That makes me absolutely apeshit; do NOT force me to choose one of your crappy questions! Let me write my own question, and my own answer.
Whenever I get to write my own question, the question is always a mnemonic for a password...Secure, and easy to remember, since the question implies the answer uniquely, and you don't get any "Did I abbreviate my hometown name in the 'What was the name of your high school question?'" problems.
The thing I do if they force the question, is use a stock response for all questions of that type, which is, itself, password like. E.g my first pet was: Wc@e%rddt^y, whereas my first car was" L!kj%nb^
Nah, it was just fucking postmodern. That's one of the rules of postmodern writing: Don't resolve anything.
The secret to reading postmodern fiction is trying to figure out what he was really talking about. The gold was a metaphor: if they were really trying to remove the gold from the mountain, that was about the worst way to do it, and, on top of that, remember that there were jewels and artwork in there as well, which would be destroyed by such a method.
The "pumping the mountain full of gas" thing was reminiscent of Bobby Shaftoe's death (with him pumping the bunker full of gas and lighting it), so he was probably drawing a parallel there.
And you'll be able to say, "Hey man, I bought a hybrid!"
I didn't say that the communities aren't practical; actually I think they are. I think expecting a lot of people to suddenly adopt that lifestyle, however, is impractical. People love their damn cars.
I've actually been advocating a big gas tax to be dumped into renewables research for a while; if you want to get something done, you have to force the market to take notice, and the easiest way to do that is to artificially constrain demand through price increases. In the example of the self-sustaining micro-community, you could add a lot of tolls, for example, to reduce the desirability of commuting.
Still, the problem with the micro-community is that it is a fundamental shift in the way we live. Existing towns won't fit the mold, people will be unwilling to sell their houses and move, they really won't be willing to fund the sort of monetary outlay that will be required to retro-fit an existing urban center.
This sort of thing needs to happen organically, and it's going to require that big companies (for example) step up and start creating company towns in that vein. That will have cultural implications which are hard to fathom (sounds a lot like cyber-punkish archologies) but its hard to see another way to get it started.
The problem with your view, in a nutshell, is that people won't make the hard sacrifices. It's just not how people work. Where you and I disagree is that I think we should plan on getting fucked by human nature, and trying to make gradual changes happen, while mitigating the effects of our current crappy lifestyle.
Right now the ocean is absorbing massive amounts of CO2. RIGHT NOW. It does that naturally. This is causing ocean acidification (mostly due to carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate) and will pretty much cause all the bad things that you're describing without any further intervention from us.
What is being proposed is to dump a bunch of lime into the ocean, where it will react with the overabundance of CO2 to produce calcium carbonate, thereby removing the CO2 which is ALREADY THERE, and AT THE SAME TIME sequestering it on the bottom of the ocean where it will eventually sediment back into limestone, which probably won't be dumped into anyone's gas tank for a few million years AT LEAST.
Next time, read the fucking article, or alternately, have some faint fucking clue before you shoot your mouth off.
Yea, because really, that was the whole of your solution.
The problem with the eco-whiners is that they're not trying to get anything done. What they want to do is to have the human race magically stop doing all the bad stuff, and let everything "return to normal." This is an impossible and naive goal.
I am all for people going out and building real, sustainable communities built around renewable energy, public transit, and pedal power, but that is not a realistic solution to our current problems. We need investment in solutions that will work in our current world, not ones that are built on the idea that everyone is suddenly going to get green.
So calcium carbonate is an introduced invasive species? And here I thought it was a mineral.
Your examples suck. Our options are: watch the oceans acidify, watch coral reefs and all the other sea animals that depend on the same fucking calcium carbonate that these scientists are talking about dumping in the sea dissolve in the acidic oceans, or, alternatively, try and do something about it.
Now, I've been against a lot of the ideas so far, but this one smacks of fucking genius, and has the potential to actually do something about the problem, which is something your unrealistic utopian ramblings will never have.
Do you know what most limestone is made of? The fossilized shells of happy little sea creatures! You think adding a bunch of calcium carbonate to their environment is going to help them or hurt them? Right now the calcium carbonate in their shells is getting stripped by the acidic water, resulting in die-offs.
It's not unreasonable to expect that a large quantity of available calcium in their environment will improve their growth, not to mention the whole acid reduction thing.
That's what this is all about. Lime is widely used to raise the ph of acidic soil and water already, and as anyone who has used it knows, while it has a high capacity to reduce the acidity of whatever its added to, its not a strong base, so your water won't end up with too high a ph.
It's also commonly used as an antacid...Tums for example contains a ton of calcium carbonate.
It's a lot more clever than seeding with iron filings and some of the other stuff thats been explored. It's fucking genius actually, because lime will hoover up CO2 like it's going out of style...the only thing limiting it is the concentration of CO2 and the problem is the oceans are concentrating too much CO2!
Actually, this is so hilariously simple I can't believe no one thought of it before...I throw a pile of lime on my garden every year to raise the ph of the soil, and I know they use it in water treatment as well for the same thing.
And lime, jesus, it's abundant and the reaction of lime->calcium carbonate is ancient and extremely well understood. Hell, the calcium carbonate mostly came from the oceans in the most place (limestone). The only issue is having to calcinate it (cook it)...I wonder what the energy cost/return is...
The mouse very well may die as an input device, but it won't be to a touch screen...Imagine websurfing where you have to use both hands. Imagine the likelihood of everyone in the world moving to something that is basically a niche interface that will require either a tablet-style pc or a wireless flatscreen or something...
Now imagine a bunch of people sitting around with bigger better monitors and more reliable cordless mice. That is a 5 year prediction.
All you whippersnappers, I swear...Look me up by my real name, and you get nothing, nada, nihil, zip, because I made a very conscious decision to separate my online identity from my regular identity. Keeps me from having to be too careful.
Make the decision, and separate yourself from your online identity. You can always claim it later if you want to, but you can disclaim it as well
This is actually a big problem; urine disposal is significant over time because it can cause serious corrosion.
There was a fleet of airplanes...I can't remember whose now...cargo planes...They had to be refitted, and a significant amount of redesign done, because the design of the restrooms coupled with air turbulence, ended up with a significant amount of piss dripping down on to one of the primary structural braces, and, over time, weakening it to the point of needing replacement.
Actually I ended up being heavily involved in the death throes of the company as the proxy of the one partner who I liked. Miserable experience. They made his life a living hell, and mine slightly hellish by association.
Two months after they folded the same jackass who fired me tried to offer me a partnership deal for some software app that I was supposed to write from the ground up for him to market through his shady incestuous contacts with the local government.
Despite the half-hearted "Maybe we shouldn't have treated you like shit" apology, and the recent glaring example of what a monumentally stupid thing it would be to get involved with them on any level greater than a mere employee, I managed a polite, "No thank you" and I haven't heard from the bastards since.
They were outstandingly litigation happy; my first response was "Bring it bitches!" They had so much dirty laundry that I would have delighted in bringing to light.
But suing really litigious people is no fun; they would have countersued me for everything imaginable, and while they'd never have been able to prove it, it would have cost me a fortune, and I'd never have been able to collect anything (they tanked a few months after I left).
Oh management was already beyond paranoid about me; they understood nothing, and they were inherently untrustworthy, so in their minds I was untrustworthy and I could do anything.
But my direct superior, and the only person at the company who was in any way my superior, and I spent 7 hours that same day drinking and cussing the company (he put the tab on his company card; I suppose that was my severance package, ha). He was the one who had to do the auditing, and was the only one actually capable of it, and I know exactly how much auditing he did, which is to say, none.
Not that the other idiots who worked there didn't run amok on my personal machines, inadvertently wiping out a big inventory management package I'd written, that I'd been due to deploy that very morning. Ah well; wasn't my 100,000 dollar project...Anymore.
My temptation was excessively high. I got the shaft for no good reason, and I was told that either I'd resign or they'd sue me for some kind of breach of contract: they didn't want to have to pay my unemployment, so they made this threat...I can't even remember what it was about now, but I do remember that the PHB...
Oh wait, I remember, it was an Arcview application that had never gotten completed because the demographic data was hung up at the state level, and he kept calling it Arcserve. So yea, I'm sitting there listening to this fat idiot with the bad hairpiece threatening me with a breach of contract dealing with a Windows backup program which we didn't even sell.
What a moron.
Anyway the "contract" was a complete handshake agreement, no paper work, no actual project specs, nothing, and the ball was in the clients court anyway, and in my opinion, they had no real interest in it in the first place. Basically he was trying to force me out to isolate one of the partners (my actual boss), and he was a real asshole about it.
So I had a moment, when I realized I had basically unlimited access, where I was tempted. I'm not a fuckup like the guy in San Fran either; I could have set shit in motion that would never have been caught, and I knew the state their backups were in.
But I'm a professional, and while I never would have been caught, I wouldn't have felt like I could be trusted with the big systems, wouldn't have been able to sit in an interview and say that my personal integrity matters more to me than just about anything.
No, it's not. There are other things you need to do as well; just changing passwords won't cut it.
Every unix system can be brought up in single user mode; single user mode means no networks, no logins, no security, no passwords. That takes care of any password problems, and you can simply edit the passwd file to remove the bad root password, and you're in.
Basically you have to encrypt the system or somehow keep the owners from gaining physical access to the machine. Encryption is the only likely way, imho.
That's the least of the problems. One, sexy hacker kung fu chicks don't exist. You're lucky if you can get 2 out of 3, and 3 out of 3 is impossible except in the movies.
And then you ask me to believe that this sexy impossibility is going to be dating a geek (even one as improbably sexy as the one in the movie)? You might as well have given her a magical talking unicorn, because it's not going to get less believable.
I can't think this would be an issue at all if there was no encryption to worry about; practically everyone knows how to access a unix/windows machine when given physical access.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes me absolutely apeshit; do NOT force me to choose one of your crappy questions! Let me write my own question, and my own answer.
Whenever I get to write my own question, the question is always a mnemonic for a password...Secure, and easy to remember, since the question implies the answer uniquely, and you don't get any "Did I abbreviate my hometown name in the 'What was the name of your high school question?'" problems.
The thing I do if they force the question, is use a stock response for all questions of that type, which is, itself, password like. E.g my first pet was: Wc@e%rddt^y, whereas my first car was" L!kj%nb^
The least secure system is the human system; that is almost always the weak point. All it takes is patience, and the right teller.
Yea, jesus, that's a whole career with only one deliverable.
I thought it was widely known that the phosphorous in fertilizer was a root cause for eutrophication?
Is there something I'm missing here?
Nah, it was just fucking postmodern. That's one of the rules of postmodern writing: Don't resolve anything.
The secret to reading postmodern fiction is trying to figure out what he was really talking about. The gold was a metaphor: if they were really trying to remove the gold from the mountain, that was about the worst way to do it, and, on top of that, remember that there were jewels and artwork in there as well, which would be destroyed by such a method.
The "pumping the mountain full of gas" thing was reminiscent of Bobby Shaftoe's death (with him pumping the bunker full of gas and lighting it), so he was probably drawing a parallel there.
And you'll be able to say, "Hey man, I bought a hybrid!"
I didn't say that the communities aren't practical; actually I think they are. I think expecting a lot of people to suddenly adopt that lifestyle, however, is impractical. People love their damn cars.
I've actually been advocating a big gas tax to be dumped into renewables research for a while; if you want to get something done, you have to force the market to take notice, and the easiest way to do that is to artificially constrain demand through price increases. In the example of the self-sustaining micro-community, you could add a lot of tolls, for example, to reduce the desirability of commuting.
Still, the problem with the micro-community is that it is a fundamental shift in the way we live. Existing towns won't fit the mold, people will be unwilling to sell their houses and move, they really won't be willing to fund the sort of monetary outlay that will be required to retro-fit an existing urban center.
This sort of thing needs to happen organically, and it's going to require that big companies (for example) step up and start creating company towns in that vein. That will have cultural implications which are hard to fathom (sounds a lot like cyber-punkish archologies) but its hard to see another way to get it started.
The problem with your view, in a nutshell, is that people won't make the hard sacrifices. It's just not how people work. Where you and I disagree is that I think we should plan on getting fucked by human nature, and trying to make gradual changes happen, while mitigating the effects of our current crappy lifestyle.
Right now the ocean is absorbing massive amounts of CO2. RIGHT NOW. It does that naturally. This is causing ocean acidification (mostly due to carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate) and will pretty much cause all the bad things that you're describing without any further intervention from us.
What is being proposed is to dump a bunch of lime into the ocean, where it will react with the overabundance of CO2 to produce calcium carbonate, thereby removing the CO2 which is ALREADY THERE, and AT THE SAME TIME sequestering it on the bottom of the ocean where it will eventually sediment back into limestone, which probably won't be dumped into anyone's gas tank for a few million years AT LEAST.
Next time, read the fucking article, or alternately, have some faint fucking clue before you shoot your mouth off.
Yea, because really, that was the whole of your solution.
The problem with the eco-whiners is that they're not trying to get anything done. What they want to do is to have the human race magically stop doing all the bad stuff, and let everything "return to normal." This is an impossible and naive goal.
I am all for people going out and building real, sustainable communities built around renewable energy, public transit, and pedal power, but that is not a realistic solution to our current problems. We need investment in solutions that will work in our current world, not ones that are built on the idea that everyone is suddenly going to get green.
So calcium carbonate is an introduced invasive species? And here I thought it was a mineral.
Your examples suck. Our options are: watch the oceans acidify, watch coral reefs and all the other sea animals that depend on the same fucking calcium carbonate that these scientists are talking about dumping in the sea dissolve in the acidic oceans, or, alternatively, try and do something about it.
Now, I've been against a lot of the ideas so far, but this one smacks of fucking genius, and has the potential to actually do something about the problem, which is something your unrealistic utopian ramblings will never have.
The ignorance here astounds me.
Do you know what most limestone is made of? The fossilized shells of happy little sea creatures! You think adding a bunch of calcium carbonate to their environment is going to help them or hurt them? Right now the calcium carbonate in their shells is getting stripped by the acidic water, resulting in die-offs.
It's not unreasonable to expect that a large quantity of available calcium in their environment will improve their growth, not to mention the whole acid reduction thing.
That's what this is all about. Lime is widely used to raise the ph of acidic soil and water already, and as anyone who has used it knows, while it has a high capacity to reduce the acidity of whatever its added to, its not a strong base, so your water won't end up with too high a ph.
It's also commonly used as an antacid...Tums for example contains a ton of calcium carbonate.
It's a lot more clever than seeding with iron filings and some of the other stuff thats been explored. It's fucking genius actually, because lime will hoover up CO2 like it's going out of style...the only thing limiting it is the concentration of CO2 and the problem is the oceans are concentrating too much CO2!
Actually, this is so hilariously simple I can't believe no one thought of it before...I throw a pile of lime on my garden every year to raise the ph of the soil, and I know they use it in water treatment as well for the same thing.
And lime, jesus, it's abundant and the reaction of lime->calcium carbonate is ancient and extremely well understood. Hell, the calcium carbonate mostly came from the oceans in the most place (limestone). The only issue is having to calcinate it (cook it)...I wonder what the energy cost/return is...
Most water based solutions don't use water at all, but instead a variety of types of non-conducting lubricating anti-freeze.
Gartner...Is there anything they can't get wrong?
The mouse very well may die as an input device, but it won't be to a touch screen...Imagine websurfing where you have to use both hands. Imagine the likelihood of everyone in the world moving to something that is basically a niche interface that will require either a tablet-style pc or a wireless flatscreen or something...
Now imagine a bunch of people sitting around with bigger better monitors and more reliable cordless mice. That is a 5 year prediction.
All you whippersnappers, I swear...Look me up by my real name, and you get nothing, nada, nihil, zip, because I made a very conscious decision to separate my online identity from my regular identity. Keeps me from having to be too careful.
Make the decision, and separate yourself from your online identity. You can always claim it later if you want to, but you can disclaim it as well
I wondered why all the spam was suddenly titled, "Hey Satanic!" and "Dear Mr. Puppy"
This is actually a big problem; urine disposal is significant over time because it can cause serious corrosion.
There was a fleet of airplanes...I can't remember whose now...cargo planes...They had to be refitted, and a significant amount of redesign done, because the design of the restrooms coupled with air turbulence, ended up with a significant amount of piss dripping down on to one of the primary structural braces, and, over time, weakening it to the point of needing replacement.
Second vote for hammer; there is nothing like good old bft for making media unreadable.
No matter how many times you write 1's and 0's across your drive, it's not going to be as secure as a good whack with a sledgehammer.
Actually I ended up being heavily involved in the death throes of the company as the proxy of the one partner who I liked. Miserable experience. They made his life a living hell, and mine slightly hellish by association.
Two months after they folded the same jackass who fired me tried to offer me a partnership deal for some software app that I was supposed to write from the ground up for him to market through his shady incestuous contacts with the local government.
Despite the half-hearted "Maybe we shouldn't have treated you like shit" apology, and the recent glaring example of what a monumentally stupid thing it would be to get involved with them on any level greater than a mere employee, I managed a polite, "No thank you" and I haven't heard from the bastards since.
They were outstandingly litigation happy; my first response was "Bring it bitches!" They had so much dirty laundry that I would have delighted in bringing to light.
But suing really litigious people is no fun; they would have countersued me for everything imaginable, and while they'd never have been able to prove it, it would have cost me a fortune, and I'd never have been able to collect anything (they tanked a few months after I left).
Oh management was already beyond paranoid about me; they understood nothing, and they were inherently untrustworthy, so in their minds I was untrustworthy and I could do anything.
But my direct superior, and the only person at the company who was in any way my superior, and I spent 7 hours that same day drinking and cussing the company (he put the tab on his company card; I suppose that was my severance package, ha). He was the one who had to do the auditing, and was the only one actually capable of it, and I know exactly how much auditing he did, which is to say, none.
Not that the other idiots who worked there didn't run amok on my personal machines, inadvertently wiping out a big inventory management package I'd written, that I'd been due to deploy that very morning. Ah well; wasn't my 100,000 dollar project...Anymore.
My temptation was excessively high. I got the shaft for no good reason, and I was told that either I'd resign or they'd sue me for some kind of breach of contract: they didn't want to have to pay my unemployment, so they made this threat...I can't even remember what it was about now, but I do remember that the PHB...
Oh wait, I remember, it was an Arcview application that had never gotten completed because the demographic data was hung up at the state level, and he kept calling it Arcserve. So yea, I'm sitting there listening to this fat idiot with the bad hairpiece threatening me with a breach of contract dealing with a Windows backup program which we didn't even sell.
What a moron.
Anyway the "contract" was a complete handshake agreement, no paper work, no actual project specs, nothing, and the ball was in the clients court anyway, and in my opinion, they had no real interest in it in the first place. Basically he was trying to force me out to isolate one of the partners (my actual boss), and he was a real asshole about it.
So I had a moment, when I realized I had basically unlimited access, where I was tempted. I'm not a fuckup like the guy in San Fran either; I could have set shit in motion that would never have been caught, and I knew the state their backups were in.
But I'm a professional, and while I never would have been caught, I wouldn't have felt like I could be trusted with the big systems, wouldn't have been able to sit in an interview and say that my personal integrity matters more to me than just about anything.
No, it's not. There are other things you need to do as well; just changing passwords won't cut it.
Every unix system can be brought up in single user mode; single user mode means no networks, no logins, no security, no passwords. That takes care of any password problems, and you can simply edit the passwd file to remove the bad root password, and you're in.
Basically you have to encrypt the system or somehow keep the owners from gaining physical access to the machine. Encryption is the only likely way, imho.
That's the least of the problems. One, sexy hacker kung fu chicks don't exist. You're lucky if you can get 2 out of 3, and 3 out of 3 is impossible except in the movies.
And then you ask me to believe that this sexy impossibility is going to be dating a geek (even one as improbably sexy as the one in the movie)? You might as well have given her a magical talking unicorn, because it's not going to get less believable.
That's what encryption is for.
I can't think this would be an issue at all if there was no encryption to worry about; practically everyone knows how to access a unix/windows machine when given physical access.