Since most MTAs do not support TLS or SSL, most email is sent in the clear across the Internet.
The vast majority of mail servers support SMTP over TLS. If you don't see it often enough in the wild, it's because the people running the mail servers are pinching pennies and don't want the extra overhead of encryption or they are incompetent and don't know how to set it up. (Looking through my logs, 99% of all my I receive is through SMTP over TLS. In fact, the only exception I was able to find is mail from hotmail.com.)
Other than that, your post is spot on. Any third party can be coerced into betraying you without your knowledge. The wise thing to do is minimize the number of third parties you need to trust.
I see how I could have misinterpreted the "riches" reference, and I apologize for that.
I still don't entirely agree with you though. I feel that it's in the best interest of the US to partake in a little introspection. I don't mean that we should become fully isolationist, but I think we should get our own house in order before we overly concern ourselves with giving advice to others. We need to convince our own government to behave in-line with American values before we try to convince others to do so.
In fact, it would be nice if perhaps the rest of the world had something to offer to help us through these trying times. (I'm not talking about money here, either!) Our government actions over the last decade have squandered international goodwill toward us, so most of what we see from the rest of the world is hostility. Your post was actually quite beautiful and uncharacteristically positive for a non-American talking about the US.
Anyway, my point is that perhaps we need to spend a bit more time tackling point 1 from your post before we even attempt to move on to the international relations parts of your post. Like most people throughout the world, most Americans are very good people and if the US government represented the interests of the people again, everything else would fall into place.
In his defense, the GP suggests that to "make their country really a Great Country again", Americans needs to interfere with other regions of the world (2), just not militarily (5). In fact, of the six things he lists, 3.5 of them involve other countries (2, 3, 5, maybe 6). And, like a panhandler on the street, he explicitly asks for the US to give money to the rest of the world. It seems that the Greatness of the US is directly tied to how much benefit other countries can glean from her.
The person you're replying to is complaining because Americans are constantly hearing complaints from non-Americans to stop interfering in other countries' affairs and simultaneously being chided for not interfering in some different countries' affairs. Americans seem to be divided between hawkish types who want to interfere with other countries militarily and the rest who don't want to be the world's policemen. The person you're replying to is clearly of the latter group, which isn't particularly ironic in any way.
The only irony I see is that, in an article specifically about the poor state of citizen's rights in the US, the whole conversation was shifted so quickly by non-Americans to the foreign policy of the US and how the US should change its policy to benefit non-Americans.
The general misconception is that any statute passed by legislators bearing the appearance of law constitutes the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statute, to be valid, must be In agreement. It is impossible for both the Constitution and a law violating it to be valid; one must prevail. This is succinctly stated as follows:
The General rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted.
Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no acts performed under it.....
A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid one. An unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the lend, it is superseded thereby.
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.
Well, it does raise the bar and increase Eve's budgetary requirements. It would require all taps to be active MitM attacks instead of passive data scooping attacks. The increase in resources required to pull this off is not to be underestimated. Asymmetric encryption is very expensive and MitMing every network transaction on the internet is orders of magnitude more expensive than the tapping that is occurring now. Practically, this means going back to targeted tapping, which is back in the direction we need to be going.
Finally, if designed properly, it could be useful as a stepping stone toward a proper encryption system. Sloppy's post above describes such a transitional system.
If a system doesn't have some sort of central authority or be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way to go around the MITM problem is to have some identity that is known from outside the communication, and prove the identity of parties in the protocol.
He's talking about the Web of Trust. Much better than a central authority in that you don't have to put all of your trust in a couple of strangers at some opaque central authority. You decide who you really trust, give a little (but not all) trust to who they trust, and so on.
Oh if only there were some decentralized trust management system like PGP!
It sounds like he made nitrocellulose (smokeless gunpowder), not nitroglycerine (the explosive in dynamite). Nitrocellulose is not particularly dangerous, although it does make lots of gas and is great as a propellant (hence your teacher putting it in the tube). Nitroglycerine, on the other hand, is not something to play around with.
Depending on how old your grandfather was, he was probably talking about nitroglycerine, too. It's pretty easy to make, but I do not recommend an amateur attempt it. Many people have been maimed or killed trying to make it. We use much more stable high explosives these days.
Driving the gauss gun this way has its advantages: very high current and very low rise time. Of course, the disadvantages pretty obviously outweigh them.
If an average.22 muzzle energy is 200 J, then 3% of that is 6 J. The muzzle velocity is 40 m/s, so the mass of the projectile is 3.75 g. Or almost twice the mass as an average.22 bullet. Remember that the velocity contributes more to the kinetic energy than does the mass.
Wikipedia lists several.22 lr bullet velocities and energies, and I picked a roundish number in the middle. For reference, (among others) it lists a 2 g bullet traveling 440 m/s with an energy of 191 J.
If they're smart they'll break up the data from least to most damaging and release it in that order...the more the US resists decency, the worse their reputation will get until the Americans (or hell, other countries) get together to kick some ass.
That's a dangerous strategy, though. It may end up just inducing a tolerance in the people if the damage is ramped up slowly like that. Already, we're seeing signs of that with the DEA's admission that systematic perjury and the outright fabrication of evidence is "a bedrock concept" in their cases. The public's response to that has been pretty mild and the whole thing seems to have blown over already. I'm not sure exactly what would be shocking enough to provoke a response from the public at this point.
Both of which are stupid units and a good reason to actually use SI instead of the bastardized version that includes "metric tons". Assuming they are referring to metric tons, since they use metric everywhere else in the paper, that's an easy 9.9 teragrams (Tg). See, no confusion at all.
The US was NEVER a democracy... The US was initially established as a Representative Republic...
This is such a lame argument and it needs to stop being made. Democracy just means, "rule by the people". A representative republic is a form of democracy, as is a direct democracy. Saying that a country is a democracy is making the distinction that the government represents the will of the people, as opposed to an aristocracy (represents the will of a small ruling class), monarchy (represents the will of one person), a plutocracy (represents the will of the wealthy), etc.
The entire basis of the United States is that the government must represent the will of the people, so the US is a democracy (in theory).
I mean, read the dictionary before calling other people idiots:
democracy (d-mkr-s) n.Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. n. A political or social unit that has such a government. n. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
Actually, the founding fathers never intended the bill of rights PERIOD.
I hate to say this, but they were wrong.
I'm completely in agreement with Hamilton's argument against appearing to enumerate rights, but those amendments are the final defenses our rights have left. The idea of people's rights being inalienable and the powers of the government coming from the people through the Constitution is long dead. The feeble pretenses of not specifically violating the Bill of Rights is all that keeps the few rights we have left intact. Without the Bill of Rights, our government would have done away with the rest of the Constitution as they already did with the elastic clauses and not had to pretend to at least slightly defer to those few amendments.
The bill of Rights may have bought us a few extra years...
felony noun, plural felonies. Law. an offense, as murder or burglary, of graver character than those called misdemeanors, especially those commonly punished in the U.S. by imprisonment for more than a year.
"copy the music from the borrowed CD" = "already committed a felony"
Police train with hollow point rounds because those are their duty rounds. Cost is not an issue and they train so infrequently that it makes more sense to buy only duty ammo than to buy and maintain different stock for different purposes.
You remember training with FMJ in the military because you remember training with duty ammo as well. The military uses FMJ ammo per the Hague convention of 1899 and is restricted from using expanding or fragmenting ammunition. Unless you were an MP in the last few years, you won't remember ever being issued hollow point ammunition.
If this all sounds familiar to you (I had some serious deja vu), it's because we've had this exact conversation here before.
Neither of which should be (are?) federal crimes. The 9th and 10th amendments leave it up to the states to make laws against stuff like that. For instance, murder is almost exclusively prosecuted by the states, not the federal government.
The corporations own the farms. The actual workers are the farmers. The corporations collect a cut of the productivity generated by the farmers, but the productivity doesn't actually come from them.
Or the email was tampered with in transit. The old key was stripped and a new key was added.
Of course every subsequent encrypted message will have to go through the man in the middle to avoid detection, but that's not too hard if they can tamper with the email in transit in the first place.
This part right here is really the hardest part of proper encryption. Secure key exchange is hard. Secure in-channel key exchange between clueless users is nearly impossible.
If that doesn't happen this will be a gimmicky gadget that's no better than the Nintendo Power Glove.
Thanks for that reference. I knew I was getting a strong deja vu feeling after playing with it for a day. That's about as long as the Power Glove was fun until I just started using the controller on the back of it.
Do you want mine? I cancelled my pre-order a month after the first set of delays, but they sent me one anyway.
I can't really tell what it's going to be useful for. The precision is too low for anything but vague gestures and there's no mapping between the screen and your hands, so you can't manipulate stuff on the screen accurately. [I was hoping that they'd use the localization for your head, as well as your hands, and use head location to guess eye location and let you actually manipulate what you see. That's not how it works.] You don't manipulate things by grasping or pointing, but my moving your whole hands in gestures. It's very much not a natural interface; if you don't learn the specific gestures, it doesn't do anything useful.
It doesn't work well unless the room is absolutely dark. If the window shades are open, or I even turn on the room light (or sometimes if there is too much white on the monitor), it will complain about "bright lighting" and switch to an even lower precision mode.
Then there are the lack of usable apps (ie, actual uses) for it. It doesn't come with anything but a game and a 3D molecule viewer (which I actually appreciated as a chemist, though the gestures are weird and unintuitive so my coworkers couldn't play with it without instruction first). There are apps in their app store, but I'm not too excited about spending money on them to find out that they are just as kludgy.
It really could have been a cool interface, but it has a very rushed and incomplete feel about it, which is doubly frustrating since it was delayed so long and so many times. I don't see the Woz and Jobs connection at all, though. The device is neat, in concept, but badly executed and the PR and launch seem to be very poorly handled.
Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.
No, you're not. You're playing their game and fighting fake battles that they've set up to distract you. Palin and Romney act like caricatures the same way that Bush did because that appeals to a certain demographic. And here, because of your glorious victory over them, we have a president who defends the same warrantless domestic spying he previously decried and who maintains a hitlist of US citizens. Things are not better than before, and are arguably worse. Your victory was another victory for evil.
This is the exact point Rockoon is making. Besides the emotions that the candidates cause you to feel, both of the two major parties are identical. Their policies are not significantly different at all and any differences you see are most likely outright lies (Hope and Change, anyone?).
That's an amazing counterargument you make. Besides being completely based in fantasy, I think you might have figured the whole thing out. Whatever you're taking, I recommend you continue it. It seems like you're having a lot of fun with it.
Your link only asserts that for renewables and doesn't address the expected life of nonrenewables at all. In fact, the first link in the calculator you provide shows the LCoE of nuclear being on the low end of the sources (comparable to geothermal, wind, and hydro), and PV being the highest of all.
He probably did do the research. Below are the examples I could find of the highest capacity power plants of each type. The power density may vary for specific installations, but I expect that these are fairly representative. There's a pretty stark difference between the power generation densities.
The world's largest wind farm, the Alta Wind Energy Center generates 1.32 GW and occupies 13 km^2 (for 101.5 MW/km^2).
The world's largest solar installation, the Solar Energy Generating Systems, generates 354 MW and occupies 6.5 km^2 (for 54.5 MW/km^2).
I think it sends the multi-recipient messages via MMS. Every time I've received a message like this, they were always MMS and 'replying to all' sent out another MMS.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most MTAs do not support TLS or SSL, most email is sent in the clear across the Internet.
The vast majority of mail servers support SMTP over TLS. If you don't see it often enough in the wild, it's because the people running the mail servers are pinching pennies and don't want the extra overhead of encryption or they are incompetent and don't know how to set it up. (Looking through my logs, 99% of all my I receive is through SMTP over TLS. In fact, the only exception I was able to find is mail from hotmail.com.)
Other than that, your post is spot on. Any third party can be coerced into betraying you without your knowledge. The wise thing to do is minimize the number of third parties you need to trust.
I see how I could have misinterpreted the "riches" reference, and I apologize for that.
I still don't entirely agree with you though. I feel that it's in the best interest of the US to partake in a little introspection. I don't mean that we should become fully isolationist, but I think we should get our own house in order before we overly concern ourselves with giving advice to others. We need to convince our own government to behave in-line with American values before we try to convince others to do so.
In fact, it would be nice if perhaps the rest of the world had something to offer to help us through these trying times. (I'm not talking about money here, either!) Our government actions over the last decade have squandered international goodwill toward us, so most of what we see from the rest of the world is hostility. Your post was actually quite beautiful and uncharacteristically positive for a non-American talking about the US.
Anyway, my point is that perhaps we need to spend a bit more time tackling point 1 from your post before we even attempt to move on to the international relations parts of your post. Like most people throughout the world, most Americans are very good people and if the US government represented the interests of the people again, everything else would fall into place.
In his defense, the GP suggests that to "make their country really a Great Country again", Americans needs to interfere with other regions of the world (2), just not militarily (5). In fact, of the six things he lists, 3.5 of them involve other countries (2, 3, 5, maybe 6). And, like a panhandler on the street, he explicitly asks for the US to give money to the rest of the world. It seems that the Greatness of the US is directly tied to how much benefit other countries can glean from her.
The person you're replying to is complaining because Americans are constantly hearing complaints from non-Americans to stop interfering in other countries' affairs and simultaneously being chided for not interfering in some different countries' affairs. Americans seem to be divided between hawkish types who want to interfere with other countries militarily and the rest who don't want to be the world's policemen. The person you're replying to is clearly of the latter group, which isn't particularly ironic in any way.
The only irony I see is that, in an article specifically about the poor state of citizen's rights in the US, the whole conversation was shifted so quickly by non-Americans to the foreign policy of the US and how the US should change its policy to benefit non-Americans.
16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256:
The general misconception is that any statute passed by legislators bearing the appearance of law constitutes the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statute, to be valid, must be In agreement. It is impossible for both the Constitution and a law violating it to be valid; one must prevail. This is succinctly stated as follows:
The General rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted.
Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no acts performed under it.....
A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid one. An unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the lend, it is superseded thereby.
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.
Well, it does raise the bar and increase Eve's budgetary requirements. It would require all taps to be active MitM attacks instead of passive data scooping attacks. The increase in resources required to pull this off is not to be underestimated. Asymmetric encryption is very expensive and MitMing every network transaction on the internet is orders of magnitude more expensive than the tapping that is occurring now. Practically, this means going back to targeted tapping, which is back in the direction we need to be going.
Finally, if designed properly, it could be useful as a stepping stone toward a proper encryption system. Sloppy's post above describes such a transitional system.
If a system doesn't have some sort of central authority or be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way to go around the MITM problem is to have some identity that is known from outside the communication, and prove the identity of parties in the protocol.
He's talking about the Web of Trust. Much better than a central authority in that you don't have to put all of your trust in a couple of strangers at some opaque central authority. You decide who you really trust, give a little (but not all) trust to who they trust, and so on.
Oh if only there were some decentralized trust management system like PGP!
It sounds like he made nitrocellulose (smokeless gunpowder), not nitroglycerine (the explosive in dynamite). Nitrocellulose is not particularly dangerous, although it does make lots of gas and is great as a propellant (hence your teacher putting it in the tube). Nitroglycerine, on the other hand, is not something to play around with.
Depending on how old your grandfather was, he was probably talking about nitroglycerine, too. It's pretty easy to make, but I do not recommend an amateur attempt it. Many people have been maimed or killed trying to make it. We use much more stable high explosives these days.
"expel a projectile by the action of an explosive"
That part.
Interestingly, if you used an explosively pumped flux compression generator to deliver the current to the gauss gun, would it meet the definition of a firearm?
Driving the gauss gun this way has its advantages: very high current and very low rise time. Of course, the disadvantages pretty obviously outweigh them.
If an average .22 muzzle energy is 200 J, then 3% of that is 6 J. The muzzle velocity is 40 m/s, so the mass of the projectile is 3.75 g. Or almost twice the mass as an average .22 bullet. Remember that the velocity contributes more to the kinetic energy than does the mass.
Wikipedia lists several .22 lr bullet velocities and energies, and I picked a roundish number in the middle. For reference, (among others) it lists a 2 g bullet traveling 440 m/s with an energy of 191 J.
If they're smart they'll break up the data from least to most damaging and release it in that order...the more the US resists decency, the worse their reputation will get until the Americans (or hell, other countries) get together to kick some ass.
That's a dangerous strategy, though. It may end up just inducing a tolerance in the people if the damage is ramped up slowly like that. Already, we're seeing signs of that with the DEA's admission that systematic perjury and the outright fabrication of evidence is "a bedrock concept" in their cases. The public's response to that has been pretty mild and the whole thing seems to have blown over already. I'm not sure exactly what would be shocking enough to provoke a response from the public at this point.
That's megatons, not metric tons.
Both of which are stupid units and a good reason to actually use SI instead of the bastardized version that includes "metric tons". Assuming they are referring to metric tons, since they use metric everywhere else in the paper, that's an easy 9.9 teragrams (Tg). See, no confusion at all.
The US was NEVER a democracy... The US was initially established as a Representative Republic...
This is such a lame argument and it needs to stop being made. Democracy just means, "rule by the people". A representative republic is a form of democracy, as is a direct democracy. Saying that a country is a democracy is making the distinction that the government represents the will of the people, as opposed to an aristocracy (represents the will of a small ruling class), monarchy (represents the will of one person), a plutocracy (represents the will of the wealthy), etc.
The entire basis of the United States is that the government must represent the will of the people, so the US is a democracy (in theory).
I mean, read the dictionary before calling other people idiots:
democracy (d-mkr-s)
n. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
n. A political or social unit that has such a government.
n. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
Can we please never see this argument again?
Actually, the founding fathers never intended the bill of rights PERIOD.
I hate to say this, but they were wrong.
I'm completely in agreement with Hamilton's argument against appearing to enumerate rights, but those amendments are the final defenses our rights have left. The idea of people's rights being inalienable and the powers of the government coming from the people through the Constitution is long dead. The feeble pretenses of not specifically violating the Bill of Rights is all that keeps the few rights we have left intact. Without the Bill of Rights, our government would have done away with the rest of the Constitution as they already did with the elastic clauses and not had to pretend to at least slightly defer to those few amendments.
The bill of Rights may have bought us a few extra years...
felony
noun, plural felonies. Law.
an offense, as murder or burglary, of graver character than those called misdemeanors, especially those commonly punished in the U.S. by imprisonment for more than a year.
"copy the music from the borrowed CD" = "already committed a felony"
Mind... boggles...
You mean "moot".
Police train with hollow point rounds because those are their duty rounds. Cost is not an issue and they train so infrequently that it makes more sense to buy only duty ammo than to buy and maintain different stock for different purposes.
You remember training with FMJ in the military because you remember training with duty ammo as well. The military uses FMJ ammo per the Hague convention of 1899 and is restricted from using expanding or fragmenting ammunition. Unless you were an MP in the last few years, you won't remember ever being issued hollow point ammunition.
If this all sounds familiar to you (I had some serious deja vu), it's because we've had this exact conversation here before.
Neither of which should be (are?) federal crimes. The 9th and 10th amendments leave it up to the states to make laws against stuff like that. For instance, murder is almost exclusively prosecuted by the states, not the federal government.
The corporations own the farms. The actual workers are the farmers. The corporations collect a cut of the productivity generated by the farmers, but the productivity doesn't actually come from them.
Or the email was tampered with in transit. The old key was stripped and a new key was added.
Of course every subsequent encrypted message will have to go through the man in the middle to avoid detection, but that's not too hard if they can tamper with the email in transit in the first place.
This part right here is really the hardest part of proper encryption. Secure key exchange is hard. Secure in-channel key exchange between clueless users is nearly impossible.
If that doesn't happen this will be a gimmicky gadget that's no better than the Nintendo Power Glove.
Thanks for that reference. I knew I was getting a strong deja vu feeling after playing with it for a day. That's about as long as the Power Glove was fun until I just started using the controller on the back of it.
Do you want mine? I cancelled my pre-order a month after the first set of delays, but they sent me one anyway.
I can't really tell what it's going to be useful for. The precision is too low for anything but vague gestures and there's no mapping between the screen and your hands, so you can't manipulate stuff on the screen accurately. [I was hoping that they'd use the localization for your head, as well as your hands, and use head location to guess eye location and let you actually manipulate what you see. That's not how it works.] You don't manipulate things by grasping or pointing, but my moving your whole hands in gestures. It's very much not a natural interface; if you don't learn the specific gestures, it doesn't do anything useful.
It doesn't work well unless the room is absolutely dark. If the window shades are open, or I even turn on the room light (or sometimes if there is too much white on the monitor), it will complain about "bright lighting" and switch to an even lower precision mode.
Then there are the lack of usable apps (ie, actual uses) for it. It doesn't come with anything but a game and a 3D molecule viewer (which I actually appreciated as a chemist, though the gestures are weird and unintuitive so my coworkers couldn't play with it without instruction first). There are apps in their app store, but I'm not too excited about spending money on them to find out that they are just as kludgy.
It really could have been a cool interface, but it has a very rushed and incomplete feel about it, which is doubly frustrating since it was delayed so long and so many times. I don't see the Woz and Jobs connection at all, though. The device is neat, in concept, but badly executed and the PR and launch seem to be very poorly handled.
Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.
No, you're not. You're playing their game and fighting fake battles that they've set up to distract you. Palin and Romney act like caricatures the same way that Bush did because that appeals to a certain demographic. And here, because of your glorious victory over them, we have a president who defends the same warrantless domestic spying he previously decried and who maintains a hitlist of US citizens. Things are not better than before, and are arguably worse. Your victory was another victory for evil.
This is the exact point Rockoon is making. Besides the emotions that the candidates cause you to feel, both of the two major parties are identical. Their policies are not significantly different at all and any differences you see are most likely outright lies (Hope and Change, anyone?).
That's an amazing counterargument you make. Besides being completely based in fantasy, I think you might have figured the whole thing out. Whatever you're taking, I recommend you continue it. It seems like you're having a lot of fun with it.
Your link only asserts that for renewables and doesn't address the expected life of nonrenewables at all. In fact, the first link in the calculator you provide shows the LCoE of nuclear being on the low end of the sources (comparable to geothermal, wind, and hydro), and PV being the highest of all.
He probably did do the research. Below are the examples I could find of the highest capacity power plants of each type. The power density may vary for specific installations, but I expect that these are fairly representative. There's a pretty stark difference between the power generation densities.
The world's largest wind farm, the Alta Wind Energy Center generates 1.32 GW and occupies 13 km^2 (for 101.5 MW/km^2).
The world's largest solar installation, the Solar Energy Generating Systems, generates 354 MW and occupies 6.5 km^2 (for 54.5 MW/km^2).
The world's largest nuclear power plant, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, generates 8.2 GW and occupies 4.2 km^2 (for 1952.4 MW/km^2).
I think it sends the multi-recipient messages via MMS. Every time I've received a message like this, they were always MMS and 'replying to all' sent out another MMS.