Anybody can get struck by a meteor when walking down the street. Or impaled by a bull statue while playing in the park. Shit happens, but that doesn't necessarily make it a general rule.
Anyhow, we're digressing quite far from the subject of Obama's climate change plan, which you fear will be used by local tin-pot dictators to arbitrarily target people they don't like. My opinion there is that power-hungry tin-pot dictators gonna be power-hungry tin-pot dictators and will find a way to abuse the law to play their tin-pot dictator games no matter what the law is. It seems that the problem you're complaining about is more a consequence of the existence of these petty local dictators than of any particular law.
- If yes, then I'm with you: this country needs a good harsh crackdown on corruption and favoritism, from the highest to the lowest level.
- If no, then please show how there's "no way of knowing what is 'allowed'" under Obama's plan.
Even from a quick glance at the summary at Wikipedia, one can see things were just a little bit more complicated than it not being "legal to move dirt from one part of your yard to another". Owning a piece of land does not mean you can do whatever you want with it. And in unfortunate exceptional cases, it does mean you cannot do something seemingly innocuous. That's life. Doesn't mean nobody can move dirt from one part of their yard to another, as you imply.
Duh. I don't mind being "look over there'd" from a stale story that has been going on since the 1960s and resurfaces every decade or so to long overdue meaningful action against a threat against world civilization.
Yes, in an ideal world, Obama would use the opportunity of the NSA scandal to curtail these practices that have been going on since the 1960s, I give you that. But the US is the US and the world is not ideal. We'll probably need to wait till after the next civil war or revolution to get a president who'd really curtail his government's excessive use of information gathering instruments.
I got my information from losing quite a bit of money by going long in solar, and looking up analysts' opinions on why this happened. Guess that makes you wrong on all accounts.
Oh yeah, Snowden re-revealed shocking facts that were already in a much-cited 12-year-old European parliment report and the media jumped on it because there didn't seem much better to report. So Obama found himself in hot water, so he goes "Look over there! The greatest challenge of our generation!"
Now what's the important point and what's the distraction?
Thank you for bravely sharing your testimony of suffering from antisocial personality disorder. Unfortunately for you, it won't help your cause; you'll just be alienating people from your side of the argument. You're that person AGW deniers don't want to be associated with.
I see and hear people claiming this all the time, but have yet to find an authoritative source saying Phillips screws are designed to stripout. For example, wikipedia says they're designed to be self-centering, which makes a lot more sense to me. I'm starting to suspect it's one of those common factoids. It probably gets its popularity from ham-fisted people looking for an excuse after stripping out a screw ("yeah but these things are designed to do that"). In fact, I'll miss that excuse...
Water supply is actually often unjustly reviled. But don't worry, I'll add a few to your list to copensate
- civilian infrastructure
- transportiation (for example, this here really reads like satire)
- income inequality
- enforcement of antitrust legislation
- high-level government corruption
you can't artificially force their prices to come down.
Yes you can. A number of EU countries collectively have artificially forced the prices of solar panels down several-fold over the timespan of less than half a decade. This is how it went: subsidize rooftop panels ==> surge in demand ==> surge in production and private R&D (with some help form public R&D funding) ==> economies of scale and more efficient production methods ==> market saturation ==> price collapse
And then the twist ending ==> subsidies not longer as necessary ==> wave of consolidations ==> massive losses for solar shareholders but prices stay nice and low. Because there's a flip side to every coin.
Oh please, what kind of fantasy workd are you living in? The NSA has been doing this kind of stuff since the 1960s, through many R and D presidencies. There was a huge stink about it in in 2001 after the publication of a number of reports, in particular this one. It's an interesting read; there's very little Snowden revealed that wans't already in that 12-years-old report. Yet now it's suddenly all Obama's fault. Guess he should have been more effective at suppressing the renewed media attention?
Also, how is him trying to go through with it a lie? I didn't hear him say: "yeah I put this plan together for shits and giggles, so don't worry, I'm not going to go through with it."
Oh one more thing: it would be much more challenging for China and India to curb emissions than for the USA. So if the high-GDP-per-capita USA is seen chickening out of relatively straightforward and low-economic-impact emission cuts out of irrational fear of losing some competitiveness, do you seriously expect low-GDP-per-capita China and India to implement the more drastic and economically somewhat more risky measures needed to curb their emissions? The will is there, but the confidence isn't...
I so hate this argument. What does a good Sergeant do when his squad is hesitant to charge? Try to talk them into it through extensive negotiations and debates?
There's all the lofty rhetoric: "the USA is a shining example for other nations", "the USA has to assume a leadership role on the international stage,..." What does the USA do? Standing at the side lines, making up ridiculous excuses, and whining "if such-and-so are not going to break cover, well then neither will I". How is anything ever going to get accomplished with such mentality?
The tragic part is that the USA hasn't quite burned through its credibility yet, and that other countries - even ones that really should know better - are standing in line to imitate the crumbling US model (doesn't matter whether we're talking about the environment, human rights, violation of international treaties, corruption/plutocracy,...). The US still has an example function - a bad one.
Yeah, and I'm sure most KKK members call themselves conservatives. Ergo, people calling themselves conservatives think that
1) white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds
2) whites should politically dominate non-whites
3) violence and murder are acceptable means to achieve this goal
And so on.
Every self-proclaimed "conservative" will tell you they are all for "equality" but turn out to be absolutely against giving any particular minority true equality.
Given that someone calling themself a "conservative" is opposed to every single option other than exterminating all black people, it is a little difficult to reclaim the term at this point.
I know TFA is very long and shock full of precautionary disclaimers that don't make it the most pleasant of reads (OK, given the subject, it wouldn't be very pleasant no matter what) but it does contain a detailed sequence of events that leaves very little to the imagination. If even half of it is true, then your point is entirely academic - from a real-life perspective, it shows beyond reasonable doubt he was trying to rape her.
I think you have it exactly backwards. Brute forcing even a single message encrypted with a solid up-to-date encryption standard by using a football field-sized data center is *extrememly* expensive (easily in the millions of dollars if you count maintenance and depreciation of the computers in addition to the energy and cooling cost) and slow. That is the Hollywood stuff. You don't need that when it's much easier to get a back door. Leaves the data centers free for more useful purposes, like flagging interesting stuff among the deluge of unencrypted messages and voice streams intercepted at the backbone (and, yes, possibly through backdoors).
Note that I'm not implying the NSA will never use its data centers to brute-force encrypted communications. But given the cost, I'd think they'll be pretty selective in doing so, ie. a pretty strong suspicion must exist to make it worth it.
at least until someone works out the mapping manually.
Perhaps it will suprise you that even amateur cryptographers these days have computer programs at their disposal that can "work out the mapping" completely hands-free from letter frequencies and patterns in the cyphertext and a library of existing words. And it doesn't take a lot of computer power; one could break a simple substitution cypher on a smartphone in a few seconds, provided a few sentences of cyphertext. When in middle school, I used to amaze classmates by cracking their substitution cyphers with pen and paper during a boring class. It's the easiest parlor trick - virtually anyone can do it once you show them how it's done.
I see it as an excercise in misinformation rather than awareness. If this catches on, a lot of "joe sixpacks" will be led to believe that a font can somehow make an electronic document less easy to decypher, rather than exploring options that are actually pretty safe, such as gpg. [lame pgp reference intended - hur hur hur]
Ignoring the obvious problem that text is usually not sent over internet as an image, if you're gonna use a cypher anyway, you might just as well spare yourself the effort of using an obnoxious font by choosing a cypher that is (probably) impossible for the NSA to crack in a reasonable amount of time. It's really not rocket science. There are some good ones implemented in gpg, among many others.
You're greatly underestimating what computers - and the cryptographers who program them - are capable of / up against. Defeating something like this UTF-8 generator is peanuts.
heck, very different engine designs become appealing then - reciprocating internal combustion is just fundamentally limited to somewhat low efficiency.
Are you talking about Stirling engines? If so, I find it unlikely that they will become appealing for use in cars; they have a very low power output for their weight and size, and are inherently expensive because of material issues. Keep in mind that mobile electricity generators (ranging from suitcase-sized to trailer-sized) almost always use internal combustion engines. As do cargo ships. There's a reason for that. The above are two constant-RPM applications applications where weight and size are somewhat less of an issue than in cars. What tips the balance in favor of internal combustion engines anyway is that, as you say, they can be made a lot more efficient if running at constant RPM. So much that it takes a lot of the advantages of the alternatives away.
There's no practical explosion or very-high-energy fire with metal hydrides, which is a real benefit over gas or current high energy density batteries.
I take it you never worked with metal hydrides in the lab. Granted, the odds of something going seriously wrong with a tank of hydrogen are higher compared to a container of metal hydrides due to the former's annoying tendency to escape, and metal hydrides will burn violently or deflagrate at worst, while hydrogen has the additional ability to detonate. But if water or fire is about to get close to a metal hydride, I'll be running for my life all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody can get struck by a meteor when walking down the street. Or impaled by a bull statue while playing in the park. Shit happens, but that doesn't necessarily make it a general rule.
Anyhow, we're digressing quite far from the subject of Obama's climate change plan, which you fear will be used by local tin-pot dictators to arbitrarily target people they don't like. My opinion there is that power-hungry tin-pot dictators gonna be power-hungry tin-pot dictators and will find a way to abuse the law to play their tin-pot dictator games no matter what the law is. It seems that the problem you're complaining about is more a consequence of the existence of these petty local dictators than of any particular law.
- If yes, then I'm with you: this country needs a good harsh crackdown on corruption and favoritism, from the highest to the lowest level.
- If no, then please show how there's "no way of knowing what is 'allowed'" under Obama's plan.
Even from a quick glance at the summary at Wikipedia, one can see things were just a little bit more complicated than it not being "legal to move dirt from one part of your yard to another". Owning a piece of land does not mean you can do whatever you want with it. And in unfortunate exceptional cases, it does mean you cannot do something seemingly innocuous. That's life. Doesn't mean nobody can move dirt from one part of their yard to another, as you imply.
Duh. I don't mind being "look over there'd" from a stale story that has been going on since the 1960s and resurfaces every decade or so to long overdue meaningful action against a threat against world civilization.
Yes, in an ideal world, Obama would use the opportunity of the NSA scandal to curtail these practices that have been going on since the 1960s, I give you that. But the US is the US and the world is not ideal. We'll probably need to wait till after the next civil war or revolution to get a president who'd really curtail his government's excessive use of information gathering instruments.
I got my information from losing quite a bit of money by going long in solar, and looking up analysts' opinions on why this happened. Guess that makes you wrong on all accounts.
Oh yeah, Snowden re-revealed shocking facts that were already in a much-cited 12-year-old European parliment report and the media jumped on it because there didn't seem much better to report. So Obama found himself in hot water, so he goes "Look over there! The greatest challenge of our generation!"
Now what's the important point and what's the distraction?
Thank you for bravely sharing your testimony of suffering from antisocial personality disorder. Unfortunately for you, it won't help your cause; you'll just be alienating people from your side of the argument. You're that person AGW deniers don't want to be associated with.
I see and hear people claiming this all the time, but have yet to find an authoritative source saying Phillips screws are designed to stripout. For example, wikipedia says they're designed to be self-centering, which makes a lot more sense to me. I'm starting to suspect it's one of those common factoids. It probably gets its popularity from ham-fisted people looking for an excuse after stripping out a screw ("yeah but these things are designed to do that"). In fact, I'll miss that excuse...
Water supply is actually often unjustly reviled. But don't worry, I'll add a few to your list to copensate
- civilian infrastructure
- transportiation (for example, this here really reads like satire)
- income inequality
- enforcement of antitrust legislation
- high-level government corruption
Haha, I think someone got his acccount hacked. If the weird unsubstantiated story didn't give it away, the sig does.
you can't artificially force their prices to come down.
Yes you can. A number of EU countries collectively have artificially forced the prices of solar panels down several-fold over the timespan of less than half a decade. This is how it went: subsidize rooftop panels ==> surge in demand ==> surge in production and private R&D (with some help form public R&D funding) ==> economies of scale and more efficient production methods ==> market saturation ==> price collapse
And then the twist ending ==> subsidies not longer as necessary ==> wave of consolidations ==> massive losses for solar shareholders but prices stay nice and low. Because there's a flip side to every coin.
Oh please, what kind of fantasy workd are you living in? The NSA has been doing this kind of stuff since the 1960s, through many R and D presidencies. There was a huge stink about it in in 2001 after the publication of a number of reports, in particular this one. It's an interesting read; there's very little Snowden revealed that wans't already in that 12-years-old report. Yet now it's suddenly all Obama's fault. Guess he should have been more effective at suppressing the renewed media attention? Also, how is him trying to go through with it a lie? I didn't hear him say: "yeah I put this plan together for shits and giggles, so don't worry, I'm not going to go through with it."
Oh one more thing: it would be much more challenging for China and India to curb emissions than for the USA. So if the high-GDP-per-capita USA is seen chickening out of relatively straightforward and low-economic-impact emission cuts out of irrational fear of losing some competitiveness, do you seriously expect low-GDP-per-capita China and India to implement the more drastic and economically somewhat more risky measures needed to curb their emissions? The will is there, but the confidence isn't...
I so hate this argument. What does a good Sergeant do when his squad is hesitant to charge? Try to talk them into it through extensive negotiations and debates?
There's all the lofty rhetoric: "the USA is a shining example for other nations", "the USA has to assume a leadership role on the international stage,..." What does the USA do? Standing at the side lines, making up ridiculous excuses, and whining "if such-and-so are not going to break cover, well then neither will I". How is anything ever going to get accomplished with such mentality?
The tragic part is that the USA hasn't quite burned through its credibility yet, and that other countries - even ones that really should know better - are standing in line to imitate the crumbling US model (doesn't matter whether we're talking about the environment, human rights, violation of international treaties, corruption/plutocracy,...). The US still has an example function - a bad one.
I have no clue. My whole post was a parody of its parent, showcasing the latter's absurdity from a different angle.
Yeah, and I'm sure most KKK members call themselves conservatives. Ergo, people calling themselves conservatives think that
1) white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds
2) whites should politically dominate non-whites
3) violence and murder are acceptable means to achieve this goal
And so on.
Every self-proclaimed "conservative" will tell you they are all for "equality" but turn out to be absolutely against giving any particular minority true equality.
Given that someone calling themself a "conservative" is opposed to every single option other than exterminating all black people, it is a little difficult to reclaim the term at this point.
They couldn't have chosen a more ironic name for it if they tried to. Or could they, /. ?
I know TFA is very long and shock full of precautionary disclaimers that don't make it the most pleasant of reads (OK, given the subject, it wouldn't be very pleasant no matter what) but it does contain a detailed sequence of events that leaves very little to the imagination. If even half of it is true, then your point is entirely academic - from a real-life perspective, it shows beyond reasonable doubt he was trying to rape her.
I think you have it exactly backwards. Brute forcing even a single message encrypted with a solid up-to-date encryption standard by using a football field-sized data center is *extrememly* expensive (easily in the millions of dollars if you count maintenance and depreciation of the computers in addition to the energy and cooling cost) and slow. That is the Hollywood stuff. You don't need that when it's much easier to get a back door. Leaves the data centers free for more useful purposes, like flagging interesting stuff among the deluge of unencrypted messages and voice streams intercepted at the backbone (and, yes, possibly through backdoors).
Note that I'm not implying the NSA will never use its data centers to brute-force encrypted communications. But given the cost, I'd think they'll be pretty selective in doing so, ie. a pretty strong suspicion must exist to make it worth it.
Nope. The first mistake was creating it. No, wait, the first mistake was thinking a font would afford any kind of security whatsoever.
at least until someone works out the mapping manually.
Perhaps it will suprise you that even amateur cryptographers these days have computer programs at their disposal that can "work out the mapping" completely hands-free from letter frequencies and patterns in the cyphertext and a library of existing words. And it doesn't take a lot of computer power; one could break a simple substitution cypher on a smartphone in a few seconds, provided a few sentences of cyphertext. When in middle school, I used to amaze classmates by cracking their substitution cyphers with pen and paper during a boring class. It's the easiest parlor trick - virtually anyone can do it once you show them how it's done.
I see it as an excercise in misinformation rather than awareness. If this catches on, a lot of "joe sixpacks" will be led to believe that a font can somehow make an electronic document less easy to decypher, rather than exploring options that are actually pretty safe, such as gpg. [lame pgp reference intended - hur hur hur]
Ignoring the obvious problem that text is usually not sent over internet as an image, if you're gonna use a cypher anyway, you might just as well spare yourself the effort of using an obnoxious font by choosing a cypher that is (probably) impossible for the NSA to crack in a reasonable amount of time. It's really not rocket science. There are some good ones implemented in gpg, among many others.
You're greatly underestimating what computers - and the cryptographers who program them - are capable of / up against. Defeating something like this UTF-8 generator is peanuts.
heck, very different engine designs become appealing then - reciprocating internal combustion is just fundamentally limited to somewhat low efficiency.
Are you talking about Stirling engines? If so, I find it unlikely that they will become appealing for use in cars; they have a very low power output for their weight and size, and are inherently expensive because of material issues. Keep in mind that mobile electricity generators (ranging from suitcase-sized to trailer-sized) almost always use internal combustion engines. As do cargo ships. There's a reason for that. The above are two constant-RPM applications applications where weight and size are somewhat less of an issue than in cars. What tips the balance in favor of internal combustion engines anyway is that, as you say, they can be made a lot more efficient if running at constant RPM. So much that it takes a lot of the advantages of the alternatives away.
There's no practical explosion or very-high-energy fire with metal hydrides, which is a real benefit over gas or current high energy density batteries.
I take it you never worked with metal hydrides in the lab. Granted, the odds of something going seriously wrong with a tank of hydrogen are higher compared to a container of metal hydrides due to the former's annoying tendency to escape, and metal hydrides will burn violently or deflagrate at worst, while hydrogen has the additional ability to detonate. But if water or fire is about to get close to a metal hydride, I'll be running for my life all the same.