Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
Yes, we are running systems with that little ram. Many of us don't want to pay top dollar for a gaming rig, and are little miffed that a PC, that was bought for no other purpose than to browse the web, is no longer sufficient for even that. I'm glad to hear that you're rolling in cash and can buy a new $400 PC every two years, but most of us have real world bills to pay and are actively unhappy that the PC we bought for e-mail, and paying bills wont work anymore, for no reason other than the bank wants to have a flashy new interface for their online banking site. A PC should last for 10+ years, not 2. I shouldn't have to upgrade to all the latest idiotic eye candy just to keep up with security updates...
Why are CDs on that list? CDs do not use electricity or magnetism.
Pop a CD in a microwave oven on high for 15 seconds and watch what happens. Then you'll understand why CDs are on the list.
To be perfectly clear however, if the sun ever starts putting out EM power at that level, and the right frequencies, we have bigger problems than a little data loss...
computers today are far more susceptible to damage than ever before. Everyone ignores the danger until it hits them, happens all the time.
They are? Funny, but I thought the chips had a higher transient voltage tolerance than ever before, I remember the bad old days when you really did have to wear a wrist strap when handling PCBs. I haven't used one in almost a decade, and I haven't had a DOA board since before I stopped. I know the power supplies have much better overload and fault tolerance and recovery than ever before. Switching Transistors can handle 600V under normal operating conditions now. 10 years ago, 300V was the norm. Seems like newer bus specs are also much more fault tolerant than they were before. I remember old school SCSI having a bitch of a time if the terminators were not perfect, but I haven't had cabling issues since LVDS. MTBF is way up on everything else. Hell even a bad memory chip on a modern drive is not a fatal error anymore.
If the local wells are somehow hitting the resonant frequency of our mud, it seems that it would be trivial to establish what that frequency is and adjust the procedure to avoid it.
Or am I missing something?
No, that's about it. More than likely, the issue comes from the foundations of the buildings being close to the right size and shape to resonate. Possibly the flooring, or maybe its a local rock shelf, or a single vein of rock. A good way to test the whole theory is to use a seismometer and check a grid pattern around the well head. If the pattern is uniform, then there is obviously some amplifying effect relating to the local geology. That would be a pretty good argument to stop the fracking. I think you'll find the distribution to be either highly local, or unrelated to the fracking, or both. Also, get the vibration frequency. Frequencies don't just come from nowhere, so it should be pretty easy to correlate the frequency from the seismometer with something from the fracking process that is causing it. If there is no correlation, then it becomes less and less likely that the fracking is the cause.
Option 8:) Conservation. Learn to do more with less. Drive smaller cars. Be more efficient. Stop pretending NASCAR is a sport and downplay the cult of the big, powerful car. Auto racing began in an attempt to raise awareness of the new mode of transportation, automobiles. Well, mission accomplished. Now let's raise awareness of the fact that everyone does not need a locomotive to get from here to the grocery store
Yeah, I didn't list that because conservation is not a source of energy. Realistically speaking, Nuclear is the only option I listed. Its the only one with a fuel source measured in millennium instead of years. Nuclear cant handle the load right now because the infrastructure isnt there yet. The real question is when will we be ready to implement 100% nuclear, and what do we do in the mean time. Everything else is just political window dressing to keep the NIMBYs at bay.
And one question: Why is it that whenever someone who doesn't believe that alternative energies can be useful for the next fifty years, they always only evaluate the various alternative technologies independently? It's "Solar isn't good enough because it can't power everything", and "Wind isn't good enough because it can't power everything" and so on for every alternative technologies. Maybe our energy needs don't have to only rely on one technology at the exclusion of the others.
The issue is that all of the renewable energy sources together aren't good enough and, without a significant (read unpredictable) breakthrough, never will be. Anyone who tells you different probably isn't qualified to have an opinion in the matter.
Odds are that eventually someone will come up with something good enough other than nuclear. The trouble is that it might be tomorrow, or it might be 10,000 years down the road. Only the desperate or the monumentally stupid would gamble our immediate future on something we don't already have in our hands. Renewable energy isn't an incremental improvement on existing technology, its a revolutionary new idea that hasn't happened yet. Good luck with that.
In theory, we should be able to build and operate plants that use fission power in an entirely safe manner.
Actually, no. In theory, it is impossible to reduce all nuclear accidents to zero. Theory states quite simply that it is a game of chance, and that we can alter the odds, but cannot render them all the way to zero. We simply have to pay our money and make our bet.
Competently done, engineering will always improve the odds, making things safer, but perfect safety is theoretically impossible.
The article stated that one of the main problems was bad cementing jobs, but from what I've gathered from reading and talking is that it is really hard to get a good cement job. There are things you can do to screw it up, but even if you do everything by the book, you can still end up with an imperfect seal. According to the US U.S. Minerals Management Service, cementing problems were associated with 18 of 39 blowouts between 1992 and 2006.
So, if doing fraking "right" requires you to have perfect cement jobs everytime, then it isn't possible to do fraking right.
To do the process right, you test the cement job when it is done, and if it doesn't pass, you seal the well and start over. This is expensive, and companies are loathe to do it. Thats how we got the deepwater horizon mess. The regulation needs to be in place. The person who makes the decision to go ahead with a well needs to be in a position of having little to gain from letting a well go ahead, but everything to loose form approving an imperfect well.
We've been drilling wells for about a century. If there was a fundamental problem with well casing, it would have shown up long before now.
There is, and it has. Its called taking shortcuts to save time and money. It caused the deep water horizon screw up, and it will happen over and over without proper regulation.
The amount of energy released is enough to cause vibration that can be felt on the surface in many areas, sometimes even several miles away.
That doesn't necescarily require as much energy as you think. Those rock formations could easily provide natural waveguides for different frequency wave fronts, channeling the relatively small energy wave in specific directions. It is most likely a simple function of natural harmonics that some random place nearby will happen to shake when the fracking is done, At the higher frequency vibrations, the energy involved can be downright trivial. Remember, a 400 watt sub woofer can vibrate a man out of his skull at 10 Hz from 30 feet away. Imagine what a 2 magawatt diesel motor can do if all the energy happens to be channeled in one direction.
So here's my idea: Let's only do fracking in theory. In practice, let's be more serious about looking for alternatives.
Ok, lets do that, Lets look at the alternatives. (Notice I said look at, not look for. That's because we need a solution today, not some pie in the sky solution tomorrow.)
Option 1:) Oil. Wow, It's been a bad idea since it was conceived, and makes fracking look like the safest thing ever.
Option 2:) Coal. Yeah, that's real safe, and clean too
Option 3:) Nuclear. Probably wouldn't be so bad if someone could come up with a design that didn't require active safety measures. Truth be told, however, putting that much power in one place gets hairy. Mini reactors might be a better bet...
Option 4:) Fracking. Not terribly bad if done right. Pretty clean burning fuel. Needs massive regulatory oversight.
Option 5:) Solar. Short of discovering an unprecedented supply of raw materials for making solar panels and being prepared to cover 200,000 Square miles of land somewhere, this is a pipe dream.
Option 6:) Wind. There just isn't enough of it, except from the environmental lobby.
Option 7:) Breakthrough technology. This is probably what we'll end up with in a millennium or so, but breakthroughs are unpredictable, so don't count on it, or you'll be alone in the dark with your fingers crossed.
Seriously, for the immediate future, Gas Fracking is the least problematic option. Anything else has geopolitical or environmental ramifications that dwarf fracking in scale and nastiness. For the longer term future, some variation on nuclear is the smart pick. 20 years from now, the Germans are gonna regret closing all those nukes when they buy 90% of their power from France, and France decides they don't want to sell... Now all we have to do is keep the damn things from melting.
Having a proper description saves quite a bit of time over figuring things out for yourself. Society is saved from the burden of having to re-invent stuff.
That may have been true 200 years ago. maybe even 100 years ago. I would submit that you cant find me even one product on the open market today, that any part of was produced or engineered by reading any relevant patents from the last 50 years. People don't read the patents to find out how the device works, they simply figure out how to make their own version work and pray they don't get sued for infringing someone else's patent. Copyright, however, is a whole other animal.
Its difficult to draw a line
Say, someone discovers a way to convert scrap metal to gold
That person should be allowed to have a patent on it
Why? If that person just simply used their machine to produce and sell the gold, they would have no need of ever letting on that they even have it.
Lets use something a little more practical. The person(s) who designed the class D amplifier for example. It was a borderline idea. It was novel enough that most engineers wouldn't have thought of it, but about a handful did. It only missed being patented because the first ones to market were from academia back before the patent furor started in the mid 20th century. They all made quite a tidy bit on money selling motor controllers based off their amplifiers. Even today, many people come up with good alternative amplifier designs. Many of those designs are patented, but the patents are not what keeps the companies like Bose in business. What keeps them selling product are the more evolutionary things, like adding multichannel support for surround sound, adding MP3 playback ability, adding multi-room support, and other features that come from a marketing perspective instead of an engineering one. If Bose stopped improving on sound quality today, and focused solely on producing better and better feature sets, they could probably survive a long long time without ever filing for another patent. The only trouble they might run into would be if some idiot granted an overly broad patent on something like using a network to do X...
Toilet paper manufacturers seem to have no trouble staying in business without needing to sue everyone in sight over patents. Makes you wonder...
In theory a person has to build whatever they are patenting, but process patents are much too broad, not being tied to an actual machine. Patents in general are no longer useful to society, and simply allow the lawyers to get rich at everyone else's expense. Patents made sense back when the time it took to reverse engineer a product was trivial compared to the time it took to design it in the first place. In an age when the time to design is less than the time to steal, patents serve no valuable purpose, and only the dark-side of patents is left. Whats worse, is that our patent system rewards those who get to the patent office first, not necessarily those who actually had the idea. Even worse, is that the patent system will award the whole pie to anyone who comes up with something even if someone a world away did the exact same thing, only didn't get to the patent office right away.
As a side note, ever had an idea and tried to figure out if some part of your idea is patented? What a flaming nightmare.
You know, things have changed in East Europe during last decades. Electricity 0.14 EUR/kWh here vs. 0.15$/kWh in USA. Gas 1.4 EUR/l vs 1$/l in USA (caused mostly by taxes but that doesn't matter). Chicken meat 2 EUR/kg vs 2$/kg in USA. House property 1300EUR/m2 in Slovakia [globalpropertyguide.com] vs 200$/m2 in USA [globalpropertyguide.com].
Wow, I'm not sure where globalpropertyguide is getting their numbers, but 37,000 USD for a 2000 square foot home is pure ghetto. I lived in a slum for a while in a more or less typical American city, and 1400 square feet (127 m2) cost me $60,000 ($470 / m2). My current place is about typical for a middle class professional in the US, and ran me 1600 USD / m2. In the tech areas of the US (Silicon Valley, the Tech northeast), I know people who have paid as much as 4000 USD / m2 just to get a place within an hour commute of their job.
I cant speak to the validity of the Slovakian estimates, but your US numbers are pure rubbish.
It's actually pretty simple. Use a small low-power CPU for I/O operations such as key presses/screen presses/whatever. Log it to internal memory, and provide OS a way to dump it - or use it to parse the packets and make dumps part of packets sent out (digital phones are packet based)...this CPU can have on-chip RAM and ROM and be almost completely self-contained. this way you've created a "hardware-only" backdoor that there may be no way to control (if it gets its hands on packets just before they leave the radio)
Once again, that requires intimate knowledge of the top level design of the system. You have to know what comm chip to use, what input controllers and what display controllers. Keep in mind, CPUs are general purpose devices. All they do is move data from one port to another. If you don't know which ports are being used for what, then which data coming in is your keystrokes? which output ports are for the comm hardware? what are the protocols? If you already know all that, you already have people on the ground at the top level designers, so why not take the easy route and put it in the software (OS).
Or perhaps you think maybe the PCB manufacturer would do it? PCBs are regularly checked by Quality Assurance to verify they are correct. This is done for the sake of avoiding manufacturing mistakes, and would notice extra chips on the board. Plus Cell phones do not exactly have a lot of room to spare in them. Where are you going to put extra chips? Also, how do you explain to the phone designer that you have a 6 month turnaround on their PCB layout while you do the reverse engineering and redesign their board? The competition has a two week turnaround.
People think that because a new cell phone model comes out every two years, that it only takes two years to design. You also have to account for the hundreds of millions of man-hours that went into making all of the chips. If any one of them does not work exactly as advertised, then the system does not work. reverse engineering takes a tremendous amount of time, and re-engineering a system to mimic the original plus some additional functionality is basically impossible given the time frame. The only way you can make unwanted changes are in software.
You know that Apple design their own chips, as well as the software, right?
Just putting that out there.
That is exactly my point. Putting in a backdoor would be fairly trivial for apple to do because they are the top level designer. In fact, they would most likely put the backdoor in the OS if anywhere.
For everyone else, the task of putting in a backdoor would be virtually impossible. Backdoors are almost exclusively a software domain problem.
Don't forget that these factories could conceivably have the full support of the Chinese government in their actions. That's a lot of resources that could be brought to bear on a relatively simple problem.
What I keep trying to explain is that such an undertaking is not at all simple, and without knowledge of how the whole system works together is nigh on impossible without getting caught.
For example, Lets say you are the manufacturer of the CPU being used. You want to provide a backdoor for your government, but you don't have access to the top level design. You don't know what memory chip set is being used, you don't have access to the software or the OS in any meaningful way. You don't even know what communication chips or display chips are being used. So now you have the responsibility for separating out some of the data that your CPU processes and sending it home to mommy. How do you do that without knowing what comm chip is being used? What is the interface? How do you select which information to send? You don't know where the software/OS keeps it. Sending everything would use hideous amounts of bandwidth and you'd be caught before the product even made it out of Quality Assurance. Lets say you make the comm chip. How do you maintain two separate connections without the carrier finding out? How about Quality Assurance finding out? The problem for the manufacturers is that designers like apple don't give the whole job of manufacturing all of the chips to any one company. They maintain the ability to change vendors of most of their chips so that they can make their vendors compete. This means that no one but Apple knows what chips the final product will have until its way too late for the manufacturer to make meaningful changes. If they do it after launch, they only have about a 12 month window in which to complete a large scale reverse engineering project before the model is end of life'd and the new model comes out, and if their chips are still used, there is no guarantee that the chip sets would be the same in the new model. So the manufacturer would not know if the newly backdoor'd chips are now being used in a configuration that not only breaks the backdoor, but breaks the chip. So now your designer (Apple) discovers the issue in QA once again, and now your in deep shift because it becomes public knowledge that your company tried to backdoor a manufacturing project for your government, and you no longer have any customers.
The problem is of such a scale and complexity that once again, it simply makes more sense to put a sleeper in the OS team and have done with it. With all the H1B's from China these days, that would be the place to look for your back door.
It would be very hard indeed to check the code that has been burned into a chip and is running some spy software, unless you could pull apart an Iphone 4s and analyze the whole circuitry and firmware for the back-doors code. I am not sure how difficult that would be, surely more than just a logic probe and some spare time.
Putting in a "hardware" backdoor of that nature would be exceptionally difficult. You would have to know all kinds of things about the whole system, not just the chip your company is responsible for. That was why Stuxnet was such a big deal. Putting a backdoor into a piece of equipment is easy. Putting it to use in anything more complex than a toaster oven will be very difficult and require massive knowledge of the total system. Hell, even for all its sophistication, Stuxnet still failed to go unnoticed. There are just too many ways that it fails, and causes someone to go see why their system is behaving odd. All it takes is one person at the device manufacturer to start digging into a consistent equipment failure, and soon the light is revealed. You basically need a bunch of spies on the ground at the device designer to tell you what chip sets they're using, what interconnects, what OS, what extra software... It would be far easier to just put a sleeper on the ground to put your backdoor in the software.
"If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?."
Such an uninformed idiot to not have noticed, how serious the issue but rather wants to gain publicity by making this, big against Apple.
Ridiculous
This is not at all unfair to single out apple in this. It has been apparent for some time that M$ would sell their users security to the highest bidder. Nokia and Rim don't make desktop software, so that leaves apple providing a backdoor on one platform as perfectly viable evidence that they would do this on their other major platform, especially since the two share a significant codebase. The revelation here isn't that only apple would do this, its that apple would do this, and risk their brand at all. All the other players had a bad reputation to start. The big question is: What has google done?
No, they will say either 1) "It's not a knock-off; it's a parody." or 2) "We bought the bag, we can use it however we like."
2) I cant help but be reminded of those retarded adds at the beginning of DVDs: Buying pirated DVDs is stealing.
Buying pirated goods is stealing. Seems like as good an analogy as any, I hope someone faces some jail time for this. It seems the only fair way to proceed given the content industries attitudes and stance in these and related matters...
One of my high-school math teachers gave multiple choice tests. Every single one of them had five choices: four possible answers, and "E: None of the above". No partial credit. Kept you on your toes.
Now that is one smart teacher... Minimizes the teachers effort, but eliminates many of the pitfalls of the multiple choice format. You should nominate that guy for a teaching award.
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Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
Yes, we are running systems with that little ram. Many of us don't want to pay top dollar for a gaming rig, and are little miffed that a PC, that was bought for no other purpose than to browse the web, is no longer sufficient for even that. I'm glad to hear that you're rolling in cash and can buy a new $400 PC every two years, but most of us have real world bills to pay and are actively unhappy that the PC we bought for e-mail, and paying bills wont work anymore, for no reason other than the bank wants to have a flashy new interface for their online banking site. A PC should last for 10+ years, not 2. I shouldn't have to upgrade to all the latest idiotic eye candy just to keep up with security updates...
-=Geoskd
Why are CDs on that list? CDs do not use electricity or magnetism.
Pop a CD in a microwave oven on high for 15 seconds and watch what happens. Then you'll understand why CDs are on the list.
To be perfectly clear however, if the sun ever starts putting out EM power at that level, and the right frequencies, we have bigger problems than a little data loss...
-=Geoskd
computers today are far more susceptible to damage than ever before. Everyone ignores the danger until it hits them, happens all the time.
They are? Funny, but I thought the chips had a higher transient voltage tolerance than ever before, I remember the bad old days when you really did have to wear a wrist strap when handling PCBs. I haven't used one in almost a decade, and I haven't had a DOA board since before I stopped. I know the power supplies have much better overload and fault tolerance and recovery than ever before. Switching Transistors can handle 600V under normal operating conditions now. 10 years ago, 300V was the norm. Seems like newer bus specs are also much more fault tolerant than they were before. I remember old school SCSI having a bitch of a time if the terminators were not perfect, but I haven't had cabling issues since LVDS. MTBF is way up on everything else. Hell even a bad memory chip on a modern drive is not a fatal error anymore.
-=Geoskd
regulation that isn't enforced isn't proper...
If the local wells are somehow hitting the resonant frequency of our mud, it seems that it would be trivial to establish what that frequency is and adjust the procedure to avoid it. Or am I missing something?
No, that's about it. More than likely, the issue comes from the foundations of the buildings being close to the right size and shape to resonate. Possibly the flooring, or maybe its a local rock shelf, or a single vein of rock. A good way to test the whole theory is to use a seismometer and check a grid pattern around the well head. If the pattern is uniform, then there is obviously some amplifying effect relating to the local geology. That would be a pretty good argument to stop the fracking. I think you'll find the distribution to be either highly local, or unrelated to the fracking, or both. Also, get the vibration frequency. Frequencies don't just come from nowhere, so it should be pretty easy to correlate the frequency from the seismometer with something from the fracking process that is causing it. If there is no correlation, then it becomes less and less likely that the fracking is the cause.
-=Geoskd
Option 8:) Conservation. Learn to do more with less. Drive smaller cars. Be more efficient. Stop pretending NASCAR is a sport and downplay the cult of the big, powerful car. Auto racing began in an attempt to raise awareness of the new mode of transportation, automobiles. Well, mission accomplished. Now let's raise awareness of the fact that everyone does not need a locomotive to get from here to the grocery store
Yeah, I didn't list that because conservation is not a source of energy. Realistically speaking, Nuclear is the only option I listed. Its the only one with a fuel source measured in millennium instead of years. Nuclear cant handle the load right now because the infrastructure isnt there yet. The real question is when will we be ready to implement 100% nuclear, and what do we do in the mean time. Everything else is just political window dressing to keep the NIMBYs at bay.
And one question: Why is it that whenever someone who doesn't believe that alternative energies can be useful for the next fifty years, they always only evaluate the various alternative technologies independently? It's "Solar isn't good enough because it can't power everything", and "Wind isn't good enough because it can't power everything" and so on for every alternative technologies. Maybe our energy needs don't have to only rely on one technology at the exclusion of the others.
The issue is that all of the renewable energy sources together aren't good enough and, without a significant (read unpredictable) breakthrough, never will be. Anyone who tells you different probably isn't qualified to have an opinion in the matter.
Odds are that eventually someone will come up with something good enough other than nuclear. The trouble is that it might be tomorrow, or it might be 10,000 years down the road. Only the desperate or the monumentally stupid would gamble our immediate future on something we don't already have in our hands. Renewable energy isn't an incremental improvement on existing technology, its a revolutionary new idea that hasn't happened yet. Good luck with that.
-=Geoskd
That that's a depressingly low bar? I don't think most anti-nuclear people are pro-coal. How many people have died producing solar?
Solar power has about 0.44 deaths per TWh
Granted thats better than the 4.0 for Natural Gas, but Solar is not viable for other reasons.
-=Geoskd
In theory, we should be able to build and operate plants that use fission power in an entirely safe manner.
Actually, no. In theory, it is impossible to reduce all nuclear accidents to zero. Theory states quite simply that it is a game of chance, and that we can alter the odds, but cannot render them all the way to zero. We simply have to pay our money and make our bet.
Competently done, engineering will always improve the odds, making things safer, but perfect safety is theoretically impossible.
-=Geoskd
The article stated that one of the main problems was bad cementing jobs, but from what I've gathered from reading and talking is that it is really hard to get a good cement job. There are things you can do to screw it up, but even if you do everything by the book, you can still end up with an imperfect seal. According to the US U.S. Minerals Management Service, cementing problems were associated with 18 of 39 blowouts between 1992 and 2006.
So, if doing fraking "right" requires you to have perfect cement jobs everytime, then it isn't possible to do fraking right.
To do the process right, you test the cement job when it is done, and if it doesn't pass, you seal the well and start over. This is expensive, and companies are loathe to do it. Thats how we got the deepwater horizon mess. The regulation needs to be in place. The person who makes the decision to go ahead with a well needs to be in a position of having little to gain from letting a well go ahead, but everything to loose form approving an imperfect well.
-=Geoskd
We've been drilling wells for about a century. If there was a fundamental problem with well casing, it would have shown up long before now.
There is, and it has. Its called taking shortcuts to save time and money. It caused the deep water horizon screw up, and it will happen over and over without proper regulation.
-=Geoskd
The amount of energy released is enough to cause vibration that can be felt on the surface in many areas, sometimes even several miles away.
That doesn't necescarily require as much energy as you think. Those rock formations could easily provide natural waveguides for different frequency wave fronts, channeling the relatively small energy wave in specific directions. It is most likely a simple function of natural harmonics that some random place nearby will happen to shake when the fracking is done, At the higher frequency vibrations, the energy involved can be downright trivial. Remember, a 400 watt sub woofer can vibrate a man out of his skull at 10 Hz from 30 feet away. Imagine what a 2 magawatt diesel motor can do if all the energy happens to be channeled in one direction.
-=Geoskd
So here's my idea: Let's only do fracking in theory. In practice, let's be more serious about looking for alternatives.
Ok, lets do that, Lets look at the alternatives. (Notice I said look at, not look for. That's because we need a solution today, not some pie in the sky solution tomorrow.)
Option 1:) Oil. Wow, It's been a bad idea since it was conceived, and makes fracking look like the safest thing ever.
Option 2:) Coal. Yeah, that's real safe, and clean too
Option 3:) Nuclear. Probably wouldn't be so bad if someone could come up with a design that didn't require active safety measures. Truth be told, however, putting that much power in one place gets hairy. Mini reactors might be a better bet...
Option 4:) Fracking. Not terribly bad if done right. Pretty clean burning fuel. Needs massive regulatory oversight.
Option 5:) Solar. Short of discovering an unprecedented supply of raw materials for making solar panels and being prepared to cover 200,000 Square miles of land somewhere, this is a pipe dream.
Option 6:) Wind. There just isn't enough of it, except from the environmental lobby.
Option 7:) Breakthrough technology. This is probably what we'll end up with in a millennium or so, but breakthroughs are unpredictable, so don't count on it, or you'll be alone in the dark with your fingers crossed.
Seriously, for the immediate future, Gas Fracking is the least problematic option. Anything else has geopolitical or environmental ramifications that dwarf fracking in scale and nastiness. For the longer term future, some variation on nuclear is the smart pick. 20 years from now, the Germans are gonna regret closing all those nukes when they buy 90% of their power from France, and France decides they don't want to sell... Now all we have to do is keep the damn things from melting.
-=Geoskd
Can people over 80 on this forum add to this discussion, if they are interested to live another 34 years, until the "current limit" of 114?
There are people here who are over 80? Damn I'm going to have to find a new place to hang out...
-=Geoskd
Having a proper description saves quite a bit of time over figuring things out for yourself. Society is saved from the burden of having to re-invent stuff.
That may have been true 200 years ago. maybe even 100 years ago. I would submit that you cant find me even one product on the open market today, that any part of was produced or engineered by reading any relevant patents from the last 50 years. People don't read the patents to find out how the device works, they simply figure out how to make their own version work and pray they don't get sued for infringing someone else's patent. Copyright, however, is a whole other animal.
-=Geoskd
Its difficult to draw a line Say, someone discovers a way to convert scrap metal to gold That person should be allowed to have a patent on it
Why? If that person just simply used their machine to produce and sell the gold, they would have no need of ever letting on that they even have it.
Lets use something a little more practical. The person(s) who designed the class D amplifier for example. It was a borderline idea. It was novel enough that most engineers wouldn't have thought of it, but about a handful did. It only missed being patented because the first ones to market were from academia back before the patent furor started in the mid 20th century. They all made quite a tidy bit on money selling motor controllers based off their amplifiers. Even today, many people come up with good alternative amplifier designs. Many of those designs are patented, but the patents are not what keeps the companies like Bose in business. What keeps them selling product are the more evolutionary things, like adding multichannel support for surround sound, adding MP3 playback ability, adding multi-room support, and other features that come from a marketing perspective instead of an engineering one. If Bose stopped improving on sound quality today, and focused solely on producing better and better feature sets, they could probably survive a long long time without ever filing for another patent. The only trouble they might run into would be if some idiot granted an overly broad patent on something like using a network to do X...
Toilet paper manufacturers seem to have no trouble staying in business without needing to sue everyone in sight over patents. Makes you wonder...
-=Geoskd
In theory a person has to build whatever they are patenting, but process patents are much too broad, not being tied to an actual machine. Patents in general are no longer useful to society, and simply allow the lawyers to get rich at everyone else's expense. Patents made sense back when the time it took to reverse engineer a product was trivial compared to the time it took to design it in the first place. In an age when the time to design is less than the time to steal, patents serve no valuable purpose, and only the dark-side of patents is left. Whats worse, is that our patent system rewards those who get to the patent office first, not necessarily those who actually had the idea. Even worse, is that the patent system will award the whole pie to anyone who comes up with something even if someone a world away did the exact same thing, only didn't get to the patent office right away.
As a side note, ever had an idea and tried to figure out if some part of your idea is patented? What a flaming nightmare.
-=Geoskd
it's a misconception that patents stifle innovation
No it isn't... They Do
The author is a lawyer, so its no wonder he is defending the legal system. It pays his bills. Take the whole thing with a gigantic grain of salt.
-=Geoskd
You know, things have changed in East Europe during last decades. Electricity 0.14 EUR/kWh here vs. 0.15$/kWh in USA. Gas 1.4 EUR/l vs 1$/l in USA (caused mostly by taxes but that doesn't matter). Chicken meat 2 EUR/kg vs 2$/kg in USA. House property 1300EUR/m2 in Slovakia [globalpropertyguide.com] vs 200$/m2 in USA [globalpropertyguide.com].
Wow, I'm not sure where globalpropertyguide is getting their numbers, but 37,000 USD for a 2000 square foot home is pure ghetto. I lived in a slum for a while in a more or less typical American city, and 1400 square feet (127 m2) cost me $60,000 ($470 / m2). My current place is about typical for a middle class professional in the US, and ran me 1600 USD / m2. In the tech areas of the US (Silicon Valley, the Tech northeast), I know people who have paid as much as 4000 USD / m2 just to get a place within an hour commute of their job.
I cant speak to the validity of the Slovakian estimates, but your US numbers are pure rubbish.
-=Geoskd
It's actually pretty simple. Use a small low-power CPU for I/O operations such as key presses/screen presses/whatever. Log it to internal memory, and provide OS a way to dump it - or use it to parse the packets and make dumps part of packets sent out (digital phones are packet based)...this CPU can have on-chip RAM and ROM and be almost completely self-contained. this way you've created a "hardware-only" backdoor that there may be no way to control (if it gets its hands on packets just before they leave the radio)
Once again, that requires intimate knowledge of the top level design of the system. You have to know what comm chip to use, what input controllers and what display controllers. Keep in mind, CPUs are general purpose devices. All they do is move data from one port to another. If you don't know which ports are being used for what, then which data coming in is your keystrokes? which output ports are for the comm hardware? what are the protocols? If you already know all that, you already have people on the ground at the top level designers, so why not take the easy route and put it in the software (OS).
Or perhaps you think maybe the PCB manufacturer would do it? PCBs are regularly checked by Quality Assurance to verify they are correct. This is done for the sake of avoiding manufacturing mistakes, and would notice extra chips on the board. Plus Cell phones do not exactly have a lot of room to spare in them. Where are you going to put extra chips? Also, how do you explain to the phone designer that you have a 6 month turnaround on their PCB layout while you do the reverse engineering and redesign their board? The competition has a two week turnaround.
People think that because a new cell phone model comes out every two years, that it only takes two years to design. You also have to account for the hundreds of millions of man-hours that went into making all of the chips. If any one of them does not work exactly as advertised, then the system does not work. reverse engineering takes a tremendous amount of time, and re-engineering a system to mimic the original plus some additional functionality is basically impossible given the time frame. The only way you can make unwanted changes are in software.
-=Geoskd
You know that Apple design their own chips, as well as the software, right? Just putting that out there.
That is exactly my point. Putting in a backdoor would be fairly trivial for apple to do because they are the top level designer. In fact, they would most likely put the backdoor in the OS if anywhere.
For everyone else, the task of putting in a backdoor would be virtually impossible. Backdoors are almost exclusively a software domain problem.
-=Geoskd
Don't forget that these factories could conceivably have the full support of the Chinese government in their actions. That's a lot of resources that could be brought to bear on a relatively simple problem.
What I keep trying to explain is that such an undertaking is not at all simple, and without knowledge of how the whole system works together is nigh on impossible without getting caught.
For example, Lets say you are the manufacturer of the CPU being used. You want to provide a backdoor for your government, but you don't have access to the top level design. You don't know what memory chip set is being used, you don't have access to the software or the OS in any meaningful way. You don't even know what communication chips or display chips are being used. So now you have the responsibility for separating out some of the data that your CPU processes and sending it home to mommy. How do you do that without knowing what comm chip is being used? What is the interface? How do you select which information to send? You don't know where the software/OS keeps it. Sending everything would use hideous amounts of bandwidth and you'd be caught before the product even made it out of Quality Assurance. Lets say you make the comm chip. How do you maintain two separate connections without the carrier finding out? How about Quality Assurance finding out? The problem for the manufacturers is that designers like apple don't give the whole job of manufacturing all of the chips to any one company. They maintain the ability to change vendors of most of their chips so that they can make their vendors compete. This means that no one but Apple knows what chips the final product will have until its way too late for the manufacturer to make meaningful changes. If they do it after launch, they only have about a 12 month window in which to complete a large scale reverse engineering project before the model is end of life'd and the new model comes out, and if their chips are still used, there is no guarantee that the chip sets would be the same in the new model. So the manufacturer would not know if the newly backdoor'd chips are now being used in a configuration that not only breaks the backdoor, but breaks the chip. So now your designer (Apple) discovers the issue in QA once again, and now your in deep shift because it becomes public knowledge that your company tried to backdoor a manufacturing project for your government, and you no longer have any customers.
The problem is of such a scale and complexity that once again, it simply makes more sense to put a sleeper in the OS team and have done with it. With all the H1B's from China these days, that would be the place to look for your back door.
-=Geoskd
It would be very hard indeed to check the code that has been burned into a chip and is running some spy software, unless you could pull apart an Iphone 4s and analyze the whole circuitry and firmware for the back-doors code. I am not sure how difficult that would be, surely more than just a logic probe and some spare time.
Putting in a "hardware" backdoor of that nature would be exceptionally difficult. You would have to know all kinds of things about the whole system, not just the chip your company is responsible for. That was why Stuxnet was such a big deal. Putting a backdoor into a piece of equipment is easy. Putting it to use in anything more complex than a toaster oven will be very difficult and require massive knowledge of the total system. Hell, even for all its sophistication, Stuxnet still failed to go unnoticed. There are just too many ways that it fails, and causes someone to go see why their system is behaving odd. All it takes is one person at the device manufacturer to start digging into a consistent equipment failure, and soon the light is revealed. You basically need a bunch of spies on the ground at the device designer to tell you what chip sets they're using, what interconnects, what OS, what extra software... It would be far easier to just put a sleeper on the ground to put your backdoor in the software.
-=Geoskd
"If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?."
Such an uninformed idiot to not have noticed, how serious the issue but rather wants to gain publicity by making this, big against Apple.
Ridiculous
This is not at all unfair to single out apple in this. It has been apparent for some time that M$ would sell their users security to the highest bidder. Nokia and Rim don't make desktop software, so that leaves apple providing a backdoor on one platform as perfectly viable evidence that they would do this on their other major platform, especially since the two share a significant codebase. The revelation here isn't that only apple would do this, its that apple would do this, and risk their brand at all. All the other players had a bad reputation to start. The big question is: What has google done?
-=Geoskd
No, they will say either 1) "It's not a knock-off; it's a parody." or 2) "We bought the bag, we can use it however we like."
2) I cant help but be reminded of those retarded adds at the beginning of DVDs: Buying pirated DVDs is stealing.
Buying pirated goods is stealing. Seems like as good an analogy as any, I hope someone faces some jail time for this. It seems the only fair way to proceed given the content industries attitudes and stance in these and related matters...
-=Geoskd
One of my high-school math teachers gave multiple choice tests. Every single one of them had five choices: four possible answers, and "E: None of the above". No partial credit. Kept you on your toes.
Now that is one smart teacher... Minimizes the teachers effort, but eliminates many of the pitfalls of the multiple choice format. You should nominate that guy for a teaching award.
-=Geoskd