We're primates after all and we're constantly trying to increase our social and physical dominance - having fancy cars, carrying guns, body building, having expensive watches, cars and other luxury items.
Social signaling has become a lot more complex than "who shows off the most expensive luxury items". A peeling "Gore 2000" sticker next to a rainbow flag on a beat up Prius is a stronger indicator of high socioeconomic status than a Cadillac with gold-plated bumpers.
than do our best to override such nonsense feeling with rational thoughts.
Don't kid yourself: your attempts at demonstrating "rational thought" are social displays intended to impress your fellow primates just like a Porsche.
Yeah, there is really no technical or practical reason for the limited number of channels and the power restrictions on WiFi: there is plenty of unused bandwidth, and with more bandwidth, more power wouldn't be a problem either. The real reason for these limits is probably that if the FCC provided more channels and allowed higher power for WiFi, hotspot services would become viable low-cost competitors to ISPs and cell phone companies, and regulators and politicians don't want that.
RTFA, this isn't IBM releasing a new version of OS/2, it's a small company that has gotten a license for OS/2 and is making a release. OS/2 is still as dead as it has been for years.
if the production value of the YouTube announcement linked to above is any indication, this is a tiny company run by people who are a little out of touch with current tech.
2. The very word 'unbreakable' is misleading - as nothing, absolutely nothing - is unbreakable, in the tech scene
Cryptographic algorithms can be unbreakable using known technology. Implementations of cryptographic algorithms often have flaws that can be exploited and hence are breakable. What they are trying to ban is the use of cryptographic algorithms that are "unbreakable" in that sense.
3. The entire thing could be an attempt by some one high up (even higher than the politicians) to instill the impression that the Western governments (including their respective spy agencies) are weak, useless and clueless - which we already know, is not the case
How do "we" know that? The fact that Western governments can spy on your grandmother's E-mail communication doesn't mean that they have an effective spy program, only that they have an intrusive spy program. Their actual target groups seem to be quite good at using cryptography and other tools effectively.
Right... They stopped all those anti-industry, pro-consumer policies like mandatory 2 year warranties, RoHS, strict car emissions standards, WEEE, non-discriminatory pricing, the right to be forgotten, the ban on government support of failing industries etc. Oh, wait...
The mistake you are making there is in thinking that those are "anti-industry, pro-consumer policies". Those policies generally create barriers to entry or hurt specific companies, and therefore are desirable for at least some big and powerful companies or industries with plenty of lobbying powers. In many cases, those policies also don't quite do what they are purported to do.
Perhaps a single issue "I'm going to pass one law and then resign" candidate just isn't well aligned with the Democratic party platform? Just a thought.
Unfortunatley I'm likely dead then, I would like to bet that it is significantly more than a meter.
So, even the IPCC says it's almost certainly less than half a meter, but you in your infinite wisdom as developer of web software are so much wiser? Your hubris is fascinating.
The claim that the US civil war was fought about slavery is wrong. The slavery argument came months if not years after the war broke out. It was a trick of Lincoln to get volunteers.
No, the claim is correct, and you just confirmed it; while politicians certainly may have had various self-serving motivations for wanting to fight the civil war initially, the people on the ground, the people who actually were necessary to fight the war volunteered because they opposed slavery. In the context of this discussion, we are talking about individual choices vs the state, so it is the individual choices of the soldiers that matter here.
At the same time the USA still had eugenic programs (from which the german Nazis copied) with their ideas about killing or neutering mental disabled or otherwise handicapped people.
You're absolutely right: it was part of America's progressive era. However, a key difference is that the US never legalized involuntary euthanasia, while Germany went on to kill millions in gas chambers. The US experiments with many bad ideas, but usually has the good sense to stop in time. It takes German dedication and obedience to the state to carry out bad political ideas to their bitter end.
These days, unfortunately, the political heirs to those programs are still very much in power in the US in the Democratic party, and they try to push many of the same broken ideas as they did back then. And in Germany, most Germans deny that their current political views and culture are actually not so far removed from those a century ago.
Just wanted to give a picture of the general attitude of the population at that time.
I would guess I know a lot more about the "general attitude of Germans" then and now than you do.
NASA didn't say sea level isn't rising. They just did a study that strongly implies that it isn't the Antarctic ice sheet, so if that turns out to be true it means that there's sea level changes we can't currently explain.
Correct. But if "we can't explain it", it must be due to some limited short term effect that cannot lead to significant sea level rise in the long term, because the only two reservoirs capable of doing that are the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
In other words, the minimum estimated costs from mitigation measures here are about the same as the minimum estimated costs of not mitigating things
One might add that the IPCC report pretty much comes to the same conclusion, and that is under its pessimistic assumptions.
Note also that many of these estimates fail to properly discount over time; properly calculated, a dollar spent/lost today needs to mitigate about $100 worth in damage (in constant dollars) in 2100 for mitigation even to start making sense.
You would think someone would have a clearer argument by now, if climate change really were the danger it is supposed to be.
As the current recession has shown, politicians can't even predict the economy for a few years, or predict the effects of a stimulus package. I think it is intrinsically impossible to make such long term predictions about either climate or the weather. In addition, opportunity costs are never considered and are next to impossible to quantify; that is, what new inventions (fusion? super-efficient batteries and solar cells?) don't get made because economic effort is misdirected to futile attempts at carbon reduction?
Presumably, you pay accountants, tax advisers, communications firms, printing companies, and secretaries to do a professional job. Why not hire a professional to do your programming for you as well? There is nothing that says that open source software needs to be written by amateurs or unpaid volunteers. In fact, a lot of open source software is created that way: by non-profits or for-profits hiring professional programmers to create it and then share it.
Note that Brennan himself shows anger and concern at the hacking of his E-mail:
"I was certainly outraged by it," Brennan said Tuesday at an intelligence conference at George Washington University when asked about his reaction to learning of the hack. "I certainly was concerned about what people might try to do with that information," Brennan added. "I was also dismayed at how some of the media handled it, and the inferences that were in there."
The point is: it doesn't matter whether the information is or is not valuable, what matters is that Brennan thought it was valuable and apparently thought it was secure in an AOL account.
As far as I know he didn't have any government information on his AOL account and at best minor information in his account. But still. The point remains. What did Brennan do that was incompetent?
Apparently, he kept a completed SF-86 form in his account. Apart from any possible government security concern, that is a serious problem for him as an individual, because it places him at grave risk of identity theft. And he kept that information in accounts with known weak security. A competent security professional wouldn't place his personal information at this kind of risk.
So, if the CIA director lacks the competence to safeguard even his personal information, how can we trust him with safeguarding the information of our nation?
The CIA director did nothing wrong. He didn't choose a lousy password. He didn't leave a copy of it lying around. He didn't even send it in e-mail to the wrong person. The security failure, according to this account, was entirely with Verizon and AOL. Yet still Brennan's e-mail was leaked to the press and posted on WikiLeaks.
Yes, and Bruce is wrong. The fact that Verizon and AOL have weak security is well known and ought to be obvious to anybody with any kind of knowledge of computer security. If a CIA director stores information that he obviously values on systems that he ought to know can be trivially breached, it calls into question his competence.
One obvious step would be to hold the providers accountable for security failures.
It would be. But since these security holes have been well known for many years and have hurt many people, the fact that these providers haven't been held accountable for them in the past shows that the government doesn't give a fuck. If they now crack down on providers because a government official was caught with his pants down, that is simple vindictiveness and arbitrariness.
It was simply personal stuff about him, nothing that compromised security.
For high government officials, the release of personal information does compromise security, because it makes them susceptible to identity theft and blackmail. But even if it didn't, evidently he didn't like this information being released, yet he stored it on a system he ought to have known was woefully insecure.
And yet, internet sheep immediately jump to a conclusion of "incompetence", a charge that would ordinarily haunt a person in future job prospects for the rest of their life.
The most striking finding of the study, however, is that continued global warming will cause average global incomes to fall by approximately 23 percent by the year 2100.
Even if the correlations that the paper identifies are actually meaningful, they in no way support that conclusion. The relationship between temperature and economic productivity the paper finds only exists after normalizing for "cultural difference", "contemporaneous shocks", "country-specific trends in growth rates", and "non-linear effects of temperature and rainfall". That is, the "23 percent estimate" only applies if all these factors remain unchanged for a century and if there is no migration in response to climate change. Those assumptions are, of course, utterly bogus.
Of course, the correlations are likely not even related to causation, but simply reflect historical accidents and the preferences of European settlers and the agricultural technologies they developed. If other cultures had become globally dominant, or if you had done the same analysis at different points in human history, you would have reached different conclusions.
In addition, even if all the assumptions of the paper were satisfied (they are not) and even if the 23 percent estimate was well-justified (it is not), then from a policy point of view, the comparison that you need to make is not climate change vs. no climate change, it is climate change vs climate change mitigation, and climate change mitigation itself has a profound negative effect on these normalizing variables.
Oh. He had an AOL account. What a F**king dinosaur. Of course he's incompetent.
No, what makes him incompetent is that he stored sensitive information on it; you know, the kind of information he, the government, and Schneier are actually getting upset about getting released. If he had just used his AOL account for sending birthday greetings to his grandchildren, that would have been fine.
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing". And the inability of top government officials to control even their own, valuable private information is politically highly significant, given how much information the US federal government is increasingly collecting about us: detailed financial and banking information, medical records, detailed census information, and lots more.
The fact that you can equate paying taxes with Slavery or the Holocaust reveals an awful lot more about you.
I didn't "equate" them, I asked you to think about how far your concept of "accepting the majority" goes. And the fact is that the Holocaust was indeed the result of Germans accepting the outcome of democratic processes instead of rebelling against them. The idea that "you have to accept" what people vote for or else leave the country is wrong and dangerous.
Ofc the absolute increase in the far north and far south is higher than at the equator... nevertheless it is icreasing there, too. You can easy check that.
That's why I said "mostly".
The relationship beween storms and heat, especially tropical storms that arise over water is not complex, it is well understood;)
Forecasters say they are less skillful at predicting the intensity of tropical cyclones than cyclone track.[6] They attribute the lack of improvement in intensity forecasting to the complexity of tropical systems and an incomplete understanding of factors that affect their development.
Astonishing how many people share opinions like yours without either having never really looked into those topics
Yeah, isn't it now.
and/or seem never to watch the news.
Yes, I rarely "watch the news". I read a few newspapers a day, and otherwise stick to scientific publications. TV really isn't a good source of information, let alone German TV news.
Only if there is a higher law, that is violated by the new act.
In the US, SCOTUS could invalidate the process by which the amendment was passed, or keep the amendment from even being voted on at all. There are probably other creative things they can do; just look at the recent decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage.
In Germany, a number of constitutional clauses are irrevocable even by amendment, as you should know. This was done because Germans previously had chosen, by democratic means, to end democracy and human rights in the country; Hitler was popular and had widespread support, and nobody stood up to him. In fact, the German supreme court could likely have intervened, but it too chose not to.
The US and German examples also show that AmiMoJo's statement that "you have to accept" the outcome of democratic processes is wrong. Slavery in the US was the result of lawful and democratic processes, but Americans believed it to be wrong and fought a civil war over it; many other changes in the US happened because people did not "accept" the outcome of democratic processes or the preferences of majorities. Germans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly "accepted" the outcome of their democratic processes in the Weimar Republic and followed Hitler.
Slashdot Mirror
The current rate of sea level rise is a foot per century. It doesn't have to "slow down", it is already not a problem.
What exactly are you afraid of?
That's like saying "I find it amusing that only redheads have red hair."
You mean like that "Anonymous Coward" guy that keeps posting here?
Social signaling has become a lot more complex than "who shows off the most expensive luxury items". A peeling "Gore 2000" sticker next to a rainbow flag on a beat up Prius is a stronger indicator of high socioeconomic status than a Cadillac with gold-plated bumpers.
Don't kid yourself: your attempts at demonstrating "rational thought" are social displays intended to impress your fellow primates just like a Porsche.
Yeah, there is really no technical or practical reason for the limited number of channels and the power restrictions on WiFi: there is plenty of unused bandwidth, and with more bandwidth, more power wouldn't be a problem either. The real reason for these limits is probably that if the FCC provided more channels and allowed higher power for WiFi, hotspot services would become viable low-cost competitors to ISPs and cell phone companies, and regulators and politicians don't want that.
Would you really want to keep working for an employer that "breaks the law"?
Right to work has nothing to do with this. Really, man, educate yourself.
RTFA, this isn't IBM releasing a new version of OS/2, it's a small company that has gotten a license for OS/2 and is making a release. OS/2 is still as dead as it has been for years.
if the production value of the YouTube announcement linked to above is any indication, this is a tiny company run by people who are a little out of touch with current tech.
Cryptographic algorithms can be unbreakable using known technology. Implementations of cryptographic algorithms often have flaws that can be exploited and hence are breakable. What they are trying to ban is the use of cryptographic algorithms that are "unbreakable" in that sense.
How do "we" know that? The fact that Western governments can spy on your grandmother's E-mail communication doesn't mean that they have an effective spy program, only that they have an intrusive spy program. Their actual target groups seem to be quite good at using cryptography and other tools effectively.
The mistake you are making there is in thinking that those are "anti-industry, pro-consumer policies". Those policies generally create barriers to entry or hurt specific companies, and therefore are desirable for at least some big and powerful companies or industries with plenty of lobbying powers. In many cases, those policies also don't quite do what they are purported to do.
Perhaps a single issue "I'm going to pass one law and then resign" candidate just isn't well aligned with the Democratic party platform? Just a thought.
So, even the IPCC says it's almost certainly less than half a meter, but you in your infinite wisdom as developer of web software are so much wiser? Your hubris is fascinating.
No, the claim is correct, and you just confirmed it; while politicians certainly may have had various self-serving motivations for wanting to fight the civil war initially, the people on the ground, the people who actually were necessary to fight the war volunteered because they opposed slavery. In the context of this discussion, we are talking about individual choices vs the state, so it is the individual choices of the soldiers that matter here.
You're absolutely right: it was part of America's progressive era. However, a key difference is that the US never legalized involuntary euthanasia, while Germany went on to kill millions in gas chambers. The US experiments with many bad ideas, but usually has the good sense to stop in time. It takes German dedication and obedience to the state to carry out bad political ideas to their bitter end.
These days, unfortunately, the political heirs to those programs are still very much in power in the US in the Democratic party, and they try to push many of the same broken ideas as they did back then. And in Germany, most Germans deny that their current political views and culture are actually not so far removed from those a century ago.
I would guess I know a lot more about the "general attitude of Germans" then and now than you do.
Well, as I explained elsewhere, I don't consider that a good thing.
Correct. But if "we can't explain it", it must be due to some limited short term effect that cannot lead to significant sea level rise in the long term, because the only two reservoirs capable of doing that are the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
One might add that the IPCC report pretty much comes to the same conclusion, and that is under its pessimistic assumptions.
Note also that many of these estimates fail to properly discount over time; properly calculated, a dollar spent/lost today needs to mitigate about $100 worth in damage (in constant dollars) in 2100 for mitigation even to start making sense.
As the current recession has shown, politicians can't even predict the economy for a few years, or predict the effects of a stimulus package. I think it is intrinsically impossible to make such long term predictions about either climate or the weather. In addition, opportunity costs are never considered and are next to impossible to quantify; that is, what new inventions (fusion? super-efficient batteries and solar cells?) don't get made because economic effort is misdirected to futile attempts at carbon reduction?
Presumably, you pay accountants, tax advisers, communications firms, printing companies, and secretaries to do a professional job. Why not hire a professional to do your programming for you as well? There is nothing that says that open source software needs to be written by amateurs or unpaid volunteers. In fact, a lot of open source software is created that way: by non-profits or for-profits hiring professional programmers to create it and then share it.
Note that Brennan himself shows anger and concern at the hacking of his E-mail:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/27/...
The point is: it doesn't matter whether the information is or is not valuable, what matters is that Brennan thought it was valuable and apparently thought it was secure in an AOL account.
Apparently, he kept a completed SF-86 form in his account. Apart from any possible government security concern, that is a serious problem for him as an individual, because it places him at grave risk of identity theft. And he kept that information in accounts with known weak security. A competent security professional wouldn't place his personal information at this kind of risk.
So, if the CIA director lacks the competence to safeguard even his personal information, how can we trust him with safeguarding the information of our nation?
Yes, and Bruce is wrong. The fact that Verizon and AOL have weak security is well known and ought to be obvious to anybody with any kind of knowledge of computer security. If a CIA director stores information that he obviously values on systems that he ought to know can be trivially breached, it calls into question his competence.
It would be. But since these security holes have been well known for many years and have hurt many people, the fact that these providers haven't been held accountable for them in the past shows that the government doesn't give a fuck. If they now crack down on providers because a government official was caught with his pants down, that is simple vindictiveness and arbitrariness.
For high government officials, the release of personal information does compromise security, because it makes them susceptible to identity theft and blackmail. But even if it didn't, evidently he didn't like this information being released, yet he stored it on a system he ought to have known was woefully insecure.
I sure hope so!
Even if the correlations that the paper identifies are actually meaningful, they in no way support that conclusion. The relationship between temperature and economic productivity the paper finds only exists after normalizing for "cultural difference", "contemporaneous shocks", "country-specific trends in growth rates", and "non-linear effects of temperature and rainfall". That is, the "23 percent estimate" only applies if all these factors remain unchanged for a century and if there is no migration in response to climate change. Those assumptions are, of course, utterly bogus.
Of course, the correlations are likely not even related to causation, but simply reflect historical accidents and the preferences of European settlers and the agricultural technologies they developed. If other cultures had become globally dominant, or if you had done the same analysis at different points in human history, you would have reached different conclusions.
In addition, even if all the assumptions of the paper were satisfied (they are not) and even if the 23 percent estimate was well-justified (it is not), then from a policy point of view, the comparison that you need to make is not climate change vs. no climate change, it is climate change vs climate change mitigation, and climate change mitigation itself has a profound negative effect on these normalizing variables.
No, what makes him incompetent is that he stored sensitive information on it; you know, the kind of information he, the government, and Schneier are actually getting upset about getting released. If he had just used his AOL account for sending birthday greetings to his grandchildren, that would have been fine.
Are you fucking kidding me? "Gates"? Seriously?
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing". And the inability of top government officials to control even their own, valuable private information is politically highly significant, given how much information the US federal government is increasingly collecting about us: detailed financial and banking information, medical records, detailed census information, and lots more.
I didn't "equate" them, I asked you to think about how far your concept of "accepting the majority" goes. And the fact is that the Holocaust was indeed the result of Germans accepting the outcome of democratic processes instead of rebelling against them. The idea that "you have to accept" what people vote for or else leave the country is wrong and dangerous.
That's why I said "mostly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yeah, isn't it now.
Yes, I rarely "watch the news". I read a few newspapers a day, and otherwise stick to scientific publications. TV really isn't a good source of information, let alone German TV news.
In the US, SCOTUS could invalidate the process by which the amendment was passed, or keep the amendment from even being voted on at all. There are probably other creative things they can do; just look at the recent decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage.
In Germany, a number of constitutional clauses are irrevocable even by amendment, as you should know. This was done because Germans previously had chosen, by democratic means, to end democracy and human rights in the country; Hitler was popular and had widespread support, and nobody stood up to him. In fact, the German supreme court could likely have intervened, but it too chose not to.
The US and German examples also show that AmiMoJo's statement that "you have to accept" the outcome of democratic processes is wrong. Slavery in the US was the result of lawful and democratic processes, but Americans believed it to be wrong and fought a civil war over it; many other changes in the US happened because people did not "accept" the outcome of democratic processes or the preferences of majorities. Germans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly "accepted" the outcome of their democratic processes in the Weimar Republic and followed Hitler.