Oh Chicken Little, you missed a remarkable note at the bottom of the Wikipedia article:
Another possible answer is that Algae is composed of 60% oil and is burnable as fuel, thus, this unwanted algae may be another useful alternative fuel to be harvested.
Ridicule is pointing and laughing, in public, without fear of reproof.
Making fun is when the new thing becomes (e.g.) the punchline of jokes and sitcoms. It's a quieter, impersonal mockery that happens when it is no longer socially acceptable to point and laugh at specific individuals.
This article is a little high on the hype. The general rule is that if you have physical access to any computer system you can compromize its security.
Don't you think that a flaw that would allow people to vote multiple times or a flaw in the security by which the voting machine uploads results to the central server or flaws in the central server itself are worse than this.
Gee, we have physical access to the guts of a machine and we can do things to it. I'm not terribly impressed.
This is where the analogy breaks down. A computer system protects against outsiders, while insiders are given free reign. A voting system, by contrast, must not allow *anyone* to be an insider.
To put it another way: the voting process is supposed to contain checks and balances so as to *tolerate* somebody having physical access to its machinery. We have such checks and balances in place for paper-ballot boxes. Do such checks and balances exist for the Diebold boxes?
It seems to me as if this facility has outlived it's usefulness anyways. It's not so much a "secret" facility that few people know about, rather it's security comes basically from the fact that it's in a mountain. If some country wanted to attack us, all it would take would be to rain a couple nukes down on that mountain and it's out of commission. I'd like to see the work that this facility handles be moved to a top-secret location, it's simply too important to be common knowledge anymore.
Why do you assume that such has not already been done?
What if Cheyenne Mountain was *never* the real facility? Perhaps its job was just to attract incoming warheads to its own very remote location?
...I have reached the following conclusion about The Big Dig and about humankind:
Humans are not suited to cooperation on projects of this size.
The individual failure rates of human responsibility, conscientiousness, and honesty are high, as we know. A project like the Big Dig is large enough to cause those individual failures to fatally compound at a rate approaching 100%.
Our own upright posture, opposable thumbs, and big brains didn't all evolve at the same time, but we still build our lifestyle around their conjunction.
A lifestyle built around the conjunction of upright posture, opposable thumbs, and big brains? That would be the "sitting upright in front of the computer, surfing pr0n and fapping" lifestyle, yes?
It's important to keep "something you are" separate from the rest, because it is the set of all personal properties that cannot be changed.
In any event, "something you are" is a datum that is built into your body. It may not be obscured properly, but it compensates for that by being hard to duplicate (at least if the scanning device is designed well).
"Something you know" is a datum that is obscured by your brain.
"Something you have" is a datum that is obscured by a physical device, like an RSA token.
I'd comfortably bet that most security professionals have rejected this concept. "Something you are" is really just a slight variation of "something you have" and there isn't anything in particular that makes them any better to make it worth differentiating.
The distinction is important because "something you are" things cannot be changed, whereas "something you have" is an external object that could be replaced if compromised or lost.
The distinction is especially important now, as the world is erroneously trying to substitute an 'are' thing (fingerprints) in place of a 'have' thing (RSA token) for the sake of convenience.
I could beat some of the early biometric thumb print scanners with a penile, pocket knife, and a couple of seconds.
So you're saying that your penis is about the same size as a typical thumb?
Next time you post information like this, you should probably do it anonymously. And, be careful with that pocket knife, or you may end up limited to pinky-print scanners.:)
something you know (passphrase, mother's maiden name, etc.)
something you have (key, RSA token, access card, etc.)
As many have already pointed out, the best security uses a combination of two of the above. This is so because each one of the above has an inherent weakness.
Unfortunately, we will never know whether (and how often) the NSA's programs did indeed prevent attacks like 09/11.
It puts is civilians in the impossible position of having to judge the need for, and effectiveness of, secret programs aimed at secretive enemies.
And the hell of it is, the president himself has to lie to us. Imagine that you are the prez, and you receive some touchy classified information that says somebody is getting ready to body-slam us. You've got to convince America that we've got to act pre-emptively... but, you can't say how you know, or what all the real reasons are. What the hell would you do?
You'd have to construct a completely false but good-sounding premise for an action which is, in fact, completely honorable and justified.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but I'm forced to allow them the possibility that they've been put in that exact situation.
It's already been pointed out that simplified spelling would cause problems with homophones (words that sound the same).
Homophone problems can only be solved by adopting different spellings, so as to cause different pronunciations.
Under 'simplified spelling', different spellings means longer spellings, because bandwidth is limited to the character set. Just look at Hawaiin, where all the words are long because they only have like 11 characters to work with.
Longer words means less overall efficiency. The loss may be comparable to the gain from simplified spelling.
That 'kapow' is the sound of capacitors blowing up. You can open the box and find bits of capacitor corpse strewn about. If you collect the bits, you can redeem them for Geek Points.
Slashdot Mirror
A real disaster in the making..
Oh Chicken Little, you missed a remarkable note at the bottom of the Wikipedia article:
Wax? Pledge? Toothpaste? Buffing?
Y'all are a bunch of workaholics.
Just lightly wave a propane or butane torch over the scratches.
It works for all polycarbonates, including CDs, DVDs, helmet visors, motorcycle windshields, airplane windshields, cellphone screens.
The trick is to wave the flame over it so very very lightly and quickly, that the rough edges of the scratch briefly melt and flow.
Making fun is when the new thing becomes (e.g.) the punchline of jokes and sitcoms. It's a quieter, impersonal mockery that happens when it is no longer socially acceptable to point and laugh at specific individuals.
You can see this process most clearly, in the evolution of society's treatment of homosexuals over the past 50 years.
Funny how academia is now going through this process with Wikipedia.
This is where the analogy breaks down. A computer system protects against outsiders, while insiders are given free reign. A voting system, by contrast, must not allow *anyone* to be an insider.
To put it another way: the voting process is supposed to contain checks and balances so as to *tolerate* somebody having physical access to its machinery. We have such checks and balances in place for paper-ballot boxes. Do such checks and balances exist for the Diebold boxes?
Why do you assume that such has not already been done?
What if Cheyenne Mountain was *never* the real facility? Perhaps its job was just to attract incoming warheads to its own very remote location?
Humans are not suited to cooperation on projects of this size.
The individual failure rates of human responsibility, conscientiousness, and honesty are high, as we know. A project like the Big Dig is large enough to cause those individual failures to fatally compound at a rate approaching 100%.
Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!
A lifestyle built around the conjunction of upright posture, opposable thumbs, and big brains? That would be the "sitting upright in front of the computer, surfing pr0n and fapping" lifestyle, yes?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It's important to keep "something you are" separate from the rest, because it is the set of all personal properties that cannot be changed.
In any event, "something you are" is a datum that is built into your body. It may not be obscured properly, but it compensates for that by being hard to duplicate (at least if the scanning device is designed well).
"Something you know" is a datum that is obscured by your brain.
"Something you have" is a datum that is obscured by a physical device, like an RSA token.
The distinction is important because "something you are" things cannot be changed, whereas "something you have" is an external object that could be replaced if compromised or lost.
The distinction is especially important now, as the world is erroneously trying to substitute an 'are' thing (fingerprints) in place of a 'have' thing (RSA token) for the sake of convenience.
I could beat some of the early biometric thumb print scanners with a penile, pocket knife, and a couple of seconds.
:)
So you're saying that your penis is about the same size as a typical thumb?
Next time you post information like this, you should probably do it anonymously. And, be careful with that pocket knife, or you may end up limited to pinky-print scanners.
As many have already pointed out, the best security uses a combination of two of the above. This is so because each one of the above has an inherent weakness.
Unfortunately, we will never know whether (and how often) the NSA's programs did indeed prevent attacks like 09/11.
It puts is civilians in the impossible position of having to judge the need for, and effectiveness of, secret programs aimed at secretive enemies.
And the hell of it is, the president himself has to lie to us. Imagine that you are the prez, and you receive some touchy classified information that says somebody is getting ready to body-slam us. You've got to convince America that we've got to act pre-emptively... but, you can't say how you know, or what all the real reasons are. What the hell would you do?
You'd have to construct a completely false but good-sounding premise for an action which is, in fact, completely honorable and justified.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but I'm forced to allow them the possibility that they've been put in that exact situation.
It's already been pointed out that simplified spelling would cause problems with homophones (words that sound the same). Homophone problems can only be solved by adopting different spellings, so as to cause different pronunciations. Under 'simplified spelling', different spellings means longer spellings, because bandwidth is limited to the character set. Just look at Hawaiin, where all the words are long because they only have like 11 characters to work with. Longer words means less overall efficiency. The loss may be comparable to the gain from simplified spelling.
That 'kapow' is the sound of capacitors blowing up. You can open the box and find bits of capacitor corpse strewn about. If you collect the bits, you can redeem them for Geek Points.