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  1. It's worth noting... on Religious Affiliation Shrinking In the US · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While it'd be fun to take out the atheist triumphalism drum, it's worth noting that the thing being measured is religious affiliation not 'theological position' or 'amount of magical thinking done per day', or 'even the vaguest knowledge of how empiricism works'.

    Religious affiliation is quite significant, of course, it's obviously notable that substantially more people both can't be bothered to get their ass out of bed on Sunday morning and are willing to admit that they have no formal affiliation(historically, at least in the US, you might not actually attend all that often, or pay that much attention; but denying association was somewhat transgressive). It's also significant for the hopes of various religious groups to exercise political power through organized bloc voting (the 'moral majority', not that it was ever either, sure isn't going to be done any good by the evangelical protestant numbers, nor is the ability of bishops to bluster during election season going to improve with those catholic numbers.

    However, it's by no means the case that religious non-affiliation is necessarily anything other than pure disinterest, or vague belief in supernatural entities(probably shaped by a layman-level understanding of whatever your parents nominally believed, with any overtly objectionable parts left on the cutting room floor). There may also be a story about atheism here; but that isn't really the poll result.

    In that sense, the results aren't really too surprising: the liberal protestant and 'cafeteria catholic' congregations have been working their way toward being increasingly irrelevant social activities for years to decades now; some nice people and all that; but pretty light on religion, which meant that they drifted into direct competition with any and all other activities you do with other people, without being obviously more entertaining, conveniently scheduled, or otherwise competitive.

    The more conservative groups tended to retain the religiosity a bit more intensely; but they really got burned by their flirtation with state power(let's say roughly Reagan through Bush II in round numbers). They did get some of what they wanted, though not enough to prevent disappointment; but they burned a lot of religious legitimacy in the process. Remember that jewish radical who said that his kingdom was not of this world? Well, it'd be hard to argue that the evangelical power-brokers hanging out at the 'National Prayer Breakfast' and trying to get Washington to do something about homos and abortionists do. Even if your beliefs are fairly strong, and largely 'Christian' in outline, it's hard to avoid seeing the liberal wing of Christianity as increasingly wishy-washy and irrelevant, certainly not worth going to church with; and the conservative wing as dangerously unfocused on the kingdom of god in favor of trying to achieve local political gains.

  2. Re:23 down, 77 to go on Religious Affiliation Shrinking In the US · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't doubt that there are some exceptions, possibly even some motivated enough to be slightly dangerous; but those people I've met who actively want religion to die out (as opposed to merely being atheists personally, or apathetic toward metaphysics) specifically want it do die out by persuasion rather than persecution.

    It is relatively trivial, if you have the resources, to wipe out a belief just by killing everyone who holds it. However, that's an atrocity and an atrocious 'argument', if it can even be called one. You prove nothing but power, and being an awful person, by doing it. It is only a victory of ideas if people voluntarily come to believe differently.

    There's also the consideration that religions(in addition to their metaphysics and their moral prescriptions, which do tend to trouble atheists and non-aligned) tend to be a fairly large chunk of cultural practice(either because they developed it or because they co-opted and modified existing traditions. It is not at all uncommon for atheists to actively enjoy these aspects (the big, scary, Richard Dawkins himself is said to participate in christmas related ceremony with his family...), so long as they don't include religious leaders being granted state power and other unpleasant side effects.

    Perhaps Rob Kaper is more ardent than usual, I don't speak for him; but my guess is that, while he'd be pleased to have you lose faith, you are in no danger whatsoever and may continue without incident.

  3. Re:The times we live in on Beware the Ticking Internet of Things Security Time Bomb · · Score: 2

    The difference is the number and sneakiness of systems thus compromised.

    Back in the day, when an 8086 was real money and whatnot, you could be fairly sure that only the identifiable computer on your desk was sophisticated enough to be disobeying you; because you couldn't afford enough transistors, even if the market could supply them, for anything else to be.

    Now, thanks to Progress, basically anything from 99 cents on up is probably turing complete, phoning home to the mothership, and host to a mixture of 'consumer analytics platforms' and egregious security flaws.

  4. Is obvious, yes? on What's the Business Model For Commercializing Cyborgs? · · Score: 1

    Provide neurosurgery and implant at subsidized contract price. Charge consumer 'brainst genuine advantage' subscription fee for privilege of not being locked out of all inputs and outputs, trapped in a solipsistic hell-world of unimaginable ennui where time has no meaning and consumer begs in vain for death's sweet release. Is compelling sales pitch, no? Also, you can use cyborg body as nimble bio-robot while customer 'considers' sunscription payment. Generate extra income from otherwise wasted labor asset.

  5. Re:Well duh on MuckRock FOIA Request Releases Christopher Hitchens' FBI Files · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Aside from the "zOMG!!!! He belonged to some 'socialist' club in college!" bullshit, most of the rest of the file seemed to be variations on 'some foreign guy wants to be a permanent resident; we have absolutely nothing interesting on him'.

    I suppose you might as well write it down if you go to the trouble of checking; but even J Edgar Hoover's paranoid little minions apparently couldn't find too much to hyperventilate about.

  6. Re:I don't see why people are so childish on it on California Gets Past the Yuck Factor With "Toilet To Tap" Water Recycling · · Score: 2

    I don't know the details of proposed and actual treatment mechanisms for non-pathogen problems (though here is an outline of the regulations surrounding levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc permitted in the US. Regulation of organic pollutants and hydrocarbon levels were considered; but dropped and don't currently apply); but my understanding is that 'composting' on a wastewater treatment scale is not much like what people do in their back gardens, and is generally done in relatively vast hardware far from the neighbors. If anything, doing it properly probably scales up better than it scales down(amateur composters frequently fail to achieve optimal temperatures, moisture, etc. That's merely inefficient if you are dealing with grass clippings; but potentially fatal if dealing with intestinal pathogens; professionals can afford expertise, instruments, and process control, if they care).

    Unfortunately, once you get past metals and pathogens(metals are at least measured, pathogens are acknowledged as a threat), you get a whole lot of 'more research needed'(the usual answer on endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical persistence); or 'ooh, it's just a teensy bit, and we aren't required to model bioaccumulation from populations exposed to higher levels of contaminants in food producing biosolids higher in contaminants, which produce more contaminated food, and so forth..'(this is why dioxins, dibenzofurans, and similar known-nasty carbon/chlorine creations aren't covered by final regulations).

    In the long run, we've obviously survived exposure to this planet, trace metals and all; and more than a few unpleasant chemicals, so I'd hope that the problems can be worked out; but the financial pressure from people who just don't want to deal with the cost of incineration or landfilling has led to some rather questionable decisions. You tell someone that if they spread the stuff over a large enough area, they get to call it 'soil treatment'; but if they bury it all in one place they need to abide by standards for non-permeable landfill construction to keep the contaminants from leaching out, you create a deeply perverse incentive.

    Better separation of industrial sources is an obvious first step(it's always more expensive to un-mix things after the fact than it is to keep them separate); but I get a lot of 'more research needed' when it comes to household disposal and drug excretion.

    On the bright side, we don't use pig toilets anymore! So there is that.

  7. Re:I don't see why people are so childish on it on California Gets Past the Yuck Factor With "Toilet To Tap" Water Recycling · · Score: 4, Informative

    The one nasty trick, even with residential effluent; but especially if commercial/industrial gets mixed in thanks to antiquated, defective, or illicit sewer piping; is that sewage is only mostly dangerous because of the bacteria.

    Drugs of various sorts show up in residential sewage all the time, and have widely varying resistance to breakdown by low cost measures(if you throw enough resources at a chemist just about anything can be separated out, right down to isotopes; but if you can't biodegrade it, destroy it with UV exposure of modest intensity and duration, settle it out with flocculants, or similar cheap bulk methods, the cost will be high enough to be dubiously relevant to water treatment even in the first world); heavy metals show up from time to time and don't do much degrading at all, nasty persistent organic compounds are always a possibility. People just dump all kinds of ghastly stuff down the drain.

    There is a certain...history... associated with people trying to dispose of the byproducts of sewage treatment, where most of these goodies end up, by means cheaper than landfilling. The current strategy involves re-branding them as 'biosolids', composting them long enough that the bacterial pathogens are (mostly) weeded out, and then trying to find suckers willing to use them as fertilizer.

    It's too bad, really. If it were just shit, moderately competent composting practices would turn it quite readily into a safe, useful, soil additive. Dealing with the modest; but very much nonzero, levels of heavy metals and persistent organic compounds has proven to be really hairy.

  8. Not a giant surprise... on California Gets Past the Yuck Factor With "Toilet To Tap" Water Recycling · · Score: 2

    Desalination is still expensive and thirst can be very, very, motivational. That, and thanks to their totally fucked water rights distribution, California will probably still be exporting alfalfa and bottled water as they are installing deathstills to reclaim the body's water of the dead.

  9. Re: using the OpenCL APIs is *noisy* on GPU Malware Can Also Affect Windows PCs, Possibly Macs · · Score: 1

    You might notice if someone is tacky enough to run a hash cracker on the target machine's GPU; but GPUs are ever so good at very, very, fast memory access without straining themselves much or bothering the CPU at all. The 'ooh, antivirus isn't scanning your VRAM!!!' issue is practically irrelevant compared to the fact that you've got a more or less flexibly programmable secondary processor that can, in most systems, do whatever the hell it wants to pretty much all the RAM.

    The only saving grace is that it's probably pretty easy to accidentally crash the system if you poke around too aggressively; but that's a weak defense.

  10. Oh, sure, this is going to work... on World Health Organization Has New Rules For Avoiding Offensive Names · · Score: 1

    I can see the case for avoiding overt offense just for giggles(Hey, let's call the downs babies 'mongoloids' just like the good old days!); but this WHO suggestion seems both excessively broad(eg. diseases named for people almost always honor discoverers or significant researchers, which is hardly stigmatizing; diseases named after locations, unless novel as all hell, tend to better known than their place of origin/discovery pretty quickly) and deeply futile(the veterinarians and epidemiologists of the world are suddenly going to stop making reference to animal vectors? Like hell.)

    Plus, even brutally banal acronyms tend to find pejorative meanings that suit peoples' impressions of a disease pretty quickly. 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome' does its best to mean nothing; but people were still calling it 'severe asian respiratory syndrome' within days of its announcement. Plus, our supply of 'Novel Something Syndrome' form names is going to dry up real quick once the first one stops being novel and a second one shows up.

    Some sort of systematic naming convention, ideally shorter than the causal organism's entire genetic code, would be nice; but informal naming is always kind of a mess and seems unlikely to change.

  11. Re:Vague details on The Best-Paying IT Security Jobs of 2015 · · Score: 1

    Most security-related hardware is also (and probably largely for this purpose) kept low-voltage/data cabling only, so you can usually do it without getting a full electrician involved.

    Especially if you want outdoor mounts, there are still any number of mistakes that can lead to moisture problems, compromise insulation, damage fire barriers, and so on, so you don't want to scrape the bottom of the barrel too hard; but there aren't too many formal requirements compared to mains voltage work or structural modifications.

  12. Umm, yeah? on The Best-Paying IT Security Jobs of 2015 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know that smearing 'security' all over things is popular; but isn't this almost comically similar to non-security job descriptions?

    Suitably high level technical skill pays very well, 'Director of' and 'Chief Something Officer' pay well to very well, 'consultants' are either quite expensive or powerless peons who have been reclassified to avoid labor laws that apply to real employees; and installation technicians aren't quite below the poverty line.

  13. Re:Wasn't there an Apache helicopter simulator... on The World's Most Dangerous Driving Simulator · · Score: 2

    It depends on what is being simulated; but if the user is expected to do something useful under dire conditions(trigger ejection seat or the like), it may not be possible to usefully 'simulate' without beating on them a bit. A simulator that produces people who can calmly press the correct button when presented with the appropriate visual and audio stimuli; but panics, or flinches and jars the controls, when exposed to the shocks of a real mechanical system really failing might well get some users killed.

    It's probably unhelpful to actually damage them; but the sensations of (sometimes violent) movement are a big part of operating some types of hardware and somebody who isn't experienced with them is arguably maltrained, or at least trained only to a very limited level.

  14. Re:They trained their replacements on FWD.us To Laid-Off Southern California Edison Workers: Boo-Hoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    These guys are jerks. Obviously the Edison IT workers were qualified - they trained their replacements. Equally obvious they were available to do the job, so there was no reason to bring in H1Bs. Outright fraud by Edison, abetted by the government.

    It's more of a sleight of hand trick: the actual issue on the table was price; the 'FWD.us' flacks did a quick swap to capability (so that they could assert that those lazy workers could have gotten the job if they just up-skilled some more or something); and then abandoned the issue before anyone could point out that 'make yourself able to get the job' is not a matter of 'become more capable'; but 'become cheaper and more powerless.'

    At least when these guys are talking about actually unskilled individuals what they say is somewhere close to true-ish, albeit not very helpful(yes, it is true that people with no skills and tepid intelligence are fucked. Any plans on how the bottom couple of quintiles are going to just train their way into being somebody you'd let touch an application, much less pay to do so?); but this one is a pure cost move. The workers were able to get the job, that's why they had it. They did have the skills, that's how they trained their replacements. They just weren't cheap enough.

    Obviously, if you run a company whose two main costs are techies and electricity, you want to be able to hire techies for whatever qualifies as subsistence wages in Uttar Pradesh; but don't pretend that that's about 'skills', and don't fucking pretend you are doing us a favor by preaching some wise words about job creation at the same time.

  15. Re:How powered off is "powered off"? on Enterprise SSDs, Powered Off, Potentially Lose Data In a Week · · Score: 1

    The floating gates are isolated; but not perfectly, and on a modern high density device(especially an MLC one) it doesn't take much leakage to result in the wrong result.

    Decay within a week is pretty aggressive for anything you'd have the nerve to sell; but all flash memory can be expected to lose its contents over time.

  16. Head/desk... on Poor, Homegrown Encryption Threatens Open Smart Grid Protocol · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

    The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

  17. Re:Why concentrate on Canada on 25 Percent of Cars Cause 90 Percent of Air Pollution · · Score: 3, Informative

    Probably because the authors of the study were researchers at the University of Toronto and had access to air sampling equipment set up in the area? Sometimes you have to do the research where you can, rather than where you might want to.

    (Also, we only share the same atmosphere on average. For, say, an urban area with lots of vehicle traffic, the amount of soot people are inhaling is going to depend very substantially on the vehicles in local use, with much weaker effects from more distant sources.)

  18. Hmm... on Researchers Make Spiders Produce Silk Strengthened With Graphene · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Aside from the overtly disconcerting possibilities of nanotechnology-augmented spiders; does it strike anyone else as a matter for some potential concern that at least some organisms are quite permeable indeed to novel carbon structures?

  19. Re:wha? on Top Cyber Attack Vectors For Critical SAP Systems · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A 'sap' is a small blunt weapon, usually a leather sack of lead shot, used to incapacitate a target. A 'SAP system' is a gargantuan and expensive piece of ERP software used to incapacitate a corporation.

  20. Re:Industry attacks it on Recent Paper Shows Fracking Chemicals In Drinking Water, Industry Attacks It · · Score: 1

    The trouble is that a court is, effectively, a species of transaction cost in this situation(ie. if the transaction is '$X for potentially degrading use of my water supply'; but I have to sue you to obtain $X, that transaction is [i]painfully[/i] inefficient compared to just about any commercial payment processor in existence; and that's if I can afford to sue you at all.)

    Plus, since pollution can be relatively tricky to detect and identify the source of, and can often be shunted off to shell entities with almost zero resources against which to make claims, any hope of legal redress is further dimmed. Never mind the fact that things like 'dying slowly of some nasty cancer' don't have an amount of money that is really compensatory.

  21. Re:Last time one was used? on SpaceX Testing Passenger Escape System Tomorrow · · Score: 0

    I'd be curious to know if it actually is a bad thing to have... In the context of a rocket, there isn't exactly a lot of spare mass, spare volume, or engineers just sitting around and wallowing in boredom because the design is trivially simple and every niggling problem has been worked out.

    If you skipped the launch escape system, you'd be able to transport more in the same number of launches(or the same amount in fewer) and your craft would be less complex, allowing you to focus on making the remaining systems less likely to need an escape.

    Even if you don't fancy a look at our (honestly somewhat curious) level of risk aversion around space activity, it's not clear that adding an escape pod is a better investment, in terms of lives saved, than spending the resources on more extensive testing, improved reliability, and similar for the main systems. It's very much unlike the car scenario, where even 100% perfect engineering doesn't change the fact that other people are going to screw up and crash into you, and that a fair number of your drivers are going to be incompetent, drunk, or distracted; so you fairly quickly run out of improvements to the drive and steering system and have to achieve further survival gains by building in crash resistance. With a rocket, building a launch system that doesn't destroy itself and/or kill the passengers some of the time is quite challenging; but there isn't the same presence of ineradicable external danger, if your system doesn't kill the passengers, they'll survive.(Until you get them into orbit, where the micrometeorites can take them out...)

  22. Re:Dosbox in a browser? on Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets · · Score: 2

    Is there any reason to suspect that the version of dosbox compiled into javascript is more vulnerable to having programs inside punch their way out than the version of dosbox compiled for your platform of choice is?

    I doubt that it is god's gift to efficiency; but it isn't obvious why dosbox would be a more permeable VM in-browser than it is on the desktop(how permeable it is, or isn't, I don't know, it probably gets less testing than the more heavily used and often publicly exposed VMs; but it is also emulating something relativley simple compared to those).

  23. Re:Industry attacks it on Recent Paper Shows Fracking Chemicals In Drinking Water, Industry Attacks It · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are there any? negative externalities that people have an obligation not to impose on others; or is it always the other guy's job to suck it up and add whatever systems are necessary to compensate for them?

  24. How adorable... on How Silicon Valley Got That Way -- and Why It Will Continue To Rule · · Score: 5, Funny

    The place where everyone goes to 'disrupt' things has assured us that business will continue as usual.

  25. Re:This is Boeing Tech Support on Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power · · Score: 3, Funny

    NTSB investigators reported the cause of the crash as 'Controlled reboot into terrain".