It's not that hard. The point of redundancy is that each individual copy doesn't need to be 100% reliable, if you've got multiple copies, odds are that atleast *one* of them will be readable, which is all you need.
Growing storage means that the amount of data quickly becomes more and more trivial. The entire collection of files I wrote for my C-64 15-20 years ago fits easily in a 3-megabyte zip-file today. That is so utterly trivial. There's a copy on my laptop. There's a copy on my fileserver in the basement. There's a copy on my dreamhost account. There's a copy attached to an email in my gmail-account. There's a copy on my friends PC. There's a copy (multiple redundant backups stored in mountain-vaults) in the national library. (not because they backed up this spesifically, but because it was at some point on a website that they archived) It's not even that I made a conscious effort to make copies, it's just that the data-amount is so trivial it's literally a 10-second job to generate another copy somewhere on the planet. All in all atleast a dozen copies, atleast 3 of them handled by entities that do their work even if I completely stop caring about it, one of these entitites is a professional state-funded agency with an excellent track-record of not losing data.
I consider it very very likely that the file will still be readable to me 25 years in the future.
It's a bad thing warning about every little minute risk, because it causes warning-inflation. In other words, people get so used to warnings that they learn to ignore them, whereupon you need bigger, scarier warnings on the stuff that is ACTUALLY dangerous, rinse, repeat.
It's ok to have warnings on stuff that is genuinely more dangerous than one would reasonably assume. Stuff that is -normal- danger-levels should not have warnings.
An example; I've got a directional parabolic wifi-antenna. It's made of perfectly ordinary aluminium. It has a large yellow/red warning, with a skull and text: "Warning - risk of DEATH". Sounds scary no ?
I read the fine print. The actual danger ? The actual danger is that the thing is made of metal. If you where to stand on your roof holding the thing (say while installing it) and touch some part of it to nearby power-lines, you could get electrocuted, since aluminium conducts electricity.
That is, frankly, bullshit. We do NOT need "risk of DEATH" in wartype-letters on all objects that happen to be made of something electrically conducting.
I make perfect sense. Transformer-losses isn't the same thing as transmission-losses, more concretely, transformer-losses are independent of distance, whereas transmission-losses are dependent on distance.
Therefore, taking a larger hit on the transformer is worth it for the lower pro-mile loss if there are enough miles.
Additionally, DC-transformers are improving rapidly, so "enough miles" gets less and less. Used to be HVDC was only a win on distances above 1000 miles, today it's a win on anything over 100 miles. (aproximately)
It's like, do you want 5% losses plus 1% pro 100 miles, or do you prefer 10% losses plus 0.5% pro 100 miles. (the numbers are fictious), point is, the latter makes sense if the distance is large.
You're full of it. This is pretty much -all- wrong.
The chief advantage of AC isn't that transmission have lower losses, it doesn't quite the oposite infact, which is why high-voltage-dc is gaining popularity. The advantage is that AC makes it simple to up or down voltages, using simple transformers. Higher voltages do indeed lead to lower losses.
Even better; get a wife who is loves the -actual- you. So you don't actually need to hide anything or be ashamed of being who you are. It's not a if there ain't porn on my laptop. She's welcome to have a look if she's in that kinda mood.
I pity all the guys (A lot !) who are in a relationship, but still feel they need to hide parts of themselves. I'm not ashamed of being me. I don't think you should marry a woman who doesn't like you as YOU.
That is true. Full medical coverage in Norway has only precisely two conditions; One you must be legally in the country. Two, your stay must be (planned or actual) longer than a year.
It's simple. And it works. We end up spending -less- on healthcare than USA (pro capita) and still have better medical care for the majority of the population. Despite salaries for healthcare-personel actually being higher here than in USA.
It also saves a metric shitload of paper-pushing blame-assigning and bureaucracy in general. Heartily recommended.
It's cheaper, better, and avoids financially ruining people who have enough problems to deal with already. (such as people who are without insurance and for example get cancer)
But it smells like "socialism", and that's one of the trigger-words that result in the immediate shutdown of thought in US-politicians, so it won't happen. (other trigger-words are "children", "drugs", "pedophile", "terrorist")
It's not about understanding. I hear you loud and clear.
It's just that if you widen your definition of "choice" too much, you end up with a word meaning something completely different from what it normally means, in which case communication suffers.
It is actually common to, for example, say that someone was forced at gunpoint to do this or that. Now, really, they wheren't forced with your "force". They could just opt to be shot instead, a free choice, no ?
That's not what people typically mean though. It's perfectly normal, and makes perfect sense, to count disproportional consequences as FORCE, even though it isn't nessecarily physical force.
There's also the possibility that you actually trust someone. My wife knows the passwords for some of my stuff, simply out of convenience. It -does- happen that she needs some stuff (say pictures) from my laptop and I'm out. The home-partition is encrypted, she knows the password.
I don't see the big deal. I didn't encrypt it to protect it from HER. I encrypted it so that stuff on there stays private even if say a burglar steals the laptop.
Yeah, this means if she likes she can dig around in my firefox-history or whatever. So what ? I trust her. Certainly, it's possible that she'll betray that trust at some point. That's always a risk when trusting people. If that happens though, the privacy of my emails will be the least of my worries.
"Lost my wife, and my gmail-password" -- somehow I don't think the gmail-password is going to be the biggest deal in that context.
How low must one then be to be a graybeard ? I mean, if there's supposed to be 30K of them, then you consider everything under 100K a graybeard, or what ?
Nope. Because the decrypted content needs to go somewhere for it to be useful, no ?
If it's sound it has to ultimately go to the soundcard, then to the speakers. Speaker-coils don't understand AES, they need raw, uncoded, plain signals, free for anyone to tap.
If it's pictures, similar logic applies; they eventually need to get to the graphics-card, and on to the screen. Screens -can- accept encrypted input, but they too need to ultimately decode the signal before they're in a position to DISPLAY it.
So ?
Typical cooling in the home is like a fridge, where the temperature-range is aproximately freezing on the cold side and room-temperature on the hot end. There's some distance between room-temperature and pvc-melts, you know ?
There are many ways really. Publish "I'm in the posession of a zip-file with the following sha1sum....." in any location whatsoever where you're unlikely to be able to tamper with it afterwards, like in an Ad in the NYT, or wherever. For example.
I agree self-signed shouldn't be presented as THE SAME as externally-signed. But it also shouldn't be presented as WORSE than nothing at all.
Two changes should happen:
First, some authority that signs for free for anyone that can demonstrate DNS-control should get their key included in FF (and the other browesers). This alone would do a lot.
Second, we need two security-icons rather than one. One for encrypted or not. One for identified or not. Self-signed https is encrypted, but not identified.
No. But I think that having a automatic, free CERT that signs the certificate of anyone that can demonstrate control of DNS will give the same security as todays solution, and will give ADDED security in that it'll lead to more sites using HTTPS.
(it could simply say: Please make 04aecf44bbfae.yourdomain.com resolve to 127.0.0.1 to prove you are controling DNS for the domain -- then when you do that, you get the certificate. Simple, quick, free, just as secure as todays solution. (all VeriSign verifies is that you can read email to like post@domain.com anyways, and that can easily be done if you control the DNS)
There are authorities like this already. It's just that their keys aren't distributed by default in FF (and others). In my opinion, it would improve security if they -where- included. It would also cost VeriSign and friends 90% of their customers, and leave them with those few who need an extended-verification certificate. Which is just fine.
It's somewhere in between in reality. I don't think everyone can easily get a certificate for anyone. The demands for getting one ain't -zero- plus cash. But they are -low- plus cash.
I work in web-development, and I can tell you I personally could easily get a certificate for any of the ~1500 companies for which we've developed the website, or hosted the email-solution, or even just delivering dns-for.
There are ~30 other people in my company, all with that access.
I could do this -without- the company owning the domain OR anyone else at my work finding out about it.
This ain't theorethical -- indeed I do it several times a year, because the client asks me to. But there is literally nothing stopping me from doing it even if they DONT ask me to.
The certificates have -some- sort of value as evidence who you're talking to. They're hardly anywhere close to rock-hard proof though.
I'm with the article-writer: A automatic free authority that authorized anyone that can demonstrate control of DNS would provide pretty much the same security, and would have the added benefit that more sites would use https since the price and hassle would be less.
Anyone with control of DNS can -already- get a certificate; (by redirecting email then simply ordering a certificate the normal way) it's just that he also has to pay.
Nobody argues (that I've seen) that self-signed https: should get the SAME security-icon browser-bar-color whatever as one with a signature.
The problem is, today quite a few small/tiny websites are opting for HTTP over self-signed HTTPS because the former is perceived as MORE secure by people visiting, despite in reality being LESS secure.
It arguably should be somewhere-in-between.
Plain http means there are NO guarantees who you are talking to and ANYONE in between can passively listen in.
Self-signes https means there are NO guarantees who you are talking to, but NOBODY in between can passively listen in. (they can however ACTIVELY pose as man-in-the-middle)
Signed https means you are talking to whomever the authority gave the certificate to. And nobody can passively or actively listen in.
Please explain why the MIDDLE of these three safety-regimes should get a scary warning that DOESNT show up on either the higher or the lower alternative.
When the end-result is sites using http instead, security is WORSE than it'd otherwise be.
The articles main complain is that the way FF does thing by default a website secured using a self-signed https:/// certificate looks MORE scary and LESS secure than the very same site using http:/// and no certificate whatsoever.
That, the author argues, is wrong. True, a https:/// site *with* a certificate is even better than one without one. But BOTH are more secure than simply using http:///
So, it makes little sense to make self-signed https:/// look MORE scary that http:///
You're flailing your arms around a lot, for something it seems we basically agree on. I already SAID it can sometimes be tricky to obtain EVIDENCE for the fact that a certain use of force was indeed nessecary and apropriate.
That is true regardless of if you're using force against a 13-year-old or a 20-year-old. If you have zero evidence that the force was nessecary, but there is ample evidence that you used force, there's always going to be some kind of risk (depending on circumstances) that the courts will believe you acted WITHOUT a good reason.
That is true. But the state of the EVIDENCE is still separate from the state of the LAW. And the law does say, without a shadow of a doubt, that anyone is allowed to use whatever level of force was, or was reasonably tougth to be, needed to prevent harm.
You sound like a reasonable person. I'm quite sure you agree with this. It's possible your conflict with your ex makes it harder for you to think straigth on the issue. But really, the age of the person constituting the threat is nearly completely irrelevant.
Yes, a 13-year-old cannot be convicted of a felony. He can still be prevented from doing on by physical force though. Just as a DOG cannot be convicted of a felony, but can nevertheless be prevented from causing harm, by use of force if nessecary, deadly-force if it is needed and it's significant harm. Yes, the precise borders are fuzzy. But the general concept is crystal-clear.
You'd get -precisely- the same problem if you used physical force against your ex to prevent her from harming the kids. It's perfectly allowed to DO this. But depending on circumstance you may experience problems getting the court to BELIEVE that there was a legitimate reason for the use of force.
You are moving the goalposts now. This is a COMPLETELY different claim.
It is true that if there are obvious proof (marks) that you use physical force, and no evidence whatsoever other than your claim, that the force was nessecary, that this may lead to suspicions that it migth not have been (i.e. you may be lying about the reason)
That ain't the same thing though. Now you're not talking about LAW or what is ALLOWED. You are talking about EVIDENCE and what problems can arise from no EVIDENCE supporting your claims.
The child is incapable of being legally RESPONSIBLE for what it is doing, because it can't nessecarily UNDERSTAND the danger. But it doesn't follow that it's not doing anything WRONG. And it doesn't follow that it's not doing anything DANGEROUS.
A -dog- is also incapable of being legally RESPONSIBLE for what it is doing. It does not follow that you can't use force to prevent the dog from doing harm. Offcourse you can.
A 13-year-old is incapable of being legally responsible for anything. It doesn't follow that you cannot use (the minimum nessecary) amount of force against the 13-year-old to stop him/her from for example beating up a weaker child, or setting fire to a building or whatever.
Your problems with your ex are completely unrelated to this.
"There is no emergency because the kid with the gun won't be held legally RESPONSIBLE for the consequences" is pure bullshit.
There is a clear and obvious danger that innocent human beings will die -- this makes it an emergency regardless of if the REASON they might die is an adult attacking them, a kid attacking them, a tiger attacking them or a volcano breaking out.
I don't know where you got the idea that one cannot use force to stop a legal-minor from causing harm (to himself, others or property). But it's wrong. You can. That the person or animal or whatever you are using force against isn't capable of being held legally responsible is completely irrelevant here. The relevant question instead is if the force was nessecary to prevent the harm.
But I -don't- that was the entire point. On the average I need to provide -1- KW. Yes, sure this would mean you'd still need the grid for peaks, but equipping every home with enough power-generation to take peak-load is obvious lunacy anyway -- that would mean every house was equipped with 20 times as much capacity as it needs on average, and that on the average, 95% of the capacity is idling unused. Which is nonsense.
As it happens, I agree hydrogen and fuel-cells for energy-storage is lunacy, batteries are, as you say, better, and even better is simply to sell to the grid when you're producing more than you need, and buy from the grid when it's the other way around.
I'm just pointing out that though my breaker-box can handle 25KW, even a steady -1- KW would cover a large fraction of my needs, probably 2/3rds or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that hard. The point of redundancy is that each individual copy doesn't need to be 100% reliable, if you've got multiple copies, odds are that atleast *one* of them will be readable, which is all you need.
Growing storage means that the amount of data quickly becomes more and more trivial. The entire collection of files I wrote for my C-64 15-20 years ago fits easily in a 3-megabyte zip-file today. That is so utterly trivial. There's a copy on my laptop. There's a copy on my fileserver in the basement. There's a copy on my dreamhost account. There's a copy attached to an email in my gmail-account. There's a copy on my friends PC. There's a copy (multiple redundant backups stored in mountain-vaults) in the national library. (not because they backed up this spesifically, but because it was at some point on a website that they archived) It's not even that I made a conscious effort to make copies, it's just that the data-amount is so trivial it's literally a 10-second job to generate another copy somewhere on the planet. All in all atleast a dozen copies, atleast 3 of them handled by entities that do their work even if I completely stop caring about it, one of these entitites is a professional state-funded agency with an excellent track-record of not losing data.
I consider it very very likely that the file will still be readable to me 25 years in the future.
It's a bad thing warning about every little minute risk, because it causes warning-inflation. In other words, people get so used to warnings that they learn to ignore them, whereupon you need bigger, scarier warnings on the stuff that is ACTUALLY dangerous, rinse, repeat.
It's ok to have warnings on stuff that is genuinely more dangerous than one would reasonably assume. Stuff that is -normal- danger-levels should not have warnings.
An example; I've got a directional parabolic wifi-antenna. It's made of perfectly ordinary aluminium. It has a large yellow/red warning, with a skull and text: "Warning - risk of DEATH". Sounds scary no ?
I read the fine print. The actual danger ? The actual danger is that the thing is made of metal. If you where to stand on your roof holding the thing (say while installing it) and touch some part of it to nearby power-lines, you could get electrocuted, since aluminium conducts electricity.
That is, frankly, bullshit. We do NOT need "risk of DEATH" in wartype-letters on all objects that happen to be made of something electrically conducting.
I make perfect sense. Transformer-losses isn't the same thing as transmission-losses, more concretely, transformer-losses are independent of distance, whereas transmission-losses are dependent on distance.
Therefore, taking a larger hit on the transformer is worth it for the lower pro-mile loss if there are enough miles.
Additionally, DC-transformers are improving rapidly, so "enough miles" gets less and less. Used to be HVDC was only a win on distances above 1000 miles, today it's a win on anything over 100 miles. (aproximately)
It's like, do you want 5% losses plus 1% pro 100 miles, or do you prefer 10% losses plus 0.5% pro 100 miles. (the numbers are fictious), point is, the latter makes sense if the distance is large.
You're full of it. This is pretty much -all- wrong.
The chief advantage of AC isn't that transmission have lower losses, it doesn't quite the oposite infact, which is why high-voltage-dc is gaining popularity. The advantage is that AC makes it simple to up or down voltages, using simple transformers. Higher voltages do indeed lead to lower losses.
The rest of your post is similarily misguided.
Even better; get a wife who is loves the -actual- you. So you don't actually need to hide anything or be ashamed of being who you are. It's not a if there ain't porn on my laptop. She's welcome to have a look if she's in that kinda mood.
I pity all the guys (A lot !) who are in a relationship, but still feel they need to hide parts of themselves. I'm not ashamed of being me. I don't think you should marry a woman who doesn't like you as YOU.
That is true. Full medical coverage in Norway has only precisely two conditions; One you must be legally in the country. Two, your stay must be (planned or actual) longer than a year.
It's simple. And it works. We end up spending -less- on healthcare than USA (pro capita) and still have better medical care for the majority of the population. Despite salaries for healthcare-personel actually being higher here than in USA.
It also saves a metric shitload of paper-pushing blame-assigning and bureaucracy in general. Heartily recommended.
It's cheaper, better, and avoids financially ruining people who have enough problems to deal with already. (such as people who are without insurance and for example get cancer)
But it smells like "socialism", and that's one of the trigger-words that result in the immediate shutdown of thought in US-politicians, so it won't happen. (other trigger-words are "children", "drugs", "pedophile", "terrorist")
It's not about understanding. I hear you loud and clear.
It's just that if you widen your definition of "choice" too much, you end up with a word meaning something completely different from what it normally means, in which case communication suffers.
It is actually common to, for example, say that someone was forced at gunpoint to do this or that. Now, really, they wheren't forced with your "force". They could just opt to be shot instead, a free choice, no ?
That's not what people typically mean though. It's perfectly normal, and makes perfect sense, to count disproportional consequences as FORCE, even though it isn't nessecarily physical force.
There's also the possibility that you actually trust someone. My wife knows the passwords for some of my stuff, simply out of convenience. It -does- happen that she needs some stuff (say pictures) from my laptop and I'm out. The home-partition is encrypted, she knows the password.
I don't see the big deal. I didn't encrypt it to protect it from HER. I encrypted it so that stuff on there stays private even if say a burglar steals the laptop.
Yeah, this means if she likes she can dig around in my firefox-history or whatever. So what ? I trust her. Certainly, it's possible that she'll betray that trust at some point. That's always a risk when trusting people. If that happens though, the privacy of my emails will be the least of my worries.
"Lost my wife, and my gmail-password" -- somehow I don't think the gmail-password is going to be the biggest deal in that context.
How low must one then be to be a graybeard ? I mean, if there's supposed to be 30K of them, then you consider everything under 100K a graybeard, or what ?
That's rather a huge difference though. "Not having a body" results in your death. "Not having music" results in you being sligthly bored.
true enough, I spesifically talked of music and movies though, both need to leave the computer to actually do anything for anyone.
Nope. Because the decrypted content needs to go somewhere for it to be useful, no ?
If it's sound it has to ultimately go to the soundcard, then to the speakers. Speaker-coils don't understand AES, they need raw, uncoded, plain signals, free for anyone to tap.
If it's pictures, similar logic applies; they eventually need to get to the graphics-card, and on to the screen. Screens -can- accept encrypted input, but they too need to ultimately decode the signal before they're in a position to DISPLAY it.
Hardly matters PVC melts at 80C, That's 176F. I don't know how warm it is in Arizona, but it ain't 176F.
So, you're saying there's a lack of people who'd want to sign up for what is, essentially, a real-life video-game ?
So ? Typical cooling in the home is like a fridge, where the temperature-range is aproximately freezing on the cold side and room-temperature on the hot end. There's some distance between room-temperature and pvc-melts, you know ?
There are many ways really. Publish "I'm in the posession of a zip-file with the following sha1sum ....." in any location whatsoever where you're unlikely to be able to tamper with it afterwards, like in an Ad in the NYT, or wherever. For example.
I -do- think clearly.
I agree self-signed shouldn't be presented as THE SAME as externally-signed. But it also shouldn't be presented as WORSE than nothing at all.
Two changes should happen:
First, some authority that signs for free for anyone that can demonstrate DNS-control should get their key included in FF (and the other browesers). This alone would do a lot.
Second, we need two security-icons rather than one. One for encrypted or not. One for identified or not. Self-signed https is encrypted, but not identified.
unknown unencrypted website. (http:)
unknown encrypted website. (self-signed https:)
KNOWN encrypted website. (signed https:)
It's not that hard really.
No. But I think that having a automatic, free CERT that signs the certificate of anyone that can demonstrate control of DNS will give the same security as todays solution, and will give ADDED security in that it'll lead to more sites using HTTPS.
(it could simply say: Please make 04aecf44bbfae.yourdomain.com resolve to 127.0.0.1 to prove you are controling DNS for the domain -- then when you do that, you get the certificate. Simple, quick, free, just as secure as todays solution. (all VeriSign verifies is that you can read email to like post@domain.com anyways, and that can easily be done if you control the DNS)
There are authorities like this already. It's just that their keys aren't distributed by default in FF (and others). In my opinion, it would improve security if they -where- included. It would also cost VeriSign and friends 90% of their customers, and leave them with those few who need an extended-verification certificate. Which is just fine.
It's somewhere in between in reality. I don't think everyone can easily get a certificate for anyone. The demands for getting one ain't -zero- plus cash. But they are -low- plus cash.
I work in web-development, and I can tell you I personally could easily get a certificate for any of the ~1500 companies for which we've developed the website, or hosted the email-solution, or even just delivering dns-for.
There are ~30 other people in my company, all with that access.
I could do this -without- the company owning the domain OR anyone else at my work finding out about it.
This ain't theorethical -- indeed I do it several times a year, because the client asks me to. But there is literally nothing stopping me from doing it even if they DONT ask me to.
The certificates have -some- sort of value as evidence who you're talking to. They're hardly anywhere close to rock-hard proof though.
I'm with the article-writer: A automatic free authority that authorized anyone that can demonstrate control of DNS would provide pretty much the same security, and would have the added benefit that more sites would use https since the price and hassle would be less.
Anyone with control of DNS can -already- get a certificate; (by redirecting email then simply ordering a certificate the normal way) it's just that he also has to pay.
Nobody argues (that I've seen) that self-signed https: should get the SAME security-icon browser-bar-color whatever as one with a signature.
The problem is, today quite a few small/tiny websites are opting for HTTP over self-signed HTTPS because the former is perceived as MORE secure by people visiting, despite in reality being LESS secure.
It arguably should be somewhere-in-between.
Plain http means there are NO guarantees who you are talking to and ANYONE in between can passively listen in.
Self-signes https means there are NO guarantees who you are talking to, but NOBODY in between can passively listen in. (they can however ACTIVELY pose as man-in-the-middle)
Signed https means you are talking to whomever the authority gave the certificate to. And nobody can passively or actively listen in.
Please explain why the MIDDLE of these three safety-regimes should get a scary warning that DOESNT show up on either the higher or the lower alternative.
When the end-result is sites using http instead, security is WORSE than it'd otherwise be.
Reading the article would be good, ya ?
The articles main complain is that the way FF does thing by default a website secured using a self-signed https:/// certificate looks MORE scary and LESS secure than the very same site using http:/// and no certificate whatsoever.
That, the author argues, is wrong. True, a https:/// site *with* a certificate is even better than one without one. But BOTH are more secure than simply using http:///
So, it makes little sense to make self-signed https:/// look MORE scary that http:///
I agree.
You're flailing your arms around a lot, for something it seems we basically agree on. I already SAID it can sometimes be tricky to obtain EVIDENCE for the fact that a certain use of force was indeed nessecary and apropriate.
That is true regardless of if you're using force against a 13-year-old or a 20-year-old. If you have zero evidence that the force was nessecary, but there is ample evidence that you used force, there's always going to be some kind of risk (depending on circumstances) that the courts will believe you acted WITHOUT a good reason.
That is true. But the state of the EVIDENCE is still separate from the state of the LAW. And the law does say, without a shadow of a doubt, that anyone is allowed to use whatever level of force was, or was reasonably tougth to be, needed to prevent harm.
You sound like a reasonable person. I'm quite sure you agree with this. It's possible your conflict with your ex makes it harder for you to think straigth on the issue. But really, the age of the person constituting the threat is nearly completely irrelevant.
Yes, a 13-year-old cannot be convicted of a felony. He can still be prevented from doing on by physical force though. Just as a DOG cannot be convicted of a felony, but can nevertheless be prevented from causing harm, by use of force if nessecary, deadly-force if it is needed and it's significant harm. Yes, the precise borders are fuzzy. But the general concept is crystal-clear.
You'd get -precisely- the same problem if you used physical force against your ex to prevent her from harming the kids. It's perfectly allowed to DO this. But depending on circumstance you may experience problems getting the court to BELIEVE that there was a legitimate reason for the use of force.
You are moving the goalposts now. This is a COMPLETELY different claim.
It is true that if there are obvious proof (marks) that you use physical force, and no evidence whatsoever other than your claim, that the force was nessecary, that this may lead to suspicions that it migth not have been (i.e. you may be lying about the reason)
That ain't the same thing though. Now you're not talking about LAW or what is ALLOWED. You are talking about EVIDENCE and what problems can arise from no EVIDENCE supporting your claims.
The child is incapable of being legally RESPONSIBLE for what it is doing, because it can't nessecarily UNDERSTAND the danger. But it doesn't follow that it's not doing anything WRONG. And it doesn't follow that it's not doing anything DANGEROUS.
A -dog- is also incapable of being legally RESPONSIBLE for what it is doing. It does not follow that you can't use force to prevent the dog from doing harm. Offcourse you can.
A 13-year-old is incapable of being legally responsible for anything. It doesn't follow that you cannot use (the minimum nessecary) amount of force against the 13-year-old to stop him/her from for example beating up a weaker child, or setting fire to a building or whatever.
Your problems with your ex are completely unrelated to this.
"There is no emergency because the kid with the gun won't be held legally RESPONSIBLE for the consequences" is pure bullshit.
There is a clear and obvious danger that innocent human beings will die -- this makes it an emergency regardless of if the REASON they might die is an adult attacking them, a kid attacking them, a tiger attacking them or a volcano breaking out.
I don't know where you got the idea that one cannot use force to stop a legal-minor from causing harm (to himself, others or property). But it's wrong. You can. That the person or animal or whatever you are using force against isn't capable of being held legally responsible is completely irrelevant here. The relevant question instead is if the force was nessecary to prevent the harm.
But I -don't- that was the entire point. On the average I need to provide -1- KW. Yes, sure this would mean you'd still need the grid for peaks, but equipping every home with enough power-generation to take peak-load is obvious lunacy anyway -- that would mean every house was equipped with 20 times as much capacity as it needs on average, and that on the average, 95% of the capacity is idling unused. Which is nonsense.
As it happens, I agree hydrogen and fuel-cells for energy-storage is lunacy, batteries are, as you say, better, and even better is simply to sell to the grid when you're producing more than you need, and buy from the grid when it's the other way around.
I'm just pointing out that though my breaker-box can handle 25KW, even a steady -1- KW would cover a large fraction of my needs, probably 2/3rds or something like that.