I've worked at a couple of companies that have sent out mass emails like this. My guess is that 1% of employees are stupid enough to hit "reply all" when requesting being removed from the email thread.
I seriously doubt that only 120 people in the NHS have hit reply all. My guess is that there will eventually be a few thousand who do this. That's assuming the NHS has above average intelligence employees.
Keystone would connected Canadian oil to the US gulf coast refineries. Please look at a map. The fastest way to China is across the pacific ocean and Canada has much easier access to the pacific without going through the USA.
We should have banned the use of MMT. Banning the import unfairly hurts a US company. This was the government of Canada just being stupid.
Looking at the other small claims. One of the claims is for under a million dollars. Maybe it was fair maybe it wasn't. The $15 Million dollar award for the Hamilton Quary would have been won in Ontario provincial court. The other smaller claims the verdicts were fair. The PCB export case should never have gone to court. When Canada was negotiating the treaty banning export of PCB we should have made a provision for moving it into the USA (it's safer than shipping it 1000s of km across Canada).
Lastly the bulk of the money is in the $130 million dollar AbitibiBowater case. But the dispute was never over $130 million dollars. It was over what fair value for the timber and water rights was. AbitibiBowater wanted $500 million for the rights. The province tried not to pay anything and didn't want to pay much more than $100 million. I'm not sure how this was a loss for Canada but if it was maybe you could count it as $30 million. i.e. how much more New Foundland paid than what they wanted to pay.
Soft wood lumber - Canadian producers have won every fight against American duties on it and yet the duties still exist and the Canadian logging companies have seen no compensation.
Canada has 35 Million people, the EU 500 million. There was no way Canada was going to enter an agreement with a partner so much larger unless we had a complaint resolution process with a little more teeth.
I have no idea who put the 3 strikes and other IP rights into the deal. No Canadian government would ever enforce such laws and stay in office.
Companies can buy aggregated credit scores that is aggregated basically really only at the street level between two intersections. These companies then mail out coupons or special offers to only the streets they care about. So they don't discriminate against who takes them up on the coupon, special credit card, mortgage rate or what ever else because they don't have to. The people they want to discriminate against never knew about the offer in the first place.
Pager is unencrypted and unauthenticated. It is trivial to spoof the messages. Pager also suffers from undetected bit errors. In my testing we had a 0.4% chance per message of a single bit error.
There are several hospitals in Eastern Ontario that use pager for patient room transfers. Watching the pager messages you can see who is being moved and between which rooms. While this is a big privacy problem I'm also concerned that the bit errors have caused patients to be sent to the wrong room.
I don't think you understand the concepts of Realtime Traffic and a file download? VoIP generates a small amount of traffic that is time sensitive. A file transfer is a large amount of data. If file transfers have no constraints other than the first hop to the ISP the file transfer will try and move the file as fast as it can (infinite bandwidth). Now a couple of hops down in the ISP infrastructure all this file transfer data and VoIP traffic are mixed together. If a router now has to drop a packet how does it choose?
ISPs should be allowed QOS
What they shouldn't be allowed is to favour traffic based on who owns it. They shouldn't be able to have their own streaming service that doesn't count towards your data cap, or their own phone service that has higher quality.
Two things you have wrong here but I think the you are looking at this like an American. As a society we want to have women participate in the work force. As a society we want parents to take time off to raise children. So as a society we decide that overall we are better off if some companies are inconvenienced by having women take time off and prioritizing their children. We are taxing companies in a way because we think it is overall beneficial to all of us.
Second, and I did stats at a credit bureau, there are two sets of factors that determine a persons credit worthiness. Who they are, their education, back ground, sex, parents income level etc. and what they have done, number of late payments, salary, debts, etc. If you are scoring credit for an entire country you are as a developer better off to score only on the second group of factors otherwise the scores become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I have access to all their books through work and I find reading the dead tree version of their books much easier on my eyes. I will read one or two chapters and then end up buying the book. If only one or two percent of the people who take advantage of this are like me O'Reilly does well. As for the people who torrents and other ways of getting the books for free, O'Reilly knows they aren't going to get a penny from those people today. 10 years from now when those people have good paying jobs they will remember O'Reilly and some fraction will spend the money.
Whoa, don't let everyone know that. The US government first pretended the constitution didn't apply to black people, then to foreigners, next it was convicts, then it was anyone who happened too be to poor to hire a lawyer and lastly anyone the government decided was thought to be a terrorist.
But I'm sure the constitution will always apply to my white males friends so I'm not worried.
(I'm just staying safe up here in Canada and letting the USA act as a cautionary tale for us remaining democracies)
A good password is hard for a computer to guess and easy for a human to remember and enter. That is the only metric we should be using for passwords. Screw the 100 different sites and work logins that expect me to have a different password for each. I have a couple of sites that I value enough to use secure passwords on, the rest Password1! is good enough.
Work policies that require 8 characters, 1 upper, 1 lower, a number, a symbol and change every 3 months are guaranteed to result in everyone eventually adopting
Common1! where Common is any common 6 letter word and the number 1 increments every 3 months.
I would love to have the ISPs do QoS based on protocol and other metrics other than source/destination. Think about it, if there is congestion would you rather :
your Skype call stutter or your download of a movie take an extra few seconds.
your minecraft swing be delayed by 2/10 of a second or a web page add take 1 second longer to load
Unfortunately do I trust most ISPs to not game this to their own ends?
The software was likely left on a staging server that got disconnected or forgotten about so the NSA was unable to delete it. The NSA doesn't launch attacks from Virginia so they would likely keep their tools close (hop and latency wise) to their target.
What drives me insane is companies that think their website is important enough to me that I will memorize a unique, secure password for their site. I don't care about most websites I visit so Password1 is good enough.
And companies should stop having people constantly change their passwords. The first time an employee will try and pick a good password, the second time they will say fu#k it and just use Commonword1! and then increment the number every 3 months.
I love Schneier as much as the next guy but he was wrong and Munroe was right. Look at Schneier's examples of secure passwords. They are hell to type and moderately hard to remember. Munroe's example had 44 bits of entropy. The entropy in Schneier's "Wow...doestcst" is harder to measure but I would put it at under 55 bits (expression, three dots, word, 4 characters). If I wanted 55 bits or 66 bits of security I would rather use Munroe's method and extend it to 5 or 6 words.
Get rid of ASN.1 ?? Heaven forbid we have a standard that explicitly states the sizes of fields and makes it easy for computers to tokenize data. I want more html and human readable text standards so I can worry every night about cross-site scripting and other vulnerabilities they cause.
Some of us old people actually want to have some fighting chance to make our systems secure.
This is a very important area of study and will tell us a lot about our future.
There are 4 broad possibilities:
1) The galaxy is teaming with advanced intelligent life and we just can't detect it.
2) There are not many earth like planets
3) On any given earth like planet the probability of intelligent life evolving is extremely small
4) Intelligent life never leaves its home world and doesn't last very long.
4 is looking like the most likely answer to the Fermi's paradox.
1 seems unlikely. If we increase our energy consumption at just 0.1% a year for part of the next million years we would be pretty easy to spot. 2 is looking very unlikely, we see planets everywhere we are able to look. If 3 is also incorrect we had better start being very careful about what we do because the chances of us lasting another couple thousand years would be pretty small.
They will sell insurance. Suppose the wind suddenly drops or electric demand jumps at when everyone turns on their kettle after the end of an episode of East Enders. The utilities need power now and they can't wait for a coal plant to increase its out put.
So this company will drive their trains to the top of the hill and just park them there. They will then sell the right to by electricity from them for a specific price. Utilities will pay for this right even they only ever purchase the power once or twice a year.
This is how most of the North American water based electric storage systems work. Even with North American prices regularly fluctuating between $7.00/kwh and $-0.02 cents companies can't take advantage of this arbitrage because there maintenance costs are too high.
My biggest issue with groups or governments doing this is they are hiding evidence of a crime. This allows groups to sound outraged, pretend they are doing something about a problem and claim that they have reduced CP while safely ignoring that fact that they have done nothing to prevent child abuse and have quite possible made it worse.
Why does this sound like the same approach used for issues like prostitution vs rape and human trafficking or drug use vs mental health?
Another way to look at this is that it will always become economical for the utility to use battery storage before it does for for urban city individual. The utilities get killed by the swings in electricity price plus having to build out for the maximum demand for those few hours each year where every AC unit is on. The last 8% or so of a typical North American utilities capacity is only used a few hours a year. That's a huge capital expense in transmission lines, generation and switching stations. Texas utilities can potentially pay the ERCOT max of $9/kwh for electricity and the price this year in some places in NA has gone as low as $-0.02/kwh. For individuals where I live the maximum we pay is $0.24/kwh and the min is $0.15/kwh.
Bottom line - If utilities aren't rolling out batter storage then it obviously isn't viable for urban individuals.
Back of the napkin math - 2 hours to accelerate the craft
Assume 99.9% reflection, square meter sail, 4.5 GW 550nm laser and 3 grams for the entire craft. Also assume the sail can withstand 3000K temperature.
At 3000K a 1 meter square sail can radiate 4.5MW. Given 99.9% reflectivity the sail can be hit with 4.5GW of light. 4.5GW of light will give us 30N of force.
30 N on a 3g object gives us an acceleration of 10000m/s^2. To reach 0.2c the craft would need to accelerate for 6000 seconds or less than 2 hours.
Ignoring whether or not we think a government could do manage and police the algorithms, any measuremtent system for measuring websites, or corporation long term profitability or even employee performance should be kept secret otherwise it will be gamed.
One of my main frustrations when hiking is getting a decent tourist map. I want 4 things on every map - Title, scale, which way north is and a key. If the map is on a sign post a little marker saying "you are here" is also helpful. I suspect most of the people who create these maps not only haven't tried to use them but they haven't ever used a map.
If I don't plan on transporting the battery it really doesn't matter. What I care about is cost, capacity and how many charges it will hold. Where I am in Ontario the "generation cost" or the cost my supplier pays for electricity typically varies between -2 cents and 70 cents (there are extremes where it will go much higher though). Even at these differences there is no current battery that makes sense for the utilities to deploy. Even pumping water back up a reservoir doesn't make sense because of the wear on the system*.
Until we have better storage we really have 2 options if we want to use more wind or solar - bigger grid interconnects or convince people to change there consumption behaviour based on electricity generation.
*yes there are a few places water is pumped back up hill but these aren't used for generation as much as for selling insurance - I'll give you 100 kw of power for 10 minutes while you scramble to get some other form of generation online or get some steel mill to cut consumption.
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I've worked at a couple of companies that have sent out mass emails like this. My guess is that 1% of employees are stupid enough to hit "reply all" when requesting being removed from the email thread.
I seriously doubt that only 120 people in the NHS have hit reply all. My guess is that there will eventually be a few thousand who do this. That's assuming the NHS has above average intelligence employees.
Tariffs and duties were originally for revenue purposes. Up until a few hundred years ago they made up a good chunk of most countries income.
Keystone would connected Canadian oil to the US gulf coast refineries. Please look at a map. The fastest way to China is across the pacific ocean and Canada has much easier access to the pacific without going through the USA.
The Huffington post article is very misleading.
We should have banned the use of MMT. Banning the import unfairly hurts a US company. This was the government of Canada just being stupid.
Looking at the other small claims. One of the claims is for under a million dollars. Maybe it was fair maybe it wasn't. The $15 Million dollar award for the Hamilton Quary would have been won in Ontario provincial court. The other smaller claims the verdicts were fair. The PCB export case should never have gone to court. When Canada was negotiating the treaty banning export of PCB we should have made a provision for moving it into the USA (it's safer than shipping it 1000s of km across Canada).
Lastly the bulk of the money is in the $130 million dollar AbitibiBowater case. But the dispute was never over $130 million dollars. It was over what fair value for the timber and water rights was. AbitibiBowater wanted $500 million for the rights. The province tried not to pay anything and didn't want to pay much more than $100 million. I'm not sure how this was a loss for Canada but if it was maybe you could count it as $30 million. i.e. how much more New Foundland paid than what they wanted to pay.
Soft wood lumber - Canadian producers have won every fight against American duties on it and yet the duties still exist and the Canadian logging companies have seen no compensation.
Canada has 35 Million people, the EU 500 million. There was no way Canada was going to enter an agreement with a partner so much larger unless we had a complaint resolution process with a little more teeth.
I have no idea who put the 3 strikes and other IP rights into the deal. No Canadian government would ever enforce such laws and stay in office.
Companies can buy aggregated credit scores that is aggregated basically really only at the street level between two intersections. These companies then mail out coupons or special offers to only the streets they care about. So they don't discriminate against who takes them up on the coupon, special credit card, mortgage rate or what ever else because they don't have to. The people they want to discriminate against never knew about the offer in the first place.
Pager is unencrypted and unauthenticated. It is trivial to spoof the messages. Pager also suffers from undetected bit errors. In my testing we had a 0.4% chance per message of a single bit error.
There are several hospitals in Eastern Ontario that use pager for patient room transfers. Watching the pager messages you can see who is being moved and between which rooms. While this is a big privacy problem I'm also concerned that the bit errors have caused patients to be sent to the wrong room.
I don't think you understand the concepts of Realtime Traffic and a file download? VoIP generates a small amount of traffic that is time sensitive. A file transfer is a large amount of data. If file transfers have no constraints other than the first hop to the ISP the file transfer will try and move the file as fast as it can (infinite bandwidth). Now a couple of hops down in the ISP infrastructure all this file transfer data and VoIP traffic are mixed together. If a router now has to drop a packet how does it choose?
ISPs should be allowed QOS
What they shouldn't be allowed is to favour traffic based on who owns it. They shouldn't be able to have their own streaming service that doesn't count towards your data cap, or their own phone service that has higher quality.
Two things you have wrong here but I think the you are looking at this like an American. As a society we want to have women participate in the work force. As a society we want parents to take time off to raise children. So as a society we decide that overall we are better off if some companies are inconvenienced by having women take time off and prioritizing their children. We are taxing companies in a way because we think it is overall beneficial to all of us. Second, and I did stats at a credit bureau, there are two sets of factors that determine a persons credit worthiness. Who they are, their education, back ground, sex, parents income level etc. and what they have done, number of late payments, salary, debts, etc. If you are scoring credit for an entire country you are as a developer better off to score only on the second group of factors otherwise the scores become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I have access to all their books through work and I find reading the dead tree version of their books much easier on my eyes. I will read one or two chapters and then end up buying the book. If only one or two percent of the people who take advantage of this are like me O'Reilly does well. As for the people who torrents and other ways of getting the books for free, O'Reilly knows they aren't going to get a penny from those people today. 10 years from now when those people have good paying jobs they will remember O'Reilly and some fraction will spend the money.
Whoa, don't let everyone know that. The US government first pretended the constitution didn't apply to black people, then to foreigners, next it was convicts, then it was anyone who happened too be to poor to hire a lawyer and lastly anyone the government decided was thought to be a terrorist.
But I'm sure the constitution will always apply to my white males friends so I'm not worried.
(I'm just staying safe up here in Canada and letting the USA act as a cautionary tale for us remaining democracies)
A good password is hard for a computer to guess and easy for a human to remember and enter. That is the only metric we should be using for passwords. Screw the 100 different sites and work logins that expect me to have a different password for each. I have a couple of sites that I value enough to use secure passwords on, the rest Password1! is good enough.
Work policies that require 8 characters, 1 upper, 1 lower, a number, a symbol and change every 3 months are guaranteed to result in everyone eventually adopting Common1! where Common is any common 6 letter word and the number 1 increments every 3 months.
I would love to have the ISPs do QoS based on protocol and other metrics other than source/destination. Think about it, if there is congestion would you rather :
your Skype call stutter or your download of a movie take an extra few seconds.
your minecraft swing be delayed by 2/10 of a second or a web page add take 1 second longer to load
Unfortunately do I trust most ISPs to not game this to their own ends?
The software was likely left on a staging server that got disconnected or forgotten about so the NSA was unable to delete it. The NSA doesn't launch attacks from Virginia so they would likely keep their tools close (hop and latency wise) to their target.
What drives me insane is companies that think their website is important enough to me that I will memorize a unique, secure password for their site. I don't care about most websites I visit so Password1 is good enough.
And companies should stop having people constantly change their passwords. The first time an employee will try and pick a good password, the second time they will say fu#k it and just use Commonword1! and then increment the number every 3 months.
I love Schneier as much as the next guy but he was wrong and Munroe was right. Look at Schneier's examples of secure passwords. They are hell to type and moderately hard to remember. Munroe's example had 44 bits of entropy. The entropy in Schneier's "Wow...doestcst" is harder to measure but I would put it at under 55 bits (expression, three dots, word, 4 characters). If I wanted 55 bits or 66 bits of security I would rather use Munroe's method and extend it to 5 or 6 words.
Get rid of ASN.1 ?? Heaven forbid we have a standard that explicitly states the sizes of fields and makes it easy for computers to tokenize data. I want more html and human readable text standards so I can worry every night about cross-site scripting and other vulnerabilities they cause.
Some of us old people actually want to have some fighting chance to make our systems secure.
This is a very important area of study and will tell us a lot about our future.
There are 4 broad possibilities:
1) The galaxy is teaming with advanced intelligent life and we just can't detect it.
2) There are not many earth like planets
3) On any given earth like planet the probability of intelligent life evolving is extremely small
4) Intelligent life never leaves its home world and doesn't last very long.
4 is looking like the most likely answer to the Fermi's paradox.
1 seems unlikely. If we increase our energy consumption at just 0.1% a year for part of the next million years we would be pretty easy to spot. 2 is looking very unlikely, we see planets everywhere we are able to look. If 3 is also incorrect we had better start being very careful about what we do because the chances of us lasting another couple thousand years would be pretty small.
They will sell insurance. Suppose the wind suddenly drops or electric demand jumps at when everyone turns on their kettle after the end of an episode of East Enders. The utilities need power now and they can't wait for a coal plant to increase its out put.
So this company will drive their trains to the top of the hill and just park them there. They will then sell the right to by electricity from them for a specific price. Utilities will pay for this right even they only ever purchase the power once or twice a year.
This is how most of the North American water based electric storage systems work. Even with North American prices regularly fluctuating between $7.00/kwh and $-0.02 cents companies can't take advantage of this arbitrage because there maintenance costs are too high.
My biggest issue with groups or governments doing this is they are hiding evidence of a crime. This allows groups to sound outraged, pretend they are doing something about a problem and claim that they have reduced CP while safely ignoring that fact that they have done nothing to prevent child abuse and have quite possible made it worse.
Why does this sound like the same approach used for issues like prostitution vs rape and human trafficking or drug use vs mental health?
Another way to look at this is that it will always become economical for the utility to use battery storage before it does for for urban city individual. The utilities get killed by the swings in electricity price plus having to build out for the maximum demand for those few hours each year where every AC unit is on. The last 8% or so of a typical North American utilities capacity is only used a few hours a year. That's a huge capital expense in transmission lines, generation and switching stations. Texas utilities can potentially pay the ERCOT max of $9/kwh for electricity and the price this year in some places in NA has gone as low as $-0.02/kwh. For individuals where I live the maximum we pay is $0.24/kwh and the min is $0.15/kwh.
Bottom line - If utilities aren't rolling out batter storage then it obviously isn't viable for urban individuals.
Back of the napkin math - 2 hours to accelerate the craft
Assume 99.9% reflection, square meter sail, 4.5 GW 550nm laser and 3 grams for the entire craft. Also assume the sail can withstand 3000K temperature.
At 3000K a 1 meter square sail can radiate 4.5MW. Given 99.9% reflectivity the sail can be hit with 4.5GW of light. 4.5GW of light will give us 30N of force. 30 N on a 3g object gives us an acceleration of 10000m/s^2. To reach 0.2c the craft would need to accelerate for 6000 seconds or less than 2 hours.
Ignoring whether or not we think a government could do manage and police the algorithms, any measuremtent system for measuring websites, or corporation long term profitability or even employee performance should be kept secret otherwise it will be gamed.
One of my main frustrations when hiking is getting a decent tourist map. I want 4 things on every map - Title, scale, which way north is and a key. If the map is on a sign post a little marker saying "you are here" is also helpful. I suspect most of the people who create these maps not only haven't tried to use them but they haven't ever used a map.
If I don't plan on transporting the battery it really doesn't matter. What I care about is cost, capacity and how many charges it will hold. Where I am in Ontario the "generation cost" or the cost my supplier pays for electricity typically varies between -2 cents and 70 cents (there are extremes where it will go much higher though). Even at these differences there is no current battery that makes sense for the utilities to deploy. Even pumping water back up a reservoir doesn't make sense because of the wear on the system*. Until we have better storage we really have 2 options if we want to use more wind or solar - bigger grid interconnects or convince people to change there consumption behaviour based on electricity generation.
*yes there are a few places water is pumped back up hill but these aren't used for generation as much as for selling insurance - I'll give you 100 kw of power for 10 minutes while you scramble to get some other form of generation online or get some steel mill to cut consumption.