> So what you're saying is that when you get real engineers and designers to identify goals and work together
Not really. I'm saying that when you have a _master_ engineer in charge of design, with well specified goals, you can get a master work. Modern cars are profoundly more complex. From their automatic transmission, to their non-skid brakes, to their emission reduction systems, to the enhanced safety standards with airbags, to their complex radio and GPS and telephone docking systems, they've become far more complex. It's not fair to compare them to the old VW Beetle, which was mechanically much, much simpler.
With the complex electrical and mechanical layouts of modern cars, it can be _invaluable_ to do a designed model and ensure that all the angles to detach and replace components can actually be reached without disassembling the entire car. That's difficult to model when designing the engine without an actual shell around it, or before you've cast most of the parts.
> SSL is also equally vulnerable to stolen keys. There is no way in which SSH is worse than SSL.
I'm pointing out a real attack vector for Man-In-The-Middle attacks, which you seemed to think was impossible for SSH. I didn't say it was worse: I'm pointing out that it's still vulnerable.
> Of the MITM attacks against SSL actually deployed in the wild, what proportion rely on stolen keys compared to compromised certs
Since so many MITM attacks are actually performed by institutions against their own users, using the company's own SSL keys on their own proxy servers or routers, I'm afraid it depends on whether you call those keys "stolen". I'd be willing to call them stolen: I'm afraid that most web site owners are not fully aware of the vulnerability they face when they share the key to ease load balancer or proxy access, or when they order private keys through their corporate IT department.
> Vandalism, arson, speeding, blasphemy, slander, theft, fraud, and copying are all different.
Yes, and the laws that govern copyright violation are linked to those of theft, in theft. Please, don't pretend "copying is not theft" and that that somehow covers this case when the law is pretty clear that it _was_ theft, due to its scale.
> No. Journals are no longer expensive to run. Neither the authors nor the reviewers receive any compensation from the publishers.
Again, nonsense. They're reasonably cheap to _print_, although electronic publication has helped that a lot. They're expensive to pay the experts and reviewers that provide the analysis and editing that make these journals useful, and there are real costs with the layout and getting the often badly formatted original documents into a printable format. And some reviewers _do_ get paid, it has become part of the "fast track" to publication to get an article reviewed and published early.
There are fascinating articles about this, such as http://www.nature.com/news/ope..., and we're seeing open access journals springing. But stealing complete copies of all journals, and the indexes and cross references from JSTOR just exacerbates the problem and discredits the "information should be free" community. And yes, the charges included "theft".
>> public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made
> Those are jobs for our public libraries.
The job is too big for libraries smaller than the Library of Congress or perhaps the British Library, or some other international institution. The Library of Congress _might_ be able to do it, if they were funded for it. But it would be taking on a job that JSTOR is already doing, as a _private_ library service and quite reasonable charges. Why should a federal agency take on a job that is being done reasonably well by private industry? And which federal program are you going to give up to fund it with?
Nice name calling. It doesn't support your argument, though. Let me go back to your original statement.
> > There exists an extremely widely-used crypto protocol which uses no certificate validation and yet prevents almost all MITM attacks.
"Almost all MITM attacks" is the phrase you used. Many MITM attacks do, indeed, rely on stolen or legitimately obtained copies of the server encryption keys, so please don't claim that SSH is immune from "almost all MITM attacks". And I just showed where the current lack of signatures for SSH private host keys make such attacks very easy indeed.
The need for a targeted attack that you mention is real. But, so what? If you're doing a MITM against a banking or e-commerce site, _of course_ you're going to target them. As it stands, SSH doesn't _buy_ you anything compared using SSL without key verification altogether, and that's demonstrably _worse_ than the current status with SSL.
> The TV licence is not a tax, it has one purpose only, to pay for the public broadcasting system and it is levied only on those in possession of a TV or radio receiver.
Yes, it is a tax. Being dedicated to a specific purpose does not mean it's not a tax. That it is paid whether or not you _use_ the television shows that it is, indeed, a tax for ownership of a television. The world "license" is like pretending that a sparkling wine is not champagne, it's deliberately misleading. Refusal to pay this tax is a criminal offense in the UK, even if you take hardware components out of your television so it can't work with a television signal.
>> and to avoid the typical monitoring and proxy configurations found on most competently administered public wi-fi access points.
> Even if the wi-fi throttled down his bandwidth for excessive usage (though an academic wi-fi should be set up more intelligently, only doing such things when the traffic is purely recreational rather than academic), he still could have obtained the data - it would have taken longer.
The throttling would have shown up and been traceable to his wireless MAC address. And he needed a safe, reliable place to _store_ the laptop with the hard drives.
Few network admins exert the effort to monitor their ports inside their wiring closets very well: they tend to devote their monitoring to their network borders, and to their wi-fi routes because those are most likely to have attackers or abusers from outside your supported community. The articles seem to show that MIT follows this "don't implement security that you can avoid" model to their internal networks.
An article every 10 minutes is slower than new articles appear at JSTOR. But I agree, he could have reduced the chance of detection by lowering his download rate. Even at MIT, if he'd lowered his download rate by 75% I don't think he'd have crashed JSTOR and they'd have pursued his abuse much less avidly: perhaps law enforcement would have never been involved at all.
> Or just their fucking imagination, geesh what mental gyrations "scientists" and the holy believers will go through to "support" their religion.
Well, yes. That's why the researchers looked for artists who tried to do "realistic" work, and compared over years of work by the same artist, and checked for the contrast levels, rather than the direct color. It's actually quite good work based on how human eyes and minds perceive color, as _contrasts_ rather than as absolute values.
Pretending "Copying is not stealing" is like pretending "no one can own the land". It ignores the last two thousand years of copyright law (dating back to the Irish "Cathach" document). I refer more to Swartz's abuse. He had legal access to the documents, He attempted to download and steal the _index_ by replicating the entire contents of JSTOR.
JSTOR was not hit with DDOS. The abusive download, its speed, and its fat bandwidth pipe did, indeed, create repeated Denial-of-Service, just not a "Distributed" one.If you persist in this belief that committing a DDOS or other disabling attacks is OK because they should have protected themselves better, then I suggest you follow the same reasoning and let people punch you in the head repeatedly, to demonstrate how it should have been OK because you should have protected yourself better. "Protecting yourself better" include, in the real world, contacting the client whose systems are attacking yours and getting them to stop it, or falling back on law enforcement if that fails.
JSTOR _does not lock away research_. Please discard that false and confusing description of JSTOR. JSTOR is a compromise between scientific journals, which are very expensive to run and often charge outrageous subscription fees for a a very small number of subscriptions, and public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made and organizers paid. JSTOR organizes and makes the data available. They do _not_ lock it away to be lost and unused, they do _not_ add copyrights, and they're very generous in their licensing costs to get the organized journal data into the hands of whoever wants it or needs it.
JSTOR is doing what a responsible non-profit or, indeed, any dedicated librarian would do. They've vastly _improved_ access to it, not reduced it, and deserve support and credit for it. They don't deserve some kid using the free printer, copying out all the books, and putting them up in their own "free library".
And the "UK TV License" is enforced at a national level. I do apologize that my use of the word "federal" was confusing, that's an american distinction from state or county or city taxes. Perhaps I should have been more careful in my adjective? None of that means it is not a tax enforced throughout the entire UK, see http://www.publications.parlia...
> If we're being precise, JSTOR is mostly a database of humanities journals.
From JSTOR's own front page information, you're quite correct. But look closely:
Area Studies (602 titles)
Arts (1600 titles)
Business and Economics (2048 titles)
History (7834 titles)
Humanities (8043 titles)
Law (817 titles)
Medicine and Allied Health (688 titles)
Science and Mathematics (3025 titles)
Social Sciences (11255 titles)
While you're quite correct that it's mostly humanities journals, the medicine journals are a critical research tool, as are the math and science journals. So called "harder" sciences tend to publish less than the humanities, but what they do publish is quite critical to further research. JSTOR is an especially useful resource for cross-correlating research that touches multiple fields and which your local university or research library may not be able to afford the journals for.
> Swartz didn't use anything but bandwidth that would have gone wasted otherwise.
No, he didn't use only "bandwidth that would have gone wasted otherwise", He overwhelmed the _JSTOR_ servers at least once, enough to crash some critical JSTOR services. That cut off access not just for MIT but for researchers worldwide. And the amount of bandwidth he was using slowed JSTOR significantly for MIT's students and researchers repeatedly in the months before he was arrested.
So no, he was blocking the service for other people.
> It could also be because they sit on their butts all day and eat lots of junk food.
Most long-haul and delivery truckers also help load and unload the trucks, and that requires intense activity scattered at add times throughout a day. The older truckers have also learned to protect their bodies and their diets: they use the safety equipment, the gloves and kidney belts, and they eat well. Or they'd have never lasted long enough in the business to be older truckers.
The VW bug was not designed by "they" It was designed by the Porsche company to meet political demands by Adolf Hitler, for a very simple German made car, costing less than 100 marks and with better than 40 mpg fuel consumption, capable of fitting a small family. It also incorporated previous design work by Ferdinand Porsche, which is why parts for Porsches and for VW Beetles were cross-compatible for so long.
The design is fascinating for its _simplicity_. It's the simplicity found in designs by a master craftsman. The presence of the engine in the rear, for example, meant a much smaller and more compact transmission without the lengthy drive shaft of contemporary front engine, rear drive wheel designs. That meant less high quality, high strength, high durability steel was needed in the manufacture, which helped keep prices down. The shape of the car worked both aerodynamically, to help gas mileage, but mechanically, with shapes that were forgiving of minor manufacturing perfections, and with placementn of connectors that made the vehicle easy to repair, easy to adjust for slightly miscut or miscast components, and easy to repair.
If you ever had the opportunity to work with one, you'd have noticed similar quality in the engine. It was _easy_ to remove if needed, and very intelligent design went into the layout so that tools could reach mounting screw or bolts and the various adjustment points for the carburetor. Its major flaw was a tendency to burn oil (which is not surprising for an engine made so inexpensively, high quality seals and tight tolerance mechanical parts cost _money_). They also had a tendency for the bottom of the car to become dangerously corroded by road salt. The broad use of road salt was nowhere near as common when these cars were designed, and would have been quite expensive to protect against. The old Beetles were so light that it was often possible to simply _lift_ or push them out of trouble when they got stuck in snow or mud: they actually floated for a while if they ever landed in water. Lifting them out of trable happened repeatedly when I was much younger and snow plows buried my old car.
Yes. The SSD systems are not reliable enough to act as registers yet, and would impose a noticeable pre-processing penalty for those highly optimized, low-level operations that use memory registers.
> I have seen the POTS network come to its knees too
Typically on Mother's Day. According to colleagues who worked in the older phone systems, that was the busiest day of the year and was used as a very reliable test of the full capacity of the complete live system, every year. It was invaluable for finding unexpected choke points or poor load distribution throughout the system.
That's what a solar powered cell phone charger is for. There are very nice ones, with solar panel and small battery pack built in, for about $30 on Amazon.
> But this is just silly. Art is subjective, even for the artist. And even if all artists always painted with perfect colours that don't change over time, artists don't paint sunsets on a regular basis, but rather irregularly, such as when they're extra pretty.
Do read the article. They measured red-green _ratios_. Since much of color vision is based on the contrast between objects, and since they measured changes in the same artist's work from year to year, this seems a very reasonable way of measuring contrasts in sunset coloring from year to year. I applaud the scientists for doing this very well, to normalize the comparisons they made for the aging of the paint, the cost or tint of locally available paint dyes, and other factors that would skew results.
Even if the artists chose to paint particularly striking sunsets, the existence of those striking sunsets is, in itself, often a sign of artificial or natural pollution altering the sunsets.
There are big problems with the switch. The old analog phone lines were powered by the -48 Volt signal DC voltage from the phone company switching stations, which had very reliable backup power and facilities to cut off phones that were accidentally left off hook and kept draining current from the batteries or secondary generators. All this has evaporated in the modern cable modem/FIOS/internaet/land line era. Each house needs its own local battery or other power supply to keep the phones active, and each buried switch needs its own power, and many cut-rate DSL or phone companies are skimping on the quality and size of these backup power systems. The result is much more fragile, and phone service is much less reliable than the old analog system. That old analog system was _amazing_ in its ability to survive natural disasters and still provide _some_ phone service, even if only to a few homes in a neighborhood.
> It's as if Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and instead of a $10 fine, found herself charged under anti-terrorism legislation with a 15 year prison sentence for disobeying TSA regulations
You forgot the part about "was welcomed on a *different bus* that didn't go to her home but which she decided to use to protect her own neighborhood bus, was welcomed on the other bus with a free transfer from her other bus pass, proceeded to *siphon off all the gas*, made the bus crash, and when kicked off the bus got on with a fake id and siphoned off the gas *again*, forcing the bus driver to stop picking up riders at that bus stop at all".
Aaron was not prosecuted for riding a bus in the wrong seat. He was prosecuted for stealing the gas, apparently to run a free bus company, and making the buses crash. Get your metaphors right.
> because of how that power has been so abused by its bearers
Except that JSTOR abused _nothing_. They're a non-profit corporation. They did all the work to _organize_ the data and make it a 24x7 worldwide resource. Their rates are very reasonable, they had excellent sliding scales for poorer clients, and universities, laboratories, and libraries worldwide, and their clients were able to share those resources with the public. JSTOR is available in public libraries world wide, and they're a _model_ of how to run a non-profit business. They charge enough to keep the lights on and the backups running and people doing the programming to run the servers and indexes.
The universities _already do_ give hope for the future. Aaron's mis-aimed abuse of JSTOR was just that. Abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
> So what you're saying is that when you get real engineers and designers to identify goals and work together
Not really. I'm saying that when you have a _master_ engineer in charge of design, with well specified goals, you can get a master work. Modern cars are profoundly more complex. From their automatic transmission, to their non-skid brakes, to their emission reduction systems, to the enhanced safety standards with airbags, to their complex radio and GPS and telephone docking systems, they've become far more complex. It's not fair to compare them to the old VW Beetle, which was mechanically much, much simpler.
With the complex electrical and mechanical layouts of modern cars, it can be _invaluable_ to do a designed model and ensure that all the angles to detach and replace components can actually be reached without disassembling the entire car. That's difficult to model when designing the engine without an actual shell around it, or before you've cast most of the parts.
On further thought, you're correct. The cache in the SSD drives is for other uses.
> SSL is also equally vulnerable to stolen keys. There is no way in which SSH is worse than SSL.
I'm pointing out a real attack vector for Man-In-The-Middle attacks, which you seemed to think was impossible for SSH. I didn't say it was worse: I'm pointing out that it's still vulnerable.
> Of the MITM attacks against SSL actually deployed in the wild, what proportion rely on stolen keys compared to compromised certs
Since so many MITM attacks are actually performed by institutions against their own users, using the company's own SSL keys on their own proxy servers or routers, I'm afraid it depends on whether you call those keys "stolen". I'd be willing to call them stolen: I'm afraid that most web site owners are not fully aware of the vulnerability they face when they share the key to ease load balancer or proxy access, or when they order private keys through their corporate IT department.
> Vandalism, arson, speeding, blasphemy, slander, theft, fraud, and copying are all different.
Yes, and the laws that govern copyright violation are linked to those of theft, in theft. Please, don't pretend "copying is not theft" and that that somehow covers this case when the law is pretty clear that it _was_ theft, due to its scale.
> No. Journals are no longer expensive to run. Neither the authors nor the reviewers receive any compensation from the publishers.
Again, nonsense. They're reasonably cheap to _print_, although electronic publication has helped that a lot. They're expensive to pay the experts and reviewers that provide the analysis and editing that make these journals useful, and there are real costs with the layout and getting the often badly formatted original documents into a printable format. And some reviewers _do_ get paid, it has become part of the "fast track" to publication to get an article reviewed and published early.
There are fascinating articles about this, such as http://www.nature.com/news/ope..., and we're seeing open access journals springing. But stealing complete copies of all journals, and the indexes and cross references from JSTOR just exacerbates the problem and discredits the "information should be free" community. And yes, the charges included "theft".
>> public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made
> Those are jobs for our public libraries.
The job is too big for libraries smaller than the Library of Congress or perhaps the British Library, or some other international institution. The Library of Congress _might_ be able to do it, if they were funded for it. But it would be taking on a job that JSTOR is already doing, as a _private_ library service and quite reasonable charges. Why should a federal agency take on a job that is being done reasonably well by private industry? And which federal program are you going to give up to fund it with?
Nice name calling. It doesn't support your argument, though. Let me go back to your original statement.
> > There exists an extremely widely-used crypto protocol which uses no certificate validation and yet prevents almost all MITM attacks.
"Almost all MITM attacks" is the phrase you used. Many MITM attacks do, indeed, rely on stolen or legitimately obtained copies of the server encryption keys, so please don't claim that SSH is immune from "almost all MITM attacks". And I just showed where the current lack of signatures for SSH private host keys make such attacks very easy indeed.
The need for a targeted attack that you mention is real. But, so what? If you're doing a MITM against a banking or e-commerce site, _of course_ you're going to target them. As it stands, SSH doesn't _buy_ you anything compared using SSL without key verification altogether, and that's demonstrably _worse_ than the current status with SSL.
> The TV licence is not a tax, it has one purpose only, to pay for the public broadcasting system and it is levied only on those in possession of a TV or radio receiver.
Yes, it is a tax. Being dedicated to a specific purpose does not mean it's not a tax. That it is paid whether or not you _use_ the television shows that it is, indeed, a tax for ownership of a television. The world "license" is like pretending that a sparkling wine is not champagne, it's deliberately misleading. Refusal to pay this tax is a criminal offense in the UK, even if you take hardware components out of your television so it can't work with a television signal.
>> and to avoid the typical monitoring and proxy configurations found on most competently administered public wi-fi access points.
> Even if the wi-fi throttled down his bandwidth for excessive usage (though an academic wi-fi should be set up more intelligently, only doing such things when the traffic is purely recreational rather than academic), he still could have obtained the data - it would have taken longer.
The throttling would have shown up and been traceable to his wireless MAC address. And he needed a safe, reliable place to _store_ the laptop with the hard drives.
Few network admins exert the effort to monitor their ports inside their wiring closets very well: they tend to devote their monitoring to their network borders, and to their wi-fi routes because those are most likely to have attackers or abusers from outside your supported community. The articles seem to show that MIT follows this "don't implement security that you can avoid" model to their internal networks.
An article every 10 minutes is slower than new articles appear at JSTOR. But I agree, he could have reduced the chance of detection by lowering his download rate. Even at MIT, if he'd lowered his download rate by 75% I don't think he'd have crashed JSTOR and they'd have pursued his abuse much less avidly: perhaps law enforcement would have never been involved at all.
> Or just their fucking imagination, geesh what mental gyrations "scientists" and the holy believers will go through to "support" their religion.
Well, yes. That's why the researchers looked for artists who tried to do "realistic" work, and compared over years of work by the same artist, and checked for the contrast levels, rather than the direct color. It's actually quite good work based on how human eyes and minds perceive color, as _contrasts_ rather than as absolute values.
Pretending "Copying is not stealing" is like pretending "no one can own the land". It ignores the last two thousand years of copyright law (dating back to the Irish "Cathach" document). I refer more to Swartz's abuse. He had legal access to the documents, He attempted to download and steal the _index_ by replicating the entire contents of JSTOR.
JSTOR was not hit with DDOS. The abusive download, its speed, and its fat bandwidth pipe did, indeed, create repeated Denial-of-Service, just not a "Distributed" one.If you persist in this belief that committing a DDOS or other disabling attacks is OK because they should have protected themselves better, then I suggest you follow the same reasoning and let people punch you in the head repeatedly, to demonstrate how it should have been OK because you should have protected yourself better. "Protecting yourself better" include, in the real world, contacting the client whose systems are attacking yours and getting them to stop it, or falling back on law enforcement if that fails.
JSTOR _does not lock away research_. Please discard that false and confusing description of JSTOR. JSTOR is a compromise between scientific journals, which are very expensive to run and often charge outrageous subscription fees for a a very small number of subscriptions, and public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made and organizers paid. JSTOR organizes and makes the data available. They do _not_ lock it away to be lost and unused, they do _not_ add copyrights, and they're very generous in their licensing costs to get the organized journal data into the hands of whoever wants it or needs it.
JSTOR is doing what a responsible non-profit or, indeed, any dedicated librarian would do. They've vastly _improved_ access to it, not reduced it, and deserve support and credit for it. They don't deserve some kid using the free printer, copying out all the books, and putting them up in their own "free library".
And the "UK TV License" is enforced at a national level. I do apologize that my use of the word "federal" was confusing, that's an american distinction from state or county or city taxes. Perhaps I should have been more careful in my adjective? None of that means it is not a tax enforced throughout the entire UK, see http://www.publications.parlia...
Registers are well defined high speed memory locations. Examples include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M....
Managing these is left, by most modern computer languages, to the compiler and the kernel.
> If we're being precise, JSTOR is mostly a database of humanities journals.
From JSTOR's own front page information, you're quite correct. But look closely:
Area Studies (602 titles)
Arts (1600 titles)
Business and Economics (2048 titles)
History (7834 titles)
Humanities (8043 titles)
Law (817 titles)
Medicine and Allied Health (688 titles)
Science and Mathematics (3025 titles)
Social Sciences (11255 titles)
While you're quite correct that it's mostly humanities journals, the medicine journals are a critical research tool, as are the math and science journals. So called "harder" sciences tend to publish less than the humanities, but what they do publish is quite critical to further research. JSTOR is an especially useful resource for cross-correlating research that touches multiple fields and which your local university or research library may not be able to afford the journals for.
> Swartz didn't use anything but bandwidth that would have gone wasted otherwise.
No, he didn't use only "bandwidth that would have gone wasted otherwise", He overwhelmed the _JSTOR_ servers at least once, enough to crash some critical JSTOR services. That cut off access not just for MIT but for researchers worldwide. And the amount of bandwidth he was using slowed JSTOR significantly for MIT's students and researchers repeatedly in the months before he was arrested.
So no, he was blocking the service for other people.
> It could also be because they sit on their butts all day and eat lots of junk food.
Most long-haul and delivery truckers also help load and unload the trucks, and that requires intense activity scattered at add times throughout a day. The older truckers have also learned to protect their bodies and their diets: they use the safety equipment, the gloves and kidney belts, and they eat well. Or they'd have never lasted long enough in the business to be older truckers.
The VW bug was not designed by "they" It was designed by the Porsche company to meet political demands by Adolf Hitler, for a very simple German made car, costing less than 100 marks and with better than 40 mpg fuel consumption, capable of fitting a small family. It also incorporated previous design work by Ferdinand Porsche, which is why parts for Porsches and for VW Beetles were cross-compatible for so long.
The design is fascinating for its _simplicity_. It's the simplicity found in designs by a master craftsman. The presence of the engine in the rear, for example, meant a much smaller and more compact transmission without the lengthy drive shaft of contemporary front engine, rear drive wheel designs. That meant less high quality, high strength, high durability steel was needed in the manufacture, which helped keep prices down. The shape of the car worked both aerodynamically, to help gas mileage, but mechanically, with shapes that were forgiving of minor manufacturing perfections, and with placementn of connectors that made the vehicle easy to repair, easy to adjust for slightly miscut or miscast components, and easy to repair.
If you ever had the opportunity to work with one, you'd have noticed similar quality in the engine. It was _easy_ to remove if needed, and very intelligent design went into the layout so that tools could reach mounting screw or bolts and the various adjustment points for the carburetor. Its major flaw was a tendency to burn oil (which is not surprising for an engine made so inexpensively, high quality seals and tight tolerance mechanical parts cost _money_). They also had a tendency for the bottom of the car to become dangerously corroded by road salt. The broad use of road salt was nowhere near as common when these cars were designed, and would have been quite expensive to protect against. The old Beetles were so light that it was often possible to simply _lift_ or push them out of trouble when they got stuck in snow or mud: they actually floated for a while if they ever landed in water. Lifting them out of trable happened repeatedly when I was much younger and snow plows buried my old car.
Yes. The SSD systems are not reliable enough to act as registers yet, and would impose a noticeable pre-processing penalty for those highly optimized, low-level operations that use memory registers.
I'm afraid that heating damage counts.
> I have seen the POTS network come to its knees too
Typically on Mother's Day. According to colleagues who worked in the older phone systems, that was the busiest day of the year and was used as a very reliable test of the full capacity of the complete live system, every year. It was invaluable for finding unexpected choke points or poor load distribution throughout the system.
That's what a solar powered cell phone charger is for. There are very nice ones, with solar panel and small battery pack built in, for about $30 on Amazon.
> But this is just silly. Art is subjective, even for the artist. And even if all artists always painted with perfect colours that don't change over time, artists don't paint sunsets on a regular basis, but rather irregularly, such as when they're extra pretty.
Do read the article. They measured red-green _ratios_. Since much of color vision is based on the contrast between objects, and since they measured changes in the same artist's work from year to year, this seems a very reasonable way of measuring contrasts in sunset coloring from year to year. I applaud the scientists for doing this very well, to normalize the comparisons they made for the aging of the paint, the cost or tint of locally available paint dyes, and other factors that would skew results.
Even if the artists chose to paint particularly striking sunsets, the existence of those striking sunsets is, in itself, often a sign of artificial or natural pollution altering the sunsets.
There are big problems with the switch. The old analog phone lines were powered by the -48 Volt signal DC voltage from the phone company switching stations, which had very reliable backup power and facilities to cut off phones that were accidentally left off hook and kept draining current from the batteries or secondary generators. All this has evaporated in the modern cable modem/FIOS/internaet/land line era. Each house needs its own local battery or other power supply to keep the phones active, and each buried switch needs its own power, and many cut-rate DSL or phone companies are skimping on the quality and size of these backup power systems. The result is much more fragile, and phone service is much less reliable than the old analog system. That old analog system was _amazing_ in its ability to survive natural disasters and still provide _some_ phone service, even if only to a few homes in a neighborhood.
"The UK TV license" is a federal tax. Don't let the name confuse you.
> It's as if Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and instead of a $10 fine, found herself charged under anti-terrorism legislation with a 15 year prison sentence for disobeying TSA regulations
You forgot the part about "was welcomed on a *different bus* that didn't go to her home but which she decided to use to protect her own neighborhood bus, was welcomed on the other bus with a free transfer from her other bus pass, proceeded to *siphon off all the gas*, made the bus crash, and when kicked off the bus got on with a fake id and siphoned off the gas *again*, forcing the bus driver to stop picking up riders at that bus stop at all".
Aaron was not prosecuted for riding a bus in the wrong seat. He was prosecuted for stealing the gas, apparently to run a free bus company, and making the buses crash. Get your metaphors right.
> because of how that power has been so abused by its bearers
Except that JSTOR abused _nothing_. They're a non-profit corporation. They did all the work to _organize_ the data and make it a 24x7 worldwide resource. Their rates are very reasonable, they had excellent sliding scales for poorer clients, and universities, laboratories, and libraries worldwide, and their clients were able to share those resources with the public. JSTOR is available in public libraries world wide, and they're a _model_ of how to run a non-profit business. They charge enough to keep the lights on and the backups running and people doing the programming to run the servers and indexes.
The universities _already do_ give hope for the future. Aaron's mis-aimed abuse of JSTOR was just that. Abuse.