>Just saying "air gap" it is I'm afraid a trite solution that will not meet the "smart grid" requirement to adjust energy flows
> dynamically based on a mixture of large-area and local algorithms.
Statements like that make me mad. When you turn on a 100 watt light bulb 100 watts of power are dynamically rerouted to your house and the extra power needed is automatically added to the generation schedules of multiple remote power plants using a mixture of large-area and local algorithms. What's more, it has worked like that since the 1880s. How the f did you think it worked all your life?
A few charlatans hoping to pocket $100 billion of government handouts (while sharing none of the accountability for grid reliability) promoted this idea of smart algorithms to reroute power to where its needed most. It's all bullshit.
The security alert linked in the summary says that the attacks were on the administrative lines of the emergency services, not the 911 lines. The summary and the Slashdot headline are bogus.
Are you talking about osmosis or reverse osmosis? There is a thermodynamic limit to the osmosis process, but reverse osmosis uses high pressure pumps and wastes lots of energy.
I'm not aware of any thermodynamic limit to reverse osmosis efficiency. Can you provide a link?
Citizens also have a right to self defense. So what if you suspect that your name might be on the kill list. You can't know for sure because the kill list is secret. What can you do to defend yourself? Launch your own drones against the officials in charge of the kill list?
"In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, "Cut it out.""
You chose to devote a big chunk of your life to debunking rather than just ignoring those people. You must feel that they do a lot of harm to make it worth your efforts.
Aside from the obvious, stealing money, please elaborate on the kinds of harm these fraudsters cause.
I didn't mean to list them in any particular order.
However, I believe that Multics deeply influenced all following O.S.s including Unix. Simply trace the careers of the MIT students who worked on Multics to trace the influence. It was not so much that Multics design was great, but that the students learned the ins/outs pros/cons difficulties/benefits and obstacles to O.S. design.
So it would jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.
We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say agree to a change it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard terms or you are denied access to health care.
During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.
So it wold jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.
We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say yes it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard term or you are denied access to health care.
During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.
Pumped storage hydro is a superb way to store and retrieve electric energy. Indeed it is the only proven way to do it on a massive scale.
Power engineers love pumped storage facilities because of a long list of desirable properties they have. From the power grid point of view, they blend well with everything ever done in the past or contemplated in the future.
USA slashdotters may be interested to hear that the Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility has been aiding the reliability and affordability of electric power in New York State and New York City for decades.
The innovation in the Belgian case is to do it using a hole in the water instead of a lake on a mountain top. I'm sure that it will present it's own engineering challenges, but nothing insurmountable comes to mind. We should all wish them good luck.
Is it possible in the USA to sue for damages due to the nocebo effect (I.e. the flip side of the placebo effect)? The harmful effects are very real.
If yes, then victims could sue sensational journalists. Lawyers who told women they must be sick because of breast implants could be sued by those women who actually suffered because of the nocebo effect. Purveyors of end of the world scenarios and global warming fear mongers could become defendants.
On the other hand, does the first amendment protect all speech no matter how harmful? It is not hard to imagine causing serious harm and even death by speech.
That's no joke. The superfund law (i.e. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980) makes current owners or leaseholders responsible for cleanups even though a prior tenant did the pollution.
My company almost got nailed by this on a property owned by New York State but was used by the federal governement for rocket research in 1947. We even found a V2 rocket wreck hidden in the bushes. Spilled rocket fuel was the contaminant. In the end, EPA had mercy on us because we were truly innocent and too poor to pay anyhow, but they could have nailed us.
Now the site has been taken over by a brand new billion dollar semiconductor foundry. I sure hope the owners of that have made their peace with EPA.
Any potential tenant of NASA land could have the same problem. IANAL so I don't know if NASA can grant them immunity to EPA's demands.
HIPPA only applies to health care providers. Anyone else who gets your data by any means, is not restricted by HIPPA. Notable examples are life insurance companies. You sign a waiver to give them access to your health info to qualify for a policy. After that they can do whatever they want with the data. They can, and do, routinely pass it along to a medical information clearing house in Massachusetts (I forget the name of it), which is a third party. The clearing house dishes out the information (including personal identifying information) to anyone who wants to pay for it.
Americans imagine that they own their personal data. Data (information, facts) are not property and can not be owned. Intellectual property laws bestow some rights but not "ownership" You can own the rights but not the facts. If you could own facts, then you could prevent police and courts from using facts about your behavior against you.
Records, on the other hand are ordinary property. Whoever owns the records can treat them like any other property, regardless of the information they contain (exceptions for national security, for parties covered by HIPPA, records under subpoena and so on). There was once a notable case of a hospital in Las Vegas. They rented a warehouse to store paper patient records. They failed to pay the rent. The landlord sold all property stored in the warehouse to recover money owed to him. Neither the landlord, nor any subsequent owner of those paper records was restricted in any way as to what they could do with them.
Kudos to Gary Marcus for raising such a provocative point. I sneer however at his suggestion that we bring in the legislators and lawyers to help us to deal with the problems. That is a naive/liberal view as opposed to a libertarian/cynical view.
I cynically don't expect enlightened laws ever in our future. Instead we will depend on the courts to once again try to apply laws and principles of centuries past to the problems of today. You could say that's the American Way.
This whole thing smacks of the crackpot science of phrenology. (i.e. a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain mental faculties and character traits are indicated by the configurations of the skull. In other words, reading the bumps on a person's head.)
Sure there are very broad indications that certain parts of the brain are associated with broadly defined functions. There may also be a valid general inference that more wrinkles in a brain are better. But those things are a million miles away from making inferences about an individual's intelligence by looking at the wrinkles. Even more remote is being able to distinguish intelligence from genius by looking at a slice of flesh. I say poppycock.
Someone explain to me how this whole branch of science differs from phrenology.
I confronted the problem of trust when evaluating PGP for private use. How could I be sure that PGP wasn't a ruse sponsored by the US government?
PGP was supposedly written by Phil Zimmerman, a counterculture hero. It's authenticity is vouched for by numerous institutions and academics.But I don't know Zimmerman personally,nor am I familiar with those institutions, nor do i know those academic names personally. On the other hand, i do know that criminal confidence men easily build up phones web sites mimicing trusted financial institutions. They can also easily mimic phony certifications and endorsements from trustworthy people. How could I know that the whole PGP thing wasn't a ruse? Believe what I read on Slashdot? Not on your life.
I concluded that there was only three ways for an individual like me to acquire the trust.
1) invest a whole lot of my time to investigate the certifying institutions and the endorsing academics to verify that they are real and trusted. Then, contact each of them to verify that they really did supply those certifications and endorsements. In other words, iinvest a huge amount of my own time on original research.
2) Find an unimpeachable source of trusted endorsements and certifications that has an unshakable way to communicate with me. In other words, trustworthy. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
3) Believe in the "too big to keep secrets" theory. Huge companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have so many employees and so many detractors that they are unable to keep dark secrets. If I use their products and I am careful to avoid getting phony copies of their products, I may feel more secure.
Since number 3 is they only option that works for an individual with limited resources, that's what I do.
Anyhow, the whole thought exercise made me realize the real truth. For end users, cyber security has very little to do with technology. It is almost entirely an exercise in trust.
Slashdot Mirror
>Just saying "air gap" it is I'm afraid a trite solution that will not meet the "smart grid" requirement to adjust energy flows
> dynamically based on a mixture of large-area and local algorithms.
Statements like that make me mad. When you turn on a 100 watt light bulb 100 watts of power are dynamically rerouted to your house and the extra power needed is automatically added to the generation schedules of multiple remote power plants using a mixture of large-area and local algorithms. What's more, it has worked like that since the 1880s. How the f did you think it worked all your life?
A few charlatans hoping to pocket $100 billion of government handouts (while sharing none of the accountability for grid reliability) promoted this idea of smart algorithms to reroute power to where its needed most. It's all bullshit.
The security alert linked in the summary says that the attacks were on the administrative lines of the emergency services, not the 911 lines. The summary and the Slashdot headline are bogus.
Instead of googlebar make it ogööglebar.
Are you talking about osmosis or reverse osmosis? There is a thermodynamic limit to the osmosis process, but reverse osmosis uses high pressure pumps and wastes lots of energy.
I'm not aware of any thermodynamic limit to reverse osmosis efficiency. Can you provide a link?
If this turns out to be as good as it sounds, the financial and social impacts will be staggering.
Citizens also have a right to self defense. So what if you suspect that your name might be on the kill list. You can't know for sure because the kill list is secret. What can you do to defend yourself? Launch your own drones against the officials in charge of the kill list?
Absurdities lead to absurdities.
I read once that 98% of America's high level nuclear waste comes from military programs.
Why is it then that 98% of the hot air voiced is about civilian uses?
Reminds me of the Steven Wright line:
"In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, "Cut it out.""
There isn't one word in the referenced article that is specific to energy delivery systems.
These guys are asking for the silver bullet to solve any cyber security problem in any system from any threat. The reward:, a measly 20 million.
Why do we have a compelling reason to care why these future prediction markets behave?
You chose to devote a big chunk of your life to debunking rather than just ignoring those people. You must feel that they do a lot of harm to make it worth your efforts.
Aside from the obvious, stealing money, please elaborate on the kinds of harm these fraudsters cause.
I didn't mean to list them in any particular order.
However, I believe that Multics deeply influenced all following O.S.s including Unix. Simply trace the careers of the MIT students who worked on Multics to trace the influence. It was not so much that Multics design was great, but that the students learned the ins/outs pros/cons difficulties/benefits and obstacles to O.S. design.
IBM's FORTRAN compiler, ditto COBOL.
Eliza, the fake psychiatrist.
Texas Instrument's Speak and Spell
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][
On board control software for Apollo 11, ditto for the Voyager space probes.
MIT's Multics O.S.
The Xerox Star office workstation
OS360
Unix and C compiler
Dartmouth Basic
General Electric's time sharing O.S.
I speak English and Swedish. I find it easy to concoct "Swinglish" words and phrases that are invalid in any language yet easy for me to remember.
I think that ought to be secure.
So it would jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.
We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say agree to a change it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard terms or you are denied access to health care.
During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.
In the USA, the only choice is to opt in or die.
So it wold jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.
We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say yes it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard term or you are denied access to health care.
During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.
In the USA, the only choice is to opt in or die.
Pumped storage hydro is a superb way to store and retrieve electric energy. Indeed it is the only proven way to do it on a massive scale.
Power engineers love pumped storage facilities because of a long list of desirable properties they have. From the power grid point of view, they blend well with everything ever done in the past or contemplated in the future.
USA slashdotters may be interested to hear that the Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility has been aiding the reliability and affordability of electric power in New York State and New York City for decades.
The innovation in the Belgian case is to do it using a hole in the water instead of a lake on a mountain top. I'm sure that it will present it's own engineering challenges, but nothing insurmountable comes to mind. We should all wish them good luck.
Is it possible in the USA to sue for damages due to the nocebo effect (I.e. the flip side of the placebo effect)? The harmful effects are very real.
If yes, then victims could sue sensational journalists. Lawyers who told women they must be sick because of breast implants could be sued by those women who actually suffered because of the nocebo effect. Purveyors of end of the world scenarios and global warming fear mongers could become defendants.
On the other hand, does the first amendment protect all speech no matter how harmful? It is not hard to imagine causing serious harm and even death by speech.
You don't need pics. It was donated to The Smithsonian and is on display in D.C. (I think) in one of the Air & Space museums.
That's no joke. The superfund law (i.e. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980) makes current owners or leaseholders responsible for cleanups even though a prior tenant did the pollution.
My company almost got nailed by this on a property owned by New York State but was used by the federal governement for rocket research in 1947. We even found a V2 rocket wreck hidden in the bushes. Spilled rocket fuel was the contaminant. In the end, EPA had mercy on us because we were truly innocent and too poor to pay anyhow, but they could have nailed us.
Now the site has been taken over by a brand new billion dollar semiconductor foundry. I sure hope the owners of that have made their peace with EPA.
Any potential tenant of NASA land could have the same problem. IANAL so I don't know if NASA can grant them immunity to EPA's demands.
HIPPA only applies to health care providers. Anyone else who gets your data by any means, is not restricted by HIPPA. Notable examples are life insurance companies. You sign a waiver to give them access to your health info to qualify for a policy. After that they can do whatever they want with the data. They can, and do, routinely pass it along to a medical information clearing house in Massachusetts (I forget the name of it), which is a third party. The clearing house dishes out the information (including personal identifying information) to anyone who wants to pay for it.
Americans imagine that they own their personal data. Data (information, facts) are not property and can not be owned. Intellectual property laws bestow some rights but not "ownership" You can own the rights but not the facts. If you could own facts, then you could prevent police and courts from using facts about your behavior against you.
Records, on the other hand are ordinary property. Whoever owns the records can treat them like any other property, regardless of the information they contain (exceptions for national security, for parties covered by HIPPA, records under subpoena and so on). There was once a notable case of a hospital in Las Vegas. They rented a warehouse to store paper patient records. They failed to pay the rent. The landlord sold all property stored in the warehouse to recover money owed to him. Neither the landlord, nor any subsequent owner of those paper records was restricted in any way as to what they could do with them.
Kudos to Gary Marcus for raising such a provocative point. I sneer however at his suggestion that we bring in the legislators and lawyers to help us to deal with the problems. That is a naive/liberal view as opposed to a libertarian/cynical view.
I cynically don't expect enlightened laws ever in our future. Instead we will depend on the courts to once again try to apply laws and principles of centuries past to the problems of today. You could say that's the American Way.
This whole thing smacks of the crackpot science of phrenology. (i.e. a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain mental faculties and character traits are indicated by the configurations of the skull. In other words, reading the bumps on a person's head.)
Sure there are very broad indications that certain parts of the brain are associated with broadly defined functions. There may also be a valid general inference that more wrinkles in a brain are better. But those things are a million miles away from making inferences about an individual's intelligence by looking at the wrinkles. Even more remote is being able to distinguish intelligence from genius by looking at a slice of flesh. I say poppycock.
Someone explain to me how this whole branch of science differs from phrenology.
Our club went with a turnkey site host (wild apricot). We didn't ask enough questions about their forums. Here's some of the things we forgot.
Support for videos and pictures in posts. Should be at least as easy as blogger.com.
The ability to host the pics and videos on storage we control. Sites like picasa, snapfish, or even YouTube may not be around forever.
A versatile engine to search old posts.
The ability to backfill or forum history from our previous site.
The ability to export forum archives from the new site in a format useful to backfill some future provider's forum.
I also miss having a way to migrate or reformat old forum threads into wiki articles.
Maybe your users don't post things that have archival value. If so, then they are easier to support.
I confronted the problem of trust when evaluating PGP for private use. How could I be sure that PGP wasn't a ruse sponsored by the US government?
PGP was supposedly written by Phil Zimmerman, a counterculture hero. It's authenticity is vouched for by numerous institutions and academics.But I don't know Zimmerman personally,nor am I familiar with those institutions, nor do i know those academic names personally. On the other hand, i do know that criminal confidence men easily build up phones web sites mimicing trusted financial institutions. They can also easily mimic phony certifications and endorsements from trustworthy people. How could I know that the whole PGP thing wasn't a ruse? Believe what I read on Slashdot? Not on your life.
I concluded that there was only three ways for an individual like me to acquire the trust.
1) invest a whole lot of my time to investigate the certifying institutions and the endorsing academics to verify that they are real and trusted. Then, contact each of them to verify that they really did supply those certifications and endorsements. In other words, iinvest a huge amount of my own time on original research.
2) Find an unimpeachable source of trusted endorsements and certifications that has an unshakable way to communicate with me. In other words, trustworthy. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
3) Believe in the "too big to keep secrets" theory. Huge companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have so many employees and so many detractors that they are unable to keep dark secrets. If I use their products and I am careful to avoid getting phony copies of their products, I may feel more secure.
Since number 3 is they only option that works for an individual with limited resources, that's what I do.
Anyhow, the whole thought exercise made me realize the real truth. For end users, cyber security has very little to do with technology. It is almost entirely an exercise in trust.