In the end, this problem is only going to get mitigated if we take it as seriously as we did the spam problem. For a long time, ISPs would allow spammers onto their servers because there was no incentive to kick them off. RBLs changed all that.
ISPs that tolerate insecure computers need to get blocked. Blocked from everything. It COULD happen, if Comcast and AT&T both decide they've had enough.
This would have the added benefit of stopping a lot of spam.
Yes, RBLs didn't get rid of spam. But they sure did (do) help. And a good part of the reason they don't work better is botnets. (remember Blue Security?
I always thought it would be a great idea if some group (a major university, perhaps) were to fork Wikipedia and make "confirmed correct" pages that could then be used for real research. This is an interesting spin on that: not "confirmed correct" but at least "not patently wrong", and it (may) approach this goal without needing to fork. Good luck guys.
This sort of thing seems like an excellent time to use carbon nanotubes. You need a long, very strong, flexible and light cable to hold the kite. In fact, I think the cable strength and weight might be the biggest limiting factor of the thrust potential of the kite. (other then the wind availability, of course) You might even use nanotubes in the rib structure of the kite itself to keep it strong. Here's hopeing they get the price of nanotubes down soon.
Seriously. I stopped caring about it when I saw that the map didn't even bother with non SV-based MySQL. (Hm. They're not important, I guess.) Give me a break.
VNC (and their ilk) are not a very efficient way to steal passwords. Too much bandwidth, and you have to watch it in real-time...and in most cases, it wouldn't work, because passwords appear as **** on the screen.
Actually, what I do ('cause I'm lazy, and copy-paste gets to be too much work) is I type about half of the password, and copy-paste the rest. So at this point someone would need a keystroke logger and a VNC client running at the same time to sniff my passwords. An unlikely scenario, unless someone is specifically targeting you and knows which terminals you frequent. And if you're that important, then you are rich enough to get a laptop.;)
When I'm on a public terminal I always open up a notepad-like application and then type all the letters in the alphabet into it. After that, when I'm typing a password or something else sensitive, I'll copy and paste individual letters into the password field. This stops keyloggers, makes you no longer "low-hanging fruit," and should solve your problem.
Well, tidal can...I'm going to rely on the tides more then on the supply of oil...and as you guys learned very recently, the supply of gas is a big wildcard too. (actually, the reason your grid almost popped on Christmas was because of gas prices, as your article states.)
Solar towers are reliable...assuming you build them in the right places (obviously, no good for England, very good for the American Southwest. I'm too tired to do the research for you on solar tower technology...do it yourself.) The others can be reliable too, but you have to use technologies like pumped storage.
Furthermore, it only takes about 10 seconds to spin up a gas turbine in case you start to exhaust your supplies of green power. Hell, you could hook up a natural gas engine to turn to the same turbines that your solar thermal plant uses.
I appreciate that nuke is cleaner then oil or coal, but carries with it too many other burdens...and the cost (research and now production) has received more subsidies then green power. Also, your solar tower will still be around in 50 years, long after you've built and decommissioned 2 nuclear plants.
I didn't green power was easy, but at the same time, neither is nuclear. And please, don't cast greens as anti-progress, or as a bunch of nutters who want everyone to spend their days farming organic veggies. We don't want that...we want a future with clean air and a climate somewhat similar to our current.
...the problem is that humans are still going to be somewhere. And, knowing the type of people who are in charge of such things -- the sort of people who let the mistakes in that article happen -- they'd probably hire these guys.;)
Agreed...but no one is seriously looking at current PV technology for large-scale generation. PV is great for remote locations, but (currently) way too expensive for a power plant. Look into: Solar thermal, solar tower, wind, (clean)biomass, tidal, wave. Tidal is real neat too...in St. John, Canada, tide height is 13m. Imagine how much energy is available from something like that! Boggles the mind.
Well, powering 6 billion people with nuclear isn't a terribly attractive option either.
How much of our (electrical) power could we get out of the alternatives? All of it, actually. Take solar: On a clear day, insolation is about 1000 W/m2. Lets assume a 10 percent efficiency rate for converting that to electricity. (Current photovoltaic cells are more like 17 percent, but the up-front costs make PV a bad tech for large-scale. I'm thinking something like solar towers, or solar thermal)
The area of Nevada is 286,367 Km2. If you were capture the energy that reaches 1/100th of Nevada, you would generate 2,863,000,000 KW. (that's 2 TRILLIAN.) Take it down with our assumed efficiency of 10 percent, and you get 283 billion KW (283 GW) of electricity.
Not bad. Make it 1/10th of Nevada, and you've overshot current production by a factor of 2.8 (or so).
Of course, in the real world, you'd spread the generation out across the states, keep gas turbines as a backup, and use pumped storage to overcome rough spots (or hydrogen, if you must, even though it's much less efficient.)
The other neat thing about alt energy is that while the initial investment is high, it never needs to be refueled. It really makes a lot more economic sense then natural gas, nuke or oil. (and coal, if you take into account things like health care costs and other environmental problems.) The trick is to get the players to look at it as a 40-year investment, rather then a 20-year.
I used to be a big fan of nuclear power. But then I did some research.
1) It's not cost efficient, even when compared to wind.
2) It's dangerous. (That's a really good article, by the way. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on this Slashdot story.)
We really need to look toward alternatives (wind, solar-thermal, solar tower, wave, tidal, biomass...) if we intend to keep consuming power at current rates. (alternatives are also great for generating hydrogen, because the hydrogen can be a storage medium to account for the unreliability of sources like wind.)
I love that the best source you could find is the conservative propaganda-tank Heritage foundation.
Oh, and read the lead of the article you quoted: The contributions are voluntary, only 10 percent of the employees are giving them, and the only role the state had was to deduct more dues then they normally would.
Try again, except next time use facts from an actual news organization, not a propaganda machine.
I won't bother with the rest of your comments, except to let you know that you're compleatly wrong about the political thing (I work for a labor union, and I know the hoops we go through to make sure that no agency fee money goes to anything even remotely political, and that no dues money goes to political ads, etc...so I'm going to trust my experience over your venom.), and to inform you that, in fact, most union members voted for the union. That's how it got there in the first place. In fact, the union can be voted out at any time with a simple majority. The workers do decide. You just don't like their choice.
I'm not going to cover most of your arguments (the NRA/sexual harrasment analogy doesn't make any sense, and you need to look real closely at the definition of democracy). However, I will talk about a couple of them. You missunderstand the term "free rider." In this case, the free rider is the person who gets the benefit from a union contract, but refuses to pay the union dues that support that contract. Union securty clauses in contracts are the only effective way to prevent free-riding. Unions are non-profit organizations; your money goes to pay the wages of the people who negotiate and defend the contract. Finally, in the US, DUES MONEY CAN'T GO TO POLITICAL CANDIDATES. I can't be more clear about that. It's already illegal, it doesn't happen. When you see union political ads, they are funded by the union's PAC, which is funded through volentary contributions.
You don't have to be a member of the union, but you do need to pay agency fee dues. It's a simple system, you pay only for money that goes directly for contract negotiation or dealing with grievances. That's true everywhere in the country.
All Unions in the US are democratic. It's the law. If you think the leadership is bad (and in some cases, it really is), then vote the bums out.
Oh, and there are PLENTY of jobs in education that are non-represented. Work for a private school. Work in special education. You won't make as much money, or be treated as well. Deal with it; that's the life you choose when you don't have a union.
Oh really? So...if you don't like the union, then vote with your feet! Take another job. It's absolutely free enterprise: the "closed shop" only exists because the employer signed an agreement that they would fire anyone who doesn't pay the organization that negotiated their contract.
Union security clauses in contracts just prevent free riders: in states where these clauses are illegal (talk about elimination of freedom of contract!) what usually happens is that a bunch of employees decide they want the benefits of the union (much higher wages) without paying the people who work at the union to provide these benefits.
Don't want to pay for union representation? That's fine! Go work for a company that is non-union. Don't want to do that because the wages suck? Hmm.
-Daniel
P.S. All unions in the USA are democratic, by law. So if the majority of people under the contract want to get rid of it, it's gone. Also, in the USA, there is actually no such thing as a closed shop. Google "Union Agency Fee" for more information.
Well, that's a terrible idea...but they could just drop the domain name of any company that sues them from their database. That would mean an instant end to all lawsuits.
You're dumb (or working for them) if you think linking to a page sponsored by corporations (likely McDonalds, though nothing can be proven because there is no disclosure requirements) proves anything about SuperSize me. Really, really, really, really, really, really dumb. Oh, and you most likely didn't get the movie.
Have you tried db.*? It's based on the Raima database engine, but is now free and open source for open-source platforms. (The odd license is very mozilla-like and is the legal result of some odd buy-outs during the peak of the bubble.) I'd be interested to hear how you like it. danielh at ittia.com is my work address.
Well, there is db.* from ITTIA, in which the developer can choose to mix and match between relational and network-model databases, depending on the need. This allows for him/her to optimize more frequently-accessed data for faster access, and allows for the ease-of-use of relational databases for the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
...except when Enron controls your 401K...
Exactly!
ISPs that tolerate insecure computers need to get blocked. Blocked from everything. It COULD happen, if Comcast and AT&T both decide they've had enough.
This would have the added benefit of stopping a lot of spam.
Yes, RBLs didn't get rid of spam. But they sure did (do) help. And a good part of the reason they don't work better is botnets. (remember Blue Security?
-Daniel
I always thought it would be a great idea if some group (a major university, perhaps) were to fork Wikipedia and make "confirmed correct" pages that could then be used for real research. This is an interesting spin on that: not "confirmed correct" but at least "not patently wrong", and it (may) approach this goal without needing to fork. Good luck guys.
This sort of thing seems like an excellent time to use carbon nanotubes. You need a long, very strong, flexible and light cable to hold the kite. In fact, I think the cable strength and weight might be the biggest limiting factor of the thrust potential of the kite. (other then the wind availability, of course) You might even use nanotubes in the rib structure of the kite itself to keep it strong. Here's hopeing they get the price of nanotubes down soon.
-Daniel
Um....your stall speed is lower when you're in ground effect. (the ground interrupts the formation of downwash or wingtip vortices) That story makes no sense. You went to flight school? Yikes.
Seriously. I stopped caring about it when I saw that the map didn't even bother with non SV-based MySQL. (Hm. They're not important, I guess.) Give me a break.
VNC (and their ilk) are not a very efficient way to steal passwords. Too much bandwidth, and you have to watch it in real-time...and in most cases, it wouldn't work, because passwords appear as **** on the screen.
;)
Actually, what I do ('cause I'm lazy, and copy-paste gets to be too much work) is I type about half of the password, and copy-paste the rest. So at this point someone would need a keystroke logger and a VNC client running at the same time to sniff my passwords. An unlikely scenario, unless someone is specifically targeting you and knows which terminals you frequent. And if you're that important, then you are rich enough to get a laptop.
-Daniel
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy.
Well, tidal can...I'm going to rely on the tides more then on the supply of oil...and as you guys learned very recently, the supply of gas is a big wildcard too. (actually, the reason your grid almost popped on Christmas was because of gas prices, as your article states.)
Solar towers are reliable...assuming you build them in the right places (obviously, no good for England, very good for the American Southwest. I'm too tired to do the research for you on solar tower technology...do it yourself.) The others can be reliable too, but you have to use technologies like pumped storage.
Furthermore, it only takes about 10 seconds to spin up a gas turbine in case you start to exhaust your supplies of green power. Hell, you could hook up a natural gas engine to turn to the same turbines that your solar thermal plant uses.
I appreciate that nuke is cleaner then oil or coal, but carries with it too many other burdens...and the cost (research and now production) has received more subsidies then green power. Also, your solar tower will still be around in 50 years, long after you've built and decommissioned 2 nuclear plants.
I didn't green power was easy, but at the same time, neither is nuclear. And please, don't cast greens as anti-progress, or as a bunch of nutters who want everyone to spend their days farming organic veggies. We don't want that...we want a future with clean air and a climate somewhat similar to our current.
-Daniel
-Daniel
Agreed...but no one is seriously looking at current PV technology for large-scale generation. PV is great for remote locations, but (currently) way too expensive for a power plant.
Look into: Solar thermal, solar tower, wind, (clean)biomass, tidal, wave. Tidal is real neat too...in St. John, Canada, tide height is 13m. Imagine how much energy is available from something like that! Boggles the mind.
-Daniel
Well, powering 6 billion people with nuclear isn't a terribly attractive option either.
_ sum.html).
How much of our (electrical) power could we get out of the alternatives? All of it, actually. Take solar: On a clear day, insolation is about 1000 W/m2. Lets assume a 10 percent efficiency rate for converting that to electricity. (Current photovoltaic cells are more like 17 percent, but the up-front costs make PV a bad tech for large-scale. I'm thinking something like solar towers, or solar thermal)
The area of Nevada is 286,367 Km2. If you were capture the energy that reaches 1/100th of Nevada, you would generate 2,863,000,000 KW. (that's 2 TRILLIAN.) Take it down with our assumed efficiency of 10 percent, and you get 283 billion KW (283 GW) of electricity.
Total power generation capacity in the US = 963 GW (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa
Not bad. Make it 1/10th of Nevada, and you've overshot current production by a factor of 2.8 (or so).
Of course, in the real world, you'd spread the generation out across the states, keep gas turbines as a backup, and use pumped storage to overcome rough spots (or hydrogen, if you must, even though it's much less efficient.)
The other neat thing about alt energy is that while the initial investment is high, it never needs to be refueled. It really makes a lot more economic sense then natural gas, nuke or oil. (and coal, if you take into account things like health care costs and other environmental problems.) The trick is to get the players to look at it as a 40-year investment, rather then a 20-year.
-Daniel
1) It's not cost efficient, even when compared to wind.
2) It's dangerous. (That's a really good article, by the way. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on this Slashdot story.)
We really need to look toward alternatives (wind, solar-thermal, solar tower, wave, tidal, biomass...) if we intend to keep consuming power at current rates. (alternatives are also great for generating hydrogen, because the hydrogen can be a storage medium to account for the unreliability of sources like wind.)
-Daniel
Large molecule on molecule action? Man, and I thought I had seen all the fetishes.
-Daniel
I love that the best source you could find is the conservative propaganda-tank Heritage foundation.
Oh, and read the lead of the article you quoted: The contributions are voluntary, only 10 percent of the employees are giving them, and the only role the state had was to deduct more dues then they normally would.
Try again, except next time use facts from an actual news organization, not a propaganda machine.
-Daniel
You're cute.
I won't bother with the rest of your comments, except to let you know that you're compleatly wrong about the political thing (I work for a labor union, and I know the hoops we go through to make sure that no agency fee money goes to anything even remotely political, and that no dues money goes to political ads, etc...so I'm going to trust my experience over your venom.), and to inform you that, in fact, most union members voted for the union. That's how it got there in the first place. In fact, the union can be voted out at any time with a simple majority. The workers do decide. You just don't like their choice.
-Daniel
I'm not going to cover most of your arguments (the NRA/sexual harrasment analogy doesn't make any sense, and you need to look real closely at the definition of democracy).
However, I will talk about a couple of them.
You missunderstand the term "free rider." In this case, the free rider is the person who gets the benefit from a union contract, but refuses to pay the union dues that support that contract. Union securty clauses in contracts are the only effective way to prevent free-riding.
Unions are non-profit organizations; your money goes to pay the wages of the people who negotiate and defend the contract.
Finally, in the US, DUES MONEY CAN'T GO TO POLITICAL CANDIDATES. I can't be more clear about that. It's already illegal, it doesn't happen. When you see union political ads, they are funded by the union's PAC, which is funded through volentary contributions.
-Daniel
You don't have to be a member of the union, but you do need to pay agency fee dues. It's a simple system, you pay only for money that goes directly for contract negotiation or dealing with grievances. That's true everywhere in the country.
All Unions in the US are democratic. It's the law. If you think the leadership is bad (and in some cases, it really is), then vote the bums out.
Oh, and there are PLENTY of jobs in education that are non-represented. Work for a private school. Work in special education. You won't make as much money, or be treated as well. Deal with it; that's the life you choose when you don't have a union.
-Daniel
Oh really? So...if you don't like the union, then vote with your feet! Take another job. It's absolutely free enterprise: the "closed shop" only exists because the employer signed an agreement that they would fire anyone who doesn't pay the organization that negotiated their contract.
Union security clauses in contracts just prevent free riders: in states where these clauses are illegal (talk about elimination of freedom of contract!) what usually happens is that a bunch of employees decide they want the benefits of the union (much higher wages) without paying the people who work at the union to provide these benefits.
Don't want to pay for union representation? That's fine! Go work for a company that is non-union. Don't want to do that because the wages suck? Hmm.
-Daniel
P.S. All unions in the USA are democratic, by law. So if the majority of people under the contract want to get rid of it, it's gone.
Also, in the USA, there is actually no such thing as a closed shop. Google "Union Agency Fee" for more information.
Well, that's a terrible idea...but they could just drop the domain name of any company that sues them from their database. That would mean an instant end to all lawsuits.
-Daniel
-Daniel
-Daniel
-Daniel
Well, Aussies usually get bad service beacause Aussies don't tip for crap.
Yay racial profiling! Of course, it sounds like you fullfiled everyone's expectations.
-Daniel