A human driver may be more likely to miss the idiot pedestrian under some circumstances. I've picked out people on the sidewalk that I somehow knew were going to dash across the street in front of me against the light.
I once interviewed for a job needing a clearance. They were forthcoming enough to tell me that there was a customer, and the customer wanted a product, and the product had software and hardware aspects. I suspect the customer was a US government agency, probably in the Defense Department, but that's unsupported speculation. They were a lot clearer on what I'd be doing (basically, source control guy and buildmaster).
I've never been able to absolutely convince myself that I'm not the biggest fool, and such things as working, spending less than I make, and letting assets accrue have done pretty well for me.
If cryptocurrencies are better for money transfers and the like, it means that the existing banking system is making money by setting prices for such services a lot above cost. It will always be less expensive for a bank to transfer numbers from one account to another (perhaps through an interbank system) than to convert dollars into a cryptocurrency, transfer that to someone in Japan, and have that person convert to yen.
I don't have to accept dollars instead of a cow. I might prefer the cow to the money. However, if you don't hand over the cow, my recourse is to sue you, and the court will very likely say that you need to pay me a certain number of dollars. Once there's a debt expressed in dollars, you can just hand me the appropriate amount in green paper and it's all settled.
If you are completely at fault in an accident that totals my car, you don't just get to pay me Blue Book value and walk away. You (or, more likely, your insurance company) need to negotiate with me, and if I hang tough I can almost certainly get more than the Blue Book value (it's cheaper for the insurance company to give me a little extra money than risk a lawsuit). If it does go to court, the court ill tell you (or the insurance company) to pay me a certain amount in dollars, and there is a debt measured in dollars.
Currently, I have stock in the 3M Corporation. It's not enough to have any effect on management. However, there are solid benefits. If the company distributes profits, I get some. If it reinvests, the stock price will probably go up (no guarantee, though). If the company were to be acquired by another, I'd get paid my share of 3M's value. In short, I have rights concerning an enterprise that is actually producing stuff and creating wealth.
If I have some cryptocurrency, it's worth precisely what someone else is willing to pay me for it, and it's value is completely intangible. If it goes out of fashion, I lose everything. I consider this to be a lot more speculative than buying stock.
It's easier to make a terrorist conviction than that. The agent provocateur spurs discussion of how to commit a terrorist act, and gets one of the group to make one innocuous act that would be part of the plan. Convict of conspiracy to commit terrorism and publicize. In one case (the agreed-on plan was shooting up Fort Knox by posing as pizza delivery people), the innocuous act was getting a publicly available map of Fort Knox.
If you play role-playing games set in the present day, make sure there aren't any covert FBI agents in the group.
iPhones are encrypted with AES-256, which is symmetric. It's impossible to brute-force it with maximally efficient quantum computers without using more resources than the Solar System contains.
There's something called "elliptical curve" asymmetric encryption, if you want to research it (I've never bothered).Of course, the NSA wanted to specify key generation to only produce ones they could break, but the appropriate body (NIST?) didn't find that acceptable. NIST legally has to consult with the NSA, not adhere to its recommendations.
I'm not up on 18th-century specifics, but for part of the 19th Century the Viginere cipher was considered unbreakable.if you didn't know the key. (Nowadays, it's usually trivial to crack with pencil and paper, and ciphertexts that are difficult with pencil and paper were trivial for my original TRS-80..) Cipher systems that nobody knew how to break are not a modern thing.
The phone has to be secure from hardware and software attack. I think Apple has more to lose than it has to gain by promising security and being proven liars about it, so I think they're probably as secure as they claim. Software updates won't unlock an iPhone 5S or later, since the AES-256 key is in a special silicon area that manages itself. There's likely a way to break in, but all the obvious ways are covered.
If what you want is a very high criminal conviction rate compared to crimes committed, it isn't necessary to convict the right person. Get someone plausible who can't spend much on a lawyer, and threaten them with long prison sentences until they agree to a plea bargain. Then you close the case and mark it solved. That eliminates all that pesky investigative work to find out who actually did it.
Assuming Apple's Secure Enclave works as advertised, updating the software that can be updated won't help unlock the phone (assuming it's a 5S or later). The phone the FBI wanted Apple to open up was a 5C, the last model before Secure Enclave.
Even if Apple can bypass the Secure Enclave, they'd be very reluctant to do so if it might become known, since it would be bad PR. Safer for them to have the Secure Enclave work as they say it does.
If the police remove a phone from my shirt pocket, and it's got my fingerprints all over it, it's a pretty good bet that it's my phone and I know how to unlock it (not to mention that the splash screen, which can be seen without unlocking it, is a picture of my cat in a Christmas tree).
If the police bring in a phone that was found elsewhere and ask you if you can unlock it, don't. If you can unlock it, the fact that you can is potentially evidence against you, and the Fifth means you don't have to incriminate yourself.
If you have an iPhone, there's a setting that will wipe your phone if the wrong PIN is entered ten times. (Actually, it wipes the AES-256 key, which is easier and faster, and leaves the actual contents as unreadable garbage.) If you use a random four-digit PIN, there's a 0.1% chance of guessing the PIN before the phone is wiped. If that's good enough for you, four digits is all you need.
Sure, this allows someone to wipe your iPhone given enough access (there's timeouts on later attempts), but there's so many other ways you can lose data if you don't back up your phone.
MS' solution is not version control, because that uses up disk space and has other UI implications, like selecting the version of a file, and that is not user friendly.
Which doesn't explain why, when I right-click to get Properties for a file or folder in Windows 7, there's a tab called "Previous Versions". So far, I haven't heard any UI complaints about it.
Developed countries tend to have birth rates below replacement level (which causes its own problems). With increasing access to health care and education for women, the population will level off and start to decline,
I'm in favor of experimenting until we find a better way. I'm not in favor of cutting off the current way we pay authors without finding and implementing something better first. Not just books, but all copyrighted materials are sold as if they were physical.
Currently, the system allows the following:
Authors can get paid enough to live on and keep writing. (The two last Hugo-winning novels were written by an author with a day job.)
The payment is set according to objective criteria (how many people want to buy the book) rather than politics.
It makes financial sense to spend money on making the book better than the author's final draft.
It allows an unknown author to write a book on spec and make money from it.
It allows unlimited success for any given book, giving some extra incentive to authors.
The downside is that it restricts how many people can enjoy a book and requires enforcement. This seems to me to be reasonable for the benefits gained, and I'd like any new scheme to be an overall improvement.
Selling PDFs is not that much more expensive than selling dead tree editions. We've had people connected with publishers post on Slashdot before. The bulk of the cost of a dead tree with ink on it is amortizing the same expenses ebooks would have to amortize. The additional cost of a hardcover book is mostly a premium to read the book before the paperback comes out. The demand for books is fairly inelastic. I'll buy lots of them, in some form or another, but not that many more than I can read. Other people will buy no books, no matter how inexpensive. The number of books sold doesn't depend that heavily on price.
Selling ebooks for $3 and still providing editing and the other services that turn the manuscript into a polished, readable, book isn't going to make it. The cheap ebooks are either from the public domain (already edited books with no need to pay the author) or ones without significant editing.
Of course not. Ideally, you get people away from the worse child molester, but this is international politics. However, if there's a child molester here and a worse one some distance away, it might be better to deal with the close one.
Do you really think that anybody is advocating moving to Russia because of problems with the US government? If so, you're wrong. Accept that nobody is defending the Russian government or advocating moving there, and reason from there.
You might want to read up on heat pumps on Wikipedia. Pay particular attention to the "Performance Considerations", which say that a typical heat pump is about as efficient as resistive heating at about -18C (0F). Above that, it's more efficient, perhaps up to four times as efficient. An air conditioner has cold air going into the building and hotter air coming out. Reverse those, with colder air going out, and hotter air going inside, and you're doing the exact same thing for heating. There's going to be resistive heating in any device that uses electricity, but it's not the main heat source.
An air conditioner will have as little resistive heating as possible, and yet it will move heat from a colder place to a warmer place. Reverse that.
As far as heating with natural gas goes, the electric company can buy natural gas at least as cheaply as I can, so if it were more efficient to use electrical resistive heating it would not be so much more expensive. There are ways to extract heat from exhaust gases, so less heat goes outside. People actually think about these things, and have incentives to make gas heaters more efficient.
So, what do my politics have to do with efficiency of heating systems?
Kaiser Wilhelm was fairly rational, particularly in his later years. Germany wasn't threatening the established order because of Wild Bill, it was threatening the established order by being Germany and having enough economic and military power to dominate the continent.
]Acquiring nuclear weapons is really dangerous. Having a few is quite safe. A country doesn't have to have MAD to be reasonably safe from major power attack.
How young are you? You could use a little historical perspective. Nothing you are talking about is new. We had race riots for at least as long as I've been paying attention (starting in the 1960s), front page news about relations with minority groups (defined by power, not by number), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
A human driver may be more likely to miss the idiot pedestrian under some circumstances. I've picked out people on the sidewalk that I somehow knew were going to dash across the street in front of me against the light.
I once interviewed for a job needing a clearance. They were forthcoming enough to tell me that there was a customer, and the customer wanted a product, and the product had software and hardware aspects. I suspect the customer was a US government agency, probably in the Defense Department, but that's unsupported speculation. They were a lot clearer on what I'd be doing (basically, source control guy and buildmaster).
I've never been able to absolutely convince myself that I'm not the biggest fool, and such things as working, spending less than I make, and letting assets accrue have done pretty well for me.
If cryptocurrencies are better for money transfers and the like, it means that the existing banking system is making money by setting prices for such services a lot above cost. It will always be less expensive for a bank to transfer numbers from one account to another (perhaps through an interbank system) than to convert dollars into a cryptocurrency, transfer that to someone in Japan, and have that person convert to yen.
I don't have to accept dollars instead of a cow. I might prefer the cow to the money. However, if you don't hand over the cow, my recourse is to sue you, and the court will very likely say that you need to pay me a certain number of dollars. Once there's a debt expressed in dollars, you can just hand me the appropriate amount in green paper and it's all settled.
If you are completely at fault in an accident that totals my car, you don't just get to pay me Blue Book value and walk away. You (or, more likely, your insurance company) need to negotiate with me, and if I hang tough I can almost certainly get more than the Blue Book value (it's cheaper for the insurance company to give me a little extra money than risk a lawsuit). If it does go to court, the court ill tell you (or the insurance company) to pay me a certain amount in dollars, and there is a debt measured in dollars.
Currently, I have stock in the 3M Corporation. It's not enough to have any effect on management. However, there are solid benefits. If the company distributes profits, I get some. If it reinvests, the stock price will probably go up (no guarantee, though). If the company were to be acquired by another, I'd get paid my share of 3M's value. In short, I have rights concerning an enterprise that is actually producing stuff and creating wealth.
If I have some cryptocurrency, it's worth precisely what someone else is willing to pay me for it, and it's value is completely intangible. If it goes out of fashion, I lose everything. I consider this to be a lot more speculative than buying stock.
It's easier to make a terrorist conviction than that. The agent provocateur spurs discussion of how to commit a terrorist act, and gets one of the group to make one innocuous act that would be part of the plan. Convict of conspiracy to commit terrorism and publicize. In one case (the agreed-on plan was shooting up Fort Knox by posing as pizza delivery people), the innocuous act was getting a publicly available map of Fort Knox.
If you play role-playing games set in the present day, make sure there aren't any covert FBI agents in the group.
iPhones are encrypted with AES-256, which is symmetric. It's impossible to brute-force it with maximally efficient quantum computers without using more resources than the Solar System contains.
There's something called "elliptical curve" asymmetric encryption, if you want to research it (I've never bothered).Of course, the NSA wanted to specify key generation to only produce ones they could break, but the appropriate body (NIST?) didn't find that acceptable. NIST legally has to consult with the NSA, not adhere to its recommendations.
I'm not up on 18th-century specifics, but for part of the 19th Century the Viginere cipher was considered unbreakable.if you didn't know the key. (Nowadays, it's usually trivial to crack with pencil and paper, and ciphertexts that are difficult with pencil and paper were trivial for my original TRS-80..) Cipher systems that nobody knew how to break are not a modern thing.
The phone has to be secure from hardware and software attack. I think Apple has more to lose than it has to gain by promising security and being proven liars about it, so I think they're probably as secure as they claim. Software updates won't unlock an iPhone 5S or later, since the AES-256 key is in a special silicon area that manages itself. There's likely a way to break in, but all the obvious ways are covered.
If what you want is a very high criminal conviction rate compared to crimes committed, it isn't necessary to convict the right person. Get someone plausible who can't spend much on a lawyer, and threaten them with long prison sentences until they agree to a plea bargain. Then you close the case and mark it solved. That eliminates all that pesky investigative work to find out who actually did it.
Assuming Apple's Secure Enclave works as advertised, updating the software that can be updated won't help unlock the phone (assuming it's a 5S or later). The phone the FBI wanted Apple to open up was a 5C, the last model before Secure Enclave.
Even if Apple can bypass the Secure Enclave, they'd be very reluctant to do so if it might become known, since it would be bad PR. Safer for them to have the Secure Enclave work as they say it does.
If the police remove a phone from my shirt pocket, and it's got my fingerprints all over it, it's a pretty good bet that it's my phone and I know how to unlock it (not to mention that the splash screen, which can be seen without unlocking it, is a picture of my cat in a Christmas tree).
If the police bring in a phone that was found elsewhere and ask you if you can unlock it, don't. If you can unlock it, the fact that you can is potentially evidence against you, and the Fifth means you don't have to incriminate yourself.
If you have an iPhone, there's a setting that will wipe your phone if the wrong PIN is entered ten times. (Actually, it wipes the AES-256 key, which is easier and faster, and leaves the actual contents as unreadable garbage.) If you use a random four-digit PIN, there's a 0.1% chance of guessing the PIN before the phone is wiped. If that's good enough for you, four digits is all you need.
Sure, this allows someone to wipe your iPhone given enough access (there's timeouts on later attempts), but there's so many other ways you can lose data if you don't back up your phone.
Which doesn't explain why, when I right-click to get Properties for a file or folder in Windows 7, there's a tab called "Previous Versions". So far, I haven't heard any UI complaints about it.
Developed countries tend to have birth rates below replacement level (which causes its own problems). With increasing access to health care and education for women, the population will level off and start to decline,
I'm in favor of experimenting until we find a better way. I'm not in favor of cutting off the current way we pay authors without finding and implementing something better first. Not just books, but all copyrighted materials are sold as if they were physical.
Currently, the system allows the following:
The downside is that it restricts how many people can enjoy a book and requires enforcement. This seems to me to be reasonable for the benefits gained, and I'd like any new scheme to be an overall improvement.
Selling PDFs is not that much more expensive than selling dead tree editions. We've had people connected with publishers post on Slashdot before. The bulk of the cost of a dead tree with ink on it is amortizing the same expenses ebooks would have to amortize. The additional cost of a hardcover book is mostly a premium to read the book before the paperback comes out. The demand for books is fairly inelastic. I'll buy lots of them, in some form or another, but not that many more than I can read. Other people will buy no books, no matter how inexpensive. The number of books sold doesn't depend that heavily on price.
Selling ebooks for $3 and still providing editing and the other services that turn the manuscript into a polished, readable, book isn't going to make it. The cheap ebooks are either from the public domain (already edited books with no need to pay the author) or ones without significant editing.
Of course not. Ideally, you get people away from the worse child molester, but this is international politics. However, if there's a child molester here and a worse one some distance away, it might be better to deal with the close one.
Do you really think that anybody is advocating moving to Russia because of problems with the US government? If so, you're wrong. Accept that nobody is defending the Russian government or advocating moving there, and reason from there.
You might want to read up on heat pumps on Wikipedia. Pay particular attention to the "Performance Considerations", which say that a typical heat pump is about as efficient as resistive heating at about -18C (0F). Above that, it's more efficient, perhaps up to four times as efficient. An air conditioner has cold air going into the building and hotter air coming out. Reverse those, with colder air going out, and hotter air going inside, and you're doing the exact same thing for heating. There's going to be resistive heating in any device that uses electricity, but it's not the main heat source.
An air conditioner will have as little resistive heating as possible, and yet it will move heat from a colder place to a warmer place. Reverse that.
As far as heating with natural gas goes, the electric company can buy natural gas at least as cheaply as I can, so if it were more efficient to use electrical resistive heating it would not be so much more expensive. There are ways to extract heat from exhaust gases, so less heat goes outside. People actually think about these things, and have incentives to make gas heaters more efficient.
So, what do my politics have to do with efficiency of heating systems?
There are race riots on the order of the ones we had when I was young? I hadn't noticed any. Got any examples?
Kaiser Wilhelm was fairly rational, particularly in his later years. Germany wasn't threatening the established order because of Wild Bill, it was threatening the established order by being Germany and having enough economic and military power to dominate the continent.
]Acquiring nuclear weapons is really dangerous. Having a few is quite safe. A country doesn't have to have MAD to be reasonably safe from major power attack.
How young are you? You could use a little historical perspective. Nothing you are talking about is new. We had race riots for at least as long as I've been paying attention (starting in the 1960s), front page news about relations with minority groups (defined by power, not by number), etc.