Why you might want to ditch yours for a dumb one.
I hate cell phones, but once in a while I need a smart-phone feature. But I generally only use it when I’m traveling. As I’ve noted in the past, young people have no conception of what good phone service is like.
This article is amusing:
CosmoCourse CEO Pavel Pushkin told Sputnik New Agency, he came up with the idea of suborbital tourism back in 2013 when he was working at Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center.
“We were reviewing various concepts of commercial space rockets and came up with the idea of launching people into space via suborbital trajectory.”
Wow, as far back as 2013! What a visionary.
Note that it’s short on details.
A long but very interesting piece on the overconfidence of the incompetent, by David Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger fame). For some reason, I think it has some relevance to the Trump phenomenon, and politics in general.
For the record, I have never had a problem claiming my ignorance on a topic.
Less than an hour to go for the next SES-9 launch attempt by SpaceX. Eric Berger has the story.
John Schindler deconstructs the Gray Lady’s attempt to whitewash:
At the National Security Agency—where I used to work as a senior intelligence analyst, including as the technical director of NSA’s largest operational division—what outsiders call hacking is handled by a shadowy group called Tailored Access Operations that gets at the hard targets requiring actual cyber-break-ins. TAO are probably the best hackers on earth, but Russia and China are no slouches either, as demonstrated by their repeated infiltrations into protected U.S. Government computer networks in recent years.
However, unencrypted IT systems don’t need “hacking”—normal SIGINT interception will suffice. Ms. Clinton’s “private” email, which was wholly unencrypted for a time, was incredibly vulnerable to interception, since it was travelling unprotected on normal commercial networks, which is where SIGINT operators lurk, searching for nuggets of gold.
They hunt for data with search terms called “selectors”—a specific phone number, a chatroom handle, an email address: here Ms. Clinton’s use of the “clintonmail.com” server was the SIGINT equivalent of waving a huge “I’m right here” flag at hostile intelligence services. Since the number of spy agencies worldwide capable of advanced SIGINT operations numbers in the many dozens, with Russia and China in the top five, that Ms. Clinton’s emails wound up in the wrong hands is a very safe bet, as any experienced spy will attest.
The amount of ignorance on this issue spouted by her defenders is both staggering and terrifying.
I listened in by phone. Here‘s the white paper.
As one would expect, a consensus from thirteen space organizations is going to be mostly motherhood, and implicitly self contradictory. More after I’ve taken the time to go through it. Elliot Pulham said that the campaigns have received it with “gratitude and interest,” but as he said, the main goal is not so much to inject space into the campaigns as to prevent people from saying stupid things about it. Good luck with that.
We may be able to turn it off, and reverse it. I’ve always been amused by (in Clarke’s words) the “distinguished elderly [or not so elderly] scientists” who think that the laws of physics require our bodies to deteriorate over time.
Via Glenn, who has some further thoughts.
No, we can’t “just” throw our trash into the sun.
But I hate when people use current launchers to demonstrate the cost of a massive space project. That’s not how it would be done. And I wish they’d simply say “the sun is the most expensive place to get in the solar system.” Because it is.
Space News has a story on Bridenstine’s proposed legislation.
I’ll have to take a look at the actual draft bill, but it has some good things, and some not so good. I don’t think that SSA should be simply handed over to the FAA. I don’t think that FAA should even be involved in launch licensing. If we’re going to be making radical changes in structure, it’s time to seriously consider a U.S. Space Guard.
I’m trying to format a micro-SD to install Fedora on my Raspberry Pi 2. I’m following the instructions here.
But when I get to the part about building the swap partition, I’m getting an error message. This is the output of fdisk:
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdd: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0002ce31Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 2048 264191 262144 128M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2 264192 1312767 1048576 512M 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd3 1312768 62333951 61021184 29.1G 83 Linux
Now here’s what happens when I run mkswap:
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mkswap /dev/sdd2
mkswap: error: swap area needs to be at least 40 KiB
I’ve tried searching for a similar issue, but am coming up empty. Anyone have any ideas?
[Update a while later]
OK, I’ve decided that it’s a bad SD. But now I’ve got a new problem; I can’t mount the W95 FAT32 boot partition:
Disk /dev/sdd: 14.5 GiB, 15560867840 bytes, 30392320 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 2048 264191 262144 128M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2 264192 772095 507904 248M 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd3 772096 30392319 29620224 14.1G 83 LinuxCommand (m for help): q
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mount -t fat32 /dev/sdd1 /tmp/rpi/boot/
mount: unknown filesystem type ‘fat32’
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mount -t auto /dev/sdd1 /tmp/rpi/boot/
mount: /dev/sdd1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other errorIn some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so.
It doesn’t work with “auto” or “vfat” either.
[Tuesday-morning update]
OK, not sure what the problem was, but after rebooting the machine, I managed to get it all to work. I haven’t actually tried booting the Pi, yet, though.