The search engines cater to the commercial crowd.... We need a search engine for blogs that really works.
As I understand it, what really happens is that the commercial crowd reverse-engineers the search engines and tunes their "message" pages to rank highly.
If there really was a "search engine for blogs that really works", and it became popular, they'd do it again for the new engine and it would no longer "really work". Just as they did with Yahoo, Google, and the dwarves.
The operators of these search engines have no interest in pushing anybody's product unless they've bought advertising. Indeed, they're behind if the advertisers parasitize the search indexes rather than paying for an ad or a sponsored search result.
It's time for everyone to stop bending over for China. Instead of helping them develop even more effective methods of oppression, the rest of the world should stand together and disconnect China from the internet.
Then they disconnect themselves from the Treasury Bill Auction and cash in their T-Bills.
Gotta do something about that balance of payments and/or the national debt if we want our great-great-great grandchildren to finally escape being held hostage in that way.
US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up.
I'll believe the politicians believe global warming is a serious threat (rather than an opportunity for power-grabbing and graft) when they stop pro-natalist policies.
Especially the open-border migration of large numbers of people from cultures with high birthrates and low incomes into countries with high standards of living.
As long as chargers are cheap enough to be given away free with a new device, they will continue to be landfilled regardless of whether or not they are compatible with the new device.
Agreed.
Also: Sometimes they DO fail.
- - - -
One thing that really bugs me about using USB as a charging standard: You have to connect the data lines to negotiate a non-trivial charging rate.
This opens the opportunity to include a processor with exploit code in the charger and have it install spyware on the phone. (Russian intelligence did this a few years back, distributing free cellphone chargers to diplomats at a major international conference...)
Also, 51,000 tonnes per decade is negligible. We throw out many times that mass in disposable diapers EVERY DAY. Maybe the regulators should focus on something that actually matters.
The diaper thing turned out to be a bogus made-up scare number - as anybody who actually VISITED a landfill at the time could tell: "Where are all those diapers?" Disposable diapers (which, by the way, are biodegradable these days) were such a small part of the waste stream that you often couldn't spot any at all.
What comes around goes around: We're currently going through another iteration with plastic straws, starting from a number "researched" by a curious nine-year-old and quoted as proven fact by the mainstream media.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?>
Too true. Even when journals in "social disciplines" do publish articles with statistical analysis of their data, they accept levels of significance so low they would be laughed at in any "hard science" publiction. The null hypothesis is far from excluded, and the expectation is that a substantial fraction of the articles are just reporting false positives.
When he says:
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology,... human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do.
he's flat out dead wrong.
One glaring example: Psychologists, with the best of training, are WORSE THAN CHANCE (to a level that even hard scientists would consider significant) at predicting whether a particular person will commit violence. To quote one: "The only proven predictor of future violence is past violence."
(This, of course, throws the whole "psychological testing for gun licensing" push into a cocked hat. If it were done, it would {in addition to exposing medical records and discouraging those in need of treatment from seeking professional help} selectively disarm, and deny civil rights to, more non-violent than violent.)
Another example, from biology/ecology. Studies were made looking for cycles in populations of wild animals of various species. They defined a "peak" as a year where there were more of the critter than in the previous or following year, a "low" when there were less. Then they computed the average length of cycles. They got pretty much the same average across many, diverse, species worldwide. It was quite a curiosity, and for a while was enshrined as a law of ecology.
As far back as the late '60s this was used as a glaring example of misuse of statistics in a first-of-the-sequence undergrad statistics course. It seems that, using that definition, you see the same "period" if you sample a random number sequence. They were measuring noise.
So does every Marketing department on the planet. Welcome to Earth.
Agreed.
Governments, especially their subdivisions, have been doing propaganda since the historical record started. The archeological record suggests they have been doing it since there were governments - and before that, tribes, and before that, hunting and gathering bands, probably back as far as people have been able to talk, or apes to make signaling sounds and gestures.
Whats's special about the US is that everybody can play.
Or at least they could, before the consolidation of the media into a handful of corporate owners (most with a consistent agenda) and the recent suppression of some political opinons - on large social media (again with a handful of corporate owners with a consistent agenda), campuses (by "antifacist" masked thugs and others equating unpopular speech with violence), and now even in the streets.
Hint: Suppression of political opinion leads to further division (because it can't be talked out and defused), and civil war (as it did once before in the US, where it was one significant step.) Further: Like war itself, it only takes one side to start it.
Fashion statement, sure. Expensive show off thing, sure. Surfboard? Nah.
It's a limited edition of 200. It's intended to be a collectable trophy, not a serious surfing product. It brought the company $300,000 and its price is slowly climbing in the post-release trading, which is exactly what was supposed to happen.
If somebody actually used it to surf it would make it non pristine and cut into its collectable price.
Not enough. Add a zero. That depends on the situation:
Was this a bank policy, based on a business decision such as "we're ahead for our stockholders by taking less interest and avoiding foreclosure on these loans", "keeping our loan customers in their houses is good for business or other company goals (even "being nice") or the like? Was this error in implementation inadvertent and non-discirminatory on "suspect categories" like race, religion, national origin, or neighborhood WITHIN THE SET OF PEOPLE TO WHOM IT APPLIED, i.e. were blacks or hispanics facing foreclosure more likely to be victims of the error than whites facing foreclosure with otherwise identical situations? If so, they don't really owe anything and it's just nice (or good-for-business-by-heading-off-some-suits) to give them anything at all (except maybe for the IT head's head...)
Was the "elegibility" for loan modification statutory, agreed to as a settlement for a regulatory action or suit, or part of a regulatory filing? They owe enough to "make the vicitms whole" and one, or even two, zeros isn't going to cut it.
Speaking as someone who worked in the Detroit auto industry during the 70s and 80s: ALL auto companies do a substantial rehack of their factories for each new model.
Detroit auto companies scheduled model changeover to coincide with deer hunting season, giving their workers (except for the plant engineers, electricians, and millwrights) time off to go chasing Bambi through the woods - or have a beer party in camp.
The changeover also gave those worthies a chance to fix all the stuff that had broken during the model year and patched up to keep limping along until the next break. (Typical example: An intermittent ground fault in some machine. You could see the balance indicator lights on the power bus flash every time it cycled as the 3-phase feed went off-center. This would work fine for months - unless two machines on the same bus would develop ground faults on different phases and happen to activate them simultaneously. Then you'd get the fireworks.)
But keep trolling.
Yes, you really should. As we used to say on Netnews: "If [somebody like you] didn't exist, we'd have to invent him."
Trolls are really handy as straight men, raising the strawman arguments and thus giving people like me an opportunity to post the real story.
Somebody who actually believes the popular misconceptions works much better than a sock puppet, because he's much better at getting the language right on the bogus argument that needs to be exposed. B-)
So sales are up, losses are up - but they're on track to make a profit? Really? Something's not adding up...
What's not adding up is that you're conflating recurring and nonrecurring expenses (NREs).
If all the money being spent now were recurring expenses - the money you spend on making a car in Q2 that you'll have to spend again to make another car in Q4 - then you'd be right.
But a LOT of that money is being spent on putting together the plant to make the cars. You do that once. Then you don't have to do it again (beyond maintenance as stuff wears out and the like).
Or at least you don't have to do it again until you EXPAND the plant to INCREASE PRODUCTION or BUILD ANOTHER TYPE OF CAR. (Guess what Tesla has been doing...) That's why companies have to spend a lot of money - that they get from investors - when starting up, that they don't earn back right away.
Their balance sheet for the quarter includes both the REs and NREs. If you allocate it ALL to the current production of cars, and project that into the future, you'll be 'way low on the bottom line once the NREs have been paid off and the plant is still making cars.
God forbid anyone [in or working for government] design anything efficiently involving forethought.
But governments are SUPPOSED to be inefficient and ineffective.
That's because, whenever they DO get efficient, then then efficiently oppress everyone within their power an become tyrannies.
Inefficiency is a defence against this. It was even deliberately designed into the US Federal government in an effort to keep it from ballooning out of control.
Fortunately for us all, the incentive structures inherent in a coercive monopoly tend to make governments inefficient and error prone even without having such flakiness as a deliberate design element. (Doubly so, since such deliberate designs are themselves subject to the inherent flakiness, and it all goes fractal from there.)
So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the-atmosphere orbits... Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to mine it.
Or if you're in a hurry for some of the mineral CO2 you do have, land an iceball on it. (Strip-mining on a planetary scale. Much easier than digging.)
But a small one, so you don't lose a couple years of ground-level solar heating waiting for the dust to settle.
Instead of nuking Mars, send CO2 rich asteroids at it to serve as both the nuke and the additional nutrient.
Water is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and Mars needs more water anyhow.
So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the -atmosphere orbits to heat and humidify the atmosphere, add oxygen (from some of the water that gets split and doesn't recombine in time), and also add whatever impurities they contain.
Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to mine it. You can hold off on the carbonaceous chondrites until you find out if you really DO have a shortfall of CO2 (or you need them to drop a few gigatons of soot over any new polar water-ice caps to avoid reflecting away a bunch of your solar warming).
Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind.
In geologic time. With the moon, if you added an atmosphere it would last just fine for millenia before you had to pump it up a bit to make up for the loss. Mars has a much deeper gravity well, so an added atmosphere should last a lot longer..
(As for "poaching" off the Earth's field, the moon is out of it except for about 6 days a month - during which it gets some substantial electrical effects that are likely to strip more gas than they protect.)
But if you're really concerned with Mars' lack of a magnetic field speeding your atmosphere's loss, MAKE one! The entire energy of the Earth's field is only about 10^17 joules. That's just over three Gigawatt years. Any of the Earth's top ten nuke plants could do that in about half a year. (But Mars wouldn't need quite as big or strong a field as Earth.)
You'll want to put your (very redundant) superconducting loops on Mars, rather than its moons or orbital platform(s), to avoid orbital decay from the field dragging through the planet and/or interacting with the solar wind in undesirable ways. (Not to mention interaction issues when orbiting multiple BIG magnets...)
It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure.
Another good reason to make a field, even if you DON'T need it to keep the atmosphere from blowing away on a human timescale.
On one hand the welfare system, financially, is terribly inefficient, serving mainly as welfare for bureaucrats. Some years ago it was estimated that, for each dollar of benefits given to a recipient, over six were spent on administration. The dollar-for-dollar loss of welfare payments if the recipient has some income made working at all a net loss (of both time and the expenses of things like work-suitable clothing and transport to/from the job site), encouraging total dependence, while the presumption that a man in the home should be financing the family (and elimination of welfare payments if one was present) led to multiple generations of unwed mothers among the poor and enormous social fallout.
On the other hand, the income tax is similarly costly (beyond the tax money paid), both in the actual costs of dealing with the reporting,, computation, and money-handling requirements and the economic cost of the market distortions resulting from the complex rules and policy rewards and punishments built into the tax rates and rules. Even without the policy builtins, the graduated tax system would still require the heavy-duty accounting.
One proposal (which has been around for decades) is the "negative income flat tax". This works as follows: 1. Every citizen (or other qualifying person), regardless of income, receives a stipend corresponding roughly to full welfare benefits. 2. Every dollar of income, starting with the first, is taxed at a fixed rate. 3. The stipend and rates are set so that, for the bulk of the population, the net income transfer is about the same as the current system. 4. The entire welfare and internal revenue departments and all their programs and regulations are replaced by a:
4a. Checking that nobody signs up for more than one stipend.
4b. Checking that the flat tax is withheld and transferred to the treasury.
Some characteristics of this:
- If a wage-earner's flat tax is withheld by his employer and paid to the government, there's no need for the government to even know who he is. No filing papers with the government for each job and/or at the end of the year. Very simple reporting for the employer, too.
- Those living on stipends can spend it as they please, without constant oversight from the government. If they need a little more, and can find employment, they can just go ahead, without loss of benefits. This breaks the "welfare trap" and makes working for pay, whether intermittent, piecework, part time, or full time, a net gain.
- The simplification of the tax structure would also drastically reduce the administrative costs and barriers to going into business or hiring others. This should produce a substantial increase in productive employment and GDP.
- The bulk of the bureaucrats can be laid off, at enormous reduction of cost to the government. (They can live on their stipends or go find more productive work.) This savings should more than offset any shortfalls from the mismatch of the simple rates to the current tax and welfare cash flows.
- Similarly the bulk of the tax-related accountants and financial workers would no longer be needed by the bulk of the population, as well. (Again they COULD live on the stipend. But their skills should be largely transferable to other employment - including bookkeeping for the expected explosion of new small businesses.)
You could even keep the effect of the few, critical, major deductions under this system without breaking it back into a forest of regulations and bureaucrats:
- Mortgage interest deduction on primary residence:
- The bkorrower declares to the lender that this mortgage is on his primary residence and supplies his (social security / stipend) number.
- The lender supplies this, along with the interest charged, to the "only one stipend per person" department, which checks "only one primary residence at a time per stipend".
As does California, several, some of which it has had for a long time. For instance: The San Luis reservoir / O'Neil Forebay complex.
San Luis reservoir was completed in 1967 and has a capacity of just over 2 million acre-feet, about 319 feet above the forebay. The forebay is at the level of the local section of the California State Water and Central Valley Projects, while the reservoir is filled by pumping and generates power when water is released. It serves both as water storage for irrigation and city drinking, and as a pumped-water energy storage facility.
For decades many ares of the US had to go to expensive peaking generation and variable electric rates while California did not: The power requirements for pumping irrigation water are enormous, but the time of day of the pumping is not critical. So California electric utilities and the water projects just arranged for the pumping to be varied by time of day to level the load on the electric grid. But the wide deployment of air conditioning and solar and wind power seem to have disrupted that.
That last is somewhat surprising, actually, Solar + wind generation tends to level the daily peaking and HVAC requirements, including compensating for weather variations. (More sun = more air conditioning load and more solar generation. More wind = more HVAC load due to lowered effectiveness of insulation and more wind generation.)
TFA and the first paragraph of the CERT advisory it quotes talk about exposing the "private key".
I'm not clear whether this is a misspeak, with the vunerable key being the session key, or if the parameter checking failure actually jeopardizes the private key of the attacked system.
The latter is a MUCH bigger problem. If its only the session key that may be exposed, fixing the bug is all you need (unless the attacker was able to get into a service that let him view or alter the private key of the affected devices). If the private key was exposed and obtained, devices will need to be re-keyed.
Does anyone looking into this have information to distinguish the two cases?
Slashdot Mirror
The search engines cater to the commercial crowd. ... We need a search engine for blogs that really works.
As I understand it, what really happens is that the commercial crowd reverse-engineers the search engines and tunes their "message" pages to rank highly.
If there really was a "search engine for blogs that really works", and it became popular, they'd do it again for the new engine and it would no longer "really work". Just as they did with Yahoo, Google, and the dwarves.
The operators of these search engines have no interest in pushing anybody's product unless they've bought advertising. Indeed, they're behind if the advertisers parasitize the search indexes rather than paying for an ad or a sponsored search result.
Orwell is spinning in his grave.
Actually, his ghost is saying "I told you so!"
It's time for everyone to stop bending over for China. Instead of helping them develop even more effective methods of oppression, the rest of the world should stand together and disconnect China from the internet.
Then they disconnect themselves from the Treasury Bill Auction and cash in their T-Bills.
Gotta do something about that balance of payments and/or the national debt if we want our great-great-great grandchildren to finally escape being held hostage in that way.
Anyone else's brain segfault while parsing the headline?
Actually, I parsed it right the first time.
What luck.
US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up.
I'll believe the politicians believe global warming is a serious threat (rather than an opportunity for power-grabbing and graft) when they stop pro-natalist policies.
Especially the open-border migration of large numbers of people from cultures with high birthrates and low incomes into countries with high standards of living.
As long as chargers are cheap enough to be given away free with a new device, they will continue to be landfilled regardless of whether or not they are compatible with the new device.
Agreed.
Also: Sometimes they DO fail.
- - - -
One thing that really bugs me about using USB as a charging standard: You have to connect the data lines to negotiate a non-trivial charging rate.
This opens the opportunity to include a processor with exploit code in the charger and have it install spyware on the phone. (Russian intelligence did this a few years back, distributing free cellphone chargers to diplomats at a major international conference...)
Also, 51,000 tonnes per decade is negligible. We throw out many times that mass in disposable diapers EVERY DAY. Maybe the regulators should focus on something that actually matters.
The diaper thing turned out to be a bogus made-up scare number - as anybody who actually VISITED a landfill at the time could tell: "Where are all those diapers?" Disposable diapers (which, by the way, are biodegradable these days) were such a small part of the waste stream that you often couldn't spot any at all.
What comes around goes around: We're currently going through another iteration with plastic straws, starting from a number "researched" by a curious nine-year-old and quoted as proven fact by the mainstream media.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?>
Too true. Even when journals in "social disciplines" do publish articles with statistical analysis of their data, they accept levels of significance so low they would be laughed at in any "hard science" publiction. The null hypothesis is far from excluded, and the expectation is that a substantial fraction of the articles are just reporting false positives.
When he says:
he's flat out dead wrong.
One glaring example: Psychologists, with the best of training, are WORSE THAN CHANCE (to a level that even hard scientists would consider significant) at predicting whether a particular person will commit violence. To quote one: "The only proven predictor of future violence is past violence."
(This, of course, throws the whole "psychological testing for gun licensing" push into a cocked hat. If it were done, it would {in addition to exposing medical records and discouraging those in need of treatment from seeking professional help} selectively disarm, and deny civil rights to, more non-violent than violent.)
Another example, from biology/ecology. Studies were made looking for cycles in populations of wild animals of various species. They defined a "peak" as a year where there were more of the critter than in the previous or following year, a "low" when there were less. Then they computed the average length of cycles. They got pretty much the same average across many, diverse, species worldwide. It was quite a curiosity, and for a while was enshrined as a law of ecology.
As far back as the late '60s this was used as a glaring example of misuse of statistics in a first-of-the-sequence undergrad statistics course. It seems that, using that definition, you see the same "period" if you sample a random number sequence. They were measuring noise.
So does every Marketing department on the planet. Welcome to Earth.
Agreed.
Governments, especially their subdivisions, have been doing propaganda since the historical record started. The archeological record suggests they have been doing it since there were governments - and before that, tribes, and before that, hunting and gathering bands, probably back as far as people have been able to talk, or apes to make signaling sounds and gestures.
Whats's special about the US is that everybody can play.
Or at least they could, before the consolidation of the media into a handful of corporate owners (most with a consistent agenda) and the recent suppression of some political opinons - on large social media (again with a handful of corporate owners with a consistent agenda), campuses (by "antifacist" masked thugs and others equating unpopular speech with violence), and now even in the streets.
Hint: Suppression of political opinion leads to further division (because it can't be talked out and defused), and civil war (as it did once before in the US, where it was one significant step.) Further: Like war itself, it only takes one side to start it.
Well, ok, the 3rd meme war, but this is the first one with actual troops.
As far as we know.
(At least so far. Government had lots of secrets that only leaked out decades later, and no doubt many that don't leak at all until the info is lost.)
Fashion statement, sure. Expensive show off thing, sure. Surfboard? Nah.
It's a limited edition of 200. It's intended to be a collectable trophy, not a serious surfing product. It brought the company $300,000 and its price is slowly climbing in the post-release trading, which is exactly what was supposed to happen.
If somebody actually used it to surf it would make it non pristine and cut into its collectable price.
Not enough. Add a zero.
That depends on the situation:
Was this a bank policy, based on a business decision such as "we're ahead for our stockholders by taking less interest and avoiding foreclosure on these loans", "keeping our loan customers in their houses is good for business or other company goals (even "being nice") or the like? Was this error in implementation inadvertent and non-discirminatory on "suspect categories" like race, religion, national origin, or neighborhood WITHIN THE SET OF PEOPLE TO WHOM IT APPLIED, i.e. were blacks or hispanics facing foreclosure more likely to be victims of the error than whites facing foreclosure with otherwise identical situations? If so, they don't really owe anything and it's just nice (or good-for-business-by-heading-off-some-suits) to give them anything at all (except maybe for the IT head's head...)
Was the "elegibility" for loan modification statutory, agreed to as a settlement for a regulatory action or suit, or part of a regulatory filing? They owe enough to "make the vicitms whole" and one, or even two, zeros isn't going to cut it.
Musk has rebuilt his factory for each new model.
Speaking as someone who worked in the Detroit auto
industry during the 70s and 80s: ALL auto companies do a substantial rehack of their factories for each new model.
Detroit auto companies scheduled model changeover to coincide with deer hunting season, giving their workers (except for the plant engineers, electricians, and millwrights) time off to go chasing Bambi through the woods - or have a beer party in camp.
The changeover also gave those worthies a chance to fix all the stuff that had broken during the model year and patched up to keep limping along until the next break. (Typical example: An intermittent ground fault in some machine. You could see the balance indicator lights on the power bus flash every time it cycled as the 3-phase feed went off-center. This would work fine for months - unless two machines on the same bus would develop ground faults on different phases and happen to activate them simultaneously. Then you'd get the fireworks.)
But keep trolling.
Yes, you really should. As we used to say on Netnews: "If [somebody like you] didn't exist, we'd have to invent him."
Trolls are really handy as straight men, raising the strawman arguments and thus giving people like me an opportunity to post the real story.
Somebody who actually believes the popular misconceptions works much better than a sock puppet, because he's much better at getting the language right on the bogus argument that needs to be exposed. B-)
So sales are up, losses are up - but they're on track to make a profit? Really? Something's not adding up...
What's not adding up is that you're conflating recurring and nonrecurring expenses (NREs).
If all the money being spent now were recurring expenses - the money you spend on making a car in Q2 that you'll have to spend again to make another car in Q4 - then you'd be right.
But a LOT of that money is being spent on putting together the plant to make the cars. You do that once. Then you don't have to do it again (beyond maintenance as stuff wears out and the like).
Or at least you don't have to do it again until you EXPAND the plant to INCREASE PRODUCTION or BUILD ANOTHER TYPE OF CAR. (Guess what Tesla has been doing...) That's why companies have to spend a lot of money - that they get from investors - when starting up, that they don't earn back right away.
Their balance sheet for the quarter includes both the REs and NREs. If you allocate it ALL to the current production of cars, and project that into the future, you'll be 'way low on the bottom line once the NREs have been paid off and the plant is still making cars.
What are the costs to rewrite the water-billing software, payroll software, work order system, etc, and then integrate them all together?
That depends. Will they run under Wine? If so, you don't need to re-write them (or can rewrite them piecemeal as they need upgrading anyhow.)
Downside to Wine is that it emulates Windows so well that it makes the system vulnerable to some Windows malware attacks. B-b
But far from all, and you can sandbox it without too much work. B-)
God forbid anyone [in or working for government] design anything efficiently involving forethought.
But governments are SUPPOSED to be inefficient and ineffective.
That's because, whenever they DO get efficient, then then efficiently oppress everyone within their power an become tyrannies.
Inefficiency is a defence against this. It was even deliberately designed into the US Federal government in an effort to keep it from ballooning out of control.
Fortunately for us all, the incentive structures inherent in a coercive monopoly tend to make governments inefficient and error prone even without having such flakiness as a deliberate design element. (Doubly so, since such deliberate designs are themselves subject to the inherent flakiness, and it all goes fractal from there.)
The "several voices wandering pseudorandomly within a narrowing envelope converging on a note" thing has a predecessor:
Krzysztof Penderecki used (I think he originated) the technique in his 1960 _Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima_
Or if you're in a hurry for some of the mineral CO2 you do have, land an iceball on it. (Strip-mining on a planetary scale...)
How's THAT for "environmental impact"? B-)
So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the-atmosphere orbits ... Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to mine it.
Or if you're in a hurry for some of the mineral CO2 you do have, land an iceball on it. (Strip-mining on a planetary scale. Much easier than digging.)
But a small one, so you don't lose a couple years of ground-level solar heating waiting for the dust to settle.
Instead of nuking Mars, send CO2 rich asteroids at it to serve as both the nuke and the additional nutrient.
Water is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and Mars needs more water anyhow.
So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the -atmosphere orbits to heat and humidify the atmosphere, add oxygen (from some of the water that gets split and doesn't recombine in time), and also add whatever impurities they contain.
Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to mine it. You can hold off on the carbonaceous chondrites until you find out if you really DO have a shortfall of CO2 (or you need them to drop a few gigatons of soot over any new polar water-ice caps to avoid reflecting away a bunch of your solar warming).
Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind.
In geologic time. With the moon, if you added an atmosphere it would last just fine for millenia before you had to pump it up a bit to make up for the loss. Mars has a much deeper gravity well, so an added atmosphere should last a lot longer..
(As for "poaching" off the Earth's field, the moon is out of it except for about 6 days a month - during which it gets some substantial electrical effects that are likely to strip more gas than they protect.)
But if you're really concerned with Mars' lack of a magnetic field speeding your atmosphere's loss, MAKE one! The entire energy of the Earth's field is only about 10^17 joules. That's just over three Gigawatt years. Any of the Earth's top ten nuke plants could do that in about half a year. (But Mars wouldn't need quite as big or strong a field as Earth.)
You'll want to put your (very redundant) superconducting loops on Mars, rather than its moons or orbital platform(s), to avoid orbital decay from the field dragging through the planet and/or interacting with the solar wind in undesirable ways. (Not to mention interaction issues when orbiting multiple BIG magnets...)
It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure.
Another good reason to make a field, even if you DON'T need it to keep the atmosphere from blowing away on a human timescale.
On a related note:
On one hand the welfare system, financially, is terribly inefficient, serving mainly as welfare for bureaucrats. Some years ago it was estimated that, for each dollar of benefits given to a recipient, over six were spent on administration. The dollar-for-dollar loss of welfare payments if the recipient has some income made working at all a net loss (of both time and the expenses of things like work-suitable clothing and transport to/from the job site), encouraging total dependence, while the presumption that a man in the home should be financing the family (and elimination of welfare payments if one was present) led to multiple generations of unwed mothers among the poor and enormous social fallout.
On the other hand, the income tax is similarly costly (beyond the tax money paid), both in the actual costs of dealing with the reporting,, computation, and money-handling requirements and the economic cost of the market distortions resulting from the complex rules and policy rewards and punishments built into the tax rates and rules. Even without the policy builtins, the graduated tax system would still require the heavy-duty accounting.
One proposal (which has been around for decades) is the "negative income flat tax". This works as follows: :
1. Every citizen (or other qualifying person), regardless of income, receives a stipend corresponding roughly to full welfare benefits.
2. Every dollar of income, starting with the first, is taxed at a fixed rate.
3. The stipend and rates are set so that, for the bulk of the population, the net income transfer is about the same as the current system.
4. The entire welfare and internal revenue departments and all their programs and regulations are replaced by a
4a. Checking that nobody signs up for more than one stipend.
4b. Checking that the flat tax is withheld and transferred to the treasury.
Some characteristics of this:
- If a wage-earner's flat tax is withheld by his employer and paid to the government, there's no need for the government to even know who he is. No filing papers with the government for each job and/or at the end of the year. Very simple reporting for the employer, too.
- Those living on stipends can spend it as they please, without constant oversight from the government. If they need a little more, and can find employment, they can just go ahead, without loss of benefits. This breaks the "welfare trap" and makes working for pay, whether intermittent, piecework, part time, or full time, a net gain.
- The simplification of the tax structure would also drastically reduce the administrative costs and barriers to going into business or hiring others. This should produce a substantial increase in productive employment and GDP.
- The bulk of the bureaucrats can be laid off, at enormous reduction of cost to the government. (They can live on their stipends or go find more productive work.) This savings should more than offset any shortfalls from the mismatch of the simple rates to the current tax and welfare cash flows.
- Similarly the bulk of the tax-related accountants and financial workers would no longer be needed by the bulk of the population, as well. (Again they COULD live on the stipend. But their skills should be largely transferable to other employment - including bookkeeping for the expected explosion of new small businesses.)
You could even keep the effect of the few, critical, major deductions under this system without breaking it back into a forest of regulations and bureaucrats:
- Mortgage interest deduction on primary residence:
- The bkorrower declares to the lender that this mortgage is on his primary residence and supplies his (social security / stipend) number.
- The lender supplies this, along with the interest charged, to the "only one stipend per person" department, which checks "only one primary residence at a time per stipend".
As does California, several, some of which it has had for a long time. For instance: The San Luis reservoir / O'Neil Forebay complex.
San Luis reservoir was completed in 1967 and has a capacity of just over 2 million acre-feet, about 319 feet above the forebay. The forebay is at the level of the local section of the California State Water and Central Valley Projects, while the reservoir is filled by pumping and generates power when water is released. It serves both as water storage for irrigation and city drinking, and as a pumped-water energy storage facility.
For decades many ares of the US had to go to expensive peaking generation and variable electric rates while California did not: The power requirements for pumping irrigation water are enormous, but the time of day of the pumping is not critical. So California electric utilities and the water projects just arranged for the pumping to be varied by time of day to level the load on the electric grid. But the wide deployment of air conditioning and solar and wind power seem to have disrupted that.
That last is somewhat surprising, actually, Solar + wind generation tends to level the daily peaking and HVAC requirements, including compensating for weather variations. (More sun = more air conditioning load and more solar generation. More wind = more HVAC load due to lowered effectiveness of insulation and more wind generation.)
So they gave tablets with weak security to inmates at a prison.
And the tablets had a mechanism to buy services - music, games, etc.
And 364 convicts broke the security and stole services - an average of $618 worth each, as much as $11,000 in one case.
Why is this surprising?
TFA and the first paragraph of the CERT advisory it quotes talk about exposing the "private key".
I'm not clear whether this is a misspeak, with the vunerable key being the session key, or if the parameter checking failure actually jeopardizes the private key of the attacked system.
The latter is a MUCH bigger problem. If its only the session key that may be exposed, fixing the bug is all you need (unless the attacker was able to get into a service that let him view or alter the private key of the affected devices). If the private key was exposed and obtained, devices will need to be re-keyed.
Does anyone looking into this have information to distinguish the two cases?