Pity he doesn't have a jury of his peers, so he's basically gonna get crucified by joe & jane blow citizen...
The downside to treating everybody as equal before the law is that everybody is everybody else's "peer" for the purposes of jury selection.
"Jury of his peers" is from British law - where the Magna Carta established the right of Lords to be tried by a jury of other Lords in disputes brought by the King, to keep the King from arbitrarily convicting them of made-up crimes and seizing their estates. Later it was extended to the other classes of "Englishmen".
When it comes to the US, while many of the legal principles came across, the explicit legal distinctions among classes of citizens, based on heritage, occupation, government position, etc. were explicitly banished from US law. We were left with free, slave/involuntary servant (a class later eliminated except for those convicted of crimes), non-citizen, and "untaxed Indian" (effectively citizen of an independent country called a tribe who hasn't opted for full US citizen status).
About the closest we have to "peer" in jury selection is the requirement that the trial take place in the community where the crime occurred unless the DEFENDANT requests it be moved elsewhere and the judge agrees he can't get a fair trial in the original location.
If you play a lot of video games, you're probably not a disinterested observer either.
I don't play video games at all.
After "spacewar" and "asteroids" I haven't done much since a few sessions when they were blocky typewriter pictures on early home computers. A few rounds of "Daleks". Played "breakout" a few times when it was current and a couple rounds of one of the "Mario" series when at a party with some younguns. Closest I've come lately is to sit in on a session where several people worked through the puzzles of Portal. This inspired me to spend a few bux on a copy of the Orange Box and a controller - but after over a year I haven't gotten around to installing and playing it.
Nothing against 'em - I just do other things with my time.
So as denizens of Slashdot are concerned I suspect my "disinterested observer" status (score? B-) ) on videogames is one of the highest.
Ebert is a movie critic. As such he has a vested interest in keeping people interested in spending their eyeball time on movies rather than "diverting" it to other passtimes, such as video games. This constitutes a conflict of interest whenever he attempts to analyze those passtimes.
Again, Ebert is a movie critic. This means he thinks movies are something more worthy of his attention than other passtimes. This can be expected to produce a subjective bias whenever he attempts to analyze other passtimes.
While this may be his actual honest and informed opinion, rather than a conscious attempt to promote his own subject matter (and thus his career as a critic) or an unconscious bias manifesting as a denigration of other art(or not)forms, I am inclined to take what he says about video-games-as-art with a large salt lick. (The same one I used in the '50s through now when blithely ignoring the mainstream literature establishment's constant criticism of both science fiction - which has an opposing ideology - and graphic novels / "comic books" - which bear the same relationship to written literature as theater does to storytelling.)
I am reminded of the TV show episodes during the rise of various things perceived as competition to network TV - cable, internet-based conferencing (netnews, blogs,...), and again video games - which attempted to tie video games to crime, drugs, death, etc. (For example I recall one particularly pathetic (and low budget) cop show (involving "The San Diego Chicken" as a major character and witness) where the murder was committed by an executive of one of two cable companies involved in a bidding war.)
I wonder if there couldn't be a more aerodynamic shape it could use to reduce the friction from the atmosphere.
Every additional pound of wing is one less pound of payload. The shuttle comes in dead-stick and has no capability to come around for another pass. So enough wing to get it to the runway is all the wing it should have.
As it is (if what I heard from someone in the industry back in the day is correct) the shuttle has FAR too much wing for the mission profiles on which it has been used.
The shuttle was a combined civilian-military project from the start - intended as a cost-saving measure (and/or to suck in military money to make the project possible). So it was designed to handle both civilian and military missions. Civilian missions typically involve near-equatorial orbits (science platforms, synchronous-orbit comsat plus low-to-high-orbit booster, etc.) These launch to the east (mainly from Cape Canaveral) to get an initial boost from the Earth's rotation. Military missions have a higher proportion of polar orbits (such as observation satellites - where one can see the whole globe because the Earth turns under it.) Polar orbits get no help from the Earth's spin and thus have much less payload for a given amount of vehicle and fuel. Intent was to launch them to the south from Vandenberg.
But the military had another mission in mind, back in the cold-war days, which got designed in. This was a fractional-orbit "pop-up" scouting (or something...) polar mission: Launch south (or potentially north, though this takes you over land in case of trouble), once-around getting your pix (or doing whatever), and land after one orbit. Ideally you'd land the same place you launched from (i.e. Vandenberg) so you can immediately recycle the craft, rather than having to mount it on a 747 to ferry it from the landing to the launch site. But the Earth turns under you while you're in orbit. A "normal" mission can just multi-orbit for one or more half-days until the launch site is under the track again. But on a war footing you can't wait a half-day: a) you might get shot down (losing the info and/or the scarce military resource) and b) your info is delayed. So a one-orbit pop-up mission means you need a lot of cross-track aerodynamic capacity: Come down to where you're out of braking and into gliding mode, then turn east and chase down the landing site. To handle this mission the shuttle was given those much bigger wings.
There's a stock ratio for rule-of-thumb ratio for computing a low-earth-orbit vehicle's polar payload as a fraction of its near-equitorial payload. Story goes this was applied to the Shuttle in the early design phases and it came out with a decent number even with the big wings. But the problem is that it was applied to "payload" as in "payload bay capacity". In the case of the shuttle THE ORBITER IS ALSO PAYLOAD. With the bigger wings it can still do a polar flight - but after deducting the orbiter, crew, and consumables you end up with a payload of a couple hundred pounds. And this was figured out too late in the design phase to rehack it.
So the military got their pop-up mission - but lost the ability to do polar satellite launches. After this was discovered they abandoned the construction of shuttles for the Vandenberg base, mostly bailed out of the shuttle program, and did their own regular-booster satellite launches. The Vandenberg shuttle-launch facility was mothballed (except as a backup landing site) and the Shuttle was always launched from Canaveral.
Now maybe it wasn't really a mistake. Maybe they were intending to use one of the intended followon replacements for the boosters/tank combo that might have given them nontrivial polar capacity - and finances never materialized. But the net result is that the shuttle has too-big wings,thus way-expensive launches, thus didn't do all that many launches, thus never developed the economy-of-scale that would have brought the price down SOMEWHAT (though never to where it would have been with dinky wings.)
Or even optionally hand it to the sender's mail agent to encrypt it before it is shipped to the server (though this would interfere with server-based anti-malware services).
Annnnd...
That reduces it to the case you wanted, Omestes. B-) Even without standardizing the protocol and deploying it globally, companies like Google and Yahoo can store the users' public mail keys and encrypt the mail as they send it between users within their service (as well as mail arriving from outside).
The server can keep the public key and encrypt the mail when it's received. Or even optionally hand it to the sender's mail agent to encrypt it before it is shipped to the server (though this would interfere with server-based anti-malware services).
... why doesn't Google start automatically encrypting messages sent between Gmail accounts?
Because if they have the keys they've reduced it to the previous case - while if they don't have the keys they can't help users who lose their key, disrupting service.
However if the user is willing to take the risk on the key, it would make sense to encrypt the email for continued storage when the user "opens" it. Then Google can give the DoJ the encrypted mail and the finger. B-)
Use an asymmetric cypher and push the decryption to a client on the user's computer and Google, Yahoo, etc. never need to even HAVE the decryption keys to do the encryption. (It's more crunch intensive than symmetric "session" keys but crunch is getting 'WAY cheap.)
Anybody up for working on an upgrade to IMAP that lets the mail reader hand the user's public key to the server and have the server encrypt the mail with it before a) sending it across the wire to the user and/or b) returning it to storage?
By george I think we've got it. Everybody else: You saw it here first so after this you can use this posting as "prior art" if somebody tries to patent it. B-)
While we're at it, post all your offsite filesystem backups, too. The same argument applies to them as you're using for the "opened" email.
Thought I should make that more explicit. Filesystem backup services (especially the network/"cloud" based ones) are next if they get away with this.
(Or even if they don't win it. They'll just claim the loss was because it was "mail" and doesn't apply to "files". Win and they have the precedent. Lose and they start fresh.)
So, it ["joke" about included malware] is not as funny as you thought.
Actually I read it as straight (except for the flip line at the end) - and was just cruising to see if anybody had raised this point before raising it myself.
Studios have a track record of shipping DRM that acts as malware. (Remember the one on the audio CDs that caused so much flap?)
No way in the world I'm running any software that comes "included" on a hard disk - built into a movie or otherwise. And when I install a new disk on one of my machines the first thing that happens to it is a surface analysis - run from a linux live CD boot - to wipe out anything that might have been installed at the factory or in the market channel.
10. Understand that if people don't have a lot of disposable income, they aren't going to spend money on your product that they don't need to live.... do something positive to get the economy rolling so people have disposable income to trade with you...
Or at least don't be so stupid as to make nothing but movies that brainwash the viewers into supporting your political buddies who then impoverish them thoroughly they can't afford your product and take to pirating it to watch it at all.
Hint: Part of that brainwashing is losing the respect for other people's property rights. If they don't believe in rights to physical property, how can you expect to convince them to respect your claim of rights to intangible "intellectual property"?
Wouldn't it be convenient for the DHS to have every new cellphone giving them a call whenever it smells that its owner is handling nitrates or peroxides.
The reason for the Third Amendment is that the British forced the Colonists to to house troops and the troops acted as spies on their activities. Looks like the Fed has finally found a virtual way to get around yet another of the Bill of Rights provisions. B-b
One of the problems with people feeding the wild deer in the US is that the critters' gut bacteria populations are very tuned to their diet. The deer get tuned up to the free food (typically grain or straw). Then when the people go on vacation for the Christmas holidays or otherwise suddenly stop providing fodder the deer sometimes starve with full guts before the bugs that digest twigs and bark can repopulate.
Also your gut flora can have major extinction events every time you have a course of antibiotics (or even eat a lot of moldy bread or blue cheese). Then you get to be recolonized. And you may need another round or two of antibiotics if some of the nastier bugs (such as clostridium difficile) that were being kept in check by the "good bugs" get overgrown and can then fight off the new immigrants while simultaneously attacking your gut lining.
So you're not going to have the same "company" in your guts throughout life.
By the way: For an ordinary American diet a few cups of a good yoghurt will give your intestines a nice mix of beneficial bacteria for starters after an antibiotic course. Don't know how good it would be fore sushi-eaters, though. B-)
"Now, the making of solar panels already use up more energy than they're able to produce in their lifetimes... wny make the energy (& $) cost any greater."
No, no they don't. Manufacturing energy payback is around two years on average, with variations for manufacturing technique.
Not to mention that, even if it wasn't outright false, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison
For starters, much of the energy cost of making panels is in the form of raw heat, not electricity. Nobody in his right MIND would burn solar electricity back to heat through a resistor for that purpose - throwing away a carnot-cycle ratio. If you INSISTED on using solar power to make panels you'd use things like solar furnaces, not photovoltaic panels, for your heat at a 4-to-1 or better boost.
Bit the target it to provide energy in the form of electricity to a particular site. What are the alternatives: If it doesn't have a water resource for microhydro generation or a wind regime suitable for a practical mill, the alternatives are a local fuel-driven generator or the far more efficient utility grid.
Fuel-driven gird consumes MUCH more in BTUs than it delivers in watts - because it's FAR from 100% efficient at turning heat from combustion into electricity at your wall outlet. Since it's a heat engine you start with the carnot cycle efficiency, deduct resistive losses, steam leaks, corona discharge. Then there's the energy cost of constructing the infrastructure: For local generators: Building the engine and generator. For the grid: building the power plants, making the iron, copper, and glass for the generators, transformers, wires, insulators, towers, meters, switch boxes, and circuit breakers, cutting and chemically treating trees to make poles, clearing a path, erecting poles, stringing wires, bringing workers to and from the sites,...
But energy isn't the only cost. Power generation and delivery affects a lot of environmental and other human values: There's pollution. There's depletion of resources. There's despoiling of other aspects of quality of life.
Money costs generally map the sum of ALL those costs pretty well. When solar R.E. at your site (absent subsidies) is past financial breakeven with grid power, it's probably a better all-around deal for all the affected values as well, including energy cost.
Given that oil companies are major producers of the current solar panels it seems silly to blame them.
Example: Arco did major R&D, productized, went to market, and at one point was the largest supplier of solar panels with a 45% market share. Eventually others were out-competing them, so they sold their solar panel operation to BP where it is still going strong.
Oil companies realize that they are really ENERGY companies. They also know that most of the money they collect for oil products goes to the people and countries that supply them with feedstock and that oil isn't the only form of energy that can make a profit. And they know that oil will eventually run out and before that crude will get WAY expensive and people will switch to other stuff.
So if you want oil products they'll sell you oil products and make a few percent. If you want solar electricity they'll sell you panels and make maybe more on their investment. And so on for a number of energy technologies.
= = =
IMHO the issue is that we have a burst of inventions that make incremental improvements but aren't many of them that has all the criteria for a switchover:
- Big enough improvement to get people to switch.
- Manufactureable at reasonable cost.
- Makes sturdy, safe, reliable products.
- Is enough ahead of the REST of the pack that it will grab enough market share to pay off the cost of going to market and not get bumped by another upstart.
That said, there has been a continuous improvement in the price/performance ratio.
A decade or so ago you'd have to pay $10/watt or more, making a solar-powered house financially practical only for new construction in rural areas where you'd have to pay more than the price of the PV setup to string the grid to the site.
These days, if you are willing to accept "irregular" panels with slight cosmetic defects, you can get UL approved panels for under $2/watt, and unmarked panels (for sites where insurance and code compliance aren't an issue) for about $1/watt. That's cheap enough to beat grid power in many suburban areas if they have good solar input, even without governmental subsidies.
Then add in construction subsidies and income from selling alternative-generation credits to power companies and you can do well in many other places.
And there ARE a few still-more-improved photovoltaic technologies that ARE just coming into production. And others that look simple enough to quickly add to existing processes for a big gain (like the nanoparticle frequency-shifter coating.) So expect the prices to be driven down still further.
When solar cells are connected in a series string, the current output of the string is limited by the current output of the cell (or paralleled set of cells) with the least current output.
Typical solar panels are either a single series string wound serpentine style back-and-forth over the panel, or a set of several series strings connected in parallel with paralleling jumpers across them every few cells. In the first case shading out any single cell drops the output of the whole panel. In the second, localized shading knocking out one or a few cells will similarly produce a drastic drop in output.
But if the array is built of many cells and intended to operate with various patterns of shading, they can be connected in parallel groups so that the total of the group is pretty much constant, then these groups connected in series to achieve the desired voltage. Alternatively, each small patch (which would pretty much be all illuminated or all dark) could be made up of a series string of cells, and these strings connected in parallel to form the array. In these cases the problem would either not arise or be greatly mitigated.
Since the panel is being designed for patchy and varying illumination the interconnects can be co-designed to work properly.
They are required to test them on animals before humans, it's part of the job. It's not a part of the job they like, but it's necessary so they do it.
At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law I feel I must point out that Animal Rights applied to a medical experiment context is what led the NAZIs, in about three steps, to medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
Step 1: To avoid experiments on animals the experiments were performed on "mentally defective" humans - i.e. inmates of mental hospitals, initially those who were believed to be so brain-damaged or mentally deficient that they were less aware than animals.
Step 2: For politically convenient reasons, propaganda campaigns spread the idea that certain classes of people were subhuman - and by extension sub-animal: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Anarchists, Labor Unionists, Gays,...
Step 3: Large numbers of the classes in Step 2. were, for the convenience of the war effort, incarcerated in concentration/labor camps (where their assignment was mainly to be out of the way, and dying was a "good" way to accomplish this). At this point, being used in medical experiments was a way to complete that assignment and contribute to "humanity" in the process...
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a very scary read. It shows that the NAZI movement started out with pretty much the full set of New Age Counterculture "virtues" (mysticism, animal rights, vegitarianism, body-beautiful health fads, back-to-nature, non-hierarchical consensus decision making,...) and how these ideas coevolved into what now are considered such monsters that even looking at what they were like is considered anathema.
(Another example: Consensus decision-making evolves into totalitarianism in the presence of the normal fraction of psychopaths. First diversity and dissent paralyze group action. Then social pressures for conformity are developed to break the deadlock. These grow to be nearly irresistible. Then an individual or small group withholds consent except when the rest of the population does what they want. Finally the population follows their new "leaders" automatically, since that's what will finally happen anyhow.)
This is about their commanders putting them at risk by doing coverups which, when they eventually fail, feed the enemys' ability to recruit, rather than actively and transparently enforcing the "rules of war" and thus pulling the enemys' teeth.
It's time for YOU to grow up. There's more to war than tactical details and bravery under fire.
This thing is nearly as big as a bomber. Seems to me the square-cube law (with power going with square and weight to be flown going with cube) would favor smaller machines - unless the density of the solar cells combined with a fixed thickness, and/or the weight of the control computer and hardware, imposed a limit.
... announced they had succeeded some six weeks later.... This is odd because it seems slow for a very weak encryption and far, far too fast for strong encryption.
Seems to me that depends on how much compute resource was donated.
If x amount of computer processing will crack it in ten years, 87x will crack it in three weeks.
Wikileaks is VERY popular with a lot of people who have compute cycles to contribute.
I seem to recall they ship them around on networks rather than physically. So it stands to reason they'd be encrypted by default.
Surveillance videos automatically have information of interest to the enemy. In addition to whatever information they record, they disclose where (and typically when, thanks to automatic annotation) the surveillance occurred. Knowing where the "eyes" are/were tells the enemy how to avoid them.
Meanwhile, practically ANY information can be of tactical significance, so the default is to hide it. Example from WW II: Tracking shipments of toilet paper exposed troop disposition and movements. Related example from a military training exercise: Leader of one side didn't like to use latrines. Intelligence guy on the other side knew that, monitored the communications of the local porta-potty vendor, found out where they delivered a potty, and thus was able to stage a surprise attack on the first side's HQ, winning the exercise.
Classification is about hiding tactical details and to some extent strategic planning and capabilities from real and potential enemies, to improve the effectiveness and reduce the vulnerability of military units. It is about troop movements, attack sites and times, resource levels, weapons construction, and so on.
It is NOT about hiding evidence of crime and allowing the perpetrators to escape justice- even if letting the existence or details of the crime be known puts troops at risk. Misusing it in this way is an additional criminal activity, making those who do so accessories after the fact, members of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
There are rules for "civilized warfare". They include limits on the acceptable activities - especially against bystanders. They also include the participating groups taking credit and blame for their actions. If personnel of the US military or the US' hirelings broke the rules, it is up to the US to bring them to justice and take the heat. If it instead actively covers up the events it is institutionalizing them, effectively making them policy. This rates a lot more heat.
To the extent that the "increased risk to the troops" from the disclosure is just the righteous "blowback" from people's anger about, and rational planning changes based on, activity disclosed, it's the fault of the perpetrators, not the whistleblower.
The way to avoid or mitigate blowback, when training fails and atrocities are committed by our own personnel, is to VISIBLY punish it, making it clear that it is NOT policy, NOT acceptable, NOT a way to achieve success and advancement, and NOT to be done in the future.
I'm curious as to why they used Sodium Sulfur rather than Vanadium Redox.
I'm unaware of any advantages to S.S. except maybe size (which wouldn't particularly matter in a stationary installation. And the Vanadium Redox is already productized for exactly this service.
Maybe too much patent encumberment and the guys with the V.R. patent don't have enough production capacity or are charging too much?
Slashdot Mirror
Pity he doesn't have a jury of his peers, so he's basically gonna get crucified by joe & jane blow citizen ...
The downside to treating everybody as equal before the law is that everybody is everybody else's "peer" for the purposes of jury selection.
"Jury of his peers" is from British law - where the Magna Carta established the right of Lords to be tried by a jury of other Lords in disputes brought by the King, to keep the King from arbitrarily convicting them of made-up crimes and seizing their estates. Later it was extended to the other classes of "Englishmen".
When it comes to the US, while many of the legal principles came across, the explicit legal distinctions among classes of citizens, based on heritage, occupation, government position, etc. were explicitly banished from US law. We were left with free, slave/involuntary servant (a class later eliminated except for those convicted of crimes), non-citizen, and "untaxed Indian" (effectively citizen of an independent country called a tribe who hasn't opted for full US citizen status).
About the closest we have to "peer" in jury selection is the requirement that the trial take place in the community where the crime occurred unless the DEFENDANT requests it be moved elsewhere and the judge agrees he can't get a fair trial in the original location.
If you play a lot of video games, you're probably not a disinterested observer either.
I don't play video games at all.
After "spacewar" and "asteroids" I haven't done much since a few sessions when they were blocky typewriter pictures on early home computers. A few rounds of "Daleks". Played "breakout" a few times when it was current and a couple rounds of one of the "Mario" series when at a party with some younguns. Closest I've come lately is to sit in on a session where several people worked through the puzzles of Portal. This inspired me to spend a few bux on a copy of the Orange Box and a controller - but after over a year I haven't gotten around to installing and playing it.
Nothing against 'em - I just do other things with my time.
So as denizens of Slashdot are concerned I suspect my "disinterested observer" status (score? B-) ) on videogames is one of the highest.
Ebert is a movie critic. As such he has a vested interest in keeping people interested in spending their eyeball time on movies rather than "diverting" it to other passtimes, such as video games. This constitutes a conflict of interest whenever he attempts to analyze those passtimes.
Again, Ebert is a movie critic. This means he thinks movies are something more worthy of his attention than other passtimes. This can be expected to produce a subjective bias whenever he attempts to analyze other passtimes.
While this may be his actual honest and informed opinion, rather than a conscious attempt to promote his own subject matter (and thus his career as a critic) or an unconscious bias manifesting as a denigration of other art(or not)forms, I am inclined to take what he says about video-games-as-art with a large salt lick. (The same one I used in the '50s through now when blithely ignoring the mainstream literature establishment's constant criticism of both science fiction - which has an opposing ideology - and graphic novels / "comic books" - which bear the same relationship to written literature as theater does to storytelling.)
I am reminded of the TV show episodes during the rise of various things perceived as competition to network TV - cable, internet-based conferencing (netnews, blogs, ...), and again video games - which attempted to tie video games to crime, drugs, death, etc. (For example I recall one particularly pathetic (and low budget) cop show (involving "The San Diego Chicken" as a major character and witness) where the murder was committed by an executive of one of two cable companies involved in a bidding war.)
I hope Ebert is not sinking to this level.
I wonder if there couldn't be a more aerodynamic shape it could use to reduce the friction from the atmosphere.
Every additional pound of wing is one less pound of payload. The shuttle comes in dead-stick and has no capability to come around for another pass. So enough wing to get it to the runway is all the wing it should have.
As it is (if what I heard from someone in the industry back in the day is correct) the shuttle has FAR too much wing for the mission profiles on which it has been used.
The shuttle was a combined civilian-military project from the start - intended as a cost-saving measure (and/or to suck in military money to make the project possible). So it was designed to handle both civilian and military missions. Civilian missions typically involve near-equatorial orbits (science platforms, synchronous-orbit comsat plus low-to-high-orbit booster, etc.) These launch to the east (mainly from Cape Canaveral) to get an initial boost from the Earth's rotation. Military missions have a higher proportion of polar orbits (such as observation satellites - where one can see the whole globe because the Earth turns under it.) Polar orbits get no help from the Earth's spin and thus have much less payload for a given amount of vehicle and fuel. Intent was to launch them to the south from Vandenberg.
But the military had another mission in mind, back in the cold-war days, which got designed in. This was a fractional-orbit "pop-up" scouting (or something...) polar mission: Launch south (or potentially north, though this takes you over land in case of trouble), once-around getting your pix (or doing whatever), and land after one orbit. Ideally you'd land the same place you launched from (i.e. Vandenberg) so you can immediately recycle the craft, rather than having to mount it on a 747 to ferry it from the landing to the launch site. But the Earth turns under you while you're in orbit. A "normal" mission can just multi-orbit for one or more half-days until the launch site is under the track again. But on a war footing you can't wait a half-day: a) you might get shot down (losing the info and/or the scarce military resource) and b) your info is delayed. So a one-orbit pop-up mission means you need a lot of cross-track aerodynamic capacity: Come down to where you're out of braking and into gliding mode, then turn east and chase down the landing site. To handle this mission the shuttle was given those much bigger wings.
There's a stock ratio for rule-of-thumb ratio for computing a low-earth-orbit vehicle's polar payload as a fraction of its near-equitorial payload. Story goes this was applied to the Shuttle in the early design phases and it came out with a decent number even with the big wings. But the problem is that it was applied to "payload" as in "payload bay capacity". In the case of the shuttle THE ORBITER IS ALSO PAYLOAD. With the bigger wings it can still do a polar flight - but after deducting the orbiter, crew, and consumables you end up with a payload of a couple hundred pounds. And this was figured out too late in the design phase to rehack it.
So the military got their pop-up mission - but lost the ability to do polar satellite launches. After this was discovered they abandoned the construction of shuttles for the Vandenberg base, mostly bailed out of the shuttle program, and did their own regular-booster satellite launches. The Vandenberg shuttle-launch facility was mothballed (except as a backup landing site) and the Shuttle was always launched from Canaveral.
Now maybe it wasn't really a mistake. Maybe they were intending to use one of the intended followon replacements for the boosters/tank combo that might have given them nontrivial polar capacity - and finances never materialized. But the net result is that the shuttle has too-big wings,thus way-expensive launches, thus didn't do all that many launches, thus never developed the economy-of-scale that would have brought the price down SOMEWHAT (though never to where it would have been with dinky wings.)
Bummer!
Or even optionally hand it to the sender's mail agent to encrypt it before it is shipped to the server (though this would interfere with server-based anti-malware services).
Annnnd...
That reduces it to the case you wanted, Omestes. B-) Even without standardizing the protocol and deploying it globally, companies like Google and Yahoo can store the users' public mail keys and encrypt the mail as they send it between users within their service (as well as mail arriving from outside).
One more tweak:
The server can keep the public key and encrypt the mail when it's received. Or even optionally hand it to the sender's mail agent to encrypt it before it is shipped to the server (though this would interfere with server-based anti-malware services).
... why doesn't Google start automatically encrypting messages sent between Gmail accounts?
Because if they have the keys they've reduced it to the previous case - while if they don't have the keys they can't help users who lose their key, disrupting service.
However if the user is willing to take the risk on the key, it would make sense to encrypt the email for continued storage when the user "opens" it. Then Google can give the DoJ the encrypted mail and the finger. B-)
Use an asymmetric cypher and push the decryption to a client on the user's computer and Google, Yahoo, etc. never need to even HAVE the decryption keys to do the encryption. (It's more crunch intensive than symmetric "session" keys but crunch is getting 'WAY cheap.)
Anybody up for working on an upgrade to IMAP that lets the mail reader hand the user's public key to the server and have the server encrypt the mail with it before a) sending it across the wire to the user and/or b) returning it to storage?
By george I think we've got it. Everybody else: You saw it here first so after this you can use this posting as "prior art" if somebody tries to patent it. B-)
While we're at it, post all your offsite filesystem backups, too. The same argument applies to them as you're using for the "opened" email.
Thought I should make that more explicit. Filesystem backup services (especially the network/"cloud" based ones) are next if they get away with this.
(Or even if they don't win it. They'll just claim the loss was because it was "mail" and doesn't apply to "files". Win and they have the precedent. Lose and they start fresh.)
OK DoJ ... Then post all your already read e-mails to the Internet.
(Those still stored offsite, that is.)
While we're at it, post all your offsite filesystem backups, too. The same argument applies to them as you're using for the "opened" email.
This will work for about 3 seconds. Then the cat will start playing tag with the cursor and icons, which will be interpreted as "taps".
If you thought the cat walking across your keyboard was disruptive wait until it starts launching multiple apps at batty-bat-bat-the-cat-toy speeds.
So, it ["joke" about included malware] is not as funny as you thought.
Actually I read it as straight (except for the flip line at the end) - and was just cruising to see if anybody had raised this point before raising it myself.
Studios have a track record of shipping DRM that acts as malware. (Remember the one on the audio CDs that caused so much flap?)
No way in the world I'm running any software that comes "included" on a hard disk - built into a movie or otherwise. And when I install a new disk on one of my machines the first thing that happens to it is a surface analysis - run from a linux live CD boot - to wipe out anything that might have been installed at the factory or in the market channel.
10. Understand that if people don't have a lot of disposable income, they aren't going to spend money on your product that they don't need to live. ... do something positive to get the economy rolling so people have disposable income to trade with you ...
Or at least don't be so stupid as to make nothing but movies that brainwash the viewers into supporting your political buddies who then impoverish them thoroughly they can't afford your product and take to pirating it to watch it at all.
Hint: Part of that brainwashing is losing the respect for other people's property rights. If they don't believe in rights to physical property, how can you expect to convince them to respect your claim of rights to intangible "intellectual property"?
Wouldn't it be convenient for the DHS to have every new cellphone giving them a call whenever it smells that its owner is handling nitrates or peroxides.
The reason for the Third Amendment is that the British forced the Colonists to to house troops and the troops acted as spies on their activities. Looks like the Fed has finally found a virtual way to get around yet another of the Bill of Rights provisions. B-b
Not just people and not just locations, either.
One of the problems with people feeding the wild deer in the US is that the critters' gut bacteria populations are very tuned to their diet. The deer get tuned up to the free food (typically grain or straw). Then when the people go on vacation for the Christmas holidays or otherwise suddenly stop providing fodder the deer sometimes starve with full guts before the bugs that digest twigs and bark can repopulate.
Also your gut flora can have major extinction events every time you have a course of antibiotics (or even eat a lot of moldy bread or blue cheese). Then you get to be recolonized. And you may need another round or two of antibiotics if some of the nastier bugs (such as clostridium difficile) that were being kept in check by the "good bugs" get overgrown and can then fight off the new immigrants while simultaneously attacking your gut lining.
So you're not going to have the same "company" in your guts throughout life.
By the way: For an ordinary American diet a few cups of a good yoghurt will give your intestines a nice mix of beneficial bacteria for starters after an antibiotic course. Don't know how good it would be fore sushi-eaters, though. B-)
"Now, the making of solar panels already use up more energy than they're able to produce in their lifetimes... wny make the energy (& $) cost any greater."
No, no they don't. Manufacturing energy payback is around two years on average, with variations for manufacturing technique.
Not to mention that, even if it wasn't outright false, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison
For starters, much of the energy cost of making panels is in the form of raw heat, not electricity. Nobody in his right MIND would burn solar electricity back to heat through a resistor for that purpose - throwing away a carnot-cycle ratio. If you INSISTED on using solar power to make panels you'd use things like solar furnaces, not photovoltaic panels, for your heat at a 4-to-1 or better boost.
Bit the target it to provide energy in the form of electricity to a particular site. What are the alternatives: If it doesn't have a water resource for microhydro generation or a wind regime suitable for a practical mill, the alternatives are a local fuel-driven generator or the far more efficient utility grid.
Fuel-driven gird consumes MUCH more in BTUs than it delivers in watts - because it's FAR from 100% efficient at turning heat from combustion into electricity at your wall outlet. Since it's a heat engine you start with the carnot cycle efficiency, deduct resistive losses, steam leaks, corona discharge. Then there's the energy cost of constructing the infrastructure: For local generators: Building the engine and generator. For the grid: building the power plants, making the iron, copper, and glass for the generators, transformers, wires, insulators, towers, meters, switch boxes, and circuit breakers, cutting and chemically treating trees to make poles, clearing a path, erecting poles, stringing wires, bringing workers to and from the sites, ...
But energy isn't the only cost. Power generation and delivery affects a lot of environmental and other human values: There's pollution. There's depletion of resources. There's despoiling of other aspects of quality of life.
Money costs generally map the sum of ALL those costs pretty well. When solar R.E. at your site (absent subsidies) is past financial breakeven with grid power, it's probably a better all-around deal for all the affected values as well, including energy cost.
Given that oil companies are major producers of the current solar panels it seems silly to blame them.
Example: Arco did major R&D, productized, went to market, and at one point was the largest supplier of solar panels with a 45% market share. Eventually others were out-competing them, so they sold their solar panel operation to BP where it is still going strong.
Oil companies realize that they are really ENERGY companies. They also know that most of the money they collect for oil products goes to the people and countries that supply them with feedstock and that oil isn't the only form of energy that can make a profit. And they know that oil will eventually run out and before that crude will get WAY expensive and people will switch to other stuff.
So if you want oil products they'll sell you oil products and make a few percent. If you want solar electricity they'll sell you panels and make maybe more on their investment. And so on for a number of energy technologies.
= = =
IMHO the issue is that we have a burst of inventions that make incremental improvements but aren't many of them that has all the criteria for a switchover:
- Big enough improvement to get people to switch.
- Manufactureable at reasonable cost.
- Makes sturdy, safe, reliable products.
- Is enough ahead of the REST of the pack that it will grab enough market share to pay off the cost of going to market and not get bumped by another upstart.
That said, there has been a continuous improvement in the price/performance ratio.
A decade or so ago you'd have to pay $10/watt or more, making a solar-powered house financially practical only for new construction in rural areas where you'd have to pay more than the price of the PV setup to string the grid to the site.
These days, if you are willing to accept "irregular" panels with slight cosmetic defects, you can get UL approved panels for under $2/watt, and unmarked panels (for sites where insurance and code compliance aren't an issue) for about $1/watt. That's cheap enough to beat grid power in many suburban areas if they have good solar input, even without governmental subsidies.
Then add in construction subsidies and income from selling alternative-generation credits to power companies and you can do well in many other places.
And there ARE a few still-more-improved photovoltaic technologies that ARE just coming into production. And others that look simple enough to quickly add to existing processes for a big gain (like the nanoparticle frequency-shifter coating.) So expect the prices to be driven down still further.
When solar cells are connected in a series string, the current output of the string is limited by the current output of the cell (or paralleled set of cells) with the least current output.
Typical solar panels are either a single series string wound serpentine style back-and-forth over the panel, or a set of several series strings connected in parallel with paralleling jumpers across them every few cells. In the first case shading out any single cell drops the output of the whole panel. In the second, localized shading knocking out one or a few cells will similarly produce a drastic drop in output.
But if the array is built of many cells and intended to operate with various patterns of shading, they can be connected in parallel groups so that the total of the group is pretty much constant, then these groups connected in series to achieve the desired voltage. Alternatively, each small patch (which would pretty much be all illuminated or all dark) could be made up of a series string of cells, and these strings connected in parallel to form the array. In these cases the problem would either not arise or be greatly mitigated.
Since the panel is being designed for patchy and varying illumination the interconnects can be co-designed to work properly.
They are required to test them on animals before humans, it's part of the job. It's not a part of the job they like, but it's necessary so they do it.
At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law I feel I must point out that Animal Rights applied to a medical experiment context is what led the NAZIs, in about three steps, to medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
Step 1: To avoid experiments on animals the experiments were performed on "mentally defective" humans - i.e. inmates of mental hospitals, initially those who were believed to be so brain-damaged or mentally deficient that they were less aware than animals.
Step 2: For politically convenient reasons, propaganda campaigns spread the idea that certain classes of people were subhuman - and by extension sub-animal: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Anarchists, Labor Unionists, Gays, ...
Step 3: Large numbers of the classes in Step 2. were, for the convenience of the war effort, incarcerated in concentration/labor camps (where their assignment was mainly to be out of the way, and dying was a "good" way to accomplish this). At this point, being used in medical experiments was a way to complete that assignment and contribute to "humanity" in the process...
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a very scary read. It shows that the NAZI movement started out with pretty much the full set of New Age Counterculture "virtues" (mysticism, animal rights, vegitarianism, body-beautiful health fads, back-to-nature, non-hierarchical consensus decision making, ...) and how these ideas coevolved into what now are considered such monsters that even looking at what they were like is considered anathema.
(Another example: Consensus decision-making evolves into totalitarianism in the presence of the normal fraction of psychopaths. First diversity and dissent paralyze group action. Then social pressures for conformity are developed to break the deadlock. These grow to be nearly irresistible. Then an individual or small group withholds consent except when the rest of the population does what they want. Finally the population follows their new "leaders" automatically, since that's what will finally happen anyhow.)
This isn't about the bravery of the troops.
This is about their commanders putting them at risk by doing coverups which, when they eventually fail, feed the enemys' ability to recruit, rather than actively and transparently enforcing the "rules of war" and thus pulling the enemys' teeth.
It's time for YOU to grow up. There's more to war than tactical details and bravery under fire.
This thing is nearly as big as a bomber. Seems to me the square-cube law (with power going with square and weight to be flown going with cube) would favor smaller machines - unless the density of the solar cells combined with a fixed thickness, and/or the weight of the control computer and hardware, imposed a limit.
... announced they had succeeded some six weeks later. ... This is odd because it seems slow for a very weak encryption and far, far too fast for strong encryption.
Seems to me that depends on how much compute resource was donated.
If x amount of computer processing will crack it in ten years, 87x will crack it in three weeks.
Wikileaks is VERY popular with a lot of people who have compute cycles to contribute.
I seem to recall they ship them around on networks rather than physically. So it stands to reason they'd be encrypted by default.
Surveillance videos automatically have information of interest to the enemy. In addition to whatever information they record, they disclose where (and typically when, thanks to automatic annotation) the surveillance occurred. Knowing where the "eyes" are/were tells the enemy how to avoid them.
Meanwhile, practically ANY information can be of tactical significance, so the default is to hide it. Example from WW II: Tracking shipments of toilet paper exposed troop disposition and movements. Related example from a military training exercise: Leader of one side didn't like to use latrines. Intelligence guy on the other side knew that, monitored the communications of the local porta-potty vendor, found out where they delivered a potty, and thus was able to stage a surprise attack on the first side's HQ, winning the exercise.
Classification is about hiding tactical details and to some extent strategic planning and capabilities from real and potential enemies, to improve the effectiveness and reduce the vulnerability of military units. It is about troop movements, attack sites and times, resource levels, weapons construction, and so on.
It is NOT about hiding evidence of crime and allowing the perpetrators to escape justice- even if letting the existence or details of the crime be known puts troops at risk. Misusing it in this way is an additional criminal activity, making those who do so accessories after the fact, members of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
There are rules for "civilized warfare". They include limits on the acceptable activities - especially against bystanders. They also include the participating groups taking credit and blame for their actions. If personnel of the US military or the US' hirelings broke the rules, it is up to the US to bring them to justice and take the heat. If it instead actively covers up the events it is institutionalizing them, effectively making them policy. This rates a lot more heat.
To the extent that the "increased risk to the troops" from the disclosure is just the righteous "blowback" from people's anger about, and rational planning changes based on, activity disclosed, it's the fault of the perpetrators, not the whistleblower.
The way to avoid or mitigate blowback, when training fails and atrocities are committed by our own personnel, is to VISIBLY punish it, making it clear that it is NOT policy, NOT acceptable, NOT a way to achieve success and advancement, and NOT to be done in the future.
I'm curious as to why they used Sodium Sulfur rather than Vanadium Redox.
I'm unaware of any advantages to S.S. except maybe size (which wouldn't particularly matter in a stationary installation. And the Vanadium Redox is already productized for exactly this service.
Maybe too much patent encumberment and the guys with the V.R. patent don't have enough production capacity or are charging too much?