With something like 20% of the US's electricity presently coming from nuclear power and *all* of those reactors approaching or already past their lifespan, all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
If someone's CA or just certificates are compromised, the liability for it needs to end up on *someone*. Being able to make the distinction that Person or Organization is exceptionally rigorous (and in popular favor as being thereof - to try and take governments of questionable purposes out of the equation) or has sufficient funds to cover potential breaches, is really the bottom line.
I suspect this would involve a change in the way browsers treat SSL certification to an extent: it's not good enough to just say "secure certification from a CA" - we the users need to know *which* CA and should be able to easily customize our browsers to alert us to particular ones.
The ultimate problem here does end up at "what are you trying to secure". If it's just your credit card details, then the CA needs to be someone big enough to cover the losses you may incur from a breach (or recover them expediently). If it's medical data, then you would like to *know* insurance companies and other citizens don't go near it. If you're planning an uprising against your dictator, then you probably shouldn't trust anyone and SHOULD be using deniable encryption to start with.
Since people like you would stop even research reactors on the concept being constructed, what's your point?
The anti-nuclear lobbyists have a lot to answer for since they seem perfectly happy to just make developing technology impossible in the idiotic belief that they can choke the industry out of existence without hazard.
This would work equally well without high-tech gunshot detectors.
The military isn't stupid - obviously if you're fired upon you have to address the possibility it's a distraction. This is a thing they already have to contend with since having one guy let a few rounds loose from one end and then hitting them from the other is a pretty obvious tactic.
You say this but I kind of doubt it. If you were reasonably sure many more lives may depend on that link, would you make the same ethical calculus?
Your example implies we should expect everything to immediately fail as everyone abandons there posts to do exactly what you suggest you would do without qualms. So is the answer to staff all our critical services with unmarried people? Widows? Orphans?
There has been nothing in the news about this and it sounds like the type of thing they would have picked up on. Care to offer some links to these personal blogs? Which amongst other things, how are they blogging?
The EU does launch probes, but I'd say the big reason is simply that space is expensive and is mostly "blue sky" research. We do it because the applications down the track range from efficient power, to understanding the origin of life and our environment, determining the likelihood of other life and maybe determining the fate of the human race.
All important endeavors, all generating huge amounts of side-data, spin-off projects and interesting research at the extremes of materials, chemical, physical and biological science which has (repeatedly) improved life on Earth. But all expensive and not-immediately commercial, and all being done largely by scientists with a strong interest in keeping costs down and collaborating to achieve the most they can.
So thanks to winning the space race and it's economy, the US gets credit for most of the "firsts". But it would be folly to ignore the diversity of nationalities and research bits and pieces which lead to those.
It's a heat engine process so it can't be more then about 70% efficient as an absolute maximum, and in practice is 30% efficient at heat-to-electricity conversion (comparable to a coal-fired powerplant).
We're also talking about 1200 degrees C temperatures here - the boiling of water isn't really a concern with those sort of temperatures.
There's no argument that you'd need a degree of overbuild to account for reliability and transmission issues, but you can easily build solar thermal plants anywhere there's decent sun - no one will complain. You can't do the same with nuclear reactors nearly as readily.
Obviously, this isn't the be all and end all: the future obviously requires smart grid and load-leveling technologies to work, but solar thermal can work for anywhere with decent sun, and work with hydro and geothermal to provide baseload power.
In a practical sense I think we'll end up with nuclear generators in there as well, but it's not as if building those is cheap and easy.
So I'll take it you have no idea what solar baseload power is.
The point of solar base-load power is that you can store thermal energy with 80% efficiency or so. A baseload power station concentrates energy onto salt (sodium chloride) and stores the molten salt in reservoir tanks. This allows the plant to continue running through the night by tanking energy it collects during the day. It also means it can run through cloudy periods, depending on reservoir sizing.
As to dispersal: weather is predictable over the long-term. We can know cloud distribution patterns even if we can't accurately determine what any given day will be. This means you can disperse plants geographically to ensure that on any given day, most will be in sufficient sunlight to provide X% of their rated output, whatever number that needs to be.
I mean, if you're arguing this is an impossible thing, then why are we worried about climate change at all since clearly those computer models aren't worth a damn thing.
The US *is not* under 80% cloud cover for months at a time.
Plenty of extremely precise and safe equipment is manufactured en masse. For a nuclear reactor this is pretty much a huge benefit since you can tool up to ensure everything is made in exactly the same way, and test the hell out of every component's design.
Melanoma increases were caused by the emission of ozone-depleting chemicals, but happily we dealt with that problem and the hole over the antarctic is receding (lowering Australia's UV index in the process).
Greenhouse gases ARE NOT ozone-depleting chemicals.
Directly, it's almost impossible to attribute present-day deaths to human greenhouse-gas activities. That said, when it becomes possible we're potentially going to be talking about quite a clusterfu*k of catastrophe.
I mean I'm pro-emissions control as anyone else, but stuff like this weakens the case by making it look idiotic.
The problem is the public and politicians have absolutely no sense of scale on these types of things. Anti-nuclear activists have probably done plenty to contribute to the current problems at Fukushima, since there's no "ok we're going to do the safe thing even if it costs more" setting there's only "SHUT IT DOWN. CLOSE THEM ALL DOWN NOW!!!!".
Hell, the situation with the spent rods on top of the containment buildings I suspect can be traced back to the company being unable to buy any land to put them on because of "radiation concerns".
The complete stupidity about nuclear power is playing an active role in making it more dangerous by creating exactly the wrong type of environment to encourage transparency and accountability. The extended runtime of these particular model reactors is likely the same issue - if you shut them down, you need to get electricity from somewhere, but if political opinion is against new reactors then nothing happens and we end up with "well we'll extend the lifespan".
Solar baseload power can generate power all the time, and weather patterns are predictable over the long-term that plants can be dispersed to complement each other's low points in generating capacity.
I'm not fully up to speed here, but couldn't the returned code be made letter redundant in some fashion with Reed-Soloman coding? That's designed to deal with bursts of errors, so presumably you could align the code so 1 or several mis written letters wouldn't wipe out the code's meaning?
As to length: I'm not sure it's problem. Individuals aren't sending that many letters, and the convenience of not needing to buy stamps to do it would be pretty high. For organizations, I'd expect they'd largely print the code after requesting it electronically.
Because kids walk home from school, and a cellphone provides an easy and immediate way to call if they are going to be late (which worries parents) or if they're in trouble or injured along the way?
Corn-based ethanol was an idiotic idea from the start, born only of lobbying by the corn industry so farmers wouldn't have to actually change their crops. Corn is and always has been a terrible source for ethanol. The problem is it is politically impossible in the US to stop subsidizing inefficient farming practices, despite most farms being owned by mega-corps anyway.
I don't know what you're getting about wind power in Spain and Germany though. Their biggest problem is that they can't let it grow to be too large a fraction of the power grid without some type of storage technology, but when the wind blows it works just fine to let them shut down coal generators.
The biggest problem any of these places face is subsidy's to specific technologies. Without a general price on CO2 emissions, most of these technologies end up being a net inefficient way to reduce CO2 emissions, often at the expense of other technologies (like tidal power, nuclear, hydro, geothermal).
The free market works wonderfully when externalities are correctly priced in, but so long as CO2 is not, then direct action plans are much more expensive then a CO2 price (and subsequent cost-of-living increase) subsidies are.
Also the digitizers are incredibly fragile. I've owned a Toshiba Portege (in my family we had two actually) and both succumbed to malfunctioning digitizers within about a year (bands of non-responsiveness to the pen would appear). The service replacements always took about 2 weeks, which is just too long to be without your device to depend on it (they kept failing even after replacement).
My brother now has a Dell tablet, and that too has had digitizer problems requiring replacement. The technology is simply not robust enough to be dependable, and so you end up with a very expensive, under-powered laptop.
You wouldn't even need to go that far though. If you had a virtualized sandbox environment running on the secured computers, then properly configured it would be impossible for anything to escape out of that and onto your secured network.
Of course, properly configured, it simply should not be possible for individual viruses to wipe out an entire mission-critical system regardless of OS.
Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes. But it is simplistic to say it is governed by just a few genes, so we should be able to handle it. Think about it, if these genes have escaped natural selection for 1 billion years, how hard it is going to be to fight them.
You're committing the common fallacy of assuming evolution == improvement. There is very little selective pressure against cancer causing genes past our historical peak fertility period (teens to late twenties). There's very little selective pressure against cancers which strike in mid-late life.
But this doesn't mean treating cancer because it's caused by this type of genetic defect need be difficult, or that they are somehow "resistant" to deliberate intervention. All it means, is we're talking about useful genetic functions that don't kill us most of the time.
Also chemo and radiation work extremely well for certain types of cancer, and work *precisely* because they affect cancerous cells far more readily then ordinary body cells (specifically: they induce damage in cells engaged in replication in the process of duplicating their DNA - cancer is doing this all the time, whereas most of your body is not replicating at any given time. It's why your hair falls out - the cells are engaged in aggressive replication constantly, and so are most affected).
Which is why it's important for people to use it even in the absence of a pressing need for privacy. If you never encrypt anything, then one day start doing it, of course that looks suspicious.
If you personally always encrypt things, then that looks less suspicious - there's no discernible change in activity. You can even use MORE encryption, and no one can tell without breaking the first code. But this is not ideal - since targeting the cryptonerds is a good first start to wiping out any potential dissidents under your nose.
But - if everyone's using strong encryption all the time - then you've got something. Nothing you can do is going to make intercepts on a large scale easier for you, in fact the problem becomes insurmountable on a large scale. Moreover, no government is going to be able to outlaw the use of such technology - if it's commonplace, then you can't mess with it without setting off everyones "holy shit tyranny!" buttons and having democratic elections oust them before the problem becomes severe.
More importantly, it means you can make an intelligent guess about the mean lifetime of your passwords.
If you're sure no-one else has a copy of your database, then you never need to vary your passwords. If you think someone else might have it, then you can figure out the time it will take to crack the password (there's a work-factor option there which means you can make it take a long time even with a simpler password), and then change all your stored passwords.
On top of that, if people *do* have access to your database file, you're already doing something very wrong since either your machine is compromised already, or people have physical access, which is a game-over as well.
Analyses conducted in the mid to late 1990s on Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee vehicles concluded that hundreds of reported sudden accelerations in these vehicles were likely caused by an undesired current leakage pathway that resulted in actuation of the cruise control servo. When this occurred, typically at shift engage (moving the shift lever from park to reverse), the engine throttle would move to the wide open position.
That's not 'dangerous stupidity', that's 'dangerous design flaw' even if it's technically possible for the driver to correct if he they know that the fault is about to occur.
In that case, yes. But the point is that a fault in the vehicle was actually traced and found in analysis. Despite extensive investigation, no such fault has been identified in Toyotas, and the "runaway car" claims consistently display a lack of braking action, under circumstances where a driver should have been able to brake and/or shift the car into neutral.
While these claims should be followed up extensively - if no fault is identified, the circumstance is rather like how the biggest factor in recovery times for workplace injury is whether there is an outstanding worker's compensation claim.
Slashdot Mirror
With something like 20% of the US's electricity presently coming from nuclear power and *all* of those reactors approaching or already past their lifespan, all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
The real issue is legal culpability.
If someone's CA or just certificates are compromised, the liability for it needs to end up on *someone*. Being able to make the distinction that Person or Organization is exceptionally rigorous (and in popular favor as being thereof - to try and take governments of questionable purposes out of the equation) or has sufficient funds to cover potential breaches, is really the bottom line.
I suspect this would involve a change in the way browsers treat SSL certification to an extent: it's not good enough to just say "secure certification from a CA" - we the users need to know *which* CA and should be able to easily customize our browsers to alert us to particular ones.
The ultimate problem here does end up at "what are you trying to secure". If it's just your credit card details, then the CA needs to be someone big enough to cover the losses you may incur from a breach (or recover them expediently). If it's medical data, then you would like to *know* insurance companies and other citizens don't go near it. If you're planning an uprising against your dictator, then you probably shouldn't trust anyone and SHOULD be using deniable encryption to start with.
Since people like you would stop even research reactors on the concept being constructed, what's your point?
The anti-nuclear lobbyists have a lot to answer for since they seem perfectly happy to just make developing technology impossible in the idiotic belief that they can choke the industry out of existence without hazard.
This would work equally well without high-tech gunshot detectors.
The military isn't stupid - obviously if you're fired upon you have to address the possibility it's a distraction. This is a thing they already have to contend with since having one guy let a few rounds loose from one end and then hitting them from the other is a pretty obvious tactic.
You're changing the subject - where are the worker's personal blogs indicating this is the plan as you stated?
You say this but I kind of doubt it. If you were reasonably sure many more lives may depend on that link, would you make the same ethical calculus?
Your example implies we should expect everything to immediately fail as everyone abandons there posts to do exactly what you suggest you would do without qualms. So is the answer to staff all our critical services with unmarried people? Widows? Orphans?
Uh, what?
There has been nothing in the news about this and it sounds like the type of thing they would have picked up on. Care to offer some links to these personal blogs? Which amongst other things, how are they blogging?
The EU does launch probes, but I'd say the big reason is simply that space is expensive and is mostly "blue sky" research. We do it because the applications down the track range from efficient power, to understanding the origin of life and our environment, determining the likelihood of other life and maybe determining the fate of the human race.
All important endeavors, all generating huge amounts of side-data, spin-off projects and interesting research at the extremes of materials, chemical, physical and biological science which has (repeatedly) improved life on Earth. But all expensive and not-immediately commercial, and all being done largely by scientists with a strong interest in keeping costs down and collaborating to achieve the most they can.
So thanks to winning the space race and it's economy, the US gets credit for most of the "firsts". But it would be folly to ignore the diversity of nationalities and research bits and pieces which lead to those.
80% is the heat storage efficiency.
It's a heat engine process so it can't be more then about 70% efficient as an absolute maximum, and in practice is 30% efficient at heat-to-electricity conversion (comparable to a coal-fired powerplant).
We're also talking about 1200 degrees C temperatures here - the boiling of water isn't really a concern with those sort of temperatures.
There's no argument that you'd need a degree of overbuild to account for reliability and transmission issues, but you can easily build solar thermal plants anywhere there's decent sun - no one will complain. You can't do the same with nuclear reactors nearly as readily.
Obviously, this isn't the be all and end all: the future obviously requires smart grid and load-leveling technologies to work, but solar thermal can work for anywhere with decent sun, and work with hydro and geothermal to provide baseload power.
In a practical sense I think we'll end up with nuclear generators in there as well, but it's not as if building those is cheap and easy.
Maybe you should contribute something about power distribution rather then trying to smugly declare your superiority?
So I'll take it you have no idea what solar baseload power is.
The point of solar base-load power is that you can store thermal energy with 80% efficiency or so. A baseload power station concentrates energy onto salt (sodium chloride) and stores the molten salt in reservoir tanks. This allows the plant to continue running through the night by tanking energy it collects during the day. It also means it can run through cloudy periods, depending on reservoir sizing.
As to dispersal: weather is predictable over the long-term. We can know cloud distribution patterns even if we can't accurately determine what any given day will be. This means you can disperse plants geographically to ensure that on any given day, most will be in sufficient sunlight to provide X% of their rated output, whatever number that needs to be.
I mean, if you're arguing this is an impossible thing, then why are we worried about climate change at all since clearly those computer models aren't worth a damn thing.
The US *is not* under 80% cloud cover for months at a time.
Plenty of extremely precise and safe equipment is manufactured en masse. For a nuclear reactor this is pretty much a huge benefit since you can tool up to ensure everything is made in exactly the same way, and test the hell out of every component's design.
Melanoma increases were caused by the emission of ozone-depleting chemicals, but happily we dealt with that problem and the hole over the antarctic is receding (lowering Australia's UV index in the process).
Greenhouse gases ARE NOT ozone-depleting chemicals.
Directly, it's almost impossible to attribute present-day deaths to human greenhouse-gas activities. That said, when it becomes possible we're potentially going to be talking about quite a clusterfu*k of catastrophe.
I mean I'm pro-emissions control as anyone else, but stuff like this weakens the case by making it look idiotic.
The problem is the public and politicians have absolutely no sense of scale on these types of things. Anti-nuclear activists have probably done plenty to contribute to the current problems at Fukushima, since there's no "ok we're going to do the safe thing even if it costs more" setting there's only "SHUT IT DOWN. CLOSE THEM ALL DOWN NOW!!!!".
Hell, the situation with the spent rods on top of the containment buildings I suspect can be traced back to the company being unable to buy any land to put them on because of "radiation concerns".
The complete stupidity about nuclear power is playing an active role in making it more dangerous by creating exactly the wrong type of environment to encourage transparency and accountability. The extended runtime of these particular model reactors is likely the same issue - if you shut them down, you need to get electricity from somewhere, but if political opinion is against new reactors then nothing happens and we end up with "well we'll extend the lifespan".
Solar baseload power can generate power all the time, and weather patterns are predictable over the long-term that plants can be dispersed to complement each other's low points in generating capacity.
A rather comprehensive study by the University of Melbourne centered around this type of technology.
I'm not fully up to speed here, but couldn't the returned code be made letter redundant in some fashion with Reed-Soloman coding? That's designed to deal with bursts of errors, so presumably you could align the code so 1 or several mis written letters wouldn't wipe out the code's meaning?
As to length: I'm not sure it's problem. Individuals aren't sending that many letters, and the convenience of not needing to buy stamps to do it would be pretty high. For organizations, I'd expect they'd largely print the code after requesting it electronically.
Because kids walk home from school, and a cellphone provides an easy and immediate way to call if they are going to be late (which worries parents) or if they're in trouble or injured along the way?
Corn-based ethanol was an idiotic idea from the start, born only of lobbying by the corn industry so farmers wouldn't have to actually change their crops. Corn is and always has been a terrible source for ethanol. The problem is it is politically impossible in the US to stop subsidizing inefficient farming practices, despite most farms being owned by mega-corps anyway.
I don't know what you're getting about wind power in Spain and Germany though. Their biggest problem is that they can't let it grow to be too large a fraction of the power grid without some type of storage technology, but when the wind blows it works just fine to let them shut down coal generators.
The biggest problem any of these places face is subsidy's to specific technologies. Without a general price on CO2 emissions, most of these technologies end up being a net inefficient way to reduce CO2 emissions, often at the expense of other technologies (like tidal power, nuclear, hydro, geothermal).
The free market works wonderfully when externalities are correctly priced in, but so long as CO2 is not, then direct action plans are much more expensive then a CO2 price (and subsequent cost-of-living increase) subsidies are.
Also the digitizers are incredibly fragile. I've owned a Toshiba Portege (in my family we had two actually) and both succumbed to malfunctioning digitizers within about a year (bands of non-responsiveness to the pen would appear). The service replacements always took about 2 weeks, which is just too long to be without your device to depend on it (they kept failing even after replacement).
My brother now has a Dell tablet, and that too has had digitizer problems requiring replacement. The technology is simply not robust enough to be dependable, and so you end up with a very expensive, under-powered laptop.
You wouldn't even need to go that far though. If you had a virtualized sandbox environment running on the secured computers, then properly configured it would be impossible for anything to escape out of that and onto your secured network.
Of course, properly configured, it simply should not be possible for individual viruses to wipe out an entire mission-critical system regardless of OS.
Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes. But it is simplistic to say it is governed by just a few genes, so we should be able to handle it. Think about it, if these genes have escaped natural selection for 1 billion years, how hard it is going to be to fight them.
You're committing the common fallacy of assuming evolution == improvement. There is very little selective pressure against cancer causing genes past our historical peak fertility period (teens to late twenties). There's very little selective pressure against cancers which strike in mid-late life.
But this doesn't mean treating cancer because it's caused by this type of genetic defect need be difficult, or that they are somehow "resistant" to deliberate intervention. All it means, is we're talking about useful genetic functions that don't kill us most of the time.
Also chemo and radiation work extremely well for certain types of cancer, and work *precisely* because they affect cancerous cells far more readily then ordinary body cells (specifically: they induce damage in cells engaged in replication in the process of duplicating their DNA - cancer is doing this all the time, whereas most of your body is not replicating at any given time. It's why your hair falls out - the cells are engaged in aggressive replication constantly, and so are most affected).
Which is why it's important for people to use it even in the absence of a pressing need for privacy. If you never encrypt anything, then one day start doing it, of course that looks suspicious.
If you personally always encrypt things, then that looks less suspicious - there's no discernible change in activity. You can even use MORE encryption, and no one can tell without breaking the first code. But this is not ideal - since targeting the cryptonerds is a good first start to wiping out any potential dissidents under your nose.
But - if everyone's using strong encryption all the time - then you've got something. Nothing you can do is going to make intercepts on a large scale easier for you, in fact the problem becomes insurmountable on a large scale. Moreover, no government is going to be able to outlaw the use of such technology - if it's commonplace, then you can't mess with it without setting off everyones "holy shit tyranny!" buttons and having democratic elections oust them before the problem becomes severe.
More importantly, it means you can make an intelligent guess about the mean lifetime of your passwords.
If you're sure no-one else has a copy of your database, then you never need to vary your passwords. If you think someone else might have it, then you can figure out the time it will take to crack the password (there's a work-factor option there which means you can make it take a long time even with a simpler password), and then change all your stored passwords.
On top of that, if people *do* have access to your database file, you're already doing something very wrong since either your machine is compromised already, or people have physical access, which is a game-over as well.
From the link you posted:
Analyses conducted in the mid to late 1990s on Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee vehicles concluded that hundreds of reported sudden accelerations in these vehicles were likely caused by an undesired current leakage pathway that resulted in actuation of the cruise control servo. When this occurred, typically at shift engage (moving the shift lever from park to reverse), the engine throttle would move to the wide open position.
That's not 'dangerous stupidity', that's 'dangerous design flaw' even if it's technically possible for the driver to correct if he they know that the fault is about to occur.
In that case, yes. But the point is that a fault in the vehicle was actually traced and found in analysis. Despite extensive investigation, no such fault has been identified in Toyotas, and the "runaway car" claims consistently display a lack of braking action, under circumstances where a driver should have been able to brake and/or shift the car into neutral.
While these claims should be followed up extensively - if no fault is identified, the circumstance is rather like how the biggest factor in recovery times for workplace injury is whether there is an outstanding worker's compensation claim.