Martian colonists get angsty, and decide to get liberated. The Earth-based companies that own the colonies decide (naturally) to launch a transport full of a few thousand space marines to retake control. That trip takes a few months, minimum, even on the fastest, least fuel-efficient course that the transport is capable of making. So the colonists know that the marines will be dropping in, well in advance of their showing up in orbit.

Now, instead of using the ship's main engines to decelerate completely on arrival, most of the Earth-Mars ships aero-brake in the thin Martian atmosphere, which conserves fuel (which can instead be used at the beginning of the trip, to accelerate out from Earth, so that the whole trip takes less time). The ship slows down partially with its engines, and then flies into the beginnings of a very close hyperbolic "slingshot" pass that grazes the upper reaches the atmosphere. The added friction slows the ship down, curling the orbit inward and turning the actual course into a parabola. In theory, if done correctly, the ship would end up in a stable "parked" orbit, with zero fuel expenditures after the slowdown and course-correction it performed at the beginning of the approach.

But, unfortunately for the intrepid space marines, a crafty scientist amongst the colonists builds a small, cheap solid-fuel rocket with a basic guidance system and a nasty payload: An explosive packed with scrap-metal shrapnel. As the marines' ship approaches and its pilots initiate their aero-braking manoeuvre, the lone colonist launches his flak rocket into the ship's approach path, where it explodes and scatters a cloud of metallic debris.

The ship's radar detects the sudden appearance of the cloud of space junk, and the navigation computer performs an emergency space-ward course adjustment to avoid a collision with the potentially dangerous debris. But the new course is too high in the atmosphere to burn off enough of its momentum, and its course stays hyperbolic--the transport ship "skips" off the Martian atmosphere and continues back out into space at high speed, on a random new course. Sorry, no invasion, this year.

The troop ship has enough fuel left to change course toward Jupiter, and it takes a conventional hyperbolic return course around the gas giant to get back heading toward the inner Solar system. Eventually, it DOES manage to get into a Martian orbit (much more carefully, this time), but the additional Jupiter round-trip buys the colonists the extra time they need to prepare to handle the invaders on the ground.

Amazing stuff, fantastic book (and trilogy, too).

While the parent post was modded "insightful", I really can't see why. He asks "How do you determine who it is "Safe" to hand over the passwords to?" as if there was no easy way to answer that question. But that's just silly. There IS an answer to this question. Any technical professional with an ounce of professionalism could tell you the simple version: Do what your superiors tell you. If in doubt, run it up to higher levels of management. If you're overruled, get on the record with a CYA memo. If you cannot in good conscience do as you're ordered, and all else fails, resign gracefully.

1) Obey company policy, as interpreted in the past by your boss. Whatever company rules or procedures govern the situation, or prior, related "standing orders" from your superiors, are your first guide.

2) If anybody not your supervisor (like the head of marketing) tells you to violate company policy, ask your direct supervisor for instructions. Your boss will either decide the issue and tell you what to do, or escalate it up to his own management, if necessary.

3) In any case, if you disagree with your direct supervisor, ask your boss's supervisor for instructions. If he sides with your boss, take it to his boss. Repeat until satisfied.

You will have to ask yourself, when considering whether to invoke rules 2 and 3, whether you want to suffer the political consequences of questioning those senior to you. Because if it's not really important, you're just a whiner--and you have to be careful, because your own judgement might be blinded by your position in the company. In any case, you should always respectfully and clearly explain your position, and frame your petitions to management as being in the company's best interests.

It's up to your own conscience whether you want to drop the issue and go along, at any point. If so, it's usually politically best to document your disagreements in a persistent written memo, or electronic document. (Usually, a group emal to the interested parties is enough.) This is usually called a "Cover-Your-Ass" (CYA) memo, and if you respectfully and clearly explain your position, and acknowledge that your management has overridden your judgement, you can't be held responsible if it goes wrong. If your only concern is that you'll be blamed for a screwup that you were ordered into, you should be satisfied, here.

And if you get as high up in management as you can reach, and you still disagree with the decisions that are coming back down, you have a final option if your conscience absolutely won't let you go along: Resign gracefully, with a lengthy notice and a proper hand-over of your responsibilities, projects, secrets, etc. This is best considered carefully, with consultations from trusted people who can help you see things objectively.

If you're asked to do anything illegal, the rules do change, a little. You may need to step outside the company and blow the whistle to the proper authorities. But the political consequences to your position will almost certainly be terminal, so again, consider carefully.

The parent post has been modded "troll". How is that possibly justified? He didn't insult anyone, or make any obnoxious remarks--unless the moderator happens to be politically offended by the ideas the poster expressed. And that's the worst reason to mod "troll".

The bullies that engage in this kind of crappy, argumentative moderating need to be called out. I will bust out the insults, but I'm reserving them for someone who can't possibly be involved in the comments, here: I'm talking aobut the asshat limp-dick insecure loser who gets off on abusing power, even if it's as lame of a power as Slashdot moderating. He probably has an undiagnosed learning disability (not a retard, probably ADHD or dyslexia), and a consequent massive authority-defiance complex as a result of being humiliated in front of schoolteachers his whole life. His obviously fragile self-esteem has to-date kept him from ever having sex with a woman, though he may have gotten some the rude way, after getting drunk one night by himself and running into the wrong bull queer in a dark alley. He probably has a hard drive full of BDSM and rape porn, which is the only thing that gets him going because he's too afraid of intimate vulnerability to express his sexuality as anything but a power trip.

The sad part is, you may know him and not suspect any of this. You probably just think he's a douchebag, and while you never really want him to hang out with you, you probably aren't overtly rude to him. He's got a "loser-y" vibe, rather than a "creepy" vibe, so you might even feel a little sorry for him. (But if you ever have given in to the pity, and tried to connect with him, you've concluded that you'd rather be mean than hand out with a combination douche / buzzkill like him.)

The funny part is (and this is where I get back on-topic), he'd make an OK small-town cop, he's certainly got the instincts for bullying. But he can't, because he's unable to muster the basic social skills needed to hang out with other men in a locker room for five minutes without causing everyone around him to fantasize about stuffing his head into a toilet. And he's probably quite the physical coward, too--standard Internet Tough Guy syndrome.

Hoo-ee, that's going to cost me some karma!

(It was worth it, if Fuckup McGee the Moderating Queen actually reads it.)

I'll probably go down as "offtopic" or "redundant", possibly even "troll"--how about that, for a touch of irony?

You are missing the point entirely, in calculus the validity of how you derived your answers is as important as the answer, how you organize your notes is not at all important in a speech(references are and I handed those over in the correct format).

News flash, son: Your actual speech performance was only part of the goal of that speech class. Your mastery of the techniques of constructing your speech was just as important. That's why the teacher docked you: To be graded, you must demonstrate knowledge of the techniques and knowledge that the course teaches.

The organization of notes IS part of the technique that the course teaches!

If you train with a good technique, in any discipline, you'll go further and get better than if you train sloppily, in your natural habits. You can spend hours throwing a baseball around, but unless you pay close, constant attention to your form and technique, you won't get to be a better fastball pitcher than when you started.

Remember, you were IN the speech class, meaning that you were LEARNING the techniques of making speeches. You were the least-qualified person to be making judgements about the importance of proper organization and note-making.

I never did anything remotely approaching that essay to any other teacher, 99% of whom I respected immensely even when I received (well-deserved) grades that were less than spectacular.

OK, maybe you're a good human being, other than that incident. But to be *proud* of something like that? That's pretty narcissistic, at least.

But enforcing a requirement that has no bearing on the final product is absurd and needs to be called out.

You seem to be laboring under the assumption that your speech was the "final product", here. The truth is that YOU are the final product.

The whole point of the class, the institution, etc. was to impart proper basic presentation techniques to you. You didn't realize this, at the time, and so the requirements seemed arbitrary, and you got irked. You didn't understand, and you were frustrated, so you lashed out at a teacher who probably doesn't get paid enough to justify putting up with shit like that from jerks like you.

Yeah, that's a lot to be proud of. You're a real hero, Spartacus, sticking it to the Man like that. Go, you!

heh, i was wrong on the protocol level, but the physical layer is still shared between all users on the same cable.

First, your statement is a tautology: Every Layer2 networking protocol that supports IP provides a "shared medium", by definition.

That's like patting yourself on the back for recognizing that water is wet. Good job, there, kid.

Second, you are misconstruing the significance of the word "SHARED", which does not mean the same thing as "BROADCAST". A pure time-domain multiple-access (TDMA) protocol provides a shared medium by giving each transmitter a fixed time window. There can be no contention, and my usage will never negatively impact your performance. Contrast that with a pure collision-sensing (CSMA) protocol, where there is a lot of contention, and your performance gets worse I increase my usage.

All unswitched Ethernet variants, including 10BASE2, are pure CSMA protocols. DOCSIS is a mixture of mostly TDMA and code-division (CDMA), with a *slight* amount of CSMA behavior.

In other words: CABLE IS NOT A BROADCAST MEDIUM. If you and I are both CATV customers in the same neighborhood, sharing a DOCSIS medium, MY USAGE DOES NOT DEGRADE YOUR PERFORMANCE on the medium.

thing is that dsl, fiber and similar behaves, for the customer at least, as a scaled up star network, as the connection between customer and first hop of the isp network is dedicated to the individual customer (i am probably generalizing heavily here, but hang with me).

cable and wireless on the other hand, shares the transmission medium (or whatever its called) between multiple users, and such is much more sensitive to one user pushing the limits of the bandwidth.

Utter nonsense.

It's possible that I could hog the upload bandwidth, on the link from our neighborhood to the Internet, *if* that uplink capacity is smaller than my DOCSIS channel capacity. In that scenario, your performance would suffer if I maxed out my download rate. But this is totally unrelated to Layer2 contention, be it Ethernet or DOCSIS. I could hog the uplink and slow you down even if our local medium was a contention-less protocol (say, pure TDMA, or frequency-division).

In other words, the problem would be that your Cable provider cheaped out or oversold your neighborhood (depending on your point of view), and they provisioned an uplink that is too small.

But, (AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART), the same kind of congestion can (and does) happen regardless of what kind of Internet connection you have, if your ISP fails to provision enough uplink capacity. So using a Cable modem versus using DSL is irrelevant. Your local medium could be DSL, T-1, FiOS, Metro Ethernet, WiMax, WiFi, EVDO, HAM radio, or frigging carrier pigeons: If your ISP oversold the shared uplink, there's going to be congestion.

while the protocols have become much better since the days of coax ethernet, this basic behavior have not changed, and probably never will, unless some new physics comes along...

That's... I don't even know what to say to that.

Anyway, you've dug yourself into quite the hole, here. Maybe you should think about stopping with the digging?

No, it doesn't. He had no idea what the term "DOCSIS" meant. He believed that cable modems and 10BASE2 Ethernet operated on the same principles because they both used coax cable.

The cable type is 100% irrelevent to the networking protocol. Hell, you can operate a collision-based protocol that's basically identical to 10BASE2 via radio broadcasts, it's just less energy efficient.

He wasn't just wrong--he blew right past "wrong" and left it in the dust, behind him. As for him talking about collisions, well... Even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.

You missed the point, double, here. Imagine that--Slashdot is full of people with authority problems so bad that their reading skills have suffered! Who'd'a thunk it?

If I'm writing a solution to an assignment question, I write it in the standard format so that others (specifically, the marker) can read it.

Ever heard the phrase "Show your work"? In every math class I've taken since I was 9 years old (including college), the instructor specifically warned us that we needed to document the entire reasoning process that we used to arrive at the answer. Even if I could have gotten the correct answers without writing anything out, I would have failed if I didn't cooperate with the teacher and show my notes. If the teacher didn't like the process I was using, but I still somehow got the correct answer, I would have gotten docked points.

If I'm taking notes for my own benefit, they can be in any format I like - whatever's easiest for me to understand.

Here's your big fail: The format of the students' notes WAS part of the assignment. Do you think the teacher didn't explain this to the class ahead of time? (Notice that the poster doesn't try to claim that the teacher unfairly surprised him with this requirement--just that he thinks the requirement is stupid.)

The notes aren't just for his own benefit. His speech teacher was trying to impart a specific method of preparation to him. If that method involves making notes in a special way, do you think there might be a reason for it? Gee, do ya?

So, how's that an invalid comparison, again?

It sounds like you're almost proud of this story, or at least feel justified in your conduct. If I misinterpreted that part, sorry in advance, but...

That's a terrible thing to do to a teacher, or anybody, really. I think you acted inappropriately, and displayed an incredible lack of maturity for someone old enough and sophisticated enough to be in college.

Also, you're flat-out wrong about whether having notes in the correct format is important. Would you get pissy with your Calculus teacher because she insisted that you show all the little nitty-gritty steps in your solutions, instead of just writing a final answer? If she docked your score because you didn't follow instructions, would you throw a temper tantrum and tell her she ought to be fired? Or how about a composition teacher who insists that you submit an outline and a rough draft, before your final draft?

BTW, are you one of those jerkoff, should-be-on-Ritalin babies who can't get his shit together, and acts out and gets mad at everybody else for the fact that God made him broken?

I think the fact that she gave you an "A", in the end, is purely a testament to her professionalism and self-control. The fact that you got the "A" doesn't really prove much about you--after all, everybody knows a speech class is an easy "A" if you just do what you're told. If anything, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I really hope you have grown up since then.

comcast = cable = coax style networking in modern form, no?

that is, its like going back to pre-hub style ethernet, where every computer is listening for the next millisecond of no signal on the coax so that it can hopefully push its next packet on there. There is a reason why this was quickly replaced with switches when said tech became available at acceptable prices...

No, No NO! For the love of God, NO! You're completely wrong, and you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as "coax style networking", and there never has been. And the network behavior of cable broadband connectivity has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that some cable connections use coaxial wiring.

You are probably thinking of the old 10BASE2 Ethernet standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2), which used coaxial cable with BNC connections and T-connectors to a shared cable bus medium. Cable broadband uses the DOCSIS protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS) over coaxial cable with F connectors. The cable is the only really similar thing between the two technologies, everything else is pretty different.

10BASE2, like all Ethernet technologies, is a shared-medium, PURE collision-detection protocol. The hosts share the cable segment as a broadcast medium, so that a transmission by one host will be "heard" by all the rest. Each host makes its own decisions about when it wants to transmit, independent of the rest, and then transmits when it senses that the cable is "silent". If multiple hosts start transmitting at almost exactly the same time, they will all shortly detect the "collision". They all cease transmitting, and each picks a short random-length interval to wait before trying to transmit again, unless another host that picked a shorter timeout window starts transmitting, first. Statistically, it's unlikely that two hosts will pick the same random wait timeout, so most collisions resolve quickly unless the network is particularly congested.

DOCSIS uses a mixture of time-division, code-division, and collision-based contention behaviors (depending on the exact revision, too), but the impact of contention is really limited. From a bandwidth scheduling and congestion standpoint, it's nothing like 10BASE2, because the TDMA and CDMA elements of the protocol help each node sees a "fair share" of throughput. Plus, modern DOCSIS supports quality-of-service tags, which (if properly implemented) are pretty much a brick wall against congestion issues.

mostly to me it seems that the ISPs that cries highest are the ones that geared up when the net was mostly static webpages and ftp file transfers, able to handle the odd spike of traffic when someone clicked a link. But now the gear they have sitting around, and that they where banking on where not to be replaced for the next decade or so, baring hardware failure, is being swamped by continual "spikes". And the only way they can fix that at their end is by replacing the gear ahead of schedule, playing havoc with their earnings estimates. And rather then doing that, they break out the whip, trying to force the "cattle" back into the "pen".

I don't think you have any kind of real grasp on the technical implications of terms like "swamped" or "spike" in this context. You certainly understand the metaphor, and I bet you could analogize extensively comparing electrical, water, or highway systems to the Internet, but you don't seem to know too much about actual networking beyond setting up your home LAN.

Heim wasn't exactly a crank, but your cheerleading of him is pretty crank-ish.

Just out of curiousity, what level of formal physics education did you complete?

Who the hell modded this "offtopic"? Waves, surfing, hello?

I swear, some of the responses and mod decisions I've been seeing on Slashdot lately make me wonder whether people are browsing in their sleep.

No, but it might be a sign that our sun is dying, and that we need to send Cilian Murphy and a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan into the sun's core to reignite it.

MrMista, do they make "jokes" on your planet?

http://www.google.com/search?q=+missing+the+joke

Since the GP is getting modded "funny", you may be the ONLY person on Slashdot who didn't get it. Congratulations, you're an idiot.

How did you get involved, originally? My first guess (having known a few scientologists) is that your parents were/are members and you were raised in it. Second guess: One of the substance abuse programs. Third guess: One of their entrepreneurial outreach programs.

Any hits? Just curious--I'm always happy to see somebody leave the CoS. it's a terrible, hurtful thing, and I've seen it ruin peoples' lives while making them feel it's their own fault.

Also, out of curiosity, have you ever been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, or at least seen the symptoms in yourself?

Personally, I think there's substantial co-morbidity between substance abuse problems and scientology for a very specific reason: Undiagnosed (or untreated) ADHD, mostly the "inattentive" kind (which is pretty substantially under-diagnosed, since the kids aren't unruly or acting out). It tends to breed feelings of worthlessness in afflicted adults, and opens up a lot of psychological vulnerabilities. Many suffers either self-medicate (hence the substance abuse issues), and/or get attracted to cults that promise direction, motivation, and self-improvement. Scientology, in particular, has substance-abuse outreach and treatment programs, which makes a handy recruiting strategy for the larger cult.

Of all the scientologists I've met (~2 dozen), almost all of them seem like classic ADHD cases. That is partly based on observing behavior, and partly on what people have said about their life histories, and partly on what they say about their relatives (ADHD is highly inheritable). I've also met a lot (~100s) of 12-steppers (mostly AA)--the proportion of them showing ADHD symptoms or personal/family histories isn't quite as high, but it's still enormous, far more than the normal population.

(Interesting side-note: According to my psychiatrist uncle (who performed a lot of criminal insanity consultations, and is borderline ADHD, himself), American prison populations also show substantial ADD/ADHD over-representation, possibly as high as 70-80% of all prison inmates. As an adult with ADHD, I have to suppress a chuckle at that little trifecta: Prison, addiction, or scientology--take your pick, kids, so many ways to ruin your life.)

For the general Slashdot audience: If you or your family have symptoms of ADHD or inattentive (no-H) ADHD, I'd recommend reading Nancy and John Ratey's books, and then going to see a psychiatrist, in that order. Even if you decide not to try the drugs (which can be helpful, but aren't a magic cure by themselves), there is a LOT you can do to improve your life. It's cheaper than a cult, too.

Yeah, total agreement, here. This stupidly transparent, self-serving quote says it all:

"...but they is vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user."

User experience? WTF? Sorry,but the only reason you need invisible-to-the-user cookies is so you can monetize them without them realizing just how much privacy/anonymity they're giving up. Because that might give users pause before they accept your cookies, if they had an informed choice.

And everybody here knows that. The quoted jackass in TFS is just trying to make his industry look like a victim, to drum up support from civil-liberties sympathizers on Slashdot. Too bad we're not that dumb...

As an employee of the advertising industry, I have zero problems with monetizing Internet traffic, or with using cookies to track user behavior, etc., etc. But I hate liars, and I hate people who try to manipulate me.