Dyson spheres would glow in the infrared and therefore be pretty obvious. This is because they still have to radiate the heat produced by the star they enclose - otherwise their internal temperature would perpetually increase.
Isn't that purely supposition?
Because, by the time a civilization has the technology to build a Dyson sphere... we really have no of what else they would be able to do.
Building a Dyson sphere sounds like it involves engineering challenges well beyond anything we can even imagine.
So, I'm not sure us naked monkeys can really say what would or would not be true if someone built one.
My guess, any civilization which could do this would be laughing at we we say about how it would work, and what the constraints would be.
Of course, that's just what I said it is... a wild assed guess by a stupid little naked monkey who can't even begin to grasp the scope of someone actually building one of these things.
Remember you need to cover air superiority, ground attack, carrier based, and VTOL
Yeah, that was the wishlist. And a pony, and an ice-cream, and a red rider BB gun with a compass in the stock.
That was the American wishlist. This was not the requirements of the client states who got suckered into this program.
At the time this was being peddled round, many other countries could have used aircraft from other countries, or even older existing US aircraft to meet their needs.
What does the US do for their solutions? I don't know, and I don't care -- because I'm not American. That's your problem.
However my government has bought into this pile of crap, and it was never what we needed, and it's so far proven to be vaporware, and therefore a waste of money. It's simply the wrong damned aircraft.
To the rest of the world, this is a bill of goods sold by the Americans, which was trying to be the end all and be all of aircraft, and it's been so long in development that it's likely to either be obsolete by the time it flies, or never really live up to the promised performance.
it will be interesting to see if the F35 arrives to late to (sic) be effective against other countries with advanced radar systems
The F35 is a joke of an airplane.
It's a wishlist of everything compiled by senior brass, and structured in such a way as to foist off the R&D costs onto partner nations.
The F35 is, and always was, a terrible idea, overly ambitious, and a plan to put everything possible into an aircraft.
It's a giant sink hole of money which the US sucked other countries into considering as an option. And now they've all got massive sunk costs, and no viable aircraft.
Meanwhile, the F35 has been largely rendered obsolete by drones and UAVs.
It's a huge put into which money has been dumped, with no real results, and no actual outcome in sight.
In countries who signed onto this, this is largely viewed as a large swindle perpetuated by Americans and their defense industry to get other people to fund their pie in the sky wishlist.
The F35 is already too damned late, overpriced, and nor really something people should be pursuing. I'm surprised most countries have't told the F35 program to go jump off a pier and go find an actual plane which exists and can be flown today.
No, I'm freely admitting my ignorance, and rejecting the categorical claim that it could never, under any circumstances, mutate into a form which spreads further and faster than it does now.
Get a grip, man.
That's it? That's the most you have to add to this?
Setting aside the specific mechanics of the virus...
Are you making the claim there is no way that Ebola could mutate into something which could spread more readily than it does now?
I'm pretty sure there's probably more people currently infected than at any point in history -- because historically it's spread in a small community and then died out, no?
Having is spread further outside of Africa doesn't seem all that impossible -- what with modern air travel and the like, you could end up with a huge amount of infected people.
Whether or not it could become purely airborne, it could still spread much further than it ever has, and, it can still mutate and do whatever these things do when that happens.
Hemorrhagic fevers are scary, because who wants to bleed to death through every orifice in your body as your organs turn to goo?
Regardless how it mutates it will always die in seconds or minutes outside of s human body.
And, you can say with 100% certainty it could never either mutate into something which can exceed these constraints, or cross mojonate with something which can? Like a hemorrhagic flu?
You can rule out every conceivable and fanciful mechanism with absolute certainty?
Or, can you say it hasn't happened yet?
These are actual honest questions, because I know fsck all about epidemiology... I just also know that the things which want to kill us have a remarkable tendency to become much harder to kill.
And people who say "that could never happen" have been wrong in the past. Quite often, actually.
Greer, representing the CIA's venture funding arm, suggested that one way that the United States government could improve cyber security would be to use its unparalleled budget to buy up all the underground's zero-day vulnerabilities
This doesn't improve cyber security, it just guarantees the CIA et al have access to everything on the planet.
This enhances their job security, and extends their ways and means... but in no way does it make anybody else more secure.
The venture funding arm of the CIA presenting at a black hat conference... capitalism has truly met the surveillance state, and it isn't going to end well.
Oh, then tell me oh great and qualified peckerhead... what new features and functionality which are of note has Oracle put into it? Anything?
I made my living programming in Java for several years.
I've used both the SE and EE versions.
As far as I can tell, the changes applied in Java lately are minor syntactic sugar, and not much else. No innovation, nothing new and shiny, no compelling reason to upgrade other than the inevitable security holes.
Really, the only thing I've seen Oracle innovate in terms of Java (and, yes, it's been a while since I actively used it) was the shitvertizing which is the Ask.com toolbar.
I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored...
Java is moving along under its own intertia, but as stewards of the technology, Oracle isn't really doing a damned thing with it.
They're doing exactly what you expect a company like Oracle to do... maintain the status quo, fail to innovate, and rest on their laurels.
Large corporations often do not have the vision, flexibility, or ability to execute on these things.
They're not making technology for the sake of making better technology, they're doing it purely to monetize it and make money -- for example, Oracle's insistence on keeping that stupid ask.com toolbar in the Java installer.
Oracle doesn't need the revenue from putting shitware on computers, but they do it anyway. Something about "One Rich Asshole".
Instead of writing a good platform which people use, Oracle have just been doing the greedy asshole thing.
Which, considering how much of their stuff runs on Java, you'd think they'd have an interest in keeping the platform working and widely used.
Sun could be visionaries, but Oracle not so much apparently.
I think a lot of people expected Java to begin its decline once it was in the hands of Oracle -- who are completely incapable of being the stewards of an open standard which doesn't generate huge amounts of revenue.
After reading the book Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone, I've come to the conclusion that the stock market will always be gamed by those with money and if HFT were banned, they'd just find something to exploit, maybe even worse.
Welcome to capitalism, where gaming the system for profit is a moral imperative.
The private key can be stored encrypted on their server
Who is in control of that encryption? Who encrypts the encryption around the encryption around the encryption?
If it's Yahoo, then "At the very least it will make bulk collection much more expensive" becomes patently false, because at some point they'll have the private key in the clear.
Every layer in here becomes a weak point where it can be broken, exploited, or bypassed.
And, since this is webmail, you're putting a lot of faith in browsers and various plugins to not also introduce security holes.
The ironic thing is that the commercial version of PGP by Symantec has the ability to use/force use of an ADK, or additional decryption key.
And, under no circumstances should anybody believe they have any security with this.
You know what ADK is? A back door. So, either they're encrypting it twice (once with your key, once with the other), or they've poked holes in the encryption and it is complete garbage.
This is useful for casual prying eyes, but it assumes you have 100% explicit trust in the agent who has the ADK -- and, given that this is Yahoo and the PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters still exist, you can't.
Because all that really happens is there is a central authority who can decrypt anything anytime they wish. Which, is pretty much what you have now.
So, no way I'll send you anything using this encryption besides my tomato sauce recipe.
The problem becomes is the very first time you decrypt something, Yahoo essentially will have your public key.
Unless the decryption is done entirely inside of a trusted agent, there are huge gaps in this.
Storing your unlocked private key in your browser cache?? Really? You're gonna trust your browser with that?
This sounds like a nod to encryption, but unless they do a tremendous job of building in a hell of a secure layer that is 100% rock solid and can't be bypassed, it will have holes in it you could drive a truck through.
So, do you think you will ever trust a cloud e-mail provider with your public key for even a millisecond? Because, really, at that point, they have your public key and can keep it (and hand it over to law enforcement).
I just don't see a web browser being anywhere near capable of providing the end to end security needed for this.
Key management is hard, and if your web mail tries to make it easier for you, it will make the system inherently less secure. And those will be the parts people will spend the most time attacking -- I don't need to defeat encryption if I can figure out how to obtain your private key.
We are working to design a key server architecture that allows for automatic discovery of public keys within Yahoo.com and other participating mail providers and to integrate encryption into the normal mail flow
So, let's think about this.
They can discover your public keys, and then presumably they will need to have your private keys in order to show you the message.
If you have to enter your private key even once, you have to assume they'll keep it.
At which point, you are more secure from casual prying eyes, but it's done nothing at all to protect you from spying governments who simply force Yahoo to hand over your private key.
And, really, if adding encryption to your email doesn't actually prevent the NSA et al from getting to your email, this is lip service to encryption.
Sounds cool and all, but isn't really giving you any additional security.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one welcome our new mind-controlled battle-spider overlords.
Isn't that purely supposition?
Because, by the time a civilization has the technology to build a Dyson sphere ... we really have no of what else they would be able to do.
Building a Dyson sphere sounds like it involves engineering challenges well beyond anything we can even imagine.
So, I'm not sure us naked monkeys can really say what would or would not be true if someone built one.
My guess, any civilization which could do this would be laughing at we we say about how it would work, and what the constraints would be.
Of course, that's just what I said it is ... a wild assed guess by a stupid little naked monkey who can't even begin to grasp the scope of someone actually building one of these things.
The last thing we need is for our biometric information to be in the hands of every web site which requires a login.
It will kill anonymity, because you will be universally identified.
Sorry, DARPA, but we trust neither you nor private corporations with this kind of stuff.
Because, all categorical statements are wrong, or incomplete.
Including the above.
Yeah, that was the wishlist. And a pony, and an ice-cream, and a red rider BB gun with a compass in the stock.
That was the American wishlist. This was not the requirements of the client states who got suckered into this program.
At the time this was being peddled round, many other countries could have used aircraft from other countries, or even older existing US aircraft to meet their needs.
What does the US do for their solutions? I don't know, and I don't care -- because I'm not American. That's your problem.
However my government has bought into this pile of crap, and it was never what we needed, and it's so far proven to be vaporware, and therefore a waste of money. It's simply the wrong damned aircraft.
To the rest of the world, this is a bill of goods sold by the Americans, which was trying to be the end all and be all of aircraft, and it's been so long in development that it's likely to either be obsolete by the time it flies, or never really live up to the promised performance.
The F35 is a joke of an airplane.
It's a wishlist of everything compiled by senior brass, and structured in such a way as to foist off the R&D costs onto partner nations.
The F35 is, and always was, a terrible idea, overly ambitious, and a plan to put everything possible into an aircraft.
It's a giant sink hole of money which the US sucked other countries into considering as an option. And now they've all got massive sunk costs, and no viable aircraft.
Meanwhile, the F35 has been largely rendered obsolete by drones and UAVs.
It's a huge put into which money has been dumped, with no real results, and no actual outcome in sight.
In countries who signed onto this, this is largely viewed as a large swindle perpetuated by Americans and their defense industry to get other people to fund their pie in the sky wishlist.
The F35 is already too damned late, overpriced, and nor really something people should be pursuing. I'm surprised most countries have't told the F35 program to go jump off a pier and go find an actual plane which exists and can be flown today.
No, I'm freely admitting my ignorance, and rejecting the categorical claim that it could never, under any circumstances, mutate into a form which spreads further and faster than it does now.
That's it? That's the most you have to add to this?
No wonder you posted as AC.
The judge said I wasn't allowed to do that anymore.
Wait, what? Oh, never mind, forget I said anything.
Setting aside the specific mechanics of the virus ...
Are you making the claim there is no way that Ebola could mutate into something which could spread more readily than it does now?
I'm pretty sure there's probably more people currently infected than at any point in history -- because historically it's spread in a small community and then died out, no?
Having is spread further outside of Africa doesn't seem all that impossible -- what with modern air travel and the like, you could end up with a huge amount of infected people.
Whether or not it could become purely airborne, it could still spread much further than it ever has, and, it can still mutate and do whatever these things do when that happens.
Hemorrhagic fevers are scary, because who wants to bleed to death through every orifice in your body as your organs turn to goo?
And, you can say with 100% certainty it could never either mutate into something which can exceed these constraints, or cross mojonate with something which can? Like a hemorrhagic flu?
You can rule out every conceivable and fanciful mechanism with absolute certainty?
Or, can you say it hasn't happened yet?
These are actual honest questions, because I know fsck all about epidemiology ... I just also know that the things which want to kill us have a remarkable tendency to become much harder to kill.
And people who say "that could never happen" have been wrong in the past. Quite often, actually.
This doesn't improve cyber security, it just guarantees the CIA et al have access to everything on the planet.
This enhances their job security, and extends their ways and means ... but in no way does it make anybody else more secure.
The venture funding arm of the CIA presenting at a black hat conference ... capitalism has truly met the surveillance state, and it isn't going to end well.
No, it's pretty much inherent.
The people who make the assumption that people aren't inherently corrupt and won't game the system are either stupid, or lying to you.
In its modern form, the corruption is built right in.
Oh, then tell me oh great and qualified peckerhead ... what new features and functionality which are of note has Oracle put into it? Anything?
I made my living programming in Java for several years.
I've used both the SE and EE versions.
As far as I can tell, the changes applied in Java lately are minor syntactic sugar, and not much else. No innovation, nothing new and shiny, no compelling reason to upgrade other than the inevitable security holes.
Really, the only thing I've seen Oracle innovate in terms of Java (and, yes, it's been a while since I actively used it) was the shitvertizing which is the Ask.com toolbar.
I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored ...
Java is moving along under its own intertia, but as stewards of the technology, Oracle isn't really doing a damned thing with it.
They're doing exactly what you expect a company like Oracle to do ... maintain the status quo, fail to innovate, and rest on their laurels.
Which is why they piggy back that Ask.com pile of crap onto the installer.
They can't quite get the licensing costs they'd like, so they've gone the cheap douchebag route and added crapware.
Where cool technology goes to die.
Large corporations often do not have the vision, flexibility, or ability to execute on these things.
They're not making technology for the sake of making better technology, they're doing it purely to monetize it and make money -- for example, Oracle's insistence on keeping that stupid ask.com toolbar in the Java installer.
Oracle doesn't need the revenue from putting shitware on computers, but they do it anyway. Something about "One Rich Asshole".
Instead of writing a good platform which people use, Oracle have just been doing the greedy asshole thing.
Which, considering how much of their stuff runs on Java, you'd think they'd have an interest in keeping the platform working and widely used.
Sun could be visionaries, but Oracle not so much apparently.
I think a lot of people expected Java to begin its decline once it was in the hands of Oracle -- who are completely incapable of being the stewards of an open standard which doesn't generate huge amounts of revenue.
Welcome to capitalism, where gaming the system for profit is a moral imperative.
You say unknown miscreant.
On Wall Street they're simply called "staff".
Frankly, I see little difference between stealing BitCoins from a mining pool and High Frequency Trading. And that's perfectly legal.
Sorry, yes, obviously I should have typed private key -- the public key is completely public.
But if there is ever an instant where Yahoo has your private key, you're screwed, which is what I was saying ... or at least, had intended to say.
Who is in control of that encryption? Who encrypts the encryption around the encryption around the encryption?
If it's Yahoo, then "At the very least it will make bulk collection much more expensive" becomes patently false, because at some point they'll have the private key in the clear.
Every layer in here becomes a weak point where it can be broken, exploited, or bypassed.
And, since this is webmail, you're putting a lot of faith in browsers and various plugins to not also introduce security holes.
And, under no circumstances should anybody believe they have any security with this.
You know what ADK is? A back door. So, either they're encrypting it twice (once with your key, once with the other), or they've poked holes in the encryption and it is complete garbage.
This is useful for casual prying eyes, but it assumes you have 100% explicit trust in the agent who has the ADK -- and, given that this is Yahoo and the PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters still exist, you can't.
Because all that really happens is there is a central authority who can decrypt anything anytime they wish. Which, is pretty much what you have now.
So, no way I'll send you anything using this encryption besides my tomato sauce recipe.
The problem becomes is the very first time you decrypt something, Yahoo essentially will have your public key.
Unless the decryption is done entirely inside of a trusted agent, there are huge gaps in this.
Storing your unlocked private key in your browser cache?? Really? You're gonna trust your browser with that?
This sounds like a nod to encryption, but unless they do a tremendous job of building in a hell of a secure layer that is 100% rock solid and can't be bypassed, it will have holes in it you could drive a truck through.
So, do you think you will ever trust a cloud e-mail provider with your public key for even a millisecond? Because, really, at that point, they have your public key and can keep it (and hand it over to law enforcement).
I just don't see a web browser being anywhere near capable of providing the end to end security needed for this.
Key management is hard, and if your web mail tries to make it easier for you, it will make the system inherently less secure. And those will be the parts people will spend the most time attacking -- I don't need to defeat encryption if I can figure out how to obtain your private key.
So, let's think about this.
They can discover your public keys, and then presumably they will need to have your private keys in order to show you the message.
If you have to enter your private key even once, you have to assume they'll keep it.
At which point, you are more secure from casual prying eyes, but it's done nothing at all to protect you from spying governments who simply force Yahoo to hand over your private key.
And, really, if adding encryption to your email doesn't actually prevent the NSA et al from getting to your email, this is lip service to encryption.
Sounds cool and all, but isn't really giving you any additional security.
Yup, Comcast is making subscribers fund the public wifi via their electric bills.
Aint it grand?
You should post a question to the Ask section, maybe some of us have some tips for cleaning it off? ;-)
Know what else is a first world problem? Bitching about first world problems on Slashdot.
Does not change the fact that Sony is making a bogus claim in their advertising claims.
Is it life threatening? Absolutely not. But it's still false advertising, which is still illegal.