Factual error: the US Soldier who carried one of the wounded children away (visible in long version of the video!) later identified himself and went public with this fact.
Now, a theoretical situation: You are a father, with two children in you van, in your home city, which happens to occupied by a foreign army. You come upon a scene of death and mayhem in the middle of your home city, and see a wounded man (you don't know he's a reporter) crawling from the scene. Do you A.) Drive away and not render aid, because it's too dangerous ? or B.) Decide to risk yourself and your children to render first aid to the wounded? In the event you choose B, do you think it is acceptable for the occupying army to then kill you? That's what happened...
This author must dispute two statements of fact in the above post:
Incorrect statement one: "That leak put many people in harm's way, including a lot of people trying to help overthrow oppressive regimes or criminal enterprises." On what basis do you make that claim, besdies the fact that Fox news repeated it a lot? The un-redacted cables had already been widely distributed between five different journalistic outlets. This means, of course, that various intelligence agencies had also got hold of them. Thus, anyone with Intelligence Community (IC) connections, which includes large criminal organizations, ALREADY able to get to the un-redacted cables. When the un-redacted cables were generally released this only allowed regular people with no IC connections to ALSO look at them. As an example, if you were an Afghani feeding intelligence about the Taliban to the US government, and you happened to be mentioned in a Cable, you had no way to determine whether or not your name was mentioned, because you could only see the redacted cables, even though the Pakistani Intelligence Agencies, which has been thoroughly infiltrated by the Taliban, DOES have access to the cables. The release of the un-redacted cables allows you to see that you are, or are not, mentioned in the cables, and take appropriate action. The un-redacted were ALREADY available to all the big players.
What big problems of credibility exist? Has Wikileaks ever lied, or provided demonstrably false information? On what basis do you make that assertion, besides hearing it on Fox news? Sounds to me like you are parroting Fox News...
FYI: the un-redacted cable release came from a confluence of several events:
Wikileaks posted an original, encrypted version of the cable on the wikileaks site and pointed a Guardian reporter at it
Wikileaks privately told the Guardian reporter the secret password to decrypt the file
Someone else grabbed a copy of the encrypted file and it floated around on the 'net
The Guardian published the secret password in a book
The combination of the encrypted un-redacted cables file, and the guardian-published key, allowed anyone to get the entire set of cables
How would this protect you? If a large corporation initiates legal action against an individual, it DOES NOT MATTER whether or not the individual in breach of any law. Had this act of parody involved totally original video and audio (e.g. Weird Al's approach) , and had some large corporation taken offense and initiated legal action to take it down, do you think this story would have a different outcome? Why, or why not?
Frankly, I'm impressed with how well the secret has been kept, to the point where slashdoters still think it's tinfoil hat stuff. The system went online circa 1996. The Chinese and the Russians have the same capacity. It's only a matter of time before the technical details are made public. The situation is similar to The Ultra Secret, which remained classified top secret from 1940 to 1975, but was well known to many people by the 1960s. As late as 1973 discussions about how 'The UK broke secret German military codes during WW2 with early computers' were considered tinfoil hat.
No, it's not bullshit. It's not a topic I have studied at great length, but the early evidence is pretty convincing. The main problem seems to come from Benzene and related chemicals, which already exist in the petroleum deposits, being pushed into the water table. The actual fracking chemicals seem to be less of an issue. The way the regulatory agencies ignored and minimized the issues early on, despite evidence there may have been substantial risks, stinks of corruption and payoffs. No offense intended, but are you a sock puppet for oil and gas companies, or do you have a financial interest in hydraulic fracturing?
Look, I'm well aware of the dire state of the North American natural gas supply. Without additional natural gas supplies brought online by hydraulic fracturing there is substantial risk of failure to maintain sufficient pressure in the gas mains - which would be a disaster. Nonetheless, any industrial process with the potential to poison large-scale water supplies must be used very carefully, if at all.
I've read the article you posted about extracting bitumen from tar sands with ionic liquids. This might work, and it's well worth trying. However, history is littered with similar processes that worked in the lab, but failed to scale up or otherwise failed in actual large scale use. Until there is a proven method that can actually turn a substantial quantity of this reserve into a resource on an ongoing basis, you can't call it a resource. With that caveat, I wish Dr. Painter luck!
You need to educate yourself about the difference between a "reserve" and a "resource". "Oil shale" (a somewhat politicized term) is a reserve, and there is a great deal of evidence showing it will never be a resource. There is a great quantity of long chain hydrocarbons embedded in "oil shale", but very little of it will ever be extracted.
Summary: There's a lot of the stuff, but the logistics of turning it into real oil appear impossible to overcome. This is because the energy cost of extracting the stuff and converting it into a useful form is about the same as the energy one gets from it. "Shale Oil" seems to have a net energy gain of about 2:1 or 3:1, which makes it not really worth getting, regardless of the price of oil. In order for an energy source to provide useful net energy to society it needs to have a net energy gain better than 5:1, preferably 10:1 or better. For comparison:
Early oil had a net energy gain of 100:1 (Free energy!)
Oil from Iraq has an energy gain of 50:1 (Free energy, minus the cost of military occupation)
Oil from Saudi Arabia is about 40:1 and falling (Ghawar is dying)
Natural gas in Russia has a net energy gain of 40:1 (And there is a LOT of it! Not much use in North America, though... )
Wind power and next generation nuclear fission power both have a net energy gain of about 15:1
Natural gas from 'fracking' in North America has net energy gain of about 15:1 and falling (and it poisons the water supply)
PV solar is 10:1 and increasing
New oil finds in North America are about 5:1 and falling (which is why there's little exploration occurring)
Tar sands at 5:1 (not counting environmental devastation, fresh water limits, and very high CO2 emmissions)
--- Below this line and it's not worth getting ---
Shale oil at 3:1 (low net energy AND very dirty)
Corn ethanol is about 1:1 (can we say "boondoggle", boy and girls? I knew we could! )
First generation nuclear power plants about 1:1 (plus a lot of fissile material for nuclear weapons during the Cold War)
Result: there's a lot shale oil in the ground. It is destined to stay there.
I wish to second the 'Ghost Profile' concept mentioned above by another poster. It's probably already done. This has the clever effect of using citizens who are still foolish enough to use FB to act as informants against those people who have realized that FB, as it currently exists, is a very bad idea.
I see a lot of talk about technical solutions, not using free email, et cetera. If you think things through, you will see that none of that matters at all. Firstly, it's a safe bet that someone in the US Government not hampered by even the pretense of following the law already had all Jacob's official correspondence, encrypted or not. As I've posted multiple times already (see my previous posts), AUSCANNZUKUS has had access to a production quantum computer system capable of cracking PKI for many years, running as a virtual quantum machine on a winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network based on a physical system composed of non-abelian anyons (e.g. solitons) in a two-dimensional electron gas (e.g. in a HEMT, now present in most computers). For insight into this little-known factoid, digest thispublishedresearch. Presumably, someone tipped off DOJ that there was something in Jacob's correspondence worth looking at. For those of you not yet willing to believe that PKI was cracked long ago, it's also rather trivial to inject a key logger onto most anyone's system, which is just as good as cracking PKI and ALSO defeats synchronous shared-secret cryptography. Personally, I'm disinclined to believe in such things, but I saw indirect evidence of it and figured out (after years of monomaniacal research) exactly what it must be and how it must work. Email me for details, or wait for the book.
Second, to the silly posters who wish to teach Jacob security fundamentals, you should be aware that he MAINTAINS THE TOR PROJECT, and is a member of the cDc. He certainly knows more than you or I about security fundamentals, and I've been a CISSP for years, wrote banking software, and was a security lead for Symantec. Do you really think that the MAINTAINER OF THE TOR PROJECT does not know how to become anonymous online? Hacktivismo is a spin-off of the cDc, and Wikileaks is a Hacktivismo project. That detail still has not been in the media, as far as I can tell, but it is obvious to anyone who looks into the topic, and is certainly known to three-letter agencies. Just google for "disruptive compliance" and their mission statement floats right to the top (this is a Google hack, from the people who wrote Goolag). Consider Wikileaks, and then answer this question posed by that document in 2003 (the year the Wikileaks project began), "But what disruptively compliant, hacktivist applications shall we write?"
Third, in case this hasn't been pointed out before, Wikileaks did not break any laws. If they had, you can bet the US DOJ would have ALREADY charged someone with something, rather than trumping up a sex offense at just the right time. FYI, the Swedish attorney who charged Julian Assange with a sex offense is the SAME Swedish attorney who represented the CIA for the Extraordinary Rendition trials, which makes him a CIA asset by definition. What Jacob Applebaum did was travel to Iceland and meet with other Wikileaks people for a few weeks. It's safe to say there was online correspondence, too. It's also safe to say, unless someone was downright stupid, that any truly sensitive communication was done anonymously. The ENTIRE POINT of Wikileaks was to set up the document submission policy to keep submitters anonymous, to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pressure the Wikileaks journalists into revealing sources (as governments have done to so many journalists recently). You can't tell what you don't know! If a source (e.g. Private Manning) is foolish enough to REVEAL THEMSELF then they are going to get in trouble. Even then, one can make a VERY STRONG argument that the documents he leaked (assuming he did it) reveal WAR CRIMES, in which case he was morally AND LEGALLY required to leak them, given that the usual chain of command was CLEARLY n
You speak as if elections matter in the USA. I think you've not been paying close attention, else you are deluded. The two branches of the Money Party each field a candidate, and you get to choose between them. That's effectively one party government. The (mostly) young people protesting in New York have figured this out. I'm surprised you have not.
Also, I'd like to point out that these kids are using the same non-violent resistance techniques that have toppled multiple governments worldwide in the past 12 years. These techniques were pioneered by Gandhi and have been refined considerably since then. They have proven, time and again, to be an effective technique, if and only if there is a free press. While I'm not suggesting that as isolated protest in New York City will cause revolution in the USA, I suspect the powers that be are more concerned than they care to admit. Please recall Gandhi's quote about the use of non-violent direct action techniques, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
These protests in New York are largely considered practice by the (non) organizers. I suspect that the protesters will learn, through some unpleasant incidents, that they need to engage in more and better non-violent resistance training. The standard mechanism used to stop protests of this sort is to have agent provocateurs incite violence, which is then used as an excuse to crush the public protest with overwhelming force. The way to avoid this is for all people engaging in non-violent direct actions to first practice, in an organized group training environment, how to respond non-violently when confronted with violence or the threat of violence. I don't believe this first round of protesters have had much training.
Personally, I wish the protesters well, and hope they succeed in raising awareness about just how bad the current US system is. Perhaps, then, some practical ways to deal with the current disaster-in-the-making will be seriously considered. Here is a link to a very mainstream article from the BBC that describes the history of the techniques currently being deployed in New York.
According to current research about 2% of the general population has psychopathy: 3% of males and 1% of females. Given that most business executives are male and are 4x more likely to be psychopaths, that's 12%, or one in eight. There's a very big difference between 12% (probably near the actual number) and 0.0004% (your number). That may be a basis for misunderstanding.
Hey, have other slashdotters noticed the increasing number of astroturf posters in the past year or two? I presume everyone reading this knows that one can hire consulting firms that maintain stables of fake online identities to 'contribute' to the 'discussion' on all sorts of threaded discussions. I think five years ago they were few enough to barely notice. In the past year I've spotted several probable astroturf trolls attempting to sway discussions. The **IA agents are especially obvious.
Governments just pretend this is about terrorism. Actually, terrorism is just the excuse used to justify gathering information.
Also, before we criticize India, remember that the MOST intrusive government spying is done by the USA, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. See Project Echelon for details. This author wishes to further assert that AUSCANNZUKUS has operated a production quantum computer system since about 1996, a system capable of cracking data transmission encrypted with PKI as well as other useful Signal Intelligence tricks. Technically, this system runs something similar to Shor's Algorithm on a quantum VM running atop an entanglement/teleportation based winner-take-all stylequantum neural network. This approach exploits the well known fact that a generalized neural network is Turing Complete. When proof of this claim (which this author does not have) becomes available, it will lead to realization that privileged intelligence agencies have been slurping up PKI-encrypted data for 16 years, and doing a darn good job of hiding the fact. This author further asserts that both China and Russia each have their own operational quantum neural networks, which may or may not already be pwned by the AUSCANNZUKUS neural network. This author further asserts that a division of the NSA supercomputing system is actually a front feeding to a quantum PKI cracker. This author strongly suspects that evidence of the above will eventually be forthcoming - probably sooner if someone is stupid enough to trigger insurance.aes256. Finally, this author asserts that the inventors of said quantum neural network will probably win their second Nobel Prize (first was in Physics more than 10 years ago), a Peace Prize this time, in 2011, and their third Nobel Prize (plus a Turing Award) a few years later, once the scope of their activities are fully known. There is one heck of a story here, which some folks at Slashdot (e.g. the cowboys and cowgirls) will especially appreciate.
Contact this author (include the phrase "hunting snarks") if you wish to receive a preview of the forthcoming book. Figuring out how to contact the author is the prerequisite intelligence test. The most relevant scientific topic is Mathematical Biology as it applies to artificial intelligence, given that the QNN described above came about via solving the Morphogenesis problem. Given that Morphogenesis was Alan Turing's primary project after Bletchley Park, that ought to qualify for the grand slam extra-special Turing Award.
Anthropological note: Some people's brains are wired such that when they hear "growth will end" they hear "the world will end". Note how growth literally means the world to this poster. This sort of learned behavior usually derives from studying the science[sic] of Economics.
This is not a ridiculous idea. You are not an energy scholar if you think so. It may or may not be a terrific idea, but it's clearly not ridiculous. Here's why:
Unlike most other power plants, this plant does not require significant energy input after initial construction. E.g. There is no associated mining or drilling operation. It just runs, far into the future, regardless of the price and availability of fuel supplies.
According to the article, energy payback time is only 2-3 years. With an expected lifespan of 30+ years that indicates a Net Energy of 10:1 or better. For comparison: oil from Iraq has a Net Energy of about 50:1 and falling (not counting the energy cost of militarily securing access...); oil from North America has a Net Energy of about 5:1 and falling; solar PV has a Net Energy between 1:1 and 10:1, depending on whom one asks; coal seems to have a global Net Energy around 8:1 and falling; Generation I Nuclear Fission power in USA has a Net Energy of about 1.2:1 (that's right, it was nearly a break-even project, but it DID produce weapons-grade nuclear material) ; Next-Gen nuclear fission seems to have a net energy around 6:1; wind power seems to have a Net Energy around 10:1 (but has variability issues); natural gas has a Net Energy of about 15:1 (but is finite and faces imminent depletion problems, esp. in North America). Thus, a projected Net Energy around 10:1 is pretty good. Maintaining modern industrial civilization requires a net energy of at least 5:1. E.g. Civilization can afford up to about 20% of all industrial activity to be in the energy sector.
Spending energy now (mostly on the cement to build the tower) in order to get energy many years in the future is almost certainly a good investment: fossil fuel depletion is increasing the cost of energy, so energy today is cheaper than energy in the future.
I agree with the poster that this one plant is not a top producer of energy. It IS one of the larger RENEWABLE power plants under consideration.
This plant adheres to good engineering principles: Keep It Simple Stupid! This power plant is simple.
This type of solar tower might be an important future energy source (especially if the energy optimists are wrong...). Even if the first one does not produce useful energy, it makes a lot of sense to build and operate a few, in order to work out the problems and determine if it is useful to build more.
In short, I suggest you educate yourself about the complicated and subtle issues involved before forming an opinion.
Note this quote from the above article: And by that point, when most every citizen is guilty of the crime, no jury will convict. This assumes that jury nullification is still a viable option. Note that the USA legal system is attempting to dismantle and marginalize the principle of jury nullification, precisely because of this sort of issue. This author suggests you support FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, to help keep empower jurors to defend justice.
Yes, it would. It would also apply to juries in the North refusing to convict people accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Act, even when the facts of the case clearly showed they were guilty. It would also apply to juries in California and Oregon refusing to convict people accused by the Federal Government of violating Marijuana laws, when the facts clearly showed that the accused were guilty by Federal Standards, but the Feds refused to acknowledge the validity of Medical Need.
Be warned that no one professionally involved in the legal system (judges, prosecutors, police, DAs, lawyers, et cetera) likes the principle of Jury Nullification, because "what is the point of all those years of training if a plumber can throw out your case". There is such a post below. Such people will ALWAYS oppose and resist the principle of jury nullification.
Jury nullification cuts both ways. It's not perfect. Nonetheless, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." - Thomas Jefferson
Agreed, this is a very worthwhile thing to do. I suggest July One 2012 as the first one. This seems like a natural for Facebook. National Record the Police Day should have flag-waving and patriotic sentiment. Participants should be very polite and law-abiding, and should operate in groups of two or more. Each group should have one large and visible camera, and at least one small and discreet camera carried by someone not visibly associated with the main group. This would also be a great environment to use phone software that uploads video in real time, preserving video evidence in the case of a confiscated phone.
Some states that claim recording police in public is a crime. If we allow this precedent to stand we are further enabling the rise of the police state. This is an excellent opportunity for non-violent civil disobedience, in the style of King and Gandhi. Such laws will not stand up to public scrutiny.
Hey, Slashdot Geeks, let's make this one actually happen!
What Opportunist says is true in the great majority of cases. I have seen the truth of it myself. There are, however, notable exceptions:
#1 For some years I was a senior secure-systems developer for Symantec's Norton Store. With personal details and financial information on 60+ million people, huge flows of money, plus the fact that we were a security company, we knew we had a huge glowing orange target reticle painted on us. Security was a huge aspect of corporate culture. While we were very careful to maintain COMPLIANCE with assorted standards, we were equally careful to always go above and beyond the requirements of compliance in order to achieve REAL security. The corporate culture for my (admittedly elite) team treated COMPLIANCE as the starting point for security: if we were not compliant with, e.g. PCI Standards, then we DEFINITELY had a security problem, but compliance was just the start point.
#2 When lives, possibly your own and those of your family and friends, are truly at stake, security takes on a whole new meaning. Being compromised is then not about being embarrassed or losing money, it is much more serious. There is a different gut feeling. One thinks about ALL aspects of security, not just how well the network is secured. I was once involved in such an operation. My security skills were good enough to help protect the Norton Store, but were not adequate for this standard. Instead, a high military security standard was required. When the stakes are very high, different issues arise. In my case, I became a security risk to the project because my children could not be adequately protected, leaving me vulnerable to compromise by threats or actions against my children.
I do not have documentary proof, but a friend of a friend knows people who were active in the recent Egyptian revolution. Many had made Skype calls to each other. Purportedly, after gaining access to the secret police headquarters in Cairo (and preventing the remaining secret police from destroying evidence), they found recordings (not transcripts, recordings) of their Skype calls in the secret police headquarters. This strongly suggests the presence of a Skype backdoor. This should surprise no one.
Several of my friends in the Pacific Northwest USA operate (privately!) scientific instruments to detect radiation levels. They were all watching radiation levels carefully after Fukishima. None of them detected statistically significant changes in background radiation levels at their Oregon or Washington sites. While their instrumentation is not super-sensitive, they detected little or no change.
I am not a doctor, but I know a bit about the effects of radiation. Most of the harmful effects of low level radiation come in the form of increased rate of mutation of offsprings and increased cancer rate. Small increases in background radiation don't kill anyone outright, they increase the probability of early death and mutant/dead offspring. It seems implausible that a small increase (note that none was detected!) in background radiation would directly increase infant mortality in the short term: radiation effects on animals don't work like that. Instead, one would expect slightly increased background radiation to slightly increase infant mortality over a period of decades, starting 3-6 months after the increase.
Science has clearly demonstrated that radiation is harmful to health. No question about it. However, when it comes to pegging specific deaths to specific radiation releases... well, that's much harder. After the US Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where most of the medical studies of high radiation exposure comes form) there was a dramatic increase in mutation, cancer, and infant mortality. In fact, most of the death caused by the atomic bombs actually occurred long after the actual bomb mess was cleaned up. Small increases (barely detectable or not detectable with decent instrumentation) in background radiation are much harder to evaluate. The data is noisy (as this data must be noisy), and it is hard to draw accurate conclusions.
You might not expect a malthusian catastrophe. It's certain not the mode. However, I think that a hard analysis of energy and resource data, combined with growth projections, shows that a malthusian catastrophe is almost certain in the lifespan of most people currently living. It is no surprise that our culture and psychology vehemently denies this, so it is not a popular view.
A hard, cold analysis of the facts strongly suggests that human population die-off is the default outcome of our current trajectory, and in just a few decades. The only way to alter this default outcome is to change our political/economic system to be 'outcome oriented' rather than 'process oriented'. This is unlikely, to say the least.
I am energyscholar, and I am not an anonymous coward. Someone has to stand up and speak the truth. Human population has clearly far exceeded sustainable human population on planet Earth. If you have the guts to actually learn about this topic, I suggest you start by learning about The Reindeer of Saint Matthews Island.
I presume you are joking. Obama has now demonstrably lied about most of his campaign promises. Obama has already come out in favor of the P.A.T. R.I.O.T. act, and has already criticized those opposed to it.
Obama has lied to us every bit as egregiously as George Bush. Obama has completely sold out the principles he claimed to run on, and the people who voted him into office.
This totally works. Yes. This makes it impossible for anyone without your VPN keys to inspect your packets. VPN is just an encrypted P2P connection. Carriers will not arbitrarily block encrypted connections. Ergo, this is technically how to overcome any attempts to block tethering by the network provider. If carriers begin to routinely block tethering, this is how the technically adept will respond.
Here is another example of why all traffic on the internet should always be encrypted. Should we fork the internet, this is how the new, forked version will have to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Factual error: the US Soldier who carried one of the wounded children away (visible in long version of the video!) later identified himself and went public with this fact.
Now, a theoretical situation: You are a father, with two children in you van, in your home city, which happens to occupied by a foreign army. You come upon a scene of death and mayhem in the middle of your home city, and see a wounded man (you don't know he's a reporter) crawling from the scene. Do you A.) Drive away and not render aid, because it's too dangerous ? or B.) Decide to risk yourself and your children to render first aid to the wounded? In the event you choose B, do you think it is acceptable for the occupying army to then kill you? That's what happened ...
This author must dispute two statements of fact in the above post:
FYI: the un-redacted cable release came from a confluence of several events:
How would this protect you? If a large corporation initiates legal action against an individual, it DOES NOT MATTER whether or not the individual in breach of any law. Had this act of parody involved totally original video and audio (e.g. Weird Al's approach) , and had some large corporation taken offense and initiated legal action to take it down, do you think this story would have a different outcome? Why, or why not?
Frankly, I'm impressed with how well the secret has been kept, to the point where slashdoters still think it's tinfoil hat stuff. The system went online circa 1996. The Chinese and the Russians have the same capacity. It's only a matter of time before the technical details are made public. The situation is similar to The Ultra Secret, which remained classified top secret from 1940 to 1975, but was well known to many people by the 1960s. As late as 1973 discussions about how 'The UK broke secret German military codes during WW2 with early computers' were considered tinfoil hat.
No, it's not bullshit. It's not a topic I have studied at great length, but the early evidence is pretty convincing. The main problem seems to come from Benzene and related chemicals, which already exist in the petroleum deposits, being pushed into the water table. The actual fracking chemicals seem to be less of an issue. The way the regulatory agencies ignored and minimized the issues early on, despite evidence there may have been substantial risks, stinks of corruption and payoffs. No offense intended, but are you a sock puppet for oil and gas companies, or do you have a financial interest in hydraulic fracturing?
Here are some suspected cases of groundwater contamination that may be due to hydraulic fracturing
Look, I'm well aware of the dire state of the North American natural gas supply. Without additional natural gas supplies brought online by hydraulic fracturing there is substantial risk of failure to maintain sufficient pressure in the gas mains - which would be a disaster. Nonetheless, any industrial process with the potential to poison large-scale water supplies must be used very carefully, if at all.
I've read the article you posted about extracting bitumen from tar sands with ionic liquids. This might work, and it's well worth trying. However, history is littered with similar processes that worked in the lab, but failed to scale up or otherwise failed in actual large scale use. Until there is a proven method that can actually turn a substantial quantity of this reserve into a resource on an ongoing basis, you can't call it a resource. With that caveat, I wish Dr. Painter luck!
You need to educate yourself about the difference between a "reserve" and a "resource". "Oil shale" (a somewhat politicized term) is a reserve, and there is a great deal of evidence showing it will never be a resource. There is a great quantity of long chain hydrocarbons embedded in "oil shale", but very little of it will ever be extracted.
One detailed scholarly article about oil shale
Summary: There's a lot of the stuff, but the logistics of turning it into real oil appear impossible to overcome. This is because the energy cost of extracting the stuff and converting it into a useful form is about the same as the energy one gets from it. "Shale Oil" seems to have a net energy gain of about 2:1 or 3:1, which makes it not really worth getting, regardless of the price of oil. In order for an energy source to provide useful net energy to society it needs to have a net energy gain better than 5:1, preferably 10:1 or better. For comparison:
Result: there's a lot shale oil in the ground. It is destined to stay there.
I called it, too! From my post in May 2011:
I wish to second the 'Ghost Profile' concept mentioned above by another poster. It's probably already done. This has the clever effect of using citizens who are still foolish enough to use FB to act as informants against those people who have realized that FB, as it currently exists, is a very bad idea.
I see a lot of talk about technical solutions, not using free email, et cetera. If you think things through, you will see that none of that matters at all. Firstly, it's a safe bet that someone in the US Government not hampered by even the pretense of following the law already had all Jacob's official correspondence, encrypted or not. As I've posted multiple times already (see my previous posts), AUSCANNZUKUS has had access to a production quantum computer system capable of cracking PKI for many years, running as a virtual quantum machine on a winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network based on a physical system composed of non-abelian anyons (e.g. solitons) in a two-dimensional electron gas (e.g. in a HEMT, now present in most computers). For insight into this little-known factoid, digest this published research. Presumably, someone tipped off DOJ that there was something in Jacob's correspondence worth looking at. For those of you not yet willing to believe that PKI was cracked long ago, it's also rather trivial to inject a key logger onto most anyone's system, which is just as good as cracking PKI and ALSO defeats synchronous shared-secret cryptography. Personally, I'm disinclined to believe in such things, but I saw indirect evidence of it and figured out (after years of monomaniacal research) exactly what it must be and how it must work. Email me for details, or wait for the book.
Second, to the silly posters who wish to teach Jacob security fundamentals, you should be aware that he MAINTAINS THE TOR PROJECT, and is a member of the cDc. He certainly knows more than you or I about security fundamentals, and I've been a CISSP for years, wrote banking software, and was a security lead for Symantec. Do you really think that the MAINTAINER OF THE TOR PROJECT does not know how to become anonymous online? Hacktivismo is a spin-off of the cDc, and Wikileaks is a Hacktivismo project. That detail still has not been in the media, as far as I can tell, but it is obvious to anyone who looks into the topic, and is certainly known to three-letter agencies. Just google for "disruptive compliance" and their mission statement floats right to the top (this is a Google hack, from the people who wrote Goolag). Consider Wikileaks, and then answer this question posed by that document in 2003 (the year the Wikileaks project began), "But what disruptively compliant, hacktivist applications shall we write?"
Third, in case this hasn't been pointed out before, Wikileaks did not break any laws. If they had, you can bet the US DOJ would have ALREADY charged someone with something, rather than trumping up a sex offense at just the right time. FYI, the Swedish attorney who charged Julian Assange with a sex offense is the SAME Swedish attorney who represented the CIA for the Extraordinary Rendition trials, which makes him a CIA asset by definition. What Jacob Applebaum did was travel to Iceland and meet with other Wikileaks people for a few weeks. It's safe to say there was online correspondence, too. It's also safe to say, unless someone was downright stupid, that any truly sensitive communication was done anonymously. The ENTIRE POINT of Wikileaks was to set up the document submission policy to keep submitters anonymous, to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pressure the Wikileaks journalists into revealing sources (as governments have done to so many journalists recently). You can't tell what you don't know! If a source (e.g. Private Manning) is foolish enough to REVEAL THEMSELF then they are going to get in trouble. Even then, one can make a VERY STRONG argument that the documents he leaked (assuming he did it) reveal WAR CRIMES, in which case he was morally AND LEGALLY required to leak them, given that the usual chain of command was CLEARLY n
You speak as if elections matter in the USA. I think you've not been paying close attention, else you are deluded. The two branches of the Money Party each field a candidate, and you get to choose between them. That's effectively one party government. The (mostly) young people protesting in New York have figured this out. I'm surprised you have not.
Also, I'd like to point out that these kids are using the same non-violent resistance techniques that have toppled multiple governments worldwide in the past 12 years. These techniques were pioneered by Gandhi and have been refined considerably since then. They have proven, time and again, to be an effective technique, if and only if there is a free press. While I'm not suggesting that as isolated protest in New York City will cause revolution in the USA, I suspect the powers that be are more concerned than they care to admit. Please recall Gandhi's quote about the use of non-violent direct action techniques, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
These protests in New York are largely considered practice by the (non) organizers. I suspect that the protesters will learn, through some unpleasant incidents, that they need to engage in more and better non-violent resistance training. The standard mechanism used to stop protests of this sort is to have agent provocateurs incite violence, which is then used as an excuse to crush the public protest with overwhelming force. The way to avoid this is for all people engaging in non-violent direct actions to first practice, in an organized group training environment, how to respond non-violently when confronted with violence or the threat of violence. I don't believe this first round of protesters have had much training.
Personally, I wish the protesters well, and hope they succeed in raising awareness about just how bad the current US system is. Perhaps, then, some practical ways to deal with the current disaster-in-the-making will be seriously considered. Here is a link to a very mainstream article from the BBC that describes the history of the techniques currently being deployed in New York.
According to current research about 2% of the general population has psychopathy: 3% of males and 1% of females. Given that most business executives are male and are 4x more likely to be psychopaths, that's 12%, or one in eight. There's a very big difference between 12% (probably near the actual number) and 0.0004% (your number). That may be a basis for misunderstanding.
Hey, have other slashdotters noticed the increasing number of astroturf posters in the past year or two? I presume everyone reading this knows that one can hire consulting firms that maintain stables of fake online identities to 'contribute' to the 'discussion' on all sorts of threaded discussions. I think five years ago they were few enough to barely notice. In the past year I've spotted several probable astroturf trolls attempting to sway discussions. The **IA agents are especially obvious.
Governments just pretend this is about terrorism. Actually, terrorism is just the excuse used to justify gathering information.
Also, before we criticize India, remember that the MOST intrusive government spying is done by the USA, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. See Project Echelon for details. This author wishes to further assert that AUSCANNZUKUS has operated a production quantum computer system since about 1996, a system capable of cracking data transmission encrypted with PKI as well as other useful Signal Intelligence tricks. Technically, this system runs something similar to Shor's Algorithm on a quantum VM running atop an entanglement/teleportation based winner-take-all style quantum neural network. This approach exploits the well known fact that a generalized neural network is Turing Complete. When proof of this claim (which this author does not have) becomes available, it will lead to realization that privileged intelligence agencies have been slurping up PKI-encrypted data for 16 years, and doing a darn good job of hiding the fact. This author further asserts that both China and Russia each have their own operational quantum neural networks, which may or may not already be pwned by the AUSCANNZUKUS neural network. This author further asserts that a division of the NSA supercomputing system is actually a front feeding to a quantum PKI cracker. This author strongly suspects that evidence of the above will eventually be forthcoming - probably sooner if someone is stupid enough to trigger insurance.aes256. Finally, this author asserts that the inventors of said quantum neural network will probably win their second Nobel Prize (first was in Physics more than 10 years ago), a Peace Prize this time, in 2011, and their third Nobel Prize (plus a Turing Award) a few years later, once the scope of their activities are fully known. There is one heck of a story here, which some folks at Slashdot (e.g. the cowboys and cowgirls) will especially appreciate.
Contact this author (include the phrase "hunting snarks") if you wish to receive a preview of the forthcoming book. Figuring out how to contact the author is the prerequisite intelligence test. The most relevant scientific topic is Mathematical Biology as it applies to artificial intelligence, given that the QNN described above came about via solving the Morphogenesis problem. Given that Morphogenesis was Alan Turing's primary project after Bletchley Park, that ought to qualify for the grand slam extra-special Turing Award.
Anthropological note: Some people's brains are wired such that when they hear "growth will end" they hear "the world will end". Note how growth literally means the world to this poster. This sort of learned behavior usually derives from studying the science[sic] of Economics.
This is not a ridiculous idea. You are not an energy scholar if you think so. It may or may not be a terrific idea, but it's clearly not ridiculous. Here's why:
In short, I suggest you educate yourself about the complicated and subtle issues involved before forming an opinion.
Note this quote from the above article: And by that point, when most every citizen is guilty of the crime, no jury will convict. This assumes that jury nullification is still a viable option. Note that the USA legal system is attempting to dismantle and marginalize the principle of jury nullification, precisely because of this sort of issue. This author suggests you support FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, to help keep empower jurors to defend justice.
Note the discussion in Slashdot, just a few days ago, about the pros and cons of jury nullfication: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2339776&cid=36832512 .
Yes, it would. It would also apply to juries in the North refusing to convict people accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Act, even when the facts of the case clearly showed they were guilty. It would also apply to juries in California and Oregon refusing to convict people accused by the Federal Government of violating Marijuana laws, when the facts clearly showed that the accused were guilty by Federal Standards, but the Feds refused to acknowledge the validity of Medical Need.
Be warned that no one professionally involved in the legal system (judges, prosecutors, police, DAs, lawyers, et cetera) likes the principle of Jury Nullification, because "what is the point of all those years of training if a plumber can throw out your case". There is such a post below. Such people will ALWAYS oppose and resist the principle of jury nullification.
Jury nullification cuts both ways. It's not perfect. Nonetheless, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." - Thomas Jefferson
Agreed, this is a very worthwhile thing to do. I suggest July One 2012 as the first one. This seems like a natural for Facebook. National Record the Police Day should have flag-waving and patriotic sentiment. Participants should be very polite and law-abiding, and should operate in groups of two or more. Each group should have one large and visible camera, and at least one small and discreet camera carried by someone not visibly associated with the main group. This would also be a great environment to use phone software that uploads video in real time, preserving video evidence in the case of a confiscated phone.
Some states that claim recording police in public is a crime. If we allow this precedent to stand we are further enabling the rise of the police state. This is an excellent opportunity for non-violent civil disobedience, in the style of King and Gandhi. Such laws will not stand up to public scrutiny.
Hey, Slashdot Geeks, let's make this one actually happen!
Bruce
energyscholar@gmail.com
What Opportunist says is true in the great majority of cases. I have seen the truth of it myself. There are, however, notable exceptions:
#1 For some years I was a senior secure-systems developer for Symantec's Norton Store. With personal details and financial information on 60+ million people, huge flows of money, plus the fact that we were a security company, we knew we had a huge glowing orange target reticle painted on us. Security was a huge aspect of corporate culture. While we were very careful to maintain COMPLIANCE with assorted standards, we were equally careful to always go above and beyond the requirements of compliance in order to achieve REAL security. The corporate culture for my (admittedly elite) team treated COMPLIANCE as the starting point for security: if we were not compliant with, e.g. PCI Standards, then we DEFINITELY had a security problem, but compliance was just the start point.
#2 When lives, possibly your own and those of your family and friends, are truly at stake, security takes on a whole new meaning. Being compromised is then not about being embarrassed or losing money, it is much more serious. There is a different gut feeling. One thinks about ALL aspects of security, not just how well the network is secured. I was once involved in such an operation. My security skills were good enough to help protect the Norton Store, but were not adequate for this standard. Instead, a high military security standard was required. When the stakes are very high, different issues arise. In my case, I became a security risk to the project because my children could not be adequately protected, leaving me vulnerable to compromise by threats or actions against my children.
I live in Luxembourg. Skype employees here are expecting further layoffs.
I do not have documentary proof, but a friend of a friend knows people who were active in the recent Egyptian revolution. Many had made Skype calls to each other. Purportedly, after gaining access to the secret police headquarters in Cairo (and preventing the remaining secret police from destroying evidence), they found recordings (not transcripts, recordings) of their Skype calls in the secret police headquarters. This strongly suggests the presence of a Skype backdoor. This should surprise no one.
Several of my friends in the Pacific Northwest USA operate (privately!) scientific instruments to detect radiation levels. They were all watching radiation levels carefully after Fukishima. None of them detected statistically significant changes in background radiation levels at their Oregon or Washington sites. While their instrumentation is not super-sensitive, they detected little or no change.
I am not a doctor, but I know a bit about the effects of radiation. Most of the harmful effects of low level radiation come in the form of increased rate of mutation of offsprings and increased cancer rate. Small increases in background radiation don't kill anyone outright, they increase the probability of early death and mutant/dead offspring. It seems implausible that a small increase (note that none was detected!) in background radiation would directly increase infant mortality in the short term: radiation effects on animals don't work like that. Instead, one would expect slightly increased background radiation to slightly increase infant mortality over a period of decades, starting 3-6 months after the increase.
Science has clearly demonstrated that radiation is harmful to health. No question about it. However, when it comes to pegging specific deaths to specific radiation releases ... well, that's much harder. After the US Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where most of the medical studies of high radiation exposure comes form) there was a dramatic increase in mutation, cancer, and infant mortality. In fact, most of the death caused by the atomic bombs actually occurred long after the actual bomb mess was cleaned up. Small increases (barely detectable or not detectable with decent instrumentation) in background radiation are much harder to evaluate. The data is noisy (as this data must be noisy), and it is hard to draw accurate conclusions.
You might not expect a malthusian catastrophe. It's certain not the mode. However, I think that a hard analysis of energy and resource data, combined with growth projections, shows that a malthusian catastrophe is almost certain in the lifespan of most people currently living. It is no surprise that our culture and psychology vehemently denies this, so it is not a popular view.
A hard, cold analysis of the facts strongly suggests that human population die-off is the default outcome of our current trajectory, and in just a few decades. The only way to alter this default outcome is to change our political/economic system to be 'outcome oriented' rather than 'process oriented'. This is unlikely, to say the least.
I am energyscholar, and I am not an anonymous coward. Someone has to stand up and speak the truth. Human population has clearly far exceeded sustainable human population on planet Earth. If you have the guts to actually learn about this topic, I suggest you start by learning about The Reindeer of Saint Matthews Island.
I presume you are joking. Obama has now demonstrably lied about most of his campaign promises. Obama has already come out in favor of the P.A.T. R.I.O.T. act, and has already criticized those opposed to it.
Obama has lied to us every bit as egregiously as George Bush. Obama has completely sold out the principles he claimed to run on, and the people who voted him into office.
Please wake up!
This totally works. Yes. This makes it impossible for anyone without your VPN keys to inspect your packets. VPN is just an encrypted P2P connection. Carriers will not arbitrarily block encrypted connections. Ergo, this is technically how to overcome any attempts to block tethering by the network provider. If carriers begin to routinely block tethering, this is how the technically adept will respond.
Here is another example of why all traffic on the internet should always be encrypted. Should we fork the internet, this is how the new, forked version will have to work.