Now there's a job with horrible pay. At least where I live. And you kinda have to mostly go after "copyright crime", not much time is spent going after malware authors.
(I mean the police department's cyber crime units)
I'm glad you're happy with the 'lower salary' right now - and I hope you're still happy with as it gets lower (or stays the same as the cleaners get more), because most European countries consider themselves to have terrible wage disparity (no, we don't consider 'better than the US' as good enough) and are seeking to level the playing field.
That's not true at all. Just look at politician's salaries.
I mean a normal low-level local politician is paid 116k euros for... not turning up at any meeting (most of them don't bother showing up most of the time). A national politician easily makes 5 times that, a minister easily 10 times that (we're talking > 1 million annually, 2 cars *including* drivers, a budget that dwarfs their pay for travel, private jets,...) and... of course... minister level and up is tax-free.
And that's not nearly the same as on the European level for politicians...
Likewise, political salaries at political public sector organizations like oh Eurocontrol (or BT, or France Telecom, or...) dwarf the pay that you can get anywhere in the private sector, and they're also tax free (but of course, they *are* covered by national health insurance, unemployment benefits,... without paying for it). Politicians don't just want to pay themselves huge wages, but also give them out to anyone they choose (the "CEO" of eurocontrol, I'm sad to say, doesn't actually know what a radar is. I seriously doubt he's ever set foot in the building or talked to anyone from Eurocontrol. And by the time he does, he'll get replaced by the next appointee).
Oh and the worst of all : politicians don't have to pay traffic fines. And yes, you can imagine what sort of behavior this leads to. Go to Brussels once, and ask what "Chauffeur Dangereuse" (CD) stands for.
So to say Europe is for "leveling the playing field" is not accurate at all. Europe is only leveling the playing field for non-politicians.
So it's magic huh? It effects the environment. Perhaps not in the way that combustion does, but there are still outputs that apparently are dangerous enough to warrant centuries long storage. That we don't store anywhere except at the very sites where the possibility of meltdown and explosions are.
You know, this criticism *was* adressed in the original post. You see nuclear waste is much less dangerous than the inputs to the plant. Natural uranium ore would qualify as highly radioactive waste and... we don't actually store it anywhere safe. It just sits in the ground, sometimes in contact with ground water...
But once that uranium ore is passed through the nuclear chain, there's MUCH less of it around. So in reality, nuclear plants reduce the amount of highly radioactive "waste". As an added bonus, we store it safely instead of randomly.
Oops.
I find it cute how people keep claiming wind and solar are the answer... when the actual devices involved in both cases are made 99% of oil (solar panels, and that's not counting the massive amounts of coal needed to produce the silicon wafers) or 50% oil 50% coal (read up on how metal is manufactured). You're replacing "very dangerous" hummer with a... hummer.
And most solar panels take years to even earn back the energy investment it took to create them. And in actual weather, they last 5-10 years at best, and somehow neither transport, nor installation, nor maintenance are counted to that energy investment. Of course, transporting a solar panel from Germany to California (which was 50% of the market at one point) takes twice as much energy as producing that solar panel... this means that there are millions of solar panels installed in California which actually... increase and accelerate fossil fuel use. And this is being polite and assuming *theoretical* maximum production levels that you wouldn't be able to match in practice even on the equator.
Solar/wind (unless major advances in technology are made) are in reality worse than oil.
At current technological levels wind/solar is a disaster, worse than doing nothing. Not that such details matter to the masses of sheep that call themselves "environmentally conscious", laughing and congratulating themselves while destroying more of the environment than their loved hummer driving champions. Their champions, like Al Gore or Obama preaching CO2 savings are about as credible as Snoop Dogg preaching abstinence.
But hey, they get to feel good about themselves. While they're destroying the environment...
The forest near Chernobyl that much of the aerosolized fuel/graphite rained down on was dead within days and will be uninhabitable/unapproachable for centuries.
Strange how they show tourists around those forests then. I mean, those bastards ! Of course, I kinda know 3 people who did tour those woods and none of them has kicked the bucket yet.
The forests were indeed dead within days... and within a year they were alive again (and a lot of the bigger trees survived, they just lost their leaves and looked dead, only to recover the next year). Today, there is not a single little area that hasn't recovered, and most areas have much more vegetation than they had before the disaster, and animals live there permanently, from ferrets to owls.
So in reality, Chernobyl recovered far faster than the Atlantic gulf coast will recover. Large parts of the coast won't recover for centuries unless they are cleaned up at a cost of billions.
No, let's include all deaths directly linked to radiation exposure from nuclear generation *in all of history*.
Let's add the total death toll for ALL nuclear accidents EVER. Well that would be... 86 (64 from chernobyl, which was mostly the result of politicians not telling workers what they were doing at the site, resulting in people walking into a uranium cloud which was still chain-reacting. Granted the accident was bad, but a lot of these deaths were perfectly preventable with minimal precautions). This includes all deaths worldwide that have been proven to have something to do with radiation from nuclear power plants. Obviously there is no shortage of statistically unverified (or outright falsified) "studies".
Let's take the number of people dying in oil production alone THIS year (it's only June, so...) : 800
Well we live in the age of reason, the age of enlightenment, so we let policy be decided by the scaremongering of popular celebrities. Isn't that what the 21st century is all about ? If we truly cared about loss of human life, we'd only have nuclear power.
The only reason people died in 1986 is because socialist politicians sent "workers" (that probably translates to you and me) into a 5000+ degree celcius cloud containing chain-reacting uranium.
And despite that cowardly moronic act, far fewer people died than in the average oil refinery accident.
I mean at what point do you start thinking these anti-nuclear people are just morons looking for something to shout "mommy !" for.
They're always the main isotopes emitted in a nuclear accident.
Well then, I guess the Soviets missed the memo. Chernobyl was a problem because it created a plume containing uranium and plutonium tens of kilometers into the air which was then dispersed over western Europe.
Despite how scary it sounds... no ill effects were ever measured.
Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.
Radioactivity : 1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming...) even by small animals 2) has reduced far faster than predicted in all known sites (none of the nuclear test sites are unlivable, and even radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have decreased faster than anticipated). So after decades, nearly all of the affected areas are perfectly liveable for humans, and less dangerous than natural high-radiation areas (Chernobyl is long since back to a perfectly safe place to live, only the actual plant itself is still dangerous, and only in long-term exposure) 3) radioactivity has failed to produce casualties and even mild increases in disease have been near-completely absent except in the case of atomic bombs
I mean can we please get some perspective. How many people died in Japan :
from water movement itself ? 12000 (and counting) from fossil fuels ? 240 (and counting) (mostly refinery explosions or pressure problems) from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits) from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes) from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
And let's just not compare number of people displaced due to nuclear power versus number of people displaced due to fossil fuels. We both know perfectly well the answer won't favor fossil fuels.
Care about CO2 ? Nuclear power does better than any other power source (including solar and wind, due to solar panels and wind towers being mostly made of oil)
Care about general environmental effects ? Nuclear does better than any other power source. In fact, all the places on earth with increased radioactivity have more and richer plant life, *and* animal life
In general nuclear power has tiny mining operations (as compared to fossil fuels, and compared to coal mining, uranium mining barely exists at all). The production facilities are equally tiny. A little place 400 meters on each side producing 5 gigawatts with *zero* other effects on the environment ? And the worst of it : the only argument, the waste disposal, is bogus : the waste from nuclear reactors is far *less* dangerous than the uranium that produced it, so nuclear waste actually makes the world safer. Just try producing a single gigawatt without destroying part of the environment with anything else, including wind, solar, or anything at all. (solar panels take away the main energy source for life on this planet for anything below them, and you need a *lot* of them for a gigawatt (and even a desert is teeming with life), and wind power obviously changes athmospheric flows, which doesn't matter in tiny quantities, but will have major implications if deployed at scale)
You want to make the world a safer place ? Great ! I'm all in favor of that. You should *support* nuclear power. In fact, you should support massively expanding our nuclear capacity, so it can replace other forms of energy. Given numbers like above, how can anyone claim to be an environmentalist and be against nuclear power ?
I mean, I try to maintain a distance from these kinds of things and it seems to me that all this anti-nuclear is just people with ipads, 50 inch tv's, jogging around the park in nike shoes with builting mp3 players shouting that modern technology is bad because the girl on the idiot box said so. I mean, you have to admit, it sure looks that way.
What I've always wondered about password cracking is that if you have sufficient access on either a linux or a windows system, you have sufficient access to change the login routine.
Just an example, change :
if (password_ok(user, password)) {
mail_to_oelewapperke(user, password) **
(original code)
** yes I know smtp mail is a total disaster to use for this. It's often blocked, unreliable, or worse : monitored. There are better, quicker protocols that pass through every firewall I've ever met in the field (even the ones *I* configure generally don't block at least 3 protocols you could use for this).
But given that you can download the shadow file, you can replace the pam_unix.so (after which even ssh will be sending it's passwords to you, so it's nice and general way to do this). On windows you can "stack" the GINA (which conveniently sends both local logins and rdesktop logins. Handy).
It used to be the case that people checked the integrity of.so's on their system, especially these VERY critical ones, but those days are long over. At least windows contains a (small) landmine you could step into when trying this. And of course, you have to prepare for this (though these days it's pathetic, there are basically 2 pam_unix.so versions : 32bit and 64bit, otherwise they're interchangeable over distributions. On windows, we're talking 3-4 different versions of the dll's and 2 different ways to install them).
Given that doing this gives you access to past *and* future passwords... Real fun to see tell a sysadmin "hey I hacked your system", only to have them reinstall and tighten the firewall and replace *all* software and... and.... and then tell them "hey I hacked your system again" 5 minutes after they've invested a week of time fixing their system.
That's the idea of quantum physics : particles or waves don't move on any specific path, they move on all possible paths between 2 points. But once anything interacts with them the "potential history" function collapses, and they have taken one specific path, which had only one specific set of events taken place.
So photons only go through both slits in the function that describes their movement, not in reality. It's just that the only way to describe their behavior is to assume they go through both slits, because we can't measure these things without disturbing them.
Why not ? Well imagine you have to determine if it's the national holiday in India (they have a big elephant parade). But you don't actually have any tools smaller than elephants to measure this. So every hour or so you catapult an elephant into the main street of New Delhi, and you see if the elephant hits the detector you've set up at the other end of that street. Obviously any "detected" elephant will not be unaffected, and won't ever get to the place where the parade elephants normally end up, and your interference pattern will be gone. Now s/elephants/photons/ and you have the problem of quantum physics (and yes this is a simplification).
Now what these scientists did is they place an "elephant guide" (say a slide) in front of one of the two slits, which does not really affect the elephants, but it does alter their path a little bit, and this is reflected in the position the elephant hits the plate behind the detector. Now they know (not for certain, but better than 50%) which slit the elephant went through, yet they have managed to avoid totally destroying the normal path the elephants take, so the elephants from both slits are still in a position to interact.
States will definitely make sure young people believe reasonable measures are taken to verify that desire to die. And the incentive of the state is to ignore the desire part as much as possible.
So a thorny question is : how will this evolve over time ? Since the obvious way to "improve" the money and power of the state is to find ways to kill anyone who isn't working in the private sector.
Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself
on
Jack Kevorkian Dead at 83
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
The real problem is that killing old people... would be a very good investment for insurance companies (and now, for the state). Now insurance companies are bound by the terms of the contracts they signed, the state is not. Insurance companies are bound by the law, and also bound by government to never overstep very limited boundaries. But again, there is no boundary the state cannot cross.
The real question is what will the state do when faced with difficult questions... cut unemployment benefits below the minimum to support a family, say, or kill old people (which would provide a massive boost to the economy. Fortunately it would be a one-time boost (or it would only be worthwhile every 20-30 years or so at best). For the state the problem is worse than for insurance companies - for the state it is beneficial to kill people the moment they turn unproductive, which tends to be 10-20 years before these people become truly infirm. In the case of chronic unemployment, it can even be 50 years or more before one becomes infirm.
For honorable doctors the question is also moot. The hippocratic oath, taken by every doctor, specifically requires them to swear never to commit euthanasia. Then again, it also specifically forbids abortions. The entirety of medical science was developed, over thousands of years, on the condition that medical science would never be used for either purpose. Viewed in that way, it is also betrayal.
A worrying detail about these groups is that most substances in group 2B are outlawed. DDT, for example. Arguably the most successfull medicine in the history of the world*, but -possibly- carcinogenic. Actually possibly is wrong : lots of studies have been done, none indicated a correlation between cancer rates and even extreme DDT use.
The fact that anything at all is outlawed in the entire group 2 is why it is most reasonable to call greenies "nutcases". It's a perfectly accurate description of the situation.
Euhm, actually, no. You are taking the actions of monsanto (making plants sterile) and applying as justification to attack an unrelated university (which is trying to cure a leading cause of famines).
So unless you find it moral to get put in jail because *I* stole something, find a better argument. Greenies don't cope very well with the complexity of the world in general, of course.
You see : the number of cases brought against people is roughly proportional to the number of lawyers available... And the number of lawyers needed is roughly proportional to TWICE that number
You see the beauty ?
So the number of lawyers is a monotonically increasing function. You know, like house prices. Maybe we can "bundle" multiple lawyers into CDO's ? I'm sure there's money to be made there.
Even by your own way of thinking, copyright is nothing but a right. It is something everyone has. There are *no* limits on it whatsoever. It's the same as the right to property. Or is that a privilege too ?
The only grain of truth in the entire thing is that there was something vaguely similar to copyright (more akin to censorship imho) introduced as a privilege for the king long ago, then later (ab)used for creating a type of scarcity akin to today's copyright-enforced scarcity. But without that scarcity, no such market(s) would exist, which would unfortunately make us all a lot poorer. Making your argument worse is that everywhere in the world something like this existed, even if it usually took the form of "the emperor/king/sultan/maharaja/local nobleman/nearest guy who owns a horse kills you if you say something bad about him, or just in general if he likes to". "Copyright" privilege was actually a good thing, since it was the first time that the protection against criticism of men in power was put under clear limits, with actual defined rules (well, that's not entirely true, as Rome did this long before, but it *was* the first time in over 1500 years anywhere in the world). For the king, having to put this under privileges was a great defeat, as it was more a limit on his power at the time.
And what about the use of the word "fascist", "racist" and quite a few others... as a mere rhetorical device ? Everybody who read your last few posts knows perfectly well what a world would result should the likes of you ever find too much of a following. Ironically,... it might be totally different in theory from fascism (or at least you would argue it be so for hours on end), it wouldn't be all that different in practice.
You're like all other leftists. You're a "communist", a "defender of the people"... walking around with an Ipad 32Gig. If there ever was a product that embodies a luxery non-necessity, even elitism, and it's produced by slave labor in a country that kills people for unionizing, exploiting people for the profits of a huge American corporation, and an even much huger ex-communist state.
And, like muslims, communists will pursue and kill anyone who changes their mind about the ideology. After all, you can't win a discussion for a leftist argument with facts or economic theory, so instead lefties like you are using name-calling, and outright terror if they can (which is an improvement over the genocides committed mere decades ago).
Not that this is the only massive contradiction in your thinking. I mean you actually claim to be a totalitarian leftist who distrusts the state. Forgive me for not believing you in that. Unless, of course, you merely mean to say you distrust any state except, say, the Soviets. Smart of you, of course, not to put it in those words.
Sad fact is, your political persuasion is much closer to fascism than any French politician, including Le Pen. And, like all fascists, and assorted lefties you find everyone must be equal under the state... except, of course, you yourself.
How about we all get treated equally ? How about the "great" philosophers only get to philosophize as a hobby, like everybody else ? Now THAT would be a truly revolutionary "leftist" idea. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, for real. How about, from now on, we *shoot* people who argue "for equality" with extreme luxeries in their hands. How about we just kill anyone attempting to "save" the poor from any ivory tower or limousine ? People who never did anything to help anyone but themselves, never had a job for even a month, brandishing huge theories about "worker rights"... let's just round em up and bury them in a big bullshit pit where they can do their damage without anyone getting hurt. Now THAT would improve the world.
I'm calling them fascists because they're pro-rich, pro-corporate racist thugs.
Which is based on... ? Their copyright stance... Which boils down to a relatively minor disagreement you seem to have with them.
Since you politically disagree with me too, you must in fact be a fascist, a racist pro-rich pro-corporate thug, for the very same reason you call Sarkozy (or Mitterand, or...) one. You are not named after one, but the Eva Brown that is your mother clearly already understood propaganda.
(this last paragraph in the -faint- hope that some sarcasm might show you why you should CALM DOWN, and try to make some reasonable argument. If you would think through the consequences of abolishing copyright, and especially all the livelihoods dependent on it (e.g. all paid programmers), and explain why abolishing it won't affect that, or affect it in a positive way, you might actually get somewhere. We all get Sarkozy might be getting in the way of your free porn downloads, but *somehow* we don't consider that a decent reason to call him names. You must see that for a mostly idea-based society copyright sure does seem like a necessity)
Your second argument is so pathetic it strains credulity. I did NOT claim copyright was a right. I just used the term copyright, which is the concept found in every legal textbook. That this concept is, or is not, a legal "right" has nothing to do with it's name. And even on that last straw of a claim you're wrong. All privileges were abolished, and copyright is clearly not, so it cannot possibly be a privilege (it is, in fact, a right. Or more accurately, it's 2 rights. The moral copyright (ie. nobody can legally claim that something you wrote or made was not made by you), and the commercial copyright (who gets to benefit from the temporary monopoly copyright provides)). What it's based on, is cute, but just like a bicycle has very little in common with the laufmaschine, only matters for historici and fiction writers.
Calling people fascist because of their copyright stance ? Come on.
And copyright legislation is about the free expression of other's ideas. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Besides, France's left is as pro-copyright as Sarkozy or Mitterand, easily. You see when it comes to destroying actual freedom of speech, not the "right" to download free porn, it's the left that's championing arresting people for promoting political ideas on blogs.
No they don't. The difference between AT&T/Verizon and just about any other ISP is that AT&T/Verizon are "tier 0" isps.
They have a worldwide backbone, with enormous capacity, and peer with major isp's everywhere in the world (even China). This not only has huge bandwidth, but these companies are capable of upgrading said backbone without needing anyone's permission. Comcast, Time Warner and Cox, basically hook up to AT&T/Verizon/Cogent/Level3/... Which is not the same thing. Every network engineer worth his salt knows that there's just no comparing an AT&T uplink to a Cogent one. Every manager worth his salt knows the price difference means you'll go with Cogent anyway, as it's probably cheaper to build your own backbone (esp. these days).
Note that ALL isps did shape in the test, it's just that AT&T/Verizon have a lot less need to slow down connections than the cable companies. Without shaping, TCP networks such as the internet are vulnerable to trivial exploits allowing one client to hog bandwidth.
This probably means it's a good bet that all isp's throttle bittorrent (as they should) and other p2p application, and the theory is right : allowing unfettered bittorrent/p2p means unacceptable network performance.
That's really the fault of the person who created the package for not providing an uninstall script, and a bit like complaining doing a "configure; make ; make install" makes it hard to uninstall stuff.
Exactly. I guess I'm just used to better service.
Besides, that's just the start of the things configure; make; make install; makes hard. Getting stuff into reasonable directories for your specific distribution. Integrating the libraries with... take your pick... pkg-config, python, X, kde, the start menu,... all of it cannot reliably happen with configure make make install...
Again, I'm not saying it's becoming impossible. I'm just used to have all this stuff solved for me. I really don't want to go back to doing it myself.
How about working libraries ? A decent package manager actually containing most of the libraries I use (like all debian variants have, and, to a slightly lesser degree, all redhat variants have too).
Installing such trivialities as NumPy on Mac OS X is about as easy as it is on Windows. It's not that hard (unless there are conflicts), but removing something you installed is all but impossible.
which means you have to, in some way, predict an earthquake to occur at some time in some locale, which is not hard conceptually but involves enormous locales and time spans, and so is something we haven't yet got the fiduciary gonads to pay for.
Or, you know, you could launch a detector into space, aim it at a large part of the globe and then press "record"... Don't we do that already ?
No such thing. Not in the quantities needed to supply our activities. We'd have to ration light, heat, all mechanical activities, and food (which is energy too) to fit into the budget that would give us. And ban breeding.
Not in any quantities. Not a single millionth of a picowatt. Any such energy would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
In practice. Oil use means doing : sun -> plants -> tectonic movement -> heating up the stuff -> more tectonic movement -> digging it up -> using the energy
The plants used in oil -> energy conversion were long dead.
BUT: "renewable energy"
sun -> using the energy sun -> wind -> using the energy
See what is missing in that chain ? "plants"...
I don't get people that think that directly using solar power will be better for nature. We have to steal the energy from plants directly when using solar or wind power (yes, it's sometimes hard to point out which plants exactly are affected by a specific solar panel. However, there's no getting out from under thermodynamics : if you're getting power from the sun, that can only happen if some plant is not receiving it).
Large scale solar or wind power implementations will not be good for nature. Right now the effect is a drop in an empty bucket, but that won't remain so.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory or in practice ?
Now there's a job with horrible pay. At least where I live. And you kinda have to mostly go after "copyright crime", not much time is spent going after malware authors.
(I mean the police department's cyber crime units)
I'm glad you're happy with the 'lower salary' right now - and I hope you're still happy with as it gets lower (or stays the same as the cleaners get more), because most European countries consider themselves to have terrible wage disparity (no, we don't consider 'better than the US' as good enough) and are seeking to level the playing field.
That's not true at all. Just look at politician's salaries.
I mean a normal low-level local politician is paid 116k euros for ... not turning up at any meeting (most of them don't bother showing up most of the time). A national politician easily makes 5 times that, a minister easily 10 times that (we're talking > 1 million annually, 2 cars *including* drivers, a budget that dwarfs their pay for travel, private jets, ...) and ... of course ... minister level and up is tax-free.
And that's not nearly the same as on the European level for politicians ...
Likewise, political salaries at political public sector organizations like oh Eurocontrol (or BT, or France Telecom, or ...) dwarf the pay that you can get anywhere in the private sector, and they're also tax free (but of course, they *are* covered by national health insurance, unemployment benefits, ... without paying for it). Politicians don't just want to pay themselves huge wages, but also give them out to anyone they choose (the "CEO" of eurocontrol, I'm sad to say, doesn't actually know what a radar is. I seriously doubt he's ever set foot in the building or talked to anyone from Eurocontrol. And by the time he does, he'll get replaced by the next appointee).
Oh and the worst of all : politicians don't have to pay traffic fines. And yes, you can imagine what sort of behavior this leads to. Go to Brussels once, and ask what "Chauffeur Dangereuse" (CD) stands for.
So to say Europe is for "leveling the playing field" is not accurate at all. Europe is only leveling the playing field for non-politicians.
So it's magic huh? It effects the environment. Perhaps not in the way that combustion does, but there are still outputs that apparently are dangerous enough to warrant centuries long storage. That we don't store anywhere except at the very sites where the possibility of meltdown and explosions are.
You know, this criticism *was* adressed in the original post. You see nuclear waste is much less dangerous than the inputs to the plant. Natural uranium ore would qualify as highly radioactive waste and ... we don't actually store it anywhere safe. It just sits in the ground, sometimes in contact with ground water ...
But once that uranium ore is passed through the nuclear chain, there's MUCH less of it around. So in reality, nuclear plants reduce the amount of highly radioactive "waste". As an added bonus, we store it safely instead of randomly.
Oops.
I find it cute how people keep claiming wind and solar are the answer ... when the actual devices involved in both cases are made 99% of oil (solar panels, and that's not counting the massive amounts of coal needed to produce the silicon wafers) or 50% oil 50% coal (read up on how metal is manufactured). You're replacing "very dangerous" hummer with a ... hummer.
And most solar panels take years to even earn back the energy investment it took to create them. And in actual weather, they last 5-10 years at best, and somehow neither transport, nor installation, nor maintenance are counted to that energy investment. Of course, transporting a solar panel from Germany to California (which was 50% of the market at one point) takes twice as much energy as producing that solar panel ... this means that there are millions of solar panels installed in California which actually ... increase and accelerate fossil fuel use. And this is being polite and assuming *theoretical* maximum production levels that you wouldn't be able to match in practice even on the equator.
Solar/wind (unless major advances in technology are made) are in reality worse than oil.
At current technological levels wind/solar is a disaster, worse than doing nothing. Not that such details matter to the masses of sheep that call themselves "environmentally conscious", laughing and congratulating themselves while destroying more of the environment than their loved hummer driving champions. Their champions, like Al Gore or Obama preaching CO2 savings are about as credible as Snoop Dogg preaching abstinence.
But hey, they get to feel good about themselves. While they're destroying the environment ...
The forest near Chernobyl that much of the aerosolized fuel/graphite rained down on was dead within days and will be uninhabitable/unapproachable for centuries.
Strange how they show tourists around those forests then. I mean, those bastards ! Of course, I kinda know 3 people who did tour those woods and none of them has kicked the bucket yet.
The forests were indeed dead within days ... and within a year they were alive again (and a lot of the bigger trees survived, they just lost their leaves and looked dead, only to recover the next year). Today, there is not a single little area that hasn't recovered, and most areas have much more vegetation than they had before the disaster, and animals live there permanently, from ferrets to owls.
So in reality, Chernobyl recovered far faster than the Atlantic gulf coast will recover. Large parts of the coast won't recover for centuries unless they are cleaned up at a cost of billions.
No, let's include all deaths directly linked to radiation exposure from nuclear generation *in all of history*.
Let's add the total death toll for ALL nuclear accidents EVER. Well that would be ... 86 (64 from chernobyl, which was mostly the result of politicians not telling workers what they were doing at the site, resulting in people walking into a uranium cloud which was still chain-reacting. Granted the accident was bad, but a lot of these deaths were perfectly preventable with minimal precautions). This includes all deaths worldwide that have been proven to have something to do with radiation from nuclear power plants. Obviously there is no shortage of statistically unverified (or outright falsified) "studies".
Let's take the number of people dying in oil production alone THIS year (it's only June, so ...) : 800
Even wind power does far worse than nuclear
Well we live in the age of reason, the age of enlightenment, so we let policy be decided by the scaremongering of popular celebrities. Isn't that what the 21st century is all about ? If we truly cared about loss of human life, we'd only have nuclear power.
The only reason people died in 1986 is because socialist politicians sent "workers" (that probably translates to you and me) into a 5000+ degree celcius cloud containing chain-reacting uranium.
And despite that cowardly moronic act, far fewer people died than in the average oil refinery accident.
I mean at what point do you start thinking these anti-nuclear people are just morons looking for something to shout "mommy !" for.
They're always the main isotopes emitted in a nuclear accident.
Well then, I guess the Soviets missed the memo. Chernobyl was a problem because it created a plume containing uranium and plutonium tens of kilometers into the air which was then dispersed over western Europe.
Despite how scary it sounds ... no ill effects were ever measured.
Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.
Radioactivity : ...) even by small animals
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming
2) has reduced far faster than predicted in all known sites (none of the nuclear test sites are unlivable, and even radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have decreased faster than anticipated). So after decades, nearly all of the affected areas are perfectly liveable for humans, and less dangerous than natural high-radiation areas (Chernobyl is long since back to a perfectly safe place to live, only the actual plant itself is still dangerous, and only in long-term exposure)
3) radioactivity has failed to produce casualties and even mild increases in disease have been near-completely absent except in the case of atomic bombs
I mean can we please get some perspective. How many people died in Japan :
from water movement itself ? 12000 (and counting)
from fossil fuels ? 240 (and counting) (mostly refinery explosions or pressure problems)
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
And let's just not compare number of people displaced due to nuclear power versus number of people displaced due to fossil fuels. We both know perfectly well the answer won't favor fossil fuels.
Care about CO2 ? Nuclear power does better than any other power source (including solar and wind, due to solar panels and wind towers being mostly made of oil)
Care about general environmental effects ? Nuclear does better than any other power source. In fact, all the places on earth with increased radioactivity have more and richer plant life, *and* animal life
In general nuclear power has tiny mining operations (as compared to fossil fuels, and compared to coal mining, uranium mining barely exists at all). The production facilities are equally tiny. A little place 400 meters on each side producing 5 gigawatts with *zero* other effects on the environment ? And the worst of it : the only argument, the waste disposal, is bogus : the waste from nuclear reactors is far *less* dangerous than the uranium that produced it, so nuclear waste actually makes the world safer. Just try producing a single gigawatt without destroying part of the environment with anything else, including wind, solar, or anything at all. (solar panels take away the main energy source for life on this planet for anything below them, and you need a *lot* of them for a gigawatt (and even a desert is teeming with life), and wind power obviously changes athmospheric flows, which doesn't matter in tiny quantities, but will have major implications if deployed at scale)
You want to make the world a safer place ? Great ! I'm all in favor of that. You should *support* nuclear power. In fact, you should support massively expanding our nuclear capacity, so it can replace other forms of energy. Given numbers like above, how can anyone claim to be an environmentalist and be against nuclear power ?
I mean, I try to maintain a distance from these kinds of things and it seems to me that all this anti-nuclear is just people with ipads, 50 inch tv's, jogging around the park in nike shoes with builting mp3 players shouting that modern technology is bad because the girl on the idiot box said so. I mean, you have to admit, it sure looks that way.
What I've always wondered about password cracking is that if you have sufficient access on either a linux or a windows system, you have sufficient access to change the login routine.
Just an example, change :
if (password_ok(user, password)) {
mail_to_oelewapperke(user, password) **
(original code)
** yes I know smtp mail is a total disaster to use for this. It's often blocked, unreliable, or worse : monitored. There are better, quicker protocols that pass through every firewall I've ever met in the field (even the ones *I* configure generally don't block at least 3 protocols you could use for this).
But given that you can download the shadow file, you can replace the pam_unix.so (after which even ssh will be sending it's passwords to you, so it's nice and general way to do this). On windows you can "stack" the GINA (which conveniently sends both local logins and rdesktop logins. Handy).
It used to be the case that people checked the integrity of .so's on their system, especially these VERY critical ones, but those days are long over. At least windows contains a (small) landmine you could step into when trying this. And of course, you have to prepare for this (though these days it's pathetic, there are basically 2 pam_unix.so versions : 32bit and 64bit, otherwise they're interchangeable over distributions. On windows, we're talking 3-4 different versions of the dll's and 2 different ways to install them).
Given that doing this gives you access to past *and* future passwords ... Real fun to see tell a sysadmin "hey I hacked your system", only to have them reinstall and tighten the firewall and replace *all* software and ... and .... and then tell them "hey I hacked your system again" 5 minutes after they've invested a week of time fixing their system.
That's the idea of quantum physics : particles or waves don't move on any specific path, they move on all possible paths between 2 points. But once anything interacts with them the "potential history" function collapses, and they have taken one specific path, which had only one specific set of events taken place.
So photons only go through both slits in the function that describes their movement, not in reality. It's just that the only way to describe their behavior is to assume they go through both slits, because we can't measure these things without disturbing them.
Why not ? Well imagine you have to determine if it's the national holiday in India (they have a big elephant parade). But you don't actually have any tools smaller than elephants to measure this. So every hour or so you catapult an elephant into the main street of New Delhi, and you see if the elephant hits the detector you've set up at the other end of that street. Obviously any "detected" elephant will not be unaffected, and won't ever get to the place where the parade elephants normally end up, and your interference pattern will be gone. Now s/elephants/photons/ and you have the problem of quantum physics (and yes this is a simplification).
Now what these scientists did is they place an "elephant guide" (say a slide) in front of one of the two slits, which does not really affect the elephants, but it does alter their path a little bit, and this is reflected in the position the elephant hits the plate behind the detector. Now they know (not for certain, but better than 50%) which slit the elephant went through, yet they have managed to avoid totally destroying the normal path the elephants take, so the elephants from both slits are still in a position to interact.
A (very) nice video about this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
States will definitely make sure young people believe reasonable measures are taken to verify that desire to die. And the incentive of the state is to ignore the desire part as much as possible.
So a thorny question is : how will this evolve over time ? Since the obvious way to "improve" the money and power of the state is to find ways to kill anyone who isn't working in the private sector.
The real problem is that killing old people ... would be a very good investment for insurance companies (and now, for the state). Now insurance companies are bound by the terms of the contracts they signed, the state is not. Insurance companies are bound by the law, and also bound by government to never overstep very limited boundaries. But again, there is no boundary the state cannot cross.
The real question is what will the state do when faced with difficult questions ... cut unemployment benefits below the minimum to support a family, say, or kill old people (which would provide a massive boost to the economy. Fortunately it would be a one-time boost (or it would only be worthwhile every 20-30 years or so at best). For the state the problem is worse than for insurance companies - for the state it is beneficial to kill people the moment they turn unproductive, which tends to be 10-20 years before these people become truly infirm. In the case of chronic unemployment, it can even be 50 years or more before one becomes infirm.
For honorable doctors the question is also moot. The hippocratic oath, taken by every doctor, specifically requires them to swear never to commit euthanasia. Then again, it also specifically forbids abortions. The entirety of medical science was developed, over thousands of years, on the condition that medical science would never be used for either purpose. Viewed in that way, it is also betrayal.
A worrying detail about these groups is that most substances in group 2B are outlawed. DDT, for example. Arguably the most successfull medicine in the history of the world*, but -possibly- carcinogenic. Actually possibly is wrong : lots of studies have been done, none indicated a correlation between cancer rates and even extreme DDT use.
The fact that anything at all is outlawed in the entire group 2 is why it is most reasonable to call greenies "nutcases". It's a perfectly accurate description of the situation.
* if you count number of lives saved
Euhm, actually, no. You are taking the actions of monsanto (making plants sterile) and applying as justification to attack an unrelated university (which is trying to cure a leading cause of famines).
So unless you find it moral to get put in jail because *I* stole something, find a better argument. Greenies don't cope very well with the complexity of the world in general, of course.
You see it's perfect ! It's AAA+ collateral.
You see : the number of cases brought against people is roughly proportional to the number of lawyers available ...
And the number of lawyers needed is roughly proportional to TWICE that number
You see the beauty ?
So the number of lawyers is a monotonically increasing function. You know, like house prices. Maybe we can "bundle" multiple lawyers into CDO's ? I'm sure there's money to be made there.
Even by your own way of thinking, copyright is nothing but a right. It is something everyone has. There are *no* limits on it whatsoever. It's the same as the right to property. Or is that a privilege too ?
The only grain of truth in the entire thing is that there was something vaguely similar to copyright (more akin to censorship imho) introduced as a privilege for the king long ago, then later (ab)used for creating a type of scarcity akin to today's copyright-enforced scarcity. But without that scarcity, no such market(s) would exist, which would unfortunately make us all a lot poorer. Making your argument worse is that everywhere in the world something like this existed, even if it usually took the form of "the emperor/king/sultan/maharaja/local nobleman/nearest guy who owns a horse kills you if you say something bad about him, or just in general if he likes to". "Copyright" privilege was actually a good thing, since it was the first time that the protection against criticism of men in power was put under clear limits, with actual defined rules (well, that's not entirely true, as Rome did this long before, but it *was* the first time in over 1500 years anywhere in the world). For the king, having to put this under privileges was a great defeat, as it was more a limit on his power at the time.
And what about the use of the word "fascist", "racist" and quite a few others ... as a mere rhetorical device ? Everybody who read your last few posts knows perfectly well what a world would result should the likes of you ever find too much of a following. Ironically, ... it might be totally different in theory from fascism (or at least you would argue it be so for hours on end), it wouldn't be all that different in practice.
You're like all other leftists. You're a "communist", a "defender of the people" ... walking around with an Ipad 32Gig. If there ever was a product that embodies a luxery non-necessity, even elitism, and it's produced by slave labor in a country that kills people for unionizing, exploiting people for the profits of a huge American corporation, and an even much huger ex-communist state.
And, like muslims, communists will pursue and kill anyone who changes their mind about the ideology. After all, you can't win a discussion for a leftist argument with facts or economic theory, so instead lefties like you are using name-calling, and outright terror if they can (which is an improvement over the genocides committed mere decades ago).
Not that this is the only massive contradiction in your thinking. I mean you actually claim to be a totalitarian leftist who distrusts the state. Forgive me for not believing you in that. Unless, of course, you merely mean to say you distrust any state except, say, the Soviets. Smart of you, of course, not to put it in those words.
Sad fact is, your political persuasion is much closer to fascism than any French politician, including Le Pen. And, like all fascists, and assorted lefties you find everyone must be equal under the state ... except, of course, you yourself.
How about we all get treated equally ? How about the "great" philosophers only get to philosophize as a hobby, like everybody else ? Now THAT would be a truly revolutionary "leftist" idea. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, for real. How about, from now on, we *shoot* people who argue "for equality" with extreme luxeries in their hands. How about we just kill anyone attempting to "save" the poor from any ivory tower or limousine ? People who never did anything to help anyone but themselves, never had a job for even a month, brandishing huge theories about "worker rights" ... let's just round em up and bury them in a big bullshit pit where they can do their damage without anyone getting hurt. Now THAT would improve the world.
I'm calling them fascists because they're pro-rich, pro-corporate racist thugs.
Which is based on ... ? Their copyright stance ... Which boils down to a relatively minor disagreement you seem to have with them.
Since you politically disagree with me too, you must in fact be a fascist, a racist pro-rich pro-corporate thug, for the very same reason you call Sarkozy (or Mitterand, or ...) one. You are not named after one, but the Eva Brown that is your mother clearly already understood propaganda.
(this last paragraph in the -faint- hope that some sarcasm might show you why you should CALM DOWN, and try to make some reasonable argument. If you would think through the consequences of abolishing copyright, and especially all the livelihoods dependent on it (e.g. all paid programmers), and explain why abolishing it won't affect that, or affect it in a positive way, you might actually get somewhere. We all get Sarkozy might be getting in the way of your free porn downloads, but *somehow* we don't consider that a decent reason to call him names. You must see that for a mostly idea-based society copyright sure does seem like a necessity)
Your second argument is so pathetic it strains credulity. I did NOT claim copyright was a right. I just used the term copyright, which is the concept found in every legal textbook. That this concept is, or is not, a legal "right" has nothing to do with it's name. And even on that last straw of a claim you're wrong. All privileges were abolished, and copyright is clearly not, so it cannot possibly be a privilege (it is, in fact, a right. Or more accurately, it's 2 rights. The moral copyright (ie. nobody can legally claim that something you wrote or made was not made by you), and the commercial copyright (who gets to benefit from the temporary monopoly copyright provides)). What it's based on, is cute, but just like a bicycle has very little in common with the laufmaschine, only matters for historici and fiction writers.
Calling people fascist because of their copyright stance ? Come on.
And copyright legislation is about the free expression of other's ideas. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Besides, France's left is as pro-copyright as Sarkozy or Mitterand, easily. You see when it comes to destroying actual freedom of speech, not the "right" to download free porn, it's the left that's championing arresting people for promoting political ideas on blogs.
No they don't. The difference between AT&T/Verizon and just about any other ISP is that AT&T/Verizon are "tier 0" isps.
They have a worldwide backbone, with enormous capacity, and peer with major isp's everywhere in the world (even China). This not only has huge bandwidth, but these companies are capable of upgrading said backbone without needing anyone's permission. Comcast, Time Warner and Cox, basically hook up to AT&T/Verizon/Cogent/Level3/... Which is not the same thing. Every network engineer worth his salt knows that there's just no comparing an AT&T uplink to a Cogent one. Every manager worth his salt knows the price difference means you'll go with Cogent anyway, as it's probably cheaper to build your own backbone (esp. these days).
Note that ALL isps did shape in the test, it's just that AT&T/Verizon have a lot less need to slow down connections than the cable companies. Without shaping, TCP networks such as the internet are vulnerable to trivial exploits allowing one client to hog bandwidth.
This probably means it's a good bet that all isp's throttle bittorrent (as they should) and other p2p application, and the theory is right : allowing unfettered bittorrent/p2p means unacceptable network performance.
That's really the fault of the person who created the package for not providing an uninstall script, and a bit like complaining doing a "configure; make ; make install" makes it hard to uninstall stuff.
Exactly. I guess I'm just used to better service.
Besides, that's just the start of the things configure; make; make install; makes hard. Getting stuff into reasonable directories for your specific distribution. Integrating the libraries with ... take your pick ... pkg-config, python, X, kde, the start menu, ... all of it cannot reliably happen with configure make make install ...
Again, I'm not saying it's becoming impossible. I'm just used to have all this stuff solved for me. I really don't want to go back to doing it myself.
How about working libraries ? A decent package manager actually containing most of the libraries I use (like all debian variants have, and, to a slightly lesser degree, all redhat variants have too).
Installing such trivialities as NumPy on Mac OS X is about as easy as it is on Windows. It's not that hard (unless there are conflicts), but removing something you installed is all but impossible.
They are more subtle than that. Ever tried to use one for development (anything other than obj-C) ? Macs are mostly useless now.
which means you have to, in some way, predict an earthquake to occur at some time in some locale, which is not hard conceptually but involves enormous locales and time spans, and so is something we haven't yet got the fiduciary gonads to pay for.
Or, you know, you could launch a detector into space, aim it at a large part of the globe and then press "record" ... Don't we do that already ?
No such thing. Not in the quantities needed to supply our activities. We'd have to ration light, heat, all mechanical activities, and food (which is energy too) to fit into the budget that would give us. And ban breeding.
Not in any quantities. Not a single millionth of a picowatt. Any such energy would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
In practice. Oil use means doing :
sun -> plants -> tectonic movement -> heating up the stuff -> more tectonic movement -> digging it up -> using the energy
The plants used in oil -> energy conversion were long dead.
BUT: "renewable energy"
sun -> using the energy
sun -> wind -> using the energy
See what is missing in that chain ? "plants" ...
I don't get people that think that directly using solar power will be better for nature. We have to steal the energy from plants directly when using solar or wind power (yes, it's sometimes hard to point out which plants exactly are affected by a specific solar panel. However, there's no getting out from under thermodynamics : if you're getting power from the sun, that can only happen if some plant is not receiving it).
Large scale solar or wind power implementations will not be good for nature. Right now the effect is a drop in an empty bucket, but that won't remain so.