Oh, well we can switch to a hydrogen based economy! Wrong again, can't make hydrogen without oil. Can't make fancy electric cars without a current reserve of oil.
Actually, it's just more economical at the moment to make hydrogen from oil and other hydrocarbons; it's trivial (if inefficient and expensive) to use nuclear power to do it directly from seawater. However, more to your original point, hydrogen isn't feedstock for fertilizers or pesticides. Hydrogen isn't as useful as oil.
a finite resource will be depleted at a rate such at, on average, its price rises at the interest rate
Hotelling's rule... which assumes an otherwise stable economy. Of course, the problem is that diminishing petroleum supplies are likely to have substantial effects on the economy, including wide spread inflation.... which does what to interest rates?
"the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright,"
In the hands of a sensible instructor, that last might well include "the Statute of Anne, or the US Constitution's Progress Clause". After all, how can you understand significance without historical perspective?
Disclaimer: I may be biased from having worked for Technology Historians for the past half decade.
Once X == Y, an oil field becomes an energy sink, not an energy source, even if there are centuries worth of oil left in it.
See Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Which, as an aside, doesn't mean it won't be used at all; such oil might be a good way to turn nuclear power into plastics. It just means such oil won't contribute to a solution for the energy crisis.
As soon as an energy crisis arises, we're going to start building nuclear reactors like they're going out of fashion.
Large nuclear plants have a 20 year production lead time, there have been maybe three new construction permits granted since TMI, there's NIMBY idiots everywhere, Uranium reserves can't make up the difference in energy demand for more than about 20 years, and no-one has demonstrated a commercially viable U-Pu or Th-U combination breeder/power reactor.
Large nuclear plants have a 20 year production lead time, there's NIMBY idiots everywhere, Uranium reserves can't make up the difference in energy demand for more than about 20 years, and no-one has demonstrated a commercially viable U-Pu or Th-U combination breeder/power reactor.
I'm much more interested in how you came up with a food crisis. North and South America already produce way more food than is necessary, with options to increase production through farming more land or (in the case of South America) improving farming technology.
Well, two easy scenarios:
(a) Fertilizer and pesticides largely come from petroleum products. American farm production techniques rely heavily on these.
(b) It doesn't matter how much food you grow, if you can't transport it to consumers.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
True. However, the USGS is notorious in peak oil circles for having continued to raise estimates of ultimate recoverables (IE, total production possible over human history) in the continental US, even after domestic production had reached and passed the predicted Hubbert Peak (IE, the halfway mark). The USGS 1972 predicted US-48-UR was a value between 2 and 10 times the value currently accepted. (Hubbard, by contrast, was about 10-30% low... from a range of 15 years pre-peak.) And, if you examine the weasel words in their footnotes, you'll see the USGS and similar agencies effectively admit to fixing their supply predictions to equal the value for predicted demand. We're at the absolute brink of Peak Oil. It would also provide a plausible secondary motivation for the Iranian nuclear program, and explain why they are so adamant about pursuing the atom despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves: they also think that Peak Oil is at hand.
If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
This, however, assumes that oil production can remain steady, and that those reseve estimates are accurate. The premise of the Hubbert peak is that production rates will begin dropping at increasing rates, due to increasing difficulty in extraction.
I don't have time to address the problems with each of your silver linings, but looking at a few PeakOil sites and a quick search for "Energy Profit Ratio" should leave many people skeptical about them.
Which, in Realpolitik terms, might well justify the invasion of Iraq completely, aside from the stupidity how the invasion was executed (IE, without detailed post-invasion planning or comrehensive allied support). And, no, I am NOT a fan of Bush or the Iraq war... largely because of the aforementioned stupidity in execution.
2) School-issued credit cards. Only people way up the food chain get to use these.
Errr... not always. I work IT for a small department -- barely a dozen tenure track faculty, two dozen counting all the adjuncts and temporary hires, not even three dozen even if you include the various TA's/minions who have to share their professor's office desktop. There are only three other IT people I know of with smaller support groups in the school. I've got a purchasing card. There's a 5 grand limit on how much I can buy from any one vendor in a year, recent rules preclude efficient on-line use, and tracking receipts is still obnoxious, but it does take care of all of the small over-the-counter bits buyable from <insert local computer store>.
But yeah, given the paperwork and time of a PO, the time value of money, and razor margins at on-line outfits, I can see why Newegg doesn't touch PO's.
If someone gets a hold of your whole computer, they can read files. If someone hacks your system, they can read your files.
Having needed to break into someone's system to recover encrypted files, I can say it's not that simple.
Windows NTFS encryption is certificate based. For installs done by anyone not a professional paranoid, the user has access to the file recovery certificate, and the domain administrator may have access to a file recovery certificate valid domain-wide. To use a certificate stored on the hard drive, you MUST have the password to that certificate... which is NOT changed when you force-change an account password.
So, yes, you can hack a machine, install a trojan, and read the users files when they login next. But, until the user logs in (which, yeah, is usually a short wait) and starts the trojan running under their user ID and password before your trojan can decrypt the files to examine/copy them. Alternately, you can get a dump of the encrypted password files, and try a brute force crack. But if the password used on the account (and, ergo, certificate) is, say, 12 random printable characters... dude, you are so SCREWED.
Fortunately, the time I needed to break in for someone, the password was "only" nine random characters. I used a boot disk to dump the password file. Then, we wandered over to the operator for the school 128-processor Linux cluster with a case of good beer at 3:30 on Friday, explained the problem, and he agreed it would be OK this once to "not notice" the copy of the cracker program that would be blatantly running over the weekend in violation of several rules. We left, "not noticing" the case we were leaving behind. At 9AM Monday morning, I checked my email, and my batch job had left the user password sitting in my inbox.
If it had been a 12 random printable character password, we'd still be waiting for the rest of our lives. And, for the professionally paranoid, I understand it's possible to use a non-default certificate (with potentially a different password) for encrypting files... where the decryption certificate need not be on the machine.
Afterwards, I gently explained to the user that EFS should generally be reserved for situations where you consider the data's loss preferable to its disclosure. "EFS is not quite blow-up-the-building-first security, but it's close." He now reserves EFS for his financial information and consulting work covered under legal privelege.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
It sounds FTA like this phishing team got a company to falsely issue a certificate, which says the phishers are associated with the bank. Couldn't a lawyer of even marginal competence make a case that doing so make the "big company" legally liable for consequential damages? Voila, one set of deep pockets to go sue. Perfect for those who fell for the scam, the lawyers for those who fell for the scam, and for scaring every other certificate company into taking due dilligence of certification seriously.
Meanwhile, how do I go about forcibly removing the Geotrust root certificate from all of my computers?
Windows Vista requires *drivers* know about HDCP
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
·
· Score: 1
This gives me the impression that not one custom built computer on the market can even RUN windows vista.
If you read one the links to Microsoft's documents in the article, I believe you'll notice they say the drivers have to report the HDCP status (of the video card and monitor IIR). Thus, it is more accurate to say that it is not at present possible to buy any computer, even custom-built, that is capable of using the HDCP features of Vista. Which does make me wonder about how that part of the Vista OS code is being tested....
POLICE: As if your life didn't suck enough, suicide is illegal, so now you have to go to jail.
Actually, suicide isn't illegal in the US; it's attempted suicide that's illegal. It's the only crime where an attempt is an offense, but success is not. Which may say something about the "crime".
...the classic "bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tape" problem.
Physical movement of media give high latency transmission, but high and readily expandable throughput. For some applications, you still can't beat sneakernet.
Technically, you're both wrong. A two-thirds vote in the senate is 67 of the 100 senators; thus, 67%. Either way, the main point holds: it's all a question of who's running the house and senate, and how many members are outraged enough to cross party lines over the vote.
If that had happened, I would line up with "evil plot!" line of thinking. [...] More simply put, don't attribute to evil what you can attribute to stupidity and incompetence.
I'm not. I'm saying it's a stupid and incompetent plot... or perhaps a plot of the stupid and incompetent, I'm not sure which. Either works for me. =)
Any good scientist will tell you that science cannot disprove the existence of God or gods no matter what you discover.
True. However, it can disprove (to forensic evidentiary standards sufficient to withstand a court of law) specific items of religious doctrine; EG, that the sun goes around the earth. If your doctrine also claims that the religious leaders can never be wrong, and they've been claiming this for 1600 years, then you have a Problem with science if it provides heliocentric evidence.
Similarly, if your religion insists that God created and populated the world in six days, and considered it finished at that point, you'll have Problems with discoveries suggesting that he's still tweaking at the designs on the various forms of life he created.
Science can't prove the non-existance of God(s). However, it can sometimes prove individual articles of faith to be wrong. Which leaves religion in general safe, but many specific creeds more than a little antsy in the crosshairs.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote
...
Now yes, the big bang theory IS a theory and should be called as such. That said, it isn't called a theory for religious reasons.
More to the point, it is completely unacceptable that someone insist that it only be refered to as a theory when that person (as is common) evidently considers "theory" to be synonymous with "opinion" in a science context.
I think the news story here is that an idiot 24 year old kid got appointed into a job way over his head and acted like a moron.
While I'll agree that the described actions are moronic, they are also in complete accord with the President's evident personal evangelistic religious agenda, and impeding the work of serious science and science education. It's also not the first time we've seen evidence that Bush has appointed a political ally to a sensitive position who later proved grossly underqualified. I suspect a terrorist group might find it worth the time investment to study a list of Bush appointees and their resumes as a guide for target selection.
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Actually, it's just more economical at the moment to make hydrogen from oil and other hydrocarbons; it's trivial (if inefficient and expensive) to use nuclear power to do it directly from seawater. However, more to your original point, hydrogen isn't feedstock for fertilizers or pesticides. Hydrogen isn't as useful as oil.
Hotelling's rule... which assumes an otherwise stable economy. Of course, the problem is that diminishing petroleum supplies are likely to have substantial effects on the economy, including wide spread inflation.... which does what to interest rates?
Perhaps. But as Resident Evil fans will know, damage is certainly practical.
In the hands of a sensible instructor, that last might well include "the Statute of Anne, or the US Constitution's Progress Clause". After all, how can you understand significance without historical perspective?
Disclaimer: I may be biased from having worked for Technology Historians for the past half decade.
See Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Which, as an aside, doesn't mean it won't be used at all; such oil might be a good way to turn nuclear power into plastics. It just means such oil won't contribute to a solution for the energy crisis.
Large nuclear plants have a 20 year production lead time, there have been maybe three new construction permits granted since TMI, there's NIMBY idiots everywhere, Uranium reserves can't make up the difference in energy demand for more than about 20 years, and no-one has demonstrated a commercially viable U-Pu or Th-U combination breeder/power reactor.
HAND.
Large nuclear plants have a 20 year production lead time, there's NIMBY idiots everywhere, Uranium reserves can't make up the difference in energy demand for more than about 20 years, and no-one has demonstrated a commercially viable U-Pu or Th-U combination breeder/power reactor.
HAND.
Do you have your own rubber tree for the tires, or do you use synthetic rubber from petroleum?
Well, two easy scenarios:
(a) Fertilizer and pesticides largely come from petroleum products. American farm production techniques rely heavily on these.
(b) It doesn't matter how much food you grow, if you can't transport it to consumers.
True. However, the USGS is notorious in peak oil circles for having continued to raise estimates of ultimate recoverables (IE, total production possible over human history) in the continental US, even after domestic production had reached and passed the predicted Hubbert Peak (IE, the halfway mark). The USGS 1972 predicted US-48-UR was a value between 2 and 10 times the value currently accepted. (Hubbard, by contrast, was about 10-30% low... from a range of 15 years pre-peak.) And, if you examine the weasel words in their footnotes, you'll see the USGS and similar agencies effectively admit to fixing their supply predictions to equal the value for predicted demand. We're at the absolute brink of Peak Oil. It would also provide a plausible secondary motivation for the Iranian nuclear program, and explain why they are so adamant about pursuing the atom despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves: they also think that Peak Oil is at hand.
If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
This, however, assumes that oil production can remain steady, and that those reseve estimates are accurate. The premise of the Hubbert peak is that production rates will begin dropping at increasing rates, due to increasing difficulty in extraction.
I don't have time to address the problems with each of your silver linings, but looking at a few Peak Oil sites and a quick search for "Energy Profit Ratio" should leave many people skeptical about them.
Which, in Realpolitik terms, might well justify the invasion of Iraq completely, aside from the stupidity how the invasion was executed (IE, without detailed post-invasion planning or comrehensive allied support). And, no, I am NOT a fan of Bush or the Iraq war... largely because of the aforementioned stupidity in execution.
Errr... not always. I work IT for a small department -- barely a dozen tenure track faculty, two dozen counting all the adjuncts and temporary hires, not even three dozen even if you include the various TA's/minions who have to share their professor's office desktop. There are only three other IT people I know of with smaller support groups in the school. I've got a purchasing card. There's a 5 grand limit on how much I can buy from any one vendor in a year, recent rules preclude efficient on-line use, and tracking receipts is still obnoxious, but it does take care of all of the small over-the-counter bits buyable from <insert local computer store>.
But yeah, given the paperwork and time of a PO, the time value of money, and razor margins at on-line outfits, I can see why Newegg doesn't touch PO's.
Having needed to break into someone's system to recover encrypted files, I can say it's not that simple.
Windows NTFS encryption is certificate based. For installs done by anyone not a professional paranoid, the user has access to the file recovery certificate, and the domain administrator may have access to a file recovery certificate valid domain-wide. To use a certificate stored on the hard drive, you MUST have the password to that certificate... which is NOT changed when you force-change an account password.
So, yes, you can hack a machine, install a trojan, and read the users files when they login next. But, until the user logs in (which, yeah, is usually a short wait) and starts the trojan running under their user ID and password before your trojan can decrypt the files to examine/copy them. Alternately, you can get a dump of the encrypted password files, and try a brute force crack. But if the password used on the account (and, ergo, certificate) is, say, 12 random printable characters... dude, you are so SCREWED.
Fortunately, the time I needed to break in for someone, the password was "only" nine random characters. I used a boot disk to dump the password file. Then, we wandered over to the operator for the school 128-processor Linux cluster with a case of good beer at 3:30 on Friday, explained the problem, and he agreed it would be OK this once to "not notice" the copy of the cracker program that would be blatantly running over the weekend in violation of several rules. We left, "not noticing" the case we were leaving behind. At 9AM Monday morning, I checked my email, and my batch job had left the user password sitting in my inbox.
If it had been a 12 random printable character password, we'd still be waiting for the rest of our lives. And, for the professionally paranoid, I understand it's possible to use a non-default certificate (with potentially a different password) for encrypting files... where the decryption certificate need not be on the machine.
Afterwards, I gently explained to the user that EFS should generally be reserved for situations where you consider the data's loss preferable to its disclosure. "EFS is not quite blow-up-the-building-first security, but it's close." He now reserves EFS for his financial information and consulting work covered under legal privelege.
The US government lets the domestic press editorialize about our human rights violations.
It sounds FTA like this phishing team got a company to falsely issue a certificate, which says the phishers are associated with the bank. Couldn't a lawyer of even marginal competence make a case that doing so make the "big company" legally liable for consequential damages? Voila, one set of deep pockets to go sue. Perfect for those who fell for the scam, the lawyers for those who fell for the scam, and for scaring every other certificate company into taking due dilligence of certification seriously.
Meanwhile, how do I go about forcibly removing the Geotrust root certificate from all of my computers?
If you read one the links to Microsoft's documents in the article, I believe you'll notice they say the drivers have to report the HDCP status (of the video card and monitor IIR). Thus, it is more accurate to say that it is not at present possible to buy any computer, even custom-built, that is capable of using the HDCP features of Vista. Which does make me wonder about how that part of the Vista OS code is being tested....
Actually, suicide isn't illegal in the US; it's attempted suicide that's illegal. It's the only crime where an attempt is an offense, but success is not. Which may say something about the "crime".
Physical movement of media give high latency transmission, but high and readily expandable throughput. For some applications, you still can't beat sneakernet.
Technically, you're both wrong. A two-thirds vote in the senate is 67 of the 100 senators; thus, 67%. Either way, the main point holds: it's all a question of who's running the house and senate, and how many members are outraged enough to cross party lines over the vote.
HTH. HAND.
I'm not. I'm saying it's a stupid and incompetent plot... or perhaps a plot of the stupid and incompetent, I'm not sure which. Either works for me. =)
True. However, it can disprove (to forensic evidentiary standards sufficient to withstand a court of law) specific items of religious doctrine; EG, that the sun goes around the earth. If your doctrine also claims that the religious leaders can never be wrong, and they've been claiming this for 1600 years, then you have a Problem with science if it provides heliocentric evidence.
Similarly, if your religion insists that God created and populated the world in six days, and considered it finished at that point, you'll have Problems with discoveries suggesting that he's still tweaking at the designs on the various forms of life he created.
Science can't prove the non-existance of God(s). However, it can sometimes prove individual articles of faith to be wrong. Which leaves religion in general safe, but many specific creeds more than a little antsy in the crosshairs.
...the term Stereogram is so 19th century... and less likely to be understood as "3D pictures" by anyone under 60.
Now yes, the big bang theory IS a theory and should be called as such. That said, it isn't called a theory for religious reasons.
More to the point, it is completely unacceptable that someone insist that it only be refered to as a theory when that person (as is common) evidently considers "theory" to be synonymous with "opinion" in a science context.
I think the news story here is that an idiot 24 year old kid got appointed into a job way over his head and acted like a moron.
While I'll agree that the described actions are moronic, they are also in complete accord with the President's evident personal evangelistic religious agenda, and impeding the work of serious science and science education. It's also not the first time we've seen evidence that Bush has appointed a political ally to a sensitive position who later proved grossly underqualified. I suspect a terrorist group might find it worth the time investment to study a list of Bush appointees and their resumes as a guide for target selection.
This is a PROBLEM.
The observed invariance of lightspeed with respect to frame of reference.
Verdict: crackpot. NEXT!
Google has known for a while.