I think it's a crime that in the leading agricultural producing nation on earth, children are hungry.
A direct result of the government keeping prices
high with subsidies (e.g. milk price
supports), protecting the domestic food
industry with tariffs on imports (e.g. sugar),
or outright banning food imports on a pretext (e.g. Canadian beef bans, even though both countries have the same regulations, and in all
likelyhood there's BSE in the USA too), and paying farmers to not grow food.
I think it's a crime that, in the richest nation on earth, families can't afford to send their children to college.
Again, government subsidies and interference at work. The government pours grant money and loans at students. This distorts the market since there's no cost pressure on colleges, which btw are mostly owned by the government.
Besides which, the USA sends more kids per-capita to college than most countries.
Ummm. No. It is because given any string, I can produce another string with the same hash faster.
And yes you do sign gibberish...It is called keys, which are used for encrypted communication. Now I can produce the key with the same hash as your key faster, and (depending on session speed) I can substitute my key for your key.
Now -- all this only means that I can do it about 2048 times faster [...]
Please clarify something for me before I panic.
You say the attack is 2048 times faster. I gather
you get that figure from 2^80 / 2^69. 2^80 is
the number of operations to brute force attack
SHA-1, and 2^69 is the new number of operations
required to attack SHA-1.
Let's look at 2^80.
Where does that come from? It is the square root
of 2^160. Why is that significant. Because 2^80
is number of operations required to perform a
Birthday Attack on a 160 bit hash.
What is a Birthday Attack? It is merely that that if I
run the attack program (which executes SHA-1) for 2^80 operations on
2^80 unique inputs (numbers 1 through 2^80 work just fine here, or generate 2^80 random messages; as long as they aren't longer than your key size), I have a 50% chance that two
numbers will produce the same hash. Not a pair of
numbers you pick, but some pair out of a set
of size 2^80 (or less).
So if you
are relating 2^69 to 2^80, then I conclude you are
saying that 2^69 is the new Birthday Attack
computation cost for SHA-1.
Well then, you cannot, in 2^69 operations
produce a key with the same hash as my key
(unless you are going to con me into changing
me key to the of the pair you found in the
birthday attack. I'm not that stupid).
More like 2^(2*69) = 2^138 operations.
If you hashed 2^80 random messages, you'd find one pair that hashed to the same value. That's the "brute force" way of finding collisions, and it depends solely on the length of the hash value. "Breaking" the hash function means being able to find collisions faster than that. And that's what the Chinese did.
They can find collisions in SHA-1 in 2^69 calculations, about 2,000 times faster than brute force. Right now, that is just on the far edge of feasibility with current technology.
But perhaps everyone has it wrong;
the 2^69 does relate to 2^160 (which
is the number of bruteforce operations necessary
to find a message with the same hash as a
chosen message. If so, then this is a huge,
huge, result, I would vehemently disagree with
the quote: "It's time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits.". On the contrary, it's probably too
late to survive the fire.
With 160 bits of hash, the probability that two pieces of data will hash to the same value is incredibly low.
The width of hash has little to do with the
probability of a collision by an attacker.
The cleverness of the hash algorithm is the key
to collision resistance. For example, a checksum
is a hash that merely breaks the
int into 160 bit chunks, adds each chunk to
together, takes the lower 160 bits of the sum,
resulting a 160 bit hash. It is trivial
to find for any given message, multiple messages
that checksum hash to the same value. Thus
far, no one has proven they can do that with SHA-1
(or MD5 for that matter), at least not trivially.
Of course, once one has a clever algorithm,
width of the hash can be a nice factor in building
up its strength, assuming the hash algorithm
lends itself to scaling that way, as SHA
apparently does, with SHA-256, SHA-512
being available.
Of course, for random data corruption due to faulty
hardware or software, a
160 bit checksum would be excellent (if costly) protection.
But that isn't what we are talking about here.
There needs to be a 10X reduction in the price/energy ratio of photovoltaics. Do that, i.e. reduce the cost of the solar energy to meet the world's needs to an investment of about $100 trillion, amortize it over 30 years, and I'm sure we can find the money and land to do this.
This will never happen. It's simply too expensive when you factor in ALL the costs to convert a substantial portion of the United States' energy consumption to solar. There is the net energy of producing the cells, which is high, and they have to be replaced. What will be the net energy costs in 20 or 30 or 40 years of replacing worn out solar cells when petroleum reserves have continued to dwindle, supply has dwindled, and the demand for oil in the Third World has rocketed up as the rest of the world wants what we have?
The supplies of easy to find oil will dwindle,
and the cost of crude will go up. This will incent
us to find other sources.
If not direct photovoltaics, maybe steam turbines
heated via concentrated sunlight. If not
solar, maybe wind. If not wind, maybe fusion.
Or something else. But the costs of alternatives
have been coming down.
The problem with most people today is that they think Moore's law applies raw marterials and material goods. It doesn't. When demand increases without increasing supply, costs inevitably increase. Solar energy will become MORE expensive in the future, not less, regardless of adding a few percentage points of efficiency.
The Economist has a recent issue that points that
every since they've tracked raw material costs
(since the 19th century), real costs of raw materials have plummetted. Maybe not like Moore's
law, but they do come down. Can't find the recent issue online, but there's this blurb from their
website:
Oil has recently bounced back--but don't expect other commodity prices to follow suit just yet. They have been falling in real terms for a century
(From The Economist print edition) Apr 15th 1999
Ig you are right, then we are looking at a
Malthusian event. Malthusiasts have been wrong
every time. Maybe you'll be right this time,
but the track record doesn't favor your
view.
I don't however think "big solar farms in the desert" are the way to go. Solar power makes the most sense to generate right where you need it, avoiding transmission losses.
This is true of any energy source. During the
rolling-backout years in California a few years
ago, my employer, stung by a couple of blackouts,
bought their own natural gas powered generator.
The next time there was a blackout, the automatic cutover
didn't work, and time and data was still lost.
It's not exactly straightforward to manage an
electrical system, which accounts for
part of the reason why we use centralized utilities.
That said, I accept the possibility that
decentralized solar could work in many cases
(just a small manner of programming and
computers). But not
everyone will have enough acreage to produce their
own energy, nor will they live in high sunshine
places, so the utility is always going to be
necessary.
> Are you sure that photovoltaics really is the best means to harvest solar energy?
Certainly not today. But electricity is
fungible. We can use electricity to power our
battery operate surface vehicles, produce hydrogen
to power our aircraft, etc.
So efficient photovolaics are "best" in terms of
convenience and I don't see how the hydrogen age
arrives without it (or fusion reactors).
Off by a factor of two, since 30% of 0.35 kW/m^2 is
is about 0.1 kW/M62 and my figures assumed 0.2 kW/m^2. It doesn't detract from my point that
we don't need 1/3 of the Earth's land area to
do this.
Not I understood: "area of the half that's in daylight is twice the area of a disk of the same radius, so only half of that 55% is available per square meter shaded on average across the daylight hemisphere.". If the atomosphere leaves 55%, then
1.3 kW *.55 *.30 is 0.21 kW/m^2, which is a
bit more than the 0.20 kW/m^2 effective that I
quoted. Note that I assumed 8 hours of sun shine
per day in the desert at 0.2 kW/m^2.
But assuming you are
correct, serves me right for trusting a
solar energy advocacy web site.:-)
And it produces billions and billions of times more energy than we could ever use
I agree with the thrust of your post. However
a "slight" quibble.
Assuming 100% efficiency, and assuming current
US energy consumption costs applied to the
entire world population, it is more like
100s times more than we could use if we had a
photovoltaic panel over every square metre of
land area. See my post on this topic.
Unless you were thinking of a Dyson sphere? I
think you'll need fusion drives on space ships
for the construction crew, and fusion drives
mounted on
asteroids (for moving the raw materials in place)
before you'll get "billions and billions" times more energy.
10% of the world's a GDP is quite a hunk
of change, like $5 trillion.
With a one time expense of $5 trillion, we could probably solve the cost problem of
photovoltaics,
and thus harness the ultimate
fusion reactor.
That said, I'd be perfectly willion to spend
0.1% of the world's annual GDP on fusion, since after
we solve the world's energy problem, I'd like
us to reduce trips to other planets in the
solar system to a few days each way.:-)
I saw a documentary about oil and energy
efficiency a while ago that stated that solar
power would required 1/3 of the world's land
in solar panels in order to meet the
world's energy needs. Hmm...
That seems quite high. Let's look at some
publically available info.
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1. html
says the 1998 U.S. energy consumption was about 94 quadrillion BTUs
Assumong 8 * 365 hours of decent sunshine in the desert year around.
So that's 100 * 10^15 / (8 * 365 ) = 34 * 10^12 BTUs/sunshine hour.
(34 * 10^12 ) / (682.4 ) = 49 * 10^9 square metres
= 49 * 10^9 / 10^6 = 49000 square kilometres = 223 KM by 223 KM
or 140 miles by 140 miles.
If you "want" the entire world to consume energy at
per-capita rates like the USA, then assuming
the US population is 300M, and the world population is 6B, then 6*10^9/(300*10^6) * 49000 =
980000 square km. The Earth's land surface area
is claimed to be 148,300,000
sq km, so 980000 / 148300000 =.006608 or less than 1% of the Earth's land surface area.
Mind you, for infrastructure that huge, you have
to build roads, support buldings, etc. So even
if a factor of 3 off, that's still about 2%
of the surface area.
Also, once demand for photovoltaics reached 1% of
the above, I imagine the industry would drive
efficiency from 20% to higher levels.
So 1/3 of the land surface area is way too high.
The real problem with photovoltaics is the cost.
http://store.yahoo.com/sancor/50w.html
will sell you a 502mm x 939mm panel for $588, or
588 / (502 * 939) * 1000000 = $1247 per sq metre.
Let's be hopeful that in quantity, wholesale lots, we
could buy this for $1000 per sq metre.
980000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = $980 trillion.
Note that the annual GDP for Earth, according
to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/xx.html
is $51.48 trillion. That figure is at purchasing
power parity. I'll leave it others to speculate
whether photovoltaics can be manufactured cheaper
in third world countries or not. If you don't think so, then considering that the U.S. economy
is about $11 trillion, and that it is blamed for consuming about 1/2 the world's resources, the non purchasing power parity world GDP is probably closer to $22 trillion.
There needs to be a 10X reduction in the
price/energy ratio of photovoltaics. Do that,
i.e. reduce the cost of the solar energy to
meet the world's needs to an investment of about $100 trillion, amortize it over 30 years,
and I'm sure we can find the money and land to do this.
> This election is complete bullshit. You can not > force democracy with the barrel of a gun. > Democracy must not be delivered by a foreign > hand. It ceases to be democracy. This is > Empire. Why is this not bothering anyone??
Because history tells us the Allies forced democracy on Japan and Germany after we defeated them in WW2.
And BTW, US troops are still occupiers there.
You probably think the USA's democracy was a peaceful event? Every hear of the Revolutionary War? You think the majority of Americans were into fighting and stuff then?
Ever hear how England became a democracy? Look up the Magna Carta and why the King signed it.
France? Can you say Guiolltine?
Post-Soviet Russia's a real peaceful right?
Force has created more democracies than you wish. Sheesh, the crap that gets modded 5 around here.
> As a Canadian, I just want to assure you that we do indeed refer to ourselves as being Canuckistani.
My father was very offended by called Canuckistani by whatever right wing American pundit coined the term. So much that he went into a tirade against my American father-in-law, who'd never heard of the term (and actually doesn't take much interest in Canadian affairs, like 99.99999% of all Americans).
Most Canadians are hypocrites. We bitch when Americans don't take notice, then bitch when they do.
The exact opposite. I live in a city with a metro area of about 500,000 people, and travel over 50,000 miles per year, often to cities with similar size, and what I'm finding is:
- routes previous service will full sized Boeing
or Airbus airliners are being replaced with
with regional jets such as the Canadair 50 seater.
- routes that previously were too uneconomical
or too long (because the older small jets
lacked the range) to have main line service are
now getting regional (non-stop) jet service
via the newer Canadair and Embrauer jets.
The trend is obvious: more non-stops via smaller more efficient (and more likely to sell out) regional jets. Jets that load and unload faster, jets where you can check your bag on the tarmac or jetway, and pick it up on the tarmac or jetway on the way out. I.e. jets that are faster, end to end, than mainliners.
Airbus and Boeing don't see it coming, but their business models are getting disrupted by Canadair and Embrauer.
For international flights, 777s are the perfect plane for me. Spending 3 hours to load the new Airbus monster is not my idea of fun.
Too slow. Say a modern airship goes 100 mph. 3000 miles coast to coast (United States) is 30 hours. Via commercial jet, 6 hours. People hate the west coast to east coast direction where it seems like 9 hours due to time zone changes.
Airships as leisure cruise ship replacements that can cross land and sea are a fine idea though. You imagine crossing the Atlantic... how about air-cruising Australia at say 30 KM/hour from Sydney to Perth? Sign me up!
Quebec can supply all of the world's, or even the North America's power needs for less that fossil fuels? If so, what's preventing the market from driving Quebec to supply more power?
>> It's amazing people still call hydroelectric >> power "green", but then hypocrisy in defense >> of liberal ideas is no vice...
> You fucking troll. It's renewable, not magical.
You have a reading comphrehension problem. The subject of the/. article is "Green Energy...". Hydro dams are not green; many (most?) self-respecting environmentalists and Green Party members hate hydro.
> Every action causes a reaction, our energy > needs aren't going away, but there are ways > to minimise the impact of our actions. > Hydroelectric damns cause dammage, but the > impact of a local flood is not in the same > ballpark as the impact that the floods > from melting the artic and antartic with > greenhouse gases would have.
Both destroy ecosystems and species. And actually, hydro dams reduce flooding.
The article quotes numbers for a 90% hydro and 10% wind mix. It doesn't say pure wind is cheaper.
If hydro weren't competitive, then humans wouldn't have been building hydro-electric plants for the past 100 years or so (and fossil fuels used to be really cheap before the 1970s).
The only problem with hydro is that there's not enough of it, or at least not enough of it that isn't tied up by environmental concerns (fish gotta live too), or indigenous people claims such as in Quebec. If there was enough of it, then don't you think all power plants would hydro and not fuel burners?
>>Why is a hand recount infallible? What
>> happens when the counter loses count?
> A human makes random mistakes, if they are to
> miscount X%, it is likely that that X% is even
> distributed amongst the candidates.
As likely that if you flip a coin 10 times,
the numbers of heads versus tails will be evenly
distributed. Which is not the same as saying
there will be 5 heads and 5 tails, exactly.
It is "likely", but it is not guaranteed to
be exactly X%. Again we are talking about a
margin of less than 100 votes out of X% cast.
Hire 10 vote counters to each independently
count all the votes in the WA election and I
guarantee you that you'll have 10 different
totals from each counter.
> The USPS isn't THAT stupid,
It has nothing to do with stupidity. It has
to do with human error. If I carry a ballot to
the USPS office at 4pm the day of the deadline,
there is a greater than zero chance that
ballot might be missed in the nightly
postmarking (maybe it falls on the floor). The
next morning someone finds it, picks it up, and
post marks it with the *next* date which is
too late. Or are you suggesting that the USPS
is not only full of very smart people, but they
routinely fake post mark dates?
Why is a hand recount infallible? What happens when the counter loses count? Oh, you were thinking that the they'd count the ballots in batches, and then add them up via a computer or calculator? Ooops.
What exactly is hand recount?
> Personally IRV looks like the best fix
How does that prevent a candidate from winning by fewer than 100 votes?
The Washington state governor's race was a statistical tie. Recounts just amount to coin tosses. And besides, recounts ignore the cases of voters who might have been unfairly denied their right to vote because for example, maybe the postmark of the ballot was wrong. Mail you self a bunch of letters on Friday afternoon by handing them to the postal clerk, and watch how many get postmarked on Saturday. I suspect far more votes that 100 were lost this way in WA
The loser should get over it, and do a better of GOTV next election.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides which, the USA sends more kids per-capita to college than most countries.
> It's Bush's fault.
Sarcasm gets a -1 Troll?
It's Bush's fault.
Let's look at 2^80. Where does that come from? It is the square root of 2^160. Why is that significant. Because 2^80 is number of operations required to perform a Birthday Attack on a 160 bit hash.
What is a Birthday Attack? It is merely that that if I run the attack program (which executes SHA-1) for 2^80 operations on 2^80 unique inputs (numbers 1 through 2^80 work just fine here, or generate 2^80 random messages; as long as they aren't longer than your key size), I have a 50% chance that two numbers will produce the same hash. Not a pair of numbers you pick, but some pair out of a set of size 2^80 (or less).
So if you are relating 2^69 to 2^80, then I conclude you are saying that 2^69 is the new Birthday Attack computation cost for SHA-1.
Well then, you cannot, in 2^69 operations produce a key with the same hash as my key (unless you are going to con me into changing me key to the of the pair you found in the birthday attack. I'm not that stupid). More like 2^(2*69) = 2^138 operations.
Schneier, on his web site blog, says:
But perhaps everyone has it wrong; the 2^69 does relate to 2^160 (which is the number of bruteforce operations necessary to find a message with the same hash as a chosen message. If so, then this is a huge, huge, result, I would vehemently disagree with the quote: "It's time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits.". On the contrary, it's probably too late to survive the fire.
The width of hash has little to do with the probability of a collision by an attacker. The cleverness of the hash algorithm is the key to collision resistance. For example, a checksum is a hash that merely breaks the int into 160 bit chunks, adds each chunk to together, takes the lower 160 bits of the sum, resulting a 160 bit hash. It is trivial to find for any given message, multiple messages that checksum hash to the same value. Thus far, no one has proven they can do that with SHA-1 (or MD5 for that matter), at least not trivially.
Of course, once one has a clever algorithm, width of the hash can be a nice factor in building up its strength, assuming the hash algorithm lends itself to scaling that way, as SHA apparently does, with SHA-256, SHA-512 being available.
Of course, for random data corruption due to faulty hardware or software, a 160 bit checksum would be excellent (if costly) protection. But that isn't what we are talking about here.
If not direct photovoltaics, maybe steam turbines heated via concentrated sunlight. If not solar, maybe wind. If not wind, maybe fusion. Or something else. But the costs of alternatives have been coming down.
The Economist has a recent issue that points that every since they've tracked raw material costs (since the 19th century), real costs of raw materials have plummetted. Maybe not like Moore's law, but they do come down. Can't find the recent issue online, but there's this blurb from their website: Oil has recently bounced back--but don't expect other commodity prices to follow suit just yet. They have been falling in real terms for a century (From The Economist print edition) Apr 15th 1999Ig you are right, then we are looking at a Malthusian event. Malthusiasts have been wrong every time. Maybe you'll be right this time, but the track record doesn't favor your view.
This is true of any energy source. During the rolling-backout years in California a few years ago, my employer, stung by a couple of blackouts, bought their own natural gas powered generator. The next time there was a blackout, the automatic cutover didn't work, and time and data was still lost. It's not exactly straightforward to manage an electrical system, which accounts for part of the reason why we use centralized utilities.
That said, I accept the possibility that decentralized solar could work in many cases (just a small manner of programming and computers). But not everyone will have enough acreage to produce their own energy, nor will they live in high sunshine places, so the utility is always going to be necessary.
Certainly not today. But electricity is fungible. We can use electricity to power our battery operate surface vehicles, produce hydrogen to power our aircraft, etc. So efficient photovolaics are "best" in terms of convenience and I don't see how the hydrogen age arrives without it (or fusion reactors).
Off by a factor of two, since 30% of 0.35 kW/m^2 is is about 0.1 kW/M62 and my figures assumed 0.2 kW/m^2. It doesn't detract from my point that we don't need 1/3 of the Earth's land area to do this.
Not I understood: "area of the half that's in daylight is twice the area of a disk of the same radius, so only half of that 55% is available per square meter shaded on average across the daylight hemisphere.". If the atomosphere leaves 55%, then 1.3 kW * .55 * .30 is 0.21 kW/m^2, which is a
bit more than the 0.20 kW/m^2 effective that I
quoted. Note that I assumed 8 hours of sun shine
per day in the desert at 0.2 kW/m^2.
But assuming you are correct, serves me right for trusting a solar energy advocacy web site. :-)
A calculation of the land area
Assuming 100% efficiency, and assuming current US energy consumption costs applied to the entire world population, it is more like 100s times more than we could use if we had a photovoltaic panel over every square metre of land area. See my post on this topic.
Unless you were thinking of a Dyson sphere? I think you'll need fusion drives on space ships for the construction crew, and fusion drives mounted on asteroids (for moving the raw materials in place) before you'll get "billions and billions" times more energy.
That said, I'd be perfectly willion to spend 0.1% of the world's annual GDP on fusion, since after we solve the world's energy problem, I'd like us to reduce trips to other planets in the solar system to a few days each way. :-)
http://www.jc-solarhomes.com/solar_energy_facts.ht m
Assume each square metre can receives 1 KW hr per hr. Assume 20% efficiency for photovoltaics. So 0.2 KW hr per hr per metre.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001729.html says a kw hour is 3412 BTUs, so photo voltaics produce 0.2 * 3412 = 682.4 BTU/hr per square metre.
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1. html
says the 1998 U.S. energy consumption was about 94 quadrillion BTUs
Assumong 8 * 365 hours of decent sunshine in the desert year around.
So that's 100 * 10^15 / (8 * 365 ) = 34 * 10^12 BTUs/sunshine hour.
(34 * 10^12 ) / (682.4 ) = 49 * 10^9 square metres = 49 * 10^9 / 10^6 = 49000 square kilometres = 223 KM by 223 KM or 140 miles by 140 miles.
If you "want" the entire world to consume energy at per-capita rates like the USA, then assuming the US population is 300M, and the world population is 6B, then 6*10^9/(300*10^6) * 49000 = 980000 square km. The Earth's land surface area is claimed to be 148,300,000 sq km, so 980000 / 148300000 = .006608 or less than 1% of the Earth's land surface area.
Mind you, for infrastructure that huge, you have to build roads, support buldings, etc. So even if a factor of 3 off, that's still about 2% of the surface area.
Also, once demand for photovoltaics reached 1% of the above, I imagine the industry would drive efficiency from 20% to higher levels. So 1/3 of the land surface area is way too high.
The real problem with photovoltaics is the cost. http://store.yahoo.com/sancor/50w.html will sell you a 502mm x 939mm panel for $588, or 588 / (502 * 939) * 1000000 = $1247 per sq metre. Let's be hopeful that in quantity, wholesale lots, we could buy this for $1000 per sq metre. 980000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = $980 trillion. Note that the annual GDP for Earth, according to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print /xx.html
is $51.48 trillion. That figure is at purchasing
power parity. I'll leave it others to speculate
whether photovoltaics can be manufactured cheaper
in third world countries or not. If you don't think so, then considering that the U.S. economy
is about $11 trillion, and that it is blamed for consuming about 1/2 the world's resources, the non purchasing power parity world GDP is probably closer to $22 trillion.
There needs to be a 10X reduction in the price/energy ratio of photovoltaics. Do that, i.e. reduce the cost of the solar energy to meet the world's needs to an investment of about $100 trillion, amortize it over 30 years, and I'm sure we can find the money and land to do this.
> This election is complete bullshit. You can not
> force democracy with the barrel of a gun.
> Democracy must not be delivered by a foreign
> hand. It ceases to be democracy. This is
> Empire. Why is this not bothering anyone??
Because history tells us the Allies forced democracy on Japan and Germany after we
defeated them in WW2.
And BTW, US troops are still occupiers there.
You probably think the USA's democracy was a
peaceful event? Every hear of the Revolutionary
War? You think the majority of Americans were
into fighting and stuff then?
Ever hear how England became a democracy? Look
up the Magna Carta and why the King signed it.
France? Can you say Guiolltine?
Post-Soviet Russia's a real peaceful right?
Force has created more democracies than you
wish. Sheesh, the crap that gets modded 5
around here.
> We aren't offened by them, though we perhaps respect them less since the last election.
And we (not me actually, since unlike
Iraqis and Americans, Canadian ex-pats can't
vote) voted for Chretien 3 times.
> As a Canadian, I just want to assure you that we do indeed refer to ourselves as being Canuckistani.
My father was very offended by called Canuckistani by whatever right wing American pundit coined the term. So much that he went into a tirade against
my American father-in-law, who'd never heard of
the term (and actually doesn't take much interest
in Canadian affairs, like 99.99999% of all Americans).
Most Canadians are hypocrites. We bitch when
Americans don't take notice, then bitch when
they do.
> So the smaller jets aren't going away
The exact opposite. I live in a city with a
metro area of about 500,000 people, and travel
over 50,000 miles per year, often to
cities with similar size, and what
I'm finding is:
- routes previous service will full sized Boeing
or Airbus airliners are being replaced with
with regional jets such as the Canadair 50 seater.
- routes that previously were too uneconomical
or too long (because the older small jets
lacked the range) to have main line service are
now getting regional (non-stop) jet service
via the newer Canadair and Embrauer jets.
The trend is obvious: more non-stops via smaller
more efficient (and more likely to sell out)
regional jets. Jets that load and unload faster,
jets where you can check your
bag on the tarmac or jetway, and pick it up
on the tarmac or jetway on the way out. I.e.
jets that are faster, end to end, than mainliners.
Airbus and Boeing don't see it coming, but
their business models are getting disrupted
by Canadair and Embrauer.
For international flights, 777s are the perfect
plane for me. Spending 3 hours to load the new
Airbus monster is not my idea of fun.
> Admittedly, it's slower than a plane,
... how about
Too slow. Say a modern airship goes 100
mph. 3000 miles coast to coast (United States)
is 30 hours. Via commercial jet, 6 hours.
People hate the west coast to east coast direction
where it seems like 9 hours due to time zone
changes.
Airships as leisure cruise ship replacements that can
cross land and sea are a fine idea though.
You imagine crossing the Atlantic
air-cruising Australia at say 30 KM/hour from
Sydney to Perth? Sign me up!
> I use my dog's name as my password.
:-D
> My dog is called Pchg65Lb, but he
> changes his name every few weeks.
Seriously, I read this as
P CHanGe 65 pounds
the attacker would have to know:
- you have a dog
- you weigh your dog every few weeks
- how much the dog weighs (which can vary quite
a bit, depending on the type of dog).
If one is a dog lover, I imagine recalling
its weight would be easy.
So this doesn't seem like a bad approach for
generating an easy to remember, hard to guess,
password.
>> So, where are all the dams going to go
/. article is "Green ...". Hydro dams are not green; many (most?)
> There.
Quebec can supply all of the world's, or
even the North America's power needs for less
that fossil fuels? If so, what's preventing
the market from driving Quebec to supply more
power?
>> It's amazing people still call hydroelectric
>> power "green", but then hypocrisy in defense
>> of liberal ideas is no vice...
> You fucking troll. It's renewable, not magical.
You have a reading comphrehension problem.
The subject of the
Energy
self-respecting environmentalists and Green
Party members hate hydro.
> Every action causes a reaction, our energy
> needs aren't going away, but there are ways
> to minimise the impact of our actions.
> Hydroelectric damns cause dammage, but the
> impact of a local flood is not in the same
> ballpark as the impact that the floods
> from melting the artic and antartic with
> greenhouse gases would have.
Both destroy ecosystems and species.
And actually, hydro dams reduce flooding.
The article quotes numbers for a 90%
hydro and 10% wind mix. It doesn't say
pure wind is cheaper.
If hydro weren't competitive, then humans
wouldn't have been building hydro-electric plants
for the past 100 years or so (and fossil fuels
used to be really cheap before the 1970s).
The only problem with hydro is that there's
not enough of it, or at least not enough of
it that isn't tied up by environmental
concerns (fish gotta live too), or indigenous
people claims such as in Quebec. If there
was enough of it, then don't you think all
power plants would hydro and not fuel burners?
Nothing new to see here.
> Translation: I don't understand statistics.
I understand that humans make errors. Therefore,
ballot counting of the magnitude of the
WA governor's race amounts to statistical sampling.
> It is not a statistical tie. The winner is the one with the most legally counted votes.
Only in your fantasy world where humans don't
produce errors.
> Honestly, some of you people can't tell the difference between statistical sampling and actual counting. And it's pathetic.
If the shoe fits.
As likely that if you flip a coin 10 times, the numbers of heads versus tails will be evenly distributed. Which is not the same as saying there will be 5 heads and 5 tails, exactly.
It is "likely", but it is not guaranteed to be exactly X%. Again we are talking about a margin of less than 100 votes out of X% cast.
Hire 10 vote counters to each independently count all the votes in the WA election and I guarantee you that you'll have 10 different totals from each counter.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. It has to do with human error. If I carry a ballot to the USPS office at 4pm the day of the deadline, there is a greater than zero chance that ballot might be missed in the nightly postmarking (maybe it falls on the floor). The next morning someone finds it, picks it up, and post marks it with the *next* date which is too late. Or are you suggesting that the USPS is not only full of very smart people, but they routinely fake post mark dates?
> the hand recount confirms the count
Why is a hand recount infallible? What
happens when the counter loses count?
Oh, you were thinking that the they'd count
the ballots in batches, and then add them up
via a computer or calculator? Ooops.
What exactly is hand recount?
> Personally IRV looks like the best fix
How does that prevent a candidate from winning
by fewer than 100 votes?
The Washington state governor's race was a
statistical tie. Recounts just amount to coin
tosses. And besides, recounts ignore the cases
of voters who might have been unfairly denied
their right to vote because for example,
maybe the postmark of the ballot was wrong.
Mail you self a bunch of letters on Friday afternoon
by handing them to the postal clerk, and watch
how many get postmarked on Saturday. I suspect
far more votes that 100 were lost this way in WA
The loser should get over it, and do
a better of GOTV next election.
> UID/GID spoofing because there's no real authentication. This is being addressed in NFSv4 but it's not ready for production.
It was addressed in NFSv2 and NFSv3. See RFC 2203.
Ask your NFS client and server implementor about
it.