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+ - NASA Proposal Reignites Asteroid vs. Return to the Moon Controversy->

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes "While NASA's plan to capture an asteroid, bring it closer to Earth, and then visit it with astronauts has gotten wide spread support, especially in the commercial space sector, that support is not universal. A group of congressmen is submitting legislation to compel NASA to return to the moon by 2022. In the meantime a report has surfaced that suggests that NASA is about to sign an agreement with Bigelow Aerospace, a commercial space firm that proposes to build a private space station built with inflatable modules, to develop an approach to further NASA's space exploration goals, including building a lunar base, commercially, with the space agency providing technical and perhaps financial support."
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Comment: Ownership of recovered artifacts (Score 1) 119

by Eric Smith (#43229777) Attached to: Bezos Expeditions Recovers Pieces of Apollo 11 Rockets

NASA claims that the US government still owns these artifacts. I think they're mistaken. The artifacts are not salvage, but rather abandoned property. NASA intentionally allowed them to be abandoned more than 40 years ago with no stated or demonstrable intention of ever recovering them. Since they were outside the territory of any US state, I don't think they are subject to any form of escheat. I think Bezos has clear title and ownership. If there's some US law providing to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing the legal citation.

If Bezos wants to give them to NASA out of his own generosity, that's great, but I don't think he's under any actual legal obligation to do so.

Comment: Re:Does your day job pay you enough? (Score 1) 257

by Eric Smith (#42876133) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Making Side-Money As a Programmer?

I only have that problem if I'm working a lot of overtime for the day job, or working at an extremely boring or unpleasant day job. I try to avoid those, though sometimes there's not much choice.

I'm sure that having hobbies or personal projects that are non-computer-related would be good, but I don't really have any. However, my computer-related personal projects are so dissimilar to my day job that they almost do seem like different fields to me.

Comment: Does your day job pay you enough? (Score 4, Interesting) 257

by Eric Smith (#42874401) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Making Side-Money As a Programmer?
If so, working on personal projects that don't necessarily have any likelihood of financial reward may be much more satisfying than doing paying work in your spare time. I've certainly found that to be the case. I spend my spare time on projects that are just things I'm personally interested in. Often they're very obscure, and only of interest to a small number of other people. However, I enjoy them very much. Sometimes I publish them as free software, and when I do, it is very cool to meet the few other people with similar interests. Because I'm interested in a wide variety of things, I've got enough ideas for personal projects to keep me busy for hundreds of years, so I almost never get bored.

I also was very lucky that a very-long-term project project in which I invested a huge amount of time (thousands of hours) starting in 1995, with absolutely no expectation of financial reward, actually started making me a non-trivial amount of money starting in 2009. I'm certainly not going to claim that this is a likely outcome, but it can happen.

As an example of a small and very obscure personal project, in July of 2011 I rewrote the Apple I ROM monitor to work on an MC6800 microprocessor (rather than the 6502), because the Apple I hardware design was theoretically capable of being configured for the MC6800. It's of no practical value whatsoever, and will never make me any money, but I submitted it as a RetroChallenge contest entry and actually won second place and a small prize. Just recently someone in Australia actually installed an MC6800 in an Apple 1 replica, did a little hardware debugging, and got my monitor code running on it. (I'd only run it in simulation with MESS.) It was very satisfying watching the video on Youtube.

Comment: Re:Key theft != cracking encryption (Score 3, Interesting) 268

by Eric Smith (#42353565) Attached to: ElcomSoft Tool Cracks BitLocker, PGP, TrueCrypt In Real-Time

Doesn't work with BitLocker and a TPM chip. The key is kept in protected memory on the chip and only authenticated code can use it.

I don't think that's true. The passphrase (perhaps hashed?) pay only be in the TPM chip, but the actual cryto key used to decrypt disk sectors is in main memory, because the main CPU is used to do the decryption. There's nowhere near enough bandwidth to and from the TPM chip to let it do the actual disk encryption/decryption. There's not even enough bandwidth to ask the TPM for the key each time you want to do a disk transfer, and erase it from memory after the disk transfer is completed.

This means that software that extracts the encryption key from memory probably can't turn it back into the passphrase that the user enters, but if you have a copy of the disk and the key, you don't actually need that passphrase.

The TPM is not a high-performance device and doesn't do anything but give out the keys on (authenticated) request. What the software does with those keys is up to the software. If someone has privileged or physical access to the machine while the keys are in use, all bets are off.

Comment: Re:Mistake (Score 1) 170

by Eric Smith (#40052555) Attached to: Wozniak's Original System Description of the Apple ][
Note that the 558 is not retriggerable. This led to bugs in joystick (or game paddle) reading in many Apple II programs. If you trigger the 558 to read input 0, then want to read input 1, do NOT just trigger it again. Make sure that input 1 has timed out first, before triggering it to be read. Otherwise you'll read an incorrect value. Or trigger once, then read all inputs you're interested in at the same time.

Comment: Garnet films in electronics of the 1970s (Score 2) 36

by Eric Smith (#39708043) Attached to: All-Optical Networks: the Last Piece of the Puzzle
In the 1970s, magnetic bubble memory was expected to be the next big thing in nonvolatile data storage, and there were commercial products from Hitachi, Intel, Rockwell, and TI. Commercial bubble memory devices were fabricated using garnet films, though there was research into the use of other materials.

Due to high cost, bubble memory was successful only in limited niches, so by the mid-1980s it was discontinued. Intel stopped development at the 4 Mbit level; I don't think the other vendors even pushed it that far. Late 1980s research results suggested the possibility of 64 Mbit devices. I suspect that the technology probably wouldn't have scaled much further anyhow.

More recently, IBM has been working on "racetrack memory", which works similarly to magnetic bubble memory.

Quark! Quark! Beware the quantum duck!

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