He's suggesting that the federal government should be relatively unimportant in your daily life, and therefore that the choice of the president would be significantly less important for most people, and more uniform across all the citizens of a state.
And senators for that matter. There's a whole series of bad amendments in there -- 16-18 -- some so bad that we actually took them back out. Even the 19th, which is a good idea, was only necessary because of a poorly drafted 14th amendment.
And now people want to directly elect the president. Progressive era 2.0 here we come.
That implies that states must choose their electoral college votes by popular election. Unless someone snuck an amendment to the federal constitution through while I wasn't looking, that is not the case.
If you've only got 60% up-time on your chillers you need to invest in better equipment, not more. Having *an* extra is probably sufficient for most cases. I'd even give you 2 if you wanted to have protection during scheduled downtime on one of the units. But that's already a bit of a stretch, and beyond that your money is much better spent on a second location than additional local redundancy.
They like to avoid complicated air-handling systems. Chiller-based systems do, at least indirectly, take advantage of the low outside temperatures -- the heat pump is more efficient when the heat sink is cooler.
The advantage of using the heat pump is you can concentrate the cooling power into small, high-thermal-capacity, relatively high pressure (compared to air ducts) water pipes and re-use the air that's already in the building. Bringing in outside air would require huge, low-pressure, low-thermal-capacity air ducts to run all over your building.
Now why *homes* don't use outside air as part of a standard HVAC system is totally beyond me. It's a little more work to monitor the outside temperature and humidity, particularly given mercury-bulb style thermostats, but with modern computer-controlled systems it's really not that tough, and you already have 96% of the necessary ductwork.
You're only half right. If you actually read any of the articles you linked to you'd know that.
Aluminum wire by itself is no hazard at all. It just doesn't do well when you connect it copper or other galvanically dissimilar materials that can cause corrosion. And there are some issues with dissimilar thermal expansion rates, but that's largely dependent on the terminal size and type.
You're right that the standard 14-10 AWG wiring used in homes is typically not aluminum, and that the wiring of that size that was aluminum and installed in the the 60s and 70s needs to be treated specially.
But aluminum was and still is commonly used in large-gauge wiring, starting around 8 AWG -- the ~2 AWG feed for many homes *is* aluminum. And it's entirely possible to safely wiring aluminum, even of smaller gauges, even of older alloy types, so long as you understand the limitations and use CO/ALR-rated devices.
Or if you're installing sensors, just have the read the existing license plate. Remember that plate with 3" tall, high-contrast, OCR-friendly lettering that you're required to install on your car? Is there some reason they couldn't just use that?
I'm as opposed to tracking as the next guy, probably more so, but I can't believe how silly people get about RFID and other such short-range ID technologies on a device that is already registered with the state and required to carry large identification signage.
Great. I'll just flip the "better engines" toggle on my car designing software and we'll be all set.
Seriously, you totally missed the point of the parent post. You might argue that vehicle manufactures should spend more money researching engine design improvements, but it's absurd to suggest that they aren't already putting in the most efficient engine available to them at salable prices.
That's probably a good thing, because the active ingredient in the treatment is intentionally harmful.
The whole idea of homeopathy is that when people are ill, you give them a highly diluted substance that, when administered to a healthy person, would cause symptoms similar to their illness. Apparently because they already have those symptoms the substance somehow cures them instead of worsening their symptoms*. So higher dilution volumes are probably the right choice if you're actually going to practice homeopathic treatments.
*Some belief in magic is required for this effect.
Because you can't use the DHS RFID serial number to get credit issued, which is the only (valid) reason people worry about their social security number.
You shouldn't be able to get credit issued with just an SSN either, but that's another store entirely.
Because then when the DHS lost their data it would not only include your name and address, but also a meaningless RFID serial number? I don't understand how this increases the threat of DHS stupidity.
Have you ever actually looked at what's required to parse an IPv4 header vs. an IPv6 header? There are plenty of good reasons that IPv6 decided the IPv4 structure was not a good plan.
Beside that, there's no practical way to add address length to IPv4 headers that wouldn't break old equipment. Moreover the kind of breakage caused would be harder to detect and repair -- old equipment would see the IPv4 header, not know about the new extensions, and likely do the wrong thing (like forward traffic to the address corresponding to the first 32-bits of the longer address). At least if you change the protocol number old equipment won't start randomly sending traffic it doesn't understand around the Internet.
I've never, ever had my/etc/hosts file stop working. Ever. Even when my NIC was eaten by a dog, I was still able to resolve hostnames to IP address for systems where I already knew the IP address through some manual information exchange.
And honestly I can't think of a reason I'd need to get to a machine by IP address rather than hostname in the first place, other than the DNS server itself (an address that IPv6 auto-config and DHCPv6 both can provide for me).
What happens when that company wants to setup a VPN to another company that also uses the 10.0.0.0 address space? Now I need a NATNAT device that invents a whole new set of addresses to let machines inside the two private networks talk to each other.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to be directly on the Internet with a public address and no firewall. But even if you are going to assign private addresses internally, there's value in having (or being able to easily obtain) a globally unique address so that you can form arbitrary connections to any other machine on the planet.
The power company supplies exactly the same product to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with delivering it to your meter, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your building layout, usage patterns, equipment, or anything else that might change where and how much electricity you need.
Or think phones. Essentially any business with more than a handful of employees buys some form of site connectivity and a bunch of DIDs from the phone company, and then pays someone else to manage the internal phones as a separate system.
You could easily do the same thing with IT -- hire someone to make changes and then leave. In fact, I sell that very service. I charge an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your computer systems. When I'm done I leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Just like an electrician I guarantee my work and will fix mistakes, but I'll charge you for any changes that weren't part of our original agreement.
Using a degree as an indication of knowledge is a bad idea.
Completing a college education is an indication that you're willing to make long-term commitments and follow through on them even when the intermediate goals are dubious and the process is expensive (in time/money/whatever). It's an indication that you're willing to work on projects that are unrelated or even contradictory to your long-term goal, on teams with people that aren't accountable to you and don't share your goals, and get stuff done anyway.
Yes, people who were willing to break encryption or spoof MACs can get in. But most people wouldn't, which eliminates 99% of the purported problem, and the people that would are demonstrably breaking the law while standing within ~200 feet of you, which should be it reasonably easy to go stop them.
Cars are giant and fairly solid. Ultrasonic sensors are very good at picking them out. Even much smaller objects -- like people and traffic cones -- are pretty easy to detect and avoid. Likewise visual systems can generally differential between "road surface", "other surface", and "obstacle" with very high reliability.
As for detours, it's a little more complicated. An obvious solution is "use humans for detours." Busses typically run bi-directional routes along the same roadway, so a driver could simply shuttle busses back and forth across the detour, letting them drive the rest of the route automatically. The article doesn't talk about the cost of complication of laying down new guidance magnets, but it may also be possible to simply install them along the detour if it will be in use for more than a few days.
Both optical and magnetic guidance systems typically use ultrasonic sensors for nearby (less than ~100 feet) obstacle detection. At highway speeds that's not enough to stop before hitting something that's at a dead stop, but it is enough to tell when someone cuts you off, or if there are construction barrels in the road, or if there is a pedestrian crossing in front of the bus.
Not that it couldn't also be combined with an optical system -- I think that's a good idea -- I just doubt the system is intended to work exclusively with magnets.
And optical systems -- even your human-based one -- really don't do well in sleet and other similar conditions. I'd bet that most people would greatly appreciate a weather-proof center-of-roadway indicator if they had to drive in such conditions. Your windshield is obscured, limiting the available information, and you often rely on things like tire tracks, nearby traffic, and off-road objects for navigation. In some case it can be done, but in some it cannot; it's obviously less reliable, and it's certainly not the way you'd teach someone (or something) to drive most of the time.
I'm not saying it was a good idea, but there's no evidence that he cause 1 cent of damage or required anyone to do any cleanup. Maybe he did, but it sure doesn't say that in the article.
I'm pretty sure if someone contacted you and told you they'd show you vulnerabilities in your system for a fee your lawyers would tell you to press charges for extortion.
But hey, don't let reality ruin your hypothetical hate session.
You could make the same argument about most computers in an office -- why are they even on the Internet? It's just unnecessary risk. Why do you have someone move an external hard drive from the public mail server to the internal mail server and visa versa every hour? The few people that actually need live Internet access can use one of the dedicated systems on another physical network.
And even the totally impractical air gap doesn't really provide the protection you think it does -- it prevents interactive attacks, but it doesn't actually stop the flow of information to the Internet and back, it just make it asynchronous.
But hey, why let facts and pragmatism get in the way of your system design bashing.
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He's suggesting that the federal government should be relatively unimportant in your daily life, and therefore that the choice of the president would be significantly less important for most people, and more uniform across all the citizens of a state.
And senators for that matter. There's a whole series of bad amendments in there -- 16-18 -- some so bad that we actually took them back out. Even the 19th, which is a good idea, was only necessary because of a poorly drafted 14th amendment.
And now people want to directly elect the president. Progressive era 2.0 here we come.
That implies that states must choose their electoral college votes by popular election. Unless someone snuck an amendment to the federal constitution through while I wasn't looking, that is not the case.
Particularly if you tell them you need M=2N/3.
If you've only got 60% up-time on your chillers you need to invest in better equipment, not more. Having *an* extra is probably sufficient for most cases. I'd even give you 2 if you wanted to have protection during scheduled downtime on one of the units. But that's already a bit of a stretch, and beyond that your money is much better spent on a second location than additional local redundancy.
They like to avoid complicated air-handling systems. Chiller-based systems do, at least indirectly, take advantage of the low outside temperatures -- the heat pump is more efficient when the heat sink is cooler.
The advantage of using the heat pump is you can concentrate the cooling power into small, high-thermal-capacity, relatively high pressure (compared to air ducts) water pipes and re-use the air that's already in the building. Bringing in outside air would require huge, low-pressure, low-thermal-capacity air ducts to run all over your building.
Now why *homes* don't use outside air as part of a standard HVAC system is totally beyond me. It's a little more work to monitor the outside temperature and humidity, particularly given mercury-bulb style thermostats, but with modern computer-controlled systems it's really not that tough, and you already have 96% of the necessary ductwork.
You're only half right. If you actually read any of the articles you linked to you'd know that.
Aluminum wire by itself is no hazard at all. It just doesn't do well when you connect it copper or other galvanically dissimilar materials that can cause corrosion. And there are some issues with dissimilar thermal expansion rates, but that's largely dependent on the terminal size and type.
You're right that the standard 14-10 AWG wiring used in homes is typically not aluminum, and that the wiring of that size that was aluminum and installed in the the 60s and 70s needs to be treated specially.
But aluminum was and still is commonly used in large-gauge wiring, starting around 8 AWG -- the ~2 AWG feed for many homes *is* aluminum. And it's entirely possible to safely wiring aluminum, even of smaller gauges, even of older alloy types, so long as you understand the limitations and use CO/ALR-rated devices.
People commonly wear headsets for in-game communication. I'm not sure it's that big a problem.
Or if you're installing sensors, just have the read the existing license plate. Remember that plate with 3" tall, high-contrast, OCR-friendly lettering that you're required to install on your car? Is there some reason they couldn't just use that?
I'm as opposed to tracking as the next guy, probably more so, but I can't believe how silly people get about RFID and other such short-range ID technologies on a device that is already registered with the state and required to carry large identification signage.
Or, you know, the license plate.
Great. I'll just flip the "better engines" toggle on my car designing software and we'll be all set.
Seriously, you totally missed the point of the parent post. You might argue that vehicle manufactures should spend more money researching engine design improvements, but it's absurd to suggest that they aren't already putting in the most efficient engine available to them at salable prices.
That's probably a good thing, because the active ingredient in the treatment is intentionally harmful.
The whole idea of homeopathy is that when people are ill, you give them a highly diluted substance that, when administered to a healthy person, would cause symptoms similar to their illness. Apparently because they already have those symptoms the substance somehow cures them instead of worsening their symptoms*. So higher dilution volumes are probably the right choice if you're actually going to practice homeopathic treatments.
*Some belief in magic is required for this effect.
Which makes it different from your current driver's license number how?
Because you can't use the DHS RFID serial number to get credit issued, which is the only (valid) reason people worry about their social security number.
You shouldn't be able to get credit issued with just an SSN either, but that's another store entirely.
Because then when the DHS lost their data it would not only include your name and address, but also a meaningless RFID serial number? I don't understand how this increases the threat of DHS stupidity.
Unfortunately most states only allow you to get one or the other -- if you are licensed to drive you may not obtain a non-drivers ID.
Have you ever actually looked at what's required to parse an IPv4 header vs. an IPv6 header? There are plenty of good reasons that IPv6 decided the IPv4 structure was not a good plan.
Beside that, there's no practical way to add address length to IPv4 headers that wouldn't break old equipment. Moreover the kind of breakage caused would be harder to detect and repair -- old equipment would see the IPv4 header, not know about the new extensions, and likely do the wrong thing (like forward traffic to the address corresponding to the first 32-bits of the longer address). At least if you change the protocol number old equipment won't start randomly sending traffic it doesn't understand around the Internet.
I've never, ever had my /etc/hosts file stop working. Ever. Even when my NIC was eaten by a dog, I was still able to resolve hostnames to IP address for systems where I already knew the IP address through some manual information exchange.
And honestly I can't think of a reason I'd need to get to a machine by IP address rather than hostname in the first place, other than the DNS server itself (an address that IPv6 auto-config and DHCPv6 both can provide for me).
What happens when that company wants to setup a VPN to another company that also uses the 10.0.0.0 address space? Now I need a NATNAT device that invents a whole new set of addresses to let machines inside the two private networks talk to each other.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to be directly on the Internet with a public address and no firewall. But even if you are going to assign private addresses internally, there's value in having (or being able to easily obtain) a globally unique address so that you can form arbitrary connections to any other machine on the planet.
The power company supplies exactly the same product to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with delivering it to your meter, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your building layout, usage patterns, equipment, or anything else that might change where and how much electricity you need.
Or think phones. Essentially any business with more than a handful of employees buys some form of site connectivity and a bunch of DIDs from the phone company, and then pays someone else to manage the internal phones as a separate system.
You could easily do the same thing with IT -- hire someone to make changes and then leave. In fact, I sell that very service. I charge an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your computer systems. When I'm done I leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Just like an electrician I guarantee my work and will fix mistakes, but I'll charge you for any changes that weren't part of our original agreement.
Using a degree as an indication of knowledge is a bad idea.
Completing a college education is an indication that you're willing to make long-term commitments and follow through on them even when the intermediate goals are dubious and the process is expensive (in time/money/whatever). It's an indication that you're willing to work on projects that are unrelated or even contradictory to your long-term goal, on teams with people that aren't accountable to you and don't share your goals, and get stuff done anyway.
Yes, people who were willing to break encryption or spoof MACs can get in. But most people wouldn't, which eliminates 99% of the purported problem, and the people that would are demonstrably breaking the law while standing within ~200 feet of you, which should be it reasonably easy to go stop them.
Cars are giant and fairly solid. Ultrasonic sensors are very good at picking them out. Even much smaller objects -- like people and traffic cones -- are pretty easy to detect and avoid. Likewise visual systems can generally differential between "road surface", "other surface", and "obstacle" with very high reliability.
As for detours, it's a little more complicated. An obvious solution is "use humans for detours." Busses typically run bi-directional routes along the same roadway, so a driver could simply shuttle busses back and forth across the detour, letting them drive the rest of the route automatically. The article doesn't talk about the cost of complication of laying down new guidance magnets, but it may also be possible to simply install them along the detour if it will be in use for more than a few days.
Both optical and magnetic guidance systems typically use ultrasonic sensors for nearby (less than ~100 feet) obstacle detection. At highway speeds that's not enough to stop before hitting something that's at a dead stop, but it is enough to tell when someone cuts you off, or if there are construction barrels in the road, or if there is a pedestrian crossing in front of the bus.
Not that it couldn't also be combined with an optical system -- I think that's a good idea -- I just doubt the system is intended to work exclusively with magnets.
And optical systems -- even your human-based one -- really don't do well in sleet and other similar conditions. I'd bet that most people would greatly appreciate a weather-proof center-of-roadway indicator if they had to drive in such conditions. Your windshield is obscured, limiting the available information, and you often rely on things like tire tracks, nearby traffic, and off-road objects for navigation. In some case it can be done, but in some it cannot; it's obviously less reliable, and it's certainly not the way you'd teach someone (or something) to drive most of the time.
I'm not saying it was a good idea, but there's no evidence that he cause 1 cent of damage or required anyone to do any cleanup. Maybe he did, but it sure doesn't say that in the article.
I'm pretty sure if someone contacted you and told you they'd show you vulnerabilities in your system for a fee your lawyers would tell you to press charges for extortion.
But hey, don't let reality ruin your hypothetical hate session.
You could make the same argument about most computers in an office -- why are they even on the Internet? It's just unnecessary risk. Why do you have someone move an external hard drive from the public mail server to the internal mail server and visa versa every hour? The few people that actually need live Internet access can use one of the dedicated systems on another physical network.
And even the totally impractical air gap doesn't really provide the protection you think it does -- it prevents interactive attacks, but it doesn't actually stop the flow of information to the Internet and back, it just make it asynchronous.
But hey, why let facts and pragmatism get in the way of your system design bashing.