Ooh, is this another reference to the Martin shooting?
Because out of the ~2 million defensive uses of a gun a year, one of them goes to trial since it's unclear what happened. He's acquitted. Martin attacked first. End of story.
But no, you have one case plastered over the news so it's an epidemic.
No, Zimmerman CLAIMED Martin attacked first. We can't hear Martin's story because he is, you know, dead. An unarmed teenager talking to his girlfriend on the phone is APPROACHED by a middle aged man with a gun and he is the attacker? Really?
Indeed, I had a lawyer decline to represent me in court because of what I had said to the cop when stopped (basically a confession of a lesser offense than what the ticket was for). Likely the lawyer would not have been able to do much for me but it was an option that was denied me because I had not declined to provide the minimum information I was required to give.
WTF was wrong with your lawyer? Didn't he like money?
In Australian courts, surveys have shown that being represented will often result in a lighter penalty, even if you plead guilty. The lawyer will tell the judge of your co-operation, contrition, previous good record, difficult childhood yada, yada.
In other words they know how to bullshit the system.
Malala gets this one hands-down. Both made very important statements we must pay attention to, but a fucking headshot beats hanging out in a Russian airport IMHO.
But Malala didn't volunteer to get shot in the head, that was done to her, although she has displayed great personal fortitude since then.
Contrast that with Snowden who deliberately gave up his career, his family, his girl friend, and his life to date to reveal the US's dirty doings. My Vote is for Snowden.
Such a noble and iconic aircraft turned into a play toy.
If I recall correctly the F16 was a Tier 2 fighter, specifically designed to be cheap to buy and cheap to run — quantity was a higher priority than capability, as least compared with its larger two-engined brethren. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "noble and iconic" seems a bit much.
While this all great Science, actually solar panels are already cheap enough in many parts of the world. Certainly they are in Australia since we have no tariffs on imported Chinese panels. What is really needed for greater market penetration is cheap storage. It would be great to have a around ~20 KWHr of storage for ~$2000 - $4000. Said storage needs to be stable over around 7000 cycles (20 years of operation) and provide of the order of 4 KW of power on demand. With this in place residential PV systems could provide over 20% of demand in many parts of the world.
This might be what you've been waiting for, but we still have to actually see it on the commercial market.
http://www.gizmag.com/iron-air-battery/23646/
This cheaper iron electrode is driving costs down significantly, and the researchers are targeting an aggressive $100 per kWh for their batteries. For reference, research firm Lux Research puts the cost of lithium-ion batteries at roughly around $600/kWh and says their cost will decrease quite slowly, dropping below the $400/kWh mark no earlier than in 2020.
He writes what I call sausage machine books; he turns the handle and out they come, one after the other. His books are inoffensive but unmemorable, the kind of thing you pick up in a bus or airline terminal when there's nothing better to do while you're waiting for your ride to show up.
Oh well, I suppose it pays his bills, but I'm not expecting to see Zahn's name on any of the Hugo or Nebula Awards' lists anytime soon.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice, when the people involved have prior form, and have close associations with the Chinese military.
To quote cold fjord above, "The story is about default and hard coded passwords". What valid reason is there to put those in (presumably) commercial modems and routers?
Without paper money, but there has been an economy equivalent for as long as abstract thinking has existed among humans. Sea shells and beads were a form of money for all intents and purposes in many cultures for thousands of years.
But what I think the OP is missing is if you have essentially free energy, and the ability to turn energy into almost any form of matter (Star Trek did note some limits to this, but very few), then what does economy mean? The only meaningful resources would be those few things you can't replicate with energy to matter conversion and skills not possible through expert systems (computers). You'd probably want some way to allocate those, but it would take an interesting form of economy to do so. Sadly, it might come down to slavery. Individuals would be important for their skills, but since you can't offer them anything tangible to convince them to work for you (they could just work for themselves on whatever they find interesting), some people would convince them through torture, I think.
Suddenly, that utopian future looks a lot more distopian to me.
The late Iain M Banks' Culture novels were set post the Age of Scarcity, and most of his human characters look like hedonistic arseholes.
It is good that science saved her and empowered her to have children. There is no denying that this is a win.
It *also* means that whatever genetic predispositions to cancer she may have had were likely passed on to her children, who are now more likely than others to get cancer and need the same treatment.
Who said she must have had genetic dispositions to cancer? Sometime shit just happens. Outside of a Larry Niven novel I don't believe in a "lucky" gene, but people win the lottery every week.
This does not make the science bad, nor its use bad. But it clearly is bad. Future generations will be looking at dating pools full of people with genetic predispositions for all kinds of expensive and life-threatening diseases. We are actively creating this future, which is unfortunate. However, any means of getting in front of this problem and ensuring the genetic health of future generations is either ruthlessly in-compassionate or frighteningly mad-scientisty (or both).
Nah, it's just expensive. I don't regard a ball of maybe 32 cells and no nervous system, is fully qualified as a human being, entitled to my consideration. BTW, what's the percentage of early term pregnancies that spontaneously miscarriage anyway?
Wikipedia says: "The National Institutes of Health report that "around half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage
But if you're worried about the growing unfitness of the human race, I'm expecting a massive cull happening during the environmental collapse that's coming in the later part of this century will sort things out.
Getting back to the relationship between poverty and intelligence, I saw something on TV this week which said the number of words spoken to young children each day was directly related to the parents income.
Children of the lowest income families were only hearing about 600 words a day spoken to them by parents and carers, while children of high income families were hearing 2000 words a day. Middle income families were somewhere in the middle. Also, I suspect many of the low income parents were saying "sit down" and "shut up" as much of their conversation.
Adequate and appropriate interaction with their parents is crucial for development of a child's intellectual and social skills, so here's another area where these kids are behind the eight ball from the start.
I think the point is that if the source and destination endpoints are not under US control, and the communication channel between them is secure, then the NSA can watch the encrypted traffic flow through US-controlled nodes all they want without getting much information beyond mail server A transferred X bytes of data to mail server B.
We're talking about government communications in India. I can't think of too many valid reasons why the packets should ever have to leave the country and visit the US.
However I believe there are frequent problems with the way SSL has been implemented in many cases, so it's not as secure as it might be. I think Moxie Marlinspike has had words about this. Encryption of the actual text before sending it is the only way to be completely secure.
Snowden created a discontinuity not only in public perceptions but in the sheer mass of available factual information about the worldwide surveillance state. That is no small feat. The tragedy of 9/11 gave the scumbags a perfect opportunity to put the entire population of the West under their control. Perhaps the disclosures will be a sufficient seed to push back the nightmare started by 9/11.
The Snowden affair is still unfolding, but when it's over, I would very much like to read the 2nd Edition of this book. The world will never be the same again, that's for sure. It may even be worse, as the police state strengthens its iron grip worldwide, but there is at least a hope that public pressure will reign in the terror by government. Hope is good.
There are products that embed a small amount (8%) of a tailored wax material coated with a protective shell, into plaster wall board.
The wax is designed to melt at around 16C and the combination acts as a thermal mass for storing heat in buildings (actually "cool"). This gives the plaster wall boards about the same thermal mass as a brick wall.
I suspect this is something similar. Phase change nano-particles dramatically increase the heat carrying capacity of the cooling fluid at a lower flow rate and probably lower noise and power consumption.
We have no idea what this is going to do to the local ecology, n'mind to the bigger picture. We do know that the oceans have a bit of a role in the climate, but we don't know very much at all about the what & how--and we know this too. So this is pretty much irresponsible.
But we do know what the current use of fossil fuels is doing to the oceans. It's raising the temperature and raising the acidity to the extent that we are already seeing the effects on the shells of the small arthropods at the base of the ocean food chain. The Australian CSIRO predicts a collapse of the ocean environment by about 2050 — goodbye commercial fishing, goodbye Great Barrier Reef. A few OTEC plants aren't likely to change that much, in either direction.
What's a bigger concern is the $30 a Watt price of capacity, although I accept that this is only a pilot plant.
I actually think US news sources are more like Pravda. Every single one is nothing more than an arm of the US government. The only way to get any news that is even remotely objective and not wildly pro-government biased is to seek foreign news sources like Al Jazeera, RT, or the BBC. So it's a Pot meet Kettle kind of situation. I actually think RT.com, at least the American section, is quite a bit less biased than any US source of news.
You must be joking. I'm an Australian and we sometimes get RT on the local community channel, along with Deutsche Weller, Al Jazeera and in the past, Voice of America. Basically they will take any programming that's cheap and will help to fill the airtime.
Russia Today is a straight out propaganda channel. It's the opposite side of Fox News' coin. If anyone at all has a negative opinion on the US, they will immediately be dragged before RT's cameras and invited to repeat it. I'd like to see the editorial staff of RT and Fox News be placed in a caged death match fight, then shoot the survivors.
Strangely I thought the pieces from Voice of America were fairly balanced and neutral, although many of them were just life-style interest pieces. The most balanced foreign news seems to come from DW and Al Jazeera.
One of the funniest things I saw on RT was a studio interview with the body guard of Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian arms dealer who was captured by US authorities in a sting operation in Thailand in 2008. Bout thought he was selling Igla anti-aircraft missiles and MI-24 Hind helicopters to FARC guerrillas, with delivery thrown in for an extra $5 million. So this body guard, who was a HUGE thug with no neck, sat perched on the edge of a studio chair recounting how it was all a mistake and they were just in Thailand for a harmless holiday. Bwahahahaha . . . hilarious.
It reminded me of an ancient Benny Hill routine where he was recounting how he and his mates had just been out on the town for a little innocent fun — in Soho at 3 am in the morning
i hate to say this as i hate the surveillance state as much as the next guy but there's this one security camera right on my walk to work and the only way to not walk by it would cost an extra five minutes but i always think anti-government thoughts when i go past it until one day i saw they actually caught a murderer with it, some dude blasted a cabbies head off during a robbery attempt and luckily they had a clear picture of the guy from that camera which i could tell because i go by it every day, i was like "holy shit". now don't get me wrong i know the nsa could use some facial recognition shit to match me to some protest and then find my route i walk to work every day from a database and do something to me or whatever but...on the other hand some of these cameras really do reduce crime on a local level, key part being "local level", the nsa doesn't need a feed from that camera, but i have no problem with the local pd watching it.
I would have no problem with security cameras having local storage that the cops could come and access when necessary, but I'm not crazy about the idea of every security camera being linked back to some central location where you could be tracked 24.7 every time you leave the house.
That small extra degree of difficulty would be enough to provide a lot of extra privacy protection
Actually, Hell freezes over fairly regularly in the winter.
I remember reading a memoir of a US soldier in WW2 who wrote about seeing a sign pointing to Hell in Norway, and noticing that the roadway headed UP from his current location.
That Hell regularly freezes over too. According to Wikipedia, the name come from a word for "cliff overhang" in the Norwegian case.
We need some developers to setup-in and develop in-browser Firefox/Chrome extensions...
And we need a USB keyboard with encryption, in order to avoid key-loggers.
I'm not sure if you were joking but I've thought of this before. You need a keyboard that could act as a smart encryption terminal with a small display for composing texts, then dumps finished product via USB to your normal desktop computer and browser.
You could maybe have the encryption module removable so it would be harder to tamper with the keyboard while you are away. Any of the small single board computers would be powerful enough to handle it these days. Great speed is not a necessity
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, is this another reference to the Martin shooting? Because out of the ~2 million defensive uses of a gun a year, one of them goes to trial since it's unclear what happened. He's acquitted. Martin attacked first. End of story. But no, you have one case plastered over the news so it's an epidemic.
No, Zimmerman CLAIMED Martin attacked first. We can't hear Martin's story because he is, you know, dead. An unarmed teenager talking to his girlfriend on the phone is APPROACHED by a middle aged man with a gun and he is the attacker? Really?
Indeed, I had a lawyer decline to represent me in court because of what I had said to the cop when stopped (basically a confession of a lesser offense than what the ticket was for). Likely the lawyer would not have been able to do much for me but it was an option that was denied me because I had not declined to provide the minimum information I was required to give.
WTF was wrong with your lawyer? Didn't he like money?
In Australian courts, surveys have shown that being represented will often result in a lighter penalty, even if you plead guilty. The lawyer will tell the judge of your co-operation, contrition, previous good record, difficult childhood yada, yada.
In other words they know how to bullshit the system.
Malala gets this one hands-down. Both made very important statements we must pay attention to, but a fucking headshot beats hanging out in a Russian airport IMHO.
But Malala didn't volunteer to get shot in the head, that was done to her, although she has displayed great personal fortitude since then.
Contrast that with Snowden who deliberately gave up his career, his family, his girl friend, and his life to date to reveal the US's dirty doings. My Vote is for Snowden.
Such a noble and iconic aircraft turned into a play toy.
If I recall correctly the F16 was a Tier 2 fighter, specifically designed to be cheap to buy and cheap to run — quantity was a higher priority than capability, as least compared with its larger two-engined brethren. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "noble and iconic" seems a bit much.
While this all great Science, actually solar panels are already cheap enough in many parts of the world. Certainly they are in Australia since we have no tariffs on imported Chinese panels. What is really needed for greater market penetration is cheap storage. It would be great to have a around ~20 KWHr of storage for ~$2000 - $4000. Said storage needs to be stable over around 7000 cycles (20 years of operation) and provide of the order of 4 KW of power on demand. With this in place residential PV systems could provide over 20% of demand in many parts of the world.
This might be what you've been waiting for, but we still have to actually see it on the commercial market.
http://www.gizmag.com/iron-air-battery/23646/
This cheaper iron electrode is driving costs down significantly, and the researchers are targeting an aggressive $100 per kWh for their batteries. For reference, research firm Lux Research puts the cost of lithium-ion batteries at roughly around $600/kWh and says their cost will decrease quite slowly, dropping below the $400/kWh mark no earlier than in 2020.
I've always regarded Zahn as a bit of a hack.
He writes what I call sausage machine books; he turns the handle and out they come, one after the other. His books are inoffensive but unmemorable, the kind of thing you pick up in a bus or airline terminal when there's nothing better to do while you're waiting for your ride to show up.
Oh well, I suppose it pays his bills, but I'm not expecting to see Zahn's name on any of the Hugo or Nebula Awards' lists anytime soon.
They're perhaps not the most economical, but at least you don't have kilos of metal hanging off your motherboard.
In the reviews I've seen the Zalman range give slightly better performance than the more common Corsairs, at the lower end.
It's apparently the Chinese equivalent of USA's National Ignition Facility.
Except that it will probably work sooner...
Yes, it's 15 years away (and always will be) instead of the usual 20 years away (ditto) for western fusion projects.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice, when the people involved have prior form, and have close associations with the Chinese military.
To quote cold fjord above, "The story is about default and hard coded passwords". What valid reason is there to put those in (presumably) commercial modems and routers?
...when you could just freeze some eggs and sperm for a surrogate, no?
She was in her early twenties when she got cancer, no life partner as yet acquired.
Also giving her hormone treatment to make her hyper-ovulate in order to collect her eggs for IVF might have accelerated the growth of her cancer.
Without paper money, but there has been an economy equivalent for as long as abstract thinking has existed among humans. Sea shells and beads were a form of money for all intents and purposes in many cultures for thousands of years.
But what I think the OP is missing is if you have essentially free energy, and the ability to turn energy into almost any form of matter (Star Trek did note some limits to this, but very few), then what does economy mean? The only meaningful resources would be those few things you can't replicate with energy to matter conversion and skills not possible through expert systems (computers). You'd probably want some way to allocate those, but it would take an interesting form of economy to do so. Sadly, it might come down to slavery. Individuals would be important for their skills, but since you can't offer them anything tangible to convince them to work for you (they could just work for themselves on whatever they find interesting), some people would convince them through torture, I think.
Suddenly, that utopian future looks a lot more distopian to me.
The late Iain M Banks' Culture novels were set post the Age of Scarcity, and most of his human characters look like hedonistic arseholes.
It is good that science saved her and empowered her to have children. There is no denying that this is a win.
It *also* means that whatever genetic predispositions to cancer she may have had were likely passed on to her children, who are now more likely than others to get cancer and need the same treatment.
Who said she must have had genetic dispositions to cancer? Sometime shit just happens. Outside of a Larry Niven novel I don't believe in a "lucky" gene, but people win the lottery every week.
This does not make the science bad, nor its use bad. But it clearly is bad. Future generations will be looking at dating pools full of people with genetic predispositions for all kinds of expensive and life-threatening diseases. We are actively creating this future, which is unfortunate. However, any means of getting in front of this problem and ensuring the genetic health of future generations is either ruthlessly in-compassionate or frighteningly mad-scientisty (or both).
Nah, it's just expensive. I don't regard a ball of maybe 32 cells and no nervous system, is fully qualified as a human being, entitled to my consideration. BTW, what's the percentage of early term pregnancies that spontaneously miscarriage anyway?
Wikipedia says: "The National Institutes of Health report that "around half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage
But if you're worried about the growing unfitness of the human race, I'm expecting a massive cull happening during the environmental collapse that's coming in the later part of this century will sort things out.
Getting back to the relationship between poverty and intelligence, I saw something on TV this week which said the number of words spoken to young children each day was directly related to the parents income.
Children of the lowest income families were only hearing about 600 words a day spoken to them by parents and carers, while children of high income families were hearing 2000 words a day. Middle income families were somewhere in the middle. Also, I suspect many of the low income parents were saying "sit down" and "shut up" as much of their conversation.
Adequate and appropriate interaction with their parents is crucial for development of a child's intellectual and social skills, so here's another area where these kids are behind the eight ball from the start.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
I'd give that accolade to basic practical statistics, including evaluating gambling and other odds, risk, failure rates etc.
On the other hand, officials may have been using gMail because they didn't want their superiors knowing their corruption.
. . . and asking for a cut.
I think the point is that if the source and destination endpoints are not under US control, and the communication channel between them is secure, then the NSA can watch the encrypted traffic flow through US-controlled nodes all they want without getting much information beyond mail server A transferred X bytes of data to mail server B.
We're talking about government communications in India. I can't think of too many valid reasons why the packets should ever have to leave the country and visit the US.
However I believe there are frequent problems with the way SSL has been implemented in many cases, so it's not as secure as it might be. I think Moxie Marlinspike has had words about this. Encryption of the actual text before sending it is the only way to be completely secure.
Snowden created a discontinuity not only in public perceptions but in the sheer mass of available factual information about the worldwide surveillance state. That is no small feat. The tragedy of 9/11 gave the scumbags a perfect opportunity to put the entire population of the West under their control. Perhaps the disclosures will be a sufficient seed to push back the nightmare started by 9/11.
The Snowden affair is still unfolding, but when it's over, I would very much like to read the 2nd Edition of this book. The world will never be the same again, that's for sure. It may even be worse, as the police state strengthens its iron grip worldwide, but there is at least a hope that public pressure will reign in the terror by government. Hope is good.
Mod +1.
There are products that embed a small amount (8%) of a tailored wax material coated with a protective shell, into plaster wall board.
The wax is designed to melt at around 16C and the combination acts as a thermal mass for storing heat in buildings (actually "cool"). This gives the plaster wall boards about the same thermal mass as a brick wall.
I suspect this is something similar. Phase change nano-particles dramatically increase the heat carrying capacity of the cooling fluid at a lower flow rate and probably lower noise and power consumption.
We have no idea what this is going to do to the local ecology, n'mind to the bigger picture. We do know that the oceans have a bit of a role in the climate, but we don't know very much at all about the what & how--and we know this too. So this is pretty much irresponsible.
But we do know what the current use of fossil fuels is doing to the oceans. It's raising the temperature and raising the acidity to the extent that we are already seeing the effects on the shells of the small arthropods at the base of the ocean food chain. The Australian CSIRO predicts a collapse of the ocean environment by about 2050 — goodbye commercial fishing, goodbye Great Barrier Reef. A few OTEC plants aren't likely to change that much, in either direction.
What's a bigger concern is the $30 a Watt price of capacity, although I accept that this is only a pilot plant.
I'm curious - what world did you grow up in? Governments have spied on their allies since there were governments.
Yes, but it's probably fairly new where a government will spy on its own people for another foreign government.
I actually think US news sources are more like Pravda. Every single one is nothing more than an arm of the US government. The only way to get any news that is even remotely objective and not wildly pro-government biased is to seek foreign news sources like Al Jazeera, RT, or the BBC. So it's a Pot meet Kettle kind of situation. I actually think RT.com, at least the American section, is quite a bit less biased than any US source of news.
You must be joking. I'm an Australian and we sometimes get RT on the local community channel, along with Deutsche Weller, Al Jazeera and in the past, Voice of America. Basically they will take any programming that's cheap and will help to fill the airtime.
Russia Today is a straight out propaganda channel. It's the opposite side of Fox News' coin. If anyone at all has a negative opinion on the US, they will immediately be dragged before RT's cameras and invited to repeat it. I'd like to see the editorial staff of RT and Fox News be placed in a caged death match fight, then shoot the survivors.
Strangely I thought the pieces from Voice of America were fairly balanced and neutral, although many of them were just life-style interest pieces. The most balanced foreign news seems to come from DW and Al Jazeera.
One of the funniest things I saw on RT was a studio interview with the body guard of Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian arms dealer who was captured by US authorities in a sting operation in Thailand in 2008. Bout thought he was selling Igla anti-aircraft missiles and MI-24 Hind helicopters to FARC guerrillas, with delivery thrown in for an extra $5 million. So this body guard, who was a HUGE thug with no neck, sat perched on the edge of a studio chair recounting how it was all a mistake and they were just in Thailand for a harmless holiday. Bwahahahaha . . . hilarious.
It reminded me of an ancient Benny Hill routine where he was recounting how he and his mates had just been out on the town for a little innocent fun — in Soho at 3 am in the morning
i hate to say this as i hate the surveillance state as much as the next guy but there's this one security camera right on my walk to work and the only way to not walk by it would cost an extra five minutes but i always think anti-government thoughts when i go past it until one day i saw they actually caught a murderer with it, some dude blasted a cabbies head off during a robbery attempt and luckily they had a clear picture of the guy from that camera which i could tell because i go by it every day, i was like "holy shit". now don't get me wrong i know the nsa could use some facial recognition shit to match me to some protest and then find my route i walk to work every day from a database and do something to me or whatever but...on the other hand some of these cameras really do reduce crime on a local level, key part being "local level", the nsa doesn't need a feed from that camera, but i have no problem with the local pd watching it.
I would have no problem with security cameras having local storage that the cops could come and access when necessary, but I'm not crazy about the idea of every security camera being linked back to some central location where you could be tracked 24.7 every time you leave the house.
That small extra degree of difficulty would be enough to provide a lot of extra privacy protection
One unsterilized woman can get pregnant. One unsterilized man can get all the women pregnant.
Or you could ship fertilized embryos in heavily shielded containers and implant them there, although I'm no sure why you'd want to.
Actually, Hell freezes over fairly regularly in the winter.
I remember reading a memoir of a US soldier in WW2 who wrote about seeing a sign pointing to Hell in Norway, and noticing that the roadway headed UP from his current location.
That Hell regularly freezes over too. According to Wikipedia, the name come from a word for "cliff overhang" in the Norwegian case.
We need some developers to setup-in and develop in-browser Firefox/Chrome extensions ...
And we need a USB keyboard with encryption, in order to avoid key-loggers.
I'm not sure if you were joking but I've thought of this before. You need a keyboard that could act as a smart encryption terminal with a small display for composing texts, then dumps finished product via USB to your normal desktop computer and browser.
You could maybe have the encryption module removable so it would be harder to tamper with the keyboard while you are away. Any of the small single board computers would be powerful enough to handle it these days. Great speed is not a necessity