The attack being described probably would have been worse. And if the NSA stopped it, that's great—they should get credit and appreciation for that. This is exactly what the NSA _should_ be doing. It's too bad that they have spent so much focus on stuff _other_ than this. People forget that the NSA has actually done a _lot_ over the past century that has been of extreme benefit, because they have done so many inappropriate things recently. It would be really great if we could get back to the old NSA.
The solution is obvious: spend less time consuming media and more time hassling your politicians to change these stupid laws. Sucking on the glass teat until you die is no way to spend a life.
Maybe if you spent less time making apathetic comments on/. and more time working to change things, it wouldn't be impossible anymore. The fact is that grass roots organizing works, and we've seen it work. Making cynical, apathetic comments also works, but the effect is has is to dissuade people from doing what works.
No offense, but it looks like they did read the study. Either that or they are lying, since they make statements that only someone who has read the study could attest to.
They also aren't promoting their own personal worldview. They are simply calling the claimed results of the study into question based on observations about what is said in the study. That's allowed. If you disagree with what was said, say something to refute it—don't attack the person speaking, but rather what they said.
Yup. There's a pretty nice analysis of the study on MindHacker. It looks like the authors of the study found what they were looking for. Whether it's meaningfully there is less certain.
Bits, or it didn't happen. I'm looking forward to this if it's real, but we haven't seen any actual code drop yet. As for a PC-like standard, not really—there are too many variations in the hardware. E.g., different CPUs require significant differences in the drivers, plus there's the whole rooting/bricking issue. It would be great if market pressure for what you're describing started to develop, but we certainly aren't seeing that at present.
It is impossible to control the dissemination of information that you make available to other people. But it is not impossible to make it expensive to crack an entire social network and feast on the gooey interior. Best is the enemy of good enough. Right now it is clearly the case that everything that happens on Facebook and Google is visible and mineable at least by Facebook and Google, and possibly by interested governments. A peer-to-peer social network makes that kind of data mining much more expensive.
Wikipedia does frequent fundraising. Linux is all about the money—there are amateur linux hackers, but more professionals. Firefox makes money. Of course they aren't all about the money, but money is important. A geek's got to eat. So if you don't think about the economics of the development cycle, you are being unrealistic. It may well be that the economics of a good distributed social network do require that the hacking be done by amateurs; it may be that there's a way to make a business of it.
I don't know why a non-profit social network would be better. Have you looked in your email inbox recently? I get constant spam from the nonprofits I've made the mistake of supporting, even the ones I think are really important. And nonprofits can get harvested—IIRC some big church I won't name sued a nonprofit that had targeted it into oblivion, and then purchased the assets.
Personally I think the right distribution model is lots of smart CPE routers, with no paid hosting at all except maybe for some kind of DNS rendezvous system. The Diaspora model seems too centralized, despite the fact that it's technicall a distributed architecture. But I have no idea how it gets paid for, and apparently the Diaspora folks don't either, now that the initial funding is finished. Crowdfunding features and maintenance might be the best model.
That said, there has to be a model. It's not going to Just Happen.
Battery systems cost orders of magnitude more than that. And you can make more on your money putting it in a certificate of deposit than in batteries at that rate of return. We looked into this when we were setting up our solar system. Also, grid-tie with batteries isn't as straightforward as you think because you need a more expensive inverter, and you don't have an infinite source to throw your load at, so you aren't even getting the same service.
There's a reason why electric cars are so expensive, even with the subsidy.
Yes, well, that business model is a thing of the past in most states (I don't know about Virginia). In Arizona there's net metering; in Vermont you get retail for your excess power and a credit for every watt you generate, even if you use it on site. This is a great incentive now, but as the amount of solar increases, there will come a time when it isn't economically feasible anymore.
We have net metering, but they still use two meters; otherwise there's no way to tell whether you were generating a shitload of power and using a shitload of power, or generating nothing and using nothing. I think this varies depending on local policy—if there is no subsidy, there's no need for two meters, but it's still interesting to collect the data, both for you and for the power company.
The grid tie fee would have to be a lot more than $4.90/month to make the batteries look economical. Have you priced an off-the-grid system? Have you tried living on one? It either requires major lifestyle changes, a truly immense investment in panels and batteries (plus ongoing maintenance costs for the batteries) or a generator that will be running more often than you'd like, burning fossil fuels less efficiently than a big plant would. Anybody who buys batteries in response to this policy is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
This is all very well and good, but does it scale? Suppose every single house and business the grid served had enough capacity to go net zero. That is, they generate their entire day's budget of power, including nighttime use, using their panels. This means that on sunny days, the power has to get stored, because by definition everybody is generating more than the total they need during daylight hours. Or else it just goes to a resistor bank or something.
And then on cloudy days, and at night, the energy has to come either from grid-tied storage, or from non-solar generators (one would like for that to be wind, but it's not a perfect solution at the moment). And of course there is a very substantial cost to actually maintaining the grid. So in this scenario, the cost of the non-solar generation capacity and the grid has to be paid for by someone; if everybody who is connected to the grid is paying zero, or slightly less, then the money has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be the power company.
Of course, that's one extreme; the other is no site-generated power. You can draw a graph; on the left zero net-zero sites, on the right, 100% net zero sites. For some part of the left-hand side of the chart, solar is making the power company's life easier, because demand for power is higher during the day than at night. For some part past that, solar is neutral—it doesn't particularly benefit the company, but it's not a negative either—they are able to sell the power, assuming they are paying a fair price for it. And then at some point on the right, there is no longer sufficient revenue to pay for the grid and the non-solar generating capacity needed to run all those net-zero houses when the sun isn't out either because it's cloudy or nighttime. Now the money to pay for the grid has to come from people who are net zero.
And somewhere before that happens, to the right side of the graph, the money that pays for the non-solar generating capacity and the grid will all be coming from people who don't have solar, even though the people who have solar also benefit both from the grid and the non-solar generation.
So when you talk about "usefulness to the grid," it's important to keep this graph in mind. At some points on the graph, that term is meaningful. At other points on the graph, it isn't. And it is absolutely unfair for users who do not have solar to subsidize users who do—in general, users without solar will be poor, and users with will be affluent, so you have a reverse subsidy.
Andrea and I have solar on our roof, and we're happy to have it, and we get a subsidy, which apparently works out well for Green Mountain Power at the moment. I'm happy that's the case, because at the moment our excess generating capacity actually benefits other users of the grid. But when the point comes where the grid exists largely to spread out the power and provide night capacity, that will no longer be the case, and it would be shameful if I were to ask for the subsidy to continue at that point, paid for largely by people less fortunate than I am, or by running the power company that maintains the grid I depend on into the ground.
In principle college ought to benefit IT workers; in practice, at least when I went, it was less useful than I would have liked, and I dropped out after a year and a half because I felt that I was wasting my money. But I haven't been forced to put my resume through an HR department in a long time; I wonder if it would be as easy now as it was a dozen years ago.
Terrorists aren't that subtle. They like to be able to take credit for what they have done. If Cheney dies of a heart attack, it's just a heart attack, not an attack. No terror. The person terrorizing Cheney was Cheney, pure and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Because there's a shit-ton of money in pervasive surveillance, and a lot less of it in doing what the NSA should be doing.
The attack being described probably would have been worse. And if the NSA stopped it, that's great—they should get credit and appreciation for that. This is exactly what the NSA _should_ be doing. It's too bad that they have spent so much focus on stuff _other_ than this. People forget that the NSA has actually done a _lot_ over the past century that has been of extreme benefit, because they have done so many inappropriate things recently. It would be really great if we could get back to the old NSA.
The solution is obvious: spend less time consuming media and more time hassling your politicians to change these stupid laws. Sucking on the glass teat until you die is no way to spend a life.
Maybe if you spent less time making apathetic comments on /. and more time working to change things, it wouldn't be impossible anymore. The fact is that grass roots organizing works, and we've seen it work. Making cynical, apathetic comments also works, but the effect is has is to dissuade people from doing what works.
No offense, but it looks like they did read the study. Either that or they are lying, since they make statements that only someone who has read the study could attest to.
They also aren't promoting their own personal worldview. They are simply calling the claimed results of the study into question based on observations about what is said in the study. That's allowed. If you disagree with what was said, say something to refute it—don't attack the person speaking, but rather what they said.
Yup. There's a pretty nice analysis of the study on MindHacker. It looks like the authors of the study found what they were looking for. Whether it's meaningfully there is less certain.
Bits, or it didn't happen. I'm looking forward to this if it's real, but we haven't seen any actual code drop yet. As for a PC-like standard, not really—there are too many variations in the hardware. E.g., different CPUs require significant differences in the drivers, plus there's the whole rooting/bricking issue. It would be great if market pressure for what you're describing started to develop, but we certainly aren't seeing that at present.
It is impossible to control the dissemination of information that you make available to other people. But it is not impossible to make it expensive to crack an entire social network and feast on the gooey interior. Best is the enemy of good enough. Right now it is clearly the case that everything that happens on Facebook and Google is visible and mineable at least by Facebook and Google, and possibly by interested governments. A peer-to-peer social network makes that kind of data mining much more expensive.
Wikipedia does frequent fundraising. Linux is all about the money—there are amateur linux hackers, but more professionals. Firefox makes money. Of course they aren't all about the money, but money is important. A geek's got to eat. So if you don't think about the economics of the development cycle, you are being unrealistic. It may well be that the economics of a good distributed social network do require that the hacking be done by amateurs; it may be that there's a way to make a business of it.
I don't know why a non-profit social network would be better. Have you looked in your email inbox recently? I get constant spam from the nonprofits I've made the mistake of supporting, even the ones I think are really important. And nonprofits can get harvested—IIRC some big church I won't name sued a nonprofit that had targeted it into oblivion, and then purchased the assets.
Personally I think the right distribution model is lots of smart CPE routers, with no paid hosting at all except maybe for some kind of DNS rendezvous system. The Diaspora model seems too centralized, despite the fact that it's technicall a distributed architecture. But I have no idea how it gets paid for, and apparently the Diaspora folks don't either, now that the initial funding is finished. Crowdfunding features and maintenance might be the best model.
That said, there has to be a model. It's not going to Just Happen.
Are you aware of anybody who's been able to do this based on the protocol description on the wiki?
Wow, you must have a lot of free time if money is the only reason you're running Linux.
Battery systems cost orders of magnitude more than that. And you can make more on your money putting it in a certificate of deposit than in batteries at that rate of return. We looked into this when we were setting up our solar system. Also, grid-tie with batteries isn't as straightforward as you think because you need a more expensive inverter, and you don't have an infinite source to throw your load at, so you aren't even getting the same service.
There's a reason why electric cars are so expensive, even with the subsidy.
Yes, well, that business model is a thing of the past in most states (I don't know about Virginia). In Arizona there's net metering; in Vermont you get retail for your excess power and a credit for every watt you generate, even if you use it on site. This is a great incentive now, but as the amount of solar increases, there will come a time when it isn't economically feasible anymore.
Rather than imagining, it might be informative to actually do the math.
We have net metering, but they still use two meters; otherwise there's no way to tell whether you were generating a shitload of power and using a shitload of power, or generating nothing and using nothing. I think this varies depending on local policy—if there is no subsidy, there's no need for two meters, but it's still interesting to collect the data, both for you and for the power company.
The grid tie fee would have to be a lot more than $4.90/month to make the batteries look economical. Have you priced an off-the-grid system? Have you tried living on one? It either requires major lifestyle changes, a truly immense investment in panels and batteries (plus ongoing maintenance costs for the batteries) or a generator that will be running more often than you'd like, burning fossil fuels less efficiently than a big plant would. Anybody who buys batteries in response to this policy is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
This is all very well and good, but does it scale? Suppose every single house and business the grid served had enough capacity to go net zero. That is, they generate their entire day's budget of power, including nighttime use, using their panels. This means that on sunny days, the power has to get stored, because by definition everybody is generating more than the total they need during daylight hours. Or else it just goes to a resistor bank or something.
And then on cloudy days, and at night, the energy has to come either from grid-tied storage, or from non-solar generators (one would like for that to be wind, but it's not a perfect solution at the moment). And of course there is a very substantial cost to actually maintaining the grid. So in this scenario, the cost of the non-solar generation capacity and the grid has to be paid for by someone; if everybody who is connected to the grid is paying zero, or slightly less, then the money has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be the power company.
Of course, that's one extreme; the other is no site-generated power. You can draw a graph; on the left zero net-zero sites, on the right, 100% net zero sites. For some part of the left-hand side of the chart, solar is making the power company's life easier, because demand for power is higher during the day than at night. For some part past that, solar is neutral—it doesn't particularly benefit the company, but it's not a negative either—they are able to sell the power, assuming they are paying a fair price for it. And then at some point on the right, there is no longer sufficient revenue to pay for the grid and the non-solar generating capacity needed to run all those net-zero houses when the sun isn't out either because it's cloudy or nighttime. Now the money to pay for the grid has to come from people who are net zero.
And somewhere before that happens, to the right side of the graph, the money that pays for the non-solar generating capacity and the grid will all be coming from people who don't have solar, even though the people who have solar also benefit both from the grid and the non-solar generation.
So when you talk about "usefulness to the grid," it's important to keep this graph in mind. At some points on the graph, that term is meaningful. At other points on the graph, it isn't. And it is absolutely unfair for users who do not have solar to subsidize users who do—in general, users without solar will be poor, and users with will be affluent, so you have a reverse subsidy.
Andrea and I have solar on our roof, and we're happy to have it, and we get a subsidy, which apparently works out well for Green Mountain Power at the moment. I'm happy that's the case, because at the moment our excess generating capacity actually benefits other users of the grid. But when the point comes where the grid exists largely to spread out the power and provide night capacity, that will no longer be the case, and it would be shameful if I were to ask for the subsidy to continue at that point, paid for largely by people less fortunate than I am, or by running the power company that maintains the grid I depend on into the ground.
The NSA knows better than to ask the Klingons for access to their fiber...
It does depend on where you go. If I'd been at MIT and had Sussman and friends as teachers, I might be telling a different story.
Apparently you have never coded in C.
In principle college ought to benefit IT workers; in practice, at least when I went, it was less useful than I would have liked, and I dropped out after a year and a half because I felt that I was wasting my money. But I haven't been forced to put my resume through an HR department in a long time; I wonder if it would be as easy now as it was a dozen years ago.
Terrorists aren't that subtle. They like to be able to take credit for what they have done. If Cheney dies of a heart attack, it's just a heart attack, not an attack. No terror. The person terrorizing Cheney was Cheney, pure and simple.
Yes, but it's broken. That's what turned Darth Vader evil too.
Yeah, I think we have a pretty clear case of projection here. If a terrorist got close enough to him to hack his pacemaker, why not just stab him?
A->B != B->A. Just because someone kills Dick Cheney doesn't mean they are not a terrorist.