The concern people have with the "right to try" legislation is that it makes it much easier for snake oil salesmen to charge desperate patients insane prices for experimental therapies that have not even started to go through any phase 2 trials to determine if they work. (Phase 1 trials just ensure that the drug doesn't kill you faster.)
The problem is, if folks don't go through the compassionate use program, they don't get the legal limitations on price associated with that program. (Compassionate use fees are limited by law to the actual cost of manufacturing and delivering the drug.) So this almost certainly will lead to desperate patients paying extortionate amounts of money to avoid having to wait for an FDA compassionate use sign-off.
The requirement that someone at the FDA sign off on compassionate use approval was there for a reason, and this legislation could cause serious financial harm to the families of people who truly have no hope of surviving regardless of the treatment. If that sign-off process is too slow, the right fix is to speed that up, not to remove an essential step in preventing egregious abuses in the name of profits. This is a very bad law as written, and IMO, the only winners will be drug companies and profiteers.
I thought all the OS X names used Cats. Now are the Deserts?
Someone thought Google naming Android versions after desserts was a great idea, but the message got mangled by iOS's autocorrect on its way to upper management.
I was going to be more charitable and say that because, on average, people need to drive further to get to anywhere in SC, then people drive more, including times when people might not in CA.
That's possibly why there are fewer pedestrian deaths. The reason there are more car occupant deaths in South Carolina is because people are apparently a lot more likely to drive drunk in South Carolina, which is fascinating given that percentage-wise, there are more drunk people in California. Very curious.
So California has about 9.4% fewer deaths per mile than the country as a whole. This is mostly because the average speed on the freeway is measured in inches per second, but still....
Notably, however, California's fatality rates have been skyrocketing lately (mostly involving collisions with pedestrians or bicycles). They're now at 1.07, compared with a low of only 0.86 back in 2009 — an increase of more than 24%. The country as a whole increased by only 6% in that same time period.
Still, it will be a long time before it catches up with South Carolina (1.86), Kentucky (1.69), or Mississippi (1.69).
And with about two-thirds of those California accidents being pedestrian/cyclist deaths, versus only 15% in South Carolina, it's pretty clear that California is an amazingly safe place to drive, and an amazingly dangerous place to walk.:-D
Even Wal-Mart associates should get better with more experience. You learn where everything is, which means when returns happen (or when clothing is tried on and not bought, or when new stock comes in), you can shelve them more quickly. When people ask where something is, you can point them at the exact product instead of hunting for it. And so on.
Whether the employer sees value in that or not is another question, but the improvement exists (or at least should).
What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc.
Actually, you're not describing older workers there. Although the age at which people start having kids is going up, most people still have them in their thirties, not their forties or fifties. By the time you're at the age that most people think of as "older workers", the oldest kid is old enough to drive around the younger kids, so they aren't taking as much time off as younger workers for their kids.
And health problems can happen to anybody. For older folks, you have more internal medicine issues; for younger folks, you have more injuries. Yes, at some point, the problems do get worse and more frequent, but if you ignore the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work (chronic injuries), that decline usually isn't until people are close to retirement age. And for the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work, the company shouldn't get a free pass.
Older workers do expect more vacation time, of course, but really, it's more accurate to say that young people are more tolerant of not getting enough vacation than they should be, rather than the other way around.
They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense
Young people shouldn't be willing to work ridiculous hours either. It leads to burn-out, and in the long term, it only hurts the companies that abuse their employees like that. But as for the productivity hit, I think you're underestimating the benefits of experience. On average, young people spend more time doing work because they are less efficient at it. The older folks usually get the same amount done in significantly less time, because they know all the tricks to get things done more quickly, having figured them out through trial and error. This tends to be true across all industries.
Also, in customer-facing jobs, it is very useful to have older employees, because many of your customers are older, and will tend to prefer interacting with people who are not kids. The whole "they show up reliably" thing is only one part of the equation.
This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.
Most of the unemployed or under-employed workers are not really that old. That chart is sort of confusing, so I'll break it down for you by looking at May 2017.
16–17: 13.1%
18–19: 14.7%
20–24: 6.7%
25–34: 4.9%
35–44: 3.3%
45–54: 3.2%
55+: 3.1%
Notice what you don't see in those numbers? Growing unemployment with age. That's because for the most part, those laws protecting older workers from discrimination actually work.
Now if you look at the numbers based on education, you see a nice pattern. These numbers ignore everyone under 25, which is to say that the unemployment numbers for people without a high school diploma are not artificially inflated by people still in school.
Among people with high school diplomas, 30% fewer are unemployed than among people without diplomas.
Not true. There are lots of potential misconfigurations that could allow you to add a file where none exists, or make a request for a specific URL provide contents without actually having a file there, but that would not allow overwriting existing files because of permissions, e.g. by overriding some error handler.
Also, if someone gains temporary write access through a known security hole that you later fix (e.g. by upgrading some large, monolithic app like WordPress or VBulletin), the attacker gains the ability to MITM you for 90 days after you fix the problem, unless you just happen to notice that the hole has been exploited. That would not be possible with key pinning, because they would not be able to gain access to the private key through a web app. But they might be able to spoof a response for an arbitrary URL.
Actually, it's a bad thing from a security standpoint, IMO. Among other things:
You have an extra bot, typically running as root, to update the cert and restart the server.
Your server has mandatory downtime at least every three months while the cert is refreshed.
It generates a new key every 90 days, so users can't do key pinning unless you write custom server-side scripts that manually run certbot and manually install the resulting certs.
Validation occurs by sticking a file in a well-known location on the server, rather than through the whois record, which IMO potentially makes it easier for attackers to create certificates without the site owner knowing about it.
The claim that this improves security by ensuring only a 90-day window in which an incorrectly issued certificate is valid would only be true if it were likely that certificates will get issued incorrectly, and if that is the case, the 90-day validity window is the least of your problems.
As designed, the validation architecture coupled with the lack of a consistent private key significantly increases the MITM risk by making it possible for third parties who manage to get write access to your web tree to generate certs that are indistinguishable from real ones, without you getting an email about it, without them even having access to the (hopefully better-protected) directory that contains your server's private key. That weakness completely erases any benefit from the shorter validity period, and then some.
Besides, the validity period only matters if you're offline and can't check the CRL, or if your DNS is so compromised that you can't check the CRL. And that is likely to be a much more temporary problem than 90 days. And that can be prevented entirely with proper use of key pinning, were it not for that flaw in the way LE ships out of the box.
In short, the whole scheme seems to stem from the bizarre notion that servers are all hopelessly insecure, and that the best you can do is ensure that when they get inevitably compromised, the stolen cert will only be valid for 90 days after the compromise is discovered, whereas in reality, a site like LE is a prime target for attackers, and unless you're a major site, attackers are far more likely to find a way to trick LE into issuing fake certs than to crack into your specific site and steal your private key. So on the whole, security is reduced by this design.
And even if you fix LE where it allows key pinning, the shorter expiration is, at best, a no-op in all but the most unlikely government-actor attacks on a specific user of your site, and even in that best case, is still such a negligible improvement that it isn't worth the risk of having an extra moving part on the server that can break and cripple your site.
Meh. GDPR is a bad law, because no two lawyers can agree on what it says. That's why it has caused so much pain. In large enough quantities, pretty much any set of data is enough to uniquely identify a person, albeit not to determine what that person's name is, so taken to the most extreme possible conclusion, all data must be treated as GDPR PII. And lots of folks are interpreting it in that way, even though that probably isn't what was intended.
GDPR is also a train wreck because there isn't consistent agreement on whether/when implied consent is allowed. When I share something on Facebook, it goes without saying that they can share it with the third parties that I chose to share it with. I shouldn't need to click some "I agree" on some privacy agreement to use a tool for what it was designed to do.
Unfortunately, lots of laws are like that. This is why it is important to treat businesses that are being regulated as partners in developing the standards, rather than as antagonistic parties to be put in their place. This is not to say that they should get to write the regulations (U.S. style), but it seems like this law went too far in the other direction.
Even without a lawyer, the cost of maintaining your privacy is too high these days. Suppose it takes you an hour to read all of the various privacy policies for Facebook in several different places. That's over 2 billion hours spent, just for one app, both when you install it and, potentially, every time they update the privacy policy. That would translate to an economic cost (if you assume U.S. minimum wage) of about $15.5 billion worldwide. Multiply that times the average number of apps that people install plus the average number of websites that people use.
Then, on top of that cost, you have to assume that the least reputable businesses won't actually follow their privacy policy, or will deliberately carve out exceptions that don't sound bad until you see how they use them. If you assume that everyone is behaving ethically, then privacy policies aren't needed, and if you assume that everyone is behaving unethically, then privacy policies do no good.
It doesn't take much effort, then, to understand why the only way to fix this is through laws that require a certain minimum set of privacy rights for every app and website that does business in your country. It's the only way to make it practical to protect your privacy in any meaningful way. That way, as soon as one person notices something wrong, they can get the state to assert their legal rights on behalf of everyone, and companies don't have the ability to carve out exceptions that look reasonable while actually violating your basic rights.
1) No power source with adequate power to weight ratio nor any prospect of one
The largest existing helicopters (hydrocarbon-based, presumably) can lift ten Teslas stacked on top of one another. Anything that can be done with hydrocarbons can be done for a shorter period of time with batteries, and when it comes to a flying car, you don't need to be always in the air for the design to be useful. Being able to lift off and fly for fifteen minutes over the worst section of freeway can save you an hour of driving.
It's really not the power-to-weight ratio that's the problem, as I understand it, but rather the requirement that the thing not take up more space than a car while driving, which makes the blade length too small, thus requiring speeds that are infeasible and amounts of power that are infeasible. That's the problem that needs to be solved.
2) No adequately robust navigation/piloting system for aerial transit by non-pilots
Easy. Require that cars travel only over existing roads, and not be in the air near airports. Then, all you need is a lane keeping system (which is trivial at this point) and cameras on the bottom for finding a spot to drop back onto the road (also not so hard).
3) Very few people are adequately trained pilots
See #2.
4) No infrastructure for takeoff/landing anywhere except existing airports
See #2.
5) It's cheaper to have a plane and a car than one that does both
This is not a reason that it isn't possible. Also, cars and planes serve different purposes, with the former being for point-to-point travel locally, and the latter being for long-range travel. A flying car serves the same purpose as a car. Thus, a plane plus a car is still not as useful as a flying car, unless your goal is long-range travel.
6) A purpose built plane or car will outperform a vehicle that does both
Again, not a reason that it isn't possible.
7) No obvious economic problem solved by a flying car
You obviously haven't driven in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.
8) Any vehicle light enough to get off the ground is too fragile to endure traveling on the ground
Again, there are helicopters that can lift twenty tons, so that's not really a safe assumption.
9) Enormous and unresolved liability issues in the event of accidents
That's potentially a serious problem. However, that could be reduced dramatically by requiring that they fly only over roadways and by providing some sort of mandatory communication system such that if one of them fails, the cars on the surface below it slam on their brakes so that it crashes onto an empty section of pavement.
10) Cost of fuel will be prohibitive for anyone but the richest of individuals
That's really the same as #1. Solve the problem of inadequate sweep somehow, and you've largely solved the cost of energy, too.
11) Cost of maintenance will be prohibitive
Not necessarily. It depends on the design. A sufficiently advanced quadcopter (or more) with computer-controlled single-blade-failure tolerance might not be that expensive maintenance-wise. The more redundancy you have, the more failure tolerance you have, and the less critical it will be to do the continuous maintenance required by traditional helicopters and (to a lesser extent) airplanes.
The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative. California's grocery bag ban, for example, means that we have to buy trash bags that use several times as much plastic, took several times as much diesel fuel to drive them to the store, and cost a couple of orders of magnitude more money. It is basically a poor tax masquerading as an environmental policy.
Those garbage bags are made using recycled plastic, they use a very little material per bag) and they don't have to be emblazoned with logos and so on, which further reduces their environmental impact. How do you think the shopping bags got to the store? They don't just magically appear. And no, they are not actually more expensive per bag.
Wrong, for so many reasons:
The average disposable shopping bag is about.5 mil. Trash bags start at.7 mil and go up to 1.4. So to begin with, they're more material, which makes them more expensive to manufacture.
For the last couple of years, recycled plastic actually costs more than new plastic, not less, so even if it were the same amount of material, it would be more expensive.
Shopping bags are packed flat on top of one another in quantities of hundreds or thousands. They have near perfect packing density. Trash bags are rolled up and placed in a small cardboard box. So at least 21.5% of the volume is wasted, plus any additional air space, plus space between boxes, plus the volume of the box material itself, plus any wasted space at the edges of the pallet caused by the boxes not fitting perfectly, plus any wasted height caused by the pallets not extending to the ceiling. And the box adds weight, too.
Shopping bags are usually bought by the store in bulk quantities directly from the bag manufacturer. They cost under a cent even in small-business quantities (say, 10,000 bags) through wholesale channels. By contrast, when individuals buy trash bags, they typically buy them at retail prices, which brings the cost up about twelve cents per bag, typically. That's more than an order of magnitude, and that's before you factor in the additional savings that chain stores get when they buy them via continuous, high-volume deliveries directly from the manufacturer.
What are you even on about? Plastic cutlery is the root cause. If it wasn't there, we wouldn't have to spend time and resources cleaning it up.
It seems you just want to jump onto any random issue in order to fire off an ill-conceived anti-government rant.
No, it isn't the root cause. If you have banana peels littering the streets, the banana peels aren't the root cause. Why would plastic be any different? Sure, plastic single-use utensils aren't ideal, but the fact remains that if government-hired garbage crews don't screw up and leave garbage out everywhere, almost none of them will end up in the oceans. It isn't the lack of biodegrading that causes them to be in the oceans. That just makes them stick around longer, which makes the poor garbage pickup a bigger problem than it otherwise would be.
You're blaming the half-full gas can in the closet instead of the person who lit the curtains on fire....
Well, yeah, but that would require the garbage people to actually pick up the stuff that their trucks leave behind whenever a bag breaks, and the mail carriers to pick up the occasional blow-in that blows out of magazines as they shove them in the mailbox, and the garbage trucks to all be fully covered while driving, and the raccoons to leave residential garbage cans alone...
... unless, of course, your goal is to reduce the total amount of garbage, in hopes that the amount of left-behind garbage will decrease proportionately, in which case you'll have to reduce it a lot before it will really help. Fixing the problems that cause garbage to turn into litter is a lot easier than reducing the amount of garbage.:-)
I honestly can't think of a time that I came across anything that didn't fit into these categories and I've never found anything that was household garbage that escaped the system that moves it to the landfill.
I've seen everything from food containers to banana peels on my street. I've never seen fast food wrappers. I have occasionally seen smaller, lighter wrappers for things like energy bars. Never homework or anything like that.
Of course, I'd guess that 75% of what I see blowing around are blow-in cards from magazines. They have a decent chance of blowing away when put into the mailbox, when taken out of the mailbox, and when put into the garbage truck. So if you really want to ban something, ban those; I certainly won't object.:-D
The long-term goal should be to drastically reduce all uses of plastic in favour of stuff that can biodegrade once discarded.
There are biodegradable plastics. As I said in my original post, the problem with the word "plastic" is that it includes lots of different materials, not all of which are as environmentally problematic as the stuff you're concerned about.
I was thinking *almost* that. More like a dancer dancing among the crowd and waving her arm close to people's back pockets. Either way, same idea, different implementation.
No, they really aren't. Only a small percentage of people are so lazy that they'll just toss trash out on the streets; most people do not.
Most of the trash you see blowing around is there because the garbage collection process has become too automated as a cost-cutting measure. A person drives by, and a machine grabs the can, turns it upside down, and dumps it into the truck. When this happens, stuff often falls out, and it ends up on the street, because there's no longer a second person on the truck to pick up what gets left behind.
It has nothing to do with humans being lazy and everything to do with humans being cheapskates who are unwilling to pay for the people needed to properly maintain our sanitation system. And instead of fixing that, they keep finding new ways to blame the garbage for not getting picked up. That's just absurd, and it will never end, because there will always be some other type of trash to use as a scapegoat for their problems.
The government is failing to clean up after me....
That's a complete mischaracterization of my comment. The government's job is to dispose of waste. If it fails to do that, then it is not doing its job. It has nothing to do with "cleaning up after people". Most people are good citizens, and at least *try* to do the right thing by putting garbage in a bin, etc.
Even if every plastic utensil made it into a landfill somewhere, that's still not really a great solution.
Why not? It came out of the ground. What's wrong with putting it back in? In a few million years, that will be oil. And if we get to the point where somehow we're out of oil and we absolutely have to have more, we know where we buried it, and we can deal with the recycling at that time, when it becomes financially practical to do so. Either way, burying it is probably the *best* solution.
Most business won't even notice a disposable plastic ban. A few will, and they might have to come up with creative solutions. Heavens.
Most businesses don't serve food. All businesses that serve food will notice, because it will become completely impractical for people to get food to-go. Unless, as I said, they allow biodegradable plastics, in which case there's no creativity needed—just an extra penny or so per utensil.
The best thing to help the poor people you're worried about would be to make fast food so expensive they couldn't possibly afford it, and do something about the grocery situation in big US cities. But if McDonalds really can't come up with anything other than charging an arm and a leg for metal cutlery, the poor will just bring their own. The rich, unfortunately, probably won't.
Who is talking about McDonald's? Fast food doesn't usually need utensils at all. It's the next quality tier up where disposable utensils start to matter — to-go orders from *real* restaurants.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're trying to say that there won't be much in this release?
The concern people have with the "right to try" legislation is that it makes it much easier for snake oil salesmen to charge desperate patients insane prices for experimental therapies that have not even started to go through any phase 2 trials to determine if they work. (Phase 1 trials just ensure that the drug doesn't kill you faster.)
The problem is, if folks don't go through the compassionate use program, they don't get the legal limitations on price associated with that program. (Compassionate use fees are limited by law to the actual cost of manufacturing and delivering the drug.) So this almost certainly will lead to desperate patients paying extortionate amounts of money to avoid having to wait for an FDA compassionate use sign-off.
The requirement that someone at the FDA sign off on compassionate use approval was there for a reason, and this legislation could cause serious financial harm to the families of people who truly have no hope of surviving regardless of the treatment. If that sign-off process is too slow, the right fix is to speed that up, not to remove an essential step in preventing egregious abuses in the name of profits. This is a very bad law as written, and IMO, the only winners will be drug companies and profiteers.
Someone thought Google naming Android versions after desserts was a great idea, but the message got mangled by iOS's autocorrect on its way to upper management.
Road conditions. Aha. That's what I forgot. It doesn't snow in most of California.
But that wouldn't explain higher deaths per mile.
That's possibly why there are fewer pedestrian deaths. The reason there are more car occupant deaths in South Carolina is because people are apparently a lot more likely to drive drunk in South Carolina, which is fascinating given that percentage-wise, there are more drunk people in California. Very curious.
Here you go. In 2016:
So California has about 9.4% fewer deaths per mile than the country as a whole. This is mostly because the average speed on the freeway is measured in inches per second, but still....
Notably, however, California's fatality rates have been skyrocketing lately (mostly involving collisions with pedestrians or bicycles). They're now at 1.07, compared with a low of only 0.86 back in 2009 — an increase of more than 24%. The country as a whole increased by only 6% in that same time period.
Still, it will be a long time before it catches up with South Carolina (1.86), Kentucky (1.69), or Mississippi (1.69).
And with about two-thirds of those California accidents being pedestrian/cyclist deaths, versus only 15% in South Carolina, it's pretty clear that California is an amazingly safe place to drive, and an amazingly dangerous place to walk. :-D
Even Wal-Mart associates should get better with more experience. You learn where everything is, which means when returns happen (or when clothing is tried on and not bought, or when new stock comes in), you can shelve them more quickly. When people ask where something is, you can point them at the exact product instead of hunting for it. And so on.
Whether the employer sees value in that or not is another question, but the improvement exists (or at least should).
What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc.
Actually, you're not describing older workers there. Although the age at which people start having kids is going up, most people still have them in their thirties, not their forties or fifties. By the time you're at the age that most people think of as "older workers", the oldest kid is old enough to drive around the younger kids, so they aren't taking as much time off as younger workers for their kids.
And health problems can happen to anybody. For older folks, you have more internal medicine issues; for younger folks, you have more injuries. Yes, at some point, the problems do get worse and more frequent, but if you ignore the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work (chronic injuries), that decline usually isn't until people are close to retirement age. And for the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work, the company shouldn't get a free pass.
Older workers do expect more vacation time, of course, but really, it's more accurate to say that young people are more tolerant of not getting enough vacation than they should be, rather than the other way around.
They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense
Young people shouldn't be willing to work ridiculous hours either. It leads to burn-out, and in the long term, it only hurts the companies that abuse their employees like that. But as for the productivity hit, I think you're underestimating the benefits of experience. On average, young people spend more time doing work because they are less efficient at it. The older folks usually get the same amount done in significantly less time, because they know all the tricks to get things done more quickly, having figured them out through trial and error. This tends to be true across all industries.
Also, in customer-facing jobs, it is very useful to have older employees, because many of your customers are older, and will tend to prefer interacting with people who are not kids. The whole "they show up reliably" thing is only one part of the equation.
This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.
Most of the unemployed or under-employed workers are not really that old. That chart is sort of confusing, so I'll break it down for you by looking at May 2017.
Notice what you don't see in those numbers? Growing unemployment with age. That's because for the most part, those laws protecting older workers from discrimination actually work.
Now if you look at the numbers based on education, you see a nice pattern. These numbers ignore everyone under 25, which is to say that the unemployment numbers for people without a high school diploma are not artificially inflated by people still in school.
Wow. You should really get that checked. Most people don't have Disney princesses growing on their faces.
How many house air conditioners would have to melt to explain this? More or fewer than actually have melted?
But in all seriousness, freon-11 actually is found in volcanic outgassing.
Not true. There are lots of potential misconfigurations that could allow you to add a file where none exists, or make a request for a specific URL provide contents without actually having a file there, but that would not allow overwriting existing files because of permissions, e.g. by overriding some error handler.
Also, if someone gains temporary write access through a known security hole that you later fix (e.g. by upgrading some large, monolithic app like WordPress or VBulletin), the attacker gains the ability to MITM you for 90 days after you fix the problem, unless you just happen to notice that the hole has been exploited. That would not be possible with key pinning, because they would not be able to gain access to the private key through a web app. But they might be able to spoof a response for an arbitrary URL.
Actually, it's a bad thing from a security standpoint, IMO. Among other things:
The claim that this improves security by ensuring only a 90-day window in which an incorrectly issued certificate is valid would only be true if it were likely that certificates will get issued incorrectly, and if that is the case, the 90-day validity window is the least of your problems.
As designed, the validation architecture coupled with the lack of a consistent private key significantly increases the MITM risk by making it possible for third parties who manage to get write access to your web tree to generate certs that are indistinguishable from real ones, without you getting an email about it, without them even having access to the (hopefully better-protected) directory that contains your server's private key. That weakness completely erases any benefit from the shorter validity period, and then some.
Besides, the validity period only matters if you're offline and can't check the CRL, or if your DNS is so compromised that you can't check the CRL. And that is likely to be a much more temporary problem than 90 days. And that can be prevented entirely with proper use of key pinning, were it not for that flaw in the way LE ships out of the box.
In short, the whole scheme seems to stem from the bizarre notion that servers are all hopelessly insecure, and that the best you can do is ensure that when they get inevitably compromised, the stolen cert will only be valid for 90 days after the compromise is discovered, whereas in reality, a site like LE is a prime target for attackers, and unless you're a major site, attackers are far more likely to find a way to trick LE into issuing fake certs than to crack into your specific site and steal your private key. So on the whole, security is reduced by this design.
And even if you fix LE where it allows key pinning, the shorter expiration is, at best, a no-op in all but the most unlikely government-actor attacks on a specific user of your site, and even in that best case, is still such a negligible improvement that it isn't worth the risk of having an extra moving part on the server that can break and cripple your site.
I'm not convinced GDPR was sufficiently well thought out, nor sufficiently clearly worded. But we need something.
Meh. GDPR is a bad law, because no two lawyers can agree on what it says. That's why it has caused so much pain. In large enough quantities, pretty much any set of data is enough to uniquely identify a person, albeit not to determine what that person's name is, so taken to the most extreme possible conclusion, all data must be treated as GDPR PII. And lots of folks are interpreting it in that way, even though that probably isn't what was intended.
GDPR is also a train wreck because there isn't consistent agreement on whether/when implied consent is allowed. When I share something on Facebook, it goes without saying that they can share it with the third parties that I chose to share it with. I shouldn't need to click some "I agree" on some privacy agreement to use a tool for what it was designed to do.
Unfortunately, lots of laws are like that. This is why it is important to treat businesses that are being regulated as partners in developing the standards, rather than as antagonistic parties to be put in their place. This is not to say that they should get to write the regulations (U.S. style), but it seems like this law went too far in the other direction.
Even without a lawyer, the cost of maintaining your privacy is too high these days. Suppose it takes you an hour to read all of the various privacy policies for Facebook in several different places. That's over 2 billion hours spent, just for one app, both when you install it and, potentially, every time they update the privacy policy. That would translate to an economic cost (if you assume U.S. minimum wage) of about $15.5 billion worldwide. Multiply that times the average number of apps that people install plus the average number of websites that people use.
Then, on top of that cost, you have to assume that the least reputable businesses won't actually follow their privacy policy, or will deliberately carve out exceptions that don't sound bad until you see how they use them. If you assume that everyone is behaving ethically, then privacy policies aren't needed, and if you assume that everyone is behaving unethically, then privacy policies do no good.
It doesn't take much effort, then, to understand why the only way to fix this is through laws that require a certain minimum set of privacy rights for every app and website that does business in your country. It's the only way to make it practical to protect your privacy in any meaningful way. That way, as soon as one person notices something wrong, they can get the state to assert their legal rights on behalf of everyone, and companies don't have the ability to carve out exceptions that look reasonable while actually violating your basic rights.
The largest existing helicopters (hydrocarbon-based, presumably) can lift ten Teslas stacked on top of one another. Anything that can be done with hydrocarbons can be done for a shorter period of time with batteries, and when it comes to a flying car, you don't need to be always in the air for the design to be useful. Being able to lift off and fly for fifteen minutes over the worst section of freeway can save you an hour of driving.
It's really not the power-to-weight ratio that's the problem, as I understand it, but rather the requirement that the thing not take up more space than a car while driving, which makes the blade length too small, thus requiring speeds that are infeasible and amounts of power that are infeasible. That's the problem that needs to be solved.
Easy. Require that cars travel only over existing roads, and not be in the air near airports. Then, all you need is a lane keeping system (which is trivial at this point) and cameras on the bottom for finding a spot to drop back onto the road (also not so hard).
See #2.
See #2.
This is not a reason that it isn't possible. Also, cars and planes serve different purposes, with the former being for point-to-point travel locally, and the latter being for long-range travel. A flying car serves the same purpose as a car. Thus, a plane plus a car is still not as useful as a flying car, unless your goal is long-range travel.
Again, not a reason that it isn't possible.
You obviously haven't driven in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.
Again, there are helicopters that can lift twenty tons, so that's not really a safe assumption.
That's potentially a serious problem. However, that could be reduced dramatically by requiring that they fly only over roadways and by providing some sort of mandatory communication system such that if one of them fails, the cars on the surface below it slam on their brakes so that it crashes onto an empty section of pavement.
That's really the same as #1. Solve the problem of inadequate sweep somehow, and you've largely solved the cost of energy, too.
Not necessarily. It depends on the design. A sufficiently advanced quadcopter (or more) with computer-controlled single-blade-failure tolerance might not be that expensive maintenance-wise. The more redundancy you have, the more failure tolerance you have, and the less critical it will be to do the continuous maintenance required by traditional helicopters and (to a lesser extent) airplanes.
The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative. California's grocery bag ban, for example, means that we have to buy trash bags that use several times as much plastic, took several times as much diesel fuel to drive them to the store, and cost a couple of orders of magnitude more money. It is basically a poor tax masquerading as an environmental policy.
Those garbage bags are made using recycled plastic, they use a very little material per bag) and they don't have to be emblazoned with logos and so on, which further reduces their environmental impact. How do you think the shopping bags got to the store? They don't just magically appear. And no, they are not actually more expensive per bag.
Wrong, for so many reasons:
What are you even on about? Plastic cutlery is the root cause. If it wasn't there, we wouldn't have to spend time and resources cleaning it up.
It seems you just want to jump onto any random issue in order to fire off an ill-conceived anti-government rant.
No, it isn't the root cause. If you have banana peels littering the streets, the banana peels aren't the root cause. Why would plastic be any different? Sure, plastic single-use utensils aren't ideal, but the fact remains that if government-hired garbage crews don't screw up and leave garbage out everywhere, almost none of them will end up in the oceans. It isn't the lack of biodegrading that causes them to be in the oceans. That just makes them stick around longer, which makes the poor garbage pickup a bigger problem than it otherwise would be.
You're blaming the half-full gas can in the closet instead of the person who lit the curtains on fire....
Even better: The second generation will know the election results before the voters even cast their ballots!
Well, yeah, but that would require the garbage people to actually pick up the stuff that their trucks leave behind whenever a bag breaks, and the mail carriers to pick up the occasional blow-in that blows out of magazines as they shove them in the mailbox, and the garbage trucks to all be fully covered while driving, and the raccoons to leave residential garbage cans alone ...
... unless, of course, your goal is to reduce the total amount of garbage, in hopes that the amount of left-behind garbage will decrease proportionately, in which case you'll have to reduce it a lot before it will really help. Fixing the problems that cause garbage to turn into litter is a lot easier than reducing the amount of garbage. :-)
I've seen everything from food containers to banana peels on my street. I've never seen fast food wrappers. I have occasionally seen smaller, lighter wrappers for things like energy bars. Never homework or anything like that.
Of course, I'd guess that 75% of what I see blowing around are blow-in cards from magazines. They have a decent chance of blowing away when put into the mailbox, when taken out of the mailbox, and when put into the garbage truck. So if you really want to ban something, ban those; I certainly won't object. :-D
There are biodegradable plastics. As I said in my original post, the problem with the word "plastic" is that it includes lots of different materials, not all of which are as environmentally problematic as the stuff you're concerned about.
Ebenezer! When did you start posting on Slashdot?
I was thinking *almost* that. More like a dancer dancing among the crowd and waving her arm close to people's back pockets. Either way, same idea, different implementation.
No, they really aren't. Only a small percentage of people are so lazy that they'll just toss trash out on the streets; most people do not.
Most of the trash you see blowing around is there because the garbage collection process has become too automated as a cost-cutting measure. A person drives by, and a machine grabs the can, turns it upside down, and dumps it into the truck. When this happens, stuff often falls out, and it ends up on the street, because there's no longer a second person on the truck to pick up what gets left behind.
It has nothing to do with humans being lazy and everything to do with humans being cheapskates who are unwilling to pay for the people needed to properly maintain our sanitation system. And instead of fixing that, they keep finding new ways to blame the garbage for not getting picked up. That's just absurd, and it will never end, because there will always be some other type of trash to use as a scapegoat for their problems.
That's a complete mischaracterization of my comment. The government's job is to dispose of waste. If it fails to do that, then it is not doing its job. It has nothing to do with "cleaning up after people". Most people are good citizens, and at least *try* to do the right thing by putting garbage in a bin, etc.
Why not? It came out of the ground. What's wrong with putting it back in? In a few million years, that will be oil. And if we get to the point where somehow we're out of oil and we absolutely have to have more, we know where we buried it, and we can deal with the recycling at that time, when it becomes financially practical to do so. Either way, burying it is probably the *best* solution.
Most businesses don't serve food. All businesses that serve food will notice, because it will become completely impractical for people to get food to-go. Unless, as I said, they allow biodegradable plastics, in which case there's no creativity needed—just an extra penny or so per utensil.
Who is talking about McDonald's? Fast food doesn't usually need utensils at all. It's the next quality tier up where disposable utensils start to matter — to-go orders from *real* restaurants.