in Wyoming or even Wisconsin.

Well, if only we realized sooner, the best way to make the IoT secure is to get Congress involved.

In the end, the article reads as an advertisement for the union they're joining. That's probably the general purpose of the article anyway.

That said, it does drive home the overall point that "inequality" is a very complicated issue, and for all the good PR that Facebook and Zuckerberg have, they're just as guilty, inasmuch as there is any real guilt to assign.

Facebook certainly has the money, and if they do indeed care about wealth inequality, they would do well to start at their own doorstep. So this worker is a contractor. So what? Very convenient; result still stands.

Every time I look at that chart, my eyes glaze over and I decide not to automate. The title text when alludes to this.

I just ... don't get it. I fear I may be a bear of small brain.

As someone else mentioned, there are other valuable considerations the chart ignores, such as likelihood and impact of mistakes.

One electricity grid operator used is iPhone to record video of the hack real-time. He watched helplessly (not touching his computer) as someone else moved the cursor about the screen, turning off breakers and causing a regional blackout.

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The hackers hadn’t sent their blackout commands from automated malware, or even a cloned machine as they’d done at Kyivoblenergo. Instead, the intruders had exploited the company’s IT helpdesk tool to take direct control of the mouse movements of the stations’ operators. They’d locked the operators out of their own user interface. And before their eyes, phantom hands had clicked through dozens of breakers—each serving power to a different swath of the region—and one by one by one, turned them cold.

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It doesn't take a careful eye to notice the computer involved appears to be running Windows XP.

Eh, it's a Pavlovian instinct. See the word "culture" in any context, shout "Racism!"

If it doesn't make sense, and people point this out, just double down and shout the same thing but louder.

Yawn.

Calm down.

A company - in this case, Zenefits - will have its own distinct culture. This is what's being referred to ... not "businesses overall" (although there can be a lot of similarities) ... and certainly nothing at all to do with something like societal culture, much less the culture of a specific demographic or race.

Honestly, the word culture in this context has nothing to do with race.

> We don't worry about massive oil seepage from kilometers underground

I dunno, I sure hear a lot of hand-wringing over fracking and the water supply.

> Sure, we also want to be doing stuff that's net carbon negative, but that's a long way into the future.

Isn't refusing emitted carbon (net negative) the entire point? That wouldn't be an "also" then, and newfangled ideas that don't give such a result are nothing to be excited about.

Seems to me capturing from the air is a wholly separate matter, whereas capturing at the source (i.e. power plant) should be the focus.

How does an increased demand for loans lead to funding the Reagan tax cuts?

Typical politician: never waste a crisis.

Oh, was there an attack? Okay, let's cram through some wholly-unrelated policy change that we couldn't normally get away with. Simultaneously, let's completely ignore anything related to the actual attackers.

Hammond, is that you? Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about hubris. People with lots of money and smarts were convinced they could control nature.

Which makes it a much tougher problem, therefore harder to have as much impact as on a truly neglected problem.

Unanticipated

I'm just a normal person with nothing to do with this, and I expected such "surprises" from the beginning.

I remain convinced mankind should not mess with this.

It was probably a "polite" lie.

When looking for a real-estate agent, one of the top pieces of advice is: DO NOT use a friend or family member. Just, don't. Nothing personal, it's just not how you go about looking for a quality real-estate agent ... even if they happen to be a great one.