Not sure what domestic competitors they have, but Arcelor Mittal makes steel in the US. They have a plant near Chicago, just over the Indiana border. I know there are also foundries operated by companies that need higher quality steel (such as for engine blocks).
You wouldn't be complaining if no one listened to us. When it comes to walking all over other countries, the citizens of the victim countries are as much to blame as Americans are. Yes, we need to get our act together over here, but in the meantime we could use help from our allies by teaching our government it can't always get what it wants.
Wakefield never wanted people to not get vaccinated (he just wanted people to buy his company's vaccines, he tried to scare people off of the competitor's one). It is people like McCarthy who actually advocated not getting vaccinated, so please put the blame squarely where it belongs. Wakefield was a greedy moron but the blood isn't on his hands.
If we do finally manage to repeal the PATRIOT act and all the TSA shenanigans, wouldn't you want to remember 9/11 for the purposes of avoiding the whole freedom/security debacle? I think your issue is with the way people invoke remembering 9/11, not the mere fact that they still consider it an important event.
As for police states reading minds, that's the ethical equivalent of humane execution. It's already a police state, it's already killing people, I'm not worried about the mind reading.
With mind reading they could better ensure no one in the government intends to influence things in favor of freedom, and they just have to catch one member of a resistance movement to bring it all down. Suddenly the police state is unstoppable from the inside.
And by the time it can be used to "undermind the political will to fight it" it'll be so easy to do that it'll be a part of normal construction.
As soon as it is possible to solve global warming (or whatever crisis) with geoengineering, people will start to lose the will to solve the crisis through less drastic measures, well before the cost makes it a good idea. I have no idea what makes you think that geoengineering would be dirt cheap on any timescale, especially compared to simple things like conservation or switching to more expensive (but cleaner) technologies.
I think that they forget one thing. In probably under an hour, every airport and every border can instantly have screeners for whatever the current outbreak is.
Okay, if I run into anyone developing a killer avian flu strain, I'll remind them long incubation periods aren't allowed.
We have M.A.D. for nuclear weapons. That's already worked a few times. It's dumb, but it worked. I'm stunned, but it worked. That's the sort of thing that we need for the rest of them.
MAD is not a good solution, it's a last resort solution. The question of dangerous science is being raised because it would be nice to avoid MAD scenarios where possible. Maybe we can't stop research from happening, but it might be a good idea to wait and look at the implications first, in case we need to sort out how to safely work with the technology before the cat is out of the box.
Let's work from the bird flu concern this all stemmed from:
1. Perform research that generates a potentially devastating virus that would kill huge numbers if developed by the wrong people.
2. Censor the research, hindering (but not stopping) any malicious effort at duplication.
3. Develop better defenses against said devastating virus (perhaps upon learning that someone else is trying to make one).
4. Someone duplicates the virus for malicious purposes, but thanks to the delay caused by censorship, the damage is minimal.
You also could have scenarios like someone developing a way to enrich weapons-grade uranium without the huge, attention-drawing facilities. So long as no one knows such a method is possible, smaller organizations suddenly capable of making a nuke won't try as they "know" they cannot. Not every breakthrough in science is easy to duplicate (especially a breakthrough no one anticipated beforehand, i.e. no one was necessarily looking for), so censorship may well prevent it from getting into the wrong hands.
How about non-lethal weapons? First tasers and rubber bullets, now microwave guns. If it comes to use of force, they're far better than lethal weapons, but because they aren't lethal they risk getting overused, and law enforcement resorts to use of force much sooner. If using force is bad, but non-lethal force is less-bad, then the net balance of such weapons is the improvement over situations where lethal force would be used, minus the increase in use of force. If it comes out negative the weapons are bad (which is subjective depending on your weighting factors in your calculation).
Geoengineering may be more costly or somehow less pleasant than proper conservation and research into green technology, especially if people actively become worse at conservation due to the safety net of geoengineering. In the event that we need it, yes geoengineering is great, but so long as we could avoid needing it at a lower cost, there is potential harm. Of course, until geoengineering proposals are thought out enough, that cost balance is impossible to determine. (I would certainly support research into geoengineering, too much of a risk invovled if we don't, but I do believe there could be a real risk involved).
To clarify my position, I think Congress should work on a bill to restrict/ban strip searches for those held in jail for under two weeks (or along those lines). That would allow for proper discussion, and provide a proper timetable and perhaps funding to help make any needed changes to accomodate the less-searched inmates. Yes, strip searches are a concern, but the Supreme Court is the wrong tool to use to fix the problem.
After all, 5 of those senile delinquents recently ruled that you can be strip-searched for jaywalking
Stop exaggerating. They ruled that it is acceptable to strip search someone before entering the prison population, nothing more. If someone gets such a search for jaywalking, that's an issue with the local law. There are way too many details for the supreme court to, in one ruling, sort out when it is and isn't acceptable (among other things, whether a jail can handle keeping searched inmates away from those deemed protected from such searches). The threshold for needing a search of course varies by location, so a jail with no gangs (far lower risk of people smuggling things in) might not need any searches, while a jail in an area with a significant smuggling problem might need to search almost anyone. The Supreme Court made the right call- take it up with your local government if you think they're too liberal with the strip searches.
I also managed to get them to give me the login credentials over the phone knowing only my name, address, and date of birth.
What phone did you call from? If you called from a home or cell phone that they would have on record, that would be an extra layer of security you're not giving them credit for. That said, it is quite possible that they would give you the login credentials when calling from a random phone, but until it's tried that would be jumping to conclusions.
(I have no familiarity with the technical details of password security beyond what little I have gleaned from the occasional slashdot discussion on it)
What I don't understand is why you calculate the difficulty of the 4-word password by the size of the dictionary- as far as I understand an attacker would have no way to know whether you used a 20 word dictionary, a 1 million word dictionary, or just used random characters. Wouldn't the attacker have to assume you used random characters? The only way I could see it making sense to calculate the difficulty by the size of the dictionary is if that dictionary is commonly used by those using *victim service*, the attacker knows that, and the attacker just wants to get into any account he can, not a specific one. Of course, if he attacks that way, your password is 100% secure if yours can't be generated by the attacker's dictionary.
There could conceivably be a dictionary-based password generator that builds a 20-word dictionary for you from a (largest usable dictionary), allowing you to generate passwords that arguably have very low entropy but, so long as the attacker doesn't know the dictionary, they would have to use the largest dictionary they can. Add enough users using some or all random characters, and the attacker doesn't have a very useful brute force attack. Am I missing something?
Instead of even trying to stop that freight train from hitting us (or even slowing it down), we should only work on coming up with a way to survive a direct impact.
We should stop trying to eradicate polio (its natural!) and just learn to live with the effects.
We should stop trying to live longer (death is natural!) and learn to die young.
Searching for quakes magnitude 3.0 and above within 500 km of Mexico City since 2009, there is only one so far this year (there were 6 in 2009, 6 in 2010 and about 16 in 2011). As someone with no idea what I'm talking about, I wouldn't draw a link between recent earthquakes and the volcano.
Re:They have lost all trust, but they retain distr
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 1
What America needs is a change in voting system
I agree, but its a chicken and the egg problem, as it will take a third party to get such a change to happen.
it has the potential to help elect your third choice instead of your second
Stop thinking in terms of 4 years, if you want permanent change each election is progress, not the end-all-be-all. A lot of people would vote for third parties but declare that the sub X% support makes it a waste, and they vote for a leading candidate. If you vote for a third party anyways, you help reach someone's X%, and help get the momentum going. The occasional worse candidate winning due to a spoiled vote is a small loss compared to the huge gain we get when we finally get voting reform. The only way to win is to vote 3rd party continuously until the two-party system has been thoroughly broken.
Sorry, compelled to point out that bicameral refers to a two-house congress (such as the US with the Senate and House of Representatives). It has nothing to do with political parties. The more you know...
So Canadian scientists should publish to journals, and the media should ask non-Canadian scientists for analysis. I'd like to see Harper try to muzzle foreign scientists.
Although that is a legitimate counter-argument, high-voltage electricity is arguably more of a danger. Gasoline requires both a spill and a sufficient source of heat to become a problem, and it is easy to control via gravity. High voltage electricity simply requires something conductive enough touches the live contact. There is a definite jump in hazard when you go from "potentially lethal when ignited or ingested" to "potentially lethal if touched". Not that it isn't feasible to make it safe for the public to dispense, but extra care would certainly be needed in designing the safetey mechanisms involved. Currently the only people handling such voltages are trained and equipped with proper protection, so standards will need to be above and beyond what we have now.
For a while now I've wondered if it would be feasible to make these black boxes exchange info when a collision occurs, making it much harder to get away with a hit-and-run. As the car would broadcast the data upon detecting a collision, receivers could also be put up at intersections to direcly communicate to the local authorities, which would help with car/pedestrian hit-and-run events where there is no victim black box to otherwise receive the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what domestic competitors they have, but Arcelor Mittal makes steel in the US. They have a plant near Chicago, just over the Indiana border. I know there are also foundries operated by companies that need higher quality steel (such as for engine blocks).
It's called job security. If you don't have terrorist plots to foil you need to make some.
So that means terrorists are job creators?
You wouldn't be complaining if no one listened to us. When it comes to walking all over other countries, the citizens of the victim countries are as much to blame as Americans are. Yes, we need to get our act together over here, but in the meantime we could use help from our allies by teaching our government it can't always get what it wants.
Wakefield never wanted people to not get vaccinated (he just wanted people to buy his company's vaccines, he tried to scare people off of the competitor's one). It is people like McCarthy who actually advocated not getting vaccinated, so please put the blame squarely where it belongs. Wakefield was a greedy moron but the blood isn't on his hands.
We are really starting to reap the rewards of allowing content and distribution to merge together.
"The next time someone attacks us, we launch these missiles at everything they hold dear."
Yes, because that sort of thing tends to work so well against those who want to be martyrs in the first place...
So nuke their cadre of virgins?
If we do finally manage to repeal the PATRIOT act and all the TSA shenanigans, wouldn't you want to remember 9/11 for the purposes of avoiding the whole freedom/security debacle? I think your issue is with the way people invoke remembering 9/11, not the mere fact that they still consider it an important event.
As for police states reading minds, that's the ethical equivalent of humane execution. It's already a police state, it's already killing people, I'm not worried about the mind reading.
With mind reading they could better ensure no one in the government intends to influence things in favor of freedom, and they just have to catch one member of a resistance movement to bring it all down. Suddenly the police state is unstoppable from the inside.
And by the time it can be used to "undermind the political will to fight it" it'll be so easy to do that it'll be a part of normal construction.
As soon as it is possible to solve global warming (or whatever crisis) with geoengineering, people will start to lose the will to solve the crisis through less drastic measures, well before the cost makes it a good idea. I have no idea what makes you think that geoengineering would be dirt cheap on any timescale, especially compared to simple things like conservation or switching to more expensive (but cleaner) technologies.
I think that they forget one thing. In probably under an hour, every airport and every border can instantly have screeners for whatever the current outbreak is.
Okay, if I run into anyone developing a killer avian flu strain, I'll remind them long incubation periods aren't allowed.
We have M.A.D. for nuclear weapons. That's already worked a few times. It's dumb, but it worked. I'm stunned, but it worked. That's the sort of thing that we need for the rest of them.
MAD is not a good solution, it's a last resort solution. The question of dangerous science is being raised because it would be nice to avoid MAD scenarios where possible. Maybe we can't stop research from happening, but it might be a good idea to wait and look at the implications first, in case we need to sort out how to safely work with the technology before the cat is out of the box.
Let's work from the bird flu concern this all stemmed from:
1. Perform research that generates a potentially devastating virus that would kill huge numbers if developed by the wrong people.
2. Censor the research, hindering (but not stopping) any malicious effort at duplication.
3. Develop better defenses against said devastating virus (perhaps upon learning that someone else is trying to make one).
4. Someone duplicates the virus for malicious purposes, but thanks to the delay caused by censorship, the damage is minimal.
You also could have scenarios like someone developing a way to enrich weapons-grade uranium without the huge, attention-drawing facilities. So long as no one knows such a method is possible, smaller organizations suddenly capable of making a nuke won't try as they "know" they cannot. Not every breakthrough in science is easy to duplicate (especially a breakthrough no one anticipated beforehand, i.e. no one was necessarily looking for), so censorship may well prevent it from getting into the wrong hands.
How about non-lethal weapons? First tasers and rubber bullets, now microwave guns. If it comes to use of force, they're far better than lethal weapons, but because they aren't lethal they risk getting overused, and law enforcement resorts to use of force much sooner. If using force is bad, but non-lethal force is less-bad, then the net balance of such weapons is the improvement over situations where lethal force would be used, minus the increase in use of force. If it comes out negative the weapons are bad (which is subjective depending on your weighting factors in your calculation).
Geoengineering may be more costly or somehow less pleasant than proper conservation and research into green technology, especially if people actively become worse at conservation due to the safety net of geoengineering. In the event that we need it, yes geoengineering is great, but so long as we could avoid needing it at a lower cost, there is potential harm. Of course, until geoengineering proposals are thought out enough, that cost balance is impossible to determine. (I would certainly support research into geoengineering, too much of a risk invovled if we don't, but I do believe there could be a real risk involved).
To clarify my position, I think Congress should work on a bill to restrict/ban strip searches for those held in jail for under two weeks (or along those lines). That would allow for proper discussion, and provide a proper timetable and perhaps funding to help make any needed changes to accomodate the less-searched inmates. Yes, strip searches are a concern, but the Supreme Court is the wrong tool to use to fix the problem.
After all, 5 of those senile delinquents recently ruled that you can be strip-searched for jaywalking
Stop exaggerating. They ruled that it is acceptable to strip search someone before entering the prison population, nothing more. If someone gets such a search for jaywalking, that's an issue with the local law. There are way too many details for the supreme court to, in one ruling, sort out when it is and isn't acceptable (among other things, whether a jail can handle keeping searched inmates away from those deemed protected from such searches). The threshold for needing a search of course varies by location, so a jail with no gangs (far lower risk of people smuggling things in) might not need any searches, while a jail in an area with a significant smuggling problem might need to search almost anyone. The Supreme Court made the right call- take it up with your local government if you think they're too liberal with the strip searches.
I also managed to get them to give me the login credentials over the phone knowing only my name, address, and date of birth.
What phone did you call from? If you called from a home or cell phone that they would have on record, that would be an extra layer of security you're not giving them credit for. That said, it is quite possible that they would give you the login credentials when calling from a random phone, but until it's tried that would be jumping to conclusions.
Bjork was quoted in an interview inviting pirates/hackers to attempt to port her code over from iPhone to other platforms
So will people take this trojan as a reflection of the ethics of all pirates/hackers? Hopefully someone did come through with a legit port of the app.
(I have no familiarity with the technical details of password security beyond what little I have gleaned from the occasional slashdot discussion on it)
What I don't understand is why you calculate the difficulty of the 4-word password by the size of the dictionary- as far as I understand an attacker would have no way to know whether you used a 20 word dictionary, a 1 million word dictionary, or just used random characters. Wouldn't the attacker have to assume you used random characters? The only way I could see it making sense to calculate the difficulty by the size of the dictionary is if that dictionary is commonly used by those using *victim service*, the attacker knows that, and the attacker just wants to get into any account he can, not a specific one. Of course, if he attacks that way, your password is 100% secure if yours can't be generated by the attacker's dictionary.
There could conceivably be a dictionary-based password generator that builds a 20-word dictionary for you from a (largest usable dictionary), allowing you to generate passwords that arguably have very low entropy but, so long as the attacker doesn't know the dictionary, they would have to use the largest dictionary they can. Add enough users using some or all random characters, and the attacker doesn't have a very useful brute force attack. Am I missing something?
Instead of even trying to stop that freight train from hitting us (or even slowing it down), we should only work on coming up with a way to survive a direct impact.
We should stop trying to eradicate polio (its natural!) and just learn to live with the effects.
We should stop trying to live longer (death is natural!) and learn to die young.
If you realize you are in breach of the licencing terms, isn't the requirement to stop using the software and uninstalling it the correct procedure?
NSW Police say on their reading of their contract... gave them the right to reproduce as many licenses as they wanted
Makes no sense to uninstall software to avoid breaching licensing terms you say you aren't breaching...
Searching for quakes magnitude 3.0 and above within 500 km of Mexico City since 2009, there is only one so far this year (there were 6 in 2009, 6 in 2010 and about 16 in 2011). As someone with no idea what I'm talking about, I wouldn't draw a link between recent earthquakes and the volcano.
What America needs is a change in voting system
I agree, but its a chicken and the egg problem, as it will take a third party to get such a change to happen.
it has the potential to help elect your third choice instead of your second
Stop thinking in terms of 4 years, if you want permanent change each election is progress, not the end-all-be-all. A lot of people would vote for third parties but declare that the sub X% support makes it a waste, and they vote for a leading candidate. If you vote for a third party anyways, you help reach someone's X%, and help get the momentum going. The occasional worse candidate winning due to a spoiled vote is a small loss compared to the huge gain we get when we finally get voting reform. The only way to win is to vote 3rd party continuously until the two-party system has been thoroughly broken.
Sorry, compelled to point out that bicameral refers to a two-house congress (such as the US with the Senate and House of Representatives). It has nothing to do with political parties. The more you know...
and a nasty, nasty (and highly secret) brew of toxic chemicals.
I was of the impression that the fossil fuels they're going for are rather toxic themselves. What's your point?
So Canadian scientists should publish to journals, and the media should ask non-Canadian scientists for analysis. I'd like to see Harper try to muzzle foreign scientists.
Although that is a legitimate counter-argument, high-voltage electricity is arguably more of a danger. Gasoline requires both a spill and a sufficient source of heat to become a problem, and it is easy to control via gravity. High voltage electricity simply requires something conductive enough touches the live contact. There is a definite jump in hazard when you go from "potentially lethal when ignited or ingested" to "potentially lethal if touched". Not that it isn't feasible to make it safe for the public to dispense, but extra care would certainly be needed in designing the safetey mechanisms involved. Currently the only people handling such voltages are trained and equipped with proper protection, so standards will need to be above and beyond what we have now.
You have a right to ride in a car or have kids, you have to earn the privalege to drive a car or deliver children.
For a while now I've wondered if it would be feasible to make these black boxes exchange info when a collision occurs, making it much harder to get away with a hit-and-run. As the car would broadcast the data upon detecting a collision, receivers could also be put up at intersections to direcly communicate to the local authorities, which would help with car/pedestrian hit-and-run events where there is no victim black box to otherwise receive the data.