Practically speaking, I doubt these traps could extract enough moisture from the air to have any effect on the humidity more than a few meters from the device. Even in huge numbers, the amount of air that comes in contact with one is negligible compared to the volume of air over the desert (the devices are on a roughly 2D plane, the atmosphere is 3D). Since the water would likely be used in the immediate vicinity (this doesn't look efficient enough to actually allow the export of water), whether it is used for crops or people, it will be added back into the local water cycle soon enough. At worst it will create minor, artificial oases. Remember, this air eventually passes over bodies of water which are more than capable of replenishing any moisture lost.
From TFA, these in-depth background investigations were being conducted for personnel in non-sensitive jobs. I'd understand the checks for jobs which require clearance, but in this case they are wasting resources background checking everyone who works there, for the sake of uniformity. It's a bit over the top.
No game I've played has even been constrained by my Core 2 Duo (E6600). Heck, I keep it downclocked to 1.6 GHz (vs. 2.4 GHz standard) most of the time and often forget to reset the clock to normal before launching a game. I rarely notice the difference. Of course, it follows that at this point, overclocking the CPU is a pointless exercise. The GPU matters, but on smaller monitors (read: 1680x1050 or less), most games can't even max out the capabilities of a high end two year old graphics card.
Also, a gaming PC is a gaming PC based on performance, not expandability. Yes, I built my home desktop on a huge chassis to allow expandability, but from age 5-24 I used pre-built gaming PCs that rarely had an upgrade more extreme than an extra stick of memory.
The lack of expandability is an arguable knock against its greenness though, for exactly the reason you gave.
Not necessarily. If they keep selling XP, they have to keep supporting XP. If they had to do that the same for any other OS favored by a substantial number of people, they'd have 90+% of the company on support. Which would mean less new features in the new OSes, and less reason to upgrade, leaving MS with a trail of incrementally upgraded OSes, all of them needing support, and people rarely buying any of them.
By not supporting every OS since DOS 1.0, MS had the resources to make Windows 7 attractive to some customers, despite the cost of an upgrade. Arguing that monopoly practices are to blame is a joke; there are other OSes, and it is MS's choice to risk driving people to them by EOL-ing XP.
What problems are people having with the Comments Beta system? I'm running Firefox 3, NoScript + AdBlock (which slashdot.org and fsdn.com whitelisted) and I find it quite nice to have dynamically expanding messages and responses. Is this a problem on some browsers or configurations?
Assuming you're old enough to have used them, have you ever broken one of the old school mercury thermometers? If so, you've already released the same amount of mercury found in 100 fluorescent bulbs. 95% of the mercury in one of those bulbs can be recycled, so if you do recycle them, it would take 2000 bulbs to equal the mercury in that single broken thermometer. And of course, the additional power consumption means using more power, usually from coal, which is "the largest source of human-caused mercury emissions in the United States," making that incandescent release far more mercury over its lifespan than the fluorescent.
I was trying to lowball my estimates on purpose. If I overestimate, pedants discount the whole argument on that basis. Since even an underestimate made for a working argument, I simply used the underestimate.
You're being naive. Since hosting illegal material yourself is dangerous, a fairly standard trick would be hosting it in a deniable location. Multiply the percentage of pedophiles (I'd guess upwards of 0.1%) by the percentage of hackers (including script kiddies, I'd say upwards of 0.01%), and at least 1 in 10,000,000 people would be both, or at least 600 worldwide. Not that many, no, but enough to have it be a potential use of cracked machines.
And of course, while he's worried about Cairo eating 2 MB of RAM, I'm sure the massive amount of RAM consumed by the JVM won't bother him in the least...
I'm really wondering how your reply is at all on topic. ISA proxy is a corporate firewall with other network security features. Last I checked, it's not the software of choice for any *country*. I was pointing out the inanity of using a protocol like this to bypass a corporate firewall, not saying steno is useless.
And as long as your security through obscurity is ensured by killing everyone who knows the protocol, I'm sure it will work out just fine. Problem is, usually you need to communicate with other people. As Ben Franklin put it, "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." The reason obscurity is disdained is that if one person blabs, the whole protocol may need to be discarded, while a secure protocol, in theory, examined by countless experts, only needs to change the key.
Or you could just hide the message inside the picture with one of a number of different techniques, which would be far less susceptible to detection, and get you more data transfer capacity for the buck. Assuming you don't want others to see your message, you can't put more than a bit or two per retrans request, and even your message would require quite a lot of retrans requests, such that statistical techniques would reveal the existence (if not the content) of the message unless it was hidden in an absolutely huge transmission.
TCP/IP protocol overhead: 160 bits/packet (TCP) + 160 bits/packet (IPv4) = 320 bits/packet (assuming no data, and that might look a little suspicious)
320 bits/packet * 250 packets/real bit = 80,000 bits/real bit
80,000 bits/real bit * 700 MB (smallest common size of compressed movie) = 80,000 bits/real bit * 5,872,025,600 real bits = 469,762,048,000,000 bits transmitted, or 53.4 TB.
Congratulations: Assuming you use the absurdly noticeable "empty packet" strategy, on a 20 megabit line with no other overhead, you could transmit one whole movie in "only" 272 days. No one will notice the absurd amount of empty traffic in that entire time I'm sure.
Or you could just run your torrents over an unblocked port, with protocol encryption... Nah, I'm sure reducing your bandwidth by multiple orders of magnitude is the way to go...
I realize that all forms of steganography are basically security through obscurity, but this one is even more inane. Unless subjected to additional protection, anyone aware of this form of steganography could easily track it, and more importantly, it would look suspicious in traffic logs (drastically increased retrans requests, but only for a small subset of the TCP connections logged). Steganography should look innocuous, in addition to hiding information, if you want it to work.
Both sides concluded it was an accident caused by mistaking a ship in an active war zone for an enemy vessel. Not exactly a deliberately hostile action. Now, if you want to get into the mutual spying, that's a whole different matter...
I'd argue there are four factors involved in poker (once you master the core rules):
Skill with probability
Skill with reading people
Skill at hiding your own tells
Luck
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker, it's closer to gambling that it is to a "game of skill," particularly for the vast majority of the population with less than stellar probability skills (see the entire population of people playing the lottery).
Again, I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to gamble, just that it's a tad silly to argue it from the perspective of the winners.
Actually, that's not what happened. The previous bill made it illegal for credit card companies to send payments to online gambling sites, so no, it didn't move offshore. The WTO actually ruled it was an illegal when we tried to ban the payments to offshore online gambling parlors, but to my knowledge, we just ignored them.
And how many people failed to attend college because they, or their parents, gambled away the college fund? I'm not saying gambling should be illegal, I just think it's silly to argue for gambling the perspective of the winners (and only the winners).
Sorry, you forgot to put question marks after the hyphens. Obviously, you'll need to license IBM's patent, because that additional tweak makes it a non-obvious invention.
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Practically speaking, I doubt these traps could extract enough moisture from the air to have any effect on the humidity more than a few meters from the device. Even in huge numbers, the amount of air that comes in contact with one is negligible compared to the volume of air over the desert (the devices are on a roughly 2D plane, the atmosphere is 3D). Since the water would likely be used in the immediate vicinity (this doesn't look efficient enough to actually allow the export of water), whether it is used for crops or people, it will be added back into the local water cycle soon enough. At worst it will create minor, artificial oases. Remember, this air eventually passes over bodies of water which are more than capable of replenishing any moisture lost.
The difference is that this can work throughout the sunlit hours, even in the absence of thermal fluctuations. Please RTFA before dismissing it.
From TFA, these in-depth background investigations were being conducted for personnel in non-sensitive jobs. I'd understand the checks for jobs which require clearance, but in this case they are wasting resources background checking everyone who works there, for the sake of uniformity. It's a bit over the top.
For sports car enthusiasts, its not that great. For people with average sized genitalia, it's more than sufficient.
*ducks*
The Core 2 Duo isn't exactly blazing fast...
No game I've played has even been constrained by my Core 2 Duo (E6600). Heck, I keep it downclocked to 1.6 GHz (vs. 2.4 GHz standard) most of the time and often forget to reset the clock to normal before launching a game. I rarely notice the difference. Of course, it follows that at this point, overclocking the CPU is a pointless exercise. The GPU matters, but on smaller monitors (read: 1680x1050 or less), most games can't even max out the capabilities of a high end two year old graphics card.
Also, a gaming PC is a gaming PC based on performance, not expandability. Yes, I built my home desktop on a huge chassis to allow expandability, but from age 5-24 I used pre-built gaming PCs that rarely had an upgrade more extreme than an extra stick of memory.
The lack of expandability is an arguable knock against its greenness though, for exactly the reason you gave.
Not necessarily. If they keep selling XP, they have to keep supporting XP. If they had to do that the same for any other OS favored by a substantial number of people, they'd have 90+% of the company on support. Which would mean less new features in the new OSes, and less reason to upgrade, leaving MS with a trail of incrementally upgraded OSes, all of them needing support, and people rarely buying any of them.
By not supporting every OS since DOS 1.0, MS had the resources to make Windows 7 attractive to some customers, despite the cost of an upgrade. Arguing that monopoly practices are to blame is a joke; there are other OSes, and it is MS's choice to risk driving people to them by EOL-ing XP.
What problems are people having with the Comments Beta system? I'm running Firefox 3, NoScript + AdBlock (which slashdot.org and fsdn.com whitelisted) and I find it quite nice to have dynamically expanding messages and responses. Is this a problem on some browsers or configurations?
You might check if either of these is the case. Both are fixable. BTW, it's LED (Light Emitting Diode), not LCD (Liquid Crystal Display).
Assuming you're old enough to have used them, have you ever broken one of the old school mercury thermometers? If so, you've already released the same amount of mercury found in 100 fluorescent bulbs. 95% of the mercury in one of those bulbs can be recycled, so if you do recycle them, it would take 2000 bulbs to equal the mercury in that single broken thermometer. And of course, the additional power consumption means using more power, usually from coal, which is "the largest source of human-caused mercury emissions in the United States," making that incandescent release far more mercury over its lifespan than the fluorescent.
I was trying to lowball my estimates on purpose. If I overestimate, pedants discount the whole argument on that basis. Since even an underestimate made for a working argument, I simply used the underestimate.
Until it's personal, I'm fairly sure it's not FUD. If people don't care, they won't experience F, U, or D.
You're being naive. Since hosting illegal material yourself is dangerous, a fairly standard trick would be hosting it in a deniable location. Multiply the percentage of pedophiles (I'd guess upwards of 0.1%) by the percentage of hackers (including script kiddies, I'd say upwards of 0.01%), and at least 1 in 10,000,000 people would be both, or at least 600 worldwide. Not that many, no, but enough to have it be a potential use of cracked machines.
And of course, while he's worried about Cairo eating 2 MB of RAM, I'm sure the massive amount of RAM consumed by the JVM won't bother him in the least...
I'm really wondering how your reply is at all on topic. ISA proxy is a corporate firewall with other network security features. Last I checked, it's not the software of choice for any *country*. I was pointing out the inanity of using a protocol like this to bypass a corporate firewall, not saying steno is useless.
At the risk of feeding a troll:
And as long as your security through obscurity is ensured by killing everyone who knows the protocol, I'm sure it will work out just fine. Problem is, usually you need to communicate with other people. As Ben Franklin put it, "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." The reason obscurity is disdained is that if one person blabs, the whole protocol may need to be discarded, while a secure protocol, in theory, examined by countless experts, only needs to change the key.
Ouch... Yeah, on rereading that was a valid interpretation (my interpretation is still plausible, but yours is better).
Or you could just hide the message inside the picture with one of a number of different techniques, which would be far less susceptible to detection, and get you more data transfer capacity for the buck. Assuming you don't want others to see your message, you can't put more than a bit or two per retrans request, and even your message would require quite a lot of retrans requests, such that statistical techniques would reveal the existence (if not the content) of the message unless it was hidden in an absolutely huge transmission.
TCP/IP protocol overhead: 160 bits/packet (TCP) + 160 bits/packet (IPv4) = 320 bits/packet (assuming no data, and that might look a little suspicious)
320 bits/packet * 250 packets/real bit = 80,000 bits/real bit
80,000 bits/real bit * 700 MB (smallest common size of compressed movie) = 80,000 bits/real bit * 5,872,025,600 real bits = 469,762,048,000,000 bits transmitted, or 53.4 TB.
Congratulations: Assuming you use the absurdly noticeable "empty packet" strategy, on a 20 megabit line with no other overhead, you could transmit one whole movie in "only" 272 days. No one will notice the absurd amount of empty traffic in that entire time I'm sure.
Or you could just run your torrents over an unblocked port, with protocol encryption... Nah, I'm sure reducing your bandwidth by multiple orders of magnitude is the way to go...
I realize that all forms of steganography are basically security through obscurity, but this one is even more inane. Unless subjected to additional protection, anyone aware of this form of steganography could easily track it, and more importantly, it would look suspicious in traffic logs (drastically increased retrans requests, but only for a small subset of the TCP connections logged). Steganography should look innocuous, in addition to hiding information, if you want it to work.
Both sides concluded it was an accident caused by mistaking a ship in an active war zone for an enemy vessel. Not exactly a deliberately hostile action. Now, if you want to get into the mutual spying, that's a whole different matter...
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker, it's closer to gambling that it is to a "game of skill," particularly for the vast majority of the population with less than stellar probability skills (see the entire population of people playing the lottery).
Again, I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to gamble, just that it's a tad silly to argue it from the perspective of the winners.
Actually, that's not what happened. The previous bill made it illegal for credit card companies to send payments to online gambling sites, so no, it didn't move offshore. The WTO actually ruled it was an illegal when we tried to ban the payments to offshore online gambling parlors, but to my knowledge, we just ignored them.
And how many people failed to attend college because they, or their parents, gambled away the college fund? I'm not saying gambling should be illegal, I just think it's silly to argue for gambling the perspective of the winners (and only the winners).
Sorry, you forgot to put question marks after the hyphens. Obviously, you'll need to license IBM's patent, because that additional tweak makes it a non-obvious invention.