Nuclear is no better than variable, because it can't match the variation of actual demand. It needs storage as much as renewables do in order to operate economically.
I say, just take all that hydropower that was built to store nuclear off-peak generation and use it to store wind and solar instead.
Nuclear cannot be varied, so it cannot meet demand by itself either. We were already building hydropower capacity to store the excess from the so-called "baseload" nuclear.
As nuclear subsides, that storage capacity will be used increasingly for wind and solar instead.
The real differences here are:
1) Solar and wind variations substantially match peak usage patterns. This is the main reason we're having this discussion at all, because these new generators are cutting into the most profitable parts of the day for established generators.
2) Nuclear is highly centralized and requires police-state protections to function in the face of an emergency. The downside of the Fukushima incident is that the Japanese government has enacted strict state secrecy to punish the kind of disobedience and truth-telling that probably saved much of Japan from a worse turn of events.
Note that even in the US, you can be arrested for taking pictures of a nuclear power plant from a public space (these days, more likely by a SWAT officer or other paramilitary goon).
TL;DR - An expansion of nuclear energy is likely to spread militarism.
3) Funding... How do you get backers for new nuclear power plants when massive cost overruns are the rule rather than the exception? As with the need for secrecy and militarism, nuclear has a problem with corruption in its finances, too.
This is why you just don't let TPTB--in whatever combination of governments or corporations--collect the mundane and fine details of your life... because the twin sister of the "parallel construction" is the "fishing expedition".
And neither of these demons permits the herded ones to stare back; They are a pat-and-proven recipe for the inversion of healthy private-vs-open interrelationships.
...because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand the playing field to begin with. They think that presenting similar windows and icons is all that's needed, when its really the "platform-ness" of the OS that matters the most. This includes a lot of qualities and business practices which Apple and Microsoft adhere to but are known only internally or not even expressed at all (along with others that are commonly talked about in MS/Apple circles but are completely ignored in most FOSS projects).
You sit at the personal computing table, you watch, you reverse-engineer the dynamics and you learn. Then you can try to figure out which elements can be adapted to FOSS or possibly even improved upon.
No? Then get out of the way, cuz users have expectations and aren't attracted when systems developers are trying to impress only their peers --as well as that works in the server world, its just a pile unrecognizable pieces to everyone else. Barging in with piles of tools, plus 6 or 8 candy-coated DEs and calling it all "Linux" hasn't worked... cannot work.
My god, man, its just a confusing mess.
What Google did with Android was very savvy: They lost the "Linux" identity, published an SDK (so app devs see a stable target) and started with a select group of hardware vendors to support it (instead of that horrible pretence of 'try different distros and see which one works on your system'). But Android is not meant for the desktop...
...because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand the playing field to begin with. They think that presenting similar windows and icons is all that's needed, when its really the "platform-ness" of the OS that matters the most. This includes a lot of qualities and business practices which Apple and Microsoft adhere to but are known only internally or not even expressed at all (along with others that are commonly talked about in MS/Apple circles but are completely ignored in most FOSS projects).
You sit at the personal computing table, you watch, you reverse-engineer the dynamics and you learn. Then you can try to figure out which elements can be adapted to FOSS or possibly even improved upon.
No? Then get out of the way, cuz users have expectations and aren't attracted when systems developers are trying to impress only their peers --as well as that works in the server world, its just a pile unrecognizable pieces to everyone else. Barging in with piles of tools, plus 6 or 8 candy-coated DEs and calling it all "Linux" hasn't worked... cannot work.
My god, man, its just a confusing mess.
What Google did with Android was very savvy: They lost the "Linux" identity, published an SDK (so app devs see a stable target) and started with a select group of hardware vendors to support it (instead of that horrible pretence of 'try different distros and see which one works on your system'). But Android is not meant for the desktop...
Google+ recently created an account for me (without my permission) when I signed onto Youtube recently. When I accessed Google+ to get rid of it, the thing stepped me through a wizard that wanted to link me up with people I haven't conversed with for many years! I delete all mail when downloading it from gmail, and I have Google search's web history deleted and turned off.
Accessing Google generates a permanent dossier on you.
We need someone new to step up and challenge the DoC export restrictions on published website content as unconstitutional interference with free speech, like we had with DJ Bernstein challenging cryptography export restrictions.
The official position now is there are no constitutional rights across borders, and the UN declaration of human rights is toilet paper. "Human rights" is something defined/forgotten sporadically by the US State Dept. and the Council on Foreign Relations between war campaigns against third-world countries; it is something relegated to short-term memory.
If hundreds of millions of people switched to I2P to render *easy* mass surveillance impossible (thereby making mass surveillance very expensive), how does your narrative fit into that at all? You might as well claim that people will become drone targets because they own handguns; That's just a teabagger's fantasy.
The thing you may be missing from the whole privacy discussion is that it is generally considered a detriment to the public when society has been turned into a panopticon... sooner or later even the very mundane information gets abused. It represents an information flow exactly the opposite of what a supposedly open and democratic society should have.
They have an android version in alpha, too, but its mainly a PC/server networking layer.
The thing to remember about plain encryption is that it still shows a lot of metadata: the Who, When, and Where of all your communications. It should be paired with an anonymizing network layer like I2P if you want to minimize leakage of that info.
On the contrary, I2P's DHT-based email uses no servers. Its all P2P-distributed, as is the underlying anonymous network protocol. No single court order or raid can acquire its data since that data only exists on the endpoint email clients.
Its based on P2P principles (i.e. users contributing bandwidth) and the result is much less centralized than Tor.
There is also a DHT (distributed) email system that runs over I2P, although it is not the default I2P email yet. This new email system has no servers to raid; it is all distributed P2P.
People have to stop hanging their hopes for privacy on HTTPS/PKI and also a network (Tor) built on the premise of accessing an insecure web.
If there is going to be any real privacy on the Internet going forward, it will have to be based on a new layer like the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). People should start using it now in a P2P fashion -- securing emails, chats, torrents and such -- and in time there is a chance the momentum will attract larger and larger web services, too. Make a habbit of telling people you can be reached at your I2P address (in this sense, it becomes no more onerous than installing an app like Skype).
Its a philosophical difference: Qubes' approach leans toward security by isolation where the attack surface is greatly reduced. That reduction is enforced by silicon and a baremetal hypervisor. So where correctness is concerned, Qubes needs much less of it to enforce security.
OTOH, OpenBSD is probably not as good at security by correctness as Qubes is at isolation. And if there were ever a need to elevate the standard for correctness to, say, mathematical proofs, a Qubes architecture would take a fraction of the time and effort.
Traditional OS kernels are good at providing useful features, but are no longer the standard-bearers for security. And its good to see Theo recognizes them as buggy (if not for providing features).
Joanna and her team seem talented, but the software is new and untested.
If anyone can test and identify the kinds of hardware pitfalls Theo is complaining about, I'm sure Joanna's team (ITL) would be among them. That's what they've done for years (Joanna's blog frequently picks at x86 implementation issues), and now they have an effort to work around those problems. I don't think there is a drop of naivete in them about what PC hardware can do (or how far current designs can be trusted).
Xen itself is well tested, and that is the basis for Qubes security. The parts of Qubes that are untested are very small, indeed, and that status will change before long.
OTOH, security by correctness all by itself never prevented resourceful attackers from compiling their own databases of zero-day exploits. Infrequent updates just means the list is somewhat larger. I can't agree with this concept of security.
I've been using Qubes OS to enhance security and though it incorporates Linux it uses a clever Xen configuration instead of SELinux to harden the system. No rules to maintain, just straightforward domains. The upshot is I can even run Windows in seamless mode and still expose my core system to less risk than an OpenBSD system running native apps.
Its dead to me. I've turned my back on more than one project (security software, no less) because the author demanded I take a leap of faith with unsigned code.
Doesn't the widespread American belief that private enterprise 'knows best' and must remain self-regulating result in that trashy government in the first place? From where I'm standing, it does.
...or maybe IE and Safari need to "die in a fire"... they're not very good and people don't need them. These companies want their tollbooths on standard formats.
This is not YouTube we're talking about, where its 100% about immediacy and convenience. People can download a free player--or use a non-Microsoft/Apple browser--when they're good and ready to view the Wikimedia content.
Fully open source software would be a good *start*. It reduces the number of private parties you are forced to trust down to the hardware OEMs... and with clever enough architecture you can even keep hostile components at bay if your core processor is trusted.
But, eventually, the open source dynamic must be expressed in the hardware in order for multifarious communities of experts and users to develop a genuine trust relationship a smartphone, PC, etc. After 2013, there is no turning back from that eventual requirement. It may not show up on the roadmaps of 99% of most FOSS projects, but for many of them the hardware aspect will be hanging somewhere on their horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear is no better than variable, because it can't match the variation of actual demand. It needs storage as much as renewables do in order to operate economically.
I say, just take all that hydropower that was built to store nuclear off-peak generation and use it to store wind and solar instead.
Nuclear cannot be varied, so it cannot meet demand by itself either. We were already building hydropower capacity to store the excess from the so-called "baseload" nuclear.
As nuclear subsides, that storage capacity will be used increasingly for wind and solar instead.
The real differences here are:
1) Solar and wind variations substantially match peak usage patterns. This is the main reason we're having this discussion at all, because these new generators are cutting into the most profitable parts of the day for established generators.
2) Nuclear is highly centralized and requires police-state protections to function in the face of an emergency. The downside of the Fukushima incident is that the Japanese government has enacted strict state secrecy to punish the kind of disobedience and truth-telling that probably saved much of Japan from a worse turn of events.
Note that even in the US, you can be arrested for taking pictures of a nuclear power plant from a public space (these days, more likely by a SWAT officer or other paramilitary goon).
TL;DR - An expansion of nuclear energy is likely to spread militarism.
3) Funding... How do you get backers for new nuclear power plants when massive cost overruns are the rule rather than the exception? As with the need for secrecy and militarism, nuclear has a problem with corruption in its finances, too.
I've long wanted a way to get around those applet-things.
This is why you just don't let TPTB--in whatever combination of governments or corporations--collect the mundane and fine details of your life... because the twin sister of the "parallel construction" is the "fishing expedition".
And neither of these demons permits the herded ones to stare back; They are a pat-and-proven recipe for the inversion of healthy private-vs-open interrelationships.
...because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand the playing field to begin with. They think that presenting similar windows and icons is all that's needed, when its really the "platform-ness" of the OS that matters the most. This includes a lot of qualities and business practices which Apple and Microsoft adhere to but are known only internally or not even expressed at all (along with others that are commonly talked about in MS/Apple circles but are completely ignored in most FOSS projects).
You sit at the personal computing table, you watch, you reverse-engineer the dynamics and you learn. Then you can try to figure out which elements can be adapted to FOSS or possibly even improved upon.
No? Then get out of the way, cuz users have expectations and aren't attracted when systems developers are trying to impress only their peers --as well as that works in the server world, its just a pile unrecognizable pieces to everyone else. Barging in with piles of tools, plus 6 or 8 candy-coated DEs and calling it all "Linux" hasn't worked... cannot work.
My god, man, its just a confusing mess.
What Google did with Android was very savvy: They lost the "Linux" identity, published an SDK (so app devs see a stable target) and started with a select group of hardware vendors to support it (instead of that horrible pretence of 'try different distros and see which one works on your system'). But Android is not meant for the desktop...
Trollmods with no counterpoint, I see.
...because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand the playing field to begin with. They think that presenting similar windows and icons is all that's needed, when its really the "platform-ness" of the OS that matters the most. This includes a lot of qualities and business practices which Apple and Microsoft adhere to but are known only internally or not even expressed at all (along with others that are commonly talked about in MS/Apple circles but are completely ignored in most FOSS projects).
You sit at the personal computing table, you watch, you reverse-engineer the dynamics and you learn. Then you can try to figure out which elements can be adapted to FOSS or possibly even improved upon.
No? Then get out of the way, cuz users have expectations and aren't attracted when systems developers are trying to impress only their peers --as well as that works in the server world, its just a pile unrecognizable pieces to everyone else. Barging in with piles of tools, plus 6 or 8 candy-coated DEs and calling it all "Linux" hasn't worked... cannot work.
My god, man, its just a confusing mess.
What Google did with Android was very savvy: They lost the "Linux" identity, published an SDK (so app devs see a stable target) and started with a select group of hardware vendors to support it (instead of that horrible pretence of 'try different distros and see which one works on your system'). But Android is not meant for the desktop...
Google+ recently created an account for me (without my permission) when I signed onto Youtube recently. When I accessed Google+ to get rid of it, the thing stepped me through a wizard that wanted to link me up with people I haven't conversed with for many years! I delete all mail when downloading it from gmail, and I have Google search's web history deleted and turned off.
Accessing Google generates a permanent dossier on you.
We need someone new to step up and challenge the DoC export restrictions on published website content
as unconstitutional interference with free speech,
like we had with DJ Bernstein challenging cryptography export restrictions.
The official position now is there are no constitutional rights across borders, and the UN declaration of human rights is toilet paper. "Human rights" is something defined/forgotten sporadically by the US State Dept. and the Council on Foreign Relations between war campaigns against third-world countries; it is something relegated to short-term memory.
If hundreds of millions of people switched to I2P to render *easy* mass surveillance impossible (thereby making mass surveillance very expensive), how does your narrative fit into that at all? You might as well claim that people will become drone targets because they own handguns; That's just a teabagger's fantasy.
The thing you may be missing from the whole privacy discussion is that it is generally considered a detriment to the public when society has been turned into a panopticon... sooner or later even the very mundane information gets abused. It represents an information flow exactly the opposite of what a supposedly open and democratic society should have.
There is one way... http://geti2p.net/
They have an android version in alpha, too, but its mainly a PC/server networking layer.
The thing to remember about plain encryption is that it still shows a lot of metadata: the Who, When, and Where of all your communications. It should be paired with an anonymizing network layer like I2P if you want to minimize leakage of that info.
On the contrary, I2P's DHT-based email uses no servers. Its all P2P-distributed, as is the underlying anonymous network protocol. No single court order or raid can acquire its data since that data only exists on the endpoint email clients.
Its based on P2P principles (i.e. users contributing bandwidth) and the result is much less centralized than Tor.
There is also a DHT (distributed) email system that runs over I2P, although it is not the default I2P email yet. This new email system has no servers to raid; it is all distributed P2P.
...than a chess game with Bill Gates, as even a Microsoft Surface tablet will behave in a wildly different manner between the two:
* Surface placed in front of Bill Gates and switched on = Very low levels of molecular, audio and visual excitation
* Microwave loaded with a Surface and switched on = Very high excitation and dynamic visual displays
People have to stop hanging their hopes for privacy on HTTPS/PKI and also a network (Tor) built on the premise of accessing an insecure web.
If there is going to be any real privacy on the Internet going forward, it will have to be based on a new layer like the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). People should start using it now in a P2P fashion -- securing emails, chats, torrents and such -- and in time there is a chance the momentum will attract larger and larger web services, too. Make a habbit of telling people you can be reached at your I2P address (in this sense, it becomes no more onerous than installing an app like Skype).
Common syntax that results in different behaviour? That sounds more confusing to me.
Its a philosophical difference: Qubes' approach leans toward security by isolation where the attack surface is greatly reduced. That reduction is enforced by silicon and a baremetal hypervisor. So where correctness is concerned, Qubes needs much less of it to enforce security.
OTOH, OpenBSD is probably not as good at security by correctness as Qubes is at isolation. And if there were ever a need to elevate the standard for correctness to, say, mathematical proofs, a Qubes architecture would take a fraction of the time and effort.
Traditional OS kernels are good at providing useful features, but are no longer the standard-bearers for security. And its good to see Theo recognizes them as buggy (if not for providing features).
Joanna and her team seem talented, but the software is new and untested.
If anyone can test and identify the kinds of hardware pitfalls Theo is complaining about, I'm sure Joanna's team (ITL) would be among them. That's what they've done for years (Joanna's blog frequently picks at x86 implementation issues), and now they have an effort to work around those problems. I don't think there is a drop of naivete in them about what PC hardware can do (or how far current designs can be trusted).
Xen itself is well tested, and that is the basis for Qubes security. The parts of Qubes that are untested are very small, indeed, and that status will change before long.
It's not a dupe, it's just that everyone installs from source on OpenBSD, so signing the binary never made much sense.
Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update.
I'm sorry, but this makes OpenBSD users sound like morons. IMO, they shouldn't try to justify the myopia that has lead to this situation.
Run whatever software you need on Qubes. Even then your system is likely to be more secure than OpenBSD.
Most updates are for security fixes.
OTOH, security by correctness all by itself never prevented resourceful attackers from compiling their own databases of zero-day exploits. Infrequent updates just means the list is somewhat larger. I can't agree with this concept of security.
I've been using Qubes OS to enhance security and though it incorporates Linux it uses a clever Xen configuration instead of SELinux to harden the system. No rules to maintain, just straightforward domains. The upshot is I can even run Windows in seamless mode and still expose my core system to less risk than an OpenBSD system running native apps.
Its dead to me. I've turned my back on more than one project (security software, no less) because the author demanded I take a leap of faith with unsigned code.
Charlatans.
Doesn't the widespread American belief that private enterprise 'knows best' and must remain self-regulating result in that trashy government in the first place? From where I'm standing, it does.
...or maybe IE and Safari need to "die in a fire"... they're not very good and people don't need them. These companies want their tollbooths on standard formats.
This is not YouTube we're talking about, where its 100% about immediacy and convenience. People can download a free player--or use a non-Microsoft/Apple browser--when they're good and ready to view the Wikimedia content.
Just Wow... it really is like brain damage.
Fully open source software would be a good *start*. It reduces the number of private parties you are forced to trust down to the hardware OEMs... and with clever enough architecture you can even keep hostile components at bay if your core processor is trusted.
But, eventually, the open source dynamic must be expressed in the hardware in order for multifarious communities of experts and users to develop a genuine trust relationship a smartphone, PC, etc. After 2013, there is no turning back from that eventual requirement. It may not show up on the roadmaps of 99% of most FOSS projects, but for many of them the hardware aspect will be hanging somewhere on their horizon.