Safety glass, the kind that doesn't splinter on impact, is everywhere these days,
No, actually it isn't. You can hardly find it anywhere, these days. I really wish I could...
In cars, safety glass has been completely replaced by "tempered" glass. Now, I don't mind that for the side windows, mirrors, and perhaps the rear window, but it's TERRIBLE windsheild material.
If you've ever had your windsheild get a tiny nick (from a small pebble) which slowly grew into a gigantic crack that spreads across the whole pane, you've experienced the wonders of tempered glass.
For that reason I've tried to find real safety glass, but nobody has it, nor can they order it. I imagine windsheild installers like the increased business they're doing, and don't want to jeopardize it. Tempered glass is perhaps the best example of "you get what you pay for" turning into "you can't get it, because most everybody is stupid and cheap".
There is proven secure encryption that is impossible to break, unless the assumption that you can generate secure (i.e. random) keys and some other very simple ones are wrong. ElGamal has this property.
Completely wrong. ElGamal is only secure under a set of several assumptions, which may not hold true. I don't know how anybody could even believe it is theoretically secure.
The only cryptographic method that can be mathematically proven secure, is a one-time-pad (and a few other very similar methods).
Just use two different ciphers with independen keys and the problem becomes exponentially more difficult since you now need to find a joint vulnerability.
True, but day-to-day use becomes exponetially more difficult as well, since you need to run all of your data, reading and writing, through both ciphers every time. That is likely computationally prohibitive, even with symmetric encryption, and you can just forget about asymmetric encryption, like ElGamal.
There is just a lot of ignorance.
True, on both account; The naysayers, and over-zealous advocates.
A bent disk with a huge hole through it will just instantly wreck any head trying to read it.
Man. People really don't get that this is military tech we're talking about, not IBM trying to refurb a drive...
Think super-powerful, super-sensative electromagnetic equipment, which they use to read bits off the disk, one by one. Even molten metal can retain tiny traces of it's former magnetic orientation, though they will obviously be distorted, and require labor-intensive extraction.
Encryption does the trick as well. Just erase the key securely and you are done.
Though that would help as a first-line of defense, you shouldn't depend entirely on it. The article clearly outlined a situation where the enemy has unlimited time, and unlimited resources to recover the data.
China has a high-tech industry, and numerous mathematicians and cryptogrophers. So it seems likely that any data encrypted with a reasonable-sized key could be broken through weaknesses, brute force, or a combination of the two, in a reasonable ammount of time.
The rest of your complaints are rather trivial. You make it sound like they're giving every pilot a large magnet, and telling them to use it. These are custom designs, and they aren't going to do something as idiotic as mistaking a solid-state storage device with a hard drive. Nor are they just going to guess that this will work. They've done very extensive tests, and know this will work in the worst-case situations, 100% of the time.
If the US sabotaged China's access to oil the cost of McDonald's happy meals in Ohio would skyrocket.
You've misunderstood. *I* don't think the US would do anything of the sort. *China* however, is quite paranoid about it, and that is why THEY are planning on building a navy.
Though, of course, if China decides it doesn't want to play nice, and decides to bomb or invade Taiwan, that might go from theory into practice real quick.
The population centers are very dense - so cars aren't too useful there
Have you read-up on China since the 1980s? They're second only to the USA in their love for cars. Traffic jams and pollution/smog are very common sights there. You certainly don't see the streets packed with bicycles anymore...
But at the same time, China is grappling with another problem, which may prove much more difficult to solve. In China's largest cities, the worst air pollution is no longer from smokestacks. It's from the tailpipes of cars. Just a few years ago, these crowded streets were nearly deserted. In 1995, the number of cars in all of China stood at a mere two million. Today, the number is 20 million and rising. Beijing has seen the most rapid growth of all, with 400,000 new cars rolling onto the city's roads in 2003 alone. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3109_worl dbal.html
Didn't you ever wonder why China would be trying to buy-up American oil/gas companies like Chevron? China is planning to establish a blue water (peace time) navy just for that purpose. Since the US undeniably has complete control over the worlds oceans, and China depends so much on ships brining in oil, they want to be able to ensure that their economy can't be potentially sabotaged by the US.
Hulling around 50% of the cars mass in batteries (as is the case of the EV) is not very efficient.
It's much more effecient than hauling around lots of dead weight known as the engine, transmission, etc., and better than burning gasoline in a 25% effecient engine.
Nor is the whole concept when you factor in the energy creation from (coal, oil whatever) to end disposal of the car.
Not true at all. Even with end-to-end ineffeciencies, you come out far ahead of inefficently burning gasoline, the operating costs were far lower, and you are far more flexible in choices of power source.
Also they tend to be small 2 seat vehicles. Which again are not practical for most people.
As are most hybrids, as are many other small ICE cars that sell quite well.
People want 1 vehicle that does it all.
Funny... You should tell that to some of my neighbors, who have 3 cars, per person. With the rising cost of gasoline, you can very quickly recoup the cost of the electric car, and BUY a conventional one for those occasional trips (or just rent one).
Not to mention that you (or the car company) could quite easily throw a gasoline generator in the trunk, and use it as a serial, plug-in hybrid for those long trips, while having all the advantages of an all-electric car for the first few hundred miles.
Furthermore, hybrids are far more practical in the end and much more environmentally friendly from an entire life cycle standpoint. That's why all the car companies killed their EV programs
Sorry, but that just doesn't hold water. A company like GM destroyed their EV1s, and sat around for numerous years without any alternative to it (no hybrids), and to this day isn't selling any hybrids, AFAIK. Hybrids are a good idea, but not in lieu of all-electric, and certainly didn't kill the electric cars. The timeline simply doesn't mesh.
GM dumped 2 billion into the program, and never even leased 1000 units in the couple years the program ran.
GM had a huge waiting list. If they didn't capitalize on it, that was completely their own doing.
Now if you manage to make a battery pack that fits in a 13 gallon space, and has the same amount of energy as 13 gallons of gasoline, and weights the same. Now you are on to something.
Not even remotely fair... Not only do you get rid of the weight of the gasoline, but also the engine, transmission, drive axle, car battery, alternator, etc, etc. That's a lot of weight gone, and with the use of batteries that are lighter than Lead-acid, you can easily have electric cars weighing less than conventional. The EV1 was seriously low-tech, even for it's day, and it still only weighed slightly more than other small cars, and less than mid-size cars.
No such thing. Companies know they can charge more and make more profit, so long as the competition doesn't undercut them, and they do exactly that.
the price is the determined by the costs of the sellers, not the desires of the buyers.
That's only even possibly and remotely true if there is unlimited supply and unlimited competition.
Yet you pay pennies for water, even though your willingness to pay is much higher.
That's because 95%+ of us don't really need to go through a company to get it. They need to keep their price low because they are competing with nature itself.
BTW: Remember when "all the world's climate experts" warned of global cooling and an impending ice age only around 30 years ago?
Actually, there was a lot of thruth to that. The particulates in pollution were causing global dimming.
However, the stronger pollution controls were instated not because of global dimming, but because people don't like smog, and they don't like developing lung cancer and other serious/fatal diseases.
So, if you'd like your smog and diseases back, we can take care of global warming pretty easily.
Or are you hoping that this way Apple might throw the open source community the odd dog treat?
I'm not "hoping" for anything. Apple has, and continues to contribute code back upstream.
Besides, the whole world benefits if OSes are more standard, more stable, more secure against attacks, even if they aren't contributing anything back. It's just like any other standard... If everybody makes a propritary, no-interoperable version of HTTP, we all lose out.
If Apple went with a proprietary OS then at least they would be paying for the kernel in some way. That's better than nothing.
What now? How is it better that they pay somebody, somewhere, for a license? How does that benefit me?
I'm sorry to say this, but this is BSD's 'fault'. They put the kernel under the BSD license - a license that allows for this to happen.
Why do GPL advocates act like companies are going to be forced to use their code, no matter what license they chose?
If FreeBSD code was GPL'd... Apple certainly wouldn't have used it, just as they didn't use Linux, and would have based it on a propritary OS. And you can be sure they wouldn't have released ANY source code in that situation.
Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else.
No, but they have a staff, and they pay impartial experts to explain things to them, where necessary.
There has been plenty of instances of highly technical legislation going through congress before, and speeches were they discussed the issues in rational and accurate terms. You can't claim many of those same people went stupid all of a sudden.
It's ok for the US to do it, because the US would never use a weapon of mass destruction like a nuke against a civilian population.
Nice straw man. The US isn't worried about the use ofIranian atomic bombs, but about unprovoked (terrorist) use, in a holy war, against an idealogical enemy, who poses no real threat. Civilian targets or not, doesn't make that big of a difference. Use of atomic bombs during a war with an approximately equally matched enemy doesn't make much of a difference. Just look at India and Pakistan's bomb programs, where the US did not threaten to invade. Of course, this is nothing like Japan.
Back in the 40s, there wasn't pin-point accuracy bombing. War was all about carpet-bombing your enemies industries, population, etc. The only alternative was to sit around and do nothing as your enemy bombed your country instead.
People look at the first atomic bombs in terms of the modern day, but that's just not the way it was. Looking at the evidence, even in hindsight, it was the least-terrible option.
In fact, even today, when faced with the option of droping atomic bombs on a waring country, or losing millions of American lives, droping the bomb would still be the better option, and nobody would argue, until 50 years later, when some idiot will post some brainless comment on the web about it.
If we replace our old weapons with shiny new ones that last longer, then Russia and China might think they have to do the same.
Yeah, they might have thought that, 20 YEARS AGO. However, with the Cold War over, and pretty good relations between the US, Russia, and China, you've got about a snowball's chance in hell that this will be an issue.
Also remember that the only way IRAN can credibly deter others from using nuclear weapons is to convince those others that IRAN is willing and able to strike back.
Iran has never admitted they are trying to build nuclear weapons. They continue to claim they are enriching uranium only for power plants.
Besides that, Iran isn't the defacto worldwide peace-keeping force that the US is. Quite the opposite. Iran has called for the complete destruction of Israel, and it's quite likely it's Israel's nuclear advantage is what is keeping the peace between those countries.
Like it or not, the US is the only superpower left, the only country with a peace time blue water navy, and the only country, other than China, that has expressed interest in doing the job, and there's no question the countries of the world would much rather have the US in that position, given the choice.
Though instances like the Iraq war are quite bad, they are the exception. The US has been a trustworthy peace-keeping force since WWII, and should continue to do so, not cripple it's military, or spend many times as much on conventional weapons, just because people don't like the "sound" of "nuclear".
Isn't it tectonics and an active planet that hides the evidence after the fact?
Tectonics will do a little bit, but not much.
That's easy to prove, by the fact that the moon has seismic activity as well, and yet still looks like... well... "the moon": http://www.physorg.com/news63645811.html
It's really the wind, rain, etc., that hides most of it. Bodies of water, and plant and animal life contribute as well (none of which we could have without an atmosphere, anyhow).
One Word: Atmosphere. It's why the Earth doesn't look like the Moon.
Sort of true, but in a very out-of-context way.
Our atmosphere burns up many meteorites, but that's not why we don't look like the moon.
The reason we don't look like the moon is that the atmosphere hides the evidence after the fact. It certainly doesn't protect the Earth from all projectiles.
Los Angeles isn't having water problems because it lacks water - but because it has too many people living in what is essentially a desert.
Well, actually it's more because everyone in L.A. INSISTS on having lush grass, tropical trees, etc., despite the limited water. If it wasn't used for irrigation, the current supplies would be plenty.
This because 99.999% is not good enough: if you spray that on your farm - in a few years the evaporating water has left the remaining salts (Chlorides) behind and will have sterilised the soil so that nothing can grow in it.
Well, 0.001% is awfully low. Still, even if there are unacceptable ammounts of salt left-over, farmers will just have to add some calcium to the water to counteract it, and possibly some magnesium and potassium as well.
One of the main battles of the pornographic industry has been to "authenticate" (sorry can not think of the exact word)
The word is "legitimize".
And, you would be more surprised to know that if the "OMG-think-of-the -Children" hundred year ol "sex-is-wrong" TABOO from USA dissappeared, almost everyone would rent/buy pronographic movies quite regularly.
No, YOU would be surprised to know that if the taboo disappeared, the porn industry would end immediately. A 30-minute porn movie costs 4X what a 2-hour Hollywood movie would, because of it being taboo. If it wasn't, nobody would pay. In fact, once it's not taboo, you'll see (high budget) porn in R-rated Hollywood movies, just because it wouldn't be an issue.
In any case, the porn industry would be dead. They want enough legitimacy to spread without fear of arrest, and to raise their profile, but enough taboo that they can charge insane prices, and be a "naughty" temptation, instead of being seen as a low-budget film with ugly actresses.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually it isn't. You can hardly find it anywhere, these days. I really wish I could...
In cars, safety glass has been completely replaced by "tempered" glass. Now, I don't mind that for the side windows, mirrors, and perhaps the rear window, but it's TERRIBLE windsheild material.
If you've ever had your windsheild get a tiny nick (from a small pebble) which slowly grew into a gigantic crack that spreads across the whole pane, you've experienced the wonders of tempered glass.
For that reason I've tried to find real safety glass, but nobody has it, nor can they order it. I imagine windsheild installers like the increased business they're doing, and don't want to jeopardize it. Tempered glass is perhaps the best example of "you get what you pay for" turning into "you can't get it, because most everybody is stupid and cheap".
Completely wrong. ElGamal is only secure under a set of several assumptions, which may not hold true. I don't know how anybody could even believe it is theoretically secure.
The only cryptographic method that can be mathematically proven secure, is a one-time-pad (and a few other very similar methods).
True, but day-to-day use becomes exponetially more difficult as well, since you need to run all of your data, reading and writing, through both ciphers every time. That is likely computationally prohibitive, even with symmetric encryption, and you can just forget about asymmetric encryption, like ElGamal.
True, on both account; The naysayers, and over-zealous advocates.
Man. People really don't get that this is military tech we're talking about, not IBM trying to refurb a drive...
Think super-powerful, super-sensative electromagnetic equipment, which they use to read bits off the disk, one by one. Even molten metal can retain tiny traces of it's former magnetic orientation, though they will obviously be distorted, and require labor-intensive extraction.
Though that would help as a first-line of defense, you shouldn't depend entirely on it. The article clearly outlined a situation where the enemy has unlimited time, and unlimited resources to recover the data.
China has a high-tech industry, and numerous mathematicians and cryptogrophers. So it seems likely that any data encrypted with a reasonable-sized key could be broken through weaknesses, brute force, or a combination of the two, in a reasonable ammount of time.
The rest of your complaints are rather trivial. You make it sound like they're giving every pilot a large magnet, and telling them to use it. These are custom designs, and they aren't going to do something as idiotic as mistaking a solid-state storage device with a hard drive. Nor are they just going to guess that this will work. They've done very extensive tests, and know this will work in the worst-case situations, 100% of the time.
You've misunderstood. *I* don't think the US would do anything of the sort. *China* however, is quite paranoid about it, and that is why THEY are planning on building a navy.
Though, of course, if China decides it doesn't want to play nice, and decides to bomb or invade Taiwan, that might go from theory into practice real quick.
Have you read-up on China since the 1980s? They're second only to the USA in their love for cars. Traffic jams and pollution/smog are very common sights there. You certainly don't see the streets packed with bicycles anymore...
Didn't you ever wonder why China would be trying to buy-up American oil/gas companies like Chevron? China is planning to establish a blue water (peace time) navy just for that purpose. Since the US undeniably has complete control over the worlds oceans, and China depends so much on ships brining in oil, they want to be able to ensure that their economy can't be potentially sabotaged by the US.
It's much more effecient than hauling around lots of dead weight known as the engine, transmission, etc., and better than burning gasoline in a 25% effecient engine.
Not true at all. Even with end-to-end ineffeciencies, you come out far ahead of inefficently burning gasoline, the operating costs were far lower, and you are far more flexible in choices of power source.
As are most hybrids, as are many other small ICE cars that sell quite well.
Funny... You should tell that to some of my neighbors, who have 3 cars, per person. With the rising cost of gasoline, you can very quickly recoup the cost of the electric car, and BUY a conventional one for those occasional trips (or just rent one).
Not to mention that you (or the car company) could quite easily throw a gasoline generator in the trunk, and use it as a serial, plug-in hybrid for those long trips, while having all the advantages of an all-electric car for the first few hundred miles.
Sorry, but that just doesn't hold water. A company like GM destroyed their EV1s, and sat around for numerous years without any alternative to it (no hybrids), and to this day isn't selling any hybrids, AFAIK. Hybrids are a good idea, but not in lieu of all-electric, and certainly didn't kill the electric cars. The timeline simply doesn't mesh.
GM had a huge waiting list. If they didn't capitalize on it, that was completely their own doing.
Not even remotely fair... Not only do you get rid of the weight of the gasoline, but also the engine, transmission, drive axle, car battery, alternator, etc, etc. That's a lot of weight gone, and with the use of batteries that are lighter than Lead-acid, you can easily have electric cars weighing less than conventional. The EV1 was seriously low-tech, even for it's day, and it still only weighed slightly more than other small cars, and less than mid-size cars.
Low? With a 1-year contract, you can get it for $15/mo, easily.
Besides, cable companies often try pulling the same crap as telcos, and telcos sometimes have minimal fees for DSL-only lines, so YMMV greatly.
No such thing. Companies know they can charge more and make more profit, so long as the competition doesn't undercut them, and they do exactly that.
That's only even possibly and remotely true if there is unlimited supply and unlimited competition.
That's because 95%+ of us don't really need to go through a company to get it. They need to keep their price low because they are competing with nature itself.
I disagree. I don't believe G.W. Bush actually exists.
Actually, there was a lot of thruth to that. The particulates in pollution were causing global dimming.
However, the stronger pollution controls were instated not because of global dimming, but because people don't like smog, and they don't like developing lung cancer and other serious/fatal diseases.
So, if you'd like your smog and diseases back, we can take care of global warming pretty easily.
I'm not "hoping" for anything. Apple has, and continues to contribute code back upstream.
Besides, the whole world benefits if OSes are more standard, more stable, more secure against attacks, even if they aren't contributing anything back. It's just like any other standard... If everybody makes a propritary, no-interoperable version of HTTP, we all lose out.
What now? How is it better that they pay somebody, somewhere, for a license? How does that benefit me?
Why do GPL advocates act like companies are going to be forced to use their code, no matter what license they chose?
If FreeBSD code was GPL'd... Apple certainly wouldn't have used it, just as they didn't use Linux, and would have based it on a propritary OS. And you can be sure they wouldn't have released ANY source code in that situation.
No, but they have a staff, and they pay impartial experts to explain things to them, where necessary.
There has been plenty of instances of highly technical legislation going through congress before, and speeches were they discussed the issues in rational and accurate terms. You can't claim many of those same people went stupid all of a sudden.
Nice straw man. The US isn't worried about the use ofIranian atomic bombs, but about unprovoked (terrorist) use, in a holy war, against an idealogical enemy, who poses no real threat. Civilian targets or not, doesn't make that big of a difference. Use of atomic bombs during a war with an approximately equally matched enemy doesn't make much of a difference. Just look at India and Pakistan's bomb programs, where the US did not threaten to invade. Of course, this is nothing like Japan.
Back in the 40s, there wasn't pin-point accuracy bombing. War was all about carpet-bombing your enemies industries, population, etc. The only alternative was to sit around and do nothing as your enemy bombed your country instead.
People look at the first atomic bombs in terms of the modern day, but that's just not the way it was. Looking at the evidence, even in hindsight, it was the least-terrible option.
In fact, even today, when faced with the option of droping atomic bombs on a waring country, or losing millions of American lives, droping the bomb would still be the better option, and nobody would argue, until 50 years later, when some idiot will post some brainless comment on the web about it.
Yeah, they might have thought that, 20 YEARS AGO. However, with the Cold War over, and pretty good relations between the US, Russia, and China, you've got about a snowball's chance in hell that this will be an issue.
Iran has never admitted they are trying to build nuclear weapons. They continue to claim they are enriching uranium only for power plants.
Besides that, Iran isn't the defacto worldwide peace-keeping force that the US is. Quite the opposite. Iran has called for the complete destruction of Israel, and it's quite likely it's Israel's nuclear advantage is what is keeping the peace between those countries.
Like it or not, the US is the only superpower left, the only country with a peace time blue water navy, and the only country, other than China, that has expressed interest in doing the job, and there's no question the countries of the world would much rather have the US in that position, given the choice.
Though instances like the Iraq war are quite bad, they are the exception. The US has been a trustworthy peace-keeping force since WWII, and should continue to do so, not cripple it's military, or spend many times as much on conventional weapons, just because people don't like the "sound" of "nuclear".
Tectonics will do a little bit, but not much.
That's easy to prove, by the fact that the moon has seismic activity as well, and yet still looks like... well... "the moon": http://www.physorg.com/news63645811.html
It's really the wind, rain, etc., that hides most of it. Bodies of water, and plant and animal life contribute as well (none of which we could have without an atmosphere, anyhow).
Sort of true, but in a very out-of-context way.
Our atmosphere burns up many meteorites, but that's not why we don't look like the moon.
The reason we don't look like the moon is that the atmosphere hides the evidence after the fact. It certainly doesn't protect the Earth from all projectiles.
I think you're confused. The Mojave certainly doesn't flow into the Colorado, although it's possible (but unknown if) it did during the last ice age.
However, it's good to find that I'm not the only
Then pee into your freezer, and the cycle is complete!
That's the most plainly redundant thing I've seen modded up in quite a while...
Well, actually it's more because everyone in L.A. INSISTS on having lush grass, tropical trees, etc., despite the limited water. If it wasn't used for irrigation, the current supplies would be plenty.
There's nothing wrong with the desert, per se.
Well, 0.001% is awfully low. Still, even if there are unacceptable ammounts of salt left-over, farmers will just have to add some calcium to the water to counteract it, and possibly some magnesium and potassium as well.
The word is "legitimize".
No, YOU would be surprised to know that if the taboo disappeared, the porn industry would end immediately. A 30-minute porn movie costs 4X what a 2-hour Hollywood movie would, because of it being taboo. If it wasn't, nobody would pay. In fact, once it's not taboo, you'll see (high budget) porn in R-rated Hollywood movies, just because it wouldn't be an issue.
In any case, the porn industry would be dead. They want enough legitimacy to spread without fear of arrest, and to raise their profile, but enough taboo that they can charge insane prices, and be a "naughty" temptation, instead of being seen as a low-budget film with ugly actresses.