Just use a secret encrypted key exchange, like Diffie-Hellman, to set up a secure communication channel on the wire.
Or use SSL, which uses protocols like DH (depending on configured protocol suite) to set up a secure communication channel. And it's a heck of a lot simpler than writing all that stuff yourself; both the protocols used and the implementation even get independently audited from time to time.
No, you don't actually need to use a CA to use SSL. Or rather, you can easily run with an explicit list of trusted certificates or operate a private CA. Those are in fact a highly secure option (if harder work to scale up).
Technology has existed for a long time that efficiently moves an entire line of vehicles in close succession from one town to the next, in some cases.. mostly autonomously and on dedicated "roads".
They're called trains.
And they work well in the US, provided your dealing with freight which doesn't require high speeds. People like to arrive more rapidly than that, and the US rail network isn't set up to service such needs.
For a proper high-speed line, you've got to not just keep freight levels down on it, but also ensure that there are very few (ideally none) level crossings on it as they're huge sources of trouble when speeds are high. Expected average speeds also control the amount which you bank the track, how sharp the curves are, what sort of junctions you use, etc. In short, you design and build a high speed line quite differently to a freight line and you don't run the same traffic on it. (You also don't run it to exactly the same places; most people don't like visiting freight terminals.)
That's a really poor way of describing SCTP. Firstly the relationship between TCP and UDP is such that TCP could be built entirely ontop of UDP, the only reason it isn't physically is so that the port numbers for UDP and TCP are distinct. On the other side the best description of UDP is actually "Bare IP packets with port numbers".
It also adds packet content checksums, so you're much less likely to get bad data delivered. It's less important than it used to be (due to improvements in physical network quality) but even so, it's a huge help since it lets you assume that the data is at least uncorrupted by the transfer process itself.
No, you jerk. BT traffic should look like the bulk asynchronous data transfer that it is. You do not need low latency networking for transfer of large files, so don't try to be an asshole by pretending it is anything else as that just encourages ISPs to do deep packet inspection and other wrong things.
I guess you have never seen west Texas... And for that matter, lots of other places currently not very nice to live in that will be much nicer in a warmer and wetter world.
Do you want to bet the farm (literally) on that? We don't know what will happen in specific locations as global average temperatures rise (though it's a reasonably good bet that arctic areas will get warmer). If an area that currently supports many people gets a lot less hospitable — unreasonable to assume that this wouldn't happen somewhere, though not necessarily where we expect — there will have to be mass migrations (and/or mass deaths). That would likely involve at least one war. Or maybe a part of the world that currently produces a lot of food would suddenly become less able to do so. That would also be very bad. Will these things happen? Who knows, but the stakes are mind-bogglingly high.
Climate scientists are kicking up a fuss over global warming not because they hate big business (though some do) but rather because they are, as a group, very scared of the consequences of what they've discovered. They'd love for this to be not true, they'd love for it to go away, but they're too honest to pretend that it will without action.
I doubt Thrun intends to offer a few courses and stop there. I think he'll offer an entire CS curriculum within maybe 3 years, and offer some soft of CS degree program soon thereafter.
That's a heck of a lot of work to create. I know from experience that a half-semester part-time course requires a massive amount of work to create (though not so much to maintain afterwards, to be fair) and you need a lot of those to build a proper curriculum since at degree level you can't just teach everyone the same thing.
Not only would the degrees be FREE (a huge thing for the poor in the third world and BRIC countries), but they'd be FAST. By excluding all the non-essentials, the equivalent of a BS in CS could be completed three times faster, in no more than 1.5 years.
All that effort to make it has got to be paid for somehow. Yes, it doesn't have to be by the students, but it's too much work for it to be reasonable to expect it to just spontaneously happen.
That said, I wonder at the timescales you mention. A nearly 5 year undergraduate degree? WTF? That's absurd. I did mine in 3. I suppose you could have shortened it further by getting rid of vacation time (but that'll likely give most students a mental breakdown of one kind or another; you need breaks from learning) and ditching all those annoying exercises and projects. Which would make the degree totally worthless as it would leave someone only able to vomit up what they'd been told instead of being able to apply it (or their brains).
Nah. A BS in 18 months is an idea put forward by someone without a fucking clue about education or people or the subject. You know, a classic Dilbertian pointy-haired manager.
hexagons would probably tessellate even better, with less waste.
Ease of manufacture is still the case though. Cutting them out would be a bitch though.
That's why triangles would be good; they can act as parts of hexagons, and yet you can cut them out with straight cuts. OTOH, you'll have to deal with acute angles in the result, which might have its own set of problems. Squares are likely a reasonable compromise, all things considered.
Why is it not your business? Anything that involves US copyright eventually involves everyone on this planet (Re: Megaupload). While I'm not sure that it will even allow you to sign it, you should at least make the attempt.
No, I should not. I get to petition UK politicians (being a UK citizen and resident) and not US politicians. It would be wrong for me to try to interfere with the US democratic process. (The reverse — a US citizen trying to directly have a voice in a UK political matter — would also be just as wrong.) Which isn't to say that I don't care. I do, and I hope you do too. But all that it is proper for me to do is to express my opinion that it is important and worthwhile for those people who are formally permitted to take part to actually do so. I guess that there ought to be some kind of petition here to urge our government to not enact similar things here; I ought to take a look...
OTOH, I've no intention of defending Megaupload; they seem to have been acting badly, with knowledge of this fact, and on a large scale. That's clearly beyond the pale (i.e., it looks very much like there was mens rea) and not something that needs SOPA or PIPA (or other new legislation proposed by corrupt shills) to prosecute. Scum are scum.
As I post this comment, every comment posted in this thread before mine was an apathetic "signing the petition will do nothing". It would have taken just a few seconds longer to sign the petition, even if also creating an account to do so.
As someone who is not a US citizen or resident, I should not sign the petition. It's not my business, formally. On the other hand, I would encourage others to do so if they have standing. Even just the perception of corruption is damaging to the foundations of democracy. While a petition can't force the Executive to act in a particular way (nor should it; they should be allowed to explain if there's a good reason why to not act) if the number of votes it is attracting is trending up fast then they'll feel it necessary to act anyway: a petition acts as a barometer of the people's concern over an issue. If there are lots of angry people about, throwing a sacrificial wolf to the lambs can help a lot.
While both scenarios are extremely improbable, I wonder what the odds are of being struck by an extinction level asteroid or comet vs being invaded or flat out destroyed by aliens.
On the one hand the likelihood of dino-killer-class impactor is pretty low (but non-zero), and on the other hand we've got zero evidence that there are aliens with the ability to get here at all. Hmm, won't worry too much about either then. The gripping hand is that the likelihood of a city-killer impactor is quite a lot higher: the last known one of that sort of scale was only around a century ago (and luckily hit Siberia, a long way from anywhere; a Tunguska-level hit to any modern city would be terrifying in the amount of destruction). It's also going to be a lot easier to deflect those smaller objects, provided we spot them early enough; with a decade's worth of heads up, we should be able to ensure total safety.
That is probably true in this case, but is not necessarily true in all cases. Imagine, for example, that the password is encrypted with the email address as its key, and the email address is hashed. Upon login, a hash lookup is done for the email address, and the encrypted password is decrypted and compared to the one sent. Or alternatively, the password is stored both encrypted as mentioned, and hashed, so that logins are done by 2 hash checks.
Store the password hashed in the "production" database, and keep an encrypted copy in a separate database hosted on a service that is responsible for sending out emails relating to password reminders (or resets). All the frontend services can do are to validate that a supplied password matches (through hashing) or request a reminder or reset for a particular user; nothing else should be possible since the encrypted version is kept out of reach.
Not that I expect anything so sensible in this case. SQL injection in one part of a system is a good indication that the rest is not much better.
Let me expand that to say that anytime you are building something that ultimately relies on a 3rd party for integral, non-easily-replicatable components, you're asking for trouble.
Yet many businesses work exactly that way. They're trading off an increase in risk (e.g., from a jerkwad supplier) for an immediate reduction in costs from not having to have so much expertise in-house. That can turn make a small business profitable enough to support an owner and a few staff, at least for a while, and is the very bedrock of the free market.
The problem with electricity for propellers or turbines is that if there's any sort of resistance to the propeller or turbine (say, goose in the prop or turbine intake), your electrically-powered prop has a pretty good chance of stopping altogether. Gas-powered props/turbines are more likely to continue to operate - you know, V = nRT/P.
You seem to be confused. Electric motors tend to increase their torque at lower speeds due to reductions in inductive resistance. A bird-strike is more likely to damage the blades than to cause the motor itself to fail. (What's more, there have been a number of fully electric planes built already, and they have been around for years; the problem at the time was making them practical when carrying a large payload. Maybe with the better batteries and motors — areas where there have been significant advances in the past decade — it will be more practical to do this in the future?)
- It's designed for browser support, which is necessary to prevent phishing attacks and improve ease of use. It's hard for your browser to log in to OpenID sites (e.g. the Firefox OpenID plugin(s) fail on several sites which use fancy login UIs).
Auto-login is always problematic in security terms, even if it is exceptionally convenient.
- Putting more of the logic in the browser simplifies the protocol (although they seem to be adding extra complexities quite fast).
It simplifies the code in the part of the implementation of the protocol that is written in Javascript and sent by sites to the browser. The protocol itself is rather complex, as is the parts that are intended to be implemented in the browser's own code. It's also not clear just how much effort has been put into making things easy for the other parties in the action: if it's not easy for sites to implement, it won't get much adoption anyway. A particular issue is that not everyone uses LAMP; there's quite a few website stacks out there, and it's next to impossible to share code between them. (Also, persuading browser vendors to adopt this will be "interesting".)
I'm more concerned about how sites are going migrate to this new way of operating. How do they detect that a browser will support the protocol? How do they provide a reasonable fallback for everyone else?
Also, why do the authors seem to hate established security standards so much? What they write sounds a lot like client-certificates with SAML, "except we're doing it all in JSON so it is bound to be better!!!" OK, maybe that's misreading it slightly but really it's sounding a lot like things that others have worked on for ages, but without the benefit of actually talking to those other people to get their experience of what the pitfalls are.
https://www.browserid.org/about No password?? Are you kidding me?? The moment I saw that 3rd step, I just.... I'm speechless. What the fuck?
When you dig into the details past all the JS crap, it's actually just a variation on client-authenticated SSL. I'm not 100% sure what exactly is being asserted in the client's identity (before checking back with the issuer) but it most certainly does work, and it should be fine provided the private keys remain locked outside of the grasp of even the browser JS. That is, the private key must provably not ever leave the browser; if anything can make that happen, it's insecure whatever the developers think.
Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year.
And how many people died during construction of the nuclear power plants? Not that I think this makes nuclear power special, rather that if you count installation deaths from one form of power generation system then you should from all the others too. Fair is fair. Building sites are hazardous places.
Anytime anyone even thinks about mixing "nuclear" and outer-space (even radioisotope generators as used on many space probes) all the anti-nuclear groups kick up a huge fuss.
Sucks to be them, then. Any time you push beyond the inner solar system, you need some sort of nuclear power to get electricity, as you can't burn things or use hydroelectric or wind-power. You can use solar panels in the inner solar system, but the further out you go the less practical that becomes. IIRC, solar is a no-go much beyond about the orbit of Mars, even for relatively low-power applications. High thrust engines are not low-power!
What's more, as long as you're outside the Earth's magnetosphere, any nuclear explosion is exceptionally unlikely to contaminate Earth (or the Moon) as the solar wind will push all of the small particles out to interstellar space. Yes, you could be hit by a large piece even so, but that would be amazing bad luck; space is damn big.
The problem is that marriage is a religious institution sponsored by our federal government.
Actually, it's a social institution that is supported and sponsored by religions and government. Even if religions and governments disappeared, you'd still see some people undertaking commitments to be together in a pair in a way that we would recognize as "getting married". (Would it be as many as at the moment? Perhaps not. I don't know. It's hypothetical, OK?)
Yeah, but a big-O improvement may do you no good if you only need n=8...
Depends on what sort of complexity it is. When the complexity function is larger than polynomial, even n=8 can be worrying. (I remember working with algorithms that were O(EXP^2(n)) at one point, many years ago; they had combinatorial searches over a system where the test function was itself an NP-Hard problem. Nasty, and we couldn't use the structure of the problem to restrict anything too much either. Suffice to say that at the time we were having problems finding supercomputers large enough to run our code...)
I think you missed the part I mentioned with regards to a financial global equilibrium.
That's not as important as the GP's point. It's also more complex because economics isn't a zero-sum game overall (and it's difficult to measure because standard indicators tend to be coupled to floating things like currencies, and inflation — the key correction factor — is tricky to measure because the degree to which people value things changes over time too). I believe/suspect that the bad side of the current slump in western economies is that it is reducing the size of the real economy in those countries; the extent to which this is happening is hard to say for sure because of the number of confounding factors, and I have no idea whether this is counterbalanced by growth in the rest of the world. (Again, problems result from things like sentiment-based valuations, etc.)
That said, if we're talking revolution then lynching the robber barons and seizing their assets is a good start. With that done, it might not be necessary to do too much about the pack of stooges in official politics. (Ah, if only I believed that a revolution would stop there, I'd be for it. I guess I'm too cynical.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just use a secret encrypted key exchange, like Diffie-Hellman, to set up a secure communication channel on the wire.
Or use SSL, which uses protocols like DH (depending on configured protocol suite) to set up a secure communication channel. And it's a heck of a lot simpler than writing all that stuff yourself; both the protocols used and the implementation even get independently audited from time to time.
No, you don't actually need to use a CA to use SSL. Or rather, you can easily run with an explicit list of trusted certificates or operate a private CA. Those are in fact a highly secure option (if harder work to scale up).
Technology has existed for a long time that efficiently moves an entire line of vehicles in close succession from one town to the next, in some cases .. mostly autonomously and on dedicated "roads".
They're called trains.
And they work well in the US, provided your dealing with freight which doesn't require high speeds. People like to arrive more rapidly than that, and the US rail network isn't set up to service such needs.
For a proper high-speed line, you've got to not just keep freight levels down on it, but also ensure that there are very few (ideally none) level crossings on it as they're huge sources of trouble when speeds are high. Expected average speeds also control the amount which you bank the track, how sharp the curves are, what sort of junctions you use, etc. In short, you design and build a high speed line quite differently to a freight line and you don't run the same traffic on it. (You also don't run it to exactly the same places; most people don't like visiting freight terminals.)
How is any of this going to protect you from the police?
It won't (well, on the basis of what the summary says) but they're surely not the only threat.
That's a really poor way of describing SCTP. Firstly the relationship between TCP and UDP is such that TCP could be built entirely ontop of UDP, the only reason it isn't physically is so that the port numbers for UDP and TCP are distinct. On the other side the best description of UDP is actually "Bare IP packets with port numbers".
It also adds packet content checksums, so you're much less likely to get bad data delivered. It's less important than it used to be (due to improvements in physical network quality) but even so, it's a huge help since it lets you assume that the data is at least uncorrupted by the transfer process itself.
Now we just make BT look like skype traffic.
No, you jerk. BT traffic should look like the bulk asynchronous data transfer that it is. You do not need low latency networking for transfer of large files, so don't try to be an asshole by pretending it is anything else as that just encourages ISPs to do deep packet inspection and other wrong things.
I guess you have never seen west Texas... And for that matter, lots of other places currently not very nice to live in that will be much nicer in a warmer and wetter world.
Do you want to bet the farm (literally) on that? We don't know what will happen in specific locations as global average temperatures rise (though it's a reasonably good bet that arctic areas will get warmer). If an area that currently supports many people gets a lot less hospitable — unreasonable to assume that this wouldn't happen somewhere, though not necessarily where we expect — there will have to be mass migrations (and/or mass deaths). That would likely involve at least one war. Or maybe a part of the world that currently produces a lot of food would suddenly become less able to do so. That would also be very bad. Will these things happen? Who knows, but the stakes are mind-bogglingly high.
Climate scientists are kicking up a fuss over global warming not because they hate big business (though some do) but rather because they are, as a group, very scared of the consequences of what they've discovered. They'd love for this to be not true, they'd love for it to go away, but they're too honest to pretend that it will without action.
I doubt Thrun intends to offer a few courses and stop there. I think he'll offer an entire CS curriculum within maybe 3 years, and offer some soft of CS degree program soon thereafter.
That's a heck of a lot of work to create. I know from experience that a half-semester part-time course requires a massive amount of work to create (though not so much to maintain afterwards, to be fair) and you need a lot of those to build a proper curriculum since at degree level you can't just teach everyone the same thing.
Not only would the degrees be FREE (a huge thing for the poor in the third world and BRIC countries), but they'd be FAST. By excluding all the non-essentials, the equivalent of a BS in CS could be completed three times faster, in no more than 1.5 years.
All that effort to make it has got to be paid for somehow. Yes, it doesn't have to be by the students, but it's too much work for it to be reasonable to expect it to just spontaneously happen.
That said, I wonder at the timescales you mention. A nearly 5 year undergraduate degree? WTF? That's absurd. I did mine in 3. I suppose you could have shortened it further by getting rid of vacation time (but that'll likely give most students a mental breakdown of one kind or another; you need breaks from learning) and ditching all those annoying exercises and projects. Which would make the degree totally worthless as it would leave someone only able to vomit up what they'd been told instead of being able to apply it (or their brains).
Nah. A BS in 18 months is an idea put forward by someone without a fucking clue about education or people or the subject. You know, a classic Dilbertian pointy-haired manager.
hexagons would probably tessellate even better, with less waste.
Ease of manufacture is still the case though. Cutting them out would be a bitch though.
That's why triangles would be good; they can act as parts of hexagons, and yet you can cut them out with straight cuts. OTOH, you'll have to deal with acute angles in the result, which might have its own set of problems. Squares are likely a reasonable compromise, all things considered.
Why is it not your business? Anything that involves US copyright eventually involves everyone on this planet (Re: Megaupload). While I'm not sure that it will even allow you to sign it, you should at least make the attempt.
No, I should not. I get to petition UK politicians (being a UK citizen and resident) and not US politicians. It would be wrong for me to try to interfere with the US democratic process. (The reverse — a US citizen trying to directly have a voice in a UK political matter — would also be just as wrong.) Which isn't to say that I don't care. I do, and I hope you do too. But all that it is proper for me to do is to express my opinion that it is important and worthwhile for those people who are formally permitted to take part to actually do so. I guess that there ought to be some kind of petition here to urge our government to not enact similar things here; I ought to take a look...
OTOH, I've no intention of defending Megaupload; they seem to have been acting badly, with knowledge of this fact, and on a large scale. That's clearly beyond the pale (i.e., it looks very much like there was mens rea) and not something that needs SOPA or PIPA (or other new legislation proposed by corrupt shills) to prosecute. Scum are scum.
As I post this comment, every comment posted in this thread before mine was an apathetic "signing the petition will do nothing". It would have taken just a few seconds longer to sign the petition, even if also creating an account to do so.
As someone who is not a US citizen or resident, I should not sign the petition. It's not my business, formally. On the other hand, I would encourage others to do so if they have standing. Even just the perception of corruption is damaging to the foundations of democracy. While a petition can't force the Executive to act in a particular way (nor should it; they should be allowed to explain if there's a good reason why to not act) if the number of votes it is attracting is trending up fast then they'll feel it necessary to act anyway: a petition acts as a barometer of the people's concern over an issue. If there are lots of angry people about, throwing a sacrificial wolf to the lambs can help a lot.
While both scenarios are extremely improbable, I wonder what the odds are of being struck by an extinction level asteroid or comet vs being invaded or flat out destroyed by aliens.
On the one hand the likelihood of dino-killer-class impactor is pretty low (but non-zero), and on the other hand we've got zero evidence that there are aliens with the ability to get here at all. Hmm, won't worry too much about either then. The gripping hand is that the likelihood of a city-killer impactor is quite a lot higher: the last known one of that sort of scale was only around a century ago (and luckily hit Siberia, a long way from anywhere; a Tunguska-level hit to any modern city would be terrifying in the amount of destruction). It's also going to be a lot easier to deflect those smaller objects, provided we spot them early enough; with a decade's worth of heads up, we should be able to ensure total safety.
That is probably true in this case, but is not necessarily true in all cases. Imagine, for example, that the password is encrypted with the email address as its key, and the email address is hashed. Upon login, a hash lookup is done for the email address, and the encrypted password is decrypted and compared to the one sent. Or alternatively, the password is stored both encrypted as mentioned, and hashed, so that logins are done by 2 hash checks.
Store the password hashed in the "production" database, and keep an encrypted copy in a separate database hosted on a service that is responsible for sending out emails relating to password reminders (or resets). All the frontend services can do are to validate that a supplied password matches (through hashing) or request a reminder or reset for a particular user; nothing else should be possible since the encrypted version is kept out of reach.
Not that I expect anything so sensible in this case. SQL injection in one part of a system is a good indication that the rest is not much better.
Read the protocols of their elders for some evidence.
What, like Telnet and UUCP and stuff like that?
Let me expand that to say that anytime you are building something that ultimately relies on a 3rd party for integral, non-easily-replicatable components, you're asking for trouble.
Yet many businesses work exactly that way. They're trading off an increase in risk (e.g., from a jerkwad supplier) for an immediate reduction in costs from not having to have so much expertise in-house. That can turn make a small business profitable enough to support an owner and a few staff, at least for a while, and is the very bedrock of the free market.
So? You'd prefer companies did not get a deduction for giving to charity?
Yes. Far better for the charity to be able to claim the tax back, as that ensures that it goes to a (presumably) deserving cause.
<sarcasm> After all, we know that the company would otherwise use the tax deduction to give more to charity, right? </sarcasm>
The problem with electricity for propellers or turbines is that if there's any sort of resistance to the propeller or turbine (say, goose in the prop or turbine intake), your electrically-powered prop has a pretty good chance of stopping altogether. Gas-powered props/turbines are more likely to continue to operate - you know, V = nRT/P.
You seem to be confused. Electric motors tend to increase their torque at lower speeds due to reductions in inductive resistance. A bird-strike is more likely to damage the blades than to cause the motor itself to fail. (What's more, there have been a number of fully electric planes built already, and they have been around for years; the problem at the time was making them practical when carrying a large payload. Maybe with the better batteries and motors — areas where there have been significant advances in the past decade — it will be more practical to do this in the future?)
- It's designed for browser support, which is necessary to prevent phishing attacks and improve ease of use. It's hard for your browser to log in to OpenID sites (e.g. the Firefox OpenID plugin(s) fail on several sites which use fancy login UIs).
Auto-login is always problematic in security terms, even if it is exceptionally convenient.
- Putting more of the logic in the browser simplifies the protocol (although they seem to be adding extra complexities quite fast).
It simplifies the code in the part of the implementation of the protocol that is written in Javascript and sent by sites to the browser. The protocol itself is rather complex, as is the parts that are intended to be implemented in the browser's own code. It's also not clear just how much effort has been put into making things easy for the other parties in the action: if it's not easy for sites to implement, it won't get much adoption anyway. A particular issue is that not everyone uses LAMP; there's quite a few website stacks out there, and it's next to impossible to share code between them. (Also, persuading browser vendors to adopt this will be "interesting".)
I'm more concerned about how sites are going migrate to this new way of operating. How do they detect that a browser will support the protocol? How do they provide a reasonable fallback for everyone else?
Also, why do the authors seem to hate established security standards so much? What they write sounds a lot like client-certificates with SAML, "except we're doing it all in JSON so it is bound to be better!!!" OK, maybe that's misreading it slightly but really it's sounding a lot like things that others have worked on for ages, but without the benefit of actually talking to those other people to get their experience of what the pitfalls are.
https://www.browserid.org/about
No password?? Are you kidding me??
The moment I saw that 3rd step, I just.... I'm speechless. What the fuck?
When you dig into the details past all the JS crap, it's actually just a variation on client-authenticated SSL. I'm not 100% sure what exactly is being asserted in the client's identity (before checking back with the issuer) but it most certainly does work, and it should be fine provided the private keys remain locked outside of the grasp of even the browser JS. That is, the private key must provably not ever leave the browser; if anything can make that happen, it's insecure whatever the developers think.
Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year.
And how many people died during construction of the nuclear power plants? Not that I think this makes nuclear power special, rather that if you count installation deaths from one form of power generation system then you should from all the others too. Fair is fair. Building sites are hazardous places.
Anytime anyone even thinks about mixing "nuclear" and outer-space (even radioisotope generators as used on many space probes) all the anti-nuclear groups kick up a huge fuss.
Sucks to be them, then. Any time you push beyond the inner solar system, you need some sort of nuclear power to get electricity, as you can't burn things or use hydroelectric or wind-power. You can use solar panels in the inner solar system, but the further out you go the less practical that becomes. IIRC, solar is a no-go much beyond about the orbit of Mars, even for relatively low-power applications. High thrust engines are not low-power!
What's more, as long as you're outside the Earth's magnetosphere, any nuclear explosion is exceptionally unlikely to contaminate Earth (or the Moon) as the solar wind will push all of the small particles out to interstellar space. Yes, you could be hit by a large piece even so, but that would be amazing bad luck; space is damn big.
The problem is that marriage is a religious institution sponsored by our federal government.
Actually, it's a social institution that is supported and sponsored by religions and government. Even if religions and governments disappeared, you'd still see some people undertaking commitments to be together in a pair in a way that we would recognize as "getting married". (Would it be as many as at the moment? Perhaps not. I don't know. It's hypothetical, OK?)
Unknown unit 'lakh'
It's a dimensionless quantity that's equal to 100k.
GP is indeed ignorant, as he was asking for a velocity expressed without any time units involved. That won't ever work.
Yeah, but a big-O improvement may do you no good if you only need n=8...
Depends on what sort of complexity it is. When the complexity function is larger than polynomial, even n=8 can be worrying. (I remember working with algorithms that were O(EXP^2(n)) at one point, many years ago; they had combinatorial searches over a system where the test function was itself an NP-Hard problem. Nasty, and we couldn't use the structure of the problem to restrict anything too much either. Suffice to say that at the time we were having problems finding supercomputers large enough to run our code...)
Congress thinks?!
Yes. Of course they do. About how to get more money for themselves usually.
I think you missed the part I mentioned with regards to a financial global equilibrium.
That's not as important as the GP's point. It's also more complex because economics isn't a zero-sum game overall (and it's difficult to measure because standard indicators tend to be coupled to floating things like currencies, and inflation — the key correction factor — is tricky to measure because the degree to which people value things changes over time too). I believe/suspect that the bad side of the current slump in western economies is that it is reducing the size of the real economy in those countries; the extent to which this is happening is hard to say for sure because of the number of confounding factors, and I have no idea whether this is counterbalanced by growth in the rest of the world. (Again, problems result from things like sentiment-based valuations, etc.)
That said, if we're talking revolution then lynching the robber barons and seizing their assets is a good start. With that done, it might not be necessary to do too much about the pack of stooges in official politics. (Ah, if only I believed that a revolution would stop there, I'd be for it. I guess I'm too cynical.)