I saw some of this in 2000, when I ran across the conflict between going 100% open-source on teaching Linux, and the prospect of students copying/passing-around test answers under the banner of 'well, it's open source, isn't it?'
I believe the correct answer would have been:
The code may be open source, but my grading isn't. It's more akin to absolute monarchy, if you recall.
So, the temperature in the lake increased by 1 Coulomb. Whoa nelly, that's... actually not a lot. Or anything really.
That said, it is curious that Slashdot (and probably also "folio.ca" from the article links) support Ç and Ç — (and even the emdash!) but not the humble degree symbol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But I guess it's at least still a bit better than the lake rising by 1c. That would end ugly. - https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
Like all prophets in Islamic thought, Jesus is also called a Muslim (i.e., one who submits to the will of God), as he preached that his followers should adopt the "straight path". Jesus is written about by some Muslim scholars as the perfect man.
Mûsâ ibn 'Imran - known as Moses in the Hebrew Bible, considered a prophet, messenger, and leader in Islam, is the most frequently mentioned individual in the Quran.
Sure, the specifics of both are viewed through a quite different lens, but the myth, history and basic teachings are all there.
Being an atheist, I have no stake in either of the many sides -- but at least I try to pay attention to what is and is not in the various beliefs, lest I not just be believed a fool, but let my words prove it.:D
One of the "much too early for its time" ideas of WebOS was precisely its dependency on JavaScript/CSS/HTML for application development.
Writing a UI with it was (and is) fine... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).
For the first year of WebOS's lifecycle, only a select few developers were permitted to write native applications. Everyone else had to use Mojo -- which restricted you to JS/CSS/HTML.
It also made interacting with the screen beyond the level of HTML virtually impossible. I should know, I created an eBook reader that was downloaded over 100k times. And let me tell you: It was a gruelling task!
Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was so ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) that it was close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch and in OpenGL.
That fact alone was already enough to doom the platform to obsolescence.
[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still... even nowadays I would dread writing heavy-lifting code in pure JS.
It is led by Opera's former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has a UI that can be fully customized via JavaScript and can be extended via regular Chrome Extensions if that is not enough.
And as for site-compatibility, since its rendering Engine is Chrome's Blink engine, you will not find much problems there.
Reading your post makes me think you're exactly the user that they make their product for.:)
What is Mojo? Well it's the new API for writing Andromeda apps, and it comes from Chromium. Mojo was originally created to "extract a common platform out of Chrome's renderer and plugin processes that can support multiple types of sandboxed content."
As a former developer of Palm/HP WebOS applications, this statement fills me with dread.
The WebOS application framework was also called Mojo and forced developers to use (WebKit) HTML, CSS & JavaScript for their entire application. Writing a UI, fine... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).
Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was still ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) and close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch.
So unless Google only uses Mojo for the UI and allows developers to use something nicer and faster for the backend, with good callback support, I feel this platform will obsolete itself, just like WebOS did.
[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still...
The same place where Apple will be in 10-20 years?
After all, who knows? IBM used to be everywhere, now it's just around. Microsoft used to be ubiquitous in many areas, now it's only so in one... and that barely. Before there was Twitter and Facebook, there was MySpace and before that, GeoCities?
Before cars were made, people bought horse carriages. Can you name one horse carriage builder now?
Things change and even the greatest empires eventually fall. No country on this earth is now even remotely like it was 50 years ago.
The greatest fools are not those who predict the future, but those who believe their own predictions will come to pass as is.
21 1/3 64th, exactly. Now, 1/3 meter in millimeters, please?
333 1/3 mm; exactly. See? Same thing.
The actual point here was that shifting that value to meter or kilometer or femtometer is all just a matter of moving the decimal dot. No need to involve fractions; unless you already had fractions before or shift the value below 1.0 (why would you?).
Problem is, you can't do that with Imperial measurements because it has different units of measurements for the same thing, and they do not cleanly convert into each other, since their base is different. In metric the base is always the same (10) and there is always just one unit for a measure.
The base could even have been 2, or 12, or 94467. Would not have mattered (much). The beauty of metric is that ALL units have the same base and thus freely convert without artificially forcing you to use fractions.
This is why: m/s, km/s, mm/s, nm/Ts -- they all convert "cleanly" into each other.
You can easily get the same out of the Imperial system, if you keep only one unit for each measurement, and use SI prefixes to alter the magnitude. If you'd only use foot or mile or yard or inch, you'd reap the same benefit as the metric system.
Point is: The actual unit does not matter, as long as the base is always the same.
To clothe it in a car analogy: The difference is about the same as there being two cars, one has a top speed of 170 km/h, the other one of 200km/h. Certainly sounds like a huge difference, does it?
Unless you'll be driving both almost exclusively in a city, where the speed limit is only about 80 km/h at most. All you'd notice is a hardly perceptible difference in acceleration, as both cars don't even reach 50% of their maximum speed.
Strictly speaking, there's no reason for user binary other than that it makes some things a lot easier, while it makes other things a bit more difficult.
For example, during the early time of electronic engineering, the Russians/Soviets experimented with ternary computers, the "SETUN" while the USA had the "Ternac". Both had more complicated hardware than a binary computer, but were a lot more efficient at processing arithmetic instructions.
Why, oh why do I always click, "Post Anonymously"? Seems I get far more +5s as an AC than as meself. The mods stop at +3 when I'm posting under me own name!
</lament>
Interesting fact: It depends on where you look at your posting and whether or not you have "Excellent" Karma.
There are two ways to look at your posting: From the article's comment section and from your own comment history on your profile.
If you're an AC, your comment gets a nifty 0 moderation. People need to upmod you 5 times until it's at +5. If you're logged in, you get an immediate +1 that is visible to you and everyone. People only need to upmod you 4 times until it's a +5. If you have "Excellent" Karma, you get another +1 putting your posting at +2. ...... but that one is only visible on the article's comment section. In your own history, it will appear as a normal, regular +1 posting.
Since people stop moderating when a comment reaches +5, your own history will never show them as more than +4. If then someone downmods it only once shortly before the thread is archived (and moderation gets closed), your posting will sit at +3 in your history forever... even if the article lists it at +4.
You see, you don't even need Slashdot Beta for the posting system not to make any sense.:-D
As others have pointed out above and before: Passphrases are neat and easy to remember --- but a nightmare to type.
There is no functional difference between typing X letters of a word, or X letters of random garbage once memorized. Indeed, I would rather argue that the (almost) random garbage is probably faster, since you could choose it for maximum typing comfort/speed, like more strongly alternating hands for typing and avoiding "distant" key combos, without greatly compromising entropy.
Now, add to this that words in almost all languages follow a nice pattern: Consonants-Vocal-Consonants-Vocal. Usually with a 1.5:1 ratio of consonants to vocals. So your actual entropy for pure word-length compresses down by a similar factor.
So, in difficulty of brute forcing (if the attacker knows you chose either garbage or words) 10 letters of random garbage equal about 15 letters of regular words; give or take a few characters.Add to that the speed argument above, once you've memorized them
This means that a passphrase gets more secure only after it has already become far more time consuming to type.
Finally, at some point (currently at about 10-16 chars, depending on the algorith), it becomes easier to break the password hashes by finding collisions that to brute-force the password.
So congrats for your passphrase having 2000 bits of entropy, when it still only takes 15 minutes to find a SHA1 collision against your password.
I have to type my password 100+ times a day. I can touch-type, but one typo usually means I have to delete it all and start over.
It's really hard to get Ctl+Alt+A wrong.
Try doing that in an SSH login shell. Or in a textual DBMS management console. Or in a general CLI tool that expects a password. Try it in a computer game that uses its own home-brewn dialog boxes.Or, do it in a text box that does not echo out characters, hiding the length of the password. Or password boxes that disable highlighting entirely.
Now do it, while knowing that you get locked out for 15 minutes when you enter the password wrong once or twice.
There are many situations in which the only way to recover safely from a typo in a password entry field is to hit backspace a few times.
> And some foolish folks decided to go ahead and replace/bin/sh with bash.
Have you ever taken a look at the original Bourne Shell code? All the way up to V7, this header file was applied to each and every line of source code of the original Bourne Shell: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin...
Essentially, this header turned C into a really crummy version of ALGOL -- and the source code was written with that in mind. It took them until 1984 to de-ALGOLize the source code, and it was still a horrible mess after that.
So the Bourne-Again Shell (Bash) was created in 1989 as a response to the shoddy code (and other limitations). Then, when that one bloated out of control, people started going back to the "minimal Bourne Shell" approach in the modern incarnations of Ash and Dash; but by then, Bash had already become the de-facto replacement for Bourne Shells.
In the end though, for any nasty bug you find in Bash, you'll probably find two in the original Bourne Shell --- only hidden behind virtually unreadable source code.
And it is very likely, that nasty things lurk in tcsh, ksh and others. After all, as someone sage once said: "Any non-trivial program that consists of more than three lines of code has at least one bug."
Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with. It's not meant to be done in flat areas, certainly, but no-one every said one solution fits everything. There are no silver bullets.
I briefly considered splitting natural gas production and the simpler hydrogen/oxygen production, but then found it just belabouring the point. The idea of turning electrical energy into bond energy is chiefly the same in both cases, they just arrive at it with different means.
Yes, flywheels are for short duration load balancing, of seconds to some dozen minutes. Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science. Plus, see again the point about the "no-silver-bullet" thingy.
As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.
The grid-storage idea currently only falls flat because of the design of the network in most parts of the world, which is geared towards putting energy production facilities smack next to energy utilizing facilities (like coal plants next to aluminium smelters), and isolating these nets from each other, with long switchover times. It's never going to store energy for hours -- but then again, many parts of the net actually have the lowest demand during the night. Which is why power is cheaper at night to begin with (for large consumers, at least).
Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year. Certainly not a factor of 10 difference --- or barely even 2, if you used binary magnitudes.
As for your point about rich/poor people: You forget that companies use most of the power in industrialized countries; it's what makes them industrialized. No-one can tell me, that Google can't afford a few million less net income -- and mid-level companies usually do not need multiple mega watts. Sure, the cost may be large... but then again, how much did the nations of this world offer as trust coverage for the bad banks from 2008 to today?
Point being: It's our short-sighted greed, that causes us to avoid these expenditures. No-one is going to starve because of a 5% price hike on energy -- which, by the way, is a hike that'll come anyway once fossil fuel gets more expensive. I mean, how much has the oil barrel price risen since 1970? Several thousand percent? Sounds about right.
Also, for a more cynical point, the jobs lost are offset by the jobs gained building this improved infrastructure. Just ask the weavers, spinners and loom operators of the 18th century, what they thought about the automated loom; and look how many jobs were created precisely because of the raised productivity this brought.
Additionally, you forget, that we don't actually have to store all the energy in chemical batteries. There are quite a lot of storage possibilities:
- Pumping water to higher locations - Splitting hydrogen and oxygen from water - Spinning up large-mass, high-velocity, low-drag flywheels (it's how the venerable Shuttle stored energy for its week long missions) - Storing the energy in the electrical network itself (the capacity of several million kilometers of copper cable can be astounding) - Heating liquid salt reservoirs (which can give back energy via the good old steam turbine)
The list continues for quite some time. Additionally, this is not even considering that you can just get your power from other parts of the world that are not currently cloudy or shrouded in nighttime. It also disregards, that we have other means of generating electricity, like water power, which runs continuously.
The question is not, IF we can produce renewable energy in sufficient and even excessive amounts (after all, remember that all power except for nuclear fission comes directly from converted sunlight. And nuclear fission simply uses up the results of old supernova explosions, instead of regular solar fusion).
The question is: WHEN do we get off our collectives asses, are ready to pay a bit more for power for 10-20 years and then get rid of the problem entirely. And that's assuming power prices wouldn't rise in 20 years to begin with, due to oil, gas, coal and uranium price hikes.
Your comparisons are ridiculous for anyone who has ever played a violin.
There are so many things that are wrong with this study. There are so many things that differentiate violins BESIDES how they sound to an audience.
But the question is, given that any musician's ultimate target is to eventually have an audience, shouldn't how an instrument sounds to them be the quintessential point of evaluating the quality of an instrument?
Remember: Price and rarity are another set of entities altogether. A solid gold violin couldn't be played, but would be worth a ludicrous amount of money. The very first violin ever created in the world would be a rare find (as it probably does not exist anymore), but would probably be in a condition in which you simply could not play it at all.
You are right that there are many qualities a musical instrument can have, but you are wrong in assuming that they have any relevance on the most important quality of an instrument: If it can create music people want to hear, in the quality they want.
The article highlights that 150 people is too low a number to preserve all the genetic diversity over multiple generations. This is in line with other estimates, that say that below 250 and 500 individuals, genetic diversity collapses rapidly.
But I always wondered: All these statements assume normal sexual selection, where some gene lines die out in the long run.
But what if one would remove the element of chance? What if you know the genetic pool of your colonists and could ensure over dozens of generations, that no genetic diversity is lost. Additionally, what if you could preserve the original genetic pool via cloning or DNA storage & synthesis?
Since the initial stock of colonists are presumably genetically healthy, it follows that their offspring should be healthy, too, if you eliminate loss of gene lines. And even if some issues appear, you still have the originals "on backup".
Of course, like others pointed out, such a strict procreation scheme might lead to adverse psychological effects in the population.:)
But all the US actors and Pop stars use American social media now. So good luck getting rid of the huge swaths of followers using US services.
Europe is the second most profitable market of such media worldwide; often accounting for between 25-40% of the gross. Do you really think that those people, for whom money always comes first, would ignore that market just because it means opening up a second account you need to flood with sock-puppeted postings?
The additional cost wouldn't even show up in their budget (apart from witholding money from those poor souls who went for a share in the profit- instead of gross-margin).
Worse yet, this whole thing is not about routing moronic teenager BS emails through US services, its about keeping the NSA out of everyone else's data....and that won't happen.
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. To use a car analogy, it's the difference between leaving your car unlocked in the streets of a Mexico City slum, and keeping it in your own garage in Beverly Hills.
Sure, it might still be stolen by someone, but one needs a concentrated, deliberate, directed effort of the right kind of person with investment of resources, whereas the other only needs a random person of questionable repute that happens to pass by.
At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux: "It's too complicated for our staff. Give us back our Windows XP, our MS Office, our Internet Explorer."
May I remind you of projects like LiMux, which involved bringing the entire Infrastructure of the city of Munich over from Microsoft products to open source products based on and around Linux?
Projects that instead of failing, succeeded quite well. Where the users -- after an initial grumbling -- not only accepted it, but gave it quite better usability marks than the MS products. Users that are governmental offices, who are not exactly known for quickly embracing new ideas. In a federal state that's Germany's equivalent of Texas in terms of conservativeness.
So given that this project quite nicely showed that going away from the US Software companies, over to truly international Open Source software is very much feasible, even when you're just using the money you'd have spent on licensing costs anyway year-over-year, what's exactly the holdup?
Also, before you raise the flag of "lowered productivity", the entire switch-over happened progressively, without impacting users beyond them having to learn a few new clicks and buttons.
Now, avoiding US-based internet services is also not that hard.
There are plenty of European online mail providers.
Facebook is for most users also easily replaceable, given that their circle of friends (that they contact more than once a year) is usually entirely local; often less than a few hundred kilometers apart.
For video-on-demand, most people don't even know Netflix exists; but can probably name one or two local competitors -- simply because they want their films in their own languages.
There are more European online radio stations than you could ever want.
Even Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and others have perfectly fine local equivalents.
This list goes on and one; at least for Europe. Therefore, ignoring US services is only a matter of overcoming complacency, not one of sheer impossibility.
A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation.
Actually, all that Chernobyl's wildlife proves is this:
It is beneficial to wildlife populations to not exist in proximity to humans.
Given that fact, the recovery and increas in Chernobyl's wildlife becomes suddenly very, very uninteresting. Add to that the fact that the average life expectancy of somewhere around 90% of species living in the wild is below 20 years, and you get while doing longterm exposure studies on them is also kinda moot.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw some of this in 2000, when I ran across the conflict between going 100% open-source on teaching Linux, and the prospect of students copying/passing-around test answers under the banner of 'well, it's open source, isn't it?'
I believe the correct answer would have been:
The code may be open source, but my grading isn't. It's more akin to absolute monarchy, if you recall.
So, the temperature in the lake increased by 1 Coulomb. Whoa nelly, that's ... actually not a lot. Or anything really.
That said, it is curious that Slashdot (and probably also "folio.ca" from the article links) support Ç and Ç — (and even the emdash!) but not the humble degree symbol.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But I guess it's at least still a bit better than the lake rising by 1c. That would end ugly.
- https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
I know your reply was all in jest.
However, it did make the think of these:
- (Stephen Fry on Language) http://www.stephenfry.com/2008.../
- (TLDR Stephen Fry on Language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here's to hoping those sacriliciously cromulent links embiggen someone's horizon, if'n'when they stumble over them at some future date.
That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it [...]. It is forever.
Not to a buddhist. After all, remember the saying:
"All journeys -- no matter how long -- start with the first step and end with the last step."
In short: Forever is a big word to toss around by small minds. What's so bad about just saying: "Pretty frickin' long"? :-)
Where are the laws of Moses in Islam? Where are the teachings of Jesus in Islam? Nowhere because they were incompatible with it.
Read these, they might be illuminating:
Like all prophets in Islamic thought, Jesus is also called a Muslim (i.e., one who submits to the will of God), as he preached that his followers should adopt the "straight path". Jesus is written about by some Muslim scholars as the perfect man.
Mûsâ ibn 'Imran - known as Moses in the Hebrew Bible, considered a prophet, messenger, and leader in Islam, is the most frequently mentioned individual in the Quran.
Sure, the specifics of both are viewed through a quite different lens, but the myth, history and basic teachings are all there.
Being an atheist, I have no stake in either of the many sides -- but at least I try to pay attention to what is and is not in the various beliefs, lest I not just be believed a fool, but let my words prove it. :D
One of the "much too early for its time" ideas of WebOS was precisely its dependency on JavaScript/CSS/HTML for application development.
Writing a UI with it was (and is) fine ... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).
For the first year of WebOS's lifecycle, only a select few developers were permitted to write native applications. Everyone else had to use Mojo -- which restricted you to JS/CSS/HTML.
It also made interacting with the screen beyond the level of HTML virtually impossible. I should know, I created an eBook reader that was downloaded over 100k times. And let me tell you: It was a gruelling task!
Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was so ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) that it was close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch and in OpenGL.
That fact alone was already enough to doom the platform to obsolescence.
[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still... even nowadays I would dread writing heavy-lifting code in pure JS.
If you want a fully customizable UI, you can always switch to Vivaldi.
https://vivaldi.com/
It is led by Opera's former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has a UI that can be fully customized via JavaScript and can be extended via regular Chrome Extensions if that is not enough.
And as for site-compatibility, since its rendering Engine is Chrome's Blink engine, you will not find much problems there.
Reading your post makes me think you're exactly the user that they make their product for. :)
What is Mojo? Well it's the new API for writing Andromeda apps, and it comes from Chromium. Mojo was originally created to "extract a common platform out of Chrome's renderer and plugin processes that can support multiple types of sandboxed content."
As a former developer of Palm/HP WebOS applications, this statement fills me with dread.
The WebOS application framework was also called Mojo and forced developers to use (WebKit) HTML, CSS & JavaScript for their entire application. Writing a UI, fine ... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).
Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was still ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) and close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch.
So unless Google only uses Mojo for the UI and allows developers to use something nicer and faster for the backend, with good callback support, I feel this platform will obsolete itself, just like WebOS did.
[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still...
And, where is Palm today?
The same place where Apple will be in 10-20 years?
After all, who knows? ... and that barely.
IBM used to be everywhere, now it's just around.
Microsoft used to be ubiquitous in many areas, now it's only so in one
Before there was Twitter and Facebook, there was MySpace and before that, GeoCities?
Before cars were made, people bought horse carriages. Can you name one horse carriage builder now?
Things change and even the greatest empires eventually fall. No country on this earth is now even remotely like it was 50 years ago.
The greatest fools are not those who predict the future, but those who believe their own predictions will come to pass as is.
For that matter, 1/3 inch in 64ths, please.
21 1/3 64th, exactly. Now, 1/3 meter in millimeters, please?
333 1/3 mm; exactly.
See? Same thing.
The actual point here was that shifting that value to meter or kilometer or femtometer is all just a matter of moving the decimal dot. No need to involve fractions; unless you already had fractions before or shift the value below 1.0 (why would you?).
Problem is, you can't do that with Imperial measurements because it has different units of measurements for the same thing, and they do not cleanly convert into each other, since their base is different. In metric the base is always the same (10) and there is always just one unit for a measure.
The base could even have been 2, or 12, or 94467. Would not have mattered (much). The beauty of metric is that ALL units have the same base and thus freely convert without artificially forcing you to use fractions.
This is why: m/s, km/s, mm/s, nm/Ts -- they all convert "cleanly" into each other.
You can easily get the same out of the Imperial system, if you keep only one unit for each measurement, and use SI prefixes to alter the magnitude. If you'd only use foot or mile or yard or inch, you'd reap the same benefit as the metric system.
Point is: The actual unit does not matter, as long as the base is always the same.
To clothe it in a car analogy: The difference is about the same as there being two cars, one has a top speed of 170 km/h, the other one of 200km/h. Certainly sounds like a huge difference, does it?
Unless you'll be driving both almost exclusively in a city, where the speed limit is only about 80 km/h at most. All you'd notice is a hardly perceptible difference in acceleration, as both cars don't even reach 50% of their maximum speed.
Stops sounding so terribly significant, does it?
Irregardless off you're opinion its still a waist off thyme for all intensive porpoises.
Did I really have to fix that for you? Shame on you.
Strictly speaking, there's no reason for user binary other than that it makes some things a lot easier, while it makes other things a bit more difficult.
For example, during the early time of electronic engineering, the Russians/Soviets experimented with ternary computers, the "SETUN" while the USA had the "Ternac". Both had more complicated hardware than a binary computer, but were a lot more efficient at processing arithmetic instructions.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
And who knows, in a few decades, people might thing binary to be quaint and outdated, given that Qubits are so much, much more efficient.
Why, oh why do I always click, "Post Anonymously"? Seems I get far more +5s as an AC than as meself. The mods stop at +3 when I'm posting under me own name!
</lament>
Interesting fact: It depends on where you look at your posting and whether or not you have "Excellent" Karma.
There are two ways to look at your posting: From the article's comment section and from your own comment history on your profile.
If you're an AC, your comment gets a nifty 0 moderation. People need to upmod you 5 times until it's at +5.
... ... but that one is only visible on the article's comment section. In your own history, it will appear as a normal, regular +1 posting.
If you're logged in, you get an immediate +1 that is visible to you and everyone. People only need to upmod you 4 times until it's a +5.
If you have "Excellent" Karma, you get another +1 putting your posting at +2.
Since people stop moderating when a comment reaches +5, your own history will never show them as more than +4. ... even if the article lists it at +4.
If then someone downmods it only once shortly before the thread is archived (and moderation gets closed), your posting will sit at +3 in your history forever
You see, you don't even need Slashdot Beta for the posting system not to make any sense. :-D
As others have pointed out above and before: Passphrases are neat and easy to remember --- but a nightmare to type.
There is no functional difference between typing X letters of a word, or X letters of random garbage once memorized. Indeed, I would rather argue that the (almost) random garbage is probably faster, since you could choose it for maximum typing comfort/speed, like more strongly alternating hands for typing and avoiding "distant" key combos, without greatly compromising entropy.
Now, add to this that words in almost all languages follow a nice pattern: Consonants-Vocal-Consonants-Vocal. Usually with a 1.5:1 ratio of consonants to vocals. So your actual entropy for pure word-length compresses down by a similar factor.
So, in difficulty of brute forcing (if the attacker knows you chose either garbage or words) 10 letters of random garbage equal about 15 letters of regular words; give or take a few characters.Add to that the speed argument above, once you've memorized them
This means that a passphrase gets more secure only after it has already become far more time consuming to type.
Finally, at some point (currently at about 10-16 chars, depending on the algorith), it becomes easier to break the password hashes by finding collisions that to brute-force the password.
So congrats for your passphrase having 2000 bits of entropy, when it still only takes 15 minutes to find a SHA1 collision against your password.
I have to type my password 100+ times a day. I can touch-type, but one typo usually means I have to delete it all and start over.
It's really hard to get Ctl+Alt+A wrong.
Try doing that in an SSH login shell. Or in a textual DBMS management console. Or in a general CLI tool that expects a password. Try it in a computer game that uses its own home-brewn dialog boxes.Or, do it in a text box that does not echo out characters, hiding the length of the password. Or password boxes that disable highlighting entirely.
Now do it, while knowing that you get locked out for 15 minutes when you enter the password wrong once or twice.
There are many situations in which the only way to recover safely from a typo in a password entry field is to hit backspace a few times.
> And some foolish folks decided to go ahead and replace /bin/sh with bash.
Have you ever taken a look at the original Bourne Shell code? All the way up to V7, this header file was applied to each and every line of source code of the original Bourne Shell:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin...
Essentially, this header turned C into a really crummy version of ALGOL -- and the source code was written with that in mind. It took them until 1984 to de-ALGOLize the source code, and it was still a horrible mess after that.
So the Bourne-Again Shell (Bash) was created in 1989 as a response to the shoddy code (and other limitations). Then, when that one bloated out of control, people started going back to the "minimal Bourne Shell" approach in the modern incarnations of Ash and Dash; but by then, Bash had already become the de-facto replacement for Bourne Shells.
In the end though, for any nasty bug you find in Bash, you'll probably find two in the original Bourne Shell --- only hidden behind virtually unreadable source code.
And it is very likely, that nasty things lurk in tcsh, ksh and others. After all, as someone sage once said: "Any non-trivial program that consists of more than three lines of code has at least one bug."
Just a (sort-of-quick) reply, to what you raised.
Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with. It's not meant to be done in flat areas, certainly, but no-one every said one solution fits everything. There are no silver bullets.
I briefly considered splitting natural gas production and the simpler hydrogen/oxygen production, but then found it just belabouring the point. The idea of turning electrical energy into bond energy is chiefly the same in both cases, they just arrive at it with different means.
Yes, flywheels are for short duration load balancing, of seconds to some dozen minutes. Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science. Plus, see again the point about the "no-silver-bullet" thingy.
As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.
The grid-storage idea currently only falls flat because of the design of the network in most parts of the world, which is geared towards putting energy production facilities smack next to energy utilizing facilities (like coal plants next to aluminium smelters), and isolating these nets from each other, with long switchover times. It's never going to store energy for hours -- but then again, many parts of the net actually have the lowest demand during the night. Which is why power is cheaper at night to begin with (for large consumers, at least).
Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year. Certainly not a factor of 10 difference --- or barely even 2, if you used binary magnitudes.
As for your point about rich/poor people: You forget that companies use most of the power in industrialized countries; it's what makes them industrialized. No-one can tell me, that Google can't afford a few million less net income -- and mid-level companies usually do not need multiple mega watts. Sure, the cost may be large ... but then again, how much did the nations of this world offer as trust coverage for the bad banks from 2008 to today?
Point being: It's our short-sighted greed, that causes us to avoid these expenditures. No-one is going to starve because of a 5% price hike on energy -- which, by the way, is a hike that'll come anyway once fossil fuel gets more expensive. I mean, how much has the oil barrel price risen since 1970? Several thousand percent? Sounds about right.
Also, for a more cynical point, the jobs lost are offset by the jobs gained building this improved infrastructure. Just ask the weavers, spinners and loom operators of the 18th century, what they thought about the automated loom; and look how many jobs were created precisely because of the raised productivity this brought.
Additionally, you forget, that we don't actually have to store all the energy in chemical batteries. There are quite a lot of storage possibilities:
- Pumping water to higher locations
- Splitting hydrogen and oxygen from water
- Spinning up large-mass, high-velocity, low-drag flywheels (it's how the venerable Shuttle stored energy for its week long missions)
- Storing the energy in the electrical network itself (the capacity of several million kilometers of copper cable can be astounding)
- Heating liquid salt reservoirs (which can give back energy via the good old steam turbine)
The list continues for quite some time. Additionally, this is not even considering that you can just get your power from other parts of the world that are not currently cloudy or shrouded in nighttime. It also disregards, that we have other means of generating electricity, like water power, which runs continuously.
The question is not, IF we can produce renewable energy in sufficient and even excessive amounts (after all, remember that all power except for nuclear fission comes directly from converted sunlight. And nuclear fission simply uses up the results of old supernova explosions, instead of regular solar fusion).
The question is: WHEN do we get off our collectives asses, are ready to pay a bit more for power for 10-20 years and then get rid of the problem entirely. And that's assuming power prices wouldn't rise in 20 years to begin with, due to oil, gas, coal and uranium price hikes.
There's just one thing I need to say: An audience of one, is still an audience.
I do not use weasel-worded statements often, but when I use them, I use them for their full meaning.
Your comparisons are ridiculous for anyone who has ever played a violin.
There are so many things that are wrong with this study. There are so many things that differentiate violins BESIDES how they sound to an audience.
But the question is, given that any musician's ultimate target is to eventually have an audience, shouldn't how an instrument sounds to them be the quintessential point of evaluating the quality of an instrument?
Remember: Price and rarity are another set of entities altogether. A solid gold violin couldn't be played, but would be worth a ludicrous amount of money. The very first violin ever created in the world would be a rare find (as it probably does not exist anymore), but would probably be in a condition in which you simply could not play it at all.
You are right that there are many qualities a musical instrument can have, but you are wrong in assuming that they have any relevance on the most important quality of an instrument: If it can create music people want to hear, in the quality they want.
The article highlights that 150 people is too low a number to preserve all the genetic diversity over multiple generations. This is in line with other estimates, that say that below 250 and 500 individuals, genetic diversity collapses rapidly.
But I always wondered: All these statements assume normal sexual selection, where some gene lines die out in the long run.
But what if one would remove the element of chance? What if you know the genetic pool of your colonists and could ensure over dozens of generations, that no genetic diversity is lost. Additionally, what if you could preserve the original genetic pool via cloning or DNA storage & synthesis?
Since the initial stock of colonists are presumably genetically healthy, it follows that their offspring should be healthy, too, if you eliminate loss of gene lines. And even if some issues appear, you still have the originals "on backup".
Of course, like others pointed out, such a strict procreation scheme might lead to adverse psychological effects in the population. :)
But all the US actors and Pop stars use American social media now. So good luck getting rid of the huge swaths of followers using US services.
Europe is the second most profitable market of such media worldwide; often accounting for between 25-40% of the gross. Do you really think that those people, for whom money always comes first, would ignore that market just because it means opening up a second account you need to flood with sock-puppeted postings?
The additional cost wouldn't even show up in their budget (apart from witholding money from those poor souls who went for a share in the profit- instead of gross-margin).
Worse yet, this whole thing is not about routing moronic teenager BS emails through US services, its about keeping the NSA out of everyone else's data....and that won't happen.
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. To use a car analogy, it's the difference between leaving your car unlocked in the streets of a Mexico City slum, and keeping it in your own garage in Beverly Hills.
Sure, it might still be stolen by someone, but one needs a concentrated, deliberate, directed effort of the right kind of person with investment of resources, whereas the other only needs a random person of questionable repute that happens to pass by.
At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux: "It's too complicated for our staff. Give us back our Windows XP, our MS Office, our Internet Explorer."
May I remind you of projects like LiMux, which involved bringing the entire Infrastructure of the city of Munich over from Microsoft products to open source products based on and around Linux?
Projects that instead of failing, succeeded quite well. Where the users -- after an initial grumbling -- not only accepted it, but gave it quite better usability marks than the MS products. Users that are governmental offices, who are not exactly known for quickly embracing new ideas. In a federal state that's Germany's equivalent of Texas in terms of conservativeness.
So given that this project quite nicely showed that going away from the US Software companies, over to truly international Open Source software is very much feasible, even when you're just using the money you'd have spent on licensing costs anyway year-over-year, what's exactly the holdup?
Also, before you raise the flag of "lowered productivity", the entire switch-over happened progressively, without impacting users beyond them having to learn a few new clicks and buttons.
Now, avoiding US-based internet services is also not that hard.
This list goes on and one; at least for Europe. Therefore, ignoring US services is only a matter of overcoming complacency, not one of sheer impossibility.
A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation.
Actually, all that Chernobyl's wildlife proves is this:
It is beneficial to wildlife populations to not exist in proximity to humans.
Given that fact, the recovery and increas in Chernobyl's wildlife becomes suddenly very, very uninteresting. Add to that the fact that the average life expectancy of somewhere around 90% of species living in the wild is below 20 years, and you get while doing longterm exposure studies on them is also kinda moot.