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User: Firethorn

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  1. Re:When a secret is a criminal act, it's evidence. on Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Eavesdropping without probable cause is a crime. Issuing warrants that do not specifically describe the places to be searched or things to be seized is a crime. The NSA cannot even abide by the unconstitutionally lax privacy rules it sets for itself, breaking those rules over 2000 times per year. Every one of those overreaches is a violation of the CFAA, those NSA analysts deserve the same treatment Aaron Swartz got.

    Given the scope of the NSA, I'm surprised it's only 2k/year.

    Somehow it's private when one individual reads the emails of Sarah Palin, but when the NSA reads all of our emails it's not private anymore?

    Have I fallen behind on what the NSA has been accused of doing? I thought they weren't so much reading our emails as collecting transmission information - the equivalent of reading the to/from addresses on everything we snail-mail. Collecting WHO we talk to, not what we're talking about. I still think it should be a violation without some sort of warrant, but it's not quite as bad.

    The echo chamber is within the US government. Espionage against US citizens is forbidden by the constitution. That the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have all conspired against the American people to ignore the constitution doesn't change that fact.

    Given that it seems that most of the western-style governments seem to be in on it as well, the echo chamber is quite a bit bigger. Consider that the UK government has gotten involved in hushing up parts of the Snowden leaks. The NSA cooperates.

  2. Re:When a secret is a criminal act, it's evidence. on Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you just start following this case? He worked in Information Systems; the only thing preventing him from accessing the documents was protocol. Since the case went public, they've added technical safeguards.

    Actually he didn't work in 'Information Systems', he was an Intelligence Analyst.

    At least in the DoD, an 'Information System' job would entail setting up and maintaining IS, keeping the network functioning, secure, patched, etc... Intelligence Analysts have wide ranging access to classified and non-classified information because their job is to put together numerous bits of information and build a more complete picture in order to make informed predictions. Basically a wide-ranging detective.

    In the DoD, clearances are granted on the basis of background investigation. Access is based on clearance and 'need to know'. Bradley had a good background investigation* and 'need to know' for the documents he accessed due to his job. Or at least arguable 'need to know' in that one of the findings from 9/11 was that we weren't sharing information enough, so we relaxed a lot of access controls so that, at least theoretically, analysts would be able to put together A, B, and C in order to reach conclusion X, enabling us to respond in time to prevent or mitigate another attack.

    Rank doesn't actually have much to do with it. Jr. Enlisted do most of the 'grunt work', even if it's in an office environment without much grunting. NCOs act as first line supervisors - train, assist, make low level policy calls. Senior NCOs manage workcenters, etc...

    *Whether the investigation process needs to be reformed or not can be a separate topic.

  3. Re:NHTSA pushed a 5 star rating on NHTSA Gives the Model S Best Safety Rating of Any Car In History · · Score: 1

    Yes, I know what all the tests are. What I don't get is your insistence that since Tesla gets to 'use the whole front' it has to perform worse than an IC car that can 'only' use the sides to absorb impact.

    I'm sure the sides of the Tesla are stronger then the center so it won't be a complete failure but there is no way it can perform as well as an IC car that also received a 5 star rating for the full frontal crash.

    I still fail to see your reasoning holding. I don't understand how a company that has much more design leeway in how the front end is constructed(not having to worry about an IC engine in there), can't design a front end that performs better in *every* crash test, from full-front to 25% front.

    Let me go through my reasoning:
    1. Front engine IC cars have a generally massive amount of mass in the form of the engine. This engine also limits the amount of cross-bracing available, as well as the true amount of 'crush space'. Meanwhile Tesla can do whatever it wants in the front because it doesn't have the engine to worry about. There are some tricks - today the engine is generally designed to 'fold down' in a crash, helping to keep it out of the passenger compartment and extending the amount of crush space, but they're just assists/makeups compared to somebody who gets to design the front end without those worries.
    2. As you mentioned, the sides of a model S are likely still far stronger than the middle. For one we know there's an opening there called the 'fronk'; it's not big, but it's there.
    3. 'Crush Zone' doesn't have to be of all equal strength, not only sides vs middle, but from front to back. There's even some tricks that can be done with inertia so that the crumple zone will require more force to collapse a given distance in a high speed impact than it will in a lower speed one. It can have stronger members near the back so that a high speed impact is more survivable while still keeping a 'no serious injury' standard for lower speed ones. There's lots of design possibilities.
    4. 'Strength' of members, of all members, not just side ones, is a calculated value - too strong and as you say they stop too fast, too weak and you lose your crumple zone faster and get into cabin intrusion(bad).
    5. There's various ways to transfer impact energy to areas not actually impacted. That's why other posters mentioned braces, transfer bars, etc... With the proper bracing you can force the rest of the crush zone to also collapse/deform even in the 25% front area impact. The model S is much more free with the ability to cross-brace than IC engine vehicles.
    6. Rear and mid-engine sports cars, where a 120mph front end collision into a static object has to be a primary design consideration tend to do surprisingly well in said collisions without the engine in the way. Tesla can draw from that design experience.

    Basically, my estimate is that the Tesla is still going to out-perform other 5* cars with traditional front engines just like they did with the 100% test. They just have too many advantages.

  4. Re: NHTSA pushed a 5 star rating on NHTSA Gives the Model S Best Safety Rating of Any Car In History · · Score: 1

    I see them on a near-daily basis. When you say "NO one" what you really mean is only people who can afford to spend $70K on a car. Granted that's not a lot of people, but in order for costs to be driven down we need those early adopters with deep pockets.

    I consider the fact that I spend like $100 in gas money every few weeks. If I was a heavier driver, $100/week, and could charge for free at work or something, that's $5k/year saved. 5 years and I'd be break even with a $45k car, which is a lot more in reach for many people. Call me back when it's equivalent to a $30k car.

    That's without figuring stuff like savings on oil changes.

  5. Re:NHTSA pushed a 5 star rating on NHTSA Gives the Model S Best Safety Rating of Any Car In History · · Score: 1

    If there is only a partial impact the combustion engine still has half its crumple zone while the Tesla will have 25%.

    Why do we care if the remaining crumple zone is 50% or 25%? The issue that matters is what forces hit the occupants of the vehicle. I could engineer a 'crumple zone' that uses 1% of it's space in a 40mph impact, it'd just cream the occupants. 100% is also bad, because that marks intrusion into the cabin. A Tesla has massive space for crumple zones because it doesn't need to keep the engine out of the passenger's laps. I also wonder if that 50% is the crumple area, or the whole front of the car? Because if it's the latter much over 50% and the engine might be intruding into the cabin, while at 25% remaining the Tesla still has 15% more to go before intrusion.

    I'd like to see the sources on the percentages, by the way. I'd like to see precisely what they're measuring.

  6. Re:NHTSA pushed a 5 star rating on NHTSA Gives the Model S Best Safety Rating of Any Car In History · · Score: 1

    Don't know about you, but given that most mid and rear engine vehicles are considered sports cars, I'd be a heck of a lot more interested in it's frontal crash rating, even over 'the family sedan'.

  7. I figure that DUI convicts will be the first to be required to use self-driving cars, it's a logical step up from the breathalyzers which already run a couple thousand. Of course, it depends on just how 'self driving' the car is. I'm picturing a 'there isn't even a driver's seat' level of automatic control, as opposed to a really advanced autopilot, but there's still usable controls/overrides in a driver's control.

    Then you go from there to 'bad drivers', insurance eventually starts being cheaper for self-driving vehicles, leading to the legislature eventually ending what's currently effectively limited liability for people NOT using self-driving cars, and yeah, once it reaches a certain point nearly every car produced will be self-driving. Exceptions would be off-roading vehicles.

    I once calced out that a self-driving vehicle would be worth roughly $2k/year for me.

  8. Re:Do the CCs work? on Instagram "Likes" Worth More Than Stolen Credit Cards · · Score: 2

    That particular CC? Sure. But like others have stated, when the cards are being sold in lots of 1k, odds are most of them are either already invalid or going to be so very quickly. So you might end up trolling through several hundred of them to find a good one, even if there is one.

    Your friend's card was likely stolen by other means and not distributed precisely to give it the long longevity. On, and you're probably looking at 2-3 people for that $600.

    Then balance the risk vs reward - the reward might be higher with the stolen CC, but so isn't the risk of criminal charges.

  9. Re:some details would be nice on Dishwasher-Size, 25kW Fuel Cell In Development · · Score: 1

    As the AC said, there's still hot water to consider for showers, baths, washing and such. This would provide that essentially for the cost of setting up the piping.

    Plus, at somewhere between 300-500F, well as long as it's 190F or higher, you can get cooling using absorption or adsorption systems.

  10. 25kw of electricity or total power? on Dishwasher-Size, 25kW Fuel Cell In Development · · Score: 1

    It mentions that it's up to 80% efficient if it's used in a cogeneration mode - so I wonder if that 25kw is pure electricity or also heat?

    On the other hand, the specs don't mention 24kW at all. It mentions 80kW@60% efficiency. Maybe it's more efficient at a lower capacity? What's with the cogeneration, which is mentioned in the forbes article, but not elsewhere? Details people, I'd like some!

    Whatever, without some solid price estimates, it's hard to say. I believe that an OOM cheaper for the system would make it competitive with diesel generators price wise, which combined with higher efficiency and comparable lifespan would quickly kill the diesel generator market.

    Let's see, the NFCRC has some info.
    1. Stationary power market, fuel cells are 'competitive' if they reach $1.5k or less per kW.
    2. Current cost is $4k+ per kW
    3. Vehicular use is competitive at $60-100 per kW.

    Going by the Forbes article, that would translate to $400+ per kW, which would indeed slaughter conventional power generation systems, which tend to be ~$1.5k+ per kW for high reliability sources of power. The Diverse Energy 'Powercube' seems to be a different product entirely - using ammonia as a fuel source, as opposed to the listed NG from Forbes, and NG, Propane, Diesel, biomass, and JP-8 listed on the product website. The Maryland Tech site mentions they're at 650F, 300F is still being developed. In either case, that's a handy heat source for various uses.

    Given that I pay some of the highest cost electricity in the country, I think I'd love to have one of the 5kW systems mentioned. I already have a fuel oil tank in the ground for heating, I could get electricity for substantially less than what I pay with this system.

  11. Re:A partial success on NASA Abandons Kepler Repairs, Looks To the Future · · Score: 2

    At least part of the reason for the extra expenses is that Congress will often starve the projects of money over the years, forcing NASA to work slower - and as it costs money to simply 'keep the lights on', it results in overruns. Then there's the whole 'part of it has to be built in MY district', etc...

    A program that might cost $5M to build and launch a satellite over 3 years might coast $10M to do the same over 10 years.

  12. As a geek? Seduce me! on Biggest Headache For Game Developers: Abusive Fans · · Score: 1

    any women that claim to be geeks are pretending, likely to try to seduce a "real geek."

    Does it make be a bad person, or geek, that my first thought was 'Seduce Me!'?

    On reflection there's the 'pretending to be somebody that you're not' problem though.

  13. Fuel efficiency on Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' · · Score: 1

    I'll note that it's generally more efficient on fuel to fly than to drive as well. Especially the fewer passengers you'd have in the car. Stuffing so many people into a single plane makes the amount of fuel used actually fairly low, and as long as the trip is high enough, they spend much of it up high enough that air resistance is less despite the speed.

    That's why you want to evacuate the tubes - lower air resistance, plus the low rolling resistance of rails(much less maglev), allows you to get the air resistance planes get, without the expense of getting to the altitude.

    Something ground based that's fast enough to compete with air travel on speed, that allows you to shift more people between hubs without using aircraft would take a lot of strain off of the hub airports.

  14. Re:Did they try this? on Four Month Mars Food Study Wraps Up · · Score: 1

    dead seriousness he replied, "Probably to make it sound better."

    *Snerk*. Same deal with 'french fries' I guess. I've never known French people to be big on deep frying.

    *Most* 'Foreign' cuisine in the USA has been modified from it's native version to a sufficient extent to really be considered a different dish. Some of this is due to availability of ingredients, especially for Chinese dishes, but a lot of it is to make it more palatable to american taste buds.

  15. Re:Ok, sure... on US Horse Registry Forced To Accept Cloned Horses · · Score: 1, Informative

    The copy will always suffer genome degradation over the span of many generations.

    Tell that to bacteria. Heck, your individual cells. No real limit. It occasionally goes wrong, but a bit of testing could easily keep that under control.

  16. Didn't I reply to this earlier? on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    The link in my sig gets about 50% positive, 50% negative comments. I think you're the first in a year to comment on it, and it's pretty traditional for me at the moment. The site itself hasn't been revised for years(and it's not mine).

    Stepping back a moment, do you feel 'yucky' because of the site, or because the site made you realize that the information your opinions are based on aren't good sources?

    What are the fallacies, strawman arguments, and ludicrous comparisons? Keep in mind that my thought processes are probably quite a bit different than yours, due to differences in life experiences, upbringing, and such.

    "Proud Heritage of Gun Control"? Which page was that? Might be having a brain fart, but I'm not seeing it. Was it one of his posters?

  17. Re:So... on NSA Firing 90% of Its Sysadmins · · Score: 1

    I assume that sysadmins score particularly badly on the 'amount of access vs. degree of trust' metric.

    Pretty much this. Well, and given the way the federal government works most of those admins won't actually be fired.

    The DoD has been clamping down on the number of admins for a while - I used to be a 'sysadmin' with god privileges to the network because it was the only way rights were assigned.

    It's possible to give admin rights much more granually today, so while I still have admin rights, I don't have enough of them to count as a 'sysadmin'. Call it a demotion if you will, but it's more secure.

    Ecuador - the trick is that the 'other workers' are all operating with locked-down accounts that limit their access.

  18. Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA on Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND · · Score: 2

    ...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive

    That's the amazing thing about a hybrid drive though, which is what Seagate is pushing. At $60 for 80GB of SSD, that's $66 for 8GB of flash cache on a 2TB HD. Best of all: NO ACTIVE MANAGEMENT.

    I tried active management between my 64GB SSD(yes, on a budget) and a 1TB HD. What with my movement between games(love steam!), I found I was spending more time managing which games were on the SSD than I was saving from the faster performance.

    Consider a 'manual' solution: All the OS drivers, manual files and other things you 'never' access are on the expensive storage space SSD. Unless you spend 'huge money', some of your actively used files will end up on the cheaper HD. Or, like me, you end up spending way too much time moving data around.

    The automatic solution? All the OS files that aren't frequently used - drivers for hardware your system doesn't have, help files, documentation, various other bits of cruft(more prevalent on some OS's than others), are eventually shuffled onto the HD, while the boot files remain in places of honor on the SSD. That game you no longer play? Eventually shuffled onto the HD.

    Heck, I've read that one of the solutions doesn't work on a file basis, but on a block basis - so if only PART of a file's blocks are frequently accessed(perhaps a blob file?)...

    Though as a power user/gamer I think I'd prefer a 16/32GB cache option. It would let the program be much less aggressive about moving stuff off the SSD.

  19. Re:Too busy for a pipe dream! on Elon Musk Admits He Is Too Busy To Build Hyperloop · · Score: 1

    Even if he noticed the corner, I don't know if one minute would be enough to slow down the train to a safe speed.

    Well, it takes about a mile to mile and a half to stop a train. Saw this figure at multiple links, irregardless of speed - faster trains tend to have fewer cars and be able to stop faster.

    60 mph seems to be a good average speed, so that 1 minute translates into 1 mile. That in turn leads to the conclusion that given 1 minute or mile of warning that the train could have shed something between 2/3rds to all of it's velocity. Even if it doesn't manage to stop hitting the corner at 20mph should be far different than hitting it at 60 mph.

  20. Re:Too busy for a pipe dream! on Elon Musk Admits He Is Too Busy To Build Hyperloop · · Score: 1

    He should have said 'leading cause of accidental death' or some such. Heck, restrict the age; 'leading cause of death to those under 40' would also work. Maybe 'non-disease' deaths?

  21. Re:Flame on, Sure on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    However, if you scroll further down, he explains why this 4X ratio is utterly meaningless, showing that the comparison is fundamentally flawed even when using the correct numbers.

    And if you read the rest of the sentence you'll see that I noted that when I mention the author's attempt to create a comparable figure based on the FBI definition of violent crime as opposed to the UK's. Using the UK's more expansive definition of violent crime, they're 4X as violent as we are. Correct that and they're still almost 2X. We're still the king of murder, but in the USA it's incredibly concentrated, to the point that there are sections of ghetto where the most likely cause of death for a black male baby would be 'murdered before age 30' if the mother lives within certain areas covering a few square blocks within the city.

    Which scares me - if violent crime(other than murder) is already double the USA's including our incredibly violent ghettos(you'd be safer in Somalia), how much higher is it if you don't include the ghettos(stay out!)? Would that cause the UK to go back to the 4X as violent?

    I blame this for a large part on income inequality and lack of social mobility.

    I agree, but also state that besides just 'lack of social mobility' we need to haul the whole AREA(s) up. We need to get rid of the poor ghettos. Somehow.

  22. Re:Flame on, Sure on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    but are they working on standardizing crime statistics?

    Wouldn't be surprised if they were, and I know for a fact that they tend to screw with how they measure crime to make their opposition look bad. Not to mention that they screw with the measurements to try to make themselves look better against other countries within the EU.

    The USA, being so self involved, tends to do it less. We don't really care how we compare, because of 'USA! FUCK YEAH!'.

    Now cities within the USA? They try it on occasion.

  23. Re:Flame on, Sure on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    The thing is, the USA has ALWAYS been far more lethal than the UK. Even before 'gun control' was really on the UK's radar, the US murder rate dwarfed the UK's.

    The USA has actually closed much of the gap since the UK effectively banned handguns.

    Oh, and on violent crime - I don't try to reach some crazy figure like '5X more violent', heck, in the article the dude says 4X. Going by the author of the article's attempt to create a 'comparable figure' that measures the same thing(FBI's definition of violent crime: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), 'Almost double', or '90% higher' is accurate.

    It gets even more complicated when you recognize that murder in the USA is extremely racially biased.

    Blacks are 12.6% of the population. Yet they're 44.0% of the victims, and 49.2% of the known perps. Get them down to the average for the rest of the races and we'd be a lot closer to Europe.

    'Anybody but black', for example - 270M population, 2,925 non-black murders, yields a rate of 1.08 per 100k, lower than the 1.2 per 100k of the UK. Add murders known to be committed by blacks against other races back in and you're up to 3,436 and you're up to 1.27 per 100k, only very slightly higher than the UK's homicide rate.

    And to try to prevent myself looking like a racist bastard, I feel the need to point out that this is correlation - I think we could drop it even more by radically adjusting the crime-ridden ghettos so they're not crime-ridden anymore, end the war on drugs that disproportionally targets blacks, provide programs that effectively reduce poverty, etc...

    Roughly speaking - poor ghettos tend to be crime ridden, and in the USA due to history poor ghettos tend to be disproportionally black.

  24. Re:Cleaning costs high? on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    You could probably line the entire range with something like that though.

    They routinely line whole garbage dumps with the stuff, so yeah. The other point is that the poison is in the dose - if your range is a 'large swath of woodland', even heavy use as a range is unlikely to put enough lead in a small enough area to really make a difference.

  25. Re:Flame on, Sure on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    Well, that brings up the first point that France is hardly without firearms, what with 31.2 per 100, making it #12 in the world.
    Meanwhile, despite being 'awash' with guns, it manages a good intentional homocide rate of 1.1, better than the UK. Not finding a violent crime rate, but it's noted that Britain(with fewer firearms) is more violent.

    BTW, France was completely out of left field for me. I was guessing Canada on the basis of language use, my backup for the 'no firearms' was going to be Japan.