But that would be needlessly complex and likely require some sort of intelligent designer.
I'm not sure you're quite understanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the bacteria are going to break down the various hydrocarbons they encounter into all sorts of different things just for the fun of it or because of an intelligent designer, or for the sake of needless complexity. I'm saying that chemistry is complicated, especially organic chemistry. Breaking down hydrocarbons for biological use is likewise going to be complicated with all kinds of potential byproducts and intermediate steps.
It's conceivable that someone somewhere might be that incompetent. Since bills with QR codes forged to point to malicious URLs are going to be obvious forgeries to any bill reader that isn't made incompetently. So, it would be pretty amazing for a bill to stay in circulation long enough to actually reach such an incompetently designed device.
Trust me, I have very little faith in the security-awareness of modern banks. They think that adding three extra numbers to your card number but printing them only on the back of the card (but still providing them to every merchant you do business with) is an ingenious security innovation, after all. Even so, the kind of incompetence required to mess up so badly for this to be any sort of issue whatsoever would be truly epic. Ig Nobel prize epic.
I'm referring to the Slashdot article. Should have said summary I suppose:
Unfortunately QR codes are easy to forge and can send you to a site that infects your system. Banks would most likely need to scan currency that have QR codes to ensure the authenticity of the bill. If the QR code was forged it could infect the bank with a virus.
While infecting the computer with a virus isn't explicitly stated to be related to "send[ing] you to a site that infects your system", it's pretty implicit. Otherwise, the last sentence doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense anyway. Might as well say: "if the serial number was forged it could infect the bank with a virus". The statement about QR codes directing to sites that infect computers at least provides some indication of where this drivel is coming from.
There are three other articles linked to from the slashdot summary. The first is about putting infra-red visible QR codes in currency. Not really much different from bar-codes or just printed numbers. The second is about creating transparent overlays to hijack QR codes, which makes little sense since you could just overlay the entire thing rather than just part of it. The third is about how visiting URLs you don't know anything about can infect your computer, with the twist that the URLs are delivered by QR code.
None of those articles are particularly new or interesting and none of them suggests any link between QR codes in money and banks being attacked by viruses as the summary implies. The whole thing is just depressing drivel.
Sorry, what part of what I wrote was false. You're being a bit unclear.
ALL hydrocarbons are composed of CH4, C2H6, C3H8, C4H10, etc.... Carbon surrounded by hydrogen. Hydrocarbon
Uh... Yeah. Duh. Hence the name Hydrocarbon. At no point did I dispute this, and I have no idea where you got the idea that I did.
There's sulfides and other shit mixed in with the oil, but that's not oil
Yes. That also doesn't seem to be in disagreement with what I wrote.
Burning this in a furnace is different from bacteria absorbing chemicals that come in contact with the cell membrane and doing stuff with them.
Yes. That was part of my point. It's pretty much paraphrasing what I said, as a matter of fact.
Bacteria will be more selective; anything not meant to be absorbed will either not enter the cell or will behave in unpredicted or undesirable ways (poison).
Yes, all in agreement so far.. Either they metabolize it, or it doesn't get in, or it gets in and they die. No disagreement there. The actual _point_ is that what does get in is by no means guaranteed to simply be combined with oxygen and come out as CO2. That's why I mentioned that it's not the same thing as burning in a furnace. Inside an organism, the chemistry can get pretty complex. It's quite conceivable that a lot of the hydrocarbons it breaks down involve chemicals other than just O2 and produce byproducts other than water and CO2. Some hydrocarbon-eating bacteria do so anaerobically, for example, so how will CO2 be a byproduct there? And, of course, even when the only byproducts are water and CO2, that's still not great for surrounding life.
The discussion was about what happens to these hydrocarbons when they're consumed by the bacteria. You talked about what happens to a bunch of carbohydrates. The only hydrocarbon you mentioned was methane which combines with oxygen very cleanly (and still doesn't produce only CO2). All of the hydrocarbons that the oil we're talking about is actually composed of produce all kinds of other stuff when combined with oxygen. Also, we're not talking about burning them in a furnace here, we're talking about them being metabolized inside a living thing.
Sanger started PP for the purpose of limiting the populations of certain "undesirable" ethnic groups through abortion, sterilization, and contraception...a form of eugenics. This is history-fact.
That doesn't seem to have been the primary motivation. The primary motivation seems to have been the horrible suffering she'd witnessed due to ridiculous laws regarding contraception. She certainly does seem to have had reducing rates of those she considered undesirable as a secondary motivation. You won't find many politically left-leaning people (even by the US definition of politically left) in this day and age who support that secondary motivation.
Her views on immigration (tied to her eugenics views) were pretty soundly on the side of modern US "Conservatives"
Bullshit. Democrats were the party of racism and segregation for decades. It was the Republicans who pushed for the Civil Rights Act to be passed (a number of times, as Democrats blocked several previous attempts) over staunch Democratic opposition, until finally public pressure caused them to cave.
What you say about the Democrats seems to be perfectly true as far as I know. It's also completely irrelevant to what I said about modern US "Conservatives". If you're going to declare loudly that I'm lying, you have to at least address what I really said rather than what you'd like to imagine I said.
As for "collective-good-over-individual-good" regarding healthcare, I'm baffled as to the logic behind that statement. Socialized healthcare systems are precisely about individual good as opposed to collective good (although they tend to promote collective good as well through vaccinations and so forth).
C'mon, it's called "socialized medicine" for a reason! Are you truly that dense? Also, under the ACA there are committees/boards that oversee distributing healthcare resources based on curves that calculate whether the cost of some particular service/procedure/medication/etc is worth the government spending based on age/health/future earnings and tax curves and calculations that are meant precisely to maximize the collective good and make it a higher priority than the individual good.
Yes, it's called socialized medicine because it involves society collectively caring for sick _individuals_ who can't care for themselves. On the whole it also helps society because a productive member of society who needs medical help for a few years can later go back to being a productive member of society, among other reasons. As for the ACA, it's a pretty poor implementation of the idea of socialized medicine and it has been ever since its previous incarnation as the Republican-proposed health plan. Parts of it are a step in the right direction, but it's an abomination for the most part. They should have just modified medicare to make everyone eligible and it would have been better. The financial death panels you're talking about are no different from what the private insurance companies already do. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the ACA that makes that situation any worse, just sets some limits on how scummy the private insurance companies it forces you to use can be about it.
The alternative to socialized medicine is to view people who are sick and can't take care of themselves as a drag on society and let them suffer and die. From a coldly pragmatic view (which ignores many of the externalities) this approach is the "collective good" one.
The every man for himself and let the weak die off (or banish them from the tribe/outright kill them) attitude is the collective good approach (a naive one, of course).
More bullshit. Nobody is/was denied treatment at hospitals. Hospitals have been required to treat anyone regardless of ability to pay for decades. The ACA still leaves some 23 million without coverage and we're already seeing pre
eugenics/abortion-related (Planned Parenthood/Margaret Sanger) and their collective-good-over-individual-good views on how healthcare and other resources and services should be allocated. ("spread the wealth", "collective salvation", "collective gov-run healthcare" etc etc)
I don't really follow your logic. Supporting rights to reproductive control (including, but by no means limited to, abortion) as Planned Parenthood does is not "love for all things eugenics/abortion-related". Margeret Sanger, for example, had some slightly disturbing views on eugenics, but was soundly against the Nazi method of doing it, as are pretty much all "Liberals" and "Progressives" I know of. Her views on immigration (tied to her eugenics views) were pretty soundly on the side of modern US "Conservatives". As it stands today, most of the people I know of who are in favor of forced eugenics (as opposed to genetic screening for defects and medical advice for at risk couples) are quite firmly on the "Conservative" side.
As for "collective-good-over-individual-good" regarding healthcare, I'm baffled as to the logic behind that statement. Socialized healthcare systems are precisely about individual good as opposed to collective good (although they tend to promote collective good as well through vaccinations and so forth). The every man for himself and let the weak die off (or banish them from the tribe/outright kill them) attitude is the collective good approach (a naive one, of course).
It's so depressing that it's the 21st century and they can't even get this right yet. It's so bloody simple to make the security perfect (DISCLAIMER: providing physical security is maintained for the device and the bank's servers aren't compromised and also that potentially unprovable truths about cryptography hold true). We have tiny and inexpensive solid state storage that can hold gigabytes. You throw one into the chip and pin device and you fill it up with random strings created on the bank's servers (and you use a good source of randomness and also randomly distribute the random strings so that there aren't runs of strings created in order) and loaded into the device when it's made. The storage on the device is write-once, read-never (it can be read internally, but not from an external reader without cutting up the device and modifying it). Every random string loaded onto the device is assigned to a unit of time, such as a single minute, in the lifetime of the card. With one gigabyte, for example, you could store about twenty years worth of 128 byte strings at one minute intervals. Then, every time a transaction is made, the authentication for the transaction (which should fit into 128 bytes easily) is XORed against the random string for the particular minute that the transaction takes place in (it can even be done offline, without any time synchronization as long as the clock on the checkout device isn't way off). You combine that with additional encryption using another hidden key and the PIN (which you obviously don't store anywhere on the card, you just save a hash of it on the bank's servers).
With a system like that, which is conceptually dead simple and obvious, you're using a theoretically unbreakable (but maybe unprovably so) one time pad for every transaction as well as using a PIN. To falsify a transaction, someone either needs to break the security on the bank's servers, or both obtain your PIN and your authentication device and perform some fancy surgery on it.
I can't imagine a qr code being able to stack overflow anything, there aren't enough bits.
That doesn't seem to be what this article is proposing, however. This article seems to be proposing that the scanners at the bank will read the QR codes on the notes, interpret the code into a URL, then direct a web browser to that URL and, if the URL is for a compromised site, the bank's computer will become infected.
I've been reading Slashdot for 15 years. I'm not going to claim that all the articles in that time have been gems. This kind of thing almost makes me want to cry, however. It just seems to be happening more and more often.
It's pretty much as postbigbang was saying though. 60% of the oil having been consumed by bacteria doesn't mean that 60% of the problem is gone. Being eaten by bacteria is just the first stage of the process. Also, in your post you said that we were just dealing with methane. There's a heck of a lot more in crude oil than just methane. There's a whole lot of different kinds of hydrocarbons as well as stuff that isn't hydrocarbons. The ability to metabolize hydrocarbons is also a fairly special skill. It's not that easy for a living organism to do. I'm pretty sure that bacteria metabolizing this stuff produce all kinds of byproducts that aren't just plain old CO2. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of benzene left over, for example.
Quite aside from that, the combining with oxygen that you mention doesn't address the critical point of where the oxygen comes from. There's oxygen dissolved in the water, of course, but not a whole lot of it is actually produced at those depths. When it gets used up, it has to be replenished or all the other things that need oxygen too can't stay alive. It comes back over time, it's just a question of how much time.
Rates are funny things though. The growth of the population relative to its size has decreased, but in absolute terms of net humans added per year, the growth is still increasing every year. It is looking like probable stabilization around 10 Billion people based on nothing but naive curve fitting. Of course, there are other curves to watch as well, such as fossil fuel production. Since modern agriculture is so heavily bound to fossil fuels for farm work, transportation and for use as fertilizer, when declining fossil fuel production hits rising population, bad things could potentially happen.
I'm confused. In a multi-party system with >2 parties, where does the "more than 50%" thing come from. Ok, I'm being facetious. I know exactly where it comes from. I find the fact that you accept it so casually to be very disturbing.
Have to agree. Obvious photoshop job is obvious. Which doesn't necessarily mean that the whole thing is a hoax. It probably just means that the pictures they took just didn't look as red/orange as they had to the naked eye, so they modified them a bit. Probably to the point where it looks even brighter than it actually appeared to the naked eye.
Some idiot "researcher" will put out a study that condemns CA and/or the U.S. for not having adequate systems/procedures/etc. in place to detect and treat this even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
Yes, it must be brought into places like Texas from places like Mexico which are so geographically distant that Texas was never even part of Mexico or anything. Clearly tapeworms couldn't be native to the US. It's impossible that you just made that up. Also clearly they must travel in those filthy, infected, unclean, foul immigrants and could never travel in, say, non-humans.
What in the hell are you talking about? I ask because it doesn't bear any resemblance to the conversation I took part in. How do your comments have ANYTHING to do with what I quoted or said?
I'm sorry you're having trouble following along. I will elaborate. I'll make sure to type slowly for your benefit;)
I wrote, in one of my posts: "With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around." This was in the context of a discussion on regulation in the wireless industry. It was a comment on the fact that there are fundamental limits on availability of spectrum to broadcast on and that the various actors in the field of telecommunications have to have some framework for respecting those limits. You quoted that one line and then said:
Not true. Frequency reuse for teleco frequencies can be very, very, very high. Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power. No addition spectrum required. This is oversimplified, but the concept is entirely correct. There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
Now, my comments after that are related to "what [you] quoted or said" by way of being a direct response to what you said. You said that what I said about limitations on spectrum wasn't true and posted something about spectrum re-use that seems to have completely missed the point of what _I_ was writing about, rather than the other way around. I explained that the having more towers broadcasting at lower power doesn't help you in any way against a competitor using the same frequencies and so regulation of what your other actors can do is required to allow you to use that scheme in the first place.
As far as I can tell, you're the one who blundered into a conversation, then fixated on one sentence that pushed one of your buttons. Then you posted about it and got all offended when someone replied within the original context of the conversation.
How can anyone even ask that question while claiming to have any idea what is meant when people refer to "wireless spectrum"?. It doesn't fit into any traditional understanding of what property is. We're not talking about land you can walk around here. We're talking about a set of rights to emit RF energy at particular frequencies or ranges of frequencies, at particular power levels in particular geographical regions tied to particular technological devices or sets of such devices and possibly only for particular purposes. That's not natural property, that's a regulatory regime.
Something being property does not make it a "chaotic free for fall", I'm not sure why you'd think that.
What I actually wrote was: "Free market assignment of wireless frequency just means a chaotic free for all." It's getting harder to believe that you're earnestly misunderstanding me rather than misrepresenting what I'm saying. In case you really are misunderstanding, what I am saying is that there are two possibilities. One is a pure free market, where you have a chaotic free for all and the other is a regulated market. There's no free market where wireless spectrum is property because any scheme that assigns spectrum as property constitutes regulation.
This is property we're talking about here, not a protocol. If one spoiler starts using a frequency that another "entity" is using, it would be just as illegal if someone were to do that now.
Once again, a "free market" in which wireless spectrum is treated as property is actually a regulated market.
Do you understand how property was dealt out when the US was becoming a nation? No regulatory body was needed. Only property law. You can call that regulation, I don't care, but there is no entity dishing out property, only people claiming property and defending that claim with the law.
I have a pretty good idea of how property was dealt out when the US was becoming a nation. Obviously a far, far better idea than you. Have you studied any history at all? I'll give you a hint. Ever hear the term "wild west" and wondered why they called it that? What does the invention of barbed wire suggest to you? Ever hear of Billy the kid and the Lincoln County range war? Indian Reservations? Seriously!
The simple fact is that some things simply can't sanely be provided by multiple providers and have to either be provided by government, provided by private organizations under regulation, or simply not be properly provided at all.
Continuing to say it does not make it true. Private roads exist today and have existed since there were roads. I would call them unregulated, but you seem to think even basic laws arising from common law are regulation too. Furthermore, you have a mental block about a theoretical belief that the ownership of roads will become a monopoly because you also believe roads are a natural monopoly. When I have asked to explain why you think a route monopoly would act against route users and other road builders, you are unable to articulate an example and go on about something to do with intersections and how, for some reason, the owner of a road would not allow them. Your scenario is not a given, just as your belief that roads are natural monopoly are not a given, just as your belief that privatized roads will result in an abusive monopoly is not a given. I realize what we're talking about here is very theoretical, but you're going to have to come up with more than blanket statements to convince me of your beliefs. Until then, I'll go by what the CATO institute says.
If you can't understand why roads are a natural monopoly, then you must not be able to understand the basics of graph theory or even Euclidean geometry. It's very simple. You can't practically have more than one set of roads servicing the same prop
I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way.
One requires no additional laws at this time and also has well-established analogs in the court, and one requires a funded regulatory body that gets to make the rules with very little oversight. Cost and effectiveness is the difference.
I'm not sure I'm parsing your first sentence properly. If I'm getting what you're trying to say, then I don't understand how you're not getting this. Wireless spectrum isn't a natural form of property in any way, shape or form. Free market assignment of wireless frequency just means a chaotic free for all. In that sort of situation, actors will sometimes cooperate without regulation, but you can have a thousand cooperating entities and just one spoiler and it wrecks things for everyone. With regulation, the spoilers can be brought to heel. Without regulation, intentionally interfering with other people's signals (and perhaps demanding a fee to stop) is allowed and will happen.
The process by which anyone could become the natural owner of wireless spectrum is otherwise incomprehensible to me. So, a free market for wireless spectrum with various entities competing for it would end up a war zone. There would be scraggly bearded hams and hackers insisting on proper practices and cooperation, etc., but the big business types would deride them as dirty hippies and flood them out.
You are acting as if this is what we don't already have today. The difference being one outcome was achieved at great expense by having a regulatory body such as the FCC. If wireless spectrum were divided up under property law, "scraggly bearded hams and hackers" would have more of a chance against whatever big business types were abusing the spectrum because they could hire a lawyer instead of beg the FCC or some politician.
That isn't what we have today. What we have is far, far from perfect. It's still not as bad as it would be with no regulation. It would be a true nightmare without regulation. Now, when the scraggly beards are the only actors, you tend to get something stable. There can be lots of vicious-seeming and petty territorial fights, but the scraggly beards tend to genuinely love their craft and don't want the environment spoiled, so they tend to cooperate based on an implicit understanding of where the limits are. But, aside from scraggly beards, the world also has the business types and griefer/script-kiddy types who will wreck everything fro the profit or just for the lulz.
You say "if wireless spectrum were divided up under property law" as if that isn't a form of regulation. Anyone who has a grasp of the actual realities of the situation understands that seeing wireless spectrum as some sort of real estate that can be claimed as property is just an abstraction. You _should_ have to twist your mind around it to see it that way if you're really thinking about it. If you don't bother thinking about it, then I can see how you could think of it as property with a clear, logical owner. The fact is, there is no way to assign it that isn't a form of regulation.
The point about the tunnels and overpasses wasn't how expensive they would be to the consumer (although they would be astronomical) it was how expensive they would be to a second operator who wants to cross the road of the first operator. In the unlikely case that they would even allow it, the charges would surely be astronomical.
Of course they would allow it because it would allow more cars onto their road which means more money. If the arrangement is obviously in the 2nd operators' favor, they could come up with an equally favorable agreement and write it into a contract (which, of course, would include the agreed upon court of arbitration because government courts are slow and ex
Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power.
Not actually doable when you don't have regulations protecting that bandwidth. How well does that method work when your competition wants to drown you out?
There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
With regulation protecting them and providing the kind of environment where they can actually do that, you're right, there's no reason they can't. Without all the regulation and without public assistance (use of all kinds of public property and grants of what would otherwise be public property, for example) which can't be ethically given without regulating the results, there would be all kinds of reasons why they can't.
I will agree with you entirely that regulation, even when necessary, can be bungled up beyond belief.
You mention that often the market wouldn't even be viable without regulation, do you have some examples to discuss? Things such as wireless frequencies could simply be considered property and handled similarly. Ownership of such property could be handled in the same way, ie homesteading.
I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way. The process by which anyone could become the natural owner of wireless spectrum is otherwise incomprehensible to me. So, a free market for wireless spectrum with various entities competing for it would end up a war zone. There would be scraggly bearded hams and hackers insisting on proper practices and cooperation, etc., but the big business types would deride them as dirty hippies and flood them out.
I also thought I'd already provided a pretty good example of a market that wouldn't be viable without regulation when discussing roads. When you're not living in an area with areas of unclaimed land between every property, acquiring the property to actually build a network of roads connecting everyone can be insanely difficult without government interference. There have been in various places, and at various times in history, road networks made up of lots of little private roads with toll booths every few hundred meters. They pretty much always ended with the sitting government or conquerors coming along and taking them over in some way with or without compensation because they were always a mess. Going anywhere would be ridiculously expensive and slow. When the roads aren't directly controlled by some sort of government, they always need regulation.
Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work?
I think the point you are getting at here is that the owners of routes to destinations, of which there are few, will take advantage of their position and it will cost you more to use those routes. Markets are actually more complicated than that as they also have to deal with indirect and potential competition. How much would it cost me to walk to a parking garage that gives me access to different routes? What if I took a different means of travel altogether?
The point I was getting at was more than just that the owners of routes to destinations would exploit their ownership by charging a lot. Traditional property rights are essentially two dimensional. You can't tunnel under or build a bridge over a road belonging to someone else without their consent. Laws allowing you to do so would be a form of government regulation on roads. A network of roads of anything other than trivial complexity, connecting a group of locations, simply can't realistically exist alongside a separate network of roads connecting those same locations without the networks crossing. It might be possible with some crazy fractal-like design, but that would be insanely inefficient as well as requiring cooperation among the builders of both networks (not to mention the fact that it would lead to way too much useful land being uselessly paved). Road networks simply can't co-exist in the same location without cooperation which is very unlikely unless it's enforced by government. Government is also very unlikely to want two sets of roads in the same area with two operators, so they would instead grant local monopolies to particular operators. Such monopolies can't just be handed out without regulation.
The point about the tunnels and overpasses wasn't how expensive they would be to the consumer (although they would be astronomical) it was how expensive they would be to a second operator who wants to cross the road of the first operator. In the unlikely case that they would even allow it, the charges would surely be astronomical.
If the oxygen partial pressure matches, the fire danger is the same. Well, not exactly the same since the extra mass from the nitrogen acts as a heat sink and the airflow characteristics will be different, etc., but it will still be largely the same.
I'm pretty sure you're the one who is failing science. All you need is for the oxygen partial pressure to match Earth's and you can have a pure oxygen. In that situation, we get the right amount of oxygen to avoid deprivation and toxicity. Also, things are no more flammable than in a normal Earth atmosphere. The lower overall pressure is within the range that human beings can adapt to. We don't actually _use_ the atmospheric nitrogen for anything. Plus, if decompression occurs, no bends (of course, you'll die anyway).
You don't quite seem to understand why the free market doesn't work very well with markets like telecommunications, roads, etc. Sometimes the regulation is problematic, but often the market wouldn't even be viable without the regulation. The problem is that some markets are what are referred to as natural monopolies. Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work? Roads are natural monopolies, which means that, to be practical, they either need to be managed by government or by heavily regulated industries. The same holds for telecommunications. With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around. In a pure free market, there would be so much noise on the airwaves that cell phones probably wouldn't even be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
But that would be needlessly complex and likely require some sort of intelligent designer.
I'm not sure you're quite understanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the bacteria are going to break down the various hydrocarbons they encounter into all sorts of different things just for the fun of it or because of an intelligent designer, or for the sake of needless complexity. I'm saying that chemistry is complicated, especially organic chemistry. Breaking down hydrocarbons for biological use is likewise going to be complicated with all kinds of potential byproducts and intermediate steps.
It's conceivable that someone somewhere might be that incompetent. Since bills with QR codes forged to point to malicious URLs are going to be obvious forgeries to any bill reader that isn't made incompetently. So, it would be pretty amazing for a bill to stay in circulation long enough to actually reach such an incompetently designed device.
Trust me, I have very little faith in the security-awareness of modern banks. They think that adding three extra numbers to your card number but printing them only on the back of the card (but still providing them to every merchant you do business with) is an ingenious security innovation, after all. Even so, the kind of incompetence required to mess up so badly for this to be any sort of issue whatsoever would be truly epic. Ig Nobel prize epic.
I'm referring to the Slashdot article. Should have said summary I suppose:
Unfortunately QR codes are easy to forge and can send you to a site that infects your system. Banks would most likely need to scan currency that have QR codes to ensure the authenticity of the bill. If the QR code was forged it could infect the bank with a virus.
While infecting the computer with a virus isn't explicitly stated to be related to "send[ing] you to a site that infects your system", it's pretty implicit. Otherwise, the last sentence doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense anyway. Might as well say: "if the serial number was forged it could infect the bank with a virus". The statement about QR codes directing to sites that infect computers at least provides some indication of where this drivel is coming from.
There are three other articles linked to from the slashdot summary. The first is about putting infra-red visible QR codes in currency. Not really much different from bar-codes or just printed numbers. The second is about creating transparent overlays to hijack QR codes, which makes little sense since you could just overlay the entire thing rather than just part of it. The third is about how visiting URLs you don't know anything about can infect your computer, with the twist that the URLs are delivered by QR code.
None of those articles are particularly new or interesting and none of them suggests any link between QR codes in money and banks being attacked by viruses as the summary implies. The whole thing is just depressing drivel.
False.
Sorry, what part of what I wrote was false. You're being a bit unclear.
ALL hydrocarbons are composed of CH4, C2H6, C3H8, C4H10, etc.... Carbon surrounded by hydrogen. Hydrocarbon
Uh... Yeah. Duh. Hence the name Hydrocarbon. At no point did I dispute this, and I have no idea where you got the idea that I did.
There's sulfides and other shit mixed in with the oil, but that's not oil
Yes. That also doesn't seem to be in disagreement with what I wrote.
Burning this in a furnace is different from bacteria absorbing chemicals that come in contact with the cell membrane and doing stuff with them.
Yes. That was part of my point. It's pretty much paraphrasing what I said, as a matter of fact.
Bacteria will be more selective; anything not meant to be absorbed will either not enter the cell or will behave in unpredicted or undesirable ways (poison).
Yes, all in agreement so far.. Either they metabolize it, or it doesn't get in, or it gets in and they die. No disagreement there. The actual _point_ is that what does get in is by no means guaranteed to simply be combined with oxygen and come out as CO2. That's why I mentioned that it's not the same thing as burning in a furnace. Inside an organism, the chemistry can get pretty complex. It's quite conceivable that a lot of the hydrocarbons it breaks down involve chemicals other than just O2 and produce byproducts other than water and CO2. Some hydrocarbon-eating bacteria do so anaerobically, for example, so how will CO2 be a byproduct there? And, of course, even when the only byproducts are water and CO2, that's still not great for surrounding life.
The discussion was about what happens to these hydrocarbons when they're consumed by the bacteria. You talked about what happens to a bunch of carbohydrates. The only hydrocarbon you mentioned was methane which combines with oxygen very cleanly (and still doesn't produce only CO2). All of the hydrocarbons that the oil we're talking about is actually composed of produce all kinds of other stuff when combined with oxygen. Also, we're not talking about burning them in a furnace here, we're talking about them being metabolized inside a living thing.
Sanger started PP for the purpose of limiting the populations of certain "undesirable" ethnic groups through abortion, sterilization, and contraception...a form of eugenics. This is history-fact.
That doesn't seem to have been the primary motivation. The primary motivation seems to have been the horrible suffering she'd witnessed due to ridiculous laws regarding contraception. She certainly does seem to have had reducing rates of those she considered undesirable as a secondary motivation. You won't find many politically left-leaning people (even by the US definition of politically left) in this day and age who support that secondary motivation.
Her views on immigration (tied to her eugenics views) were pretty soundly on the side of modern US "Conservatives"
Bullshit. Democrats were the party of racism and segregation for decades. It was the Republicans who pushed for the Civil Rights Act to be passed (a number of times, as Democrats blocked several previous attempts) over staunch Democratic opposition, until finally public pressure caused them to cave.
What you say about the Democrats seems to be perfectly true as far as I know. It's also completely irrelevant to what I said about modern US "Conservatives". If you're going to declare loudly that I'm lying, you have to at least address what I really said rather than what you'd like to imagine I said.
As for "collective-good-over-individual-good" regarding healthcare, I'm baffled as to the logic behind that statement. Socialized healthcare systems are precisely about individual good as opposed to collective good (although they tend to promote collective good as well through vaccinations and so forth).
C'mon, it's called "socialized medicine" for a reason! Are you truly that dense? Also, under the ACA there are committees/boards that oversee distributing healthcare resources based on curves that calculate whether the cost of some particular service/procedure/medication/etc is worth the government spending based on age/health/future earnings and tax curves and calculations that are meant precisely to maximize the collective good and make it a higher priority than the individual good.
Yes, it's called socialized medicine because it involves society collectively caring for sick _individuals_ who can't care for themselves. On the whole it also helps society because a productive member of society who needs medical help for a few years can later go back to being a productive member of society, among other reasons. As for the ACA, it's a pretty poor implementation of the idea of socialized medicine and it has been ever since its previous incarnation as the Republican-proposed health plan. Parts of it are a step in the right direction, but it's an abomination for the most part. They should have just modified medicare to make everyone eligible and it would have been better. The financial death panels you're talking about are no different from what the private insurance companies already do. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the ACA that makes that situation any worse, just sets some limits on how scummy the private insurance companies it forces you to use can be about it.
The alternative to socialized medicine is to view people who are sick and can't take care of themselves as a drag on society and let them suffer and die. From a coldly pragmatic view (which ignores many of the externalities) this approach is the "collective good" one.
The every man for himself and let the weak die off (or banish them from the tribe/outright kill them) attitude is the collective good approach (a naive one, of course).
More bullshit. Nobody is/was denied treatment at hospitals. Hospitals have been required to treat anyone regardless of ability to pay for decades. The ACA still leaves some 23 million without coverage and we're already seeing pre
When you wrote:
We're dealing with CH4 here or basically C(n)H(2(n+1)) which when combined with oxygen gives CO2 and H2O. News flash: it's a fuel source, it burns
It was in post 41313793, which is the one I originally replied to.
Well, let's see.
eugenics/abortion-related (Planned Parenthood/Margaret Sanger) and their collective-good-over-individual-good views on how healthcare and other resources and services should be allocated. ("spread the wealth", "collective salvation", "collective gov-run healthcare" etc etc)
I don't really follow your logic. Supporting rights to reproductive control (including, but by no means limited to, abortion) as Planned Parenthood does is not "love for all things eugenics/abortion-related". Margeret Sanger, for example, had some slightly disturbing views on eugenics, but was soundly against the Nazi method of doing it, as are pretty much all "Liberals" and "Progressives" I know of. Her views on immigration (tied to her eugenics views) were pretty soundly on the side of modern US "Conservatives". As it stands today, most of the people I know of who are in favor of forced eugenics (as opposed to genetic screening for defects and medical advice for at risk couples) are quite firmly on the "Conservative" side.
As for "collective-good-over-individual-good" regarding healthcare, I'm baffled as to the logic behind that statement. Socialized healthcare systems are precisely about individual good as opposed to collective good (although they tend to promote collective good as well through vaccinations and so forth). The every man for himself and let the weak die off (or banish them from the tribe/outright kill them) attitude is the collective good approach (a naive one, of course).
It's so depressing that it's the 21st century and they can't even get this right yet. It's so bloody simple to make the security perfect (DISCLAIMER: providing physical security is maintained for the device and the bank's servers aren't compromised and also that potentially unprovable truths about cryptography hold true). We have tiny and inexpensive solid state storage that can hold gigabytes. You throw one into the chip and pin device and you fill it up with random strings created on the bank's servers (and you use a good source of randomness and also randomly distribute the random strings so that there aren't runs of strings created in order) and loaded into the device when it's made. The storage on the device is write-once, read-never (it can be read internally, but not from an external reader without cutting up the device and modifying it). Every random string loaded onto the device is assigned to a unit of time, such as a single minute, in the lifetime of the card. With one gigabyte, for example, you could store about twenty years worth of 128 byte strings at one minute intervals. Then, every time a transaction is made, the authentication for the transaction (which should fit into 128 bytes easily) is XORed against the random string for the particular minute that the transaction takes place in (it can even be done offline, without any time synchronization as long as the clock on the checkout device isn't way off). You combine that with additional encryption using another hidden key and the PIN (which you obviously don't store anywhere on the card, you just save a hash of it on the bank's servers).
With a system like that, which is conceptually dead simple and obvious, you're using a theoretically unbreakable (but maybe unprovably so) one time pad for every transaction as well as using a PIN. To falsify a transaction, someone either needs to break the security on the bank's servers, or both obtain your PIN and your authentication device and perform some fancy surgery on it.
I can't imagine a qr code being able to stack overflow anything, there aren't enough bits.
That doesn't seem to be what this article is proposing, however. This article seems to be proposing that the scanners at the bank will read the QR codes on the notes, interpret the code into a URL, then direct a web browser to that URL and, if the URL is for a compromised site, the bank's computer will become infected.
I've been reading Slashdot for 15 years. I'm not going to claim that all the articles in that time have been gems. This kind of thing almost makes me want to cry, however. It just seems to be happening more and more often.
It's pretty much as postbigbang was saying though. 60% of the oil having been consumed by bacteria doesn't mean that 60% of the problem is gone. Being eaten by bacteria is just the first stage of the process. Also, in your post you said that we were just dealing with methane. There's a heck of a lot more in crude oil than just methane. There's a whole lot of different kinds of hydrocarbons as well as stuff that isn't hydrocarbons. The ability to metabolize hydrocarbons is also a fairly special skill. It's not that easy for a living organism to do. I'm pretty sure that bacteria metabolizing this stuff produce all kinds of byproducts that aren't just plain old CO2. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of benzene left over, for example.
Quite aside from that, the combining with oxygen that you mention doesn't address the critical point of where the oxygen comes from. There's oxygen dissolved in the water, of course, but not a whole lot of it is actually produced at those depths. When it gets used up, it has to be replenished or all the other things that need oxygen too can't stay alive. It comes back over time, it's just a question of how much time.
So, in other words, the water has been acidified.
Rates are funny things though. The growth of the population relative to its size has decreased, but in absolute terms of net humans added per year, the growth is still increasing every year. It is looking like probable stabilization around 10 Billion people based on nothing but naive curve fitting. Of course, there are other curves to watch as well, such as fossil fuel production. Since modern agriculture is so heavily bound to fossil fuels for farm work, transportation and for use as fertilizer, when declining fossil fuel production hits rising population, bad things could potentially happen.
I'm confused. In a multi-party system with >2 parties, where does the "more than 50%" thing come from. Ok, I'm being facetious. I know exactly where it comes from. I find the fact that you accept it so casually to be very disturbing.
Have to agree. Obvious photoshop job is obvious. Which doesn't necessarily mean that the whole thing is a hoax. It probably just means that the pictures they took just didn't look as red/orange as they had to the naked eye, so they modified them a bit. Probably to the point where it looks even brighter than it actually appeared to the naked eye.
Some idiot "researcher" will put out a study that condemns CA and/or the U.S. for not having adequate systems/procedures/etc. in place to detect and treat this even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
Yes, it must be brought into places like Texas from places like Mexico which are so geographically distant that Texas was never even part of Mexico or anything. Clearly tapeworms couldn't be native to the US. It's impossible that you just made that up. Also clearly they must travel in those filthy, infected, unclean, foul immigrants and could never travel in, say, non-humans.
It wasn't them, it was the inanimate carbon rod!
What in the hell are you talking about? I ask because it doesn't bear any resemblance to the conversation I took part in. How do your comments have ANYTHING to do with what I quoted or said?
I'm sorry you're having trouble following along. I will elaborate. I'll make sure to type slowly for your benefit ;)
I wrote, in one of my posts: "With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around."
This was in the context of a discussion on regulation in the wireless industry. It was a comment on the fact that there are fundamental limits on availability of spectrum to broadcast on and that the various actors in the field of telecommunications have to have some framework for respecting those limits.
You quoted that one line and then said:
Not true. Frequency reuse for teleco frequencies can be very, very, very high. Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power. No addition spectrum required. This is oversimplified, but the concept is entirely correct. There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
Now, my comments after that are related to "what [you] quoted or said" by way of being a direct response to what you said. You said that what I said about limitations on spectrum wasn't true and posted something about spectrum re-use that seems to have completely missed the point of what _I_ was writing about, rather than the other way around. I explained that the having more towers broadcasting at lower power doesn't help you in any way against a competitor using the same frequencies and so regulation of what your other actors can do is required to allow you to use that scheme in the first place.
As far as I can tell, you're the one who blundered into a conversation, then fixated on one sentence that pushed one of your buttons. Then you posted about it and got all offended when someone replied within the original context of the conversation.
How is wireless spectrum not property?
How can anyone even ask that question while claiming to have any idea what is meant when people refer to "wireless spectrum"?. It doesn't fit into any traditional understanding of what property is. We're not talking about land you can walk around here. We're talking about a set of rights to emit RF energy at particular frequencies or ranges of frequencies, at particular power levels in particular geographical regions tied to particular technological devices or sets of such devices and possibly only for particular purposes. That's not natural property, that's a regulatory regime.
Something being property does not make it a "chaotic free for fall", I'm not sure why you'd think that.
What I actually wrote was: "Free market assignment of wireless frequency just means a chaotic free for all." It's getting harder to believe that you're earnestly misunderstanding me rather than misrepresenting what I'm saying. In case you really are misunderstanding, what I am saying is that there are two possibilities. One is a pure free market, where you have a chaotic free for all and the other is a regulated market. There's no free market where wireless spectrum is property because any scheme that assigns spectrum as property constitutes regulation.
This is property we're talking about here, not a protocol. If one spoiler starts using a frequency that another "entity" is using, it would be just as illegal if someone were to do that now.
Once again, a "free market" in which wireless spectrum is treated as property is actually a regulated market.
Do you understand how property was dealt out when the US was becoming a nation? No regulatory body was needed. Only property law. You can call that regulation, I don't care, but there is no entity dishing out property, only people claiming property and defending that claim with the law.
I have a pretty good idea of how property was dealt out when the US was becoming a nation. Obviously a far, far better idea than you. Have you studied any history at all? I'll give you a hint. Ever hear the term "wild west" and wondered why they called it that? What does the invention of barbed wire suggest to you? Ever hear of Billy the kid and the Lincoln County range war? Indian Reservations? Seriously!
The simple fact is that some things simply can't sanely be provided by multiple providers and have to either be provided by government, provided by private organizations under regulation, or simply not be properly provided at all.
Continuing to say it does not make it true. Private roads exist today and have existed since there were roads. I would call them unregulated, but you seem to think even basic laws arising from common law are regulation too. Furthermore, you have a mental block about a theoretical belief that the ownership of roads will become a monopoly because you also believe roads are a natural monopoly. When I have asked to explain why you think a route monopoly would act against route users and other road builders, you are unable to articulate an example and go on about something to do with intersections and how, for some reason, the owner of a road would not allow them. Your scenario is not a given, just as your belief that roads are natural monopoly are not a given, just as your belief that privatized roads will result in an abusive monopoly is not a given. I realize what we're talking about here is very theoretical, but you're going to have to come up with more than blanket statements to convince me of your beliefs. Until then, I'll go by what the CATO institute says.
If you can't understand why roads are a natural monopoly, then you must not be able to understand the basics of graph theory or even Euclidean geometry. It's very simple. You can't practically have more than one set of roads servicing the same prop
I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way.
One requires no additional laws at this time and also has well-established analogs in the court, and one requires a funded regulatory body that gets to make the rules with very little oversight. Cost and effectiveness is the difference.
I'm not sure I'm parsing your first sentence properly. If I'm getting what you're trying to say, then I don't understand how you're not getting this. Wireless spectrum isn't a natural form of property in any way, shape or form. Free market assignment of wireless frequency just means a chaotic free for all. In that sort of situation, actors will sometimes cooperate without regulation, but you can have a thousand cooperating entities and just one spoiler and it wrecks things for everyone. With regulation, the spoilers can be brought to heel. Without regulation, intentionally interfering with other people's signals (and perhaps demanding a fee to stop) is allowed and will happen.
The process by which anyone could become the natural owner of wireless spectrum is otherwise incomprehensible to me. So, a free market for wireless spectrum with various entities competing for it would end up a war zone. There would be scraggly bearded hams and hackers insisting on proper practices and cooperation, etc., but the big business types would deride them as dirty hippies and flood them out.
You are acting as if this is what we don't already have today. The difference being one outcome was achieved at great expense by having a regulatory body such as the FCC. If wireless spectrum were divided up under property law, "scraggly bearded hams and hackers" would have more of a chance against whatever big business types were abusing the spectrum because they could hire a lawyer instead of beg the FCC or some politician.
That isn't what we have today. What we have is far, far from perfect. It's still not as bad as it would be with no regulation. It would be a true nightmare without regulation. Now, when the scraggly beards are the only actors, you tend to get something stable. There can be lots of vicious-seeming and petty territorial fights, but the scraggly beards tend to genuinely love their craft and don't want the environment spoiled, so they tend to cooperate based on an implicit understanding of where the limits are. But, aside from scraggly beards, the world also has the business types and griefer/script-kiddy types who will wreck everything fro the profit or just for the lulz.
You say "if wireless spectrum were divided up under property law" as if that isn't a form of regulation. Anyone who has a grasp of the actual realities of the situation understands that seeing wireless spectrum as some sort of real estate that can be claimed as property is just an abstraction. You _should_ have to twist your mind around it to see it that way if you're really thinking about it. If you don't bother thinking about it, then I can see how you could think of it as property with a clear, logical owner. The fact is, there is no way to assign it that isn't a form of regulation.
The point about the tunnels and overpasses wasn't how expensive they would be to the consumer (although they would be astronomical) it was how expensive they would be to a second operator who wants to cross the road of the first operator. In the unlikely case that they would even allow it, the charges would surely be astronomical.
Of course they would allow it because it would allow more cars onto their road which means more money. If the arrangement is obviously in the 2nd operators' favor, they could come up with an equally favorable agreement and write it into a contract (which, of course, would include the agreed upon court of arbitration because government courts are slow and ex
Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power.
Not actually doable when you don't have regulations protecting that bandwidth. How well does that method work when your competition wants to drown you out?
There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
With regulation protecting them and providing the kind of environment where they can actually do that, you're right, there's no reason they can't. Without all the regulation and without public assistance (use of all kinds of public property and grants of what would otherwise be public property, for example) which can't be ethically given without regulating the results, there would be all kinds of reasons why they can't.
I will agree with you entirely that regulation, even when necessary, can be bungled up beyond belief.
You mention that often the market wouldn't even be viable without regulation, do you have some examples to discuss? Things such as wireless frequencies could simply be considered property and handled similarly. Ownership of such property could be handled in the same way, ie homesteading.
I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way. The process by which anyone could become the natural owner of wireless spectrum is otherwise incomprehensible to me. So, a free market for wireless spectrum with various entities competing for it would end up a war zone. There would be scraggly bearded hams and hackers insisting on proper practices and cooperation, etc., but the big business types would deride them as dirty hippies and flood them out.
I also thought I'd already provided a pretty good example of a market that wouldn't be viable without regulation when discussing roads. When you're not living in an area with areas of unclaimed land between every property, acquiring the property to actually build a network of roads connecting everyone can be insanely difficult without government interference. There have been in various places, and at various times in history, road networks made up of lots of little private roads with toll booths every few hundred meters. They pretty much always ended with the sitting government or conquerors coming along and taking them over in some way with or without compensation because they were always a mess. Going anywhere would be ridiculously expensive and slow. When the roads aren't directly controlled by some sort of government, they always need regulation.
Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work?
I think the point you are getting at here is that the owners of routes to destinations, of which there are few, will take advantage of their position and it will cost you more to use those routes. Markets are actually more complicated than that as they also have to deal with indirect and potential competition. How much would it cost me to walk to a parking garage that gives me access to different routes? What if I took a different means of travel altogether?
The point I was getting at was more than just that the owners of routes to destinations would exploit their ownership by charging a lot. Traditional property rights are essentially two dimensional. You can't tunnel under or build a bridge over a road belonging to someone else without their consent. Laws allowing you to do so would be a form of government regulation on roads. A network of roads of anything other than trivial complexity, connecting a group of locations, simply can't realistically exist alongside a separate network of roads connecting those same locations without the networks crossing. It might be possible with some crazy fractal-like design, but that would be insanely inefficient as well as requiring cooperation among the builders of both networks (not to mention the fact that it would lead to way too much useful land being uselessly paved). Road networks simply can't co-exist in the same location without cooperation which is very unlikely unless it's enforced by government. Government is also very unlikely to want two sets of roads in the same area with two operators, so they would instead grant local monopolies to particular operators. Such monopolies can't just be handed out without regulation.
The point about the tunnels and overpasses wasn't how expensive they would be to the consumer (although they would be astronomical) it was how expensive they would be to a second operator who wants to cross the road of the first operator. In the unlikely case that they would even allow it, the charges would surely be astronomical.
If the oxygen partial pressure matches, the fire danger is the same. Well, not exactly the same since the extra mass from the nitrogen acts as a heat sink and the airflow characteristics will be different, etc., but it will still be largely the same.
I'm pretty sure you're the one who is failing science. All you need is for the oxygen partial pressure to match Earth's and you can have a pure oxygen. In that situation, we get the right amount of oxygen to avoid deprivation and toxicity. Also, things are no more flammable than in a normal Earth atmosphere. The lower overall pressure is within the range that human beings can adapt to. We don't actually _use_ the atmospheric nitrogen for anything. Plus, if decompression occurs, no bends (of course, you'll die anyway).
You don't quite seem to understand why the free market doesn't work very well with markets like telecommunications, roads, etc. Sometimes the regulation is problematic, but often the market wouldn't even be viable without the regulation. The problem is that some markets are what are referred to as natural monopolies. Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work? Roads are natural monopolies, which means that, to be practical, they either need to be managed by government or by heavily regulated industries. The same holds for telecommunications. With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around. In a pure free market, there would be so much noise on the airwaves that cell phones probably wouldn't even be possible.