1) I would love nothing else for petro-power to become economically unsustainable with respect to renewables. Currently, that's not the case even with massive green-power subsidies. Here in CA, power prices are pushed ever higher as they push the mandates higher.
2) Functional regulation also requires a principled opposition that is willing to focus on actual deliverables rather than scoring points.
3) There is no way that global warming is going to be solved by regulations on the extractive industry, so this is a non-goal in this domain. If we want to try for a comprehensive solution to AGW, it needs to be done across industries and across countries. Global problems cannot be solved locally.
Now proper regulation would raise costs significantly and put pressure on finding REAL solutions sooner which is why environmentalists want to use them to prohibit dirty industry growth
This is exactly the problem, you are effectively deciding on the solution rather than the goal. If it's possible to pump crude out of Alaska without spilling it on the tundra, then you should be in favor of it. To the extent that safety requires raising the cost, that's an acceptable tradeoff, but it absolutely is not the goal unless you are just being obstructionist instead of productive.
Nuclear power is a great example. A still functioning regulatory system makes nuclear power more costly than solar PV. This is still the case with the large government subsidies involved in that industry already.
I worked in nuclear for a while. Most of the cost increase goes to lobbyists and lawyers to fight the other guys' lobbyists and lawyers. Which is all that the nimbyciles have every really accomplished -- making the industry grease the same palms that they are doing with at least as much dough.
[ Kind of ironic actually -- the fight against the parasitic plutocrats only spawns more plutocrats. Perhaps that's a sign about why it's unproductive not to engage with problems directly and find solutions. ]
I keep hearing other nations do a better job deciding such things; like Canada for example.
You mean that country that's pissed off we are stalling our decision on the giant pipeline to transport their oil from the tar sands?!
Truth be told, I've heard they don't care what the answer is since if we say no they'll build the pipeline to the Pacific themselves, but they wanted the stability of shipping it to us. Such a shame really to keep them in limbo, since they can't go elsewhere until we've officially said no too. But yeah, that oil isn't going to the stay in the ground in any event.
We are not anti-fracking or anti-drilling. My goodness, we live in Texas. Keep it in the pipes, and if you have a leak or spill, report it and be respectful to your neighbors. If you are going to put this stuff in close proximity to homes, be respectful and careful.
Yeah, pretty much this.
We all know that extraction companies do idiotic and careless things and don't give a fuck about safety -- either of their workers or of the environment around them.
We also know that a lot of environmentalists advocate the complete cessation of fracking and drilling even though that makes no practical sense (for now).
And so we've lost the middle ground of wanting a strong extractive industry with strong environmental safeguards and a culture of safety grown up around it. It would be a strategic error for companies to adopt such a policy in a situation where environmentalists are going to oppose them politically and legally anyway no matter what they do. And it would be a strategic error for environmentalists to advocate for responsible extraction given that the companies are going to weasel out of it anyway.
I know where we want to go, I think it's certainly technologically and economically feasible to extract oil and gas without damaging the environment. But the way we pursue it is fundamentally broken on all sides.
[ And none of this is intended to be negative. I consider myself an environmentalist and a technologist FWIW. ]
How is shooting something from hundreds of feet away with a high powered rifle any kind of sport? And now drones? FFS , why not just nuke the whole fucking forest then Billy Bob Smalldick can claim he's killed everything and act the hero to all the toothless hags that inhabit the trailers in the area!
Well we killed off all the damned wolves so now we have to control the herbivore population or they will boom/bust and starve to death -- a fate much worse than being shot.
Anyway, it's an enjoyable activity and actually rather zen given that you often spend hours perched away with nothing but your thoughts...
You don't have to cull it down, you just need to organize it into logically distinct groups and assign them priorities. Hoarding isn't the problem, the problem is assigning too high a priority to the hoarded pr0n as compared to the really important stuff.
Group #0:
Contents: Documents, source control repositories, user preferences, email archives Maximum Size: 10GB Protection: 3-way Mirror + Snapshots + Offsite Total Space Required (way upper bound): 150GB Total Cost: $3 a month for Crashplan
Group #1:
Contents: Personal photos, music collection, other people's #0 backups,/home Maximum Size: 1TB Protection: 2-way Mirror + Offsite Total Space Required: 2TB Total cost $3 a month for Crashplan
Group #2
Contents: Everything else, media, pr0n, Maximum Size: âz Protection: Diskpool, maybe integrity if you like zfs/btrfs
Again, that sentence is unparseable by people in the real world.
Maybe tech workers have spent too much time in the tech world and forgot that terms like "SIP" and "POTS" are not really part of the language. Moreover, the mental model of understanding used to conceptualize the various bits of the phone system and how they interact is itself part of a specialized skill set. You can't get very far when you are, quite literally, thinking about it wrong.
And it's not just the idiots (although they certainly qualify), I've met tons of research academics, medical professionals, authors, historians whose make fundamental errors in how information systems work and are organized. They ask questions that I just have to answer with, "the fact that you ask this question means you have the wrong picture in your head already".
As an example, I once had a surgeon explain to me that his computer was not likely to be hacked because he always put it to sleep when he wasn't using it. I asked him what about the times it was awake, and he said that "well it can't be hacked because I'm using it at the time and only one person can be on the computer at once". Suffice it to say, I had to go down a few levels to explain things.
Or think of it this way -- he knows as much about computers and information systems as you know about orthopaedic surgery and the organization of the connective tissue in the body.:-)
If you're doing wifi-only, get yourself a static IP, run asterisk, use any old cellphone with SIP support and wifi and skip AT&T, as they are fuckers of the highest degree. Their prices are beyond fucking ridiculous. They want $50/mo for a land line. I got SIP for about ten bucks a month. My Xperia Play is now our cordless phone, and it's also a neato clock. My server is a $20 pogoplug, but in fairness I bought two of them so I could do HA.
You forgot to account for the time of a competent admin that can set up asterisk and is around to troubleshoot it.
$50/mo for a landline is stupid, but make a fair comparison -- you can't rate a system that requires a/.er to design and set up against one that a person with an IQ of room temperature can use.
For many (but certainly not all) applications, especially when it comes to UI, what matters is 95% worst performance, not peak throughput. From the Anandtech review, that's where this drive really shines.
Different tradeoffs have to be made for different workloads -- it can't be boiled down to a single (or even a set of) number(s). Some applications are far more tolerant of worst-case performance than others.
You are right to be sarcastic but you are dead wrong in conflating volatility risk with counterparty risk. The two are actually completely orthogonal -- you can have very little risk of volatility but high counterparty risk, or high/low (and high/high low/low for that matter).
The key is to distinguish from the risk inherent in the fulfillment of the contract and the risk that the contract will not be carried out.
Look, it's nice when you are well versed enough in a language to not have to lookup method/function names, nor their arguments. But let's face it, it's hardly the mark of an amazing programmer to have a photographic memory.
On the other hand, a guy that says "oh yeah, I should use one of those STL things that let's you look up values by keys" and has to go fishing for std::map doesn't inspire one with confidence. Repeated exposure to (and use) of a language (and/or framework API) naturally causes considerable memorization to happen even without trying to memorize everything. It's an indicia of experience.
Of course, experience isn't skill and so forth. But having a decent working recall of how to get around seems to me a necessary but not sufficient condition of being an "amazing programmer".
[ Full disclosure: I do, in fact, use an IDE for most C/C++ development. ]
Until the boffins at Intel or ARM create a processor whose machine code is JavaScript, you need bullshit quotes around that 'native' claim.
If you want to make the argument that you don't need native code, that's your prerogative. Depending on the use case and requirements, you will no doubt be correct in a large number of cases -- I don't need a native slashdot app, the HTML version is quite sufficient.
But why in God's name do you need to make a preposterous claim like that? What does that buy you?
Bluetooth keyboard? Almost all platforms support it.
Also, I have this vague terror about any sort of important scripting being done from a device with a sub-5" screen. No offense, but I kind of hope that I don't rely on those services...
"They don't want to endanger the space-farers or the public, and they can't let the industry get started and then have a Titanic-like scenario that puts an end to it all in the eyes of the public."
Puts and end to all of what? Did we stop ocean-faring after Titanic sunk? What is this guy talking about?
No affiliation, but this sounds like a good reason to move to TRESOR-like implementation in which the AES key is kept in hardware registers that are cleared when you go to S3 and on each reset. It's still vulnerable to anyone that gets root access to your OS, but a cold-reboot attack or a DMA attack on the RAM are not going to work -- so that's some forward progress.
Anyone want to take a stab at porting it to TrueCrypt?
Yeah, why should we trust judges when they explain the law? And what's with these pesky biologists trying to explain biology. And don't get me started on mathematicians telling me that I'm doing matrix multiplication wrong! And historians! Talking about history!
You should really start referring to them as "my opinions of how the 4th amendment works". As far as I can tell, not a single practicing or academic legal authority has ever endorsed this construction.
Now, of course, it's a free country -- you can represent your views however you want. But you don't get to pick your facts and you definitely don't get to reinterpret the law just because you don't like it (hellooo segregationists).
The problem is that many of us rent or otherwise occupy a dwelling for a much shorter period of time than the lifetime of these bulbs. So either you've got to convince my landlord (or the next tenant) to pay me for the remaining lifetime on the LED bulb (how can they measure that, we don't know) or else I've got to swallow it when I move somewhere else.
The time horizon of these things is just way too long to make sense except for those already fairly stable in where they are.
You seem to have misunderstood the point of insurance. The way it works is that you pay more than you need to most of the time on the off chance that something goes horribly wrong.
The issue is that the vast majority of spending doesn't go to "the off chance something goes horribly wrong", it goes to treating a very small fraction of people with multiple chronic conditions. That's not catastrophe insurance, it's continued expense.
Since you made the analogy to homeowners insurance, it's the difference between having your house burn down once by accident and living right in the middle of a dry forest that periodically burns down. Insurance will cover the first case without issue, but in the latter case you simply won't be able to get homeowner's insurance because the company figures out that they aren't so much insuring you against a random chance of disaster but signing up for continued upkeep of a house that's nearly certain to burn down again.
What 23andMe does is market a product that you use to extract unique information about your own body, which is then presented to you in the form of suggestions about what health measures you should take -- in other words, medical advice. Very different.
So does the local palm-reader.
The point appears to be that you can provide medical advice if you are completely unscientific about it, but as soon as you try to offer even a little bit (even of experimental or tenuous) fact, then you have to go whole hog.
This is in Germany. They have a different history than we do in the US. You will find laws like that in France and other nations that where under Nazi rule. They are a democratic nation and it is up to them to change their laws if they see fit. Canada also has laws about hate speech that would not fly in the US. The US never had Nazis in control of our nation so we feel the best protection is freedom of speech. In many places in the EU they do not feel secure in that. The US has stricter restrictions on porn because of our culture. Although the restrictions are really very minimal outside of broadcast TV and radio. I hate when a bunch of people from Europe start spouting off options about the US's rules. Germany is a free nation so let it's citizens decide what works best for them.
This line of logic might be fine for Nazis, but ultimately it has the problem that "a free nation" is not just a statement about the derivation of rules but also about some meta-rules that govern the process of rules-formation itself. This is sometimes called constitutional (not in the capital-C sense) or meta-political ordering that goes beyond the individual policy choices. One of those meta-political rules that I think has merit is that, irrespective of the democratic nature of the process, no body-politic ought to be able to suppress organized dissent or prevent those from offering a contrary platform. Otherwise, I think you (in general, not in Germany ever) risk the run of falling into the "one-man-one-vote-one-time" trap where a democratically elected government is able to use the levers of power to permanently embed itself.
Ultimately, I'm not losing any sleep over it.
[ FWIW, I don't think there's anything wrong with (polite!) normative comments about contrary policies abroad. I have no problem when people from Europe say (respectfully) that they are bewildered by American support for the RKBA and that, if they were the voters here, they would not chose such a policy. I disagree with that, but they are entitled to their opinion and no one should begrudge them that. ]
. Before it's done, it will become clear that the House and Senate oversight committees were either derelict in their duties or complicit in illegal activities. They either knew or they didn't. Either way, eventually they will be the ones asking for clemency.
Huh? I don't agree with the behavior or the votes of the Intelligence Committees but it's hard for me to accept that this constitutes some sort of criminal act because I disagree with their (vile) politics. This is getting perilously close to criminalizing legislators over holding divergent views about the proper role of secrecy and surveillance. What happens if some next neo-con administration accuses the SSCI of treason over denying some operation or publicizing some classified fact?
Is it no longer enough to disagree with our political opponents that we have to accuse them of criminality at every turn?
Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that heâ(TM)s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?
Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long heâ(TM)s been in the country?
So that if you refuse to do business with him on equal terms with Americans, they can sic the DOJ on you for discrimination in a public accommodation.
After all, it's illegal to refuse to do business with Mr Aghazadeh based on his religion or national origin.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I would love nothing else for petro-power to become economically unsustainable with respect to renewables. Currently, that's not the case even with massive green-power subsidies. Here in CA, power prices are pushed ever higher as they push the mandates higher.
2) Functional regulation also requires a principled opposition that is willing to focus on actual deliverables rather than scoring points.
3) There is no way that global warming is going to be solved by regulations on the extractive industry, so this is a non-goal in this domain. If we want to try for a comprehensive solution to AGW, it needs to be done across industries and across countries. Global problems cannot be solved locally.
This is exactly the problem, you are effectively deciding on the solution rather than the goal. If it's possible to pump crude out of Alaska without spilling it on the tundra, then you should be in favor of it. To the extent that safety requires raising the cost, that's an acceptable tradeoff, but it absolutely is not the goal unless you are just being obstructionist instead of productive.
I worked in nuclear for a while. Most of the cost increase goes to lobbyists and lawyers to fight the other guys' lobbyists and lawyers. Which is all that the nimbyciles have every really accomplished -- making the industry grease the same palms that they are doing with at least as much dough.
[ Kind of ironic actually -- the fight against the parasitic plutocrats only spawns more plutocrats. Perhaps that's a sign about why it's unproductive not to engage with problems directly and find solutions. ]
You mean that country that's pissed off we are stalling our decision on the giant pipeline to transport their oil from the tar sands?!
Truth be told, I've heard they don't care what the answer is since if we say no they'll build the pipeline to the Pacific themselves, but they wanted the stability of shipping it to us. Such a shame really to keep them in limbo, since they can't go elsewhere until we've officially said no too. But yeah, that oil isn't going to the stay in the ground in any event.
Yeah, pretty much this.
We all know that extraction companies do idiotic and careless things and don't give a fuck about safety -- either of their workers or of the environment around them.
We also know that a lot of environmentalists advocate the complete cessation of fracking and drilling even though that makes no practical sense (for now).
And so we've lost the middle ground of wanting a strong extractive industry with strong environmental safeguards and a culture of safety grown up around it. It would be a strategic error for companies to adopt such a policy in a situation where environmentalists are going to oppose them politically and legally anyway no matter what they do. And it would be a strategic error for environmentalists to advocate for responsible extraction given that the companies are going to weasel out of it anyway.
I know where we want to go, I think it's certainly technologically and economically feasible to extract oil and gas without damaging the environment. But the way we pursue it is fundamentally broken on all sides.
[ And none of this is intended to be negative. I consider myself an environmentalist and a technologist FWIW. ]
Dude with 30lbs of marijuana in an uncovered truck bed.
I hate the War on Drugs as much as the next /.er, but seriously, if you have that much weed you can probably afford a hard-top or a van or something.
Maybe not, depending on the license.
In fact, protecting the integrity of the software by using a digital signature is expressly the use case that GPLv3 is trying to forbid.
How is shooting something from hundreds of feet away with a high powered rifle any kind of sport? And now drones? FFS , why not just nuke the whole fucking forest then Billy Bob Smalldick can claim he's killed everything and act the hero to all the toothless hags that inhabit the trailers in the area!
Well we killed off all the damned wolves so now we have to control the herbivore population or they will boom/bust and starve to death -- a fate much worse than being shot.
Anyway, it's an enjoyable activity and actually rather zen given that you often spend hours perched away with nothing but your thoughts ...
You don't have to cull it down, you just need to organize it into logically distinct groups and assign them priorities. Hoarding isn't the problem, the problem is assigning too high a priority to the hoarded pr0n as compared to the really important stuff.
Contents: Documents, source control repositories, user preferences, email archives
Maximum Size: 10GB
Protection: 3-way Mirror + Snapshots + Offsite
Total Space Required (way upper bound): 150GB
Total Cost: $3 a month for Crashplan
Contents: Personal photos, music collection, other people's #0 backups, /home
Maximum Size: 1TB
Protection: 2-way Mirror + Offsite
Total Space Required: 2TB
Total cost $3 a month for Crashplan
Contents: Everything else, media, pr0n,
Maximum Size: âz
Protection: Diskpool, maybe integrity if you like zfs/btrfs
(1) Password managers. One strong password, infinite storage. Maybe one for work and one for home.
(2) DropBox. One file, infinite number of distributed copies. Also available to sync on your mobile device of choice :-)
(3) Discipline. Every password is in the vault, no exceptions. Every change is updated and synced to DB.
Problem Solved.
Again, that sentence is unparseable by people in the real world.
Maybe tech workers have spent too much time in the tech world and forgot that terms like "SIP" and "POTS" are not really part of the language. Moreover, the mental model of understanding used to conceptualize the various bits of the phone system and how they interact is itself part of a specialized skill set. You can't get very far when you are, quite literally, thinking about it wrong.
And it's not just the idiots (although they certainly qualify), I've met tons of research academics, medical professionals, authors, historians whose make fundamental errors in how information systems work and are organized. They ask questions that I just have to answer with, "the fact that you ask this question means you have the wrong picture in your head already".
As an example, I once had a surgeon explain to me that his computer was not likely to be hacked because he always put it to sleep when he wasn't using it. I asked him what about the times it was awake, and he said that "well it can't be hacked because I'm using it at the time and only one person can be on the computer at once". Suffice it to say, I had to go down a few levels to explain things.
Or think of it this way -- he knows as much about computers and information systems as you know about orthopaedic surgery and the organization of the connective tissue in the body. :-)
You forgot to account for the time of a competent admin that can set up asterisk and is around to troubleshoot it.
$50/mo for a landline is stupid, but make a fair comparison -- you can't rate a system that requires a /.er to design and set up against one that a person with an IQ of room temperature can use.
For many (but certainly not all) applications, especially when it comes to UI, what matters is 95% worst performance, not peak throughput. From the Anandtech review, that's where this drive really shines.
Different tradeoffs have to be made for different workloads -- it can't be boiled down to a single (or even a set of) number(s). Some applications are far more tolerant of worst-case performance than others.
You are right to be sarcastic but you are dead wrong in conflating volatility risk with counterparty risk. The two are actually completely orthogonal -- you can have very little risk of volatility but high counterparty risk, or high/low (and high/high low/low for that matter).
The key is to distinguish from the risk inherent in the fulfillment of the contract and the risk that the contract will not be carried out.
On the other hand, a guy that says "oh yeah, I should use one of those STL things that let's you look up values by keys" and has to go fishing for std::map doesn't inspire one with confidence. Repeated exposure to (and use) of a language (and/or framework API) naturally causes considerable memorization to happen even without trying to memorize everything. It's an indicia of experience.
Of course, experience isn't skill and so forth. But having a decent working recall of how to get around seems to me a necessary but not sufficient condition of being an "amazing programmer".
[ Full disclosure: I do, in fact, use an IDE for most C/C++ development. ]
FTFY.
Until the boffins at Intel or ARM create a processor whose machine code is JavaScript, you need bullshit quotes around that 'native' claim.
If you want to make the argument that you don't need native code, that's your prerogative. Depending on the use case and requirements, you will no doubt be correct in a large number of cases -- I don't need a native slashdot app, the HTML version is quite sufficient.
But why in God's name do you need to make a preposterous claim like that? What does that buy you?
Bluetooth keyboard? Almost all platforms support it.
Also, I have this vague terror about any sort of important scripting being done from a device with a sub-5" screen. No offense, but I kind of hope that I don't rely on those services ...
Puts and end to all of what? Did we stop ocean-faring after Titanic sunk? What is this guy talking about?
Won't help -- the time it takes to try even thousands or millions of decoy keys is trivial (10^6) complexity.
Security through obscurity of the key storage is papering over the fundamental new assumption that RAM Is accessible to a hostile attacker.
No affiliation, but this sounds like a good reason to move to TRESOR-like implementation in which the AES key is kept in hardware registers that are cleared when you go to S3 and on each reset. It's still vulnerable to anyone that gets root access to your OS, but a cold-reboot attack or a DMA attack on the RAM are not going to work -- so that's some forward progress.
Anyone want to take a stab at porting it to TrueCrypt?
Yeah, why should we trust judges when they explain the law? And what's with these pesky biologists trying to explain biology. And don't get me started on mathematicians telling me that I'm doing matrix multiplication wrong! And historians! Talking about history!
Anti-intellectualism at its finest.
You should really start referring to them as "my opinions of how the 4th amendment works". As far as I can tell, not a single practicing or academic legal authority has ever endorsed this construction.
Now, of course, it's a free country -- you can represent your views however you want. But you don't get to pick your facts and you definitely don't get to reinterpret the law just because you don't like it (hellooo segregationists).
The problem is that many of us rent or otherwise occupy a dwelling for a much shorter period of time than the lifetime of these bulbs. So either you've got to convince my landlord (or the next tenant) to pay me for the remaining lifetime on the LED bulb (how can they measure that, we don't know) or else I've got to swallow it when I move somewhere else.
The time horizon of these things is just way too long to make sense except for those already fairly stable in where they are.
The issue is that the vast majority of spending doesn't go to "the off chance something goes horribly wrong", it goes to treating a very small fraction of people with multiple chronic conditions. That's not catastrophe insurance, it's continued expense.
Since you made the analogy to homeowners insurance, it's the difference between having your house burn down once by accident and living right in the middle of a dry forest that periodically burns down. Insurance will cover the first case without issue, but in the latter case you simply won't be able to get homeowner's insurance because the company figures out that they aren't so much insuring you against a random chance of disaster but signing up for continued upkeep of a house that's nearly certain to burn down again.
So does the local palm-reader.
The point appears to be that you can provide medical advice if you are completely unscientific about it, but as soon as you try to offer even a little bit (even of experimental or tenuous) fact, then you have to go whole hog.
This line of logic might be fine for Nazis, but ultimately it has the problem that "a free nation" is not just a statement about the derivation of rules but also about some meta-rules that govern the process of rules-formation itself. This is sometimes called constitutional (not in the capital-C sense) or meta-political ordering that goes beyond the individual policy choices. One of those meta-political rules that I think has merit is that, irrespective of the democratic nature of the process, no body-politic ought to be able to suppress organized dissent or prevent those from offering a contrary platform. Otherwise, I think you (in general, not in Germany ever) risk the run of falling into the "one-man-one-vote-one-time" trap where a democratically elected government is able to use the levers of power to permanently embed itself.
Ultimately, I'm not losing any sleep over it.
[ FWIW, I don't think there's anything wrong with (polite!) normative comments about contrary policies abroad. I have no problem when people from Europe say (respectfully) that they are bewildered by American support for the RKBA and that, if they were the voters here, they would not chose such a policy. I disagree with that, but they are entitled to their opinion and no one should begrudge them that. ]
Huh? I don't agree with the behavior or the votes of the Intelligence Committees but it's hard for me to accept that this constitutes some sort of criminal act because I disagree with their (vile) politics. This is getting perilously close to criminalizing legislators over holding divergent views about the proper role of secrecy and surveillance. What happens if some next neo-con administration accuses the SSCI of treason over denying some operation or publicizing some classified fact?
Is it no longer enough to disagree with our political opponents that we have to accuse them of criminality at every turn?
So that if you refuse to do business with him on equal terms with Americans, they can sic the DOJ on you for discrimination in a public accommodation.
After all, it's illegal to refuse to do business with Mr Aghazadeh based on his religion or national origin.