4. you have lots of weapon's grade plutonium. [...] So while there may be some efficiencies with recycling the fuel the security concerns, especially in this day and age, perhaps out weigh any benefit.
This was Jimmy Carter's argument... and why he signed the executive order.
It did not stop South Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is an ineffective measure, and not worth the cost of having to let nuclear waste pile up just so it doesn't end up being reprocessed.
Your problem is UTM; but if you really care... pay Amazon a couple hundred $, spin up 100,000 instances for a really short time, and push them a couple of million dollars into bandwidth debt, and they won't bother you again.
Alternately, buy something other than UTM, which filters before the alerts, instead of after.
Well then, in that sense, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is just a clone of a Nazi Germany's V-2 technology.
Just. The. Same.
I suppose you're right... in the same sense the Golden Gate Bridge is just the same as a child's erector set. The V-2 technology was impressive for it's time, but to be honest, it wasn't even a very good weapons system, let alone capable of being used as an ICBM or being capable of putting things in orbit.
You might have an argument for comparing Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic... those guys can't put things in orbit, just like the Germans couldn't (and still can't, actually).
Linux is a complete re-write and many of the contributors live overseas.
This is an irrelevant side conversation. SpaceX's use of Linux is tactical, not strategic, and they could just as easily used many other OS's in place of Linux, so long as they were capable of getting the job done.
Since most of the time is spent in user space running the applications they need the platform to run, and not in the system calls, it's really quite irrelevant what software platform is implementing those system calls, just like the speed, overhead, or number of system calls a second, and other benchmarks on which Linux prides itself, are largely irrelevant.
Apple isn't a prime actor, but is a beneficiary. The Chinese phone makers are afraid to sell outside China.
The primary reason there is that Qualcomm will sue their ass off for using CDMA technology without paying the license fee.
The secondary reason is that the FCC, in cooperation with the telephone carriers, will rip them a new asshole over not having certified their radios with the FCC, or their phones with the carrier networks.
It's generally not Apple that they're afraid of at all; they just don't want to spend their money getting the certification, since that would raise their marginal cost to sell into the U.S., and once certified, there's nothing to stop some other Chinese company from cloning the equipment, and beating them on amortized margin.
This is the same reason FTDI intentionally screwed up the Linux and Windows drivers, to not work with clones of FTDI USB to serial chips.
That'd be true, so long as the US doesn't spend trillions of dollars influencing global policy and laws, and making stronger IP laws that benefit them. When the US government spends billions to ensure Apple profits, why wouldn't Apple owe on that service?
Apple is a beneficiary of this, but the IP laws the U.S. foists off on other countries have a lot more to do with pharmaceutical company profits and Hollywood/MPAA and music industry/RIAA profits than Apple profits.
They are not U.S. profits. The U.S. has no right to tax them uuntil and unless Apple does something stupid, and converts them into U.S. profits.
Is there anything Apple could spend that money on in the U.S.?
It's not like they are going to build factories in the U.S. and raise their costs of production by complying with U.S. environmental laws, or hiring more expensive U.S. workers.
Even if they did bring it back to the U.S. as profits, and offset the environmental costs by subtracting out the shipping costs in exchange: you aren't going to get U.S. jobs out of it: those tasks will be automated. Sorry, blue collar workers: no paycheck for you!
Like Steve Jobs told Obama in Feb 2011, when Obama asked what it would take to manufacture Apple products in the U.S. ("Why can’t that work come home?") -- the answer is: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Others agree. On 23 Jan 2015:
“Our economy is in deep trouble,” said billionaire and self-professed American Dream-liver Jeff Greene in an interview yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We’ve had a realistic level of job destruction, and those jobs aren’t coming back.”
So other than funding the U.S. government with a bunch of money so they can bomb more Muslims and make them even more pissed off at the U.S. (is that even fricking possible?!?), there's no good reason to convert it to a dividend from the subsidiary, paid to the U.S. Apple headquarters (which is, from an accounting perspective, how it would have to be handled).
(Full disclosure: I own a diesel Passat. Great car so far. 50 MPG on the freeway now, I'm anticipating 45 once they adjust the software.)
This really smacks of a conspiracy theory. I strongly suspect CARB really is trying to carry out its charter to reduce California air pollution. If I had to guess, they'd prefer to outlaw trucks and trains, not diesel cars, but they can't because it would cause too much economic damage
You are forgiven your youth. This article from the 24 Oct 2002 Wall Street Journal explains the California issue:
As to the relative amount: diesel fuel tends to be produced as a byproduct of gasoline production, in that anything not convertible to other things is either diesel or waste. The California refineries are controlled by 3 companies, but it's ~90% Chevron -- the same company who lobbies for the reformulation legislation in California (i.e. "The Great Guys Who Brought You MTBE!(tm)"), and therefore there is not gasoline importation into California; by that same token, there is not diesel importation into California, since there is diesel there.
The way the money gets jerked out of your wallet is by controlling the refined supply -- which is why gas prices in California have not dropped, as they have everywhere else in the U.S., proportionally to the drop in the price of crude oil. To do that with diesel -- and keep the diesel prices high -- they just need to control how much is refined, so that they can make the same amount of money per passenger car mile from diesel as they make from gasoline.
Note that Tesoro and others have been fined over this several times, but since the fines never reach the level of the windfall profits (let's go back to the 1974 "energy crisis" which caused the national 55 MPH speed limit to be put in place on 2 Jan 1974: "Up like a rocket, down like a feather").
California instituting a tax on windfall profits would be a good thing... just saying...
What a dumb ass way to go about it. Plant a colony somewhere that looks like a good spot, and then let the colonists do the exploration when they are not busy reading Slashdot or playing on their X Box.
Lewis and Clark didn't do their thing until we already had colonies on the continent.
Why do we have to map the whole damn place down to the millimeter before we send people there? To employ a few roboticists? I'd rather have colonists there than a few employed roboticists on Earth.
Religion is one of those funny things that will crop up anyway, regardless of whether or not the colonists bring it with them.
Just start with the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
If it's the official religion of Mars, then the people who start to get fanatical about it will drill holes in the helmets to obtain the colander hats, go out side, and "Blort!", their eyes bug out of their heads like Schwartzenegger in Total Recall, and the problem takes care of itself!
For years the EPA and other interested parties have deluded the public into thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. We can drive cars as much as we want. And it's clean! In fact cars always will be about trade-offs. Risk and benefits. And nevermind net CO2, which isn't even part of this.
This is not precisely what happened.
The emissions requirements on vehicles are strongly tied to what we are and are not able to easily and economically test. If it's hard to test something, it doesn't get tested, it gets ignored. What happened is that we became better able to test diesel emissions to a high granularity, and so we tested them to that granularity.
This same thing happens in reactive software testing. You build a product iteratively, and as you discover bugs, you write tests for those bugs, and then you verify that the software passes that test as a result of some bug fix, and as long as it keeps passing that test on each iteration, you declare it good software. The theory being that you can arrive at (or asymptotically approach) some ideal that approximates the set of tests you would have arrived at had you written your tests from the design document in the first place.
When we became better able to test diesel emissions, CARB started ratcheting down the emissions diesels were allowed to have based on their ability to test; this is the "less is better" theory, without providing a correlation to visible emissions or health effects from emissions, visible or not (this is the "any emissions more than zero are bad" theory).
This was also not an issue until they started turning the ratchet; the rate at which they turned the ratchet was higher than the rate at which technology to reduce emissions was advancing.
Sure, there are a small minority of systems that are capable of keeping up with the ability to test these specific emissions; but this is not by design on the part of the vendors, this is based solely on luck: the emissions they have are not the emissions for which we are able to test easily and economically. In other words, these other vendors don't actually have overall "cleaner" vehicles, what they have is a different set of emissions for which testing is currently difficult.
Time to follow the money...
Do we require freight haulers to meet these emissions standards? Specifically, do we require freight hauling trucks, and diesel electric trains to meet these emissions standards? No; doing so would cripple the economy.
OK...
Why passenger vehicles, but not these other vehicles? The answer is that passenger vehicles utilizing diesel fuel make less diesel fuel available for trains and trucks. The intent of these vehicles was to take advantage of the price differential in diesel vs. gasoline pricing, in order to cause cars to be cheaper to operate. In doing that, they create a scarcity market for diesel fuel, and drove the price up.
So in the end, we have that CARB really doesn't care about diesel emissions, they care about passenger cars, and they care about them in two ways: they would like fewer passenger cars, period, and they would like diesel to be cheap for the freight companies. So they would like to get passenger vehicles off of using diesel fuel entirely. In fact, California had a ban, which did not stand up to legal challenge, as it violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, on importation of diesel passenger cars to California; so it's not like we can't see the hand they are playing.
Comparatively speaking, we also have the "phase-in", which on the face of it looks reasonable, but which in practice disadvantages passenger vehicles compared to other vehicles, since it doesn't apply to other vehicles, and for which there are not real, measurable justifications.
So Volkswagen hacked the law, by meeting its letter, and defeating its spirit.
Lest you think this is evil, this is precisely what H&R Block do for you, personally, when you have them do your t
The act clearly states on page 1740 that personal information needs to be removed from data that is shared. The act also states that any violation of this will require notification of the person if this is not followed.
Only information which is (A) personally identifiable, AND (B) not relevant to the investigation. Guess who decides relevance?
Meanwhile, we also know for a fact that it's rather easy to mine personal identifications out of aggregate "depersonalized" data, since there's a story on Slashdot every couple of weeks where someone has done it in order to get their Masters degree.
I believe this bill was making it's way through the legislative process and then the Eric Snowden disclosure happened.
And? The concurrency of the two unrelated things is rather irrelevant. The Snowden disclosure happened because (A) The government was engaged in illegal activity, and (B) Snowden decided to be a whistleblower.
Which would have been a protected action, were he an employee, but instead head was a 1099 contractor, like all the Uber drivers.
How many high profile network break-ins have happened since then?
Lots. They're generally not announced to the public, unless they involve credit cards or medical records.
Juniper Networks just announced yesterday a major compromise.
No, they announced a software patch for a problem that could have been used to compromised the security of VPN communications, but there's no evidence that it was ever used to do so, and some evidence that the change was made to the system by the employee of a government agency to allow them to eavesdrop on VPN conversations.
OPM was hacked and information for 20Million current and former employees and their spouses and children were compromised.
The agency should not have been keeping records on their spouses and children, since they were not employees, but even so, the compromised information was mishandled by the OPM. This was not a demonstration of skill on the part of the people who penetrated the system, it was a demonstration of incompetence on the people who were tasked with ensuring the system could not be penetrated.
This legislation has been needed for years. It is about time congress passed it.
This legislation was never needed. It's only utility is for making information collection for government agencies an unfunded mandate that has to be paid for by the companies whose systems the information is transiting.
The purpose of doing this is to make the companies adding strong privacy features to their software, particularly mobile phone and tablet software, among others, responsible for, and punishable for not, revealing said information, on demand, and without warrant.
In other words, it's an attempt to force companies to include back doors, or face fines when demands for information simply can not be accomodated to the governments satisfaction, for technological and mathematical reasons.
BTW: You have your dates wrong: the Snowden disclosure occurred in 2013; the bill was first introduced to to the Senate Intelligence Committe over a hear later, in 2013, during the 113th congress.
It's a really asinine piece of legislation. Paul Ryan (R, WI) should be removed from office over this nasty piece of crap, let alone the way he got it shoved through.
Let's see, translate "middle school" into Jr. High and High School, carry the one...
Yeah... my first year in middle school was the year I built my first CO2 laser from scratch to poke holes in an old piece of metal rain gutter. Friends had to help me carry the CO2 tank, since it was too big for one of us.
You kids are so *much* more advanced these days, with your Common Core, and marking kids off for saying
3 x 5 = 5 + 5 + 5 = 15
instead of what they're supposed to say, which is
3 x 5 = 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 15
because in your brave new world, 3 x 5 != 5 x 3, because you've done away with the commutative property of multiplication for some reason. Gotta solve the problem exactly one way, or you'll never be able to add coins to type into the cash register at Burger King when someone gives you exact change...
Gotta love a system where fricking *Vint Cerf* is not allowed to fill in for a CS teacher at a local high school "because he's not qualified to teach computer science"...
With ageism rampant in the field and large number of workers being forced out of their jobs while being insulted with the mandate to train their replacements, these actions are a slap in the face to everyone already in the field.
We don't use the words "age discrimination" in politics. If we did, we'd have to admit those people were unemployed, instead of cheery "workforce nonparticipants", and then the unemployment numbers would look bad. Honest, granted you, but bad.
With recent advances in machine learning, a large number of which have come from American universities and companies, and the amount of telemetry data available via mobile phones, America has a golden opportunity to lead the world in automatically personalized fart apps.
Personally, what I'm looking forward to is the ability to bring up an app, fart into my phone, and have it tell me what I need to buy the next time I go to the store to replace what I used to cook dinner. If I just ate at a restaurant, it should also know that because of the phone's GPS, and in addition to adding to my shopping list, it should email me the recipe. Now *that's* a fart app!
None of this security theater matters. All someone has to to is bring a bomb vest to the entry line at CES and wait for it to be super crowded at the detector and then detonate while in the middle of the yet-to-be-screened crowd.
...
I actually think it rather depends on the point they are attempting to make.
If their point was simply "you are not safe", then yes, such attacks would make sense, and we'd have more attacks like the Boston Marathon bombings.
If their point was retaliation for things like the drone strike which killed "Jihadi John", then we'd see more like the San Bernardino and Paris attacks.
If their point was "your government has put security in place, yet they can not protect you", then we'd see more attacks like 9/11 and the London Underground bombings.
If their intent was to crash the U.S. economy, there are a number of ways that could be easily achieved. If it were to crash the U.S. and European economies, there's a number of ways that could be achieved as well. It's pretty clear that there are several factors in play, and it's pretty clear there are several factors and directions occurring simultaneously.
An attack intentionally perpetrated through existing security, such as 9/11-style attacks, are clearly intent on government destabilization. This is a tactic frequently used by fanatics, who believe that the people will rise up against their government, "if only they can be shown the truth!". One definition of a fanatics is "someone who does what God would do in the same situation, if only God were aware of all the facts". If your experience is with weakly coherent coalitions of competing factions, then you tend to believe that everyone is like that, and you perpetrate these types of attacks, in the hopes that you will show your enemy the error of their ways. Obviously, this is not something that works on strong coalitions, and even less so on homogeneous systems with built in damping mechanisms, such as democracies.
An attack perpetrated for vengeance is a knee-jerk reaction. It's understandable, but it's knee-jerk. "Jihadi John" started with the beheadings, primarily as a propaganda move; the decapitation of the propaganda machine that represented by the drone strike which killed him; the retaliation on Paris, which was close by and with assets in place; the massive increase in bombings of ISIS targets in retaliation for Paris; the shootings in San Bernardino in retaliation for the bombings, to show that the reach was not limited, coupled with a statement to that effect. All action and reaction. It may or may not be counter to the overall strategy, but it tends to be a chain with a limited number of links, and is not overall disruptive of anything but timelines, particularly if they use up assets you had planned to use on something else.
An attack perpetrated for chaos sake is done by well-wishers of the terrorists, without an understanding of the underlying motivations for their acts, and thus of their strategy behind them. These are the crowd bombings, and the message "you are not safe" contradicts the message "your government has put security in place, yet they can not protect you". If no one can protect you, then certainly you can not blame the government, and even if further acts are perpetrated through security systems, which we all largely recognize as being theatrical in nature, the population is immunized against blaming the government. This is actually counter to the goals of the highly organized attacks, and undermines their organizations.
I don't think the point is general chaos, I think it's regime destabilization; and while I don't think it will work, it's pretty clearly the intended effect.
To that end, actually one of the worst possible things we could do, in order to put their plan "back on track" is to set up a situation whereby (A) the government makes a public promise of protection, and (B) fails to be able to keep that promise, in a rather big way. I put the finger
You can set yourself up with an amazing booth, including pamphlets, a fake company that's been around for 6 months, and a whole bunch of backstory, etc., etc., for about $150,000 (actual booth rental is only about $20K-$30K, the rest is just window dressing).
And at that price it includes paying the union guys to haul in your bombs for you from the truck, and more union guys to plug it in for you, in case you don't know how plugs work.
Long in the tooth?? WTF is that supposed to be? You mean mature, right?
Version number penis envy.
If he wants to increment his version number, I can tell him how to do it with UNIX command line tools... basically, a couple of dd's, and a command line printf, plus cat, will do the trick...
Slashdot Mirror
4. you have lots of weapon's grade plutonium. [...] So while there may be some efficiencies with recycling the fuel the security concerns, especially in this day and age, perhaps out weigh any benefit.
This was Jimmy Carter's argument... and why he signed the executive order.
It did not stop South Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is an ineffective measure, and not worth the cost of having to let nuclear waste pile up just so it doesn't end up being reprocessed.
Your problem is UTM; but if you really care... pay Amazon a couple hundred $, spin up 100,000 instances for a really short time, and push them a couple of million dollars into bandwidth debt, and they won't bother you again.
Alternately, buy something other than UTM, which filters before the alerts, instead of after.
Well then, in that sense, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is just a clone of a Nazi Germany's V-2 technology.
Just. The. Same.
I suppose you're right ... in the same sense the Golden Gate Bridge is just the same as a child's erector set. The V-2 technology was impressive for it's time, but to be honest, it wasn't even a very good weapons system, let alone capable of being used as an ICBM or being capable of putting things in orbit.
You might have an argument for comparing Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic... those guys can't put things in orbit, just like the Germans couldn't (and still can't, actually).
Linux is a complete re-write and many of the contributors live overseas.
This is an irrelevant side conversation. SpaceX's use of Linux is tactical, not strategic, and they could just as easily used many other OS's in place of Linux, so long as they were capable of getting the job done.
Since most of the time is spent in user space running the applications they need the platform to run, and not in the system calls, it's really quite irrelevant what software platform is implementing those system calls, just like the speed, overhead, or number of system calls a second, and other benchmarks on which Linux prides itself, are largely irrelevant.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
I'm French. I tend to make mistakes like that. Thanks for the correction. Very appreciated.
Which means you are probably better at cooking with morel than I am... ;^)
Apple isn't a prime actor, but is a beneficiary. The Chinese phone makers are afraid to sell outside China.
The primary reason there is that Qualcomm will sue their ass off for using CDMA technology without paying the license fee.
The secondary reason is that the FCC, in cooperation with the telephone carriers, will rip them a new asshole over not having certified their radios with the FCC, or their phones with the carrier networks.
It's generally not Apple that they're afraid of at all; they just don't want to spend their money getting the certification, since that would raise their marginal cost to sell into the U.S., and once certified, there's nothing to stop some other Chinese company from cloning the equipment, and beating them on amortized margin.
This is the same reason FTDI intentionally screwed up the Linux and Windows drivers, to not work with clones of FTDI USB to serial chips.
Because China is a morale compass for all of us to follow.
Funny "morale" vs. "moral"...
While they are *certainly* a bad *moral* compass, it would certainly improve my *morale* if idiots like this were shot...
They are not U.S. profits.
That'd be true, so long as the US doesn't spend trillions of dollars influencing global policy and laws, and making stronger IP laws that benefit them. When the US government spends billions to ensure Apple profits, why wouldn't Apple owe on that service?
Apple is a beneficiary of this, but the IP laws the U.S. foists off on other countries have a lot more to do with pharmaceutical company profits and Hollywood/MPAA and music industry/RIAA profits than Apple profits.
Things could be a lot worse.
Consider that the headline might read "Microsoft Fails Windows Phone Fans Again By Releasing Windows 10 Mobile"...
If Paul Vixie and Vint Cerf weren't there... I pass.
They are not U.S. profits. The U.S. has no right to tax them uuntil and unless Apple does something stupid, and converts them into U.S. profits.
Is there anything Apple could spend that money on in the U.S.?
It's not like they are going to build factories in the U.S. and raise their costs of production by complying with U.S. environmental laws, or hiring more expensive U.S. workers.
Even if they did bring it back to the U.S. as profits, and offset the environmental costs by subtracting out the shipping costs in exchange: you aren't going to get U.S. jobs out of it: those tasks will be automated. Sorry, blue collar workers: no paycheck for you!
Like Steve Jobs told Obama in Feb 2011, when Obama asked what it would take to manufacture Apple products in the U.S. ("Why can’t that work come home?") -- the answer is: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Others agree. On 23 Jan 2015:
“Our economy is in deep trouble,” said billionaire and self-professed American Dream-liver Jeff Greene in an interview yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We’ve had a realistic level of job destruction, and those jobs aren’t coming back.”
So other than funding the U.S. government with a bunch of money so they can bomb more Muslims and make them even more pissed off at the U.S. (is that even fricking possible?!?), there's no good reason to convert it to a dividend from the subsidiary, paid to the U.S. Apple headquarters (which is, from an accounting perspective, how it would have to be handled).
(Full disclosure: I own a diesel Passat. Great car so far. 50 MPG on the freeway now, I'm anticipating 45 once they adjust the software.)
This really smacks of a conspiracy theory. I strongly suspect CARB really is trying to carry out its charter to reduce California air pollution. If I had to guess, they'd prefer to outlaw trucks and trains, not diesel cars, but they can't because it would cause too much economic damage
You are forgiven your youth. This article from the 24 Oct 2002 Wall Street Journal explains the California issue:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
As to the relative amount: diesel fuel tends to be produced as a byproduct of gasoline production, in that anything not convertible to other things is either diesel or waste. The California refineries are controlled by 3 companies, but it's ~90% Chevron -- the same company who lobbies for the reformulation legislation in California (i.e. "The Great Guys Who Brought You MTBE!(tm)"), and therefore there is not gasoline importation into California; by that same token, there is not diesel importation into California, since there is diesel there.
The way the money gets jerked out of your wallet is by controlling the refined supply -- which is why gas prices in California have not dropped, as they have everywhere else in the U.S., proportionally to the drop in the price of crude oil. To do that with diesel -- and keep the diesel prices high -- they just need to control how much is refined, so that they can make the same amount of money per passenger car mile from diesel as they make from gasoline.
Note that Tesoro and others have been fined over this several times, but since the fines never reach the level of the windfall profits (let's go back to the 1974 "energy crisis" which caused the national 55 MPH speed limit to be put in place on 2 Jan 1974: "Up like a rocket, down like a feather").
California instituting a tax on windfall profits would be a good thing... just saying...
"starting to ramp up our Mars exploration plans"
What a dumb ass way to go about it. Plant a colony somewhere that looks like a good spot, and then let the colonists do the exploration when they are not busy reading Slashdot or playing on their X Box.
Lewis and Clark didn't do their thing until we already had colonies on the continent.
Why do we have to map the whole damn place down to the millimeter before we send people there? To employ a few roboticists? I'd rather have colonists there than a few employed roboticists on Earth.
Religion is one of those funny things that will crop up anyway, regardless of whether or not the colonists bring it with them.
Just start with the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
If it's the official religion of Mars, then the people who start to get fanatical about it will drill holes in the helmets to obtain the colander hats, go out side, and "Blort!", their eyes bug out of their heads like Schwartzenegger in Total Recall, and the problem takes care of itself!
For years the EPA and other interested parties have deluded the public into thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. We can drive cars as much as we want. And it's clean! In fact cars always will be about trade-offs. Risk and benefits. And nevermind net CO2, which isn't even part of this.
This is not precisely what happened.
The emissions requirements on vehicles are strongly tied to what we are and are not able to easily and economically test. If it's hard to test something, it doesn't get tested, it gets ignored. What happened is that we became better able to test diesel emissions to a high granularity, and so we tested them to that granularity.
This same thing happens in reactive software testing. You build a product iteratively, and as you discover bugs, you write tests for those bugs, and then you verify that the software passes that test as a result of some bug fix, and as long as it keeps passing that test on each iteration, you declare it good software. The theory being that you can arrive at (or asymptotically approach) some ideal that approximates the set of tests you would have arrived at had you written your tests from the design document in the first place.
When we became better able to test diesel emissions, CARB started ratcheting down the emissions diesels were allowed to have based on their ability to test; this is the "less is better" theory, without providing a correlation to visible emissions or health effects from emissions, visible or not (this is the "any emissions more than zero are bad" theory).
This was also not an issue until they started turning the ratchet; the rate at which they turned the ratchet was higher than the rate at which technology to reduce emissions was advancing.
Sure, there are a small minority of systems that are capable of keeping up with the ability to test these specific emissions; but this is not by design on the part of the vendors, this is based solely on luck: the emissions they have are not the emissions for which we are able to test easily and economically. In other words, these other vendors don't actually have overall "cleaner" vehicles, what they have is a different set of emissions for which testing is currently difficult.
Time to follow the money...
Do we require freight haulers to meet these emissions standards? Specifically, do we require freight hauling trucks, and diesel electric trains to meet these emissions standards? No; doing so would cripple the economy.
OK...
Why passenger vehicles, but not these other vehicles? The answer is that passenger vehicles utilizing diesel fuel make less diesel fuel available for trains and trucks. The intent of these vehicles was to take advantage of the price differential in diesel vs. gasoline pricing, in order to cause cars to be cheaper to operate. In doing that, they create a scarcity market for diesel fuel, and drove the price up.
So in the end, we have that CARB really doesn't care about diesel emissions, they care about passenger cars, and they care about them in two ways: they would like fewer passenger cars, period, and they would like diesel to be cheap for the freight companies. So they would like to get passenger vehicles off of using diesel fuel entirely. In fact, California had a ban, which did not stand up to legal challenge, as it violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, on importation of diesel passenger cars to California; so it's not like we can't see the hand they are playing.
Comparatively speaking, we also have the "phase-in", which on the face of it looks reasonable, but which in practice disadvantages passenger vehicles compared to other vehicles, since it doesn't apply to other vehicles, and for which there are not real, measurable justifications.
So Volkswagen hacked the law, by meeting its letter, and defeating its spirit.
Lest you think this is evil, this is precisely what H&R Block do for you, personally, when you have them do your t
The act clearly states on page 1740 that personal information needs to be removed from data that is shared. The act also states that any violation of this will require notification of the person if this is not followed.
Only information which is (A) personally identifiable, AND (B) not relevant to the investigation. Guess who decides relevance?
Meanwhile, we also know for a fact that it's rather easy to mine personal identifications out of aggregate "depersonalized" data, since there's a story on Slashdot every couple of weeks where someone has done it in order to get their Masters degree.
I believe this bill was making it's way through the legislative process and then the Eric Snowden disclosure happened.
And? The concurrency of the two unrelated things is rather irrelevant. The Snowden disclosure happened because (A) The government was engaged in illegal activity, and (B) Snowden decided to be a whistleblower.
Which would have been a protected action, were he an employee, but instead head was a 1099 contractor, like all the Uber drivers.
How many high profile network break-ins have happened since then?
Lots. They're generally not announced to the public, unless they involve credit cards or medical records.
Juniper Networks just announced yesterday a major compromise.
No, they announced a software patch for a problem that could have been used to compromised the security of VPN communications, but there's no evidence that it was ever used to do so, and some evidence that the change was made to the system by the employee of a government agency to allow them to eavesdrop on VPN conversations.
OPM was hacked and information for 20Million current and former employees and their spouses and children were compromised.
The agency should not have been keeping records on their spouses and children, since they were not employees, but even so, the compromised information was mishandled by the OPM. This was not a demonstration of skill on the part of the people who penetrated the system, it was a demonstration of incompetence on the people who were tasked with ensuring the system could not be penetrated.
This legislation has been needed for years. It is about time congress passed it.
This legislation was never needed. It's only utility is for making information collection for government agencies an unfunded mandate that has to be paid for by the companies whose systems the information is transiting.
The purpose of doing this is to make the companies adding strong privacy features to their software, particularly mobile phone and tablet software, among others, responsible for, and punishable for not, revealing said information, on demand, and without warrant.
In other words, it's an attempt to force companies to include back doors, or face fines when demands for information simply can not be accomodated to the governments satisfaction, for technological and mathematical reasons.
BTW: You have your dates wrong: the Snowden disclosure occurred in 2013; the bill was first introduced to to the Senate Intelligence Committe over a hear later, in 2013, during the 113th congress.
It's a really asinine piece of legislation. Paul Ryan (R, WI) should be removed from office over this nasty piece of crap, let alone the way he got it shoved through.
keep it simple, after all, it is a middle school
How cute.
Let's see, translate "middle school" into Jr. High and High School, carry the one...
Yeah... my first year in middle school was the year I built my first CO2 laser from scratch to poke holes in an old piece of metal rain gutter. Friends had to help me carry the CO2 tank, since it was too big for one of us.
You kids are so *much* more advanced these days, with your Common Core, and marking kids off for saying
3 x 5 = 5 + 5 + 5 = 15
instead of what they're supposed to say, which is
3 x 5 = 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 15
because in your brave new world, 3 x 5 != 5 x 3, because you've done away with the commutative property of multiplication for some reason. Gotta solve the problem exactly one way, or you'll never be able to add coins to type into the cash register at Burger King when someone gives you exact change...
Gotta love a system where fricking *Vint Cerf* is not allowed to fill in for a CS teacher at a local high school "because he's not qualified to teach computer science"...
How's that whole ConnectED thing working out?
We've all got high speed broadband with no data caps in all our houses for our students to use, right?
With ageism rampant in the field and large number of workers being forced out of their jobs while being insulted with the mandate to train their replacements, these actions are a slap in the face to everyone already in the field.
We don't use the words "age discrimination" in politics. If we did, we'd have to admit those people were unemployed, instead of cheery "workforce nonparticipants", and then the unemployment numbers would look bad. Honest, granted you, but bad.
With recent advances in machine learning, a large number of which have come from American universities and companies, and the amount of telemetry data available via mobile phones, America has a golden opportunity to lead the world in automatically personalized fart apps.
Personally, what I'm looking forward to is the ability to bring up an app, fart into my phone, and have it tell me what I need to buy the next time I go to the store to replace what I used to cook dinner. If I just ate at a restaurant, it should also know that because of the phone's GPS, and in addition to adding to my shopping list, it should email me the recipe. Now *that's* a fart app!
None of this security theater matters. All someone has to to is bring a bomb vest to the entry line at CES and wait for it to be super crowded at the detector and then detonate while in the middle of the yet-to-be-screened crowd.
...
I actually think it rather depends on the point they are attempting to make.
If their point was simply "you are not safe", then yes, such attacks would make sense, and we'd have more attacks like the Boston Marathon bombings.
If their point was retaliation for things like the drone strike which killed "Jihadi John", then we'd see more like the San Bernardino and Paris attacks.
If their point was "your government has put security in place, yet they can not protect you", then we'd see more attacks like 9/11 and the London Underground bombings.
If their intent was to crash the U.S. economy, there are a number of ways that could be easily achieved. If it were to crash the U.S. and European economies, there's a number of ways that could be achieved as well. It's pretty clear that there are several factors in play, and it's pretty clear there are several factors and directions occurring simultaneously.
An attack intentionally perpetrated through existing security, such as 9/11-style attacks, are clearly intent on government destabilization. This is a tactic frequently used by fanatics, who believe that the people will rise up against their government, "if only they can be shown the truth!". One definition of a fanatics is "someone who does what God would do in the same situation, if only God were aware of all the facts". If your experience is with weakly coherent coalitions of competing factions, then you tend to believe that everyone is like that, and you perpetrate these types of attacks, in the hopes that you will show your enemy the error of their ways. Obviously, this is not something that works on strong coalitions, and even less so on homogeneous systems with built in damping mechanisms, such as democracies.
An attack perpetrated for vengeance is a knee-jerk reaction. It's understandable, but it's knee-jerk. "Jihadi John" started with the beheadings, primarily as a propaganda move; the decapitation of the propaganda machine that represented by the drone strike which killed him; the retaliation on Paris, which was close by and with assets in place; the massive increase in bombings of ISIS targets in retaliation for Paris; the shootings in San Bernardino in retaliation for the bombings, to show that the reach was not limited, coupled with a statement to that effect. All action and reaction. It may or may not be counter to the overall strategy, but it tends to be a chain with a limited number of links, and is not overall disruptive of anything but timelines, particularly if they use up assets you had planned to use on something else.
An attack perpetrated for chaos sake is done by well-wishers of the terrorists, without an understanding of the underlying motivations for their acts, and thus of their strategy behind them. These are the crowd bombings, and the message "you are not safe" contradicts the message "your government has put security in place, yet they can not protect you". If no one can protect you, then certainly you can not blame the government, and even if further acts are perpetrated through security systems, which we all largely recognize as being theatrical in nature, the population is immunized against blaming the government. This is actually counter to the goals of the highly organized attacks, and undermines their organizations.
I don't think the point is general chaos, I think it's regime destabilization; and while I don't think it will work, it's pretty clearly the intended effect.
To that end, actually one of the worst possible things we could do, in order to put their plan "back on track" is to set up a situation whereby (A) the government makes a public promise of protection, and (B) fails to be able to keep that promise, in a rather big way. I put the finger
Someone should start a non profit... to manufacture and distribute stickers:
This item is not
a f*cking bomb
Seriously.
Aren't most terrorists well funded?
You can set yourself up with an amazing booth, including pamphlets, a fake company that's been around for 6 months, and a whole bunch of backstory, etc., etc., for about $150,000 (actual booth rental is only about $20K-$30K, the rest is just window dressing).
And at that price it includes paying the union guys to haul in your bombs for you from the truck, and more union guys to plug it in for you, in case you don't know how plugs work.
Security theater much?
Long in the tooth??
WTF is that supposed to be?
You mean mature, right?
Version number penis envy.
If he wants to increment his version number, I can tell him how to do it with UNIX command line tools... basically, a couple of dd's, and a command line printf, plus cat, will do the trick...