What I would be keen to see is a residential fridge that had water hookups to allow it to be plumbed into a chilled-water loop. Instead of the back of the fridge being covered with a radiator and relying on natural convection to remove the heat from the compressor, have a water-to-refrigerant heat-exchanger. The water flowing through the heat exchanger would be a separate circuit in a geothermal HVAC system.* In other words, you would always be using your geothermal "ground" loop as the heat sink for the fridge, rather than the kitchen air. The amount of heat energy we are talking about for a well-constructed fridge isn't all that much, so the heat exchanger, water flow rates, etc, could all be very modestly sized.
*Alternately, depending on the temperatures involved, it could serve as a heat input to the home's hydronic heating system, in series or parallel to the geothermal heat pump.
That's the whole problem - there's really not much energy to be saved by adding geothermal to refrigerators, and manufacturing all of the extra tubing, water pumps, etc have an environmental cost themselves, plus you're reducing the reliability of the refrigerator because not only are you dependent upon the compressor in the refrigerator, but now you have to pump heated water into a geothermal bed as well. And if you make a refrigerator using $60/year of electricity 20% more efficient, then you've saved $12/year, hardly enough to pay for the extra manufacturing costs to make a brand new style of refrigerator that plugs into geothermal systems (which are already pretty rare).
I believe the newer designs are safer, but the rub is that any reactor will still be operated by the same model of humans that brought us Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Can you honestly tell me that any new reactor will be built and operated by companies that have any different set of priorities than the ones that currently run nuclear plants? Keep it cheap, repay the investors, keep the profits coming in, whatever it takes.I would like to see dozens of new reactors in the U.S., but as long as the clueless and the greedy continue to own the techs who build and operate them, we're going to see more "accidents".
I thought the whole point behind newer designs like the thorium reactor is that they fail safe - they are inherently safe so even if you do nothing to an overheating reactor, it will moderate on its own.
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Do you really want to install and maintain all of that duct work and automatic louvers for "several months of the year" when it would make a difference? Don't forget to take into account the energy use for the fan that you'll need to run to vent the heat outside, and to account for the fact that while you're saving a bit of energy by making your air conditioner work less hard, your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
I'm not sure that the energy cost savings would be worth it - a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh). Even if you saved 100% of that energy, it might take you around 10 years to recoup the cost of $500 worth of duct work, electronic louvers, vent fan, and associated control circuitry. If you run the air conditioning 4 months out of the year, then it's a 30 year payback time.
Note that's not 1.39 KW-Hr/Year, but is 1.39KW per person (or 1.39 KW-year per person per year), which is about 12,200 KW-Hr per person per year. This must include all sources of electrical energy usage in the USA (industrial, agricultural, etc) since my own annual residential use is closer to 1200KW-hr per person.
"I use TOR for the same reason I wrap my house in tinfoil."
That sounds more like it.
Yes, it's clear that Anonymous Cowards like yourself don't value anonymity so you sign every post with your full name and email address since you don't have anything to hide and don't care who knows what you said online.
Sherwin Smith should be fired immediately. If I threatened my customers, my boss would rightfully fire me on the spot.
Public agencies utilities don't have "customers", they have "captive consumers". You can threaten them or piss them off all you want, they have no choice but to keep buying your product or paying taxes at whatever price you set.
If I wanted to hide my browser activity, I'd run Damn Small Linux (or some other lightweight linux distribution) in a virtual machine (that reverts itself back to its starting state each time I boot it), with the lynx or links browser, and TOR over a VPN to a foreign server using Wifi via a Cantenna that lets me pick up internet from one of the 6 coffee shops, restaurants and other nearby small businesses with free internet. Maybe instead of a VM, run Linux on a Raspberry Pi (or other small computer) over a serial port... than it's easy to dispose of or destroy the entire computer if I needed to.
I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.
No one thinks that the NSA put it the code themselves, a MS developer did it. The low level developer that put it there used that name as a protest and a secret signal that it's there and no one noticed.
The point is that a number of people (not pointing at anyone in particular) have said something along the lines of, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
Could you remind me which people in government were saying that? I know it is very popular on Slashdot, but I don't recall it being common coming from the national security establishment. I think I do recall them saying things along the lines of they don't target ordinary Americans, which is a very different thing.
“I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.”
You don't get to call yourselves the land of the free when you're being monitored around the clock in case you might say or do something upsetting to your betters.
We get to call ourselves the land of the free because even with surveillance, people being imprisoned for saying things that "upset our betters" is practically unheard of. Land of the whiny. But still the land of the free.
Unless, of course, your "betters" declare that you're a terrorist or you're aiding terrorists, then they feel that they have the justification to kill you with a drone strike - even if you're a US citizen and no trial or even court oversight is needed. So you better hope that the pervasive surveillance doesn't mistakenly link you to terrorism (or that a terrorist hasn't stolen your identity), or you may find yourself on the wrong end of a drone strike. If a teenaged hacker in Russia can use a virus to make your computer download porn, how do you know that a sophisticated terrorist isn't using your computer and cloned your phone to plan his attack without fear of being discovered?
Intelligence officials last week disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks - one targeting the New York subway system, one to bomb a Danish newspaper office that had published the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Alexander and Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offered additional details on two other foiled plots, including one targeting Wall Street.
Under questioning, Joyce said the NSA was able to identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with an individual in Kansas City, Mo. They were able to identify co-conspirators and thwart a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
Joyce also said a terrorist financier inside the U.S. was identified and arrested in October 2007, thanks to a phone record provided by the NSA. The individual was making phone calls to a known designated terrorist group overseas.
It doesn't matter how much they disclose if you don't listen. Maybe they should send the stories to Wikileaks, maybe then it would get people's attention.
Both of those specific instances were calls made overseas, and many people are ok with the NSA looking at international calls. So remind me again why they are watching all of our domestic calls? If they see a call to a foreign terrorist organization, they can use a good old fashioned court order to get the phone records from the domestic end of the call. No need for the NSA to collect all of the data.
Obama Obama Obama. Enough with this partisan nonsense. Watch the documentary 'Enemy of the State', what 16 years old now or more, this surveillance is nothing new. You don't get to call yourselves the land of the free when you're being monitored around the clock in case you might say or do something upsetting to your betters. And no I don't care if terrorists are the excuse, if you're going to put the USA on a pedestal, hold yourselves to a higher standard than totalitarians.
I think the Obama bashing is coming out because Obama said he was going to bring about change that America needs and he even spoke out specifically against secret spying on citizens. No one (well few) think that a Republican in the Whitehouse would be any better since nearly all of the opposition against the Patriot Act renewals has come from the democrats.
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.
This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not. There are no short-cuts to protecting America, and that is why the fifth part of my strategy is doing the hard and patient work to secure a more resilient homeland.
Yet not only is he aware of the secret spying programs, he is actively defending them.
The NSA has a secret budget believed to be around $10B/annually (out of a total intelligence budget of about $75B), and we know that they are spending billions of dollars on new datacenters, so how does anyone know that the USA is falling behind in computers that can be used as weapons?
Even China's new Tianhe-2 supercomputer is reported to have "only" cost $390 million so the NSA could be building 10 of those a year and no one would know.
Just get 1/4 rack space, two Dell R81x boxes fully loaded (48 cores, 512GB RAM, 6 x 15K 500GB SAS drives in RAID 1 + HS) and that should solve your problems. boxes run around $5K each. send me an email to my anon email if you like (msharp42@fastmail.fm) I get traffic like that and manage it on a daily basis.
What reseller gives you 65% off? I priced out an R815 with those specs and the cheapest configuration I could come up with was around $13,500. (but they didn't have 500GB 15K SAS drives, so I used 600GB 10K)
But when someone says "I'm the most geeky of the group" and he's coming to Slashdot to find his hosting provider, recommending that he rent some coloc space is probably not going to serve him well.
Why do these new laptops top out at only 8GB of RAM? My 5 year old desktop has 8GB and I make good use of the RAM and sometimes find myself wanting more. Anyone that does java development or graphics/video editing can easily run into memory constraints with only 8GB.
I don't really get it... The entire reason you might use Tor is because you want to hide what you're doing from the authorities... Why on earth would the authorities not consider it interesting what you're hiding if you're doing so?
It's like suggesting that a cop shouldn't go and investigate a guy handing a package to another guy in a back alley because back allies are common places for drug deals to take place.
They have suspicion that something dodgy is going on, and they're investigating it, that's what we pay them to do.
I use TOR for the same reason I close my curtains at night and don't keep my personal journal out on the front porch with a sign that says "read me!". I just don't like other people snooping on my private life. Though if I had to choose between some random guy on the street watching my browsing activity or the NSA, I'd choose the guy on the street because he's probably only doing it because he's nosy, but the NSA is doing it to see if they can link me to terrorism.
This technology won't be impressive until it can perform general computing tasks. Right now, it's too constrained of a technology to be useful for something as simple as web browsing. Great promise... but that's what it is: A promise.
There are lots of specialized computers that do one thing really well, yet still aren't great at general computing tasks... like GPUs and DSPs. For that matter, the CPU in your hard drive may not be nearly powerful enough to run a web browser, yet it's still extremely useful for its intended purpose.
Not every computer development is meant to make Firefox run faster.
If my eyes are watering after a long session its because my screen is too bright, which is exactly the opposite of what he postulates as the problem (on off cycles of LEDs). Brighter requires longer "on" cycles, which in turn are less perceptible. Yet for most people overly bright screens are the source of complaints.
You could put a 'privacy filter' on the screen that will reduce the brightness (with an intended side effect of reducing viewing angle)
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
It's no different to other jobs where people hold a position of power (e.g., police officer, principal, medical doctor, judge, etc). We expect and demand that those people behave professionally and appropriately at all times (even when they don't like you). Just because a computer is involved doesn't excuse a system administrator from being held to the same professional standards.
There's a difference between abusing power and being fair to all users. If one department or individual continually makes "emergency" last minute requests that they could have made weeks or even months ago, then making everyone else wait while you service the "emergency" request is unfair. So it's not abusing power if a sysadmin team refuses to scramble around to accommodate unreasonable last minute requests. A former manager was fond of responding to those requests with "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part".
The same goes with other users that complain that the "internet is down" when what they really mean is "The online gambling site I use is unreachable". Or the people that complain that their system is too slow and we say "Yeah, you need more RAM for that application, ask your manager to submit a purchase request for more", yet they still keep complaining to IT when IT doesn't have the budget to provide hardware upgrades. It's unfair to other users that work within the system to make them wait while we service requests from "problem users".
Sure, but it's a lot cheaper to hire a drone "pilot" who took a vendor supplied 2 week training course versus hiring an experienced helicopter pilot with years of experience.
3. You can get helicopters for less than $1M.
But few police departments are going to use an $80,000 helicopter. Plus, if you're going to cut corners, you can get drones for a lot less than $50,000.
4. Sticking a camera on a helicopter is easier and cheaper than sticking the same camera on a drone.
You don't need to use the same camera - a drone can get much closer to the subject without arousing suspicion.
The government just likes to spend more money on things. That doesn't mean it has to.
Well, they don't have to spy on us either, but they do.
So what I hear you saying is that if for some reason helicopters became much cheaper and easier to use they would need to be made illegal too.
Well no, but they would be subject to the same types of concerns, whether or not they would be made illegal depends on society.
But no worries, if helicopters suddenly were available for $50,000, then that means society has already made vast changes in other ways, perhaps through cheap interstellar alien slave labor who brought with them vast stores of raw materials to make helicopters.
Yes, but where does the slippery slope lead to? It's an airborne camera - either you allow them or you don't.
It's an airborne wide-spectrum camera, sometimes with parabolic and laser microphones.
People don't tend to have an issue with the helicopters because they're big, noisy, expensive, and take a number of people to operate. Thus, you're only going to deploy them when it's really necessary, and everyone in the area knows it's deployed. Compare that to drones, where you don't know how many there are, where they are, how much information they're gathering, who they're gathering it for, etc.
We haven't even got to the questions yet of the legality of knocking a drone out of the air -- we know the rules for helicopters.
Basically, there's a lot of "undefined" areas surrounding how drones integrate with our current society, and as such, there are a lot of potentials for abuse based on those gaps.
Exactly -- it's the same argument against warrantless tracking of cell phones. Some would say "Well tracking your cell phone is no different than sending a team of agents out to track you all day", which is true if you ignore the cost and inconvenience of sending teams of agents to track millions of people. It's the same thing with drones - the government is going to very judiciously use a 5 million dollar helicopter to spy on someone, and we'd all notice if they were sending thousands of them to track thousands of people. But when they can use a $50,000 (or $5000 or $500) drone, then the barrier to entry is much lower, so they may track many more people with much less justification.
And it becomes easier to target people based on politics or other non-criminal reasons. It'd be hard for the mayor to call up the chief of police and say "Hey, I'm going to face some real competition in the next election, can you have one of your boys track my opponent and see if you can dig up some dirt", there's a lot of people and paperwork involved in allocating a week of helicopter time. But when the city has several dozen drone units and surveillance is common place, then the chief can call his buddy in the drone unit and say "Hey, I'll give you a case of beer if you can watch this guy for a week".
I think really what the moral of the story is, is that no one owns anything really. Possesion is 9/10ths the Law came in to existence for a reason. Ultimately if anyone wants anything you have, and they have the firepower to take it, then it's thiers. All I can say to that though is at least it isn't the Dark Ages anymore so we have at least some civility when it comes to that sort of thing.
In today's world, legal firepower tends to mean more than actual firepower. If the goverment wants to take your house to build a freeway, they are going to take it.
Slashdot Mirror
What I would be keen to see is a residential fridge that had water hookups to allow it to be plumbed into a chilled-water loop. Instead of the back of the fridge being covered with a radiator and relying on natural convection to remove the heat from the compressor, have a water-to-refrigerant heat-exchanger. The water flowing through the heat exchanger would be a separate circuit in a geothermal HVAC system.* In other words, you would always be using your geothermal "ground" loop as the heat sink for the fridge, rather than the kitchen air. The amount of heat energy we are talking about for a well-constructed fridge isn't all that much, so the heat exchanger, water flow rates, etc, could all be very modestly sized.
*Alternately, depending on the temperatures involved, it could serve as a heat input to the home's hydronic heating system, in series or parallel to the geothermal heat pump.
That's the whole problem - there's really not much energy to be saved by adding geothermal to refrigerators, and manufacturing all of the extra tubing, water pumps, etc have an environmental cost themselves, plus you're reducing the reliability of the refrigerator because not only are you dependent upon the compressor in the refrigerator, but now you have to pump heated water into a geothermal bed as well. And if you make a refrigerator using $60/year of electricity 20% more efficient, then you've saved $12/year, hardly enough to pay for the extra manufacturing costs to make a brand new style of refrigerator that plugs into geothermal systems (which are already pretty rare).
I believe the newer designs are safer, but the rub is that any reactor will still be operated by the same model of humans that brought us Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Can you honestly tell me that any new reactor will be built and operated by companies that have any different set of priorities than the ones that currently run nuclear plants? Keep it cheap, repay the investors, keep the profits coming in, whatever it takes.I would like to see dozens of new reactors in the U.S., but as long as the clueless and the greedy continue to own the techs who build and operate them, we're going to see more "accidents".
I thought the whole point behind newer designs like the thorium reactor is that they fail safe - they are inherently safe so even if you do nothing to an overheating reactor, it will moderate on its own.
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Do you really want to install and maintain all of that duct work and automatic louvers for "several months of the year" when it would make a difference? Don't forget to take into account the energy use for the fan that you'll need to run to vent the heat outside, and to account for the fact that while you're saving a bit of energy by making your air conditioner work less hard, your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
I'm not sure that the energy cost savings would be worth it - a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh). Even if you saved 100% of that energy, it might take you around 10 years to recoup the cost of $500 worth of duct work, electronic louvers, vent fan, and associated control circuitry. If you run the air conditioning 4 months out of the year, then it's a 30 year payback time.
power consumption
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=united+states+power+use+%2F+population+of+united+states
1.39 kilowatt hr / year per person in the USA
If everyone globally uses the same (similar) amount, which is reasonable, it will require about 5x more power that currently used globally. That assumes a lot of things, of course.
Projections are fun!
Note that's not 1.39 KW-Hr/Year, but is 1.39KW per person (or 1.39 KW-year per person per year), which is about 12,200 KW-Hr per person per year. This must include all sources of electrical energy usage in the USA (industrial, agricultural, etc) since my own annual residential use is closer to 1200KW-hr per person.
"I use TOR for the same reason I wrap my house in tinfoil."
That sounds more like it.
Yes, it's clear that Anonymous Cowards like yourself don't value anonymity so you sign every post with your full name and email address since you don't have anything to hide and don't care who knows what you said online.
Sherwin Smith should be fired immediately. If I threatened my customers, my boss would rightfully fire me on the spot.
Public agencies utilities don't have "customers", they have "captive consumers". You can threaten them or piss them off all you want, they have no choice but to keep buying your product or paying taxes at whatever price you set.
If I wanted to hide my browser activity, I'd run Damn Small Linux (or some other lightweight linux distribution) in a virtual machine (that reverts itself back to its starting state each time I boot it), with the lynx or links browser, and TOR over a VPN to a foreign server using Wifi via a Cantenna that lets me pick up internet from one of the 6 coffee shops, restaurants and other nearby small businesses with free internet. Maybe instead of a VM, run Linux on a Raspberry Pi (or other small computer) over a serial port... than it's easy to dispose of or destroy the entire computer if I needed to.
I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.
No one thinks that the NSA put it the code themselves, a MS developer did it. The low level developer that put it there used that name as a protest and a secret signal that it's there and no one noticed.
There's lots of ways to explain a conspiracy.
The point is that a number of people (not pointing at anyone in particular) have said something along the lines of, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
Could you remind me which people in government were saying that? I know it is very popular on Slashdot, but I don't recall it being common coming from the national security establishment. I think I do recall them saying things along the lines of they don't target ordinary Americans, which is a very different thing.
Here's an example:
Senator Lindsey Graham:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130607/18020323369/sen-lindsey-graham-verizon-customer-im-glad-nsa-is-harvesting-my-data-because-terrorists.shtml
“I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.”
You don't get to call yourselves the land of the free when you're being monitored around the clock in case you might say or do something upsetting to your betters.
We get to call ourselves the land of the free because even with surveillance, people being imprisoned for saying things that "upset our betters" is practically unheard of. Land of the whiny. But still the land of the free.
Unless, of course, your "betters" declare that you're a terrorist or you're aiding terrorists, then they feel that they have the justification to kill you with a drone strike - even if you're a US citizen and no trial or even court oversight is needed. So you better hope that the pervasive surveillance doesn't mistakenly link you to terrorism (or that a terrorist hasn't stolen your identity), or you may find yourself on the wrong end of a drone strike. If a teenaged hacker in Russia can use a virus to make your computer download porn, how do you know that a sophisticated terrorist isn't using your computer and cloned your phone to plan his attack without fear of being discovered?
Because:
Officials from President Obama down have said they welcomed the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs...
But only to secret judges on secret courts.
Same story, different day. They are speaking publicly, but not everyone is listening, paying attention, or caring.
NSA director: Surveillance foiled 50 terror plots
FBI deputy director: NSA foiled NYC bombing plots
NSA director says surveillance foiled plot against Wall Street
Intelligence officials last week disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks - one targeting the New York subway system, one to bomb a Danish newspaper office that had published the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Alexander and Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offered additional details on two other foiled plots, including one targeting Wall Street.
Under questioning, Joyce said the NSA was able to identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with an individual in Kansas City, Mo. They were able to identify co-conspirators and thwart a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
Joyce also said a terrorist financier inside the U.S. was identified and arrested in October 2007, thanks to a phone record provided by the NSA. The individual was making phone calls to a known designated terrorist group overseas.
It doesn't matter how much they disclose if you don't listen. Maybe they should send the stories to Wikileaks, maybe then it would get people's attention.
Both of those specific instances were calls made overseas, and many people are ok with the NSA looking at international calls. So remind me again why they are watching all of our domestic calls? If they see a call to a foreign terrorist organization, they can use a good old fashioned court order to get the phone records from the domestic end of the call. No need for the NSA to collect all of the data.
Obama Obama Obama. Enough with this partisan nonsense. Watch the documentary 'Enemy of the State', what 16 years old now or more, this surveillance is nothing new. You don't get to call yourselves the land of the free when you're being monitored around the clock in case you might say or do something upsetting to your betters. And no I don't care if terrorists are the excuse, if you're going to put the USA on a pedestal, hold yourselves to a higher standard than totalitarians.
I think the Obama bashing is coming out because Obama said he was going to bring about change that America needs and he even spoke out specifically against secret spying on citizens. No one (well few) think that a Republican in the Whitehouse would be any better since nearly all of the opposition against the Patriot Act renewals has come from the democrats.
http://www.cfr.org/us-election-2008/obamas-speech-woodrow-wilson-center/p13974
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution
works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.
This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not. There are no short-cuts to protecting America, and that is why the fifth part of my strategy is doing the hard and patient work to secure a more resilient homeland.
Yet not only is he aware of the secret spying programs, he is actively defending them.
I thought that only those with something to hide needed privacy?
The NSA has a secret budget believed to be around $10B/annually (out of a total intelligence budget of about $75B), and we know that they are spending billions of dollars on new datacenters, so how does anyone know that the USA is falling behind in computers that can be used as weapons?
Even China's new Tianhe-2 supercomputer is reported to have "only" cost $390 million so the NSA could be building 10 of those a year and no one would know.
Just get 1/4 rack space, two Dell R81x boxes fully loaded (48 cores, 512GB RAM, 6 x 15K 500GB SAS drives in RAID 1 + HS) and that should solve your problems. boxes run around $5K each.
send me an email to my anon email if you like (msharp42@fastmail.fm)
I get traffic like that and manage it on a daily basis.
What reseller gives you 65% off? I priced out an R815 with those specs and the cheapest configuration I could come up with was around $13,500. (but they didn't have 500GB 15K SAS drives, so I used 600GB 10K)
But when someone says "I'm the most geeky of the group" and he's coming to Slashdot to find his hosting provider, recommending that he rent some coloc space is probably not going to serve him well.
Why do these new laptops top out at only 8GB of RAM? My 5 year old desktop has 8GB and I make good use of the RAM and sometimes find myself wanting more. Anyone that does java development or graphics/video editing can easily run into memory constraints with only 8GB.
I don't really get it... The entire reason you might use Tor is because you want to hide what you're doing from the authorities... Why on earth would the authorities not consider it interesting what you're hiding if you're doing so?
It's like suggesting that a cop shouldn't go and investigate a guy handing a package to another guy in a back alley because back allies are common places for drug deals to take place.
They have suspicion that something dodgy is going on, and they're investigating it, that's what we pay them to do.
I use TOR for the same reason I close my curtains at night and don't keep my personal journal out on the front porch with a sign that says "read me!". I just don't like other people snooping on my private life. Though if I had to choose between some random guy on the street watching my browsing activity or the NSA, I'd choose the guy on the street because he's probably only doing it because he's nosy, but the NSA is doing it to see if they can link me to terrorism.
This technology won't be impressive until it can perform general computing tasks. Right now, it's too constrained of a technology to be useful for something as simple as web browsing. Great promise... but that's what it is: A promise.
There are lots of specialized computers that do one thing really well, yet still aren't great at general computing tasks... like GPUs and DSPs. For that matter, the CPU in your hard drive may not be nearly powerful enough to run a web browser, yet it's still extremely useful for its intended purpose.
Not every computer development is meant to make Firefox run faster.
If my eyes are watering after a long session its because my screen is too bright, which is exactly the opposite of what he postulates as the problem (on off cycles of LEDs). Brighter requires longer "on" cycles, which in turn are less perceptible. Yet for most people overly bright screens are the source of complaints.
You could put a 'privacy filter' on the screen that will reduce the brightness (with an intended side effect of reducing viewing angle)
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
It's no different to other jobs where people hold a position of power (e.g., police officer, principal, medical doctor, judge, etc). We expect and demand that those people behave professionally and appropriately at all times (even when they don't like you). Just because a computer is involved doesn't excuse a system administrator from being held to the same professional standards.
There's a difference between abusing power and being fair to all users. If one department or individual continually makes "emergency" last minute requests that they could have made weeks or even months ago, then making everyone else wait while you service the "emergency" request is unfair. So it's not abusing power if a sysadmin team refuses to scramble around to accommodate unreasonable last minute requests. A former manager was fond of responding to those requests with "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part".
The same goes with other users that complain that the "internet is down" when what they really mean is "The online gambling site I use is unreachable". Or the people that complain that their system is too slow and we say "Yeah, you need more RAM for that application, ask your manager to submit a purchase request for more", yet they still keep complaining to IT when IT doesn't have the budget to provide hardware upgrades. It's unfair to other users that work within the system to make them wait while we service requests from "problem users".
1. Drones have pilots too.
2. You can get pilots for cheaper than $80,000.
Sure, but it's a lot cheaper to hire a drone "pilot" who took a vendor supplied 2 week training course versus hiring an experienced helicopter pilot with years of experience.
3. You can get helicopters for less than $1M.
But few police departments are going to use an $80,000 helicopter. Plus, if you're going to cut corners, you can get drones for a lot less than $50,000.
4. Sticking a camera on a helicopter is easier and cheaper than sticking the same camera on a drone.
You don't need to use the same camera - a drone can get much closer to the subject without arousing suspicion.
The government just likes to spend more money on things. That doesn't mean it has to.
Well, they don't have to spy on us either, but they do.
You mean if suddenly the cheapest helicopters were $50,000 instead of $80,000 it would mean the world was a drastically different place?
No, I mean if the helicopters used for police surveillance cost $50,000 instead a million dollars plus several hundred dollars an hour in operating costs.
$80,000 wouldn't even pay the annual salary for a pilot, and I don't even know if it would buy a high quality FLIR camera.
So what I hear you saying is that if for some reason helicopters became much cheaper and easier to use they would need to be made illegal too.
Well no, but they would be subject to the same types of concerns, whether or not they would be made illegal depends on society.
But no worries, if helicopters suddenly were available for $50,000, then that means society has already made vast changes in other ways, perhaps through cheap interstellar alien slave labor who brought with them vast stores of raw materials to make helicopters.
Yes, but where does the slippery slope lead to? It's an airborne camera - either you allow them or you don't.
It's an airborne wide-spectrum camera, sometimes with parabolic and laser microphones.
People don't tend to have an issue with the helicopters because they're big, noisy, expensive, and take a number of people to operate. Thus, you're only going to deploy them when it's really necessary, and everyone in the area knows it's deployed. Compare that to drones, where you don't know how many there are, where they are, how much information they're gathering, who they're gathering it for, etc.
We haven't even got to the questions yet of the legality of knocking a drone out of the air -- we know the rules for helicopters.
Basically, there's a lot of "undefined" areas surrounding how drones integrate with our current society, and as such, there are a lot of potentials for abuse based on those gaps.
Exactly -- it's the same argument against warrantless tracking of cell phones. Some would say "Well tracking your cell phone is no different than sending a team of agents out to track you all day", which is true if you ignore the cost and inconvenience of sending teams of agents to track millions of people. It's the same thing with drones - the government is going to very judiciously use a 5 million dollar helicopter to spy on someone, and we'd all notice if they were sending thousands of them to track thousands of people. But when they can use a $50,000 (or $5000 or $500) drone, then the barrier to entry is much lower, so they may track many more people with much less justification.
And it becomes easier to target people based on politics or other non-criminal reasons. It'd be hard for the mayor to call up the chief of police and say "Hey, I'm going to face some real competition in the next election, can you have one of your boys track my opponent and see if you can dig up some dirt", there's a lot of people and paperwork involved in allocating a week of helicopter time. But when the city has several dozen drone units and surveillance is common place, then the chief can call his buddy in the drone unit and say "Hey, I'll give you a case of beer if you can watch this guy for a week".
I think really what the moral of the story is, is that no one owns anything really. Possesion is 9/10ths the Law came in to existence for a reason. Ultimately if anyone wants anything you have, and they have the firepower to take it, then it's thiers. All I can say to that though is at least it isn't the Dark Ages anymore so we have at least some civility when it comes to that sort of thing.
In today's world, legal firepower tends to mean more than actual firepower. If the goverment wants to take your house to build a freeway, they are going to take it.