I presume the gas tax insurance would only be 3rd party insurance, you'd still go to an insurance company and still get your no claims bonus for full coverage, plus fire and theft. The insurance company would also charge more for people driving new shiney cars.
But just for 3rd party, gas tax makes a lot of sense - to use a lot of gas, you car is either:
Big and heavy: It's unable to stop on a dime like a light car and so more likely to have an accident. Big and heavy also means more damage when there is an accident.
Overpowered: If you have a supercharged car and drive it like a dickhead (I would:)) then it will use lots of fuel, turbocharged dickheads should be paying more insurance.
Constantly in use: the more your car is on the road the more likely it is to have an accident.
Seems to me that there's a lot to be said for putting the 3rd party insurance in the petrol.
There's no point having PDA functions, web browsing, email etc on a phone that only has a number pad.
Predictive text doesn't work on urls, names, addresses, email addresses etc. If you're going to use it like a PDA you need a keyboard - it's not just txt messaging that the keyboard kicks ass at.
Having used the 6800, then the 6820, I will never touch a phone without a keyboard again. And thanks to this slashdot article I know know that there is also the Siemens SK65 to consider.
Cannes film festival: May 12th - 23rd Clarke claiming responsibility: May 25th
It is speculated that Moore's movie is the very reason Clarke came forward to take the fall for this. I don't think we'll ever know, but I doubt this was a dishonest omission on Moore's part.
The metric system doesn't need any conversion tables.
n gauge wire has no size relation to n gauge sheet steel, which has no size relation to an n gauge shotgun or n gauge railway tracks etc They're all using different arbitrary units of measure (that share the same name).
In metric, 3mm wire has the same thickness as 3mm sheet steel, and a 9mm pistol round is obviously three times that.
True story: I needed 250 grams of salt for a dye, I don't do much cooking so had no scales that could measure that little, however I did have a measuring cup (regardless of the measuring cup, getting 1/4 a litre of water would be easy).
250grams = 250ml of water
place a chopstick under a board with two cups on it, fill one cup with 250ml of water, pour the salt in the other glass until the board balances on the chopstick.
Water might seem an arbitrary choice for the metric system, but I must say it's handily available when you need it.
And no, you can't do this with ounces and fluidic ounces, because (just like gauges) a fluidic ounce of water does not weight an ounce.
The only appropriate base system for units of measure is that of the number system they will be used in.
We work in decimal - base 10.
You arguments are a red herring, they are arguments for us adopt a number system that is base 12 system (which incidently, imperial is not) over the base 10 one we use at the moment, not arguments to have your metrics in a different base to the one they are used in.
In the computer world we work in binary instead of decimal, and relevent computer metrics are base 2 rather than base 10 because of this. Having 12 bits in a byte, 3 bytes in a word and 1760 words in a kb (or whatever) would just be daft, exactly as daft as the imperial system infact.
Also, using an imperial measure of angles to justify the imperial system is a bit circular.
The reality is that this is more of a regional than a country issue
Are you saying stay in the rich white areas and you have next to no chance of getting shot? This is probably true, I get the impression (unsubstantiated of course) that the higher crime in the US is a result of the higher poverty there - very regional.
that people will inevitably use whatever tools they have to reach their goals be they a handgun or hypodermic needle the dangers in the wrong hands are the same
Lets run with this for a moment (because I believe it myself).
In the UK, a mugger corners you with a knife, a baseball bat, or a hypodermic needle, and demands your iPod. This is a situation you will walk away from (sans iPod), or if you're an idiot end up in hospital but probably not die.
In the US, the mugger must to do it at gunpoint as the victim could have a gun, but this is still a situation any sane person will walk away from - just hand over the iPod as the mugger is not likely to want the crime raised to murder. I think this a slightly nastier situation, but I admit this is arguable.
What I don't understand is the Americans who immediately jump in and say this problem can be solved by letting people in the UK have guns. What they are proposing is that in the situation above - where a mugger has you at point-blank, you should attempt to draw your gun and shoot him (or scare him off). I cannot grasp how someone could advocate something so idiotic, the phrase "go darwin" springs to mind. But if they're not proposing that then how does carrying a gun solve the problem?
Bowling for Columbine made a pretty good argument that gun control is not a solution that will work in America, but in countrys that already have it it works well, so I guess the argument is moot since the UK isn't going to change its gun laws.
I'd rather live in a country where my iPod might have a higher chance of getting stolen (anybody got mugging stats for the UK and US?) than one where I'm more than 3 times more likely to be shot dead.
The report was to investigate possible scenarios and implications of climate change for geopolitics and US national security etc, what we should be doing to prevent climate change had nothing to do with the report.
The poster said the war in Iraq had already cost far more than the biofuel project would, they didn't say that biofuel was cheaper than pumping oil out of ground.
Biofuel is just cheaper when you take into account how much money is spent subsidising the oil industry via the military.
Since everyone foots the costs of the military, the oil companies can still make lots of money.
Yeah, as non-American watching that I was looking at Canada going "Wow, everyone just leaves their doors unlocked all the time!", then it gradually became clearer that he just meant people leave their doors unlocked when they're home, which was followed by the realisation "you mean in America everybody keeps their doors locked even when they're home??"
I would often leave mine unlocked even when I'm out [for short periods anyway - I don't have a drug dealer], but I have flatmates so it's not a decision that would be appropriate for me to make.
Yes but that's all quite irrelevent to whether fossile fuels are carbon neutral or not - burning fossile fuels changes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and increases global warming, burning biofuels does not - you can't burn biofuels faster than you are removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The problem of global warming we are concerned with is not on the geologic timescale, it's on the human one.
It's not a matter of having an arbitrary cutoff peroid for a cycle, an established forest is carbon neutral because the CO2 released by the decaying undergrowth matches the CO2 being absorbed by the current generation of growing plants. When burning oil from farmed biomatter, the farm is still farming and absorbing CO2 at the same rate we are burning it. Neither of these things can change the ratio of CO2 in the earths atmosphere.
With fossile fuels there is no cycle.
I guess their might be a cycle if the age of the automobile is something that inevitably happens every hundred million years or so:) But it's not carbon neutral because (cycle or not) it changes the ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere. And I imagine releasing it all over a few hundred years changes the ratio much faster than the evolutionary pace of most flora and fauna.
Apparently a lot of the CO2 we are emitting is going missing - the CO2 in the atmosphere is not spiking nearly as much as it should given the CO2 we are producing. This sounds like a good thing, but like with programming, when something is working and it shouldn't be it's best to find out why because otherwise you can't rely on it to keep working. I've heard two or three different theories about what's buffering us from the effects of our emmisions, and interestingly enough, they all reach a point where they not just stop working as a CO2 buffer, but break down and release most of the carbon they built up when they were acting as a buffer, that will suck.
I was wrong about the barrels per day figure, mine was how much the US imports, not how much it uses. Looks like world usage is 77mbd.
These fuels are considered carbon nuetral because the carbondioxide is taken from the air in order to produce them.
Plants extract carbon from CO2, animals eat plants, end up in being turned into oil with TCP, we burn the oil creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place, or they decompose, creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place.
Fossile fuels on the other hand bring CO2 into the environment that has been removed over millions of years, and when the US alone is burning 10 millions barrels of the stuff each day.
The attacker must first snag both classical and quantum channels, but then [s]he can pretend to Bob to Alice and Alice to Bob. Nothing prevents this within a straight QKD system
This is the bit I don't understand about Quantum crypto - if conventional crypto is broken then there's no way for Bob to be sure Alice is at the other end and vice versa, so breaking quantum cyrpto becomes as easy as cutting the fiber and talking to both ends.
So by relying on conventional crypto, quantum crypto is exactly as weak as conventional crypto yet requires costly and inflexible infrastructure, why are people bothering with it at all?
I thought the auction system was to help prevent that:
Old system: Google sells their shares at a sensible price to daytraders who then make a fortune selling them on because hype has caused demand to far exceed supply, everybody end up owns overvalue shares which eventually lose their value.
The new Google system: People bid for shares and Google then prices them so that demand doesn't far exceed supply. Hype causes people to pay far more for Google shares than they're worth, but it no longer matters because instead of ending up in daytrader's pockets, all that extra money you invested goes to google - the company you have shares in - so the shares remain worth what you paid for them.
I could well be wrong here, I'm someone who doesn't know much about the sharemarket.
But quantum crypto doesn't prevent man in the middle attacks, it only prevents evesdropping.
The only thing quantum crypto gives you is knowledge that the guy at the other end of the line is the only guy getting your message, it doesn't tell you who that person is, or even where the other end of the line is - someone could have cut the cable and set themselves up as 'the other end'.
So quantum crypto falls back on traditional crypto to establish who is at the other end, making it as mathematically weak as conventional crypto but needing special infrastructure.
More detailed information is available here, but some strong quotes:
"In a series of 61 tests, where LH2 in thermoses were put under great physical stresses (such as crushing the thermos with a heavy object), there was never a case of detonation as a result of the direct blows"
"...confirmed that hydrogen never detonated from impact - not even when bullets were shot through the tank."
With this architecture it becomes easy to fix the problem you described as RBL lists become far more accurate.
Also, your computer only downloads the email you choose to read, so the bandwidth problem of spam is nearly solved, this also fixes another broken aspect of email - unlike the phone, face to face, SMS, or registered mail etc, with email you don't know if the person you are talking to actually heard you. If you're paranoid about privacy you might have grown to like this about email, but really it just makes it broken as a communication medium.
You're not allowed to import the DVD of a film that is still playing in cinemas or yet to come out, but I reckon that's fair enough - especially given that we get unzoned DVD players.
Go to the right place and you can get the brand new Rammstein DVD for cheaper than a CD costs (just one example), if there's a parallel importing restriction then it doesn't seem to be inflating prices too much.
I live in the US, and we *do*. Do you never get telemarketers?
I was under the impression that problem had just been solved in the US by leglislation. I live in New Zealand, I've probably had a 3 telemarketing calls in the last few years, and twice that number again in phone surveys. I've nevered asked why it's so low, I've always been listed too.
IM systems do. The only reason that problems aren't worse than one might expect is that it's easier to pick up peple blasting out masses of messages because everything in centralized
No, it's easyier to fix things when once entity gets to determine what protocol everyone is using, with ICQ messages only pass through a central server if the person is offline, otherwise it is peer to peer - and spam has still stopped (if you use ICQ and spam hasn't stopped, upgrading might be the answer). Also, Jabber is not centralised but has been designed not to fall into the same trap SMTP did. Being centralized makes things easier, sure, but it's not required.
I've certainly heard about people getting SMS spam
I imagine it's because the cell provider has a large $$$ incentive in making sure people don't turn off SMS, and people kick up a big stink when they do get SMS spam. I've had a couple of promotional SMSs from my cellphone provider, but that's it.
*I* get junk mail in my postal mailbox
Do you have a "no circulars" sign, and does your country have laws to enforce that? Our laws allow party political spam to delivered to "no circulars" addresses but that's it. Someone else in this thread mentioned postal spam that is addressed specifically to you (as opposed to the stuff that goes into every letterbox), I might just be lucky in this respect as I've moved every 3 or so years.
** The fax does not have a spam problem.
True. Up until not all *that* long ago, it *did*, though, at least in the US.
Well that is even more significant, it means the spam problem was solved - lucky for us nobody was listening to the guy that said "fax spam will never end, learn to live with it and get on with your life"
The security in the telephone is that the phone company can look up who called you, this is missing from SMTP and is needed before spam legislation can be effective.
No it's not. No other medium has this problem (not in my country anyway)
The telephone does not have a spam problem.
My instant messanger does not have a spam problem (it used to but they fixed it).
SMS does not have a spam problem.
My postal mailbox does not have a spam problem - "No circulars".
The fax does not have a spam problem.
email is the only communications medium that has a spam problem, you are suggesting there is something magical about email that makes email and spam a law of nature.
The only thing special about email is it uses a protocol that was designed with different goals to what is needed now (ie security) and switching is hard, so hard that instead we cop out and just bolt more shit onto SMTP.
A secure protocol with existing anti-spam technology in combination with legislation (which mostly exists already) is all that's required.
Hopefully Microsoft (Hotmail+Outlook+OE) will one day join Yahoo and a few others and together they'll have enough momentum to make the jump to a protocol designed for todays environment. Then SMTP email will go the way of usenet - ie you can still use it if you like, but most people won't have a clue what it is.
If the jump isn't made then email will become less and less useful until it is entirely replaced in our lives by a better (and spam free) communications medium. I'm guessing this will be instant messaging (we already use it more than email), and if I had to put money on the future I'd say the gradual death of email and its replacement by another medium is more likely than actually seeing people stop kicking a dead SMTP uphill and adopting a secure protocol.
Slashdot Mirror
But just for 3rd party, gas tax makes a lot of sense - to use a lot of gas, you car is either:
- Big and heavy: It's unable to stop on a dime like a light car and so more likely to have an accident. Big and heavy also means more damage when there is an accident.
- Overpowered: If you have a supercharged car and drive it like a dickhead (I would
:)) then it will use lots of fuel, turbocharged dickheads should be paying more insurance. - Constantly in use: the more your car is on the road the more likely it is to have an accident.
Seems to me that there's a lot to be said for putting the 3rd party insurance in the petrol.And what of the important bit - the keyboard?
There's no point having PDA functions, web browsing, email etc on a phone that only has a number pad.
Predictive text doesn't work on urls, names, addresses, email addresses etc. If you're going to use it like a PDA you need a keyboard - it's not just txt messaging that the keyboard kicks ass at.
Having used the 6800, then the 6820, I will never touch a phone without a keyboard again. And thanks to this slashdot article I know know that there is also the Siemens SK65 to consider.
Everyone knows that the first patent filed was for a time machine
Apparently it wasn't even the first time machine. Typical US Patent Office morons.
Pity the details burned in the fire.
Cannes film festival: May 12th - 23rd
Clarke claiming responsibility: May 25th
It is speculated that Moore's movie is the very reason Clarke came forward to take the fall for this. I don't think we'll ever know, but I doubt this was a dishonest omission on Moore's part.
You forgot a point
The metric system doesn't need any conversion tables.
n gauge wire has no size relation to n gauge sheet steel, which has no size relation to an n gauge shotgun or n gauge railway tracks etc They're all using different arbitrary units of measure (that share the same name).
In metric, 3mm wire has the same thickness as 3mm sheet steel, and a 9mm pistol round is obviously three times that.
True story:
I needed 250 grams of salt for a dye, I don't do much cooking so had no scales that could measure that little, however I did have a measuring cup (regardless of the measuring cup, getting 1/4 a litre of water would be easy).
250grams = 250ml of water
place a chopstick under a board with two cups on it, fill one cup with 250ml of water, pour the salt in the other glass until the board balances on the chopstick.
Water might seem an arbitrary choice for the metric system, but I must say it's handily available when you need it.
And no, you can't do this with ounces and fluidic ounces, because (just like gauges) a fluidic ounce of water does not weight an ounce.
The only appropriate base system for units of measure is that of the number system they will be used in.
We work in decimal - base 10.
You arguments are a red herring, they are arguments for us adopt a number system that is base 12 system (which incidently, imperial is not) over the base 10 one we use at the moment, not arguments to have your metrics in a different base to the one they are used in.
In the computer world we work in binary instead of decimal, and relevent computer metrics are base 2 rather than base 10 because of this. Having 12 bits in a byte, 3 bytes in a word and 1760 words in a kb (or whatever) would just be daft, exactly as daft as the imperial system infact.
Also, using an imperial measure of angles to justify the imperial system is a bit circular.
Lets run with this for a moment (because I believe it myself).
In the UK, a mugger corners you with a knife, a baseball bat, or a hypodermic needle, and demands your iPod. This is a situation you will walk away from (sans iPod), or if you're an idiot end up in hospital but probably not die.
In the US, the mugger must to do it at gunpoint as the victim could have a gun, but this is still a situation any sane person will walk away from - just hand over the iPod as the mugger is not likely to want the crime raised to murder. I think this a slightly nastier situation, but I admit this is arguable.
What I don't understand is the Americans who immediately jump in and say this problem can be solved by letting people in the UK have guns. What they are proposing is that in the situation above - where a mugger has you at point-blank, you should attempt to draw your gun and shoot him (or scare him off). I cannot grasp how someone could advocate something so idiotic, the phrase "go darwin" springs to mind. But if they're not proposing that then how does carrying a gun solve the problem?
Bowling for Columbine made a pretty good argument that gun control is not a solution that will work in America, but in countrys that already have it it works well, so I guess the argument is moot since the UK isn't going to change its gun laws.
I'd rather live in a country where my iPod might have a higher chance of getting stolen (anybody got mugging stats for the UK and US?) than one where I'm more than 3 times more likely to be shot dead.
This according to stats provided by the pro-gun lobby.
(BTW I live in neither the US nor the UK, so this is not a "my country is better than yours" thing)
The report was to investigate possible scenarios and implications of climate change for geopolitics and US national security etc, what we should be doing to prevent climate change had nothing to do with the report.
The poster said the war in Iraq had already cost far more than the biofuel project would, they didn't say that biofuel was cheaper than pumping oil out of ground.
Biofuel is just cheaper when you take into account how much money is spent subsidising the oil industry via the military.
Since everyone foots the costs of the military, the oil companies can still make lots of money.
Yeah, as non-American watching that I was looking at Canada going "Wow, everyone just leaves their doors unlocked all the time!", then it gradually became clearer that he just meant people leave their doors unlocked when they're home, which was followed by the realisation "you mean in America everybody keeps their doors locked even when they're home??"
I would often leave mine unlocked even when I'm out [for short periods anyway - I don't have a drug dealer], but I have flatmates so it's not a decision that would be appropriate for me to make.
Yes but that's all quite irrelevent to whether fossile fuels are carbon neutral or not - burning fossile fuels changes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and increases global warming, burning biofuels does not - you can't burn biofuels faster than you are removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The problem of global warming we are concerned with is not on the geologic timescale, it's on the human one.
It's not a matter of having an arbitrary cutoff peroid for a cycle, an established forest is carbon neutral because the CO2 released by the decaying undergrowth matches the CO2 being absorbed by the current generation of growing plants. When burning oil from farmed biomatter, the farm is still farming and absorbing CO2 at the same rate we are burning it. Neither of these things can change the ratio of CO2 in the earths atmosphere.
:) But it's not carbon neutral because (cycle or not) it changes the ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere. And I imagine releasing it all over a few hundred years changes the ratio much faster than the evolutionary pace of most flora and fauna.
With fossile fuels there is no cycle.
I guess their might be a cycle if the age of the automobile is something that inevitably happens every hundred million years or so
Apparently a lot of the CO2 we are emitting is going missing - the CO2 in the atmosphere is not spiking nearly as much as it should given the CO2 we are producing. This sounds like a good thing, but like with programming, when something is working and it shouldn't be it's best to find out why because otherwise you can't rely on it to keep working. I've heard two or three different theories about what's buffering us from the effects of our emmisions, and interestingly enough, they all reach a point where they not just stop working as a CO2 buffer, but break down and release most of the carbon they built up when they were acting as a buffer, that will suck.
I was wrong about the barrels per day figure, mine was how much the US imports, not how much it uses. Looks like world usage is 77mbd.
These fuels are considered carbon nuetral because the carbondioxide is taken from the air in order to produce them.
Plants extract carbon from CO2, animals eat plants, end up in being turned into oil with TCP, we burn the oil creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place, or they decompose, creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place.
Fossile fuels on the other hand bring CO2 into the environment that has been removed over millions of years, and when the US alone is burning 10 millions barrels of the stuff each day.
So by relying on conventional crypto, quantum crypto is exactly as weak as conventional crypto yet requires costly and inflexible infrastructure, why are people bothering with it at all?
I thought the auction system was to help prevent that:
Old system:
Google sells their shares at a sensible price to daytraders who then make a fortune selling them on because hype has caused demand to far exceed supply, everybody end up owns overvalue shares which eventually lose their value.
The new Google system:
People bid for shares and Google then prices them so that demand doesn't far exceed supply. Hype causes people to pay far more for Google shares than they're worth, but it no longer matters because instead of ending up in daytrader's pockets, all that extra money you invested goes to google - the company you have shares in - so the shares remain worth what you paid for them.
I could well be wrong here, I'm someone who doesn't know much about the sharemarket.
Slow Down the Security Patch Cycle?
This case would seem to support the reasons made in the computerworld article about slowing down the security patch release cycle.
But quantum crypto doesn't prevent man in the middle attacks, it only prevents evesdropping.
The only thing quantum crypto gives you is knowledge that the guy at the other end of the line is the only guy getting your message, it doesn't tell you who that person is, or even where the other end of the line is - someone could have cut the cable and set themselves up as 'the other end'.
So quantum crypto falls back on traditional crypto to establish who is at the other end, making it as mathematically weak as conventional crypto but needing special infrastructure.
2) Rupture a fuel line in each of them.
3) Ignite
4) Stand back and watch
More detailed information is available here, but some strong quotes:
With this architecture it becomes easy to fix the problem you described as RBL lists become far more accurate.
Also, your computer only downloads the email you choose to read, so the bandwidth problem of spam is nearly solved, this also fixes another broken aspect of email - unlike the phone, face to face, SMS, or registered mail etc, with email you don't know if the person you are talking to actually heard you. If you're paranoid about privacy you might have grown to like this about email, but really it just makes it broken as a communication medium.
Are you sure about this?
You're not allowed to import the DVD of a film that is still playing in cinemas or yet to come out, but I reckon that's fair enough - especially given that we get unzoned DVD players.
Go to the right place and you can get the brand new Rammstein DVD for cheaper than a CD costs (just one example), if there's a parallel importing restriction then it doesn't seem to be inflating prices too much.
No, it's easyier to fix things when once entity gets to determine what protocol everyone is using, with ICQ messages only pass through a central server if the person is offline, otherwise it is peer to peer - and spam has still stopped (if you use ICQ and spam hasn't stopped, upgrading might be the answer). Also, Jabber is not centralised but has been designed not to fall into the same trap SMTP did. Being centralized makes things easier, sure, but it's not required.
I imagine it's because the cell provider has a large $$$ incentive in making sure people don't turn off SMS, and people kick up a big stink when they do get SMS spam. I've had a couple of promotional SMSs from my cellphone provider, but that's it.
Do you have a "no circulars" sign, and does your country have laws to enforce that? Our laws allow party political spam to delivered to "no circulars" addresses but that's it.
Someone else in this thread mentioned postal spam that is addressed specifically to you (as opposed to the stuff that goes into every letterbox), I might just be lucky in this respect as I've moved every 3 or so years.
Well that is even more significant, it means the spam problem was solved - lucky for us nobody was listening to the guy that said "fax spam will never end, learn to live with it and get on with your life"
The security in the telephone is that the phone company can look up who called you, this is missing from SMTP and is needed before spam legislation can be effective.
No other medium has this problem (not in my country anyway)
- The telephone does not have a spam problem.
- My instant messanger does not have a spam problem (it used to but they fixed it).
- SMS does not have a spam problem.
- My postal mailbox does not have a spam problem - "No circulars".
- The fax does not have a spam problem.
email is the only communications medium that has a spam problem, you are suggesting there is something magical about email that makes email and spam a law of nature.The only thing special about email is it uses a protocol that was designed with different goals to what is needed now (ie security) and switching is hard, so hard that instead we cop out and just bolt more shit onto SMTP.
A secure protocol with existing anti-spam technology in combination with legislation (which mostly exists already) is all that's required.
Hopefully Microsoft (Hotmail+Outlook+OE) will one day join Yahoo and a few others and together they'll have enough momentum to make the jump to a protocol designed for todays environment. Then SMTP email will go the way of usenet - ie you can still use it if you like, but most people won't have a clue what it is.
If the jump isn't made then email will become less and less useful until it is entirely replaced in our lives by a better (and spam free) communications medium. I'm guessing this will be instant messaging (we already use it more than email), and if I had to put money on the future I'd say the gradual death of email and its replacement by another medium is more likely than actually seeing people stop kicking a dead SMTP uphill and adopting a secure protocol.
Gates plans an end to spam in two years