I find it quite odd that Stevens would make this change, as this was clearly not the intent of the founding fathers. Anyone who's spent even a few minutes with writings such as James Madison's Federalist Paper #46 and a host of other contemporaneous documents would soon be dissuaded of such a delusion as Stevens'.
The satellites aren't looking for radiation in that manner. There's a characteristic double flash of light from a nuclear detonation that is deemed the signature.
Given the federal government's complete aversion to risk post-9/11, good luck with that capabilities based approach. The fed push with IT security these days is toward risk management - period.
There's no solid evidence of health risks from thiomersal.
Not in the manner in which you were speaking perhaps. However, I am highly allergic to thiomersal. I first ran into this nasty stuff when it was used as a preservative in contact lens solutions in the early 1980s. I still have one pupil that is slightly more dilated than the other as a result of a relatively brief exposure 30 years ago - a few stubborn days figuring that my new contacts would just take getting used to even while my eyes continued to swell, burn, and turn red as a beet.
This stuff is still used medically in such items as flu vaccine. It's difficult and expensive to secure an alternative vaccine for me come flu season.
Not in Tennessee either. We have a rich history of insane alcohol laws and political opposition. For example, a former Speaker of the House, Ned Ray McWherter, who owned a beer distributorship at the time, cleverly crafted the tax schedules for keg beer to exclude, for example, Guinness, which came in an odd-sized keg compared to the domestics which McWherter's distributorship sold. No tax schedule for that size meant that it was not legal to sell here. IIRC it was about a decade after his tenure before the tax schedules were amended to allow for other sizes of kegs.
Even today a liquor license is required to sell beer > 6% ABV. This, of course, applies to wine as well. This means that we get nothing but the low gravity beers in our grocery stores and no wine at all. And the prices at the liquor stores for high gravity beer (what little you can find) and wine are much higher as a result than, for example, in Georgia. Grocery chains like Trader Joe's and Publix are just now making inroads into our great state, largely because of the lunacy of restricted alcohol sales.
In regards to the Nissan LEAF, the base price is just over $35,000. There are tax incentives that bring this figure down somewhat ($7,500 federal, plus possibly state and local tax breaks - yet more government subsidies), but add back the $2,000 home charger and you're back into the $30K range for a compact car (typically a ~$20K segment) that would only seat 5 smaller individuals comfortably for short distances. In this regard, the very limited range of the car is a blessing.
And I just love how the technological limitations of EVs have been magically transformed into a new psychological condition known as "range anxiety". Sub 100 mile range, reduced range in intemperate conditions, reduced range at night, severely reduced flexibility with route planning, virtually no supporting infrastructure for not-at-home charging, long recharge times, and a 50% initial price premium do not a neurosis make.
I'm glad that the LEAF works for you. It just doesn't work for enough of us from a variety of angles to draw the kind of investment that it would take to overcome many of these issues. There's approximately $1T in petroleum refueling infrastructure in the US alone. That's a lot of J1772 and JARI/CHAdeMO charging station investment (money that could go to improving battery/fuel cell R&D instead of feeding a handful of 1st gen plug EVs), not to mention the upgrade to an aging, outdated electrical grid to support the additional load. Even then, patience and significant planning will be necessary within the limits of current battery and charging technology.
Please don't take this wrong. I'd really love to have an EV (Fisker Karma - drool, drool). The instantaneous torque, reduced fuel costs, potentially reduced negative environmental impact, and various other advantages of an advanced EV would be exciting. But, for me, it's got to have at worst a 300 mile range and at most a 15 minute recharge available nearly anywhere I travel to have a broad enough appeal to justify the additional investment that will make a battery-based EV viable. The EV price premium has to be significantly cut as well. Nothing on the horizon that I've seen comes close to this.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
Simple answer: the government, any government, is addicted to money - our money.
In math terms: Money = spending. Spending = votes. Votes=reelection. Reelection=power.
Don't see how the security is any better than a direct https link between Exchange and your phone.
It's not an issue of data in flight. It's a matter of data at rest on the smart phone itself. BlackBerries have strong encryption that covers everything stored on the phone itself, including the removable media. No other smart phone comes close. It's FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 blessed, which is good enough for sensitive but unclassified information storage by US Federal government users. It meets several other governments' requirements as well.
FIPS 140-2 certification is the only reason I'm still on a BlackBerry. iPhone 4 has crypto hardware onboard, but doesn't seem to use it for much of anything. No Android phone has crypto hardware AFAIK and there's nothing until Gingerbread in the Android specs that even comes close to what the BlackBerry has in terms of locally encrypted storage.
Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.
Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the.exe and also told me that I needed to make sure that I installed the battery level monitor.exe beforehand. The tech support person could not grasp that I was running Linux, not Windows, despite my best efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unbelievable.
My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.
This being an IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Fixed that for you.
This being a large, overarching, overreaching government project, I predict that it will take 10 years longer than planned, cost 50x the initial budget, and be cancelled halfway through by a shift in the political winds.
I had to stop and re-read my post. Your response to it had me wondering if it was a response to some other post. My previous post is not so much directed toward the piracy itself as it is the human tendency to justify our actions, legal or otherwise. You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I also get torqued when the inevitable soft-hearted and soft-headed "solutions" palette gets dredged up, from hardly effective soft responses of non-lethal means to "reasoning" with the offending party. Non-lethal means of dealing with those with lethal weapons is largely ineffective and sends a message laced with weakness. You simply don't fight fire with smoke and expect the desired outcome to occur. You bring your own heat. And lots of it.
My policy position is to let those who would commit piracy know that they're not going to ride up to an unarmed, defenseless vessel and climb onboard without a reasonably good chance that they'll be killed/injured/captured in the process. The deterrence has to be credible, the consequences of failure severe, and the likelihood of success remote. And it has to be communicated in such a way as to make sure that the recipients get the message loud and clear. I have history on my side to bear witness that this is effective.
And your Iraq troll-fu is weak. This is not a war. You are correct, however, that this is an asymmetrical conflict. On the one hand you have pirates with lethal weapons. On the other hand you have commercial vessels with no weaponry. The pirates have the upper hand. All I propose is that the odds be evened up, that symmetry be restored. As with most systems, balance tends to be the most preferred state and the one that spawns the least problems.
I always get angry when I see someone attempting to justify another's illegal actions. First of all, I don't give any credence to Amy Goodman's interview of a pirate sympathizer that the facts of the issue are accurately reported. I dismiss the argument made in the Democracy Now article quoted in the Free Republic piece cited in the parent as naively absurd. Second, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right. You cannot equivocate lawful means of redress with international piracy, even if they had a legitimate gripe.
The bottom line is that I'm not concerned about "not giving them a reason to pirate". I'm interested in giving them a reason not to pirate - that is, sure and certain punishment for illegal actions in international waters against lawful commerce. Neither am I interested in non-lethal deterrents as means of possibly controlling their bad behavior. They're bringing AK-47s and RPGs to the game. This isn't a paintball fight. They're threatening human lives and millions of dollars of cargo with their actions. This simply has to be deterred with harsh, even lethal, measures. Anything short of this level of response will be viewed as a sign of weakness and will have no significant deterrent capability.
I'd call that a abject failure, a speed bump at best. It was a temporary takedown that was reinstated long enough for the baddies to copy all of their goods off to another site and reset the command and control to point to that other site.
Hey, where are the coupons? Especially in this economy, that matters to a lot of people. Yeah, there are some you can download and print, but that doesn't always work well. I had to disable certain portions of my home firewall to get some of those sites to work.
No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all.
Dead wrong. Any sufficiently funded terrorist organization is the only market for such an antiquated device. No government would want to field one of these (N. Korea excepted), but any terrorist/extremist group would give their last item of worth for just one of these. Terror does not require efficiency.
The trick to nuclear weapons is, and will always be, manufacturing of the fuel. Uranium enrichment and plutonium manufacture require enormous budgets, know-how, and persistence. Neutron enhancers like lithium deuteride and tritium in quantity aren't available from Walmart. A country with defensible borders where you can build/hide/lie to the IAEA about your manufacturing and engineering facilities is a plus.
With no disrespect toward the weapons engineers, the rest of the process is exactly that - a process. Make a case, engineer some conventional explosives, create a tightly-timed detonation system for those conventional explosives, add fissile material, and stir. Mix and match for desired effect.
Everything else is tuning. Big, fast computers with lots of thermodynamic models of nuclear designs are a plus - test firings are expensive and frowned upon.
Remember, folks, that we're talking about a nearly 70 year old technology here. Just as the article states, the biggest secret about nukes is that they're just not that hard to make. Big thermonuclear devices that are efficient? Yes, they're much more work. Little fission-only ones for terrorist/tin pot dictator use? With a little help from deep pockets, a relatively attainable goal.
In this vein, one of the smarter things we've done during this War on Terror (tm) is install a lot of radiation detection devices in ports for all types of transportation. At least the obvious transportation routes are covered for the asymmetrical case.
Because Microsoft is playing nice with the new administration and getting a lot of free advertising to boot. Did you see the Photosynth stuff that CNN was drooling over during the festivities today> Yep, that's a Microsoft Labs product.
It's an advertising coup that bodes ill for open source in the new administration.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it quite odd that Stevens would make this change, as this was clearly not the intent of the founding fathers. Anyone who's spent even a few minutes with writings such as James Madison's Federalist Paper #46 and a host of other contemporaneous documents would soon be dissuaded of such a delusion as Stevens'.
How is this relevant on /.? I mean no disrespect, but this is a topic for more mainstream news sources, not a site dedicated to technology.
Let's get back to Geekdom, shall we?
The satellites aren't looking for radiation in that manner. There's a characteristic double flash of light from a nuclear detonation that is deemed the signature.
Given the federal government's complete aversion to risk post-9/11, good luck with that capabilities based approach. The fed push with IT security these days is toward risk management - period.
There's no solid evidence of health risks from thiomersal.
Not in the manner in which you were speaking perhaps. However, I am highly allergic to thiomersal. I first ran into this nasty stuff when it was used as a preservative in contact lens solutions in the early 1980s. I still have one pupil that is slightly more dilated than the other as a result of a relatively brief exposure 30 years ago - a few stubborn days figuring that my new contacts would just take getting used to even while my eyes continued to swell, burn, and turn red as a beet.
This stuff is still used medically in such items as flu vaccine. It's difficult and expensive to secure an alternative vaccine for me come flu season.
I'm not surprised that it took HP so long to figure out
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
on the whole O/S.
After all, it has a dollar sign in it and they're not particularly astute with cash lately.
Not in Tennessee either. We have a rich history of insane alcohol laws and political opposition. For example, a former Speaker of the House, Ned Ray McWherter, who owned a beer distributorship at the time, cleverly crafted the tax schedules for keg beer to exclude, for example, Guinness, which came in an odd-sized keg compared to the domestics which McWherter's distributorship sold. No tax schedule for that size meant that it was not legal to sell here. IIRC it was about a decade after his tenure before the tax schedules were amended to allow for other sizes of kegs.
Even today a liquor license is required to sell beer > 6% ABV. This, of course, applies to wine as well. This means that we get nothing but the low gravity beers in our grocery stores and no wine at all. And the prices at the liquor stores for high gravity beer (what little you can find) and wine are much higher as a result than, for example, in Georgia. Grocery chains like Trader Joe's and Publix are just now making inroads into our great state, largely because of the lunacy of restricted alcohol sales.
...giant atom bomb...
Really?
This is the kind of inartfully worded rhetoric that continues to fuel the distrust of nuclear power.
Unless you consider the cost of flying his dog back from Hawaii for a photo op a couple of days ago. That cost we US taxpayers plenty.
The fix is to not install spyware on the phones in the first place. How hard is this to understand?
In regards to the Nissan LEAF, the base price is just over $35,000. There are tax incentives that bring this figure down somewhat ($7,500 federal, plus possibly state and local tax breaks - yet more government subsidies), but add back the $2,000 home charger and you're back into the $30K range for a compact car (typically a ~$20K segment) that would only seat 5 smaller individuals comfortably for short distances. In this regard, the very limited range of the car is a blessing.
And I just love how the technological limitations of EVs have been magically transformed into a new psychological condition known as "range anxiety". Sub 100 mile range, reduced range in intemperate conditions, reduced range at night, severely reduced flexibility with route planning, virtually no supporting infrastructure for not-at-home charging, long recharge times, and a 50% initial price premium do not a neurosis make.
I'm glad that the LEAF works for you. It just doesn't work for enough of us from a variety of angles to draw the kind of investment that it would take to overcome many of these issues. There's approximately $1T in petroleum refueling infrastructure in the US alone. That's a lot of J1772 and JARI/CHAdeMO charging station investment (money that could go to improving battery/fuel cell R&D instead of feeding a handful of 1st gen plug EVs), not to mention the upgrade to an aging, outdated electrical grid to support the additional load. Even then, patience and significant planning will be necessary within the limits of current battery and charging technology.
Please don't take this wrong. I'd really love to have an EV (Fisker Karma - drool, drool). The instantaneous torque, reduced fuel costs, potentially reduced negative environmental impact, and various other advantages of an advanced EV would be exciting. But, for me, it's got to have at worst a 300 mile range and at most a 15 minute recharge available nearly anywhere I travel to have a broad enough appeal to justify the additional investment that will make a battery-based EV viable. The EV price premium has to be significantly cut as well. Nothing on the horizon that I've seen comes close to this.
Simple answer: the government, any government, is addicted to money - our money.
In math terms:
Money = spending. Spending = votes. Votes=reelection. Reelection=power.
I just read posts from three digit /. IDs. Lights the ol' wayback machine for me every time!
Don't see how the security is any better than a direct https link between Exchange and your phone.
It's not an issue of data in flight. It's a matter of data at rest on the smart phone itself. BlackBerries have strong encryption that covers everything stored on the phone itself, including the removable media. No other smart phone comes close. It's FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 blessed, which is good enough for sensitive but unclassified information storage by US Federal government users. It meets several other governments' requirements as well.
FIPS 140-2 certification is the only reason I'm still on a BlackBerry. iPhone 4 has crypto hardware onboard, but doesn't seem to use it for much of anything. No Android phone has crypto hardware AFAIK and there's nothing until Gingerbread in the Android specs that even comes close to what the BlackBerry has in terms of locally encrypted storage.
Has /. become so political as to stoop to this level? This isn't Digg. This isn't $POLITICALBLOGSITE.
...besides nobody who will live much longer than another 2-3 years even knows who Bill Joy, or a SPARC let alone a 360 was)...
That would be a Sun 3/60, not 360, as in IBM 360. BTW, thanks for giving me only 2-3 years more to live, Doc...
Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.
Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the .exe and also told me that I needed to make sure that I installed the battery level monitor .exe beforehand. The tech support person could not grasp that I was running Linux, not Windows, despite my best efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unbelievable.
My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.
This being an IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Fixed that for you.
This being a large, overarching, overreaching government project, I predict that it will take 10 years longer than planned, cost 50x the initial budget, and be cancelled halfway through by a shift in the political winds.
Fixed that for you.
I had to stop and re-read my post. Your response to it had me wondering if it was a response to some other post. My previous post is not so much directed toward the piracy itself as it is the human tendency to justify our actions, legal or otherwise. You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I also get torqued when the inevitable soft-hearted and soft-headed "solutions" palette gets dredged up, from hardly effective soft responses of non-lethal means to "reasoning" with the offending party. Non-lethal means of dealing with those with lethal weapons is largely ineffective and sends a message laced with weakness. You simply don't fight fire with smoke and expect the desired outcome to occur. You bring your own heat. And lots of it.
My policy position is to let those who would commit piracy know that they're not going to ride up to an unarmed, defenseless vessel and climb onboard without a reasonably good chance that they'll be killed/injured/captured in the process. The deterrence has to be credible, the consequences of failure severe, and the likelihood of success remote. And it has to be communicated in such a way as to make sure that the recipients get the message loud and clear. I have history on my side to bear witness that this is effective.
And your Iraq troll-fu is weak. This is not a war. You are correct, however, that this is an asymmetrical conflict. On the one hand you have pirates with lethal weapons. On the other hand you have commercial vessels with no weaponry. The pirates have the upper hand. All I propose is that the odds be evened up, that symmetry be restored. As with most systems, balance tends to be the most preferred state and the one that spawns the least problems.
I always get angry when I see someone attempting to justify another's illegal actions. First of all, I don't give any credence to Amy Goodman's interview of a pirate sympathizer that the facts of the issue are accurately reported. I dismiss the argument made in the Democracy Now article quoted in the Free Republic piece cited in the parent as naively absurd. Second, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right. You cannot equivocate lawful means of redress with international piracy, even if they had a legitimate gripe.
The bottom line is that I'm not concerned about "not giving them a reason to pirate". I'm interested in giving them a reason not to pirate - that is, sure and certain punishment for illegal actions in international waters against lawful commerce. Neither am I interested in non-lethal deterrents as means of possibly controlling their bad behavior. They're bringing AK-47s and RPGs to the game. This isn't a paintball fight. They're threatening human lives and millions of dollars of cargo with their actions. This simply has to be deterred with harsh, even lethal, measures. Anything short of this level of response will be viewed as a sign of weakness and will have no significant deterrent capability.
I'd call that a abject failure, a speed bump at best. It was a temporary takedown that was reinstated long enough for the baddies to copy all of their goods off to another site and reset the command and control to point to that other site.
Hey, where are the coupons? Especially in this economy, that matters to a lot of people. Yeah, there are some you can download and print, but that doesn't always work well. I had to disable certain portions of my home firewall to get some of those sites to work.
No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all.
Dead wrong. Any sufficiently funded terrorist organization is the only market for such an antiquated device. No government would want to field one of these (N. Korea excepted), but any terrorist/extremist group would give their last item of worth for just one of these. Terror does not require efficiency.
The trick to nuclear weapons is, and will always be, manufacturing of the fuel. Uranium enrichment and plutonium manufacture require enormous budgets, know-how, and persistence. Neutron enhancers like lithium deuteride and tritium in quantity aren't available from Walmart. A country with defensible borders where you can build/hide/lie to the IAEA about your manufacturing and engineering facilities is a plus.
With no disrespect toward the weapons engineers, the rest of the process is exactly that - a process. Make a case, engineer some conventional explosives, create a tightly-timed detonation system for those conventional explosives, add fissile material, and stir. Mix and match for desired effect.
Everything else is tuning. Big, fast computers with lots of thermodynamic models of nuclear designs are a plus - test firings are expensive and frowned upon.
Remember, folks, that we're talking about a nearly 70 year old technology here. Just as the article states, the biggest secret about nukes is that they're just not that hard to make. Big thermonuclear devices that are efficient? Yes, they're much more work. Little fission-only ones for terrorist/tin pot dictator use? With a little help from deep pockets, a relatively attainable goal.
In this vein, one of the smarter things we've done during this War on Terror (tm) is install a lot of radiation detection devices in ports for all types of transportation. At least the obvious transportation routes are covered for the asymmetrical case.
Because Microsoft is playing nice with the new administration and getting a lot of free advertising to boot. Did you see the Photosynth stuff that CNN was drooling over during the festivities today> Yep, that's a Microsoft Labs product.
It's an advertising coup that bodes ill for open source in the new administration.