There really is no option (with respect to a viable political party) for someone who believes in liberty in all areas. The democrats want to take away economic liberty.
Well, you're obviously not talking about healthcare --- since you don't want that delivered by the free market. So what specifically are you talking about?
Cap & Trade (a conservative plan for pricing pollution externalities, ripped right from the libertarian playbook)? Higher taxes so we can balance the budget? A single one-time economic stimulus bill that will probably never be repeated? Or the stupid TARP thing that was initiated by a Republican president, and was still probably necessary because the alternative was not economic freedom, but economic destruction.
Seriously, be specific. I know it's fashionable to reflexively bash the Democratic party on Slashdot, but you were able to give specifics about how the Republicans fucked us. Given that the Libertarian party has no chance of ever doing anything for anyone, anywhere, what would you ask the Democrats to do differently?
I know you're joking, but there's something to that. Cringely wrote an interesting opinion piece on what would be the downfall of Google one day, and his idea was that it would be a job satisfaction issue.
There are worse problems to have than a core of employees with brilliant ideas. If this really becomes an problem, then Google could just fund some of these projects. They already have a venture capital arm --- they could offer those employees a small amount of angel funding and their job back if things don't work out. They'd make money on the successes, and get back most of the good people who don't make it.
Google's real worry is that someday the market will freak out; the stock will crash; the investors will ask them to refocus on their core business rather than hiring a zillion kids to think about neat ideas. The good people will flee and the place gets a whole lot duller, really quickly. This happens to startups all the time. It's something of a miracle that it hasn't happened to Google yet.
If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....
My understanding is that the letter frequencies are correct, as if it is a cipher, but nobody's been able to make much sense of any candidate decodings --- which all seem like gibberish. This is what makes it so interesting. Letter scrambling might explain that, but who knows.
Yes, and I think this makes the point. From a corporation's point of view there was never any guarantee that an artificial meat product would be welcomed, since so many PETA-types would object on basically irrational grounds. This was a barrier to commercialization, since manufacturers didn't know if the product would be rejected by PETA even if it did substantially decrease cruelty to animals. To pre-empt this, PETA basically had to go to war with itself, making it clear that they/had/ considered the issue and the consensus was that artificial meat would be welcomed. It wasn't unanimous, but it's much better for PETA to fight this out/before/ a product is developed rather than after.
In practice, I don't think PETA's statement should be seen as having the force of a demand. What they're saying is: if some company can create a cruelty-free artificial meat, they can rest assured that they will not encounter irrational opposition from PETA. Which doesn't mean they won't get friction from other anti-meat groups, but PETA is big and vocal.
Why will it harm the Chinese? They can trade the stuff they make internally rather than shipping it to the US in return for what are basically IOUs.
If they could do that, they'd be doing it now. The Asian markets wouldn't have been panicking last fall when it looked like the US economy was going to hell. Sooner or later China will be able to support their economy on internal trade and trade with other markets. They just can't do it yet.
Sounds fair. Let's ignore your findings and recompute using the other's data sets and see if everything comes out equal.
I think he's saying that you can do that, and it will come out equal. Go ahead and do it if you don't believe him, assuming you're qualified to do so. Don't waste you time posting on Slashdot about it.
I used to think like you. Still do, to some extent. But reality is a whole lot more complicated than your postcard analysis.
In particular, it's hard to ignore the fact that the major economic trend of the late 20th, early 21st century is the commodification of labor. Specifically, reducing the amount of labor we need to do all of the things we did before. To some extent it's China and India, to another extent it's automation. All of these are good things, and may have positive effects (and some terribly, awful negative ones, like the environmental effects of six billion chinese burning US quantities of coal-generated electricity).
But in practice, a likely intermediate effect is a huge amount of economic political instability; in order for a billion people to become richer, the US has to be able to support a sophisticated high-demand economy. If we go into a depression or elect a reactionary pro-tariffs government, both Americans and Chinese will suffer enormously. I find it hard to believe that we're going to be able to maintain a relatively high-employment labor-driven workforce under the given conditions, and I fear for the end- and intermediate- states. It's going to be a long time before those billion Chinese are doing well enough that US labor can compete with them on an even footing. And in the meantime we need to find a completely new means of supporting society, preferably one that doesn't involve the majority of Americans poor and running meth labs (which is a perfectly likely outcome).
No, the FOI stuff sounds awful in context. How can you possibly defend any scientist who is against openness? Openness is the CORE of science. If you don't have that, you don't have science.
As a scientist, I can tell you that there's a lot of information I prefer to keep to myself. For example, my draft papers --- those are confidential until I'm ready to publish them. Otherwise somebody else publishes my results and my career is substantially harmed. Doesn't mean that I'm hiding anything from anyone (in my field, that's hardly a possibility).
And let's not kid ourselves: the response to this data dump so far does kind of make the scientists' case. There are clearly a lot of people who are just out to make it look like the scientists are being nefarious (as in the "hiding" comment), not actively seeking out source data to confirm/deny the observations. If someone with no scientific background asked for my email archive, for example, I would damned well resist the FOI request. It's my personal correspondence and I don't want someone dribbling it all over the Internet.
Until someone shows me that these scientists are hiding data, all of this is just tin foil hat bullshit. The availability of a hacked data should up the ante on the accusers --- after all, if there is a conspiracy you should be able to prove it now. Give me something real, anything real, rather than FUD and you'll have my respect.
Without any context --- e.g., our biochemistry, amino acid structure, nature of DNA --- this message amounts to about the worst practical joke in the history of interstellar communication. It has a relatively non-random structure, so clearly must mean something, and yet they'll never figure it out.
If they're wrong, you just have to get baptized just once anyway. Ergo, everyone should be baptized and a Christian.
Ergo, I don't believe Christians are committing a grave offense for wanting me to be baptized. Just as I have nothing against Al Gore for not making me watch his movie. You can hit "Parent" and re-read if my argument wasn't clear.
In any case, I wouldn't compare the unknowable fact of the afterlife to the 40-odd year future results of doubling our atmospheric CO2 levels.
This data dump has been out for a week or so, and here's the damning evidence:
# Michael Mann feels that a journal has published a sub-par paper, for reasons that are highly political, and wants other scientists to consider not submitting there. He doesn't destroy the journal or force anyone not to submit there. (1047388489)
# Tim Osborn uses a known, published technique --- that has been widely discussed in the literature --- to deal with the fact that one (of many) datasets is inconsistent. (0939154709).
# Phil Jones discusses his role in the assassination of skeptic John Daly!! (Just kidding, this email is tactless but has no impact on the science, and you know that perfectly well.) (1075403821)
# This FOI stuff does sound "awful" out of context. But here's the thing --- a hacker just stole their entire database, so who needs FOI requests? I mean, if they're avoiding FOI requests to hide some malfeasance, I'm sure you guys'll find it now. But instead of finding a smoking gun, all we get are a bunch of silly emails. (1219239172)
Did the models predict the cooling over the past decade or did they fail to actually predict anything other than warming?
I found this AP story interesting. They gave a number of statisticians the temperature data for the last few decades (without telling them what it was) and asked them to identify a trend. All found an increase, and determined that the tail end -- the "cooling" -- was statistical noise consistent with noise from earlier periods in the data set.
My point is that models don't predict every nook and cranny in the temperature map, since a lot of the noise is based on unpredictable events. (As an example, if you pour cold cream into hot coffee, you can't model the precise distribution of the two substances after one second, but you can predict the temperature of the mixture after a minute or two.) To the best of my knowledge, the models are consistent with recent trends.
If climate scientists are right, then there's a real chance that millions and millions will die fighting for their lives. On the other hand, if they're wrong, we've been forced* to sit through a 90 minute slideshow. Clearly these are events with comparable significance.
* And by "forced", of course, I mean "you are not forced to see this movie at all, you could go rent Wolverine instead".
So they are going to hide behind Intelectual Property Rights to keep their data from being reviewed!. Holy Fucking Shit! How can science do that and still remain respectable?
I just submitted a Federal grant (different field), with one deliverable being an open source library containing our work. Even thought we asked for this, we want to disseminate the stuff, our Universities put us through all kinds of hell over the Intellectual Property Rights. So I have no idea what's going on with this email, but this is one of the things that scientists have to deal with. It does not imply a worldwide scientific conspiracy.
(Incidentally, the idea that scientists could organize a worldwide conspiracy --- even if they weren't facing opposition from the most profitable industries on earth --- is one of the most laughably stupid ideas I've ever heard. The scientists I know can't even remember to throw out their old Chinese food before it rots in the lab fridge.)
The problem, as I understand it from TFA, is that the existing designs for FBRs are enormously expensive and dangerous --- not just because of the plutonium stockpile, but because they're cooled with liquid sodium. Most of the safety advances in modern reactors haven't been replicated to the FBR technology yet. We're not even sure how to do it.
As for the "securing plutonium is easy" argument, well --- geez, any engineer will tell you that making things work is the easy part. Making them work in the face of malicious actors, now, that's the hard problem.
Effectively securing that plutonium may be possible in the more developed nations (though there are risks). However, any solution that significantly reduces CO2 emissions is going to require global deployment. That means not just first-world countries, but "second" and third-world ones. Countries with political instability, criminal gangs, and in some cases nasty dictators. TFA is pointing out that every FBR will have enough plutonium lying around to build at least one fission device, possibly more. As the number of reactors hits the thousands, the probability that some will be stolen/misappropriated rapidly approaches one. This means wide-scale nuclear proliferation, the very real threat of cities being nuked, etc. And it's a problem that can't be put back in the bag even if we do eventually develop a safer technology. That will make civilization enormously more painful and expensive as we go forward.
The author appears to be advocating Thorium reactors as a solution. No idea if this is the right idea, but he seems to know more than myself or the parent poster, so I won't dismiss him with a handwave.
For those who didn't read (the rather dense) TFA, a big part of his objection is that we don't have a good, safe technology for breeder reactors, and that our existing reactor designs require Uranium which is something of a limited resource. I've seen estimates that we have maybe 70 years of the stuff around if we went totally nuclear, but those could be high or low -- who knows (and the cost will be astronomical when we start to run short of it). Breeder reactors can extend the fuel lifetime for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the existing breeder reactors that we do have tend to be very unsafe and expensive, using things like liquid sodium (catches fire when it contacts air) for coolant.
This brings me to my main point: the current state of nuclear reactor technology is not sustainable. Most Slashdot nuclear advocacy goes like this: (a) start building reactors now, (b) don't worry about fuel supplies, we'll just build breeder reactors. The problem is that the reactors we build in step (a) may be entirely incompatible with the breeder reactors, and we may not be able to build enough of the breeders in (b) safely to move to this technology in the near term.
Both of these problems can probably be solved with technological developments, which means spending a lot of money on nuclear research. It does not necessarily mean "go out and build reactors", "give subsidies to the nuclear industry", which seems to be the preferred policy action of many nuclear advocates. I think this needs to be understood.
TURN OFF THE CAR! That's what the key in the ignition is for. I remember my driver's ed teacher telling me this.
There is no key in many modern vehicles. Apparently the typical push-button start system can be manually turned off, but you have to hold the button for several seconds. People who are trying to control a surging vehicle often don't realize this. In any case, I'm not sure this is a standard, so you might be unlucky to wind up in the one car brand that doesn't support that feature.
Also there is a trend of finding slimmer women more attractive. In the past this ment that those would be having more children. However with the pill and other contraceptives, it looks as if the most attractive (in a biological way) females have LESS babies.
It's not quite as simple as that. As I've grown older (my 30s) I've discovered (the perhaps obvious fact) that "slimness" is largely a function of age. It amazes me how easy it is for my early-20s colleagues to stay skinny while drinking corn syrup all day long, and the same goes for females. I look ridiculously thin in pictures of me when I was the same age (and at the time I thought I needed to slim down, yikes). Its obviously possible to stay thin as you get older, but it becomes harder.
The point I'm trying to make here is that our cultural fetish for "skinny = beautiful" can also be viewed as a fetish for "younger = beautiful". And youth and fertility go together like a horse and carriage. I'm not sure what this has to do with this study, since they obviously controlled for age, but don't imagine that things are as simple as you make out.
Also, let's pray there are no women reading Slashdot, oy...
I was referring to encrypted hard drives, where the encryption and key storage is entirely performed in hardware (e.g. this). (Yes, the "hardware" is probably itself a microcontroller running software, but the point here is that the key is stored on the hard drive itself, not in the main computer's RAM). Even these drives are vulnerable to an evil bootloader, but at least the key isn't floating around in RAM as it must be for a software disk encryption solution.
There needs to be some generic solution that lets you not worry about the "stick in the USB boot device and press reset" sort of attack. Once you've got that, then all you worry about is it not being physically stolen.. and the hotel safe takes care of that for you. A laptop with NO writable media would do; that is, it uses only external storage. (sure, one could open the laptop and install some sort of keylogger, but that is trivially solvable with the usual tamperproof seals or, if you're really serious, self destruct) You'd carry the entire disk with you in an encrypted USB dongle.
The solution is to keep your sensitive data in an extremely portable device like a smartphone, and to never let it out of your sight. It may take a few years for these phones the become small enough to do the kinds of things that your typical spy/mafioso/industrial engineer needs to do with the device (when he's not out at fancy dress banquets, of course:).
Unfortunately, any general solution is going to be vulnerable to some sort of physical or software compromise. If the device (or any of its subcomponents) contains software-modifiable firmware, that can be re-written by some piece of malware. Even if all storage is RO, the device's OS can be compromised "in RAM" if there's an exploitable software vulnerability and it accesses the network. Physical anti-tamper protections will only get you so far against a motivated attacker. Most can be compromised somehow --- and if the device is produced on the mass-market, one could probably swap in a modified lookalike.
The point here is that while there may be some extreme combination of safeguards one can use to protect their hardware, the challenges in implementing these are far, far greater than that of carrying your hardware with you at all times (or finding some trusted, secure physical storage to put it in when you're out dancing with the villain's girlfriend). Portable commodity computing devices are not compatible with the evil maid.
You can see why it's called the "evil maid" attack; a likely scenario is that you leave your encrypted computer in your hotel room when you go out to dinner, and the maid sneaks in and installs the hacked bootloader. The same maid could even sneak back the next night and erase any traces of her actions.
Maybe if she's an idiot. Once you've installed your own bootloader, it can neatly remove itself. (After installing malware, or transferring the encryption keys and data it needs over the network.) Why in the world would the maid unnecessarily repeat the riskiest part of the entire attack?
But more to the point, it must be a slow week. Why are "serious" security researchers even wasting time on something this obvious? Of course your software-based hard disk encryption is hosed in the event that an attacker gets hold of your machine and can alter the bootloader. Hell, the really sophisticated bad guys aren't even going to do anything this difficult or risky. After all, the encryption key has to be in RAM somewhere whenever you're using software-based encryption (hardware encryption excluded). A well-engineered piece of malware will recover it, and two-factor authentication isn't going to help you.
Even trusted boot will only get you so far against a motivated adversary with this much sophistication. Don't leave your vital computing equipment behind in your hotel room.
Profits tend to be down when people aren't paying you for your work.;)
I realize you put a ";)" on this statement, but it's worth clarifying anyway: Nokia's profits are down because people aren't buying their products (as much as they used to). I'm sure it would help Nokia to collect some one-time patent license fees, but it isn't going to heal their phone sales.
I used to work for AT&T back before the SBC merger, and I can assure you, this is exactly what they said about 3G. While all of the other carriers were rolling out fast CDMA-based networks with associated data networks, AT&T was in the dark ages with its proprietary TDMA network. They spent a lot of time excusing this by saying that they were building a new 3G network. This may or may not be the same 3G technology they're using now, but I stress that it took them at least five more years (plus the transition to a completely different non-3G network technology --- GSM) before any of it actually happened.
If the vote is to reflect public opinion, people should vote their own opinion. They don't need to try to help the system by guessing the most popular option.
We don't vote everyday. Therefore it's useful and important for politicals representatives to know how their constituents feel about them, and about the relevant issues in between elections. While policy shouldn't always be based on polling, it's certainly a useful tool.
Slashdot Mirror
There really is no option (with respect to a viable political party) for someone who believes in liberty in all areas. The democrats want to take away economic liberty.
Well, you're obviously not talking about healthcare --- since you don't want that delivered by the free market. So what specifically are you talking about?
Cap & Trade (a conservative plan for pricing pollution externalities, ripped right from the libertarian playbook)? Higher taxes so we can balance the budget? A single one-time economic stimulus bill that will probably never be repeated? Or the stupid TARP thing that was initiated by a Republican president, and was still probably necessary because the alternative was not economic freedom, but economic destruction.
Seriously, be specific. I know it's fashionable to reflexively bash the Democratic party on Slashdot, but you were able to give specifics about how the Republicans fucked us. Given that the Libertarian party has no chance of ever doing anything for anyone, anywhere, what would you ask the Democrats to do differently?
I know you're joking, but there's something to that. Cringely wrote an interesting opinion piece on what would be the downfall of Google one day, and his idea was that it would be a job satisfaction issue.
There are worse problems to have than a core of employees with brilliant ideas. If this really becomes an problem, then Google could just fund some of these projects. They already have a venture capital arm --- they could offer those employees a small amount of angel funding and their job back if things don't work out. They'd make money on the successes, and get back most of the good people who don't make it.
Google's real worry is that someday the market will freak out; the stock will crash; the investors will ask them to refocus on their core business rather than hiring a zillion kids to think about neat ideas. The good people will flee and the place gets a whole lot duller, really quickly. This happens to startups all the time. It's something of a miracle that it hasn't happened to Google yet.
If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....
My understanding is that the letter frequencies are correct, as if it is a cipher, but nobody's been able to make much sense of any candidate decodings --- which all seem like gibberish. This is what makes it so interesting. Letter scrambling might explain that, but who knows.
Yes, and I think this makes the point. From a corporation's point of view there was never any guarantee that an artificial meat product would be welcomed, since so many PETA-types would object on basically irrational grounds. This was a barrier to commercialization, since manufacturers didn't know if the product would be rejected by PETA even if it did substantially decrease cruelty to animals. To pre-empt this, PETA basically had to go to war with itself, making it clear that they /had/ considered the issue and the consensus was that artificial meat would be welcomed. It wasn't unanimous, but it's much better for PETA to fight this out /before/ a product is developed rather than after.
In practice, I don't think PETA's statement should be seen as having the force of a demand. What they're saying is: if some company can create a cruelty-free artificial meat, they can rest assured that they will not encounter irrational opposition from PETA. Which doesn't mean they won't get friction from other anti-meat groups, but PETA is big and vocal.
Why will it harm the Chinese? They can trade the stuff they make internally rather than shipping it to the US in return for what are basically IOUs.
If they could do that, they'd be doing it now. The Asian markets wouldn't have been panicking last fall when it looked like the US economy was going to hell. Sooner or later China will be able to support their economy on internal trade and trade with other markets. They just can't do it yet.
Sounds fair. Let's ignore your findings and recompute using the other's data sets and see if everything comes out equal.
I think he's saying that you can do that, and it will come out equal. Go ahead and do it if you don't believe him, assuming you're qualified to do so. Don't waste you time posting on Slashdot about it.
I used to think like you. Still do, to some extent. But reality is a whole lot more complicated than your postcard analysis.
In particular, it's hard to ignore the fact that the major economic trend of the late 20th, early 21st century is the commodification of labor. Specifically, reducing the amount of labor we need to do all of the things we did before. To some extent it's China and India, to another extent it's automation. All of these are good things, and may have positive effects (and some terribly, awful negative ones, like the environmental effects of six billion chinese burning US quantities of coal-generated electricity).
But in practice, a likely intermediate effect is a huge amount of economic political instability; in order for a billion people to become richer, the US has to be able to support a sophisticated high-demand economy. If we go into a depression or elect a reactionary pro-tariffs government, both Americans and Chinese will suffer enormously. I find it hard to believe that we're going to be able to maintain a relatively high-employment labor-driven workforce under the given conditions, and I fear for the end- and intermediate- states. It's going to be a long time before those billion Chinese are doing well enough that US labor can compete with them on an even footing. And in the meantime we need to find a completely new means of supporting society, preferably one that doesn't involve the majority of Americans poor and running meth labs (which is a perfectly likely outcome).
No, the FOI stuff sounds awful in context. How can you possibly defend any scientist who is against openness? Openness is the CORE of science. If you don't have that, you don't have science.
As a scientist, I can tell you that there's a lot of information I prefer to keep to myself. For example, my draft papers --- those are confidential until I'm ready to publish them. Otherwise somebody else publishes my results and my career is substantially harmed. Doesn't mean that I'm hiding anything from anyone (in my field, that's hardly a possibility).
And let's not kid ourselves: the response to this data dump so far does kind of make the scientists' case. There are clearly a lot of people who are just out to make it look like the scientists are being nefarious (as in the "hiding" comment), not actively seeking out source data to confirm/deny the observations. If someone with no scientific background asked for my email archive, for example, I would damned well resist the FOI request. It's my personal correspondence and I don't want someone dribbling it all over the Internet.
Until someone shows me that these scientists are hiding data, all of this is just tin foil hat bullshit. The availability of a hacked data should up the ante on the accusers --- after all, if there is a conspiracy you should be able to prove it now. Give me something real, anything real, rather than FUD and you'll have my respect.
Without any context --- e.g., our biochemistry, amino acid structure, nature of DNA --- this message amounts to about the worst practical joke in the history of interstellar communication. It has a relatively non-random structure, so clearly must mean something, and yet they'll never figure it out.
If they're wrong, you just have to get baptized just once anyway. Ergo, everyone should be baptized and a Christian.
Ergo, I don't believe Christians are committing a grave offense for wanting me to be baptized. Just as I have nothing against Al Gore for not making me watch his movie. You can hit "Parent" and re-read if my argument wasn't clear.
In any case, I wouldn't compare the unknowable fact of the afterlife to the 40-odd year future results of doubling our atmospheric CO2 levels.
This data dump has been out for a week or so, and here's the damning evidence:
# Michael Mann feels that a journal has published a sub-par paper, for reasons that are highly political, and wants other scientists to consider not submitting there. He doesn't destroy the journal or force anyone not to submit there. (1047388489)
# Tim Osborn uses a known, published technique --- that has been widely discussed in the literature --- to deal with the fact that one (of many) datasets is inconsistent. (0939154709).
# Phil Jones discusses his role in the assassination of skeptic John Daly!! (Just kidding, this email is tactless but has no impact on the science, and you know that perfectly well.) (1075403821)
# This FOI stuff does sound "awful" out of context. But here's the thing --- a hacker just stole their entire database, so who needs FOI requests? I mean, if they're avoiding FOI requests to hide some malfeasance, I'm sure you guys'll find it now. But instead of finding a smoking gun, all we get are a bunch of silly emails. (1219239172)
Did the models predict the cooling over the past decade or did they fail to actually predict anything other than warming?
I found this AP story interesting. They gave a number of statisticians the temperature data for the last few decades (without telling them what it was) and asked them to identify a trend. All found an increase, and determined that the tail end -- the "cooling" -- was statistical noise consistent with noise from earlier periods in the data set.
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ap-impact-statisticians-reject-174088.html
My point is that models don't predict every nook and cranny in the temperature map, since a lot of the noise is based on unpredictable events. (As an example, if you pour cold cream into hot coffee, you can't model the precise distribution of the two substances after one second, but you can predict the temperature of the mixture after a minute or two.) To the best of my knowledge, the models are consistent with recent trends.
If climate scientists are right, then there's a real chance that millions and millions will die fighting for their lives. On the other hand, if they're wrong, we've been forced* to sit through a 90 minute slideshow. Clearly these are events with comparable significance.
* And by "forced", of course, I mean "you are not forced to see this movie at all, you could go rent Wolverine instead".
So they are going to hide behind Intelectual Property Rights to keep their data from being reviewed!. Holy Fucking Shit! How can science do that and still remain respectable?
I just submitted a Federal grant (different field), with one deliverable being an open source library containing our work. Even thought we asked for this, we want to disseminate the stuff, our Universities put us through all kinds of hell over the Intellectual Property Rights. So I have no idea what's going on with this email, but this is one of the things that scientists have to deal with. It does not imply a worldwide scientific conspiracy.
(Incidentally, the idea that scientists could organize a worldwide conspiracy --- even if they weren't facing opposition from the most profitable industries on earth --- is one of the most laughably stupid ideas I've ever heard. The scientists I know can't even remember to throw out their old Chinese food before it rots in the lab fridge.)
The problem, as I understand it from TFA, is that the existing designs for FBRs are enormously expensive and dangerous --- not just because of the plutonium stockpile, but because they're cooled with liquid sodium. Most of the safety advances in modern reactors haven't been replicated to the FBR technology yet. We're not even sure how to do it.
As for the "securing plutonium is easy" argument, well --- geez, any engineer will tell you that making things work is the easy part. Making them work in the face of malicious actors, now, that's the hard problem.
Effectively securing that plutonium may be possible in the more developed nations (though there are risks). However, any solution that significantly reduces CO2 emissions is going to require global deployment. That means not just first-world countries, but "second" and third-world ones. Countries with political instability, criminal gangs, and in some cases nasty dictators. TFA is pointing out that every FBR will have enough plutonium lying around to build at least one fission device, possibly more. As the number of reactors hits the thousands, the probability that some will be stolen/misappropriated rapidly approaches one. This means wide-scale nuclear proliferation, the very real threat of cities being nuked, etc. And it's a problem that can't be put back in the bag even if we do eventually develop a safer technology. That will make civilization enormously more painful and expensive as we go forward.
The author appears to be advocating Thorium reactors as a solution. No idea if this is the right idea, but he seems to know more than myself or the parent poster, so I won't dismiss him with a handwave.
For those who didn't read (the rather dense) TFA, a big part of his objection is that we don't have a good, safe technology for breeder reactors, and that our existing reactor designs require Uranium which is something of a limited resource. I've seen estimates that we have maybe 70 years of the stuff around if we went totally nuclear, but those could be high or low -- who knows (and the cost will be astronomical when we start to run short of it). Breeder reactors can extend the fuel lifetime for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the existing breeder reactors that we do have tend to be very unsafe and expensive, using things like liquid sodium (catches fire when it contacts air) for coolant.
This brings me to my main point: the current state of nuclear reactor technology is not sustainable. Most Slashdot nuclear advocacy goes like this: (a) start building reactors now, (b) don't worry about fuel supplies, we'll just build breeder reactors. The problem is that the reactors we build in step (a) may be entirely incompatible with the breeder reactors, and we may not be able to build enough of the breeders in (b) safely to move to this technology in the near term.
Both of these problems can probably be solved with technological developments, which means spending a lot of money on nuclear research. It does not necessarily mean "go out and build reactors", "give subsidies to the nuclear industry", which seems to be the preferred policy action of many nuclear advocates. I think this needs to be understood.
TURN OFF THE CAR! That's what the key in the ignition is for. I remember my driver's ed teacher telling me this.
There is no key in many modern vehicles. Apparently the typical push-button start system can be manually turned off, but you have to hold the button for several seconds. People who are trying to control a surging vehicle often don't realize this. In any case, I'm not sure this is a standard, so you might be unlucky to wind up in the one car brand that doesn't support that feature.
Also there is a trend of finding slimmer women more attractive. In the past this ment that those would be having more children. However with the pill and other contraceptives, it looks as if the most attractive (in a biological way) females have LESS babies.
It's not quite as simple as that. As I've grown older (my 30s) I've discovered (the perhaps obvious fact) that "slimness" is largely a function of age. It amazes me how easy it is for my early-20s colleagues to stay skinny while drinking corn syrup all day long, and the same goes for females. I look ridiculously thin in pictures of me when I was the same age (and at the time I thought I needed to slim down, yikes). Its obviously possible to stay thin as you get older, but it becomes harder.
The point I'm trying to make here is that our cultural fetish for "skinny = beautiful" can also be viewed as a fetish for "younger = beautiful". And youth and fertility go together like a horse and carriage. I'm not sure what this has to do with this study, since they obviously controlled for age, but don't imagine that things are as simple as you make out.
Also, let's pray there are no women reading Slashdot, oy...
I was referring to encrypted hard drives, where the encryption and key storage is entirely performed in hardware (e.g. this). (Yes, the "hardware" is probably itself a microcontroller running software, but the point here is that the key is stored on the hard drive itself, not in the main computer's RAM). Even these drives are vulnerable to an evil bootloader, but at least the key isn't floating around in RAM as it must be for a software disk encryption solution.
There needs to be some generic solution that lets you not worry about the "stick in the USB boot device and press reset" sort of attack. Once you've got that, then all you worry about is it not being physically stolen.. and the hotel safe takes care of that for you. A laptop with NO writable media would do; that is, it uses only external storage. (sure, one could open the laptop and install some sort of keylogger, but that is trivially solvable with the usual tamperproof seals or, if you're really serious, self destruct) You'd carry the entire disk with you in an encrypted USB dongle.
The solution is to keep your sensitive data in an extremely portable device like a smartphone, and to never let it out of your sight. It may take a few years for these phones the become small enough to do the kinds of things that your typical spy/mafioso/industrial engineer needs to do with the device (when he's not out at fancy dress banquets, of course :).
Unfortunately, any general solution is going to be vulnerable to some sort of physical or software compromise. If the device (or any of its subcomponents) contains software-modifiable firmware, that can be re-written by some piece of malware. Even if all storage is RO, the device's OS can be compromised "in RAM" if there's an exploitable software vulnerability and it accesses the network. Physical anti-tamper protections will only get you so far against a motivated attacker. Most can be compromised somehow --- and if the device is produced on the mass-market, one could probably swap in a modified lookalike.
The point here is that while there may be some extreme combination of safeguards one can use to protect their hardware, the challenges in implementing these are far, far greater than that of carrying your hardware with you at all times (or finding some trusted, secure physical storage to put it in when you're out dancing with the villain's girlfriend). Portable commodity computing devices are not compatible with the evil maid.
You can see why it's called the "evil maid" attack; a likely scenario is that you leave your encrypted computer in your hotel room when you go out to dinner, and the maid sneaks in and installs the hacked bootloader. The same maid could even sneak back the next night and erase any traces of her actions.
Maybe if she's an idiot. Once you've installed your own bootloader, it can neatly remove itself. (After installing malware, or transferring the encryption keys and data it needs over the network.) Why in the world would the maid unnecessarily repeat the riskiest part of the entire attack?
But more to the point, it must be a slow week. Why are "serious" security researchers even wasting time on something this obvious? Of course your software-based hard disk encryption is hosed in the event that an attacker gets hold of your machine and can alter the bootloader. Hell, the really sophisticated bad guys aren't even going to do anything this difficult or risky. After all, the encryption key has to be in RAM somewhere whenever you're using software-based encryption (hardware encryption excluded). A well-engineered piece of malware will recover it, and two-factor authentication isn't going to help you.
Even trusted boot will only get you so far against a motivated adversary with this much sophistication. Don't leave your vital computing equipment behind in your hotel room.
Profits tend to be down when people aren't paying you for your work. ;)
I realize you put a ";)" on this statement, but it's worth clarifying anyway: Nokia's profits are down because people aren't buying their products (as much as they used to). I'm sure it would help Nokia to collect some one-time patent license fees, but it isn't going to heal their phone sales.
I used to work for AT&T back before the SBC merger, and I can assure you, this is exactly what they said about 3G. While all of the other carriers were rolling out fast CDMA-based networks with associated data networks, AT&T was in the dark ages with its proprietary TDMA network. They spent a lot of time excusing this by saying that they were building a new 3G network. This may or may not be the same 3G technology they're using now, but I stress that it took them at least five more years (plus the transition to a completely different non-3G network technology --- GSM) before any of it actually happened.
If the vote is to reflect public opinion, people should vote their own opinion. They don't need to try to help the system by guessing the most popular option.
We don't vote everyday. Therefore it's useful and important for politicals representatives to know how their constituents feel about them, and about the relevant issues in between elections. While policy shouldn't always be based on polling, it's certainly a useful tool.