[P]ut all the anti vaxxers in their own tribe behind an extension of trumps wall - if they survive then they should develop immunity to all those illnesses, have lower levels of autism etc. and also prove evolution.
That experiment has already been run:
- Many tribes of the American Indians had substantial public works infrastructure, medical procedures, and cultural biases (like hygiene) that helped protect them from disease.
- The Europeans went through a thousand years of "Dark Ages" when "mortifying the flesh" was a way of life, baths were exceptional occurrences for much of the population, and waves of plagues decimated the population repeatedly.
So when the Europeans arrived, they brought with them some pretty severe diseases which most of them could survive and to which the American Indians were substantially more susceptible and more likely to find fatal. Several major civilizations were wiped out and their populations knocked down to minor handfuls. (And some tribes that had been relatively minor, but had access to early Smallpox immunizations, became major powers in the next decades.)
Estimates of the indigenous American population's reduction due to imported European diseases run as high as 90-95%
(Lenovo's hypersensitive touchpad strikes again. Finishing the last paragraph.)
With effective herd immunity, the number and/or strength of immunizations can be lower than with a constant threat of exposure from mini-epidemics. There are legitimate risks associated with additional immunizations, so the smart move is to stop when the risks of the immunizations approach or exceed the risks they mitigate. With a large population of anti-vaxser victims, the risks from disease are higher and the crossover is pushed out.
The anti-vaxxers are creating extra risk from immunizations for the rest of us. Thanks for the self-fulfilling prophecy, guys!
Unfortunately the carriers of these "dumb genes" not only risk their childrens' lives, but also the herd immunity of the local community. Thereby putting the immune-compromised, newborns, and the unlucky for which the vaccine didn't take effect or are allergic.
Also: By providing a large enough pool of unimmunized to create repeated mini-epidemics and constant risk of exposure (especially in the case of human-host-only diseases that can be ELIMINATED), the anti-vaxxers "use up" the herd-immunity benefits, especially the available number of susceptible individuals that can be supported before additional measures need to be taken.
With effective herd immunity, the number and/or strength of immunizations can be lower than with a constant threat of exposure from mini-epidemics. There are legitimate risks associated with additional immunizations, so the smart move is to stop when the risks of the immunizations approach or exceed the risks they mitigate. With a large population of anti-vaxer
... this if someone offering aid and comfort to an individual who happily perpetuated a medical con that hurt and killed innocent children and still is doing so for his own material benefit
And he caused something that's even incrementally worse than the suffering and deaths of innocent children because their parents fell for the con: The suffering and death of innocent children whose parents DIDN'T fall for the con - but were nevertheless infected by those who did fall for it.
Immunizations aren't anywhere near 100% effective. So a substantial number of people, even though immunized, are still susceptible to the disease. They are dependent on "herd immunity" to keep their chances of exposure low. Creating a population of unimmunized offspring of suckers, large enough to switch the contagion exponential from decaying to expanding, creates the exposures that sicken and kill these innocent victims.
Then there are those who are exposed before the can be immunized, or before the immunity can build, or after it decays, or who can't be immunized for other reasons (such as a deathly allergy to a component of the available formulas), or who are immune compromized for any of a number of reasons,...
So seeing through the fraud and doing the right thing is STILL not enough to avoid the risk of disease and death created by this jolly psychopath.
This is what they've been saying about both AMD and NVIDIA since there was a linux and an AMD and an NVIDIA. They all say "open-source xxx with binary". So what, they are drawing the line somewhere else?
Sounds to me like an open source driver in the OS and an opaque firmware blob to be loaded into the peripheral and run entirely there.
Not ideal. But how (besides the complexity and ease of installing malware) is it different from doing a complex silicon design, with an open driver, and not giving the RTL description of the logic? Or doing an FPGA design, providing an open driver, but not giving the source to the FPGA load, only the opaque binary object that describes the logic to be emulated?
I noticed before sometimes in the United States when people want your government to control people more it says "D something" by their name. What does the D mean?
Abbreviation for party affiliation. So far I've seen:
D- Democrat
R- Republican
I- Independent (not affiliated with a major party - usually someone who lost a primary and ran anyway, sometimes someone who just ran without going through a party mechanism)
L- Libertarian
A- American Independent (historic: George Wallace's party from the '60s)
A couple years back the wife and I were driving in NV, from Topaz Lake to Hawthorne, over a very dirt-track-across-the-desert, scraped every couple years (but still an official state route), road.
As we approached Hawthorne, going through a pass in a range of hills, the nav system told us to turn left about a mile early and take a little road that went a couple car lengths and then off a cliff, maybe a couple hundred feet high.
Seems there had been an old road there, back in the pony-express days, which had gone away nn a landslide long ago. We're guessing the USGS still showed it, the map company had included it in their database, and the nav system had computed it could save us a couple tenths of a mile by taking the shortcut.
Fortunately we are aware of such pathologies, especially in remote areas, and were on the alert for it.
how would two-way microwave transmission compare ? Say you beam your excess up to a satelite which beams it down to another country
That's an interesting idea.
Unfortunately, answering it requires more engineering info than I have. I've seen numbers for the microwvave link efficiency in the mid 80s to low 90s percent, so square that for the double-link. It might come out better and/or cheaper than ground-based transmission.
But if you're going to put a rectenna and a transmitter array into orbit, why not put the solar generation there, too? Replacing the Earth's atmospheric attenuation, cosine error, and night, with a direct view of the sun > 23/7 (geosync orbit has an earth eclipse of zero to 70 minutes per day, depending on the season, plus the occasional moon shadow) you get more than six times the power of a similarly-sized array on the ground. You also don't need anywhere near as much supporting structure and don't have as much weather damage. And you're only hopping the energy ONCE, not twice, to get from the collectors to the ground-based load.
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them. Less than a third is converted into electricity and the remaining more than two-thirds ends up being re-radiated as infrared, which generally doesn't make it back out.
Were you worried about a greenhouse effect boost from carbon dioxide? What about that from leaving solar panels out in the sun?
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not aripart of the quote? Who ever came up with that?
Some of us are.
Unlike some languages (such as French), which have centralized regulatory authorities, English is a language defined by its usage. Academics either track how it's used or (in some cases) try to impose their ideas, or define their regional dialect as "correct" (and thus their region as more elite and others as lower class and/or ignorant).
(Case in point: The rule against using a preposition to end a sentence with. That was an academic attempt to import and promulgate a rule from Latin. It was never a part of English, which is a Germanic rather than a Romance language.)
With large amounts of written English now committed by the general population over the Internet, with a substantial fraction of the early adopters coming from the computer industry (and thus lots of painful experience with artificial languages that are pedantic about balancing and nesting quotes and brackets in a rational manner), written English is tending toward the rational simplification you yearn for.
We have yet to overwhelm the "correct" form and become the new normal. But the academics are starting to take note. You may find it migrating into style manuals soon (though it has a way to go before it makes it into elementary school instruction).
The sun is always shining down on earth somewhere. Is it possible to transmit electricity so that the power is distributed across (most/some of) the planet?
You lose less by storing it nearby rather than shipping it long distances. Storage technology is still improving rapidly, too. Long distance transmission is improving slowly or not much at all, and is unlikely to have a major breakthrough short of discovery of a hot-day-temperature, non-type-A superconductor.
Given that, there's no good reason to get into the politics, environmental hassles, solar flare and terrorist vulnerabilities, etc. of additional transcontinental and intercontinental electrical transmission just to even out the load while avoiding storage.
... what if something like this was left deliberately weak so that a part of the population could be disposed of, should it become necessary, and then hackers are the convenient scapegoat for blame in the eyes of everyone else.
They don't need to use a water plant for that. They've got Obamacare.
... you could open the valves to their greatest extent without jumping the chlorine content up from the usual part-per-million to more than a couple of parts per million...that is, still way less chlorine than your average municipal pool needs to combat all those filthy kids.
But what if the bad guys CLOSE the valves? Then live pathogens go straight from the water source into the no-longer-purified water supply. Several million customers are exposed. Many are sickened. Some take permanent damage. Some die. Even after the issue is fixed the whole water system needs decontamination. And the whole set of cities fed by the plant are disrupted (which is what they're really after).
It gets even nastier if the bad guys up the ante by dumping a bit of some particularly virulent bugs upstream of the intakes, during the period where they won't be killed off by the shut-down disinfectant injection.
They use chlorine because its a heck of a lot less damaging to people than the things it is used to kill off.
Apple's concern about "security" is just a marketing ploy and posturing - that's it.
So they're ~just refusing to crack their own product for the US goverment because it's good for their business~?
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If it's the right BUSINESS decision, they'll KEEP doing it. I trust that a LOT more than if they're doing it because it's the moral thing to do. Morals last until the stockholders replace the C-suite with fresh, intelligent, psychopaths from the big-name business schools. The profit motive lasts as long as the officers in charge are smart enough to see which side of the bread has the butter.
In this case the Apple execs judged that the situation was SO lopsided that it was worth risking the company and their own personal freedom to FIGHT THE US GOVERNMENT HEAD-ON rather than cooperate.
With the public show over that decision, it should last at least until they have deployed code they couldn't crack if they wanted to. Further, they now have the incentive to write that code, before the government gets a judge that will move against Apple and make the issue moot in the other direction, or the world market deserts them in droves and it becomes apparent that even Apple is not "too big to fail".
If the FBI or anyone else really wants to get in, they'll get in.
Being crackable by nation-state level outside attackers is only Apple's problem to the extent that, if true, it's another incentive to work on the future code to make it still more robust.
40 millionaires opening their checkbooks and paying some extra tax won't solve large problems.
But if all millionaires do, that adds up to a lot more. This is a stunt by 40 millionaires to suggest that this is what should be done.
There's nothing hypocritical about it.
This isn't about making a dent. Forty super-rich paying an extra 1% of gross won't make a dent. ALL the millionaires paying an extra 1% ALSO won't make a dent. (Seizing all the assets of all the top 1% - or even all the millionaires - might make a small dent in the year it was done, after which there would be a total economic crash, reducing the US to third-world status.)
This is about a handful of super-rich throwing speed-bumps in front of anybody trying to move from the upper middle class to rich, or from rich to super-rich, and becoming competition (for money and/or power) for the existing super-rich.
They're pulling up the ladder after they (or some ancestor) climbed it. They want to keep their exclusive club exclusive. That's how elites stay elite.
Remember: The money has massively inflated. A million dollars now was about $20,000 before we went off the gold standard. A million dollars annual gross may only yield a poverty-level income, if that, once you've paid expenses an get down to the net.
Are you sure it was FreeBSD, not Net or Open? If so you were either on some oddball hardware where support was just coming into existence, or you were doing something wrong.
BSD forked three ways and the three branches are specialized for three purposes:
- FreeBSD is about running on as many kinds of hardware and peripherals as possible. If it runs under BSD it runs under FreeBSD. Once the driving code is solid it might get imported into other branches, or ported to other things (like Linux). Meanwhile, maybe the code for your device is still new and still flaky.
- NetBSD is about being a reference platform for developing, and pushing the envelope on, networking technology (at the expense of only bothering to be guaranteed to run on a limited number of platforms and configurations).
- OpenBSD is about being reliable and secure - at the expense of being limited to devices and code that are open enough to be audited, and being developed and maintained outside the US and its "encryption is a weapon" export controls.
(Or at least that's how I understand it. I'm not following it closely right now because I'm not running it - though I'm considering switching from Linux to Open and may soon be giving it more attention.)
To stereotype mercilessly, most Americans are seen as energetic, conscientious, achievement-oriented team workers.
And how are stereotypes formed?
- Peoples' personal experiences with the subjects of the stereotype, followed by their communicating about it.
- Media presentations.
And what sort of sampling bias does this introduce?
- Extroerts will be out interacting with others and going to other places while introverts are tooling away in private or small groups.
- Media production is a quintesentially extrovert activity and its personnel - especially those making the decisions about what to portray and how to portray it - tend to be outliers on the extrovert end of the scale.
It's something like how the post-WW II stereotypes for Germans, British, Americans, and Japanese, look substantially more like the distinctions between the symptoms of the different performance-enhancing drugs fed to the various armies than distinctions between their national cultures at the time. If the experience of a few hundred thousand people from your country with those from another are mainly from interacting with doped-up soldiers in battle, soldiers with varying personalities and from different subcultures, but all on the same dope, it's easy to read the dope's common symptoms as the nature of the country's culture.
In my opinion the US government - in the person of its primary internal investigation agency - obtaining either a compelled downloadable security bypass hack or the source code to enable them to construct their own, would have committed a Fifth Amendment "Taking".
... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
What would be taken would be the security reputation of the company, and thus the bulk of their current and future markets worldwide (ESPECIALLY foreign), for all future time - essentially all of the future value of the company. "Just compensation" would be the current value of that future revenue loss.
The general public, acting through the stock market, computes their best estimate of a price for that. It's called the "market capitalization" As of the close of trading today it was over 586 Billion US dollars.
So, IMHO, Apple's lawyers might want to make the following statement:
"SURE you can have your back door and our source code. And the rest of the company, if you want it. We'll deliver it as soon as your check for $586,340,000.00 (times the devaluation multiplier for the government printing or borrowing that much additional money, plus funds to cover any claims from our customers for damage from the exposure of their private data) clears."
Then they could distribute the money to their stockholders, set up the claims fund, and all go do something else, or retire. Meanwhile the government would be left with the "New FBI/NSA Apple", and the prospect of trying to sell its products to a sceptical world.
Reminds me of Niven's _The Magic Goes Away_ - where at one point the protagonists are using a magically-stiffened-and-driven cloud for cross-country transport and are concerned about what happens to them if they hit a place in the sky where the "mana" is used up...
"Where are you on a cloud when the magic goes away?"
Where are you on a cloud SERVICE when the magic goes away?
Perhaps a few incidents like this will start people wondering why you would ever use a cloud service for something mission-critical - or for anything -in the first place?
The man who invented NTP and originally wrote the implementation was David L. Mills of the University of Delaware.
Mills is also the man who created the Fuzzballs and EGP, making global-scale internetworking possible.
I knew Dr. Dave when he was still at the University of Michigan, doing the Data Concentrator and the Language Lab's automation, and I was in high school and hanging around the campus.
For those of you too young to have been of draft age during the Vietnam conflict, this pair of (possibly bogus) incidents were used as the excuse get Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president (LBJ) the authority he used to puff a minor conflict into a major war without a declaration of war.
from Broken Arrow: I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it.
Knowing just a bit about military planning, I'd be surprised if the term for it wasn't coined and detailed plans made LONG before any weapons were actually lost.
They say, "peak power density of 560mW cm2 at 550C" but don't list the room temperature of the container.
What matters is how hot it is at the oxygen transport site - which is heated by the losses (because this is high energy, insulated, and less than 100% efficient.). Some solid oxide cells can run VERY hot - like orange - no problem.
You have to insulate them anyhow, to keep them hot, so the oxygen ions will be mobile enough for them to work at all. If they're running at 550C and were designed for a 25C room environment, running them at -40C (where C and F come together and mercury freezes) requires increasing the amount of insulation by less than 13%.
It's about time somebody made them out of thin films, so they can start up quickly and are small and light. Making them tiny also shrinks the insulated container. Big win.
Once again, Slashdot is behind the curve, I read this on TMZ 5 hours ago!
Then read "firehose". Or become a patron and see news items after they're vetted but before they hit the front page.
I see two complaints a lot:
- It's not news for nerds / stuff that matters.
- It's slow. You can't have both fast and filtered. It takes time to sift the jems from the slush.
Further: faster processing means more errors, while better (though still "imperfect") filtering means later stories. And there's no way to get the filtering right for all readers: I'm constantly finding stories I consider "news for me (a nerd) and stuff that matters (to me, a nerd)" to attract a chorus of one, or (as in this case) both, complaints.
I like Slashdot's setting of the fast - filtered tweak knob. I can always skip stuff *I* don't consider interesting, and it has a HELL of a lot of stuff I *AM* interested in, presented in a timely enough manner to be useful (when the rest of the media ignores it completely or warps it out of recognition).
In 2002, Hellman suggested the algorithm be called Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange in recognition of Ralph Merkle's contribution to the invention of public-key cryptography (Hellman, 2002), writing:
The system...has since become known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange. While that system was first described in a paper by Diffie and me, it is a public key distribution system, a concept developed by Merkle, and hence should be called 'Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange' if names are to be associated with it. I hope this small pulpit might help in that endeavor to recognize Merkle's equal contribution to the invention of public key cryptography.
Not to diminsh in any way the excellent work of Diffie and Hellmann - but it seems to me (and to at least Hellman) that Merkle (still) doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
[P]ut all the anti vaxxers in their own tribe behind an extension of trumps wall - if they survive then they should develop immunity to all those illnesses, have lower levels of autism etc. and also prove evolution.
That experiment has already been run:
- Many tribes of the American Indians had substantial public works infrastructure, medical procedures, and cultural biases (like hygiene) that helped protect them from disease.
- The Europeans went through a thousand years of "Dark Ages" when "mortifying the flesh" was a way of life, baths were exceptional occurrences for much of the population, and waves of plagues decimated the population repeatedly.
So when the Europeans arrived, they brought with them some pretty severe diseases which most of them could survive and to which the American Indians were substantially more susceptible and more likely to find fatal. Several major civilizations were wiped out and their populations knocked down to minor handfuls. (And some tribes that had been relatively minor, but had access to early Smallpox immunizations, became major powers in the next decades.)
Estimates of the indigenous American population's reduction due to imported European diseases run as high as 90-95%
(Lenovo's hypersensitive touchpad strikes again. Finishing the last paragraph.)
With effective herd immunity, the number and/or strength of immunizations can be lower than with a constant threat of exposure from mini-epidemics. There are legitimate risks associated with additional immunizations, so the smart move is to stop when the risks of the immunizations approach or exceed the risks they mitigate. With a large population of anti-vaxser victims, the risks from disease are higher and the crossover is pushed out.
The anti-vaxxers are creating extra risk from immunizations for the rest of us. Thanks for the self-fulfilling prophecy, guys!
Unfortunately the carriers of these "dumb genes" not only risk their childrens' lives, but also the herd immunity of the local community. Thereby putting the immune-compromised, newborns, and the unlucky for which the vaccine didn't take effect or are allergic.
Also: By providing a large enough pool of unimmunized to create repeated mini-epidemics and constant risk of exposure (especially in the case of human-host-only diseases that can be ELIMINATED), the anti-vaxxers "use up" the herd-immunity benefits, especially the available number of susceptible individuals that can be supported before additional measures need to be taken.
With effective herd immunity, the number and/or strength of immunizations can be lower than with a constant threat of exposure from mini-epidemics. There are legitimate risks associated with additional immunizations, so the smart move is to stop when the risks of the immunizations approach or exceed the risks they mitigate. With a large population of anti-vaxer
... this if someone offering aid and comfort to an individual who happily perpetuated a medical con that hurt and killed innocent children and still is doing so for his own material benefit
And he caused something that's even incrementally worse than the suffering and deaths of innocent children because their parents fell for the con: The suffering and death of innocent children whose parents DIDN'T fall for the con - but were nevertheless infected by those who did fall for it.
Immunizations aren't anywhere near 100% effective. So a substantial number of people, even though immunized, are still susceptible to the disease. They are dependent on "herd immunity" to keep their chances of exposure low. Creating a population of unimmunized offspring of suckers, large enough to switch the contagion exponential from decaying to expanding, creates the exposures that sicken and kill these innocent victims.
Then there are those who are exposed before the can be immunized, or before the immunity can build, or after it decays, or who can't be immunized for other reasons (such as a deathly allergy to a component of the available formulas), or who are immune compromized for any of a number of reasons, ...
So seeing through the fraud and doing the right thing is STILL not enough to avoid the risk of disease and death created by this jolly psychopath.
This is what they've been saying about both AMD and NVIDIA since there was a linux and an AMD and an NVIDIA. They all say "open-source xxx with binary". So what, they are drawing the line somewhere else?
Sounds to me like an open source driver in the OS and an opaque firmware blob to be loaded into the peripheral and run entirely there.
Not ideal. But how (besides the complexity and ease of installing malware) is it different from doing a complex silicon design, with an open driver, and not giving the RTL description of the logic? Or doing an FPGA design, providing an open driver, but not giving the source to the FPGA load, only the opaque binary object that describes the logic to be emulated?
I noticed before sometimes in the United States when people want your government to control people more it says "D something" by their name. What does the D mean?
Abbreviation for party affiliation. So far I've seen:
D- Democrat
R- Republican
I- Independent (not affiliated with a major party - usually someone who lost a primary and ran anyway, sometimes someone who just ran without going through a party mechanism)
L- Libertarian
A- American Independent (historic: George Wallace's party from the '60s)
A couple years back the wife and I were driving in NV, from Topaz Lake to Hawthorne, over a very dirt-track-across-the-desert, scraped every couple years (but still an official state route), road.
As we approached Hawthorne, going through a pass in a range of hills, the nav system told us to turn left about a mile early and take a little road that went a couple car lengths and then off a cliff, maybe a couple hundred feet high.
Seems there had been an old road there, back in the pony-express days, which had gone away nn a landslide long ago. We're guessing the USGS still showed it, the map company had included it in their database, and the nav system had computed it could save us a couple tenths of a mile by taking the shortcut.
Fortunately we are aware of such pathologies, especially in remote areas, and were on the alert for it.
how would two-way microwave transmission compare ? Say you beam your excess up to a satelite which beams it down to another country
That's an interesting idea.
Unfortunately, answering it requires more engineering info than I have. I've seen numbers for the microwvave link efficiency in the mid 80s to low 90s percent, so square that for the double-link. It might come out better and/or cheaper than ground-based transmission.
But if you're going to put a rectenna and a transmitter array into orbit, why not put the solar generation there, too? Replacing the Earth's atmospheric attenuation, cosine error, and night, with a direct view of the sun > 23/7 (geosync orbit has an earth eclipse of zero to 70 minutes per day, depending on the season, plus the occasional moon shadow) you get more than six times the power of a similarly-sized array on the ground. You also don't need anywhere near as much supporting structure and don't have as much weather damage. And you're only hopping the energy ONCE, not twice, to get from the collectors to the ground-based load.
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them. Less than a third is converted into electricity and the remaining more than two-thirds ends up being re-radiated as infrared, which generally doesn't make it back out.
Were you worried about a greenhouse effect boost from carbon dioxide? What about that from leaving solar panels out in the sun?
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not aripart of the quote? Who ever came up with that?
Some of us are.
Unlike some languages (such as French), which have centralized regulatory authorities, English is a language defined by its usage. Academics either track how it's used or (in some cases) try to impose their ideas, or define their regional dialect as "correct" (and thus their region as more elite and others as lower class and/or ignorant).
(Case in point: The rule against using a preposition to end a sentence with. That was an academic attempt to import and promulgate a rule from Latin. It was never a part of English, which is a Germanic rather than a Romance language.)
With large amounts of written English now committed by the general population over the Internet, with a substantial fraction of the early adopters coming from the computer industry (and thus lots of painful experience with artificial languages that are pedantic about balancing and nesting quotes and brackets in a rational manner), written English is tending toward the rational simplification you yearn for.
We have yet to overwhelm the "correct" form and become the new normal. But the academics are starting to take note. You may find it migrating into style manuals soon (though it has a way to go before it makes it into elementary school instruction).
The sun is always shining down on earth somewhere. Is it possible to transmit electricity so that the power is distributed across (most/some of) the planet?
You lose less by storing it nearby rather than shipping it long distances. Storage technology is still improving rapidly, too. Long distance transmission is improving slowly or not much at all, and is unlikely to have a major breakthrough short of discovery of a hot-day-temperature, non-type-A superconductor.
Given that, there's no good reason to get into the politics, environmental hassles, solar flare and terrorist vulnerabilities, etc. of additional transcontinental and intercontinental electrical transmission just to even out the load while avoiding storage.
... what if something like this was left deliberately weak so that a part of the population could be disposed of, should it become necessary, and then hackers are the convenient scapegoat for blame in the eyes of everyone else.
They don't need to use a water plant for that. They've got Obamacare.
(bud-a-boom TISH!)
... you could open the valves to their greatest extent without jumping the chlorine content up from the usual part-per-million to more than a couple of parts per million...that is, still way less chlorine than your average municipal pool needs to combat all those filthy kids.
But what if the bad guys CLOSE the valves? Then live pathogens go straight from the water source into the no-longer-purified water supply. Several million customers are exposed. Many are sickened. Some take permanent damage. Some die. Even after the issue is fixed the whole water system needs decontamination. And the whole set of cities fed by the plant are disrupted (which is what they're really after).
It gets even nastier if the bad guys up the ante by dumping a bit of some particularly virulent bugs upstream of the intakes, during the period where they won't be killed off by the shut-down disinfectant injection.
They use chlorine because its a heck of a lot less damaging to people than the things it is used to kill off.
Apple's concern about "security" is just a marketing ploy and posturing - that's it.
So they're ~just refusing to crack their own product for the US goverment because it's good for their business~?
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If it's the right BUSINESS decision, they'll KEEP doing it. I trust that a LOT more than if they're doing it because it's the moral thing to do. Morals last until the stockholders replace the C-suite with fresh, intelligent, psychopaths from the big-name business schools. The profit motive lasts as long as the officers in charge are smart enough to see which side of the bread has the butter.
In this case the Apple execs judged that the situation was SO lopsided that it was worth risking the company and their own personal freedom to FIGHT THE US GOVERNMENT HEAD-ON rather than cooperate.
With the public show over that decision, it should last at least until they have deployed code they couldn't crack if they wanted to. Further, they now have the incentive to write that code, before the government gets a judge that will move against Apple and make the issue moot in the other direction, or the world market deserts them in droves and it becomes apparent that even Apple is not "too big to fail".
If the FBI or anyone else really wants to get in, they'll get in.
Being crackable by nation-state level outside attackers is only Apple's problem to the extent that, if true, it's another incentive to work on the future code to make it still more robust.
This isn't about making a dent. Forty super-rich paying an extra 1% of gross won't make a dent. ALL the millionaires paying an extra 1% ALSO won't make a dent. (Seizing all the assets of all the top 1% - or even all the millionaires - might make a small dent in the year it was done, after which there would be a total economic crash, reducing the US to third-world status.)
This is about a handful of super-rich throwing speed-bumps in front of anybody trying to move from the upper middle class to rich, or from rich to super-rich, and becoming competition (for money and/or power) for the existing super-rich.
They're pulling up the ladder after they (or some ancestor) climbed it. They want to keep their exclusive club exclusive. That's how elites stay elite.
Remember: The money has massively inflated. A million dollars now was about $20,000 before we went off the gold standard. A million dollars annual gross may only yield a poverty-level income, if that, once you've paid expenses an get down to the net.
Are you sure it was FreeBSD, not Net or Open? If so you were either on some oddball hardware where support was just coming into existence, or you were doing something wrong.
BSD forked three ways and the three branches are specialized for three purposes:
- FreeBSD is about running on as many kinds of hardware and peripherals as possible. If it runs under BSD it runs under FreeBSD. Once the driving code is solid it might get imported into other branches, or ported to other things (like Linux). Meanwhile, maybe the code for your device is still new and still flaky.
- NetBSD is about being a reference platform for developing, and pushing the envelope on, networking technology (at the expense of only bothering to be guaranteed to run on a limited number of platforms and configurations).
- OpenBSD is about being reliable and secure - at the expense of being limited to devices and code that are open enough to be audited, and being developed and maintained outside the US and its "encryption is a weapon" export controls.
(Or at least that's how I understand it. I'm not following it closely right now because I'm not running it - though I'm considering switching from Linux to Open and may soon be giving it more attention.)
To stereotype mercilessly, most Americans are seen as energetic, conscientious, achievement-oriented team workers.
And how are stereotypes formed?
- Peoples' personal experiences with the subjects of the stereotype, followed by their communicating about it.
- Media presentations.
And what sort of sampling bias does this introduce?
- Extroerts will be out interacting with others and going to other places while introverts are tooling away in private or small groups.
- Media production is a quintesentially extrovert activity and its personnel - especially those making the decisions about what to portray and how to portray it - tend to be outliers on the extrovert end of the scale.
It's something like how the post-WW II stereotypes for Germans, British, Americans, and Japanese, look substantially more like the distinctions between the symptoms of the different performance-enhancing drugs fed to the various armies than distinctions between their national cultures at the time. If the experience of a few hundred thousand people from your country with those from another are mainly from interacting with doped-up soldiers in battle, soldiers with varying personalities and from different subcultures, but all on the same dope, it's easy to read the dope's common symptoms as the nature of the country's culture.
In my opinion the US government - in the person of its primary internal investigation agency - obtaining either a compelled downloadable security bypass hack or the source code to enable them to construct their own, would have committed a Fifth Amendment "Taking".
What would be taken would be the security reputation of the company, and thus the bulk of their current and future markets worldwide (ESPECIALLY foreign), for all future time - essentially all of the future value of the company. "Just compensation" would be the current value of that future revenue loss.
The general public, acting through the stock market, computes their best estimate of a price for that. It's called the "market capitalization" As of the close of trading today it was over 586 Billion US dollars.
So, IMHO, Apple's lawyers might want to make the following statement:
"SURE you can have your back door and our source code. And the rest of the company, if you want it. We'll deliver it as soon as your check for $586,340,000.00 (times the devaluation multiplier for the government printing or borrowing that much additional money, plus funds to cover any claims from our customers for damage from the exposure of their private data) clears."
Then they could distribute the money to their stockholders, set up the claims fund, and all go do something else, or retire. Meanwhile the government would be left with the "New FBI/NSA Apple", and the prospect of trying to sell its products to a sceptical world.
Reminds me of Niven's _The Magic Goes Away_ - where at one point the protagonists are using a magically-stiffened-and-driven cloud for cross-country transport and are concerned about what happens to them if they hit a place in the sky where the "mana" is used up...
"Where are you on a cloud when the magic goes away?"
Where are you on a cloud SERVICE when the magic goes away?
Perhaps a few incidents like this will start people wondering why you would ever use a cloud service for something mission-critical - or for anything -in the first place?
The man who invented NTP and originally wrote the implementation was David L. Mills of the University of Delaware.
Mills is also the man who created the Fuzzballs and EGP, making global-scale internetworking possible.
I knew Dr. Dave when he was still at the University of Michigan, doing the Data Concentrator and the Language Lab's automation, and I was in high school and hanging around the campus.
Great guy.
I wonder if North Korea will puff this up into their own Gulf of Tonkin Incident
For those of you too young to have been of draft age during the Vietnam conflict, this pair of (possibly bogus) incidents were used as the excuse get Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president (LBJ) the authority he used to puff a minor conflict into a major war without a declaration of war.
Knowing just a bit about military planning, I'd be surprised if the term for it wasn't coined and detailed plans made LONG before any weapons were actually lost.
They say, "peak power density of 560mW cm2 at 550C" but don't list the room temperature of the container.
What matters is how hot it is at the oxygen transport site - which is heated by the losses (because this is high energy, insulated, and less than 100% efficient.). Some solid oxide cells can run VERY hot - like orange - no problem.
You have to insulate them anyhow, to keep them hot, so the oxygen ions will be mobile enough for them to work at all. If they're running at 550C and were designed for a 25C room environment, running them at -40C (where C and F come together and mercury freezes) requires increasing the amount of insulation by less than 13%.
It's about time somebody made them out of thin films, so they can start up quickly and are small and light. Making them tiny also shrinks the insulated container. Big win.
Once again, Slashdot is behind the curve, I read this on TMZ 5 hours ago!
Then read "firehose". Or become a patron and see news items after they're vetted but before they hit the front page.
I see two complaints a lot:
- It's not news for nerds / stuff that matters.
- It's slow.
You can't have both fast and filtered. It takes time to sift the jems from the slush.
Further: faster processing means more errors, while better (though still "imperfect") filtering means later stories. And there's no way to get the filtering right for all readers: I'm constantly finding stories I consider "news for me (a nerd) and stuff that matters (to me, a nerd)" to attract a chorus of one, or (as in this case) both, complaints.
I like Slashdot's setting of the fast - filtered tweak knob. I can always skip stuff *I* don't consider interesting, and it has a HELL of a lot of stuff I *AM* interested in, presented in a timely enough manner to be useful (when the rest of the media ignores it completely or warps it out of recognition).
Not to diminsh in any way the excellent work of Diffie and Hellmann - but it seems to me (and to at least Hellman) that Merkle (still) doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.