I work with children. In my extensive experience, they are vile creatures indeed. Ill-mannered, inconsiderate, uneducated and ignorant. They lack the most basic common sense, and what they do have is overridden by their susceptibility to peer pressure and the forces of advertising. They have a compulsion to destroy all that they touch, leaving me to spend my working day endlessly repairing equipment which has been vandalized - past highlights include throwing a switch from a window, placing a power cable in a stapler and impaling a laptop keyboard on a pen.
IME such abuse of hardware is not confined to children. Even in education it's possible to find teachers who are more destructive than students. (As well as those who don't appear able to understand the concept of "supervision".)
They are transparent HTTP proxies. All the router needs to do is check each packet against a list of suspect IPs, and pass the matching ones down a different interface to the box that does the real work.
Thing is that HTTP dosn't need to be over TCP/80, nor does TCP/80 need to be HTTP. Where things are more of a concern is that "transparent proxying" of HTTPS requires a Man In The Middle attack. Regular proxying, even using a "filtering proxy" does not.
I used to piss people off this way. Everyone would be in auto-awesome mode, and I'd be thinking "what will defeat this?". Then I'd open my yap, and they'd get really annoyed. Most people who weren't used to me just assumed I was being pessemistic, until a few predicted failures happened. Unfortunately in some cultures only optimism is allowed, yes only answers, nothing that doesn't agree that the idea is the best thing since sliced bread.
This sounds like what people such as Bruce Schneier refer to as a "security mindset". In practice it's quite possible for people to be overly optimistic in trying to do this.
Fining the NHS is pointless, it only harms the NHS itself...
Fining any public body tends to be at best pointless, at worst counter productive. (Another common example of this kind of daftness is fining police forces when prosecution of police officers would be more appropriate.)
Those responsible don't care because its not their money. They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
The most obvious thing to do would be for NHS Surrey to sue the contractor for all of their costs, including the fine. (Possibly something more like £300k.) But the former may well mean they won't bother.
Well, there are solutions to this. One is to store that power for nighttime consumption, perhaps as potential energy, by adding water to a reservoir, or thermally, by heating something up a lot.
You need suitable geology for a pumped hydro system. Even if you can find a suitable site the "greenies" will oppose it.
Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.
Nor are they much good as "topping plants" since not only do these vary in output their variation is in no way related to demand. Thus you need more plants which can rapidly vary their output in a controlled way in order to avoid the entire grid falling over.
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
No shortage of subsidies when it comes to wind and solar. Which are rather poor methods of generating electricity.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
Even with an inefficient fuel cycle and no reprocessing there isn't really that much waste in the first place. IIRC the US actually stopped researching how to make nuclear fission "renewable" some time ago.
The kids I see can't type. Some of them can't use a mouse. Most of them use CAPSLOCK when they mean Shift.
I've seen plenty of adults use Caps Lock to enter a single capital. These include teachers. Some of them easily old enough to have been around when you'd press the Shift key on a typewriter to release Caps Lock...
India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database.
And from the comments..
I think it is good that we are creating the national database of all our citizens. This will help maintain law and order, minimise crimes and help in locating people responsible for crimes. This will also ensure government benefits reach everybody and we will know who is left out. It will help individuals in getting house or land registrations, opening bank accounts and getting employment easier. These things usually take a lot of time because of background checks and the numerous documents required. I think this is a great job that the government is doing.
Except that gathering such data can create all sorts of opportunities for criminals. Since no country in history, AFAIK, has managed to keep criminals out of actual law enforcement what chance is there of ensuring that everyone involved in such a census is honest?
....they sell to a bunch of countries, supposedly over 160, including China, Iran, Bahrain, Syria, the USA and India, and then each country simply tweaks it a mite and calls it by a different name
Given that there are only around 200 countries there can't be many not on the list.
"Snooping" is when your harmless 80-year-old neighbor peers out between the blinds to see who you've invited over to visit. The term "snooping" implies harmlessness, whereas government (and its fundamental tool of physical force) is anything but harmless.
What government does is called spying, because government is a coercive authority, not an equal.
Except in the smallest of countries "government" spies tend not to be one monolithic entity. Even within the same "agency". India is certainly big enough to have all sorts of complex politics within it's spying groups. They also tend not to care too much about the security of data they gather, unless it concerns them or their "friends". As well as freely sharing information with "friends", ("friends of friends", "friends of friends of friends" and so on).
The point the original post was making is that just because they called themselves "socialists" doesn't necessarily make it true.
It's fairly common in politics for entities to try to re-define terms, even to the point of twisting them to have the opposite meaning from normal. Another variation on this is very tiny political groups claiming to represent some "silent majority".
It extrapolates backwards using all of the known data (ice cores, etc) and shows that over the past 100, CO2 levels began to rise almost linearly at an unprecedented rate and are now higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Just look at that linear upward trend. If that's not man-made, what the fuck is it? Possibly an artefact (thus in a sense "man-made") of trying to stick the information from different measuring techniques, with different resolutions, together. Air trapped in ice cores is not "hermetically sealed".
Low resolution "proxies" simply won't show rapid changes. Ever heard of Harry Nyquist?
This is ridiculous. No one would take a one-time one foot rise in global sea level seriously if it wasn't being construed as a canary in a coal mine with respect to a larger threat. They would just accept the city being built with insufficient surge margin as one of a thousand things done differently one hundred years ago.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
Building too close to unpredictable water is an ageless human tradition.
Land can also move up or down. If it was simply an issue of sea levels changing you wouldn't see relative changes between land and sea being a LOCAL phenomenon. (Including cases where there has been no apparent change for periods of time longer than a century.)
JapanesJapanese killed because of radiation in i: zero. Total count of Japanese with radiation induced health problems around Fukashima: zero.e killed because of radiation in Fukushima-Diachi: zero. Total count of Japanese with radiation induced health problems around Fukashima: zero.
But a large number of deaths and injuries caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Also Fukushima-Diachi wan't that damaged compared with other industrial sites.
According to what I just googled, California currently has just over a gigawatt of installed solar production, and just over half a gigawatt of installed wind power.
Therefore, to replace the 2 gigawatts that used to come from San Onofre with renewable energy (and ignoring the possibility of increases in renewable efficiency), we'd have to roughly double our current amount of installed renewable infrastructure.
Except that a steam turbine plant (regardless of the heat source) is capable of producing its rated power most of the time. Day or night, whatever the weather. Not only do solar and wind rarely produce anything like their rated capacity they also tend to vary more or less at random. Also having all of the plant outside greatly increases the costs of maintainance.
Germany's painters plan to test 99c balaclavas to try to reduce the evidence collected by 9,900 â airborne drones with infra-red cameras. A spokesman for the painters said it will protect their skin from chemical agents too.
They also plan on testing how well the drones function after being spray painted.
Simply turning off the fucking floodlights wouldn't just save DB a fortune on juice, it makes vandal highly visible. You can't tag if you can't see; any light is a give-away.
As well as obvious to cameras. Yet the idea that lighting things up "deters crime" continues to exist.
These organizations likely did accomplish something in their early history. But what does an activist group do when its won? Does it disband and go back to their day jobs? No. They just move their platform to the next radical step... something far enough out that no one will ever accept it... and in taking that insane position they ensure that they'll always have something to complain about.
It isn't unknown for founder members of such groups to leave (sometimes in disgust). The longer such organisations have existed the more likely they are to comprise "professional activists". (Who are a type of "career politician".)
Yes, and for an example of this, mention "Streisand effect" to someone that doesn't read Slashdot, and they will probably have no idea what you are talking about.
Whilst the term is fairly new the "effect" in question is very old. But the Romans undoubtedly called it something else:) Interestingly even the Wikipedia article about it gives an example from the late 1970's. This for a term coined less than a decade ago.
Of course, the text-to-speech program isn't illegal, but redistributing the copyrighted text is. The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies. That means that legally accessing the work becomes collateral damage, but that's perfectly acceptable to a special-interest group like the MPAA. They're not interested in helping the blind. They're interested in helping copyright holders.
Actually they don't even appear to be interested in helping "copyright holders". Since they have been caught at least once enguaging in movie and software "piracy". The only people they are really interested in helping are their members.
There is evidence that it is fossil fuel related. The concentrations of different isotopes of carbon are shifting. Fossil fuels don't have much Carbon 14 in them, since they haven't been exposed to the atmosphere for a long time.
AFAIK nobody is measuring and recording the isotope ratios of fossil fuels as they are extracted. Volcanic emissions, including hydrothermal vents in deep ocean, are also likely to be very low in C14. If anything coal would be most likely to contain C14, given a source of neutrons, since solid carbon is a good neutron moderator. Oxygen isotope ratios in water are affected by temperature. What effect does temperature have on carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide? In the recent past carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has followed average temperature, with a delay of a few hundred years. Even if it can be demonstrated that human activities have had an effect on the isotope ratio, then that dosn't in itself show that these have made any difference to the concentration. There is much more carbon dioxide in the oceans than in atmosphere. More entering the atmosphere from other sources may simply equate to less entering the atmosphere from the oceans. The fundermental problem is that we have no way of knowing what either concentration or isotope ratio of carbon dioxide would "naturally" be now. Moreover climate models predicated on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration have failed to predicted anything. Thus "geo-engineering" involving attempts to manipulate the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere is likely to be a complete waste of time. Even if something was done to actually reduce either carbon dioxide emitted by human activities or its concentration in the atmosphere. So far "green" methods have at best made no difference to human carbon dioxide emissions. About they only thing they appear to be good for is wasting money!
All the worlds plants took a collective sigh of relief. CO2 has been so low for so long, it was like hypoxia for plants.
Probably not that much relief. The optimal level for plants appears to be in the 1,000 to 2,000 ppm range. Thus 400 ppm is "too low" and still close to the 200 ppm lower limit. For animals, including humans, "too high", would appear to be greater than 5,000 ppm. Yet there are those prediction ecological disaster at more than an order of magnitude lower.
The 800,000 year level comes from testing of air pockets locked in glacial ice. Seriously, is it that hard to try and understand something before speaking stupid things?
If these trapped air pockets formed within minutes then remained hermetically sealed until humans looked at them then it might make sense to compare them with modern measuring instruments. Since this is obviously not the case such comparisons are, at best, "apples and oranges". (Things get even worst using "proxies" which equate to rough averages over periods from decades to centuries.) That's before even considering precision, accuracy and signal to noise ratio of any of the data.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with children. In my extensive experience, they are vile creatures indeed. Ill-mannered, inconsiderate, uneducated and ignorant. They lack the most basic common sense, and what they do have is overridden by their susceptibility to peer pressure and the forces of advertising. They have a compulsion to destroy all that they touch, leaving me to spend my working day endlessly repairing equipment which has been vandalized - past highlights include throwing a switch from a window, placing a power cable in a stapler and impaling a laptop keyboard on a pen.
IME such abuse of hardware is not confined to children. Even in education it's possible to find teachers who are more destructive than students. (As well as those who don't appear able to understand the concept of "supervision".)
They are transparent HTTP proxies. All the router needs to do is check each packet against a list of suspect IPs, and pass the matching ones down a different interface to the box that does the real work.
Thing is that HTTP dosn't need to be over TCP/80, nor does TCP/80 need to be HTTP.
Where things are more of a concern is that "transparent proxying" of HTTPS requires a Man In The Middle attack. Regular proxying, even using a "filtering proxy" does not.
I used to piss people off this way. Everyone would be in auto-awesome mode, and I'd be thinking "what will defeat this?". Then I'd open my yap, and they'd get really annoyed. Most people who weren't used to me just assumed I was being pessemistic, until a few predicted failures happened. Unfortunately in some cultures only optimism is allowed, yes only answers, nothing that doesn't agree that the idea is the best thing since sliced bread.
This sounds like what people such as Bruce Schneier refer to as a "security mindset". In practice it's quite possible for people to be overly optimistic in trying to do this.
If the Queen goes to visit the Royal Baby and abdicates the throne to become a full time grandmother, Charles will reign in her stead.
The baby in question is her great grandchild. Also were she to abdicate the next in line would be her nephew, David Armstrong-Jones.
Fining the NHS is pointless, it only harms the NHS itself...
Fining any public body tends to be at best pointless, at worst counter productive. (Another common example of this kind of daftness is fining police forces when prosecution of police officers would be more appropriate.)
Those responsible don't care because its not their money. They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
The most obvious thing to do would be for NHS Surrey to sue the contractor for all of their costs, including the fine. (Possibly something more like £300k.) But the former may well mean they won't bother.
Well, there are solutions to this. One is to store that power for nighttime consumption, perhaps as potential energy, by adding water to a reservoir, or thermally, by heating something up a lot.
You need suitable geology for a pumped hydro system. Even if you can find a suitable site the "greenies" will oppose it.
Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.
Nor are they much good as "topping plants" since not only do these vary in output their variation is in no way related to demand. Thus you need more plants which can rapidly vary their output in a controlled way in order to avoid the entire grid falling over.
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
No shortage of subsidies when it comes to wind and solar. Which are rather poor methods of generating electricity.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
Even with an inefficient fuel cycle and no reprocessing there isn't really that much waste in the first place. IIRC the US actually stopped researching how to make nuclear fission "renewable" some time ago.
The kids I see can't type. Some of them can't use a mouse. Most of them use CAPSLOCK when they mean Shift.
I've seen plenty of adults use Caps Lock to enter a single capital. These include teachers.
Some of them easily old enough to have been around when you'd press the Shift key on a typewriter to release Caps Lock...
India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database.
And from the comments..
I think it is good that we are creating the national database of all our citizens. This will help maintain law and order, minimise crimes and help in locating people responsible for crimes. This will also ensure government benefits reach everybody and we will know who is left out. It will help individuals in getting house or land registrations, opening bank accounts and getting employment easier. These things usually take a lot of time because of background checks and the numerous documents required. I think this is a great job that the government is doing.
Except that gathering such data can create all sorts of opportunities for criminals. Since no country in history, AFAIK, has managed to keep criminals out of actual law enforcement what chance is there of ensuring that everyone involved in such a census is honest?
....they sell to a bunch of countries, supposedly over 160, including China, Iran, Bahrain, Syria, the USA and India, and then each country simply tweaks it a mite and calls it by a different name
Given that there are only around 200 countries there can't be many not on the list.
"Snooping" is when your harmless 80-year-old neighbor peers out between the blinds to see who you've invited over to visit. The term "snooping" implies harmlessness, whereas government (and its fundamental tool of physical force) is anything but harmless.
What government does is called spying, because government is a coercive authority, not an equal.
Except in the smallest of countries "government" spies tend not to be one monolithic entity. Even within the same "agency". India is certainly big enough to have all sorts of complex politics within it's spying groups. They also tend not to care too much about the security of data they gather, unless it concerns them or their "friends". As well as freely sharing information with "friends", ("friends of friends", "friends of friends of friends" and so on).
The point the original post was making is that just because they called themselves "socialists" doesn't necessarily make it true.
It's fairly common in politics for entities to try to re-define terms, even to the point of twisting them to have the opposite meaning from normal. Another variation on this is very tiny political groups claiming to represent some "silent majority".
It extrapolates backwards using all of the known data (ice cores, etc) and shows that over the past 100, CO2 levels began to rise almost linearly at an unprecedented rate and are now higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Just look at that linear upward trend. If that's not man-made, what the fuck is it?
Possibly an artefact (thus in a sense "man-made") of trying to stick the information from different measuring techniques, with different resolutions, together. Air trapped in ice cores is not "hermetically sealed".
Low resolution "proxies" simply won't show rapid changes. Ever heard of Harry Nyquist?
This is ridiculous. No one would take a one-time one foot rise in global sea level seriously if it wasn't being construed as a canary in a coal mine with respect to a larger threat. They would just accept the city being built with insufficient surge margin as one of a thousand things done differently one hundred years ago.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
Building too close to unpredictable water is an ageless human tradition.
Land can also move up or down. If it was simply an issue of sea levels changing you wouldn't see relative changes between land and sea being a LOCAL phenomenon. (Including cases where there has been no apparent change for periods of time longer than a century.)
JapanesJapanese killed because of radiation in i: zero. Total count of Japanese with radiation induced health problems around Fukashima: zero.e killed because of radiation in Fukushima-Diachi: zero. Total count of Japanese with radiation induced health problems around Fukashima: zero.
But a large number of deaths and injuries caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Also Fukushima-Diachi wan't that damaged compared with other industrial sites.
According to what I just googled, California currently has just over a gigawatt of installed solar production, and just over half a gigawatt of installed wind power.
Therefore, to replace the 2 gigawatts that used to come from San Onofre with renewable energy (and ignoring the possibility of increases in renewable efficiency), we'd have to roughly double our current amount of installed renewable infrastructure.
Except that a steam turbine plant (regardless of the heat source) is capable of producing its rated power most of the time. Day or night, whatever the weather.
Not only do solar and wind rarely produce anything like their rated capacity they also tend to vary more or less at random. Also having all of the plant outside greatly increases the costs of maintainance.
Germany's painters plan to test 99c balaclavas to try to reduce the evidence collected by 9,900 â airborne drones with infra-red cameras. A spokesman for the painters said it will protect their skin from chemical agents too.
They also plan on testing how well the drones function after being spray painted.
Simply turning off the fucking floodlights wouldn't just save DB a fortune on juice, it makes vandal highly visible. You can't tag if you can't see; any light is a give-away.
As well as obvious to cameras. Yet the idea that lighting things up "deters crime" continues to exist.
These organizations likely did accomplish something in their early history. But what does an activist group do when its won? Does it disband and go back to their day jobs? No. They just move their platform to the next radical step... something far enough out that no one will ever accept it... and in taking that insane position they ensure that they'll always have something to complain about.
It isn't unknown for founder members of such groups to leave (sometimes in disgust). The longer such organisations have existed the more likely they are to comprise "professional activists". (Who are a type of "career politician".)
Yes, and for an example of this, mention "Streisand effect" to someone that doesn't read Slashdot, and they will probably have no idea what you are talking about.
:) Interestingly even the Wikipedia article about it gives an example from the late 1970's. This for a term coined less than a decade ago.
Whilst the term is fairly new the "effect" in question is very old. But the Romans undoubtedly called it something else
Of course, the text-to-speech program isn't illegal, but redistributing the copyrighted text is. The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies. That means that legally accessing the work becomes collateral damage, but that's perfectly acceptable to a special-interest group like the MPAA. They're not interested in helping the blind. They're interested in helping copyright holders.
Actually they don't even appear to be interested in helping "copyright holders". Since they have been caught at least once enguaging in movie and software "piracy". The only people they are really interested in helping are their members.
There is evidence that it is fossil fuel related. The concentrations of different isotopes of carbon are shifting. Fossil fuels don't have much Carbon 14 in them, since they haven't been exposed to the atmosphere for a long time.
AFAIK nobody is measuring and recording the isotope ratios of fossil fuels as they are extracted. Volcanic emissions, including hydrothermal vents in deep ocean, are also likely to be very low in C14. If anything coal would be most likely to contain C14, given a source of neutrons, since solid carbon is a good neutron moderator.
Oxygen isotope ratios in water are affected by temperature. What effect does temperature have on carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide?
In the recent past carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has followed average temperature, with a delay of a few hundred years. Even if it can be demonstrated that human activities have had an effect on the isotope ratio, then that dosn't in itself show that these have made any difference to the concentration. There is much more carbon dioxide in the oceans than in atmosphere. More entering the atmosphere from other sources may simply equate to less entering the atmosphere from the oceans.
The fundermental problem is that we have no way of knowing what either concentration or isotope ratio of carbon dioxide would "naturally" be now. Moreover climate models predicated on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration have failed to predicted anything. Thus "geo-engineering" involving attempts to manipulate the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere is likely to be a complete waste of time. Even if something was done to actually reduce either carbon dioxide emitted by human activities or its concentration in the atmosphere. So far "green" methods have at best made no difference to human carbon dioxide emissions. About they only thing they appear to be good for is wasting money!
All the worlds plants took a collective sigh of relief. CO2 has been so low for so long, it was like hypoxia for plants.
Probably not that much relief. The optimal level for plants appears to be in the 1,000 to 2,000 ppm range. Thus 400 ppm is "too low" and still close to the 200 ppm lower limit. For animals, including humans, "too high", would appear to be greater than 5,000 ppm.
Yet there are those prediction ecological disaster at more than an order of magnitude lower.
The 800,000 year level comes from testing of air pockets locked in glacial ice. Seriously, is it that hard to try and understand something before speaking stupid things?
If these trapped air pockets formed within minutes then remained hermetically sealed until humans looked at them then it might make sense to compare them with modern measuring instruments. Since this is obviously not the case such comparisons are, at best, "apples and oranges". (Things get even worst using "proxies" which equate to rough averages over periods from decades to centuries.) That's before even considering precision, accuracy and signal to noise ratio of any of the data.