One of my hobbies is critiquing unpublished authors, and there's a certain group of writers who write post-apocalyptic "gun sci-fi" where it's more important to get the minutiae of gun technology right than it is to get the science right. Their science tends to come straight from other stories. The EMP scenario is sufficiently popular that I decided to spend a weekend afternoon doing the research into EMP that they should have.
EMP is not magic, like in the movies or on TV. It works by physical effects that require energy to be propagated to the affected device, which can be shielded and otherwise radiation hardened. You would need a massive attack that saturates all of near space to take out all satellites from geosynchronous orbits down to LEO. Terrestrial effects are amplified by interaction with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but even so the kind of blanket destruction of electronics we see in TV sci-fi would require many, many warheads. Many small warheads work better than a few (or usually ONE in the stories I read).
So an attack on communication satellites would tend to be targeted at individual satellites or groups of satellites. Taking out all LEO satellites (assuming they can't be shielded) would require an attack similar to blanketing most of the surface of the Earth.
Helium is sold in highly pure form as a side effect of its being transported in liquid form. Since gasses liquefy at different temperatures, preparing He for transport works kind of like fractional distillation. On the user end the remaining impurities are mainly trace atmospheric gasses, which of course are approximately neutrally buoyant.
However it given the titanic volume of He used in these things, it might more economical to fill them or top them off near the natural gas fields we get He from. In that case the He would be much less pure, but the main contaminant would be methane, which is also lighter than air. This less pure gas would not work as well as the the very pure He that is normally marketed, but given this is a hybrid airship the net result would only be a slightly lower payload.
So it's physically feasible to use relatively impure He, but whether it makes economic sense depends on whether the savings offset the reduced cargo payload revenue and costs of sourcing the He specially.
Which is why you need to vote in state Attorneys General who make consumer protection a priority. When you or even your lawyer try to call a company out for breaking the law this way, they'll laugh you off for the simple economic reason cite. When the state AG's consumer protection office calls a company out, it pays attention because those guys get paid in scalps.
Most stockholders are focused on quarterly profits. That's because of the way most shares are traded; they don't stay unthought-of in someones portfolio for years. They're traded frequently.
You are 100% right. If there is a way of monetizing their customer base, it's their duty to do it unless forbidden by contract (e.g. with vendors like Apple) or regulation.
Companies aren't in the business of making you a satisfied customer. Usually that's a good strategy, but when they can make more money pissing you off, they will. And if you think that can't happen, open your eyes.
Oh, if I were to dox you, put a picture of your front door on a forum and say "I'm going to rape you, bitch," then I think you'd probably feel threatened.
You do have a right to stop someone from saying things that a reasonable person would perceive as threatening. This is not some kind of recent PC innovation, it goes back in the law for centuries.
You can sort this out with a Venn diagram. All threats are assholery, and all threats are illegal, but some assholerly is legal.
My wife is a geophysicist, and I used to read the journals she subscribed to all through the late 80s and 90s -- well before "Global Warming" became a political issue.
It was the tail end of the shift in consensus between global cooling and global warming. By then almost everyone was convinced, but they still argued like cats and dogs over how to interpret the instrumental record. If they were convinced, why fight the data that supported what they believed to be true? Because they wanted the data to be more equivocal. The lack of ambiguity in the data struck in their craw, so they attacked it, over and over and over again. It was kind of like the way baseball purists must have felt when the dead ball era ended. Yeah, we like to see runs scored, but this is just ridiculous.
It amazes me that layman believe that scientists never thought to question how the instrumental record should be interpreted. Do you really thing all those people getting geophysics PhDs from MIT and CalTech are so much more obtuse than you are? Believe me, if you can think of a nit, it got picked. It's probably still getting picked, although the range of impact has likely been reduced to practical insignificance. That's what scientists are paid to do: argue with each other. If they have nothing significant to disagree about, then trivialities will do. I know an astronomer who claims to have seen fist fights break out over whether the moon was full or not -- although I suspect that might have been the boozing.
Well, it's only a problem if the way we get to 90% electric cars is by waving a magic wand and converting all our ICE cars instantaneously. Assuming the change is incremental over several decades I assume that the standards for "normal" infrastructure associated with things like apartment buildings and parking garages will change.
I brought Internet into an organization back in the days you had to prove you were an educational, government or military organization to do it. Back in those days the idea of broadband to every apartment would have seem far-fetched to most people, and that wasn't very long ago, at least for an old fart like me. If that was before you were born, trust me, you'll be amazed at how quickly what is normal changes.
The importance of the adjustment is when you're comparing months that are decades apart; there hasn't been any massive urbanization spurt in the last several years that could account for the July anomaly even in the unadjusted data. So July clearly was hotter than any month in the past several years, and those were very hot years indeed.
So basically you're making a pointless conjecture here. We have no reason to suspect the data weren't adjusted in the usual fashion, but if they weren't it wouldn't change the fact that we're at least probably looking the hottest month ever and nearly certainly looking at one of the hottest. It makes no practical difference.
Years ago I had an idea for a car that would detect rising your stress levels, and gradually reduce the power available to you if the fight or flight reaction persisted. If however you manage to calm yourself a pleasant little chime would go off announcing that you'd been rewarded with more power.
This would retrain angry, aggressive drivers by operant conditioning to be calm and relaxed.
No driver can be in control of his car until he's in control of himself.
If you're in a situation where the government has proper legal authority to demand decryption, and you believe in the rule of law, then you must decrypt.
That much is simple. But there are two complicated angles to this: (1) What to do when the government doesn't have the legal power to compel you to decrypt and (2) when the government should have the power to compel you to decryupt.
As a private citizen one often does things one is not required to out of public-spiritedness. But as a provider of IT services you're not being public spirited with your own resources, you're volunteering stuff that belongs to other people -- in fact stuff those people have entrusted to you. So I'd say the decision boils down to this: as a provider of IT services you should decrypt your customers' data if -- and only if -- the law compels you to.
There are exceptions, e.g. if the Gestapo are looking for Anne Frank's family you'd be justified in not decrypting a document that will lead them to the attic where they're hiding. In other words situations where civil disobedience is justified. But then you'd better be prepared for the consequences.
As for how much legal power the government should have to compel, I've watched these things for many years and thought about that, and the conclusion I've come to is there is no one single, simple answer. There are good arguments on both sides, but the danger is in the assumptions behind the arguments. My belief is that the amount of power the government should have to compel should depend upon the degree to which that power is constrained by oversight and transparency. The harder it is for a government to abuse a power the more it safe to give it power; or equivalently: the easier it is for a government to abuse power the less it should have.
My point is this: when a sociopath lands on his feet he immediately sets to work getting his hooks into the important people there.
You know that saying you can't cheat an honest man? Well it depends on what you mean by "dishonest man"; if you include dishonesty to self, it's absolutely true.
I worked for a manager like this; her previous gig almost put the formerly comfortably endowed Christian Science Church into bankruptcy by leading disastrous foray into broadcasting that cost the Church hundreds of millions of dollars. The Church only survived by publishing a book which it had previously condemned as heretical in order to obtain a 90 million dollar bequest that came with that book.
After she was fired from her job at the Church my boss hired her to transform the medium-sized non-profit I worked for into a media powerhouse -- pretty much the same thing she had promised to do at the Christian Science Monitor. And it had pretty much the same results, but I got a close up view of how people like this operate. The day she took over it suddenly became like working in the Soviet Kremlin. Whereas managers had formerly worked closely together, they were now forbidden to discuss what was going on in their departments with anyone else; all information had to come and go through her. However as IT guy nothing that was going could really be hidden from me; I knew very well that the financial systems were telling us we were overbudget and rapidly running to the end of our cash, but I was literally forbidden by the CEO to pass any information to him except through the COO.
So I did the only honorable thing open to me. I resigned. As a former senior manager I got an exit interview with the CEO in which I explained that the reason I was quitting was that the organization was going to go bankrupt in about three months if he didn't immediately sideline the COO and put the CFO in charge. The CEO was shaken by this news, but in the end my giving him a last chance didn't matter. His hiring of an obviously dangerous manager was driven by his greed, ego and ambition. To save himself he'd have to set those things aside, and he just couldn't.
Madison's arguments in this case are specious -- at least as regards to enlarging the house. Take the argument that a larger house essentially dilutes the talent pool. It's true that for a fixed size population if you make the house sufficiently larger you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill seats. But enlarging the house proportionally to population has no such effect. He argues that a larger house is too poorly coordinated, but he does not reckon on the existence of political parties and the discipline they can enforce.
What's more debate in those days took the form of oratory, and the oratory was by modern standards incalculably long-winded. Today oratory is engaged in for the benefit of CSPAN cameras; the real work of debate is done off the floor. There is no reason, especially in the era of asynchronous electronic communication, that you can't have a discussion with several thousand participants.
Well, blame the Constitution, which was devised for a tiny nation of fewer than four million... That's including the 18% that were slaves. We're over 80x larger than we were in the 1790 census, but the House is only seven times as big. It's considerably less representative than the framers envisioned.
If the House had grown proportionally there'd be almost five thousand reps and more of them would answer their own correspondence. It'd be harder to gerrymander a decisive party advantage without winning the popular vote too. With modern IT it'd be perfectly manageable. You'd have to build a new Capitol though.
This is what I was thinking, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the analog hole will ALWAYS exist. It's conceivable that you could watermark the analog output in ways that are imperceptible to human hearing.
But clearly THIS decision is driven by form factor considerations. An analog jack makes no difference one way or the other whether or not you can close the analog hole.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my hobbies is critiquing unpublished authors, and there's a certain group of writers who write post-apocalyptic "gun sci-fi" where it's more important to get the minutiae of gun technology right than it is to get the science right. Their science tends to come straight from other stories. The EMP scenario is sufficiently popular that I decided to spend a weekend afternoon doing the research into EMP that they should have.
EMP is not magic, like in the movies or on TV. It works by physical effects that require energy to be propagated to the affected device, which can be shielded and otherwise radiation hardened. You would need a massive attack that saturates all of near space to take out all satellites from geosynchronous orbits down to LEO. Terrestrial effects are amplified by interaction with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but even so the kind of blanket destruction of electronics we see in TV sci-fi would require many, many warheads. Many small warheads work better than a few (or usually ONE in the stories I read).
So an attack on communication satellites would tend to be targeted at individual satellites or groups of satellites. Taking out all LEO satellites (assuming they can't be shielded) would require an attack similar to blanketing most of the surface of the Earth.
Helium is sold in highly pure form as a side effect of its being transported in liquid form. Since gasses liquefy at different temperatures, preparing He for transport works kind of like fractional distillation. On the user end the remaining impurities are mainly trace atmospheric gasses, which of course are approximately neutrally buoyant.
However it given the titanic volume of He used in these things, it might more economical to fill them or top them off near the natural gas fields we get He from. In that case the He would be much less pure, but the main contaminant would be methane, which is also lighter than air. This less pure gas would not work as well as the the very pure He that is normally marketed, but given this is a hybrid airship the net result would only be a slightly lower payload.
So it's physically feasible to use relatively impure He, but whether it makes economic sense depends on whether the savings offset the reduced cargo payload revenue and costs of sourcing the He specially.
Oh, their argument is nowhere so coherent.
Which is why you need to vote in state Attorneys General who make consumer protection a priority. When you or even your lawyer try to call a company out for breaking the law this way, they'll laugh you off for the simple economic reason cite. When the state AG's consumer protection office calls a company out, it pays attention because those guys get paid in scalps.
Most stockholders are focused on quarterly profits. That's because of the way most shares are traded; they don't stay unthought-of in someones portfolio for years. They're traded frequently.
You are 100% right. If there is a way of monetizing their customer base, it's their duty to do it unless forbidden by contract (e.g. with vendors like Apple) or regulation.
Companies aren't in the business of making you a satisfied customer. Usually that's a good strategy, but when they can make more money pissing you off, they will. And if you think that can't happen, open your eyes.
Oh, if I were to dox you, put a picture of your front door on a forum and say "I'm going to rape you, bitch," then I think you'd probably feel threatened.
No, sinij is right on this one.
You do have a right to stop someone from saying things that a reasonable person would perceive as threatening. This is not some kind of recent PC innovation, it goes back in the law for centuries.
You can sort this out with a Venn diagram. All threats are assholery, and all threats are illegal, but some assholerly is legal.
Well, a particular kind of assholery. Threatening and intimidating people.
And yes, of law enforcement is sufficiently determined and they can probably track down most people who engage in a persistent pattern of threats.
My wife is a geophysicist, and I used to read the journals she subscribed to all through the late 80s and 90s -- well before "Global Warming" became a political issue.
It was the tail end of the shift in consensus between global cooling and global warming. By then almost everyone was convinced, but they still argued like cats and dogs over how to interpret the instrumental record. If they were convinced, why fight the data that supported what they believed to be true? Because they wanted the data to be more equivocal. The lack of ambiguity in the data struck in their craw, so they attacked it, over and over and over again. It was kind of like the way baseball purists must have felt when the dead ball era ended. Yeah, we like to see runs scored, but this is just ridiculous.
It amazes me that layman believe that scientists never thought to question how the instrumental record should be interpreted. Do you really thing all those people getting geophysics PhDs from MIT and CalTech are so much more obtuse than you are? Believe me, if you can think of a nit, it got picked. It's probably still getting picked, although the range of impact has likely been reduced to practical insignificance. That's what scientists are paid to do: argue with each other. If they have nothing significant to disagree about, then trivialities will do. I know an astronomer who claims to have seen fist fights break out over whether the moon was full or not -- although I suspect that might have been the boozing.
Well, it's only a problem if the way we get to 90% electric cars is by waving a magic wand and converting all our ICE cars instantaneously. Assuming the change is incremental over several decades I assume that the standards for "normal" infrastructure associated with things like apartment buildings and parking garages will change.
I brought Internet into an organization back in the days you had to prove you were an educational, government or military organization to do it. Back in those days the idea of broadband to every apartment would have seem far-fetched to most people, and that wasn't very long ago, at least for an old fart like me. If that was before you were born, trust me, you'll be amazed at how quickly what is normal changes.
He'll build a wall to keep the atmosphere out.
The importance of the adjustment is when you're comparing months that are decades apart; there hasn't been any massive urbanization spurt in the last several years that could account for the July anomaly even in the unadjusted data. So July clearly was hotter than any month in the past several years, and those were very hot years indeed.
So basically you're making a pointless conjecture here. We have no reason to suspect the data weren't adjusted in the usual fashion, but if they weren't it wouldn't change the fact that we're at least probably looking the hottest month ever and nearly certainly looking at one of the hottest. It makes no practical difference.
Years ago I had an idea for a car that would detect rising your stress levels, and gradually reduce the power available to you if the fight or flight reaction persisted. If however you manage to calm yourself a pleasant little chime would go off announcing that you'd been rewarded with more power.
This would retrain angry, aggressive drivers by operant conditioning to be calm and relaxed.
No driver can be in control of his car until he's in control of himself.
If you're in a situation where the government has proper legal authority to demand decryption, and you believe in the rule of law, then you must decrypt.
That much is simple. But there are two complicated angles to this: (1) What to do when the government doesn't have the legal power to compel you to decrypt and (2) when the government should have the power to compel you to decryupt.
As a private citizen one often does things one is not required to out of public-spiritedness. But as a provider of IT services you're not being public spirited with your own resources, you're volunteering stuff that belongs to other people -- in fact stuff those people have entrusted to you. So I'd say the decision boils down to this: as a provider of IT services you should decrypt your customers' data if -- and only if -- the law compels you to.
There are exceptions, e.g. if the Gestapo are looking for Anne Frank's family you'd be justified in not decrypting a document that will lead them to the attic where they're hiding. In other words situations where civil disobedience is justified. But then you'd better be prepared for the consequences.
As for how much legal power the government should have to compel, I've watched these things for many years and thought about that, and the conclusion I've come to is there is no one single, simple answer. There are good arguments on both sides, but the danger is in the assumptions behind the arguments. My belief is that the amount of power the government should have to compel should depend upon the degree to which that power is constrained by oversight and transparency. The harder it is for a government to abuse a power the more it safe to give it power; or equivalently: the easier it is for a government to abuse power the less it should have.
We'll seize the element of surprise, by landing on it at night.
Wasn't so cool to live through.
My point is this: when a sociopath lands on his feet he immediately sets to work getting his hooks into the important people there.
You know that saying you can't cheat an honest man? Well it depends on what you mean by "dishonest man"; if you include dishonesty to self, it's absolutely true.
The problem with satire ... even travesty ... is that eventually you realize that you can't compete with real life.
I worked for a manager like this; her previous gig almost put the formerly comfortably endowed Christian Science Church into bankruptcy by leading disastrous foray into broadcasting that cost the Church hundreds of millions of dollars. The Church only survived by publishing a book which it had previously condemned as heretical in order to obtain a 90 million dollar bequest that came with that book.
After she was fired from her job at the Church my boss hired her to transform the medium-sized non-profit I worked for into a media powerhouse -- pretty much the same thing she had promised to do at the Christian Science Monitor. And it had pretty much the same results, but I got a close up view of how people like this operate. The day she took over it suddenly became like working in the Soviet Kremlin. Whereas managers had formerly worked closely together, they were now forbidden to discuss what was going on in their departments with anyone else; all information had to come and go through her. However as IT guy nothing that was going could really be hidden from me; I knew very well that the financial systems were telling us we were overbudget and rapidly running to the end of our cash, but I was literally forbidden by the CEO to pass any information to him except through the COO.
So I did the only honorable thing open to me. I resigned. As a former senior manager I got an exit interview with the CEO in which I explained that the reason I was quitting was that the organization was going to go bankrupt in about three months if he didn't immediately sideline the COO and put the CFO in charge. The CEO was shaken by this news, but in the end my giving him a last chance didn't matter. His hiring of an obviously dangerous manager was driven by his greed, ego and ambition. To save himself he'd have to set those things aside, and he just couldn't.
Stealing IP doesn't preclude having significant capability of your own.
Madison's arguments in this case are specious -- at least as regards to enlarging the house. Take the argument that a larger house essentially dilutes the talent pool. It's true that for a fixed size population if you make the house sufficiently larger you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill seats. But enlarging the house proportionally to population has no such effect. He argues that a larger house is too poorly coordinated, but he does not reckon on the existence of political parties and the discipline they can enforce.
What's more debate in those days took the form of oratory, and the oratory was by modern standards incalculably long-winded. Today oratory is engaged in for the benefit of CSPAN cameras; the real work of debate is done off the floor. There is no reason, especially in the era of asynchronous electronic communication, that you can't have a discussion with several thousand participants.
Well, blame the Constitution, which was devised for a tiny nation of fewer than four million... That's including the 18% that were slaves. We're over 80x larger than we were in the 1790 census, but the House is only seven times as big. It's considerably less representative than the framers envisioned.
If the House had grown proportionally there'd be almost five thousand reps and more of them would answer their own correspondence. It'd be harder to gerrymander a decisive party advantage without winning the popular vote too. With modern IT it'd be perfectly manageable. You'd have to build a new Capitol though.
This is what I was thinking, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the analog hole will ALWAYS exist. It's conceivable that you could watermark the analog output in ways that are imperceptible to human hearing.
But clearly THIS decision is driven by form factor considerations. An analog jack makes no difference one way or the other whether or not you can close the analog hole.