Nuclear material released by coal combustion vs nuclear material released by fission plants of similar size. That doesn't count radioactive waste from the fission plants, so it's biased in favor of nuclear over coal.
Nuclear material released by all coal combustion plants in the US vs nuclear material consumed by all fission plants in the US. Because there are so many more coal plants than nuclear reactors, that is also biased in favor of nuclear over coal.
From that, I have to conclude that comparing plants with similar output, a nuclear reactor produces more radioactive waste than a coal plant releases. Of course, the nuclear waste is controlled, not pumped into the atmosphere, and if recycled through a breeder reactor can still produce much, much more power, so I still think nuclear is far better for the environment overall, but this particular comparison doesn't hold the weight I hoped it did.
The nuclear plant creates many orders of magnitude more radioactive waste than a coal plant
Got a source with numbers? That's the problem with this particular discussion point: Lots of claims about this being more than that without any authoritative numbers to back it up.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. Even if there are only small amounts of radioactive material (enough to make it not "significantly enriched"), it could still be the case that when multiplied by the amount of ash released, the result is a larger amount than is produced by a nuclear reactor of the same size.
I don't know if it is, but it's possible. I'd like to see numbers.
It's because the tool itself would need to be DRM-locked if you wanted to enforce the time expiration on the intended recipient.
You'd also have to ensure that there's no way to retrieve the key without the tool. That doesn't seem to be a goal of this research, which is my point.
The Atom can only barely play higher-quality youtube videos. Any little thing will tip it over the edge. I agree that it is only a minor impact for most users. But Atoms are a different case.
You should actually try it. I have an OLPC XO-1 (with a Geode processor -- even slower than the Atom) and full-disk encryption makes no detectable difference in performance.
What you're missing is the fact that symmetric ciphers, which are actually what the bulk encryption is done with, are very fast. Even low-end processors are typically able to encrypt/decrypt *many* times faster than they can read or write data to disk/flash. And, actually, there shouldn't be any storage I/O involved in playing a youtube video, so even if full-disk encryption were slow, it wouldn't cause a problem with that.
I see someone has tagged this article with "drm", but this isn't a usable technique for DRM. This is an interesting technique for creating a "disappearing" decryption key, but it only works if no one bothers to retrieve/reassemble the decryption key before it disappears. If the recipient retrieves the key while it still exists, he can save the key and decrypt the message at any time. Or he can retrieve the key, decrypt the message and save that.
The most obvious application for this, I think, is forward security. As long as the recipient doesn't save a copy of the decrypted message or the decryption key, the message would become unreadable -- to anyone -- after a short period of time. I need to read the details to see if this would be useful in some real-world setting, or if it's of academic interest only.
Yes. Read the GP's post. He was decrying classes that required him to spend time working with others who he didn't perceive as up to his standards -- completely missing the GGP's point. I was reinforcing the GGP's point, that it's a good thing to learn to explain to work with others who don't think the same way you do, and a valuable skill you may acquire during your schooling.
If, on the other hand, you're paying good money, you shouldn't have to cater to other peoples' needs in a learning environment. What if, the next time the class is offered, all the students are of an extremely high caliber? Should my money be worth less education because of the random luck of the draw as to what students are in my class?
So you're saying the school should ensure there are some slower students in the class so you can get full value, and learn the skill of explaining things?
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
True for business use, but for home users there's another category:
1.5. If you lose this data, you'll have lost irreplaceable records of important life events.
Much of my kids' lives is chronicled in bits stored on hard drives. Photos, video, school work (you might be surprised how interesting a 4th grade paper can be years later), etc. This data is significantly more important to me than business data, and there are many gigabytes.
My solution is peer-to-peer backup. Most everyone has extra disk space they're not using, and if they don't, well, a 1TB drive is $60 on newegg. So, I've set up a "storage grid" with my family members using the allmydata.org Tahoe network. Tahoe encrypts every file with 128-bit AES, splits each via Reed-Solomon encoding into six pieces, any three of which are sufficient to restore the file, and spreads those pieces around other machines, all of which are off-site.
Because Tahoe's backup facilities are a little primitive, I'm writing my own backup solution, called GridBackup, which separates file change detection and upload, because upload is inherently slow on typical ADSL/Cable Internet connections. GridBackup also compresses whatever can be compressed and uses rsync-style signatures and deltas to upload diffs for small file changes. Uploading is done in priority order, where the default priority algorithm favors user files over system files, small files over large files (on the theory that if you have to pick, it's better to back up many small files than a few large ones), and recently-modified files over long-unchanged files (on the theory that long-unchanged files are likely to stay unchanged for a while longer).
Sometimes when I'm trying to handhold a shot and I have to use a shutter speed that's a little too slow (meaning small shakes of my hands cause blur), I put the camera in continuous mode and mash the button for 2-3 seconds, collecting 10-15 images of almost exactly the same image -- but some of them will come out less shaky and significantly sharper than others.
In post-processing, I could manually compare them one by one to find the sharpest, but it's much quicker and easier to look at the file sizes. Having done this a few hundred times, I now no longer even bother examining the images visually at 1:1 zoom, because in the many that I did check carefully, file size was always an accurate indicator. This is true with both JPEG files and CR2 (losslessly-compressed RAW files).
Normally stores will not press the issue due to fear of litigation. But if they wanted to there are certain procedures they can do to arrest shoplifters.
Not in my state (Utah) or, as I understand it, in most states.
Utah's laws are pretty typical in this regard. They can detain you, but only if they have specific probable cause to believe you stole something. Basically, they had to see you do it. Otherwise they have no authority to stop you. You're right that the fourth amendment doesn't apply, but laws against unlawful detention and kidnapping do, and if they hold you without justifiable cause that's exactly what they're doing and you can press charges against them.
Look up your own state's legal code and I'll bet you find it's very similar.
Unfortunately it is not the same- we know none of the technical details of what was done with the UK works
Unless there is some evidence that the photographer added his own expression to the works, the technical details are irrelevant. Assuming the photographer did a good job, there is no copyright under US law.
not to mention the UK work was done in- the UK.
Also irrelevant to allegedly infringing activities that took place in the US and are subject to US law.
A photographer lighting artwork may (and this comes from experience) spend hours trying to get all the nuances of the painting recorded properly. What would you say if the photographer had to take 9 consecutive images at different exposures and merge them all into a HDR-type image, then spend hours rendering it down to sRGB to view correctly on the screen. Brush strokes can reflect light- perhaps he had to cross-polarize shots carefully.
If all of that work was done in order to capture the painting with maximum fidelity to the original, then there is no copyright.
Copyright is not related to effort, it's related to creativity. In this case, that means that a photographer who shoots from some interesting angle or employs some unusual lighting or other techniques to try to add his own interpretation to the original painting would have a copyright interest. But the harder the photographer works to remove his own expression from the resulting image, the less copyright can accrue. So in your example, the photographer would have more copyright protection if he did less work, or if he failed in his effort to faithfully reproduce the original.
Indeed. I didn't read carefully enough to notice that the "shenanigans" comment was addressed specifically at the issue of the information release.
I don't know enough to have an opinion on that. All I can say is that based on their other behavior it would not be at all surprising if this request were unjustifiable. While past (and ongoing) misdeeds aren't an indictment regarding a specific, separate question, they do guide expectations.
But the question is whether the RIAA, by requesting that their information be protected, are engaged in "shenanigans." Are they doing something they have no right to do?
Many things. The ones that come to my mind (and I haven't even followed it closely) are (1) illegally joining unrelated cases, (2) using really shoddy "evidence", (3) intentionally targeting people with little to no ability to defend themselves, and (4) dropping rapidly any suits against people who *do* turn out to have the ability to defend themselves.
Without Windows, organized crime might have had a lot more trouble bootstrapping themselves to the level of profit required to maintain their organized attack. Half a clue on Microsoft's part would have increased the cost ten fold on recruiting a bot to a bot net. Would it still have made enough profit to involve organized crime? Now we'll never know. The one group where I wish MS had cut off the air supply, they didn't. Not a direct competitor. Morally, more like an ally.
MS has gotten better, in many ways. And some of their earliest shenanigans were just competition-as-usual, but there came a time in between when they were a sufficiently-dominant monopoly that their competitive approach became abusive, but they got away with it.
You're right, though, that these days Microsoft doesn't strike terror into the heart of startups, because they're wary enough of anti-trust issues that they play fair. These days it's a good thing to have Microsoft looking at your startup, as long as you're not infringing their patents or something.
In many cases it was ruthless and unfair, but in many cases they won by actually producing better products. I remember when copy / paste of rich content between independent applications seemed like magic - and anyone could do it.
Other operating systems did it first (like NeXTstep, which had rich, interactive content copy and paste working in the late 80s), and better -- COM and DCOM were (are) *horrible* APIs, terrible to work with, and created by MS in spite of there being an existing, open standard to do the same thing more flexibly and more robustly (SOM and DSOM/CORBA).
Yes, Microsoft brought it to the masses, years later, poorly implemented and non-standard to ensure lock-in.
Your example is a good one that exactly supports my point. Microsoft managed to conceal from the masses the existence of great features for years, until they got around to creating their own half-assed implementations, which they then sold as "innovation" and "progress".
The only thing Microsoft really got right was the thing that IBM did for them (to IBM's chagrin): commodity hardware. Thanks to IBM and Compaq, Microsoft's "platform" was ubiquitous, and so was Microsoft's name. That plus ruthless business tactics and aggressive marketing allowed them to maintain their dominant position in spite of the fact that they were always years behind technologically. And even more, those same tactics and marketing allowed them to conceal their retardation of progress from the less-technical world.
It's not that this is a really big deal for me. It's just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had all sorts of trouble with Comcast of late, and this just pushed me over the edge. I've been very, very close ever since they started blocking outbound SMTP connections (yeah, I can and do use the SMTP submission port for sending e-mail, but how am I supposed to monitor my remote SMTP servers from home?).
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
I read two main comparisons in that article:
From that, I have to conclude that comparing plants with similar output, a nuclear reactor produces more radioactive waste than a coal plant releases. Of course, the nuclear waste is controlled, not pumped into the atmosphere, and if recycled through a breeder reactor can still produce much, much more power, so I still think nuclear is far better for the environment overall, but this particular comparison doesn't hold the weight I hoped it did.
Thanks for the link.
The nuclear plant creates many orders of magnitude more radioactive waste than a coal plant
Got a source with numbers? That's the problem with this particular discussion point: Lots of claims about this being more than that without any authoritative numbers to back it up.
The USGS says that this claim is not true and that "The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks."
That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. Even if there are only small amounts of radioactive material (enough to make it not "significantly enriched"), it could still be the case that when multiplied by the amount of ash released, the result is a larger amount than is produced by a nuclear reactor of the same size.
I don't know if it is, but it's possible. I'd like to see numbers.
A nuclear plant also produces less radioactive waste than does a corresponding coal plant.
Cite?
I've seen this claim many times, and I'd like it to be true, but I've never seen a trustworthy source with hard numbers to back it up.
It's because the tool itself would need to be DRM-locked if you wanted to enforce the time expiration on the intended recipient.
You'd also have to ensure that there's no way to retrieve the key without the tool. That doesn't seem to be a goal of this research, which is my point.
The Atom can only barely play higher-quality youtube videos. Any little thing will tip it over the edge. I agree that it is only a minor impact for most users. But Atoms are a different case.
You should actually try it. I have an OLPC XO-1 (with a Geode processor -- even slower than the Atom) and full-disk encryption makes no detectable difference in performance.
What you're missing is the fact that symmetric ciphers, which are actually what the bulk encryption is done with, are very fast. Even low-end processors are typically able to encrypt/decrypt *many* times faster than they can read or write data to disk/flash. And, actually, there shouldn't be any storage I/O involved in playing a youtube video, so even if full-disk encryption were slow, it wouldn't cause a problem with that.
I see someone has tagged this article with "drm", but this isn't a usable technique for DRM. This is an interesting technique for creating a "disappearing" decryption key, but it only works if no one bothers to retrieve/reassemble the decryption key before it disappears. If the recipient retrieves the key while it still exists, he can save the key and decrypt the message at any time. Or he can retrieve the key, decrypt the message and save that. The most obvious application for this, I think, is forward security. As long as the recipient doesn't save a copy of the decrypted message or the decryption key, the message would become unreadable -- to anyone -- after a short period of time. I need to read the details to see if this would be useful in some real-world setting, or if it's of academic interest only.
Yes. Read the GP's post. He was decrying classes that required him to spend time working with others who he didn't perceive as up to his standards -- completely missing the GGP's point. I was reinforcing the GGP's point, that it's a good thing to learn to explain to work with others who don't think the same way you do, and a valuable skill you may acquire during your schooling.
If, on the other hand, you're paying good money, you shouldn't have to cater to other peoples' needs in a learning environment. What if, the next time the class is offered, all the students are of an extremely high caliber? Should my money be worth less education because of the random luck of the draw as to what students are in my class?
So you're saying the school should ensure there are some slower students in the class so you can get full value, and learn the skill of explaining things?
There are three kinds of data:
1. If you lose this data you will go to jail.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
True for business use, but for home users there's another category:
1.5. If you lose this data, you'll have lost irreplaceable records of important life events.
Much of my kids' lives is chronicled in bits stored on hard drives. Photos, video, school work (you might be surprised how interesting a 4th grade paper can be years later), etc. This data is significantly more important to me than business data, and there are many gigabytes.
My solution is peer-to-peer backup. Most everyone has extra disk space they're not using, and if they don't, well, a 1TB drive is $60 on newegg. So, I've set up a "storage grid" with my family members using the allmydata.org Tahoe network. Tahoe encrypts every file with 128-bit AES, splits each via Reed-Solomon encoding into six pieces, any three of which are sufficient to restore the file, and spreads those pieces around other machines, all of which are off-site.
Because Tahoe's backup facilities are a little primitive, I'm writing my own backup solution, called GridBackup, which separates file change detection and upload, because upload is inherently slow on typical ADSL/Cable Internet connections. GridBackup also compresses whatever can be compressed and uses rsync-style signatures and deltas to upload diffs for small file changes. Uploading is done in priority order, where the default priority algorithm favors user files over system files, small files over large files (on the theory that if you have to pick, it's better to back up many small files than a few large ones), and recently-modified files over long-unchanged files (on the theory that long-unchanged files are likely to stay unchanged for a while longer).
Average human intelligence really does sit in the middle, and most people are average.
Most people are within one standard deviation of the mean. Relatively few people are precisely at the mean.
File size doesn't tell you anything.
I use it all the time, and it works really well.
Sometimes when I'm trying to handhold a shot and I have to use a shutter speed that's a little too slow (meaning small shakes of my hands cause blur), I put the camera in continuous mode and mash the button for 2-3 seconds, collecting 10-15 images of almost exactly the same image -- but some of them will come out less shaky and significantly sharper than others.
In post-processing, I could manually compare them one by one to find the sharpest, but it's much quicker and easier to look at the file sizes. Having done this a few hundred times, I now no longer even bother examining the images visually at 1:1 zoom, because in the many that I did check carefully, file size was always an accurate indicator. This is true with both JPEG files and CR2 (losslessly-compressed RAW files).
I'm sure the key storage chip can be made just as difficult to reverse-engineer as a custom encryption chip.
The chip they're trying to reverse engineer *IS* the key storage chip.
He was a bigshot lawyer on tee vee. 'Course he's got millions.
Sorry. I didn't specify that I'm Canadian, so your mickey mouse laws don't apply to me.
If you lose visual on a shoplifter, you can't persue the offence.
That's pretty much what the laws in most states say as well.
Normally stores will not press the issue due to fear of litigation. But if they wanted to there are certain procedures they can do to arrest shoplifters.
Not in my state (Utah) or, as I understand it, in most states.
Utah's laws are pretty typical in this regard. They can detain you, but only if they have specific probable cause to believe you stole something. Basically, they had to see you do it. Otherwise they have no authority to stop you. You're right that the fourth amendment doesn't apply, but laws against unlawful detention and kidnapping do, and if they hold you without justifiable cause that's exactly what they're doing and you can press charges against them.
Look up your own state's legal code and I'll bet you find it's very similar.
Unfortunately it is not the same- we know none of the technical details of what was done with the UK works
Unless there is some evidence that the photographer added his own expression to the works, the technical details are irrelevant. Assuming the photographer did a good job, there is no copyright under US law.
not to mention the UK work was done in- the UK.
Also irrelevant to allegedly infringing activities that took place in the US and are subject to US law.
A photographer lighting artwork may (and this comes from experience) spend hours trying to get all the nuances of the painting recorded properly. What would you say if the photographer had to take 9 consecutive images at different exposures and merge them all into a HDR-type image, then spend hours rendering it down to sRGB to view correctly on the screen. Brush strokes can reflect light- perhaps he had to cross-polarize shots carefully.
If all of that work was done in order to capture the painting with maximum fidelity to the original, then there is no copyright.
Copyright is not related to effort, it's related to creativity. In this case, that means that a photographer who shoots from some interesting angle or employs some unusual lighting or other techniques to try to add his own interpretation to the original painting would have a copyright interest. But the harder the photographer works to remove his own expression from the resulting image, the less copyright can accrue. So in your example, the photographer would have more copyright protection if he did less work, or if he failed in his effort to faithfully reproduce the original.
Indeed. I didn't read carefully enough to notice that the "shenanigans" comment was addressed specifically at the issue of the information release.
I don't know enough to have an opinion on that. All I can say is that based on their other behavior it would not be at all surprising if this request were unjustifiable. While past (and ongoing) misdeeds aren't an indictment regarding a specific, separate question, they do guide expectations.
But the question is whether the RIAA, by requesting that their information be protected, are engaged in "shenanigans." Are they doing something they have no right to do?
Many things. The ones that come to my mind (and I haven't even followed it closely) are (1) illegally joining unrelated cases, (2) using really shoddy "evidence", (3) intentionally targeting people with little to no ability to defend themselves, and (4) dropping rapidly any suits against people who *do* turn out to have the ability to defend themselves.
All of these are abuses of the legal system.
Without Windows, organized crime might have had a lot more trouble bootstrapping themselves to the level of profit required to maintain their organized attack. Half a clue on Microsoft's part would have increased the cost ten fold on recruiting a bot to a bot net. Would it still have made enough profit to involve organized crime? Now we'll never know. The one group where I wish MS had cut off the air supply, they didn't. Not a direct competitor. Morally, more like an ally.
Man, that one made me laugh out loud.
MS has gotten better, in many ways. And some of their earliest shenanigans were just competition-as-usual, but there came a time in between when they were a sufficiently-dominant monopoly that their competitive approach became abusive, but they got away with it.
You're right, though, that these days Microsoft doesn't strike terror into the heart of startups, because they're wary enough of anti-trust issues that they play fair. These days it's a good thing to have Microsoft looking at your startup, as long as you're not infringing their patents or something.
I'm semi-lucky in that I do have one other option: Qwest DSL. It's not a great option either, but it's better.
In many cases it was ruthless and unfair, but in many cases they won by actually producing better products. I remember when copy / paste of rich content between independent applications seemed like magic - and anyone could do it.
Other operating systems did it first (like NeXTstep, which had rich, interactive content copy and paste working in the late 80s), and better -- COM and DCOM were (are) *horrible* APIs, terrible to work with, and created by MS in spite of there being an existing, open standard to do the same thing more flexibly and more robustly (SOM and DSOM/CORBA).
Yes, Microsoft brought it to the masses, years later, poorly implemented and non-standard to ensure lock-in.
Your example is a good one that exactly supports my point. Microsoft managed to conceal from the masses the existence of great features for years, until they got around to creating their own half-assed implementations, which they then sold as "innovation" and "progress".
The only thing Microsoft really got right was the thing that IBM did for them (to IBM's chagrin): commodity hardware. Thanks to IBM and Compaq, Microsoft's "platform" was ubiquitous, and so was Microsoft's name. That plus ruthless business tactics and aggressive marketing allowed them to maintain their dominant position in spite of the fact that they were always years behind technologically. And even more, those same tactics and marketing allowed them to conceal their retardation of progress from the less-technical world.
It's not that this is a really big deal for me. It's just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had all sorts of trouble with Comcast of late, and this just pushed me over the edge. I've been very, very close ever since they started blocking outbound SMTP connections (yeah, I can and do use the SMTP submission port for sending e-mail, but how am I supposed to monitor my remote SMTP servers from home?).