Posts by fg_swe 1478 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2021
Germany was once a leader in nuclear reactors. We had all types of reactors, including two types of breeders.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300
https://www.enbw.com/unternehmen/konzern/energieerzeugung/kernenergie/standorte/standort-neckarwestheim.html
Almost all shut down by people who are great at communist Propaganda, but are otherwise useless(useful for Moscow) idiots.
The Soviet-Ukrainians worked hard to ignore the operating manual written by the design engineers in Moscow. That is how they managed to blow it up.
But even if you add the 1000 or so people killed in Ukraine from the Chernobyl accident, nuclear power is still safer and cleaner than anything else.
Imagine how much it would cost (in terms of energy, work, raw materials) to build 40 million large batteries for a country like Germany, Britain or France. Then compare that to the cost (in terms of energy, copper, steel, work) to electrify all major roads of said countries.
I cannot prove it by numbers at the moment, but my strong feeling is that it would be much cheaper/easier to do the second option, as no exotic materials are required. It is more a problem of Thinking. We cannot imagine a car with a pantograph (which could look very different than the one for trucks or trains).
We have 20000km of electrified rail in Germany already. The autobahn network is 13000km(multiple lanes, two wires per lane, yes...). Definitely looks like it can be done.
The conductance of concrete and asphalt is not as good as required. You would have to bury a metal rail into the road, flush with the road surface. That is prolly more expensive than a second overhead line and it creates a safety problem, as the metal does not provide as much grip as the asphalt does.
Nuclear power using established light water reactors has proven to be sufficiently safe. If you add up all the damage from Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Windscale and Fukushima, it is the safest form of electricity generation in terms of People_Killed/TWh. Just think of how many people have been killed from Methane explosions and burning oil platforms. Think of how many cancer cases from coal plants.
There is no need for supa-dupa new reactor types or fusion. Just build more proven light water reactors(like the french ones) or the CANDU, which is a proven heavy water reactor.
Batteries are expensive and very dirty to produce (in terms of CO2 and other emissions and environmental damage). The Way Forward is
1.) Electrify all major Autobahns and other highways with two overhead power lines per lane.
2.) New cars and trucks are electric-combustion hybrids. They have an automatically steered pantograph(using a camera to correctly touch to the power lines). A small battery is included to "bridge" lane changes and so on.
3.) Use the combustion engine for the last couple of kilometers from the Autobahn to the destination.
4.) Nuclear fission power for electrcity generation.
I venture to claim that this approach has the lowest total environmental footprint. Batteries are hugely dirty and energy-intensive to produce. It is much better to electrify with overhead power lines from copper or aluminium.
See also:
https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.oberleitungen-fuer-saubere-lastwagen-schwarzwald-erhaelt-lkw-teststrecke.d23b88d2-e850-420f-9eef-720b5b566e83.html?reduced=true
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/frankfurt/teststrecke-bei-frankfurt-elektro-highway-im-vollbetrieb-16824051.html
Depending on the weight and trajectory of the incoming "rock"(could be non-stone materials like water ice, Wolfram), the warhead yield must be customized. In most cases, much less than 1MT will suffice.
The idea is to evaporate enough material from the "rock" to give it the needed impulse for the needed trajectory change. The idea is not necessarily to break the thing in lots of small pieces, which will still enter the atmosphere.
Of course the exact location and timing of the explosion is important to achieve the desired impulse vector, but the Japanese have shown this can be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2PM2_Topol-M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)
As always, powerful tools can be used for good and bad.
The good side is that we do not have to suffer the fate of the big dinosaurs.
+ seL4 microkernel
+ CompCert proven correct compiler
+ Rust and other efficient memory safe languages
+ AppArmor, SE Linux, LSM sandboxing
+ MIG-V CPU https://hensoldt-cyber.com/mig-v/
+ Spark Ada
+ PC Lint, PolySpace static analysis
+ Wirth-developed Systems (Modula-2, Oberon): elegant, robust, KISS
The question is, can there be useful regulation, which will make systems more secure ?
Innovation, efficiency, security must be balanced. It does not help to set up a soviet-style bureaucracy because of security issues.
One idea would be that government mandates Payment-For-Exploits for all systems in wide use. For example, SAP would have to pay whitehat hackers for finding bugs in SAP/R3. Microsoft would have to pay for bugs found in Windows. Then the question arises, how large is the finance pool to be paid out to security researchers ? Maybe 3% of sales revenue ?
Of course, companies must also be forced to make these systems available to qualified researchers. So IBM would have to make their mainframes available to skilled software engineers. Same with SAP/R3, Oracle ERP, Windows Server and so on. Inevitably, some sort of state bureaucracy must administer this. It must be staffed by skilled and motivated civil servants. Could NSA, BSI or CESG do this ? Possibly, if we want to make the fox the master of the henhouse ;-)
Widely used FOSS software would have a state-paid exploit payout pool for the same effect. So USG would cough up 30 million p.a. for Apache Exploit Research ? How would Japan, SK, Britain, France contribute ?
Maybe the software tycoons have a constructive idea on the matter ? (Seriously)
I.T. Systems are becoming more and more critical to the life and well-being of a nation. This will probably mean that some software projects will come under Government Scrutiny. For example, it will no longer be the sole authority of Microsoft to develop Windows and government security engineers will be part of the development organization. Same for Android, iOS, Oracle, SAP, Apache, Python and so on.
In embedded systems (rail, aerospace, medical, automotive) this is already an (imperfect) reality. See V-Model, ISO26262, DO178, IEC 61508, DIN EN 50128, FDA Medical Safety Regulations.
CESG already monitors Huawei source code, this model could be extended to other widely used software. Firefox, Linux Kernel, Apache, libc, gcc, iOS, MacOS, WNT, MS Office, libreoffice, ...
I am below 50 and have been able to look back at the ALGOL mainframes, because they had great security features (memory safety of some sorts). I also created a memory safe and efficient language, marrying the best of C++ and Java. I see the problems of C and Unix. I have also seen horribly buggy mainframe hardware in the 2000s. The pressure of the market competition and the pressure from the financiers...
See my posting history.
Open Source which is too complex to be reviewed has proven to be full of exploitable bugs. See OpenSSL.
A lot of insecurity comes from the "moar is betta" line of thinking. The more LOC, the better. In reality, the more code, the more long-term bugs.
Also see KISS and the seL4 MicroKernel.
My M1 Macbook is a very fast platform for software development. It is also super efficient in terms of power consumption, as it runs for two working days on one battery charge. A nice and useful office package included. A real Unix machine as soon as the command line is launched. And yes, all looks great, too.
Not sure how nicely a fleet of M1/M2 mac minis would serve as datacenter/cloud machines. Maxing out at 32GB RAM is certainly not enough for some application types. But if you want power-efficient servers, the M2 definitely is interesting.
...you have some points.
You are wrong to assume that nobody has physical gold. You point out why it makes sense to have it physically and I have a small amount. Yes, transaction costs are about 10% here, which is bad for short-term transactions. On the long run, 10% does not matter if you use it for Value Storage, as the gold chart shows.
Central banks in the US and the EU are now coming back to reason by having a substantially non-zero interest rate.
When I grew up in the 80s, it was always said that low interest rates will fuel inflation.
In the 20xxs, this rule was ignored and we can now see the results.
BTC and Gold are indeed a viable alternative to a financial system run by crooks.
USG and EU Gov must clean out bankrobbers posing as bankers, then trust in investments will come back.
The gold price displays the aggressive inflation (of all NATO+JP+SK currencies) ongoing since the end of the 1990s. That is why folks look for an alternative like Gold itself or, for easier payment, BTC.
The members of the dollar team have a vested interest in badmouthing any alternatives. because they feed on this inflation.
Others want to store wealth and pay, without having their property eaten up by the dollar team.
And of course the dollar team will not speak too much how they store their treasure in houses, land, metals, factories, autobahns and so on.
The semiconductor industry is
a) dependent on government finance+subsidies (at least at the current growth rate)
b) prone to over-investment by governments and other players
If you know that, you will also know that there are heavy business cycles in this industry. Only invest in semiconductors if you are in for the long run (6 years at least). This is not my opinion, but that of many industry experts.
Also, theory says you should not over-expose yourself to one industry. Have John Deere, Airbus, BASF, Rolls Royce(and similar) in your portfolio, too.
" Is your software guaranteed correct and/or free of harmful bugs"
Not a single I.T. software company operated on that premise. Rather, they will send you weekly updates.
Open Source is in most cases not systemically better. You get quarterly bug fixes for most of them, too.
A software business is first and foremost about selling your stuff effectively. You can always fix your bugs later.
Proof: MSFT, Oracle, IBM, SAP.
Indeed, your business must be able to respond to bug reports in a useful way.
(Having said that, auto, aerospace, rail and medical are different. You really must have powerful design+testing processes in place. A software patch cannot fix a car crash from a faulty ABS brake. This mostly implies good documentation, too. See ASPICE, V-model. And even these industries use the hairball Windows to run their crosscompiler and other essential tools.)
(IT hardware is not much better. See FDIV bug)
1.) Sorry to hear you are caught in Great Power Conflict.
2.) You must play business hardball.
3.) From now on, release any (or most) releases and bugfixes under a commercial license. Also see the Qt business model. If they cheat you, obfuscate some of the code and insert a copy protection mechanism.
4.) Make your international users/customers pay for new releases and bugfixes by bitcoin. They also pay bitcoin ransoms, so they surely can pay you, too.
5.) If 2-4 does not work out, switch to a different project/job.
One way to fix Denis' income problem is to put his great work on the CV and apply for a job where his skills can be used. Lots of software engineers do this, myself included.
On the other hand, he could simply turn to the Qt business model and demand payment for all bug fixes and new releases. Maybe that would work, too.
I find the Cygwin toolkit a very useful extension of Windows
http://cygwin.org/
It gives me much of the power of Unix on Windows:
perl, wc, egrep, wc, sed, vim, ctags, ls, sed, gcc, make and so on.
Much more powerful than the simpleton cmd shell of Windows. No need to learn powershell.
Many(most?) Unix programs can be run nicely on cygwin, including many which need an X11 server.
Also see "Weib" in German, which is very close to Wife. For some reason "Weib" is now derogatory here (Suebi land), but that is a very recent development. So we now use "Frau".
"weiblich" still means "female" and is not derogatory. Well, maybe already on the left coast, they apparently want to cancel Mutter/Mother.
I do think we use too many latin terms already(in English much worse than in German) and that is why I prefer "men" over "human".
I assume most people know the C/Java/C#/C++ Syntax(curly braces and all that) and Rust *looks* closer to what they know, as compared to Ada syntax.
Semantically, Spark Ada definitely looks very interesting.
I am not an Ada guy, but found this: https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memory-Management-in-Ada-and-SPARK.pdf
Please also look here for a POSIX compliant OS in Ada: https://marte.unican.es/
The short answer is that Rust is safer than traditional Ada. They did not have safe heap deallocation.
From my experience with memory-safe languages I can support "Applications written in it are unequivocally stable". The undefined behaviour of the C and C++ languages has real-world effects such as mysterious crashes and other mysterious "behaviour". Memory safety brings real improvements in terms of reliability, safety and security.
Apparently, each true and factual statement gets some heavy downvoting here. I now take it as a badge of honor to get heavy downvoting.
I use Linux and MacOS. The latter is a Unix with very nice GUI, ergonomics and comes with a nice Apple office package. Compilers I can get from brew and the bash command line feels like any other Unix.
OpenOffice and Linux in general does not look as polished, but certainly does the job, too.
Buy a Linux computer from a Linux vendor, if you don't want to spend many hours driver-hunting/compiling.
Only the business folks *think* that they need Windows+Office.
MacOS X: very nice Unix system (from mechanics to GUI) running on top of superfast/superefficient ARM cpu.
iOS: locked-down Unix.
Android: locked-down Unix.
OpenBSD, FreeBSD: important players in several applications, some of them of strategic relevance.
For better or worse, Unix dominates the computing world. Also, it is much more than the Linux kernel.
1.) The Linux kernel can be stripped much smaller than the WNT kernel, as the latter has graphics, font rendering and several networking stacks baked-in. Mind you: a single kernel exploit is Game Over.
2.) Windows has automated a limited number of tasks with user-friendly GUIs. As soon as you need advanced things or if you want to automate/mass operations: same effort as Linux command line. Capable Windows Admins are not cheaper than Linux Admins, as they all must be semi-programmers using bash, perl, python or PowerShell.
3.) The men running AWS or Google Cloud must be true experts, their economy comes from the scale of their operations.
4.) If you want to see the future of OSs, look at minimalist microkernels:
https://sel4.systems/
http://sappeur.ddnss.de/L4gegenueberLinux.html
(Maybe it is not fair to compare L4 to Linux at the moment, but in the future it could be like the picture)
https://github.com/AmbiML/sparrow-manifest
Like a warship, seL4 can take hits in base modules, and still be overall secure.
Lazy people hate the hard-working, hard-learning ?
You are free to stop using the inventions of Europeans. Have fun with the horse carriage and don't use any food from artificial
fertilizer(invented by the bad, bad Kaiser Wilhelm Institute). That would be "cultural appropriation". Also, have fun with the Abacus, as Zuse and Turing invented the digital computer.
Likewise, transistors are the evil work of the white men of AT&T. You can always use Smoke Signs, but never with digital signaling. Don't appropriate the work of Boole !
And when you hurt yourself, don't dare to use Penicillin.
Both Canada and Mexico are on very friendly terms with the U.S. Strong economic partnership. There has been belligerence with latin America decades ago and it yielded not many good relations.
Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are the exception from the rule. And all of them suffer from HUNGER, as far as I can fathom here. Communism at its worst.
Granted, there are loads of lazy and entitled commies throughout latin America, but most nations have very good relations with America. Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and many small ones.
Your assumption just shows the lack of people skills of computer folks like us. Do you really think the British, the Americans, the Germans will send a Bond-style white guy to China ? Complete with an shiny Aston-Martin and a $30000 Rolex ?
No, they will recruit a Chinese engineer/scientist working in South Korea or Japan. This man will travel between mainland and SK or JP on a regular basis. He can bring the goods with him on a Flash chip stuck into his gumshoes. Also, the guy will look like a moderately well-off Chinese man, just like engineers do.
Now, that's my imagination, the Oxford-educated and SIS-trained officers of SIS have much better knowledge how to do this. They robbed the Russians blind, they will do the same with China.
China dominates several industries, because they now burn 30% of the earth's total annual coal consumption. Coal is cheap energy, which you need for many processes, including the refinement of silicon. Solar cells need lots of silicon, so China is the "natural" king of solar cells. For some reasons, the west's Greenies never complain about communist CO2 emissions.
As I wrote before, Mao is proud of how he could mess with other nation's minds.
It's all a great tragedy, brothers killing brothers. And a competition of two power centers, the Russian and the English speaking power centers. With a bit of imagination you could say "two Viking powers duking it out".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27
https://www.history.org.uk/primary/resource/3867/the-vikings-in-britain-a-brief-history
If the English and the Americans only knew how much they have in common with the Rus, maybe they could find a way to talk to each other and find a truce...
Indeed a big problem. Many people in the US, Germany, the UK and many other nations have been fighting this corruption. Check General Flynn, if you want a high profile antagonist.
In China, they locked up their people like cattle as part of the C thing.
If General Flynn were Chinese, he would have disappeared in a Gulag or worse.
Now, can you see the difference ? Fixable Corruption vs. Total Corruption.
I have been on the street protesting the craze, what have you done ?
These corporations and their scientific basis only exist because of the rule of law, security and decency provided by the states they operate in. In communism, any independent thought will be destroyed by the secret police, if their paranoia deems it necessary.
See this
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Hartmann_(Physiker)#1965%E2%80%931974:_das_Mikroelektronik-Jahrzehnt
Essentially, the GDR leadership thought they could steal the designs of the west, without understanding of the technology. The rationality of robbers.
(Google Translate can give you an english version)
Technology and science is based on questions, honesty and independent thought.
If Russia and China want to become science and technology centers, they are free to dump their communist attitudes. They are free to value their best minds instead of killing, incarcerating and jailing them. Eventually, their own workers, technicians, engineers and scientists will give them a top notch semiconductor industry.
Technology transfer fuels the arms race. Advanced arms might lead their owners to miscalculations. Our first objective should be to preserve the moderately peaceful situation we have. It could be much worse than "just" the Ukraine war.
In Ukraine, a negotiated solution should be found. See what RAND thinks
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html
Given the threats of nuclear war, considerations of free trade and "development" are clearly secondary.
You possibly think that your crypto layer protects the code which displays the plaintext (text, audio, video, HTML, GIF, whatever). This is a dangerous assumption, as one of your communication partners could be captured, be a mole or be hacked.
Then a properly ciphered data stream, containing an exploit, could enter your "display code".
I assume this is a theoretical threat for you, but this is not true for all users. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-boss-jeff-bezoss-phone-hacked-by-saudi-crown-prince
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Thilo_Schmidt
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