Nuclear fusion is easy (in theory). The math formula, if not trivial, is certainly not -that- hard.
Finding the appropriate apparatus that can achieve sustained nuclear fusion is hard. Harder than the mathematical depiction of the process. Sure, we know, thanks to maths and formulas -what- needs to be done (and what it will look like when it has happened, even). Finding -how- to do it is much harder. We'll have the solution to this practical problem in 30 years (since nuclear fusion is always in 30 years from know, for any date since After-Unix).
No. This is the thinking that made the level of high schoolers so bad in the first place that they can't follow when things get serious. This is maybe appropriate for elementary school and as a blend in middle school. But you have to face the reality of science, sooner than later. The longer you stay at "fun" science, and don't dive in the real thing, the worst the monster slap in the face gets when you -have to- use complex abstractions to do anything.
Not niche, it is becoming an appliance. Everybody already have one. The exponential growth and amazement period has passed. So you keep what you have until it breaks. There is no (big) money to make on this kind of market anymore. It is just another mature market, like dishwashers. We are seeing the transition from boom market to appliance market.
Even if it was a Learjet, blowing up the plane is an -overkill-. There will be other casualties, and Snowden does not represent an immediate menace to US citizens. It would be impossible to argue the legality of such an act, even in US courts of law. Acting like the bully does not always get what you want. Proof, look at what Obama got the Europeans to do (ridicule themselves), where Bush met strong and persistent resistance.
Methodology is bogus. Ethiopia, as an example, was only occupied for a short period of time during the 20th century. It was a long standing kingdom before that. It is registered as young state, due to the date of its latest independence. China on the other hand is marked as 3k years old. Fair enough. But it was similarly chopped in pieces, colonized and occupied during a good share of the 20th century. India is as old a country, and Iran could be 600 years old (or even 4k years old, depending on how you count). Taking independence dates and making a graph is plain stupid. It takes knowledge of history, and relevant events on each cultures and people to make such a graph.
Mount Tambora doesn't care about your refutations. Even if it is extremely hot, it is a cold blooded natural phenomenon that doesn't care about what you say, and just did what you said is impossible.
There are, at all time, 20 or more volcanos erupting, nobody care. Yet that single volcano in iceland that was merely -smocking- not even erupting, was a major disruption to the entire northern hemisphere, 3 years ago.
I do not think 16 bombs would be enough. But arguing that because more than 16 have been detonated over the course of half a century, the result would be the same as blasting them all simultaneously is pretty stupid. Arguing that because energy dissipated is inferior, the disruption would be less is also stupid (crickets are not that energetic, but they can provoke vast ravage and decimate human population through famine, much more so than hurricanes that are very energetic but destroy only localized things, what is "energized" matters, a lot).
It is just as compatible as Open Office is compatible with Powerpoint, let's say. It opens and reads the documents, you can change them and save, and then when you open it back in Powerpoint for windows, formating has changed, fonts are messed-up, figures have moved around, transparent objects are not transparent anymore, etc, etc, etc.
We even had an instance where the Office for Mac 11 edited document would just crash Powerpoint for windows.
It does not happen all the time, but enough that it is disruptive and we decided to all use the same mac os version, and never edit-save a document on anything else. So yeah, overall, incompatible.
Why are you running the binary, if you care about having a version that is trustful to the source code? Just compile your own, never use precompiled binary, problem solved.
Old CRT were giving me pretty severe headackes. This has all disapeared as soon as I used TFT panels, even with the early models that were not as good as recent ones. I definitely could see flicker on CRTs, I cannot anymore on TFTs.
Maybe you need to turn off "true motion" option on your TFT TV ?
I live in regular suburban space in a fairly large US city.
I relocated from Europe (France) 7 years ago.
Service in a typical suburban neighborhood is still low quality (24/5, but 200ms latency,...... $75, capped) and more expensive than what I had in rural country France 7 years ago (30/7, 15ms latency, 29euros, ~40$, uncapped, includes TV, ondemand, landline phone).
So this is BS. Value is low in the US. This guy is paid to stir BS in the media.
Libertarianism is nothing else than rule of the powerful. If there is a power gap, it will be filled. Beware what replaces an elected government in that role. You may find that the new boss is not the same as the old boss, but is actually much worse.
Very worried about that. Since Preview is "cloud enabled" it's a POS that crashes constantly. It -was- the best PDF viewer before, it is crippled and buggy now. It always want to sync with 'the cloud' even when I don't want it to do this. I certainly hope that Keynotes remains the productive tool it is now, and not some bloated "cloudware" .
Why would you ask a question that has an obvious answer in any constitutional law 101 on Slashdot, and spend countless hours writing such an elaborate pamphlet obviously before searching for the widely available answer is amusing. Like Slashdot is a renowned law authority or something.
You must have lived under a rock. There has been numerous plane hijacks and blowups over the 80's and early 90's. The TSA is a useless security theater, but there is a need for some sort of security nonetheless, like metal detectors and random picks which have been good enough, as the rate of successful blowups during the end of the 90s prove. No need to go berserk and get everybody groped, that, is useless).
Thanks for the nice additions. It is a shame that you didn't got more mods up.
I did not know of the first exploit. Thanks for lighting it up.
I had read the scribd paper. It is not a problem with the vote but with the security of the user terminal. Obviously all systems are subject to this, even voting on electronic booth at the poll station (where on top of it, officials and their minions have physical access to the device).
The 3rd bug is more a glitch than a real problem, but I get your point that security is not perfect and there are known defects.
Your last point recoup my reservations. Wether the system is secure or not doesn't matter if citizen's cannot check for themselves that it is. Uncertainty can lead to turmoil and civil war, to the extreme. I really do not see a case for mass usage of this technology. I do see it useful in restricted use, for regions where it make sense for geographic reasons (like north america, which is huge, there is no way to install a voting station in all necessary locations to get a realistic expectation that distance is not the main deciding factor of abstention).
Addition: * physical coercion is possible to force somebody to vote. It is always a possibility as soon as voting happens outside of a controlled ballot room. So even split credential is not a definitive solution to the issue of forced/bought votes.
I fail to see the benefit for the general voting body. IT makes sense only for citizens that cannot otherwise access a physical ballot due to distance (think deployed military personnel, nationals leaving in foreign countries, etc).
What the French republic implementation does (not the bogus system described in this article, that pertains to a particular party internal votes only) seems to enable verifiable anonymous votes.
You receive credentials in a split fashion. Half comes in the mailbox as paper. The second half is sent to a personal device (email is possible, but sms is preferred). If you want to prevent somebody to vote for you, just have your credentials sent to your personal phone, even if the family head receives the mail credentials, he cannot use them.
Second, the voting receipt is a sha key. Should there be a need for recounting, or should a citizen verify his vote, the sha key can be used. However, just having the sha key doesn't tell anybody what the vote was (without authority compliance, which is improbable to say the least, the procedure involves showing up IN PERSON with the sha printout, to verify your own vote). Votes are stored on the server anonymized, the sha key codes the voter identity, actually.
It is not immune to tempering (physical access to the computers always eliminate any expectation of security, just like physical access to paper ballots would result in the same uncertainty), but it is not -that- weak, and can be recounted if needed (by asking citizens to give back their sha keys, one can verify if all ballots have been counted, since the sha key is a proof of having voted, if the corresponding ballot is not found, there is a proof of tempering the results).
The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of). I have some reservations about e-voting (for lack of accountability and falsifiability by the random citizen), but being weak and easy to compromise doesn't seem to be the most important problem for the particular implementation. However, it is hard to use, and I know many voters that gave up voting because it was to difficult to have the voting system to work on their computer.
UMP (which is conservative right party) is reckoned for hiring the worst people to do any sort of techno job and ridicule themselves in dub-songs when trying to be cool on facebook. That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.
Moreover, the paper ballot vote at the last UMP president election also got seriously rigged. There was a 2 month period where the two prominent candidates claimed victory (and it seems that the one that cheated the most is still the ongoing president of the party... ). So in some sense, a weak system is not a bug, for the elections of this party, it's a feature.
Agreed. Highway mileage are the last thing that matter. You never need to convert them to anything else anyway.
What only matters is units that need to be converted to one another and are tedious or borderline insane in "imperial". having base 16 for small measures and 3 for longer is nonsensical. square feets being multiple of 144 is very impractical. Volume units that are a jungle of non-convertible measures is problematic.
But definitely, highway miles, who cares? Same goes for temperature. This is a single unit, it is confusing for foreigners for a while, but you get used to it. Unlike volumes and weight metric units, the Celsius system is not vastly superior, simply because Fahrenheit system is not broken, it is unusually consistent for an imperial measurement.
I think time could benefit from rationalization, but I doubt it is doable because of political/sociological resistance. Beside, there is rarely need to do other type of conversions than hours:minutes to seconds, months to years and weeks to years/month. It would be more practical to have a unit in wich a year is a kilomonth, a month a kiloweek etc, but that would be a disruptive change, for little practical improvement.
Try making Macarons with your gut feeling, and tell me how it goes:)
Patisserie requires precision. You cannot just pour, stir and adapt. Doing this is a recipe for poor looking pastries, at best. At the extreme they do not even take and you have nothing but a sugary goop.
This is why recipe are actually different depending on what is customary for raw ingredients (amount of fat in butter/milk, amount of gluten in flour, yolk in eggs, dominant variant of yeast, etc).
Now, if you are making pizza, this is a different story.
In most of Europe, size of containers is standardized. That is, it is illegal to package things by 486g, meanwhile everybody else sells 500g in order to get a sticker advantage. Similarly, it is mandatory by law that stickers give price per unit or price per volume or price per weight in a consistent unit per product type, all produces of a particular type have to be labeled in price/Kg, and it is not legal to label them in price/L. It is especially irritating when, in the US, a similar item is sold per pound from one brand, per floz on the second brand, and per "unit" on the third one (typical for toilet paper rolls, often labeled per sheet, or per linear feets or per weight, all brand choose a different one, and sometimes even within a single brand this is not consistent). Makes any comparison practically impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I oppose the following counter example:
Nuclear fusion is easy (in theory). The math formula, if not trivial, is certainly not -that- hard.
Finding the appropriate apparatus that can achieve sustained nuclear fusion is hard. Harder than the mathematical depiction of the process. Sure, we know, thanks to maths and formulas -what- needs to be done (and what it will look like when it has happened, even). Finding -how- to do it is much harder. We'll have the solution to this practical problem in 30 years (since nuclear fusion is always in 30 years from know, for any date since After-Unix).
No. This is the thinking that made the level of high schoolers so bad in the first place that they can't follow when things get serious. This is maybe appropriate for elementary school and as a blend in middle school. But you have to face the reality of science, sooner than later. The longer you stay at "fun" science, and don't dive in the real thing, the worst the monster slap in the face gets when you -have to- use complex abstractions to do anything.
Not niche, it is becoming an appliance. Everybody already have one. The exponential growth and amazement period has passed. So you keep what you have until it breaks. There is no (big) money to make on this kind of market anymore. It is just another mature market, like dishwashers. We are seeing the transition from boom market to appliance market.
Even if it was a Learjet, blowing up the plane is an -overkill-. There will be other casualties, and Snowden does not represent an immediate menace to US citizens. It would be impossible to argue the legality of such an act, even in US courts of law. Acting like the bully does not always get what you want. Proof, look at what Obama got the Europeans to do (ridicule themselves), where Bush met strong and persistent resistance.
This line of defense didn't worked at Nuremberg.
Methodology is bogus. Ethiopia, as an example, was only occupied for a short period of time during the 20th century. It was a long standing kingdom before that. It is registered as young state, due to the date of its latest independence. China on the other hand is marked as 3k years old. Fair enough. But it was similarly chopped in pieces, colonized and occupied during a good share of the 20th century. India is as old a country, and Iran could be 600 years old (or even 4k years old, depending on how you count). Taking independence dates and making a graph is plain stupid. It takes knowledge of history, and relevant events on each cultures and people to make such a graph.
A nuclear reactor is not a weapon, and hospitals are certainly not full of victims from Fukujima.
Mount Tambora doesn't care about your refutations. Even if it is extremely hot, it is a cold blooded natural phenomenon that doesn't care about what you say, and just did what you said is impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
There are, at all time, 20 or more volcanos erupting, nobody care. Yet that single volcano in iceland that was merely -smocking- not even erupting, was a major disruption to the entire northern hemisphere, 3 years ago.
I do not think 16 bombs would be enough. But arguing that because more than 16 have been detonated over the course of half a century, the result would be the same as blasting them all simultaneously is pretty stupid. Arguing that because energy dissipated is inferior, the disruption would be less is also stupid (crickets are not that energetic, but they can provoke vast ravage and decimate human population through famine, much more so than hurricanes that are very energetic but destroy only localized things, what is "energized" matters, a lot).
Except that hospital are not full of nuclear weapons victims. There must be something different, then.
It is just as compatible as Open Office is compatible with Powerpoint, let's say. It opens and reads the documents, you can change them and save, and then when you open it back in Powerpoint for windows, formating has changed, fonts are messed-up, figures have moved around, transparent objects are not transparent anymore, etc, etc, etc.
We even had an instance where the Office for Mac 11 edited document would just crash Powerpoint for windows.
It does not happen all the time, but enough that it is disruptive and we decided to all use the same mac os version, and never edit-save a document on anything else. So yeah, overall, incompatible.
Amusingly, office for mac is incompatible with office for windows.
Why are you running the binary, if you care about having a version that is trustful to the source code? Just compile your own, never use precompiled binary, problem solved.
Old CRT were giving me pretty severe headackes. This has all disapeared as soon as I used TFT panels, even with the early models that were not as good as recent ones. I definitely could see flicker on CRTs, I cannot anymore on TFTs.
Maybe you need to turn off "true motion" option on your TFT TV ?
I live in regular suburban space in a fairly large US city.
I relocated from Europe (France) 7 years ago.
Service in a typical suburban neighborhood is still low quality (24/5, but 200ms latency,...... $75, capped) and more expensive than what I had in rural country France 7 years ago (30/7, 15ms latency, 29euros, ~40$, uncapped, includes TV, ondemand, landline phone).
So this is BS. Value is low in the US. This guy is paid to stir BS in the media.
And take us with them there.
Libertarianism is nothing else than rule of the powerful. If there is a power gap, it will be filled. Beware what replaces an elected government in that role. You may find that the new boss is not the same as the old boss, but is actually much worse.
Very worried about that. Since Preview is "cloud enabled" it's a POS that crashes constantly. It -was- the best PDF viewer before, it is crippled and buggy now. It always want to sync with 'the cloud' even when I don't want it to do this. I certainly hope that Keynotes remains the productive tool it is now, and not some bloated "cloudware" .
Why would you ask a question that has an obvious answer in any constitutional law 101 on Slashdot, and spend countless hours writing such an elaborate pamphlet obviously before searching for the widely available answer is amusing. Like Slashdot is a renowned law authority or something.
You must have lived under a rock. There has been numerous plane hijacks and blowups over the 80's and early 90's. The TSA is a useless security theater, but there is a need for some sort of security nonetheless, like metal detectors and random picks which have been good enough, as the rate of successful blowups during the end of the 90s prove. No need to go berserk and get everybody groped, that, is useless).
Thanks for the nice additions. It is a shame that you didn't got more mods up.
I did not know of the first exploit. Thanks for lighting it up.
I had read the scribd paper. It is not a problem with the vote but with the security of the user terminal. Obviously all systems are subject to this, even voting on electronic booth at the poll station (where on top of it, officials and their minions have physical access to the device).
The 3rd bug is more a glitch than a real problem, but I get your point that security is not perfect and there are known defects.
Your last point recoup my reservations. Wether the system is secure or not doesn't matter if citizen's cannot check for themselves that it is. Uncertainty can lead to turmoil and civil war, to the extreme. I really do not see a case for mass usage of this technology. I do see it useful in restricted use, for regions where it make sense for geographic reasons (like north america, which is huge, there is no way to install a voting station in all necessary locations to get a realistic expectation that distance is not the main deciding factor of abstention).
Addition:
* physical coercion is possible to force somebody to vote. It is always a possibility as soon as voting happens outside of a controlled ballot room. So even split credential is not a definitive solution to the issue of forced/bought votes.
I fail to see the benefit for the general voting body. IT makes sense only for citizens that cannot otherwise access a physical ballot due to distance (think deployed military personnel, nationals leaving in foreign countries, etc).
What the French republic implementation does (not the bogus system described in this article, that pertains to a particular party internal votes only) seems to enable verifiable anonymous votes.
You receive credentials in a split fashion. Half comes in the mailbox as paper. The second half is sent to a personal device (email is possible, but sms is preferred). If you want to prevent somebody to vote for you, just have your credentials sent to your personal phone, even if the family head receives the mail credentials, he cannot use them.
Second, the voting receipt is a sha key. Should there be a need for recounting, or should a citizen verify his vote, the sha key can be used. However, just having the sha key doesn't tell anybody what the vote was (without authority compliance, which is improbable to say the least, the procedure involves showing up IN PERSON with the sha printout, to verify your own vote). Votes are stored on the server anonymized, the sha key codes the voter identity, actually.
It is not immune to tempering (physical access to the computers always eliminate any expectation of security, just like physical access to paper ballots would result in the same uncertainty), but it is not -that- weak, and can be recounted if needed (by asking citizens to give back their sha keys, one can verify if all ballots have been counted, since the sha key is a proof of having voted, if the corresponding ballot is not found, there is a proof of tempering the results).
The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of). I have some reservations about e-voting (for lack of accountability and falsifiability by the random citizen), but being weak and easy to compromise doesn't seem to be the most important problem for the particular implementation. However, it is hard to use, and I know many voters that gave up voting because it was to difficult to have the voting system to work on their computer.
UMP (which is conservative right party) is reckoned for hiring the worst people to do any sort of techno job and ridicule themselves in dub-songs when trying to be cool on facebook. That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.
Moreover, the paper ballot vote at the last UMP president election also got seriously rigged. There was a 2 month period where the two prominent candidates claimed victory (and it seems that the one that cheated the most is still the ongoing president of the party... ). So in some sense, a weak system is not a bug, for the elections of this party, it's a feature.
Agreed. Highway mileage are the last thing that matter. You never need to convert them to anything else anyway.
What only matters is units that need to be converted to one another and are tedious or borderline insane in "imperial". having base 16 for small measures and 3 for longer is nonsensical. square feets being multiple of 144 is very impractical. Volume units that are a jungle of non-convertible measures is problematic.
But definitely, highway miles, who cares? Same goes for temperature. This is a single unit, it is confusing for foreigners for a while, but you get used to it. Unlike volumes and weight metric units, the Celsius system is not vastly superior, simply because Fahrenheit system is not broken, it is unusually consistent for an imperial measurement.
I think time could benefit from rationalization, but I doubt it is doable because of political/sociological resistance.
Beside, there is rarely need to do other type of conversions than hours:minutes to seconds, months to years and weeks to years/month. It would be more practical to have a unit in wich a year is a kilomonth, a month a kiloweek etc, but that would be a disruptive change, for little practical improvement.
Try making Macarons with your gut feeling, and tell me how it goes :)
Patisserie requires precision. You cannot just pour, stir and adapt. Doing this is a recipe for poor looking pastries, at best. At the extreme they do not even take and you have nothing but a sugary goop.
This is why recipe are actually different depending on what is customary for raw ingredients (amount of fat in butter/milk, amount of gluten in flour, yolk in eggs, dominant variant of yeast, etc).
Now, if you are making pizza, this is a different story.
In most of Europe, size of containers is standardized. That is, it is illegal to package things by 486g, meanwhile everybody else sells 500g in order to get a sticker advantage. Similarly, it is mandatory by law that stickers give price per unit or price per volume or price per weight in a consistent unit per product type, all produces of a particular type have to be labeled in price/Kg, and it is not legal to label them in price/L. It is especially irritating when, in the US, a similar item is sold per pound from one brand, per floz on the second brand, and per "unit" on the third one (typical for toilet paper rolls, often labeled per sheet, or per linear feets or per weight, all brand choose a different one, and sometimes even within a single brand this is not consistent). Makes any comparison practically impossible.