I certainly won't disagree that there are poor investments to be made out there, including in terms of vehicles.
However, the prudent thing if you're not an expert is to ask an expert you trust if available, and, regardless, to go with something popular and boring. Spend five minutes on Google to find out what model of the class you need has sold the most over the past decade, go to the library and check out Consumer reports, find out what's the most popular car for taxicab companies, that sort of thing; you should know very quickly what will suit you, even if it's not the sexiest option on the road.
As far as losing your job over your car...well, if that's a realistic risk, either you or your job (not your car) aren't reliable regardless. Cars fail. Even a brand-new luxury car could get totaled while sitting in a parking lot by some drunk idiot. If you're a reliable person, you'll already have realized this and have figured out a contingency plan. Perhaps you have a partner who is reliable and can serve as a taxi; perhaps you'll just take the bus and add an hour both ways to your commute; or perhaps you'll have budgeted and set aside money for a rental car for a week or three.
And if even exercising one of those types of options is enough to get you fired, your boss is likely looking for an excuse to fire you no matter what.
If you're scraping the bottom of the jobs barrel where that's not uncommon...well, yeah. That sucks royally. And our society is pretty damned fucked up that so many people face such hazards.
But don't fool yourself by thinking that spending several times as much money on a car is somehow magically going to keep you from getting fired from that type of job.
Indeed, those're exactly the people who need to be spending the bare minimum on transportation, and putting every penny into something -- anything -- that'll give them a leg up into less-sucky jobs. Or, if nothing else, put the money into a rainy day account (instead of bank payments on a new car they can't afford) so, when they do lose today's job, they've got enough breathing room to make it to the next job.
Lastly, if we're to dip into the ad hom bucket...even if I am blaming the victim, you're presuming the great unwashed masses are incapable of figuring out what you yourself already know....
Might you spend more per year in repairs on an old clunker than an under-warranty new car? Perhaps.
But even the most expensive things that might ever go horridly worng with that old clunker will still cost you less than a couple months of typical new car payments. And that's including you paying for a rental out-of-pocket while the car's at the mechanic.
That's another point -- there's no need to take car to the dealer for service and repairs. My own mechanic is a righteously grizzled shade-tree mechanic who works out of his back yard. He does awesome work; hardly surprising, since in a past life he was on the team of a top fuel racer. And every time I go there he's got some new Tin Lizzie or some such that he's restoring for somebody else; it's like an automobile museum. As a nice bonus, he doesn't charge anywhere near what he should, mainly because he has almost none of the overhead of a garage.
The short version is that it's always cheaper to fix up an old-and-busted car than it is to buy a new one. Always.
Will you have the latest and greatest array of gadgets, like three climate-controlled cupholders per passenger? No. But you'll have safe and affordable transportation.
Of course, if you do have lots of money and you can afford to buy (with cash!) a new luxury car every year and you enjoy spending your money on that sort of thing, go for it! The problem is that far too many people are spending money they don't have on things they can't afford, or they're giving half or more of their money to banks for no good reason.
That line above where I mentioned that you could double your purchasing power by not buying on credit? Imagine if everybody did that -- we'd double the size of our economy, just at the expense of the parasitic aspects of the banking industry. I daresay that just might do a wee bit of good for our economy...but only if we turned around and invested the windfall in solar power...and that's a rant for another time....
By financing your car, even at 2%, you cut the effective rate of return on your mutual funds in half. Instead of your mutual fund doubling (through interest, not additional investment) in eighteen years, it'll now take 35 years to double. (Presumably, it won't take that long to pay off the car...but, if you're typical, by the time the loan period is up, you'll just go out and finance yet another car.) And, again, if you fail to make your payments on time, the bank can and will take your car and all the money you've already given them in payments.
In short, the bank can't lose, and you can't even break even.
The only instances where "but I'm earning more interest in this other instrument" make sense are where, for example, banks borrow money from the Fed at 0.04% and re-loan it to suckers like you at 1.99%. There are other institutional examples; in some circumstances, it makes sense for governmental agencies to defer bond repayments or the like, for similar reasons.
And, remember. The same people who run the shadow banking system are the ones who want you to put all your money into it rather than pay down your mortgage.
If you own your home free and clear, you don't need anywhere near as much savings (or income!) to be comfortable. But if you have a hundred grand outstanding on your mortgage and a hundred grand in the market and the market goes tits-up, that hundred grand is gone and you still have to pay the mortgage and the lender can still kick you on the street if you don't. And, ohbytheway, all that equity you've put into the home goes *poof* when the bank evicts you as well.
Debt may be what's driving the economy, but it's pure evil for the little people.
If you want a stress-free life, pay cash for everything. If you want something and you can't afford it, set aside whatever you'd spend on the monthly payments and then buy it outright when you've saved up enough. It won't take anywhere near as many monthly payments to save up for it as it would to buy it on credit. You're pretty much always going to spend a bare minimum of half the purchase price on finance charges, and often more than the purchase price.
That's really all you have to do to double your purchasing power: don't buy on credit.
(The only types of exceptions are for capital investments, such as big equipment for a business. If a company will make significantly more money from the equipment than it'll pay in finance charges, the loan makes sense. But that's almost never the case for individuals, and certainly not the case for living room furniture and kitchen doodads and exercise equipment that rusts from disuse. And rarely the case for vehicles. Homes you might have no choice but to finance, but buy something you can pay off in five to ten years, even if it means living on rice and beans in the mean time; if you can't afford to pay it off that fast, you can't afford the house.)
Except that there're virtually always young Turks or gadflies or other types looking to make a name for themselves or upset the applecart when those in power show signs of weakness.
Am I really to believe that there's nobody in this country with a badge interested in doing the right thing, for whatever reason?
I can almost see how the Justice Department could have been purged so effectively that no junior prosecutor is willing to stick his or her neck out for something like this. But even in all fifty states and the territories? No first-term Representative from Hicksville's 52nd district willing to demand a Congressional investigation?
The news is full of all sorts of illegal shit that the NSA and its lackeys have been doing for years, yet I haven't heard a peep about any hints of prosecution.
Where're the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?
Whilst I certainly wouldn't disagree with you over the importance of encryption...well, put it this way: when was the last time you encrypted a letter you dropped in the mailbox?
The point is that it's about as much hassle for somebody at the post office to steam-open an envelope with nobody being none the wiser for it as it is for an ISP to snoop on people's mail.
People have historically been just fine with sending the most private of letters protected by nothing more than the seal of the envelope because the United States Postal Service has a well-deserved unimpeachable reputation for being the hardest of hard-cases about protecting the sanctity of the mail.
It's not surprising that people carried that same trust over to email; it's an almost instinctual conclusion to assume the one is every bit like the other save for the mechanisms of delivery.
And, had they done it right, Google could have earned the world's trust by self-policing with the same vigilance the USPS does.
But they blew it.
Royally, and spectacularly, they blew it.
But what remains most troubling about it is that it was an official government agency that twisted their arm, even if Google shouldn't have put up with the arm-twisting.
Here we see the beginnings of real, hard evidence of just how disastrous the NSA's recent actions are to the best interests of the country.
It used to be that American IT companies were the gold standard, to the point that there almost wasn't even any pretense of competition. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook -- American companies ruled the Internet.
And the NSA has turned that all to shit. Now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust any American company not to hand your data over to the NSA. And the NSA has most emphatically been demonstrated that it cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted with that data; just look at not only the overt corporate espionage, but the pervy stalking culture of the degenerates working there. Even if not for official policy directives, you can bet that some low-level flunky at the NSA will be placing insider trades based on what he reads in your executive's emails.
In other words, the NSA has utterly devastated the greatest industry the United States has ever created, and the very backbone of our economy. It's worse than if they had bombed all our ball bearing plants; infrastructure can be rebuilt, but trust? How the fuck are we supposed to rebuild that?...and the corporate heads and legal departments wonder why they shouldn't have refused to play with the NSA and gone public at the first hint of this malfeasance, writs of classification be damned. Had Google insisted it be taken down swinging rather than play lapdog to the NSA, their brand would have been unimpeachable; rather, it is untouchable.
I'd have a lot more trust in Obama if he weren't the one responsible for ramping it up to the level it is today. (If not, remind me again where the buck stops?)
Also, of course they're not interested in "ordinary" people. The instant they're interested in you, you're no longer ordinary.
Imagine Snowden was some political candidate's nephew. And imagine that, instead of leaking details of the entire operation to the press, he leaked details of the other candidate's campaign strategies (or sexual exploits) back to his uncle. You know, like the Watergate breakins?
If a junior flunky can do that sort of thing and get away with it, what makes you think it's not standard operating procedure?
The NSA has the power to utterly control the entire political process with an iron grip -- and that's before we start to worry about political dissidents being extraordinarily renditioned.
If Obama truly wanted to "address the situation," he'd completely dismantle the NSA. But, somehow, even if he truly wanted to, I rather doubt the NSA would let him....
I just called my representative to express my displeasure. The young woman who answered had an obvious prepared response about how Rep. Sinema has been working to protect the Fourth Amendment and this was a hard decision...but it didn't sound like her heart was in it.
That this amendment failed is a bad sign, that Congress would rather stand with the spymasters than with the citizenry. But there may still be a glimmer of hope for us to push hard enough to un-fuck ourselves.
It does make me wonder, though, what kind of dirt the NSA has on my representative that they could make her cave like that.
Last week there was an Amber Alert in the Valley of the Sun. A bit later, I thought that such a system was too easy to abuse...imagine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.
They've also been excessively over-zealous about thunderstorm alerts, but I'm not quite yet ready to turn those off. But if they don't clean up their act fast, I will.
First, you can -- and probably should -- just accept that the deadlines don't mean anything. They self-evidently don't to anybody else, so why should they to you?
But if you must pretend that they mean something, then you've really only got three options:
1) adjust the deadline based upon how much actual work is involved with the new request; 2) factor into your initial estimate how much you think it'll take to do what you think they're likely to add on later; 3) or make new requests a separate project with their own life cycle.
This, of course, assumes that you're the one estimating time and setting deadlines. If somebody else is doing all that, forget about it. It's not your problem; it's the problem of whomever is setting deadlines. Either they need to be doing a better job at time / project / resource management, or they need to bring on enough additional developers to meet the demands, or they need to fire the incompetent hacks they've got working for them now who can't meet the demands of the job. Whatever the case may be, it's a management problem and nothing for a developer to worry about.
The two-factor authentication is supposed to protect against a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem is that the verification response from the second factor goes back through the same already-compromised channel.
Imagine you're a sophisticated vilain in some backwater part of the world. You notice there's an AP reporter there doing some long-term investigative journalism, and said reporter likes to file his reports from a particular internet cafe.
You hack the cafe's wifi and somehow convince the reporter that his Twitter account has already been hacked -- say, by showing him a tweet in his name of something outrageous. The reporter, panicked, resets his account -- but does so through your fake Twitter authentication. You now capture both his password and the second factor sent through his text message; you now own his Twitter account.
And you now go ahead and actually send out some outrageous tweet as this particular reporter. Perhaps you pull off your attack while some very important person is visiting, and you report said person's assassination. You know this will crash the markets, and so you short all the proper stocks and make a killing...on the market.
Is it wise for people to have the trust they do in Twitter? Hell no. Do they have such trust anyway? Yes.
Before anybody here recommends the Gimp as an alternative...yes, it's a well-done project, and yes, it admirably suits many people's needs.
But suggesting that the Gimp is a suitable alternative to Photoshop for a creative professional makes you sound as insanely stupid as that accountant who wonders why the company spends all that money on a huge financials package with a massive SQL backend when he could whip up something that works just as well in Excel with a few macros in an afternoon.
There is a serious lack of alternatives in this space; the monopoly Adobe enjoys is akin to AT&T before the breakup. Adobe clearly knows this, and this cloud bullshit is obviously an attempt to (continue to) cash in on said monopoly.
Most people I know are planning on camping out indefinitely on CS6 and hope something shakes free sooner rather than later. Long-shot dreams, such as Google buying Corel and turning PaintShop Pro into a Photoshop competitor, are being desperately wished for.
Colony ships need at least as much energy, if not more. You've got an entire postmodern industrial complex to keep running, after all -- plus, you've also got the added energy overhead from recycling literally everything.
And sleeper ships are a no-go. At those timescales, any and all gasses will leak out of any container, no matter how thick and sturdy, as surely as it does from a rubber balloon...plus all your plastics and rubber will turn brittle, your silicon chips will be completely fried from cosmic radiation, and on and on and on. You'll need a continuous maintenance operation, which turns it back into a colony ship.
And, besides. If you're happy living between the stars for several times longer than recorded human history, why should you care at all about any particular star except as a place to recharge the batteries? A planet would be useless to you -- especially one with an entirely alien biosphere, where everything will either try to eat you or trigger allergic reactions.
Even if there's a literal Heavenly Paradise a mere 1000 light years away, that's as unfriendly to humans as the surface of Venus.
How, pray tell, is one supposed to make the six quadrillion mile journey to get there?
With the amount of energy you'd need to send just a single schoolbus-sized Space Shuttle that distance fast enough that the astronauts wouldn't be collecting Social Security several hundred millennia before they got there (which actually is physically possible thanks to relativistic time dilation), you could power the most ludicrous imaginable planet-wide environmental cleanup program here on Earth. Hell, with that much energy, you could probably terraform Mars as a side job, turn it into a luscious garden. And that's just a single ship....
Suggesting we colonize the Solar System to protect the species, as Professor Hawking has done, is simply idiotic. But the stars? They're beyond idiocy.
Okay, I know it's Stephen Freakin' Hawking and all. But still. This isn't rocket surgery, and he really should know better.
But there is nowhere else in the entire universe that's anywhere near as friendly to humans as Earth.
Not only that, even if we fought a global thermonuclear / biological / chemical war that ignited all the coal, oil, and other carbon deposits, the Earth would still be the friendliest place in the universe.
It would be far easier to clean up such a fucked-up Earth than it would be to even establish a beachhead anywhere else.
There are lots of reasons to explore space, but survival of the species isn't one of them. If we can't survive here, we can't survive anywhere else, either.
Sure, it's quite romantic to imagine a rotating asteroid colony where we raise our crops and our babies while we go use clean nukes to mine the other nearby asteroids...but not only is that so far removed from reality it's not even funny, it doesn't even pass the sniff test. Even if the Earth's atmosphere were rendered unbreathable, it'd still be far easier to build a dome on Earth that just has to server as a barrier and not as a high-pressure containment vessel, plus you could replenish your inside air by refining the contaminated air that surrounds you. Oh -- and temperatures will still be pretty close to what you want, you've got the right amount of insolation, there's all sorts of raw materials right here at the surface for the taking, and on and on and on and on and on.
First, 1/200s is a very common shutter speed, yes, but most cameras can shoot at at least 1/2000s and most high-end cameras can shoot at 1/8000s...assuming, of course, you have enough light.
Most high-speed stills photography is actually done with a slow shutter speed; perhaps even a shutter left open for a couple seconds. Motion is stopped by the short duration of the flash burst. And with, for example, a Canon 580 EX II flash, you can get a 1/35,000s flash duration. Granted, this will be at minimum power...but they're operating at macro distances, where you can put the flash head almost on top of your subject and still overpower the subject with light.
Don't get me worng; this team is doing some nifty stuff. But it's also something that most professional photographers could easily replicate with the equipment they already have -- and that anybody who specializes in macro photography will probably already plan on playing around with next winter after reading this article.
What the team is doing that's interesting isn't the photography. It's the 3D reconstruction and subsequent analysis and modeling. Making it seem that it's about the photography, which is the easy and inconsequential part, really detracts from the good stuff.
For what it's worth, I'm in Arizona; my roof is covered with panels; and I'm generating half again as much as I'm using -- enough to power an electric vehicle, when they finally become economical (and I hardly drive much already as it is).
Yes, of course it will. As supply drops, prices rise. It's not cost-effective to make gasoline from tar sands at $100 / barrel, but it would be very cost-effective at $1,000 / barrel (and substantially less).
The thing is, that applies to more than just petroleum reserves.
At some point, it becomes cost-effective to create syngas as a feedstock for petroleum distilleries, and to create that syngas with atmospheric CO2 for the carbon source using solar photovoltaics as the energy source. And, yes, oil would have to be very expensive for that to be cost-effective.
Before it's cost-effective to use atmospheric CO2 for the carbon source, it'll be cost-effective to use CO2 captured from coal plant exhaust. We'd still burn the coal for electricity generation, but the carbon would serve double duty and get burned twice before being dumped in the atmosphere. Still very expensive, yes, and still needs lots of photovoltaic electricity as input, but it's not quite as expensive as pulling the CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
Thing is...the price at which these sorts of non-petrochemical alternatives become cost-effective is less than the price at which many petrochemical alternatives become cost-effective to exploit.
So I personally doubt we'll ever touch the Canadian tar sands. They're too expensive, and we have cheaper alternatives that are inexhaustible.
That's not to say that the alternatives are affordable, just that they're less expensive than the tar sands.
Whether or not we can afford any of the alternatives remains to be seen. Of course, the other alternative is a retreat from civilization, so let's hope that we actually do figure out a way to pay for all of this....
Cover every roof in the United States with photovoltaics at today's efficiency levels and you'll generate roughly as much energy as the entire civilization consumes. And lots of places in the world have roofs other than just the United States....
But, though there's no problem with resource availability, there are two huge practical concerns. First, such a project would be massively expensive. Second, it generates electricity, which is not readily useable for transportation with today's infrastructure.
Neither of those problems are insurmountable. Though solar photovoltaics aren't cheap, they're not as expensive as many petrochemical alternatives being seriously considered, such as tar sands. That is, we might not be able to afford widespread PV adoption, true...but, if we can't afford it, we won't be able to afford anything else when the existing wells run dry.
(As a side note, we're already scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. Remember Deepwater Horizon? Imagine you're standing on the shore of the Colorado River in the middle of the Grand Canyon. A mile above you is the rim; that's how far below the ocean surface the wellhead was. Several miles above the rim is an airliner flying past. That's how far through solid rock the well was bored before it reached the oil deposits. That's how desperate we already are today for oil...loooooong gone are the days when you had to be careful in Texas with a pickaxe lest you start a gusher. Yes, we've got lots of oil left -- about half as much as the planet's total original reserves, in fact. But -- duh! -- we went for the easy-to-get-to, high-quality half first, and what's left increasingly fits the definition of, "dregs.")
The problem with transportation fuels is more pressing. At the very least, with enough input energy, you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel (via the Fischer-Tropsch process, for example) that you can put back into a tank to burn it again, so we have alternatives. The catch, of course, is that it takes a lot of excess energy to do so, and so won't be cheap.
TL/DR: Yes, we can run our society on solar power. No, it won't be cheap. No, we won't have any better alternatives. Yes, that means we're facing some tough times in the not-too-distant future.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Even worse than the looming transportation fuel shortage is the looming petroleum-based fertilizer shortage. That double whammy is going to result in lots of people starving to death. b&
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I certainly won't disagree that there are poor investments to be made out there, including in terms of vehicles.
However, the prudent thing if you're not an expert is to ask an expert you trust if available, and, regardless, to go with something popular and boring. Spend five minutes on Google to find out what model of the class you need has sold the most over the past decade, go to the library and check out Consumer reports, find out what's the most popular car for taxicab companies, that sort of thing; you should know very quickly what will suit you, even if it's not the sexiest option on the road.
As far as losing your job over your car...well, if that's a realistic risk, either you or your job (not your car) aren't reliable regardless. Cars fail. Even a brand-new luxury car could get totaled while sitting in a parking lot by some drunk idiot. If you're a reliable person, you'll already have realized this and have figured out a contingency plan. Perhaps you have a partner who is reliable and can serve as a taxi; perhaps you'll just take the bus and add an hour both ways to your commute; or perhaps you'll have budgeted and set aside money for a rental car for a week or three.
And if even exercising one of those types of options is enough to get you fired, your boss is likely looking for an excuse to fire you no matter what.
If you're scraping the bottom of the jobs barrel where that's not uncommon...well, yeah. That sucks royally. And our society is pretty damned fucked up that so many people face such hazards.
But don't fool yourself by thinking that spending several times as much money on a car is somehow magically going to keep you from getting fired from that type of job.
Indeed, those're exactly the people who need to be spending the bare minimum on transportation, and putting every penny into something -- anything -- that'll give them a leg up into less-sucky jobs. Or, if nothing else, put the money into a rainy day account (instead of bank payments on a new car they can't afford) so, when they do lose today's job, they've got enough breathing room to make it to the next job.
Lastly, if we're to dip into the ad hom bucket...even if I am blaming the victim, you're presuming the great unwashed masses are incapable of figuring out what you yourself already know....
Cheers,
b&
Not at all -- and quite the contrary!
Might you spend more per year in repairs on an old clunker than an under-warranty new car? Perhaps.
But even the most expensive things that might ever go horridly worng with that old clunker will still cost you less than a couple months of typical new car payments. And that's including you paying for a rental out-of-pocket while the car's at the mechanic.
That's another point -- there's no need to take car to the dealer for service and repairs. My own mechanic is a righteously grizzled shade-tree mechanic who works out of his back yard. He does awesome work; hardly surprising, since in a past life he was on the team of a top fuel racer. And every time I go there he's got some new Tin Lizzie or some such that he's restoring for somebody else; it's like an automobile museum. As a nice bonus, he doesn't charge anywhere near what he should, mainly because he has almost none of the overhead of a garage.
The short version is that it's always cheaper to fix up an old-and-busted car than it is to buy a new one. Always.
Will you have the latest and greatest array of gadgets, like three climate-controlled cupholders per passenger? No. But you'll have safe and affordable transportation.
Of course, if you do have lots of money and you can afford to buy (with cash!) a new luxury car every year and you enjoy spending your money on that sort of thing, go for it! The problem is that far too many people are spending money they don't have on things they can't afford, or they're giving half or more of their money to banks for no good reason.
That line above where I mentioned that you could double your purchasing power by not buying on credit? Imagine if everybody did that -- we'd double the size of our economy, just at the expense of the parasitic aspects of the banking industry. I daresay that just might do a wee bit of good for our economy...but only if we turned around and invested the windfall in solar power...and that's a rant for another time....
Cheers,
b&
Your math skills need work.
By financing your car, even at 2%, you cut the effective rate of return on your mutual funds in half. Instead of your mutual fund doubling (through interest, not additional investment) in eighteen years, it'll now take 35 years to double. (Presumably, it won't take that long to pay off the car...but, if you're typical, by the time the loan period is up, you'll just go out and finance yet another car.) And, again, if you fail to make your payments on time, the bank can and will take your car and all the money you've already given them in payments.
In short, the bank can't lose, and you can't even break even.
The only instances where "but I'm earning more interest in this other instrument" make sense are where, for example, banks borrow money from the Fed at 0.04% and re-loan it to suckers like you at 1.99%. There are other institutional examples; in some circumstances, it makes sense for governmental agencies to defer bond repayments or the like, for similar reasons.
Cheers,
b&
And, remember. The same people who run the shadow banking system are the ones who want you to put all your money into it rather than pay down your mortgage.
If you own your home free and clear, you don't need anywhere near as much savings (or income!) to be comfortable. But if you have a hundred grand outstanding on your mortgage and a hundred grand in the market and the market goes tits-up, that hundred grand is gone and you still have to pay the mortgage and the lender can still kick you on the street if you don't. And, ohbytheway, all that equity you've put into the home goes *poof* when the bank evicts you as well.
Debt may be what's driving the economy, but it's pure evil for the little people.
If you want a stress-free life, pay cash for everything. If you want something and you can't afford it, set aside whatever you'd spend on the monthly payments and then buy it outright when you've saved up enough. It won't take anywhere near as many monthly payments to save up for it as it would to buy it on credit. You're pretty much always going to spend a bare minimum of half the purchase price on finance charges, and often more than the purchase price.
That's really all you have to do to double your purchasing power: don't buy on credit.
(The only types of exceptions are for capital investments, such as big equipment for a business. If a company will make significantly more money from the equipment than it'll pay in finance charges, the loan makes sense. But that's almost never the case for individuals, and certainly not the case for living room furniture and kitchen doodads and exercise equipment that rusts from disuse. And rarely the case for vehicles. Homes you might have no choice but to finance, but buy something you can pay off in five to ten years, even if it means living on rice and beans in the mean time; if you can't afford to pay it off that fast, you can't afford the house.)
Cheers,
b&
That didn't stop Archibald Cox....
b&
Except that there're virtually always young Turks or gadflies or other types looking to make a name for themselves or upset the applecart when those in power show signs of weakness.
Am I really to believe that there's nobody in this country with a badge interested in doing the right thing, for whatever reason?
I can almost see how the Justice Department could have been purged so effectively that no junior prosecutor is willing to stick his or her neck out for something like this. But even in all fifty states and the territories? No first-term Representative from Hicksville's 52nd district willing to demand a Congressional investigation?
Nobody!?
b&
The news is full of all sorts of illegal shit that the NSA and its lackeys have been doing for years, yet I haven't heard a peep about any hints of prosecution.
Where're the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?
b&
Whilst I certainly wouldn't disagree with you over the importance of encryption...well, put it this way: when was the last time you encrypted a letter you dropped in the mailbox?
The point is that it's about as much hassle for somebody at the post office to steam-open an envelope with nobody being none the wiser for it as it is for an ISP to snoop on people's mail.
People have historically been just fine with sending the most private of letters protected by nothing more than the seal of the envelope because the United States Postal Service has a well-deserved unimpeachable reputation for being the hardest of hard-cases about protecting the sanctity of the mail.
It's not surprising that people carried that same trust over to email; it's an almost instinctual conclusion to assume the one is every bit like the other save for the mechanisms of delivery.
And, had they done it right, Google could have earned the world's trust by self-policing with the same vigilance the USPS does.
But they blew it.
Royally, and spectacularly, they blew it.
But what remains most troubling about it is that it was an official government agency that twisted their arm, even if Google shouldn't have put up with the arm-twisting.
Cheers,
b&
Here we see the beginnings of real, hard evidence of just how disastrous the NSA's recent actions are to the best interests of the country.
It used to be that American IT companies were the gold standard, to the point that there almost wasn't even any pretense of competition. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook -- American companies ruled the Internet.
And the NSA has turned that all to shit. Now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust any American company not to hand your data over to the NSA. And the NSA has most emphatically been demonstrated that it cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted with that data; just look at not only the overt corporate espionage, but the pervy stalking culture of the degenerates working there. Even if not for official policy directives, you can bet that some low-level flunky at the NSA will be placing insider trades based on what he reads in your executive's emails.
In other words, the NSA has utterly devastated the greatest industry the United States has ever created, and the very backbone of our economy. It's worse than if they had bombed all our ball bearing plants; infrastructure can be rebuilt, but trust? How the fuck are we supposed to rebuild that? ...and the corporate heads and legal departments wonder why they shouldn't have refused to play with the NSA and gone public at the first hint of this malfeasance, writs of classification be damned. Had Google insisted it be taken down swinging rather than play lapdog to the NSA, their brand would have been unimpeachable; rather, it is untouchable.
Cheers,
b&
I'd have a lot more trust in Obama if he weren't the one responsible for ramping it up to the level it is today. (If not, remind me again where the buck stops?)
Also, of course they're not interested in "ordinary" people. The instant they're interested in you, you're no longer ordinary.
Imagine Snowden was some political candidate's nephew. And imagine that, instead of leaking details of the entire operation to the press, he leaked details of the other candidate's campaign strategies (or sexual exploits) back to his uncle. You know, like the Watergate breakins?
If a junior flunky can do that sort of thing and get away with it, what makes you think it's not standard operating procedure?
The NSA has the power to utterly control the entire political process with an iron grip -- and that's before we start to worry about political dissidents being extraordinarily renditioned.
If Obama truly wanted to "address the situation," he'd completely dismantle the NSA. But, somehow, even if he truly wanted to, I rather doubt the NSA would let him....
Cheers,
&
Lovely bullet point:
* Show me all the VPN startups in country X, and give me the data so I can decrypt and discover the users.
Translation: not only do you have no privacy, doing what you think will make you hidden will just shine a spotlight on yourself.
b&
...yes. It runs Linux.
b&
I just called my representative to express my displeasure. The young woman who answered had an obvious prepared response about how Rep. Sinema has been working to protect the Fourth Amendment and this was a hard decision...but it didn't sound like her heart was in it.
That this amendment failed is a bad sign, that Congress would rather stand with the spymasters than with the citizenry. But there may still be a glimmer of hope for us to push hard enough to un-fuck ourselves.
It does make me wonder, though, what kind of dirt the NSA has on my representative that they could make her cave like that.
b&
Last week there was an Amber Alert in the Valley of the Sun. A bit later, I thought that such a system was too easy to abuse...imagine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.
They've also been excessively over-zealous about thunderstorm alerts, but I'm not quite yet ready to turn those off. But if they don't clean up their act fast, I will.
b&
First, you can -- and probably should -- just accept that the deadlines don't mean anything. They self-evidently don't to anybody else, so why should they to you?
But if you must pretend that they mean something, then you've really only got three options:
1) adjust the deadline based upon how much actual work is involved with the new request;
2) factor into your initial estimate how much you think it'll take to do what you think they're likely to add on later;
3) or make new requests a separate project with their own life cycle.
This, of course, assumes that you're the one estimating time and setting deadlines. If somebody else is doing all that, forget about it. It's not your problem; it's the problem of whomever is setting deadlines. Either they need to be doing a better job at time / project / resource management, or they need to bring on enough additional developers to meet the demands, or they need to fire the incompetent hacks they've got working for them now who can't meet the demands of the job. Whatever the case may be, it's a management problem and nothing for a developer to worry about.
Cheers,
b&
The two-factor authentication is supposed to protect against a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem is that the verification response from the second factor goes back through the same already-compromised channel.
Imagine you're a sophisticated vilain in some backwater part of the world. You notice there's an AP reporter there doing some long-term investigative journalism, and said reporter likes to file his reports from a particular internet cafe.
You hack the cafe's wifi and somehow convince the reporter that his Twitter account has already been hacked -- say, by showing him a tweet in his name of something outrageous. The reporter, panicked, resets his account -- but does so through your fake Twitter authentication. You now capture both his password and the second factor sent through his text message; you now own his Twitter account.
And you now go ahead and actually send out some outrageous tweet as this particular reporter. Perhaps you pull off your attack while some very important person is visiting, and you report said person's assassination. You know this will crash the markets, and so you short all the proper stocks and make a killing...on the market.
Is it wise for people to have the trust they do in Twitter? Hell no. Do they have such trust anyway? Yes.
Which is why this is a big deal.
Cheers,
b&
...is there're so many to choose from.
b&
Before anybody here recommends the Gimp as an alternative...yes, it's a well-done project, and yes, it admirably suits many people's needs.
But suggesting that the Gimp is a suitable alternative to Photoshop for a creative professional makes you sound as insanely stupid as that accountant who wonders why the company spends all that money on a huge financials package with a massive SQL backend when he could whip up something that works just as well in Excel with a few macros in an afternoon.
There is a serious lack of alternatives in this space; the monopoly Adobe enjoys is akin to AT&T before the breakup. Adobe clearly knows this, and this cloud bullshit is obviously an attempt to (continue to) cash in on said monopoly.
Most people I know are planning on camping out indefinitely on CS6 and hope something shakes free sooner rather than later. Long-shot dreams, such as Google buying Corel and turning PaintShop Pro into a Photoshop competitor, are being desperately wished for.
It's not pretty.
Cheers,
b&
Colony ships need at least as much energy, if not more. You've got an entire postmodern industrial complex to keep running, after all -- plus, you've also got the added energy overhead from recycling literally everything.
And sleeper ships are a no-go. At those timescales, any and all gasses will leak out of any container, no matter how thick and sturdy, as surely as it does from a rubber balloon...plus all your plastics and rubber will turn brittle, your silicon chips will be completely fried from cosmic radiation, and on and on and on. You'll need a continuous maintenance operation, which turns it back into a colony ship.
And, besides. If you're happy living between the stars for several times longer than recorded human history, why should you care at all about any particular star except as a place to recharge the batteries? A planet would be useless to you -- especially one with an entirely alien biosphere, where everything will either try to eat you or trigger allergic reactions.
Cheers,
b&
Even if there's a literal Heavenly Paradise a mere 1000 light years away, that's as unfriendly to humans as the surface of Venus.
How, pray tell, is one supposed to make the six quadrillion mile journey to get there?
With the amount of energy you'd need to send just a single schoolbus-sized Space Shuttle that distance fast enough that the astronauts wouldn't be collecting Social Security several hundred millennia before they got there (which actually is physically possible thanks to relativistic time dilation), you could power the most ludicrous imaginable planet-wide environmental cleanup program here on Earth. Hell, with that much energy, you could probably terraform Mars as a side job, turn it into a luscious garden. And that's just a single ship....
Suggesting we colonize the Solar System to protect the species, as Professor Hawking has done, is simply idiotic. But the stars? They're beyond idiocy.
Cheers,
b&
Okay, I know it's Stephen Freakin' Hawking and all. But still. This isn't rocket surgery, and he really should know better.
But there is nowhere else in the entire universe that's anywhere near as friendly to humans as Earth.
Not only that, even if we fought a global thermonuclear / biological / chemical war that ignited all the coal, oil, and other carbon deposits, the Earth would still be the friendliest place in the universe.
It would be far easier to clean up such a fucked-up Earth than it would be to even establish a beachhead anywhere else.
There are lots of reasons to explore space, but survival of the species isn't one of them. If we can't survive here, we can't survive anywhere else, either.
Sure, it's quite romantic to imagine a rotating asteroid colony where we raise our crops and our babies while we go use clean nukes to mine the other nearby asteroids...but not only is that so far removed from reality it's not even funny, it doesn't even pass the sniff test. Even if the Earth's atmosphere were rendered unbreathable, it'd still be far easier to build a dome on Earth that just has to server as a barrier and not as a high-pressure containment vessel, plus you could replenish your inside air by refining the contaminated air that surrounds you. Oh -- and temperatures will still be pretty close to what you want, you've got the right amount of insolation, there's all sorts of raw materials right here at the surface for the taking, and on and on and on and on and on.
I hate to be so blunt...but what a maroon.
Cheers,
b&
First, 1/200s is a very common shutter speed, yes, but most cameras can shoot at at least 1/2000s and most high-end cameras can shoot at 1/8000s...assuming, of course, you have enough light.
Most high-speed stills photography is actually done with a slow shutter speed; perhaps even a shutter left open for a couple seconds. Motion is stopped by the short duration of the flash burst. And with, for example, a Canon 580 EX II flash, you can get a 1/35,000s flash duration. Granted, this will be at minimum power...but they're operating at macro distances, where you can put the flash head almost on top of your subject and still overpower the subject with light.
Don't get me worng; this team is doing some nifty stuff. But it's also something that most professional photographers could easily replicate with the equipment they already have -- and that anybody who specializes in macro photography will probably already plan on playing around with next winter after reading this article.
What the team is doing that's interesting isn't the photography. It's the 3D reconstruction and subsequent analysis and modeling. Making it seem that it's about the photography, which is the easy and inconsequential part, really detracts from the good stuff.
Cheers,
b&
For what it's worth, I'm in Arizona; my roof is covered with panels; and I'm generating half again as much as I'm using -- enough to power an electric vehicle, when they finally become economical (and I hardly drive much already as it is).
Cheers,
b&
Yes, of course it will. As supply drops, prices rise. It's not cost-effective to make gasoline from tar sands at $100 / barrel, but it would be very cost-effective at $1,000 / barrel (and substantially less).
The thing is, that applies to more than just petroleum reserves.
At some point, it becomes cost-effective to create syngas as a feedstock for petroleum distilleries, and to create that syngas with atmospheric CO2 for the carbon source using solar photovoltaics as the energy source. And, yes, oil would have to be very expensive for that to be cost-effective.
Before it's cost-effective to use atmospheric CO2 for the carbon source, it'll be cost-effective to use CO2 captured from coal plant exhaust. We'd still burn the coal for electricity generation, but the carbon would serve double duty and get burned twice before being dumped in the atmosphere. Still very expensive, yes, and still needs lots of photovoltaic electricity as input, but it's not quite as expensive as pulling the CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
Thing is...the price at which these sorts of non-petrochemical alternatives become cost-effective is less than the price at which many petrochemical alternatives become cost-effective to exploit.
So I personally doubt we'll ever touch the Canadian tar sands. They're too expensive, and we have cheaper alternatives that are inexhaustible.
That's not to say that the alternatives are affordable, just that they're less expensive than the tar sands.
Whether or not we can afford any of the alternatives remains to be seen. Of course, the other alternative is a retreat from civilization, so let's hope that we actually do figure out a way to pay for all of this....
Cheers,
b&
...on how you look at the problem.
Cover every roof in the United States with photovoltaics at today's efficiency levels and you'll generate roughly as much energy as the entire civilization consumes. And lots of places in the world have roofs other than just the United States....
But, though there's no problem with resource availability, there are two huge practical concerns. First, such a project would be massively expensive. Second, it generates electricity, which is not readily useable for transportation with today's infrastructure.
Neither of those problems are insurmountable. Though solar photovoltaics aren't cheap, they're not as expensive as many petrochemical alternatives being seriously considered, such as tar sands. That is, we might not be able to afford widespread PV adoption, true...but, if we can't afford it, we won't be able to afford anything else when the existing wells run dry.
(As a side note, we're already scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. Remember Deepwater Horizon? Imagine you're standing on the shore of the Colorado River in the middle of the Grand Canyon. A mile above you is the rim; that's how far below the ocean surface the wellhead was. Several miles above the rim is an airliner flying past. That's how far through solid rock the well was bored before it reached the oil deposits. That's how desperate we already are today for oil...loooooong gone are the days when you had to be careful in Texas with a pickaxe lest you start a gusher. Yes, we've got lots of oil left -- about half as much as the planet's total original reserves, in fact. But -- duh! -- we went for the easy-to-get-to, high-quality half first, and what's left increasingly fits the definition of, "dregs.")
The problem with transportation fuels is more pressing. At the very least, with enough input energy, you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel (via the Fischer-Tropsch process, for example) that you can put back into a tank to burn it again, so we have alternatives. The catch, of course, is that it takes a lot of excess energy to do so, and so won't be cheap.
TL/DR: Yes, we can run our society on solar power. No, it won't be cheap. No, we won't have any better alternatives. Yes, that means we're facing some tough times in the not-too-distant future.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Even worse than the looming transportation fuel shortage is the looming petroleum-based fertilizer shortage. That double whammy is going to result in lots of people starving to death. b&