It occurred to me that if we replaced airbags with shotgun cartridges people might start driving carefully and stop running into other cars and things.
No they wouldn't. This isn't very far from the state of affairs before seatbelts became mandatory equipment, and nobody cared much back then that people were dying in droves. Not even the drivers themselves. (Volvo cared though, and invented seatbelts.)
Let's say there are 300M (mostly) law abiding citizens in the US, and 500M in the EU, and that 0.001% of them are radicalized by these blatant attacks on civil liberties. You do the maths.
The distinction can't really be drawn. In Germany it is considered harmful to deny the Holocaust to the extent that it's illegal to do so. If a German Google employee is left to decide whether such a ban is 451 or 452 he will likely conclude differently than a US Google employee would.
And of course, child porn means different things in different countries. In some places, someone drawing a basic stick figure and writing underneath "naked child" may be guilty of creating child porn. How obviously harmful is that drawing to anyone? Would blocking it be a ban on political speech? How realistic must the drawing be before it's "reasonable" to ban it?
You must realize that the language used in the US Constitution is very exceptional in international terms. It affirms a non-restricted freedom of speech in a way that cannot be misunderstood: the only real way to subvert it is if you can get away with completely changing the meaning of the words used in it. This is a very strong barrier to tyranny. Don't make the mistake of assuming that there are any other nations in the world that enjoy this same level of protection.
The language used in European freedom of speech laws, as an example, comes with qualifications and exceptions built-in. Consequently the seed of tyranny is also built into these laws. They can never be understood to be any sort of guarantee of actual free speech but need to be seen as a (strong) statement of intent more than anything.
(This is one of the reasons I personally am completely indifferent to the whole EU project: they only serve more of the same tripe that is already in place. Had the EU proposed an actual strong freedoms-centric constitution it would have been different, but they didn't.)
And why can't people voice their concerns over their governments giving away their tax money to middle class "refugees"?
This is Europe, and Europe doesn't have the sort of unrestricted free speech that the US does. All European "free speech" laws that I've seen (which is far from all of them, I will admit) are along the lines of "speech is free so long as it's not objectionable". And I'm guessing the speech in question has been found objectionable by the people who decide such things.
Now, it's not sufficiently bad here that govt can get away with saying something like "we object to you criticizing us go to jail", but, if it can be rephrased as "hate speech go to jail" or "supporting terrorists go to jail" (or in Germany, "go to jail you nazi") then you're screwed.
This was tried for the first decade but the IWC is no longer science based and so it kept failing. Nowadays whaling nations no longer care and the IWC is effectively a dead organization.
The core problem is that the IWC was hijacked by the lunatic fringe a couple decades ago and ever since it's been impossible to cooperate internationally about whaling levels. Countries that do whaling are left to wing it on their own, and since there is no rationality left in the international debate anyway they long since stopped trying to come up with good explanations of what they're doing or why.
The lesson from that scene is extremely powerful when you understand the same lesson applies to ANY problem. When you are faced with a heavily secured door, or an encryption standard, the attack vector is often going to be something other than going through the face of the door or the front end of the encryption. What you'd do is KICK IN THE DOOR. And the TLAs know this and do exactly that. Their people have always kicked in doors while normal people look at the locks and shrug and walk away.
In this case the lock has performed its function: it prevented Redford from effecting a clandestine break-in. It is now obvious to the office owner when he returns that he has been burgled and he can take steps to minimize the damage that will result from it.
In the security business it is accepted that ultimately you cannot prevent a determined attacker from gaining access to a physical location. The best you can do is 1) delay him and 2) force him to leave evidence that he was there.
The huge advantage of electric cars is that the mode of power generation for them is infinitely mutable, as decided on national policy level. If coal pollution is an issue it can easily be eliminated by shutting down the coal plants and building nuclear or hydro or whatever. You can't do this with gas powered cars because replacing all the millions of petrol power plants in people's cars is an impossible prospect as compared to replacing a few dozen regional power plants.
Full Disclosure: I live in Russia. And I am quite glad that the experiment failed.
Failed? No, it provided a roadmap.
What Russia needs to do to control the domestic network is start consolidating/nationalizing the ISP sector so that you end up with half a dozen big ISPs which can then be controlled by the government directly or indirectly.
Next the network hardware market will need to be heavily regulated so that only approved entities can legally get access to the equipment necessary to establish satellite or radio uplinks.
With this in place the rogue uplink problem can be eliminated and Putin can have his control. So I'd look out for those things starting to happen, if they do you have 5-10 years of internet freedom left before the lockdown sets in.
Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
These aren't rich people, they are people who couldn't afford to buy an EV that covers their actual needs so they went for one class below. This is why they need to plug in ever time they stop, they couldn't afford the range necessary to bypass that issue.
The rich people are driving Teslas, which don't need to charge outside the home ever except on road trips. And on road trips they use Tesla's super chargers because other charging stations just don't have the power necessary.
Typical electric car consumes 35 kWh per 100km. (62 miles)
The Tesla Model S easily gets 400km out of 85kWh which puts it at ~20kWh per 100km.
Say it can drive 400km (250 miles). That's 140 kWh of energy.
85kWh for the Model S
Now, to pump 140 kWh in 15 mins, one needs electircity source of 560 kW. Typical "big" power plants with several blocks are normally in 1-1.5GW area. With about 2500 such vehicles you'd consume 100% of power generated by such power plant.
Only if all cars always simultaneously drive 400km in 15 minutes and also charge at full capacity during those 15 minutes, and they do this continuously 24/7. This is a practical impossibility for a number of reasons.
Even if you suppose that all cars drive 400km per day (which isn't the case) and so need a full charge every day, a smart grid would distribute those 2500 cars out such that 26 charge at a time (26 x 4 x 24 = ~2500 cars) and you only need a 9MW energy supply for the 2500 cars with the Model S 85kWh battery. (In practice cars drive a lot less than this and so when all is said and done you don't need a whole lot of electricity at all to keep them going.)
If the NSA's intrusive powers, constitutionality aside, are all about terrorists, what in God's name are they doing passing normal crime info on to the FBI and DEA?
There is no meaningful distinction between terrorism and crime, so this is how it must be.
They acknowledge right at the start that whatever you propose could easily be defeated by the consumer simply encrypting things themselves. So if the entire thing is technologically unfeasible why on earth would you even study it?
It makes sense as a first step towards a total solution. It will be massively imperfect but you've got to start somewhere and over a 20-30 year period of refinement and expanding the scope you might actually get to where you want to be.
The one thing I haven't seen covered in the paper at all is that IF the US were to implement these requirements that all business involved in encryption would simply move off shore and destroy a thriving US business ecosystem. The paper's assumption is that any US developed protocol would then be exported world wide. This is profoundly illogical on many fronts. There would be numerous countries that would simply not participate in some US encryption compromising ring.
This could only work if done at an international level. You absolutely must have the major economic blocs (Europe, Russia, China etc.) on team with it, and preferably also the major "new" economies. The rest will naturally follow. Actually generating this international consensus will be a difficult task but they're finally doing it with personal finance so there's no reason to think they couldn't do it with digital communication. Again, 20 years of constant pushing and making the best use of every crisis can get you a long way.
The result of this is that even is some key recovery system is mandated users could simply encrypt their own data underneath the compromised encryption and render the device inaccessible and defeat the entire purpose of the law and international accords.
If this is made illegal though most people will be disinclined towards doing it, and those that still do it can be sent to prison for that at least even if you can't figure what else wrong they may have done.
There's a million crimes in this world any one of us can commit any day (and probably get away with), yet because they are illegal most people don't. This will be another one of those.
Objectifying a woman-shaped sexbot will only train men (or women) to objectify women.
You're not seeing the long picture here.
Once we have trained people to desire sexbots, we can start slowly morphing the sexbots away from looking like women (or men for that matter) and over to some other form entirely. In the end, when the sexbots look completely non human like, we will have trained men to feel no sexual desire to woman-shaped forms at all and everyone wins!
A couple of DAYS between SF and the Oregon border?
I have no idea how far this is, but that is also not relevant.
If Tesla has superchargers along your route then essentially your Model S drives for 4 hours then charges for 20 minutes before repeating the cycle. It can keep doing this 24/7 for however long you need it to. What will usually stop you is tired drivers or having reached your destination.
This summer I did a 12 hour drive with a Model S covering about 800km, which includes ~2h of stops wasted on feeding the humans. (That may seem like slow going but that's Norwegian speed limits for you.)
And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
I'm too busy playing games to play games. Instead I have twitch.tv on in the background while I play games.
Does this make me less of a gamer, or more of a gamer, than were I just playing games on my own?
They are right in the effect. However, you never see anyone take it to the next step. Do we NEED to market to be THAT liquid?
We can't really know the answer to this. The applications that would benefit from instant liquidity haven't been developed because instant liquidity has not been available.
Maybe there are some true killer applications for this that just need a few more years of HFT-provided instant liquidity for someone get around to inventing, and once they do, we'll all wonder how people could even pay their bills under the old system let alone live their lives to the full.
We can't see it but we can observe it, most significantly our skin reacts to it. The point of weirdness with the 2D example is that the third dimension is fundamentally unobservable, not that it's simply tricky to observe.
Slashdot Mirror
It occurred to me that if we replaced airbags with shotgun cartridges people might start driving carefully and stop running into other cars and things.
No they wouldn't. This isn't very far from the state of affairs before seatbelts became mandatory equipment, and nobody cared much back then that people were dying in droves. Not even the drivers themselves. (Volvo cared though, and invented seatbelts.)
Let's say there are 300M (mostly) law abiding citizens in the US, and 500M in the EU, and that 0.001% of them are radicalized by these blatant attacks on civil liberties. You do the maths.
The distinction can't really be drawn. In Germany it is considered harmful to deny the Holocaust to the extent that it's illegal to do so. If a German Google employee is left to decide whether such a ban is 451 or 452 he will likely conclude differently than a US Google employee would.
And of course, child porn means different things in different countries. In some places, someone drawing a basic stick figure and writing underneath "naked child" may be guilty of creating child porn. How obviously harmful is that drawing to anyone? Would blocking it be a ban on political speech? How realistic must the drawing be before it's "reasonable" to ban it?
Except you got the results for someone who allows redirects, rather than the results for you.
You must realize that the language used in the US Constitution is very exceptional in international terms. It affirms a non-restricted freedom of speech in a way that cannot be misunderstood: the only real way to subvert it is if you can get away with completely changing the meaning of the words used in it. This is a very strong barrier to tyranny. Don't make the mistake of assuming that there are any other nations in the world that enjoy this same level of protection.
The language used in European freedom of speech laws, as an example, comes with qualifications and exceptions built-in. Consequently the seed of tyranny is also built into these laws. They can never be understood to be any sort of guarantee of actual free speech but need to be seen as a (strong) statement of intent more than anything.
(This is one of the reasons I personally am completely indifferent to the whole EU project: they only serve more of the same tripe that is already in place. Had the EU proposed an actual strong freedoms-centric constitution it would have been different, but they didn't.)
And why can't people voice their concerns over their governments giving away their tax money to middle class "refugees"?
This is Europe, and Europe doesn't have the sort of unrestricted free speech that the US does. All European "free speech" laws that I've seen (which is far from all of them, I will admit) are along the lines of "speech is free so long as it's not objectionable". And I'm guessing the speech in question has been found objectionable by the people who decide such things.
Now, it's not sufficiently bad here that govt can get away with saying something like "we object to you criticizing us go to jail", but, if it can be rephrased as "hate speech go to jail" or "supporting terrorists go to jail" (or in Germany, "go to jail you nazi") then you're screwed.
This was tried for the first decade but the IWC is no longer science based and so it kept failing. Nowadays whaling nations no longer care and the IWC is effectively a dead organization.
The core problem is that the IWC was hijacked by the lunatic fringe a couple decades ago and ever since it's been impossible to cooperate internationally about whaling levels. Countries that do whaling are left to wing it on their own, and since there is no rationality left in the international debate anyway they long since stopped trying to come up with good explanations of what they're doing or why.
The lesson from that scene is extremely powerful when you understand the same lesson applies to ANY problem. When you are faced with a heavily secured door, or an encryption standard, the attack vector is often going to be something other than going through the face of the door or the front end of the encryption. What you'd do is KICK IN THE DOOR. And the TLAs know this and do exactly that. Their people have always kicked in doors while normal people look at the locks and shrug and walk away.
In this case the lock has performed its function: it prevented Redford from effecting a clandestine break-in. It is now obvious to the office owner when he returns that he has been burgled and he can take steps to minimize the damage that will result from it.
In the security business it is accepted that ultimately you cannot prevent a determined attacker from gaining access to a physical location. The best you can do is 1) delay him and 2) force him to leave evidence that he was there.
The huge advantage of electric cars is that the mode of power generation for them is infinitely mutable, as decided on national policy level. If coal pollution is an issue it can easily be eliminated by shutting down the coal plants and building nuclear or hydro or whatever. You can't do this with gas powered cars because replacing all the millions of petrol power plants in people's cars is an impossible prospect as compared to replacing a few dozen regional power plants.
Any civilization capable of building anything close to size of a dyson sphere would not be limited to what's available in a single solar system.
Pretty much by definition.
I don't think most people really grasp how mindboggingly big a Dyson sphere is. I sure as hell don't.
Full Disclosure: I live in Russia. And I am quite glad that the experiment failed.
Failed? No, it provided a roadmap.
What Russia needs to do to control the domestic network is start consolidating/nationalizing the ISP sector so that you end up with half a dozen big ISPs which can then be controlled by the government directly or indirectly.
Next the network hardware market will need to be heavily regulated so that only approved entities can legally get access to the equipment necessary to establish satellite or radio uplinks.
With this in place the rogue uplink problem can be eliminated and Putin can have his control. So I'd look out for those things starting to happen, if they do you have 5-10 years of internet freedom left before the lockdown sets in.
Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
These aren't rich people, they are people who couldn't afford to buy an EV that covers their actual needs so they went for one class below. This is why they need to plug in ever time they stop, they couldn't afford the range necessary to bypass that issue.
The rich people are driving Teslas, which don't need to charge outside the home ever except on road trips. And on road trips they use Tesla's super chargers because other charging stations just don't have the power necessary.
Why don't they just go that extra mile and make it "for the greater good"?
Typical electric car consumes 35 kWh per 100km. (62 miles)
The Tesla Model S easily gets 400km out of 85kWh which puts it at ~20kWh per 100km.
Say it can drive 400km (250 miles). That's 140 kWh of energy.
85kWh for the Model S
Now, to pump 140 kWh in 15 mins, one needs electircity source of 560 kW.
Typical "big" power plants with several blocks are normally in 1-1.5GW area.
With about 2500 such vehicles you'd consume 100% of power generated by such power plant.
Only if all cars always simultaneously drive 400km in 15 minutes and also charge at full capacity during those 15 minutes, and they do this continuously 24/7. This is a practical impossibility for a number of reasons.
Even if you suppose that all cars drive 400km per day (which isn't the case) and so need a full charge every day, a smart grid would distribute those 2500 cars out such that 26 charge at a time (26 x 4 x 24 = ~2500 cars) and you only need a 9MW energy supply for the 2500 cars with the Model S 85kWh battery. (In practice cars drive a lot less than this and so when all is said and done you don't need a whole lot of electricity at all to keep them going.)
If the NSA's intrusive powers, constitutionality aside, are all about terrorists, what in God's name are they doing passing normal crime info on to the FBI and DEA?
There is no meaningful distinction between terrorism and crime, so this is how it must be.
If there is no audit trail, shouldn't the buck stop at the top?
It does. The top already resigned.
They acknowledge right at the start that whatever you propose could easily be defeated by the consumer simply encrypting things themselves. So if the entire thing is technologically unfeasible why on earth would you even study it?
It makes sense as a first step towards a total solution. It will be massively imperfect but you've got to start somewhere and over a 20-30 year period of refinement and expanding the scope you might actually get to where you want to be.
The one thing I haven't seen covered in the paper at all is that IF the US were to implement these requirements that all business involved in encryption would simply move off shore and destroy a thriving US business ecosystem. The paper's assumption is that any US developed protocol would then be exported world wide. This is profoundly illogical on many fronts. There would be numerous countries that would simply not participate in some US encryption compromising ring.
This could only work if done at an international level. You absolutely must have the major economic blocs (Europe, Russia, China etc.) on team with it, and preferably also the major "new" economies. The rest will naturally follow. Actually generating this international consensus will be a difficult task but they're finally doing it with personal finance so there's no reason to think they couldn't do it with digital communication. Again, 20 years of constant pushing and making the best use of every crisis can get you a long way.
The result of this is that even is some key recovery system is mandated users could simply encrypt their own data underneath the compromised encryption and render the device inaccessible and defeat the entire purpose of the law and international accords.
If this is made illegal though most people will be disinclined towards doing it, and those that still do it can be sent to prison for that at least even if you can't figure what else wrong they may have done.
There's a million crimes in this world any one of us can commit any day (and probably get away with), yet because they are illegal most people don't. This will be another one of those.
Objectifying a woman-shaped sexbot will only train men (or women) to objectify women.
You're not seeing the long picture here.
Once we have trained people to desire sexbots, we can start slowly morphing the sexbots away from looking like women (or men for that matter) and over to some other form entirely. In the end, when the sexbots look completely non human like, we will have trained men to feel no sexual desire to woman-shaped forms at all and everyone wins!
A couple of DAYS between SF and the Oregon border?
I have no idea how far this is, but that is also not relevant.
If Tesla has superchargers along your route then essentially your Model S drives for 4 hours then charges for 20 minutes before repeating the cycle. It can keep doing this 24/7 for however long you need it to. What will usually stop you is tired drivers or having reached your destination.
This summer I did a 12 hour drive with a Model S covering about 800km, which includes ~2h of stops wasted on feeding the humans. (That may seem like slow going but that's Norwegian speed limits for you.)
What I would really want is the ability to say where I want my tax money to go to.
You already have that ability, it's called an election.
And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
I'm too busy playing games to play games. Instead I have twitch.tv on in the background while I play games.
Does this make me less of a gamer, or more of a gamer, than were I just playing games on my own?
They are right in the effect. However, you never see anyone take it to the next step. Do we NEED to market to be THAT liquid?
We can't really know the answer to this. The applications that would benefit from instant liquidity haven't been developed because instant liquidity has not been available.
Maybe there are some true killer applications for this that just need a few more years of HFT-provided instant liquidity for someone get around to inventing, and once they do, we'll all wonder how people could even pay their bills under the old system let alone live their lives to the full.
We can't see it but we can observe it, most significantly our skin reacts to it. The point of weirdness with the 2D example is that the third dimension is fundamentally unobservable, not that it's simply tricky to observe.