Here's the real math from the UK where government contractors face a real threat of jail time if they are caught intentionally lowballing a cost estimate....
"Total cost of closing down nuclear sites rises to £73bn
The cost of decommissioning Britain's ageing nuclear power sites has risen from an estimated £61bn in 2005 to £73bn as the "start-stop" nature of the work is creating significant uncertainty for contractors, Whitehall's value-for-money watchdog reveals today.
The report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will prove particularly uneasy reading for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who earlier this month gave the green light to a new generation of nuclear power stations - albeit that none will be built in Scotland because of the anti-nuclear stance adopted by the Scottish Government.
As well as reporting to the UK Government via the Department for Business, the authority also reports to Scottish ministers who agree its strategy and plans for sites in Scotland. By December 2007, 14 of 19 facilities across Britain had already shut down and were in the process of being decommissioned, which includes cleaning up the sites.
That's 150 BILLION DOLLARS... ON JUST 19 UK reactors. That means the REAL US cost of decommissioning US nuclear reactors is going to be well over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!
The only way that nuclear power production can be considered cheap is if you leave out the costs of building the reactors AND the cost of decommissioning the reactors after the facilities eventually they lose their licenses and have to be decommissioned. The cost of decommisioning nuclear reactors is ALWAYS left out of the equation by nuclear power advocates. ALWAYS.
Including the multi-billion dollar cost of decommissioning nuclear reactors makes burning US currency to generate power look like a better idea.
The nuclear power industry never pays this cost, either. The decommissioned reactors get spun off into separate corporations with only the shut-down reactor in the portfolio of assets, leaving the US Gov't to pay the multi-billion dollar price tag every single shut down nuclear reactor costs to decommission.
The key discussion is the current primary biodiesel production is on crop land. They're right. We're going to be needing all our crop land to grow food to feed a rapidly growing population.
Biodiesel production from high oil content algaes doesn't need to use crop land. From a University of New Hampshire study...
"...NREL's research focused on the development of algae farms in desert regions, using shallow saltwater pools for growing the algae. Using saltwater eliminates the need for desalination, but could lead to problems as far as salt build-up in bonds. Building the ponds in deserts also leads to problems of high evaporation rates. There are solutions to these problems, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus instead on the potential such ponds can promise, ignoring for the moment the methods of addressing the solvable challenges remaining when the Aquatic Species Program at NREL ended.
NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
The algae farms would not all need to be built in the same location, of course (and should not for a variety of reasons). The case mentioned above of building it all in the Sonora desert is purely a hypothetical example to illustrate the amount of land required. It would be preferable to spread the algae production around the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in transporting the feedstocks. Algae farms could also be constructed to use waste streams (either human waste or animal waste from animal farms) as a food source, which would provide a beautiful way of spreading algae production around the country. Nutrients can also be extracted from the algae for the production of a fertilizer high in nitrogen and phosphorous. By using waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially also provide a means of recycling nutrients from fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer. Extracting the nutrients from algae provides a far safer and cleaner method of doing this than spreading manure or wastewater treatment plant "bio-solids" on farmland.
These projected yields of course depend on a variety of factors, sunlight levels in particular. The yield in North Dakota, for example, wouldn't be as good as the yield in California. Spreading the algae production around the country would result in more land being required than the projected 9.5 million acres, but the benefits from distributed production would outweigh the larger land requirement. Further, these yield estimates are based on what is theoretically achievable - roughly 15,000 gallons per acre-year. It's important to point out that the DOE's ASP that projected that such yields are possible, was never able to come close to achieving such yields. Thei
Indeed, it is I that have posted facts about the Republicans crying wolf over false terrorism threats over and over and over again here which you know I am right about. Your silence in response to the issues I raised conceded my points. You are left with nothing to say other than lame personal insults addressed at me. That's called ad hominem arguments.
"...An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject....Ad hominem arguments are ALWAYS invalid..."
Wrong again, Ritchie boy. All this make people afraid terrorists popping out of their computers games and their crock pots and their feminine hygiene products is ALL REPUBLICAN bullshit, in particular all neo-conservative bullshit. Ain't no Democrats pulling any of that "It's an Orange Alert... be afraid, be very afraid" crap.
It's all a distration to get tens of millions of idiots like you to not pay attention while a few thousand really fucking rich Republicans steal all YOUR money from YOU.
Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi Arabian. The guys the Bush administration says hijacked the airliners on 9/11 were Saudi Arabian. Those guys would be the guys that would be at the top of the list of enemies of the USA that we would supposedly need to be defended against.
But there's nobody invading Saudi Arabia, are there? Matter of fact, The Saudi Royal family, the Bin Laden family and their close friends were allowed to be evacuated without a single investigator asking them a single question by airliner when no other aircraft were allowed to fly in the US a couple of days after 9/11. Matter of fact, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are business partners, aren't they? The Bin Laden family invested big bucks in Carlyle Group, Poppy Bush's company.
No... we invaded somewhere else that has a lot of oil for Dubya's oil buddies while Osama Bin Laden is alive and well dragging a kidney dialysis machine behind him through the various deserts of the Middle East.
Democratic Party members know everyone can't build their own personal flood levees, air traffic control systems, etc. Do you plan on building your own freeway for just your car, Ritchie? Some things are ridiculously inefficient when attempted by individuals. It's economically smart to understand there are some things that are far, far better done by groups of citizens. It's best to have those that are trained experts in the field running it, too, instead of... like naming horse club lawyers to run disaster management, or nominating one's cleaning lady to the Supreme Court, that sort of thing.
This is as paranoid and bizarre as the Moral Majority freak that spit on me and ranted "my demon worshiping would condemn me to hell" outside a Virginia game store in the early 80's because I played Dungeons and Dragons.
The Republicans should force everyone in the US to carry around lightning rods everywhere they go first. Since people are more likely to be hit by lightning than they are to be a victim of terrorist attack, we need to spend that money on the threat from evil lightning bolts.
My Gawd, are the vast majority of the GOP the biggest bunch of sniveling cowards you have ever seen?
"I MUST BE PROTECTED FROM BOOGIE MEN HIDING UNDER MY BED! SAVE ME!"
Can you imagine one of these yellow-streak-down-their-back right wingers ever loading all their possessions in a Conestoga Wagon and heading out west into the unknown on the Oregon Trail? What made so many Americans such cowards?
"...Others maintain the damage signifies retribution for the impending opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse, which will allow trading in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, potentially diminishing the value of the dollar. (((As if the dollar wasn't busy diminishing itself, with or without submarines.)))
Clearly, the political impact, should the damage be attributed to military or financially motivated activity, poses severe implications, but apart from that, the mere impact on broadband connectivity within the region, and communications capabilities with Europe and North America have already been hampered, causing significant disruption to workflows at many businesses.
"This has been an eye-opener for the telecom industry worldwide," said According to Colonel R.S. Parihar, Secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. "Today, the cause of the problem might have been an anchor, but what if it is sabotage tomorrow? These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables."
Thanks for your demonstration that the only real response you offered to the documentation proving the NSA compromised Crypto AG, the best crypto in the world, for decades was 4 letter words and personal insults. The NSA has made sure nobody on the planet other than the US has had secure communication since the 50's. Naive insistences regarding "tinfoil hats" is a religious mantra that fools repeat over and over and over again hoping their faith-based beliefs that "things like that can't happen in the US" will stay strong. Your religious beliefs are not facts.
Every major telecom carrier in the US except Qwest obediently surrendered the constitutional rights of their customer base to private communications upon demand of the Bush White House to the wiretap every Americans phone and internet usage in 2001 BEFORE 9/11. The facts are every bit of telecom traffic that didn't begin and end within Quest's lines was intercepted at the network level.
"1024-bit encryption is 'compromised'
Upgrade to 2048-bit, says crypto expert James Middleton, vnunet.com 26 Mar 2002
1024-bit encryption is 'compromised'
Upgrade to 2048-bit, says crypto expert James Middleton, vnunet.com 26 Mar 2002 ADVERTISEMENT
According to a security debate sparked off by cryptography expert Lucky Green on Bugtraq yesterday, 1,024-bit RSA encryption should be "considered compromised".
The Financial Cryptography conference earlier this month, which largely focused on a paper published by cryptographer Dan Bernstein last October detailing integer factoring methodologies, revealed "significant practical security implications impacting the overwhelming majority of deployed systems utilising RSA as the public key algorithm".
Based on Bernstein's proposed architecture, a panel of experts estimated that a 1,024-bit RSA factoring device can be built using only commercially available technology for a price range of several hundred million to $1bn.
These costs would be significantly lowered with the use of a chip fab. As the panel pointed out: "It is a matter of public record that the National Security Agency [NSA] as well as the Chinese, Russian, French and many other intelligence agencies all operate their own fabs."
And as for the prohibitively high price tag, Green warned that we should keep in mind that the National Reconnaissance Office regularly launches Signal Intelligence satellites costing close to $2bn each.
"Would the NSA have built a device at less than half the cost of one of its satellites to be able to decipher the interception data obtained via many such satellites? The NSA would have to be derelict of duty to not have done so," he said.
The machine proposed by Bernstein would be able to break a 1,024-bit key in seconds to minutes. But the security implications of the practical 'breakability' of such a key run far deeper.
None of the commonly deployed systems, such as HTTPS, SSH, IPSec, S/MIME and PGP, use keys stronger than 1,024-bit, and you would be hard pushed to find vendors offering support for any more than this.
What this means, according to Green, is that "an opponent capable of breaking all of the above will have access to virtually any corporate or private communications and services that are connected to the internet"...."
I honestly don't think it matters. A determined party with all the resources the US Gov't has can find many, many ways to hide dormant coded instructions in plain sight.
"...Whitespace
What is Whitespace?
Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren't there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax. What are the advantages of Whitespace?
Some things which are difficult in other languages are made much easier in Whitespace. For example, literate programming is simply a matter of writing your helpful comments in between program instructions. It's also easy to encrypt your programs. Simply write a misleading comment!
Whitespace is a particularly useful language for spies. Imagine you have a top secret program that you don't want anyone to see. What do you do? Simply print it out and delete the file, ready to type in at a later date. Nobody will know that your blank piece of paper is actually vital computer code! What does a typical Whitespace program look like?
Below is an extract from a program which asks for a name then outputs it (see here for the full script.
Where can I get it?
There is a prototype Whitespace interpreter available on this site, go to this page to download it. The source code is written in Haskell, or you can get a Linux binary. You can also read a tutorial. Who is responsible?
The interpreter was written by someone who shouldn't have stayed up so late, Edwin Brady, and the language was designed by two people who shouldn't have had so much to drink, Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. No doubt Andrew Stribblehill isn't entirely blameless either...."
You guys are in denial. You think there's a single public encryption application the NSA hasn't got an easily opened back door into?
Ever heard of Crypto AG?
"It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world's most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality. The purchasing nations, confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling. All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the morning newspaper. The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in Teheran...."
It's not like people can read through the machine language output of a crypto application to make sure there isn't anything extra that been attached to the output that gives away the key. It's encrypted. it looks like garbage.
All the NSA has to do is either get someone to join the project helping develop the software, or swap the download file with one that includes whatever the NSA wants included. Matter of fact... how do you know the developers of, for example, "true crypt" isn't the NSA itself?
This is the Bush Administration, dude. The most secrecy obsessed White House in US History. They've got the FBI tracking and conducting surveillance like little senior citizen Quaker pacifist groups.
You do know the NSA supercomputers can crack any of the encryption applications the general public has access to without breaking a sweat, right?
The only people you will be keeping out with any of the above applications is like... maybe your boss, maybe a private investigator a spouse hired to find out if you are exchanging e-mail with someone you are having an affair with. That's it.
'Stupid software keeps on locking the cameras on the cathedral, starts screaming something about Fallen Gongs, or something fall and gone, then starts tasering the Priests and Nuns when they come out!'
Ruby Central is rewarding people to use Ruby. That's like paying people to drink Heineken instead of Keystone Light.
This is just Sun's latest plot to get people to code in Java. I don't care what kinda airmiles bonus scheme Sun starts wavin' at me, that ain't happenin'.
Comcast is getting OnDemand TV out to their subscribers. They also have their eggs in more than one basket with increasing revenues coming in from arena management and programming with VS. and several regional sports nets challenging Fox Sports Net.
Comcast is my cable provider. I don't like the way they operate, but I'm not switching and losing OnDemand TV and my local NBA team games as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I showed above, the UK estimate on decommissioning the 19 nuclear reactors there is 73 BIL pounds.
Here's the real math from the UK where government contractors face a real threat of jail time if they are caught intentionally lowballing a cost estimate....
"Total cost of closing down nuclear sites rises to £73bn
The cost of decommissioning Britain's ageing nuclear power sites has risen from an estimated £61bn in 2005 to £73bn as the "start-stop" nature of the work is creating significant uncertainty for contractors, Whitehall's value-for-money watchdog reveals today.
The report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will prove particularly uneasy reading for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who earlier this month gave the green light to a new generation of nuclear power stations - albeit that none will be built in Scotland because of the anti-nuclear stance adopted by the Scottish Government.
As well as reporting to the UK Government via the Department for Business, the authority also reports to Scottish ministers who agree its strategy and plans for sites in Scotland. By December 2007, 14 of 19 facilities across Britain had already shut down and were in the process of being decommissioned, which includes cleaning up the sites.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2003619.0.Total_cost_of_closing_down_nuclear_sites_rises_to_73bn.php
That's 150 BILLION DOLLARS... ON JUST 19 UK reactors. That means the REAL US cost of decommissioning US nuclear reactors is going to be well over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!
The only way that nuclear power production can be considered cheap is if you leave out the costs of building the reactors AND the cost of decommissioning the reactors after the facilities eventually they lose their licenses and have to be decommissioned. The cost of decommisioning nuclear reactors is ALWAYS left out of the equation by nuclear power advocates. ALWAYS.
Including the multi-billion dollar cost of decommissioning nuclear reactors makes burning US currency to generate power look like a better idea.
The nuclear power industry never pays this cost, either. The decommissioned reactors get spun off into separate corporations with only the shut-down reactor in the portfolio of assets, leaving the US Gov't to pay the multi-billion dollar price tag every single shut down nuclear reactor costs to decommission.
The key discussion is the current primary biodiesel production is on crop land. They're right. We're going to be needing all our crop land to grow food to feed a rapidly growing population.
Biodiesel production from high oil content algaes doesn't need to use crop land. From a University of New Hampshire study...
"...NREL's research focused on the development of algae farms in desert regions, using shallow saltwater pools for growing the algae. Using saltwater eliminates the need for desalination, but could lead to problems as far as salt build-up in bonds. Building the ponds in deserts also leads to problems of high evaporation rates. There are solutions to these problems, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus instead on the potential such ponds can promise, ignoring for the moment the methods of addressing the solvable challenges remaining when the Aquatic Species Program at NREL ended.
NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
The algae farms would not all need to be built in the same location, of course (and should not for a variety of reasons). The case mentioned above of building it all in the Sonora desert is purely a hypothetical example to illustrate the amount of land required. It would be preferable to spread the algae production around the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in transporting the feedstocks. Algae farms could also be constructed to use waste streams (either human waste or animal waste from animal farms) as a food source, which would provide a beautiful way of spreading algae production around the country. Nutrients can also be extracted from the algae for the production of a fertilizer high in nitrogen and phosphorous. By using waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially also provide a means of recycling nutrients from fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer. Extracting the nutrients from algae provides a far safer and cleaner method of doing this than spreading manure or wastewater treatment plant "bio-solids" on farmland.
These projected yields of course depend on a variety of factors, sunlight levels in particular. The yield in North Dakota, for example, wouldn't be as good as the yield in California. Spreading the algae production around the country would result in more land being required than the projected 9.5 million acres, but the benefits from distributed production would outweigh the larger land requirement. Further, these yield estimates are based on what is theoretically achievable - roughly 15,000 gallons per acre-year. It's important to point out that the DOE's ASP that projected that such yields are possible, was never able to come close to achieving such yields. Thei
Wrong once again, Ritchie boy.
Indeed, it is I that have posted facts about the Republicans crying wolf over false terrorism threats over and over and over again here which you know I am right about. Your silence in response to the issues I raised conceded my points. You are left with nothing to say other than lame personal insults addressed at me. That's called ad hominem arguments.
"...An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject....Ad hominem arguments are ALWAYS invalid..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
I know I'll have to translate that for you, Ritchie Boy. It means you lose.
Wrong again, Ritchie boy. All this make people afraid terrorists popping out of their computers games and their crock pots and their feminine hygiene products is ALL REPUBLICAN bullshit, in particular all neo-conservative bullshit. Ain't no Democrats pulling any of that "It's an Orange Alert... be afraid, be very afraid" crap.
It's all a distration to get tens of millions of idiots like you to not pay attention while a few thousand really fucking rich Republicans steal all YOUR money from YOU.
Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi Arabian. The guys the Bush administration says hijacked the airliners on 9/11 were Saudi Arabian. Those guys would be the guys that would be at the top of the list of enemies of the USA that we would supposedly need to be defended against.
But there's nobody invading Saudi Arabia, are there? Matter of fact, The Saudi Royal family, the Bin Laden family and their close friends were allowed to be evacuated without a single investigator asking them a single question by airliner when no other aircraft were allowed to fly in the US a couple of days after 9/11. Matter of fact, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are business partners, aren't they? The Bin Laden family invested big bucks in Carlyle Group, Poppy Bush's company.
No... we invaded somewhere else that has a lot of oil for Dubya's oil buddies while Osama Bin Laden is alive and well dragging a kidney dialysis machine behind him through the various deserts of the Middle East.
Democratic Party members know everyone can't build their own personal flood levees, air traffic control systems, etc. Do you plan on building your own freeway for just your car, Ritchie? Some things are ridiculously inefficient when attempted by individuals. It's economically smart to understand there are some things that are far, far better done by groups of citizens. It's best to have those that are trained experts in the field running it, too, instead of... like naming horse club lawyers to run disaster management, or nominating one's cleaning lady to the Supreme Court, that sort of thing.
This is as paranoid and bizarre as the Moral Majority freak that spit on me and ranted "my demon worshiping would condemn me to hell" outside a Virginia game store in the early 80's because I played Dungeons and Dragons.
The Republicans should force everyone in the US to carry around lightning rods everywhere they go first. Since people are more likely to be hit by lightning than they are to be a victim of terrorist attack, we need to spend that money on the threat from evil lightning bolts.
My Gawd, are the vast majority of the GOP the biggest bunch of sniveling cowards you have ever seen?
"I MUST BE PROTECTED FROM BOOGIE MEN HIDING UNDER MY BED! SAVE ME!"
Can you imagine one of these yellow-streak-down-their-back right wingers ever loading all their possessions in a Conestoga Wagon and heading out west into the unknown on the Oregon Trail? What made so many Americans such cowards?
From Bruce Sterling's blog at Wired.com...
"...Others maintain the damage signifies retribution for the impending opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse, which will allow trading in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, potentially diminishing the value of the dollar. (((As if the dollar wasn't busy diminishing itself, with or without submarines.)))
Clearly, the political impact, should the damage be attributed to military or financially motivated activity, poses severe implications, but apart from that, the mere impact on broadband connectivity within the region, and communications capabilities with Europe and North America have already been hampered, causing significant disruption to workflows at many businesses.
"This has been an eye-opener for the telecom industry worldwide," said According to Colonel R.S. Parihar, Secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. "Today, the cause of the problem might have been an anchor, but what if it is sabotage tomorrow? These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables."
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/02/the-undersea-ca.html
Since they won't let Cheney satisfy his invasion fetish, Cheney has to do something with all that free time on his hands.
No text
Thanks for your demonstration that the only real response you offered to the documentation proving the NSA compromised Crypto AG, the best crypto in the world, for decades was 4 letter words and personal insults. The NSA has made sure nobody on the planet other than the US has had secure communication since the 50's. Naive insistences regarding "tinfoil hats" is a religious mantra that fools repeat over and over and over again hoping their faith-based beliefs that "things like that can't happen in the US" will stay strong. Your religious beliefs are not facts.
Every major telecom carrier in the US except Qwest obediently surrendered the constitutional rights of their customer base to private communications upon demand of the Bush White House to the wiretap every Americans phone and internet usage in 2001 BEFORE 9/11. The facts are every bit of telecom traffic that didn't begin and end within Quest's lines was intercepted at the network level.
"1024-bit encryption is 'compromised'
Upgrade to 2048-bit, says crypto expert
James Middleton, vnunet.com 26 Mar 2002
1024-bit encryption is 'compromised'
Upgrade to 2048-bit, says crypto expert
James Middleton, vnunet.com 26 Mar 2002
ADVERTISEMENT
According to a security debate sparked off by cryptography expert Lucky Green on Bugtraq yesterday, 1,024-bit RSA encryption should be "considered compromised".
The Financial Cryptography conference earlier this month, which largely focused on a paper published by cryptographer Dan Bernstein last October detailing integer factoring methodologies, revealed "significant practical security implications impacting the overwhelming majority of deployed systems utilising RSA as the public key algorithm".
Based on Bernstein's proposed architecture, a panel of experts estimated that a 1,024-bit RSA factoring device can be built using only commercially available technology for a price range of several hundred million to $1bn.
These costs would be significantly lowered with the use of a chip fab. As the panel pointed out: "It is a matter of public record that the National Security Agency [NSA] as well as the Chinese, Russian, French and many other intelligence agencies all operate their own fabs."
And as for the prohibitively high price tag, Green warned that we should keep in mind that the National Reconnaissance Office regularly launches Signal Intelligence satellites costing close to $2bn each.
"Would the NSA have built a device at less than half the cost of one of its satellites to be able to decipher the interception data obtained via many such satellites? The NSA would have to be derelict of duty to not have done so," he said.
The machine proposed by Bernstein would be able to break a 1,024-bit key in seconds to minutes. But the security implications of the practical 'breakability' of such a key run far deeper.
None of the commonly deployed systems, such as HTTPS, SSH, IPSec, S/MIME and PGP, use keys stronger than 1,024-bit, and you would be hard pushed to find vendors offering support for any more than this.
What this means, according to Green, is that "an opponent capable of breaking all of the above will have access to virtually any corporate or private communications and services that are connected to the internet"...."
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2118141/1024-bit-encryption-compromised
I honestly don't think it matters. A determined party with all the resources the US Gov't has can find many, many ways to hide dormant coded instructions in plain sight.
"...Whitespace
What is Whitespace?
Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren't there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
What are the advantages of Whitespace?
Some things which are difficult in other languages are made much easier in Whitespace. For example, literate programming is simply a matter of writing your helpful comments in between program instructions. It's also easy to encrypt your programs. Simply write a misleading comment!
Whitespace is a particularly useful language for spies. Imagine you have a top secret program that you don't want anyone to see. What do you do? Simply print it out and delete the file, ready to type in at a later date. Nobody will know that your blank piece of paper is actually vital computer code!
What does a typical Whitespace program look like?
Below is an extract from a program which asks for a name then outputs it (see here for the full script.
Where can I get it?
There is a prototype Whitespace interpreter available on this site, go to this page to download it. The source code is written in Haskell, or you can get a Linux binary. You can also read a tutorial.
Who is responsible?
The interpreter was written by someone who shouldn't have stayed up so late, Edwin Brady, and the language was designed by two people who shouldn't have had so much to drink, Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. No doubt Andrew Stribblehill isn't entirely blameless either...."
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
Now if 3 drunk guys on a binge can figure somthing like this out, what do you think the NSA has you don't know about.
NT
You guys are in denial. You think there's a single public encryption application the NSA hasn't got an easily opened back door into?
Ever heard of Crypto AG?
"It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world's most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality. The purchasing nations, confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling. All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the morning newspaper. The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in Teheran...."
http://mediafilter.org/caq/cryptogate/
It's not like people can read through the machine language output of a crypto application to make sure there isn't anything extra that been attached to the output that gives away the key. It's encrypted. it looks like garbage.
All the NSA has to do is either get someone to join the project helping develop the software, or swap the download file with one that includes whatever the NSA wants included. Matter of fact... how do you know the developers of, for example, "true crypt" isn't the NSA itself?
This is the Bush Administration, dude. The most secrecy obsessed White House in US History. They've got the FBI tracking and conducting surveillance like little senior citizen Quaker pacifist groups.
You do know the NSA supercomputers can crack any of the encryption applications the general public has access to without breaking a sweat, right?
The only people you will be keeping out with any of the above applications is like... maybe your boss, maybe a private investigator a spouse hired to find out if you are exchanging e-mail with someone you are having an affair with. That's it.
'Stupid software keeps on locking the cameras on the cathedral, starts screaming something about Fallen Gongs, or something fall and gone, then starts tasering the Priests and Nuns when they come out!'
Hendricks has also done a couple episodes of NBC's new show Life. She's playing Damian Lewis' soon to be trophy wife stepmom.
Noooo they be stealin' my Bucket o' Vaxnashens.
Ruby Central is rewarding people to use Ruby. That's like paying people to drink Heineken instead of Keystone Light.
This is just Sun's latest plot to get people to code in Java. I don't care what kinda airmiles bonus scheme Sun starts wavin' at me, that ain't happenin'.
Comcast is getting OnDemand TV out to their subscribers. They also have their eggs in more than one basket with increasing revenues coming in from arena management and programming with VS. and several regional sports nets challenging Fox Sports Net.
Comcast is my cable provider. I don't like the way they operate, but I'm not switching and losing OnDemand TV and my local NBA team games as a result.
"....but what can we do?"
Delete Gamespot from your favorites list.
No big loss. I've been using sites that compile as many reviews as possible and generate an overall average review score for quite a while anyway.
We have to be protected against the threat of Hugo Drax.
http://www.sheep101.info/
http://www.sheep101.info/