I did not see 5% efficiency mentioned in TFA, just 6 watts per gram of solar cells
Somebody here did the math; look it up.
ith a material so thin and light, I can't see just using the roof of anything, I would cover every exposed surface as the exposure angle would constantly be changing
You'd still only have about 2m2 capturing energy; the number I gave was an upper bound.
More people will be driving EVs at some time in the future, why not grab every free electron at that point.
Because solar cells aren't free, and spending thousands of dollars on generating miniscule amounts of energy isn't worth it.
Odd, every far right winger I know tells me that the subsidies for oil and gas extraction are needed because the oil and gas are critical needs.
Well, you talk to the wrong people. And "non-lefties" are overwhelmingly not "right wingers". Finally, the views of Republican politicians are certainly not representative of "non-left wingers".
Is giving things away part of the invisible hand of the free market?
Since the PA severance tax is for removal of natural resources from public lands and set through political processes, there is no free market or invisible hand involved in this price setting at all. Without a market, nobody can tell whether the payments by the gas industry are a subsidy or not. The solution is to auction off the drilling and resource recovery rights.
Meanwhile, they drilled like crazy for a few years, helped create a natural gas glut, and have now left, with all the jerbs they promised.
Yes, that is another problem with the lack of a free market and government taxation: it means that people end up drilling like crazy, instead of treating the natural resources as an investment in the future.
Feel free to give suggestions why deuterium, uranium and thorium work in a space crafts engine and why solar cells don't.
It's basic physics: inverse square law and power to weight ratios. You can power non-propulsive electronics within the inner solar system if you can keep aiming at the sun, but they become increasingly useless the further out you go. And for propulsion, the only realistic options for manned and most robotic missions are chemical, fission, fusion, or antimatter.
Again: to me the rights of the individual is more important than the right of a company. If the quention comes to: should we thing of the people or of the companies, we should always say 'we, the people.'
Think this through. Do you really want federal prosecutors to be able to decide who to put in jail for talking about the past legal troubles of people like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Jesse Jackson, Lewis Libby, or any of the other shady political characters we have? How do you think a Trump or Clinton administration would use such powers?
Furthermore, if a company screws up and discloses harmful or private information about you, you can sue for damages. When the government gets its lists wrong (and it will), you can do nothing about it. Inclusion and exclusion on governmental lists, prosecution and failure to prosecute, simply become tools of oppression and control. "We the people" are far more represented by private associations than we are represented by government.
Yes, all things being equal, it would be nice if people who have rehabilitated themselves and could now be peaceful and productive members of society could get a fresh start. Maybe there is a way to do that by giving everybody the ability to change identities more easily. But trying to accomplish this by legally restricting what private individuals can say (and that includes the case where they have formed corporations) is wrong and dangerous.
Next step: Government should be prohibited from throwing you in jail without due process, but if private security companies want to do it, they should have a right to.
You really do have trouble understanding the classical liberal concept of free speech, don't you? There is no point in arguing with an idiot.
A gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh and lasts you about an hour. Solar power is about 1000W/m2 and the efficiency of these cells is less than 5%, meaning you get maybe 50W/m2 under ideal conditions. Let's say your car roof is 2 m2. If you do the math, that means such a solar roof panel would give you at most 0.2% of the power you get from gasoline, under ideal solar conditions.
Space craft certainly should use non renewable energy, namely deuterium, uranium, and thorium. We're not ever going to get much of a space program with solar cells.
There is a difference between a web site keeping information and a search engine that provides a commercial service to find information about people. [...] Sure, the news of your bankruptcy might be on the newspaper's website
Newspapers aren't a "commercial service"? What planet are you from? Newspapers and media companies are massive commercial entities that are trying to squeeze every penny of revenue out of their data.
AFAIK, there is no useful Google API for searching for credit-related information on Google. There definitely are several commercial services that let you search newspaper archives. So, by your reasoning, Google should be allowed to continue to provide this information, while newspapers should be forced to remove it from their archives.
A person or corporation can be compelled to testify about facts they know about. That's quite different than compelling speech which creates new facts.
"oh_my" claimed that the government cannot compel speech; I corrected him and pointed out that it can, and that it does so all the time. Nowhere did I say that that the government was limited to compelling speech. In fact, court orders can compel both speech and other actions.
In any case, the government could easily retreat to simply demanding that Apple disclose the iOS source code and the code signing key to the FBI. And if not the US government, other governments can and have done that. The Russian spy agency obtained Microsoft's Windows source code that way, for example.
The need for a "right to be forgotten" is a result of the intrusive ways in which governments track our identity and use and record our data. Before that, if you wanted to be forgotten, you simply moved and adopted a new name.
Instead of draconian measures to limit online freedom of speech, Europe and Asia should make it much easier for people to change their name and possibly even get a new government ID number. That way, the "unnamed person" can change his name (and possibly even gender) to, say, "Fukuyo Hada" and not suffer the indignities of his/her criminal history.
Sure, they can be compelled to speak. But the FBI cannot decide what exactly they say.
For such court orders, you have to answer the question, invoke the 5A, or face a contempt of court charge. The only other way out is to claim that compliance would be an "undue burden", which is what Apple is attempting.
Umm high 5th Amendment. The government CANNOT compel anyone to speak..
The government can compel many people to speak. It simply can't compel you to self-incriminate. How does demanding Apple's encryption keys (even if the government were doing that) amount to "self-incrimination"?
But if you had bothered to READ the article, instead of pull something out of your ass, you would have read how code as speech argument has been used in court.
Yes, and if you bothered to read my response, you'd understand why I argue that the analogy that the lawyer is trying to make doesn't work.
That is a bizarre argument. Sure, code can be speech. But compelling people to speak is probably the primary function of court orders. If code were just speech, it is hard to see why the FBI shouldn't be able to compel Apple to speak to them and give them the signing keys and the source code. In fact, the only real objection to such court orders is that they may be an "undue burden".
You're saying it could easily break into the iPhone by hiring its own developers
No, it's not easy, it's a lot of work: without Apple's help, they need to get a hardware debugger, a couple of people able to use it, a couple of old iPhones with the same software version, and then try to identify the location where the unlock count is kept/updated. Then they need to take the target 5c and change the unlock count in hardware.
I think the NSA could do it easily: they probably have both Apple's source code and their keys.
but instead chooses to go mano a mano against a company with far more money than it does, and be willing to shred the US Constitution - in an election year - to support its crappy case?
I seriously doubt any of that was the FBI's intention. They had a phone from a mass murderer and wanted help getting at the data, that's all. This isn't even a privacy issue because the shooter didn't even own the phone, it is a government issued phone.
But the real issue here isn't the FBI's intention, it's the fact that Apple is presenting itself as a white knight protecting our liberty and the Constitution, when the simple fact is that their phones are not as secure as they could or should be, and that the kind of legal protection Apple is asking for is useless: it may stop the FBI, it won't stop the NSA or foreign governments. I really don't care what the outcome of the legal case is: it's irrelevant. What I care about is that people get a fucking clue, demand good crypto from their manufacturers, and realize what a shitty job Apple did on those phones.
First, the US healthcare system is set up to run one way (or, actually, many ways). It can't just morph into a more efficient one; there will be transition costs. It's a matter of spending more temporarily in order to get a longer-term savings.
Look, you can repeat this nonsense till the cows come home and it doesn't make it true. Sanders says that he can create a public health care system that works as efficiently as the European system. If he can do that, he doesn't have to "morph" the entire US health care system, it is sufficient if he "morphs" the US public system. The fact that I have private insurance doesn't make the public system any more inefficient or expensive, and forcing me to pay more for my private health coverage won't make the US public system any more efficient either.
If you were to propose a hundred-billion-euro measure in Germany that would wind up saving twenty billion euros a year, you wouldn't be laughed at.
Germany has a budget surplus and is paying down its debt. No, Germans do not believe in such voodoo economics.
I have a relative who's in six-figure medical debt that she's never going to be able to repay, and that doesn't happen with most health care systems.
That means she chose not to pay for sufficient catastrophic health insurance coverage, while at the same time choosing an expensive medical treatment. You're right: that doesn't happen in some medical systems; they'll simply refuse the treatment instead.
Third, what drives people and companies into bankruptcy isn't well-chosen investments. Neglecting to spend money as needed to get into a better position is more likely to cause bankruptcy.
When people use terms like "investment" with respect to social spending they use it as metaphor for "investment in our future", but it isn't actually an "investment".
Okay... how does Apple build a phone they can't break into, but is capable of updates and bug fixes?
Easy: the contents of the phone are encrypted with a long random key that is stored securely in a crypto processor. The crypto processor also checks your pin for unlocking. If you make too many pin entry attempts, the crypto processor erases the key internally, rendering the data on the phone irretrievable. There is no way to reset the pin entry count that's kept inside the crypto processor without actually giving the correct pin. Updates to the phone OS software don't affect the crypto processor or its built in firmware.
The iPhone 5c already has a crypto processor, but the design isn't entirely secure. But it is easy to make cheap and secure designs instead; lots of smart cards, SIM cards, and phones have demonstrated that.
Apple has already designed iOS to be not decryptable
That's simply false. Apple has code signing for OS updates plus insecure cryptographic hardware.
Instead, it is trying to compel Apple to write the software for it, knowing that this would make it easier to break into other such devices in the future
Again, that is also false. There is no reason to believe that such software would work for other devices.
and to establish an exception to the Thirteenth Amendment as precedent. Apple disagrees with this legal maneuver.
That is utter and complete bullshit. You do have "perform labor" when a court orders you to do so as part of a subpoena; that is not "forced labor" any more than being called up for military duty is "forced labor". A court may find that the FBI's request is an "undue burden", but such a finding has nothing to do with the 13A.
Courts do not have unlimited authority. Apple is claiming that this oversteps the bounds of legal court orders.
Yes, but that is an "undue burden" argument, not a "forced labor" argument; Applehu Akbar's argument was bullshit. Apple's argument may or may not be valid.
Apple is capable of making this tool because it has intimate knowledge of the security features and OS involved, and has the signing keys. Nobody else can perform this particular attack, so if Apple can manage to avoid it it's not a practical security vulnerability
Sorry, that's just silly. Figuring out where the unlock count is kept in RAM is a moderate amount of work, but it isn't rocket science. Furthermore, an attacker with access to the hardware doesn't need code signing, they can simply change the location in RAM directly. Finally, it is rather naive to think that Apple's source code and code signing keys haven't already been obtained by the NSA and foreign intelligence agencies.
The reason the FBI got a court order is because was the simplest thing to do and because this isn't a high priority to them anyway, not because the phone is secure against attacks.
Since Apple is objecting on the grounds that they don't want to write the software, it's a reasonable presumption that they haven't written it already.
No, that's not a reasonable presumption. If Apple had already written this software on the order of the US government or some foreign government, they could not, and would not want to, admit that they had already done so.
But in this instance, if the FBI is able to convince courts that forced labor is a valid tactic to use in a terror investigation, it already has nine new cases (more according to some sources) for which it wants Apple to be forced to write custom crack code in hopes of solving.
This is no different from anybody else having to comply with a court order: it can be costly and the penalties for non-compliance can be harsh. This is nothing new.
As long as they can break into the phones they produce, courts can order them to do so (some courts may order reimbursement of their expenses). If Apple wants to avoid such cases in the future, they should design phones that they themselves cannot break into. That is entirely legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody here did the math; look it up.
You'd still only have about 2m2 capturing energy; the number I gave was an upper bound.
Because solar cells aren't free, and spending thousands of dollars on generating miniscule amounts of energy isn't worth it.
Well, you talk to the wrong people. And "non-lefties" are overwhelmingly not "right wingers". Finally, the views of Republican politicians are certainly not representative of "non-left wingers".
Since the PA severance tax is for removal of natural resources from public lands and set through political processes, there is no free market or invisible hand involved in this price setting at all. Without a market, nobody can tell whether the payments by the gas industry are a subsidy or not. The solution is to auction off the drilling and resource recovery rights.
Yes, that is another problem with the lack of a free market and government taxation: it means that people end up drilling like crazy, instead of treating the natural resources as an investment in the future.
It's basic physics: inverse square law and power to weight ratios. You can power non-propulsive electronics within the inner solar system if you can keep aiming at the sun, but they become increasingly useless the further out you go. And for propulsion, the only realistic options for manned and most robotic missions are chemical, fission, fusion, or antimatter.
Think this through. Do you really want federal prosecutors to be able to decide who to put in jail for talking about the past legal troubles of people like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Jesse Jackson, Lewis Libby, or any of the other shady political characters we have? How do you think a Trump or Clinton administration would use such powers?
Furthermore, if a company screws up and discloses harmful or private information about you, you can sue for damages. When the government gets its lists wrong (and it will), you can do nothing about it. Inclusion and exclusion on governmental lists, prosecution and failure to prosecute, simply become tools of oppression and control. "We the people" are far more represented by private associations than we are represented by government.
Yes, all things being equal, it would be nice if people who have rehabilitated themselves and could now be peaceful and productive members of society could get a fresh start. Maybe there is a way to do that by giving everybody the ability to change identities more easily. But trying to accomplish this by legally restricting what private individuals can say (and that includes the case where they have formed corporations) is wrong and dangerous.
You really do have trouble understanding the classical liberal concept of free speech, don't you? There is no point in arguing with an idiot.
Hence, my use of the subjunctive: "if the court fails to compel Apple's cooperation, the court could..."
English: try learning it.
A gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh and lasts you about an hour. Solar power is about 1000W/m2 and the efficiency of these cells is less than 5%, meaning you get maybe 50W/m2 under ideal conditions. Let's say your car roof is 2 m2. If you do the math, that means such a solar roof panel would give you at most 0.2% of the power you get from gasoline, under ideal solar conditions.
Space craft certainly should use non renewable energy, namely deuterium, uranium, and thorium. We're not ever going to get much of a space program with solar cells.
Actually, all us evil non lefties object to is subsidies for green energy, just like we object to subsidies for fossil fuel extraction.
Newspapers aren't a "commercial service"? What planet are you from? Newspapers and media companies are massive commercial entities that are trying to squeeze every penny of revenue out of their data.
AFAIK, there is no useful Google API for searching for credit-related information on Google. There definitely are several commercial services that let you search newspaper archives. So, by your reasoning, Google should be allowed to continue to provide this information, while newspapers should be forced to remove it from their archives.
Yes, the court could compel Apple to share their current iOS source code and their current iOS signing keys; nothing needs to be made up.
Government-maintained sex offender registries should be abolished. But if private web sites keep such information, they should have a right to.
"oh_my" claimed that the government cannot compel speech; I corrected him and pointed out that it can, and that it does so all the time. Nowhere did I say that that the government was limited to compelling speech. In fact, court orders can compel both speech and other actions.
In any case, the government could easily retreat to simply demanding that Apple disclose the iOS source code and the code signing key to the FBI. And if not the US government, other governments can and have done that. The Russian spy agency obtained Microsoft's Windows source code that way, for example.
Instead of draconian measures to limit online freedom of speech, Europe and Asia should make it much easier for people to change their name and possibly even get a new government ID number. That way, the "unnamed person" can change his name (and possibly even gender) to, say, "Fukuyo Hada" and not suffer the indignities of his/her criminal history.
For such court orders, you have to answer the question, invoke the 5A, or face a contempt of court charge. The only other way out is to claim that compliance would be an "undue burden", which is what Apple is attempting.
The government can compel many people to speak. It simply can't compel you to self-incriminate. How does demanding Apple's encryption keys (even if the government were doing that) amount to "self-incrimination"?
Yes, and if you bothered to read my response, you'd understand why I argue that the analogy that the lawyer is trying to make doesn't work.
Indeed it is. Too bad you are incapable of it.
That is a bizarre argument. Sure, code can be speech. But compelling people to speak is probably the primary function of court orders. If code were just speech, it is hard to see why the FBI shouldn't be able to compel Apple to speak to them and give them the signing keys and the source code. In fact, the only real objection to such court orders is that they may be an "undue burden".
No, it's not easy, it's a lot of work: without Apple's help, they need to get a hardware debugger, a couple of people able to use it, a couple of old iPhones with the same software version, and then try to identify the location where the unlock count is kept/updated. Then they need to take the target 5c and change the unlock count in hardware.
I think the NSA could do it easily: they probably have both Apple's source code and their keys.
I seriously doubt any of that was the FBI's intention. They had a phone from a mass murderer and wanted help getting at the data, that's all. This isn't even a privacy issue because the shooter didn't even own the phone, it is a government issued phone.
But the real issue here isn't the FBI's intention, it's the fact that Apple is presenting itself as a white knight protecting our liberty and the Constitution, when the simple fact is that their phones are not as secure as they could or should be, and that the kind of legal protection Apple is asking for is useless: it may stop the FBI, it won't stop the NSA or foreign governments. I really don't care what the outcome of the legal case is: it's irrelevant. What I care about is that people get a fucking clue, demand good crypto from their manufacturers, and realize what a shitty job Apple did on those phones.
Look, you can repeat this nonsense till the cows come home and it doesn't make it true. Sanders says that he can create a public health care system that works as efficiently as the European system. If he can do that, he doesn't have to "morph" the entire US health care system, it is sufficient if he "morphs" the US public system. The fact that I have private insurance doesn't make the public system any more inefficient or expensive, and forcing me to pay more for my private health coverage won't make the US public system any more efficient either.
Germany has a budget surplus and is paying down its debt. No, Germans do not believe in such voodoo economics.
That means she chose not to pay for sufficient catastrophic health insurance coverage, while at the same time choosing an expensive medical treatment. You're right: that doesn't happen in some medical systems; they'll simply refuse the treatment instead.
When people use terms like "investment" with respect to social spending they use it as metaphor for "investment in our future", but it isn't actually an "investment".
Easy: the contents of the phone are encrypted with a long random key that is stored securely in a crypto processor. The crypto processor also checks your pin for unlocking. If you make too many pin entry attempts, the crypto processor erases the key internally, rendering the data on the phone irretrievable. There is no way to reset the pin entry count that's kept inside the crypto processor without actually giving the correct pin. Updates to the phone OS software don't affect the crypto processor or its built in firmware.
The iPhone 5c already has a crypto processor, but the design isn't entirely secure. But it is easy to make cheap and secure designs instead; lots of smart cards, SIM cards, and phones have demonstrated that.
That's simply false. Apple has code signing for OS updates plus insecure cryptographic hardware.
Again, that is also false. There is no reason to believe that such software would work for other devices.
That is utter and complete bullshit. You do have "perform labor" when a court orders you to do so as part of a subpoena; that is not "forced labor" any more than being called up for military duty is "forced labor". A court may find that the FBI's request is an "undue burden", but such a finding has nothing to do with the 13A.
Yes, but that is an "undue burden" argument, not a "forced labor" argument; Applehu Akbar's argument was bullshit. Apple's argument may or may not be valid.
Sorry, that's just silly. Figuring out where the unlock count is kept in RAM is a moderate amount of work, but it isn't rocket science. Furthermore, an attacker with access to the hardware doesn't need code signing, they can simply change the location in RAM directly. Finally, it is rather naive to think that Apple's source code and code signing keys haven't already been obtained by the NSA and foreign intelligence agencies.
The reason the FBI got a court order is because was the simplest thing to do and because this isn't a high priority to them anyway, not because the phone is secure against attacks.
No, that's not a reasonable presumption. If Apple had already written this software on the order of the US government or some foreign government, they could not, and would not want to, admit that they had already done so.
You're a bloody fool
This is no different from anybody else having to comply with a court order: it can be costly and the penalties for non-compliance can be harsh. This is nothing new.
As long as they can break into the phones they produce, courts can order them to do so (some courts may order reimbursement of their expenses). If Apple wants to avoid such cases in the future, they should design phones that they themselves cannot break into. That is entirely legal.