Are we talking passenger trains, freight trains, or both? Will this (presumably) be an electrified train system, so no fumes in the tunnels, or something else? Any word on where the power is expected to come from if electrified (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro? I'm guessing you wouldn't run a train system on wind or solar, but perhaps I'm wrong)?
"As much as I love the leave it to the police system, if you don't recognize the robber and he wore gloves and a hood, stalling him for 10-15 minutes for the police to arive on the scene (if you are lucky and live near a station)."
This is what pepper spray, tazers, blunt objects, and chloroform were invented for. *grin*.
Again, if the thief has a weapon, then it's a whole different situation. I have no problem with someone defending themselves, their family, and their guests/friends. I'm just saying, for the unarmed/nonviolent thief, I don't think lethal force is appropriate or *should* be made legal.
Anyone know if anyone has ever created a bot that has the ability to learn from losses and wins, to figure out what works and what doesn't (both what it is doing and what the enemy is doing, then use that in the future to predict what the other player is *trying* to do and come up with a counter)?
I've not played a lot of RTS's, but I've played a few, and the thing I've noticed is, if a strategy works against a bot, even if there's a fairly obvious counter, it will always work against that bot.
The RTS I've played the most is Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, so I'll use an example from that: There are a collection of different bots available which will use different strategies. Now, the player can build a strategic missile launcher, which builds nukes. You can also build a strategic missile defense which will build 'seeker' missiles which will shoot down incoming nukes.
Some of the bots will build SMD's, some won't, but in no case does it build an SMD based upon the player/opponent's actions. That is, it doesn't check to see if you have started to build any Strategic Missile Launchers before it begins to build the defenses. The bots that don't build defenses won't build them even if you are building one. This means on the one hand that the bot wastes resources which it could have used otherwise, to build defenses, while on the other hand, if it doesn't build them, you can pretty easily and quickly defeat the bot with a nuke or two. Alternatively, instead of building a strategic missile defense, the bot *could* try to use someattack method (for example, if you don't have good air defenses, it could hypothetically try a targeted attack with a bunch of bombers or gunships to either destroy the SML, or the engineer units which are constructing the SML).
However, the bots never seem to be smart enough to attack the obvious threat of a strategic missile launcher. It seems like the only way the developers found to make the bots harder is to make them much more efficient at building up their economy and spamming out lots of land-units to try to attack the player.
When I get a chance, I want to try SC2, but right now, I'm in a period where I'm not playing games as much as I used to, and trying to reduce my gaming down to almost none while I get some more important things done in RL. It'll be interesting to see how the AI differs in that game.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but the OP sounded like he was talking about 'on-the-spot justice' where you alone act as police, judge, jury, and executioner. If you just think we should allow courts to use capital punishment for theft, that's a bit different discussion.
"The Smartwater people keep your particular code unique for as long as you pay them rental of it."
That statement has a logical inconsistency. Either it's unique or it's not. I'd be pretty peeved if I was their customer, and found out the prosecution of someone stealing from me got screwed up because 5 years ago, a different customer was using the same code, stopped paying for it, and they re-assigned the code to me. If the code is sufficiently long, there is no reason for them to ever ever re-use a code. We're talking DNA encoding, right? Since DNA gives you four possible symbols to encode with (A, T, C, and G), the number of possible permutations for a sequence of N symbols is 4^N (four raised to the Nth power), right? A 48-symbol long DNA code would have approx 7.9E+28 possible unique codes.
I suppose it's possible that you wouldn't actually be able to use all the codes because of, for example, maybe very similar codes might become too easily corrupted into the other very similar codes through chemical or radioactive processes that would be likely to occur as the product is in use. But, it still seems to me that they can make the code as long as they need to, in order to have a large enough number of usable permutations that they don't need to re-use individual codes.
How long do you think it will be before people 'mask' murder as 'defending their property'. I believe in a justice system where criminals are tried based upon evidence presented to a jury of 12 members of the community, not people killing other people when their life (or *someones* life) is not in immediate jeopardy. Also, how do you, all-knowing one, know whether a man is stealing for survival or stealing 'for pleasure'?
Google hasn't exactly done the best job of trying to coordinate things. Google can Open Source the platform, but do like Sun did with Java - anyone can implement Java, but you can't *call* it "Java", unless you passed a conformance test that Sun had. Google should have tried something similar to Android - make it so people can't market their phone as running "Android", unless they conformed to a certain definition of what Android is.
It's too late for that now, of course, but for future releases of the OS, they could do something similar - e.g "Android 3.0". I know these different phone manufacturer's think they MUST modify the OS so they can have "Product Diferentiation", but that's going to bite them all in the ass when some apps will only work on some Android phones and not others. If that starts to become too much of a problem, it might frustrate users and lead to the platform being abandoned by a lot of customers.
Yeah, well, NYTime is free to do whatever they want. Slashdot is also free to do whatevery *they* want. Slashdot doesn't want to have links which are basically inaccessible to most of their readers.
Fundamentally, I'm not interested in paying for 100 subscriptions to 100 different news sites, and I think neither is almost anyone else. Since Slashdot links to so many news sources, I can't possibly pay for individual subscriptions to all of them. So, Slashdot does the most reasonable thing in the situation - instead of frustrating their readers with links to paywalls, they just reject the story until an accessible source can be found.
*Most* news stories will be carried by other sources, you just have to wait a bit. The rather esoteric example you gave, it's true, is the type of story which perhaps no one else will run. The rest of us mostly have decided *we don't have to read such stories*. Our lives will go on if we miss out on why Newtond dabbled in Alchemy, even though as Nerds, we'd probably be interested.
Longer term, I think the answer to the basic problem here, is that the newspublishing industry needs to collaborate on creating a central clearinghouse sort of system - a sort of micro-transaction system which spans hundreds or thousands of news sources. I would go there and add credit to my account, then when I go to a site with premium content, I could be offered a choice "Do you want to purchase access to this article from XYZ.com for 5 cents, from your account, or purchase access to the entire site for a day for 25 cents? Current credit: $8.55).
That way I don't have to screw around with subscriptions to a site that I might only read one or two articles from in a given month (or only one article, ever).
There's just too many content sources to setup seperate accounts, payment details, and recurring monthly subscription fees, if I'm only interested in the occasional article from any given site.
"but there are good reasons to subsidize them: they're better, and will cost the public less in the long run once we're converted to using them predominantly."
I challenge your statement. Show that they're better and cost the public less in the long run than Nuclear? You can't just make such a statement with no argument, evidence, or proof.
First, how are they 'better'? True, they don't use radioactive fuel, but that is a manageable problem - we can reprocess and re-use the 'waste' in breeder-reactor plants, and the final 'waste' products will be material which only remains radioactive for about 300 years, which we can safely store, and which should not cost us too greatly to store for a few centuries (the huge costs associated with storing nuclear fuel, I believe, only is incurred if you are trying to store waste for 100,000 years, but we DO NOT NEED to store it that long if we burn it off first.
If for no other reason than dealing with our current nuclear waste 'problem', we really need to start building breeder-reactors (or some other technology [maybe thorium nuclear?] which can burn off the long-lived waste). Building enough reactors to burn off the waste would, conveniently, also provide us with nuclear power for 200-500 years, according to estimates I've seen.
We know from 50 years of operational experience that U.S. Nuclear plants have about a 90% capacity factor (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute ) - that is the industry as a whole, will on average, generate 90% of the theoretical maximum 'faceplate' energy during the sample period (individual nukes do get shutdown for maintenance and refueling periodically, which is why the capacity factor isn't 100% - during operation they will, I believe, typically run at or near 100 percent, and for long periods - 3 to 4 years at a time with no outages). We also know that most plants that actually get built do pay for themselves and make a profit in the long run (I think TMI is the only exception, but not positive about that), all while selling electricity at competitive prices with other sources (coal is about the only one which, if you don't consider the environmental costs, is cheaper than nuclear, I believe).
Nuclear Plants are expensive, but when you look at the total lifetime power produced, they *do* make financial sense. If we can get the price of building nuclear plants down, which should be possible, that becomes even more true.
In operation, everyone agrees they produce almost no carbon dioxide (I think you can account a small amount of CO2 to a nuke plant for things like vehicles and grounds maintenance equipment [tractors, mowers, wheedwackers, etc], and emergency diesel generators to power the control and safety systems at a plant when outside power is lost), but it's pretty small.
Of course, operation isn't the only carbon we have to account for when considering carbon footprint: I found this article at Nature.com, which discusses the topic a bit.
There is the CO2 that would be generated in manufacturing the materials for the plant, transporting materials to the plant for construction, doing the actual construction (cranes, diggers, etc), which might add up to quite a bit of carbon - I'd like to find a source for what that is - but I don't think the carbon for building nuclear is worse than the carbon needed to build an equivalent generation capacity of wind farms - it takes lots and lots of wind turbines, since they run at about 30-40% capacity factor, to be equivalent to a 1-2GW nuke), and of course there is carbon for decommissioning of the plant (again, need to find a source for that number). There may also be carbon emissions associated with the mining, processing, and transportation of nuclear fuel.
Now what I'm about to say applies equally to any power source who's actual operation does not produce
An important thing to keep in mind is that very very low levels of radiation exposure, a lot of studies show, is not hazardous, and probably even has health benefits (lookup Radiation Hormesis some time). Now, as far as I've heard (and if I'm wrong, please provide a link to a better source than what I've read/heard so far), Vermont Yankee, and the New York plant that have leaked 'radioactivity' into the water have leaked fairly small amounts of water that had some tritium in it.
I'm not saying we should constantly leak lots of Tritium and not worry about it, but my point is, I believe the leaks are being found and stopped before much has been released, and those small short term leaks are not necessarily worth worrying about?
I don't believe that anyone has found the quantities of tritium leaked to be considered a real health risk, have they?
Tritium occurs naturally in small amounts in water anyhow - you drink a tiny amount of tritium every day. As long as the concentration of the tritium leaked by the plants isn't too much higher than natural tritium levels, it wouldn't have much affect on the ground water, would it?
Hey, I'd be all for Geothermal, if it actually does make economic and environmental sense. I can only conclude that since we know about the possibility of Geotherm, but have not really made use of it (outside of a small number of places, like a few plants in California, and perhaps elsewhere), that there must be some sort of problem which has prevented investment in the tech, but I admit I'm not really sure what the problems are.
I still don't see how a government loan is a subsidy? How is the government losing money on a loan that you pay back at interest, even if the interest is a lower rate than what you would have payed if you got the money from a bank? Paying less interest doesn't seem like a subsidy to me - to me a subsidy is something that actually costs taxpayers money - like the subsidies on Wind and Solar projects, where the government is actually spending money which will never be repayed?
"So even the basic economics are that nuke plants are subsidized by the public with loans, among the many other public subsidies (eg. security, R&D, insurance)."
What is a subsidy, really? I don't see how a loan is exactly a subsidy - you pay it back, with interest. That's not a subsidy.
I suppose you can make the argument that, to the extent that some proposed nuclear plants get abandoned after part of the money has been spent, but before the reactor is actually built, that such defaults become a subsidy to the industry. However, the main reason that nuclear plant projects default is because the *government* makes it almost impossible to get a nuclear plant built on-time and within budget (at least, that is what I've read from every source I can find, so far - please feel free to post links to any credible source which shows otherwise).
It's kind of like if you kept trying to walk down the street, and I kept tripping you, maybe breaking your knees, then telling everyone you can't walk.
It's one of the reasons the industry has to go to the government in the first place for loans, instead of getting loans from private capital - the risks of the government screwing up the project and causing investors to lose all their money is too large. It's not generally considered the case that the power utility companies don't know how to manage the projects and get them done, or that the reactor manufacturers keep screwing up and making the plants go way over budget - it's mostly the government (and sometimes, some of the contractors who do something bad and cause problems, like needing to rebuild something because the contractor didn't do it right and the inspectors discovered the problem; that particular issue could be dealt with by requiring bonded contractors which can be held financially liable for their mistakes - you screw it up, you pay for the mistake).
If you can get a *reasonable* regulatory environment where investors could have confidence that different lobbyists, PACs, and environmental action groups couldn't interfere with the project (in the form of constantly changing regulations) after it's started, and if you can get enough of them built with government loans to start the ball rolling, private capital *will* follow. It's just a matter of showing we can get the job done, which we *can*.
I guarantee that the industry wouldn't need subsidies if you can just get enough plants built, and can start to get the per-plant cost to begin to decline instead of constantly rising.
The thing is, even if it costs $10 Billion to build a plant, if that plant can make $18-$20 Billion over it's lifespan (and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do it), it's a great investment. The problem is getting people to stake that much money up-front, when the prevailing regulatory environment leads to so many changes in the cost of a project after it has been planned and financed.
"Yes of course, unproven reactor designs will certainly be cheaper!"
Well, they won't *certainly* be more expensive (they *might* be more expensive, they might be the same, or they might be cheaper) - we won't know till we try them, will we? However, a LOT of engineering (3 or 4 decades of it) has gone into some of these new designs with the *specific primary design goal* being to create plants that are SAFER, while also being cheaper because they are designed to be simpler, with fewer welds, pipes, valves, and other 'support equipment' that increases the costs of anything.
It's a true-ism in engineering that generally, if you can accomplish the same results with fewer components, the design will be cheaper. You generally don't need a lot of 'testing' or 'proving' to show that a design with fewer expensive components costs less. The proving just needs to show that it is as safe as it is believed to be, and works as well as it was designed to work.
Also, a lot of the newer designs are for smaller reactors that can be factory manufactured to a standardized, proven (well, eventually - they aren't proven yet, so we need to start the process of proving them) design. It's also generally a true-ism that something mass produced in factories will be cheaper than things which are custom designed and built-to-order on site (which many of the older power plants basically were).
The whole argument against nuclear power, that it is "too expensive", is somewhat dumb, because we know that we can build them cheaper than they have been or currently are being built. Much of the expense isn't inherent to nuclear power, and isn't required for safety (that has been, I believe, a driver of much of the cost increases of nuclear power, but a lot of the things I've been reading about which add to the costs, don't realistically add to safety - they just add to the cost without providing any real additional safety).
I don't really know how much we could reduce the costs, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if we could eventually cut the cost of new plants in 1/2 compared to current prices - at 12 Billion per plant (or maybe that's per-reactor, not sure), it seems like there is a lot of room to reduce costs without reducing safety - I, of course, wouldn't advocate reducing costs at the expense of safety, but I can't believe we can't get those costs down other ways.
This is a topic I've been trying to research a bit more lately, but Wind and Solar are not, perhaps, as 'green' and safe as everyone seems to assume. Just because the energy itself is provided 'free and clean' by the Sun, doesn't mean that the technologies used to harvest the power are safe and green. There is a website I found, called "Learning About Energy", but a senior nuclear engineer named Ted Rockwell who has been part of the nuclear industry since almost the beginning - so, he's maybe not the most 'neutral' person, but it also doesn't mean he's wrong (I mention it mostly for full disclosure).
He wrote a paper (It's something like 20 pages long), called the Nuclear Facts Report, to try to address some of the claims made by opponents of nuclear/proponents of other 'renewables'. The paper mostly brings together and summarizes information from a variety of other studies and papers from all sorts of different sources.
In the sections discussing wind and solar, he talks about some of the safety and environmental issues associated with wind turbines and solar panels.
Some of the points he raises include the fact that there are an increasing number of accidents and injuries related to the installation and maintenance of Wind Turbines (they are, after all, hulking giant machines operating a fairly high mechanical energy levels). Now, that's not to say there's any huge amount of deaths associated with them - I think we all realize that at a certain level, life is dangerous, and nothing can be made totally safe - but there are 'reasonable' levels of risk. But, my point is, if we go to a big wind turbine buildout, while there may not be huge numbers of deaths, I can guarantee that more people will be killed in accidents involving Wind Power.
As far as environmental costs associated with wind, if you install it on land, if there's forest in that area, you have to clear-cut the forest under the wind-farm, as everyone knows, but, and this is a topic I'm trying to research more, I wonder what kinds of pollution might be created when we manufacture wind turbines? Of course, when you manufacture *anything* you will probably create some pollution (the same goes for Nuclear Plants, of course). Nobody ever talks about the environmental costs of manufacturing and installing all those turbines?
In the section on Wind Power, Ted calls out the fact that there is apparently some very toxic byproduct which is produced in fairly large quantities when manufacturing what is currently the most commonly used solar photovoltaic panels, and there are also toxic metals which are embedded into the panels themselves, which when the panels reach their end-of-life, could become a disposal problem.
Another approach to creating electricity from solar energy is the solar-thermal power plant concept. Ted also addresses safety issues related to them - there has apparently already been problems with fires at one or two of the experimental solar-thermal plants that have been built, and additionally, they haven't proven to be cost effective. (Which, might sound like an ironic claim in a discussion on an article about nuclear power being stalled because it's too expensive - but nuclear power, if you can fund it and get the plants built, does actually have a record of generating LOTS of electricity (about 16% of national demand in the U.S.) at competitive prices over the lifespan of the plant [about 60 years] - it's just that they are so expensive to build in the first place, it's hard to get all the funding together to build them, but the actual electricity they produce does not end up being expensive - much cheaper than solar or wind over the course of 60 years, at least with current technologies).
I don't know that solar and wind end up being any worse for the environment than Nuclear - that's something I'm still trying to get enough data to answer; but, there is certainly reason to be concerned about the real environmental cost of wind and solar technologies. It'
Well, that's a sort-of VPN. My point is that you use encryption to a server that you connect via IP address instead of DNS, to secure your DNS lookups. With SSH+SOCKS, you should be able to encrypt most of your traffic (web, ftp, remote X-sessions, etc), so that's basically, kinda a VPN.
The GP is correct - the only real way to 'secure' a public internet connection like a WiFi hotspot is with a VPN that also secures your DNS traffic so that all name lookups are served from a 'trusted' DNS Server. (This doesn't apply so much to SSH/SFTP, where you have, presumably, already cached the fingerprint of the server's Public Key, so if you get back the wrong key, you know someone's trying to attack you, and the client will warn you).
It all depends on how paranoid you are - generally, SSL Certs are *supposed* to protect you from someone impersonating an https request. However, I remember reading somewhere (might've been a story Slashdot covered), about someone successfully getting an SSL Cert signed by a registrar somewhere in the world, that they shouldn't have had, which allowed them to impersonate some site. I don't remember the exact details, but it had something to do with wildcard certs, IIRC.
In practice, I suspect most people setting up a 'phishing hole' WiFi hotspot, probably don't even worry about trying to attack the SSL connections, because that requires too much foreknowledge of what sites your targets would be visiting - just grab whatever plaintext you can - ought to be something interesting in it, sooner or later. Well, there's also the issue that someone could setup a phishing site and direct you to it with their poisoned DNS, and they just don't use any SSL at all, so the browser never gives a certificate complaint, and if the user isn't paying attention and verifying that encryption is in use, they'd maybe not realize they were connecting to the wrong server.
"If they significantly differ, then A shouldn't be trusted, but B(SA) (SA) is probably good."
Unless Compiler B was 'infected', and passed the exploit along to B(SA), which passed it along to B(SA)(SA), no? Just because they are different doesn't mean that compiler binary A was at fault - it could just as easily be B.
However, I do agree that if they are the same, then that would probably mean neither of the grandparent compiler binaries was compromised. I'm going to have to review, when I get some time, that dissertation which David A. Wheeler provided the link for in one of the other replies, to see if there is a refinement to this technique which would allow you to guarantee that you have 'sanitized' the resulting binaries.
Don't use Binary Blobs, I agree, absolutely, if you care at all about your Sovereignty. Get the source tree for an already very well secured OS like, say, OpenBSD, or perhaps Linux (though OBSD is, I believe, generally developed with practices that encourage better security - less focus on feature, more on audits and exploit finding/fixing). Have your 'trusted' developers from your nation go over every line of code, to make sure no trojans/backdoors/intentional exploits were added, then build it all yourself.
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
I suppose you need your own people to do a dis-assembly of the compiler to verify that. Or, build your own assembler in machine language, then build your own compiler with your assembler. Once you've done that, if you have a trusted compiler, and verified source code, you don't really lose security by using Open Source. If anything, it'll *probably* be more secure, if it's popular enough to have a lot of devs analyzing it and fixing problems.
I was in a store recently, and my eye caught a cheap DECT phone, and I was thinking of buying it, but decided I should research DECT first. Turns out it has weak encryption which has already been broken. So, you should just throw that phone away anyhow. *grin* Well, at least, don't use it for any sensitive communications.
Unforunately, GSM was recently 'broken' too, so there doesn't seem to be too much left in the way of secure wireless comms - maybe some sort of VoIP with TLS or AES crypto or something (seems like I remember hearing about a VoIP encapsulation scheme based on OpenPGP - I'll have to look into that.
Still, the consumer electronics industry needs to really update their encryption standards.
Yeah, if you have an Android phone, Goog-411 becomes kind of redundant, as the phone has built-in voice search from Google - one touch on the icon, then speak what I want, and up it pops in the built-in browser. Can even use the maps feature to locate what you want at a convenient location without having to actually know where such-and-such street is (that is, Goog - 411 would give you a list of results, with addresses, but what if you don't already know where all those addresses are? Sure nice to see them on a map).
However, not everyone has a smart phone, and it really is a shame that the service will no longer be available for them - I used to use Goog-411 pretty frequently before getting my G1. I'm afraid just not enough people knew about Goog-411. Or perhaps they were happy with the number of users, but just decided it cost too much and as a company, didn't provide any revenue. "Free" things don't usually seem to last forever - you need *some* kind of revenue to support any service, no matter how cheap it is to provide it to the customers. Since they didn't make you listen to an ad, there was no apparent revenue stream (well, sometimes I do remember hearing something like this service brought to you by broadband.com, or something like that, so perhaps they got a little revenue from that).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this isn't a complete answer, but I just noticed this in the article. . .
"It is also a cornerstone of the policy to move freight in particular from road to rail."
So I guess there will be at least some freight running through it, but there could also be passenger trains running at other times, I suppose.
Are we talking passenger trains, freight trains, or both? Will this (presumably) be an electrified train system, so no fumes in the tunnels, or something else? Any word on where the power is expected to come from if electrified (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro? I'm guessing you wouldn't run a train system on wind or solar, but perhaps I'm wrong)?
"As much as I love the leave it to the police system, if you don't recognize the robber and he wore gloves and a hood, stalling him for 10-15 minutes for the police to arive on the scene (if you are lucky and live near a station)."
This is what pepper spray, tazers, blunt objects, and chloroform were invented for. *grin*.
Again, if the thief has a weapon, then it's a whole different situation. I have no problem with someone defending themselves, their family, and their guests/friends. I'm just saying, for the unarmed/nonviolent thief, I don't think lethal force is appropriate or *should* be made legal.
Anyone know if anyone has ever created a bot that has the ability to learn from losses and wins, to figure out what works and what doesn't (both what it is doing and what the enemy is doing, then use that in the future to predict what the other player is *trying* to do and come up with a counter)?
I've not played a lot of RTS's, but I've played a few, and the thing I've noticed is, if a strategy works against a bot, even if there's a fairly obvious counter, it will always work against that bot.
The RTS I've played the most is Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, so I'll use an example from that: There are a collection of different bots available which will use different strategies. Now, the player can build a strategic missile launcher, which builds nukes. You can also build a strategic missile defense which will build 'seeker' missiles which will shoot down incoming nukes.
Some of the bots will build SMD's, some won't, but in no case does it build an SMD based upon the player/opponent's actions. That is, it doesn't check to see if you have started to build any Strategic Missile Launchers before it begins to build the defenses. The bots that don't build defenses won't build them even if you are building one. This means on the one hand that the bot wastes resources which it could have used otherwise, to build defenses, while on the other hand, if it doesn't build them, you can pretty easily and quickly defeat the bot with a nuke or two. Alternatively, instead of building a strategic missile defense, the bot *could* try to use someattack method (for example, if you don't have good air defenses, it could hypothetically try a targeted attack with a bunch of bombers or gunships to either destroy the SML, or the engineer units which are constructing the SML).
However, the bots never seem to be smart enough to attack the obvious threat of a strategic missile launcher. It seems like the only way the developers found to make the bots harder is to make them much more efficient at building up their economy and spamming out lots of land-units to try to attack the player.
When I get a chance, I want to try SC2, but right now, I'm in a period where I'm not playing games as much as I used to, and trying to reduce my gaming down to almost none while I get some more important things done in RL. It'll be interesting to see how the AI differs in that game.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but the OP sounded like he was talking about 'on-the-spot justice' where you alone act as police, judge, jury, and executioner. If you just think we should allow courts to use capital punishment for theft, that's a bit different discussion.
". . .Nativity . . ."
I don't think that word means what you think it means. I believe the word you are looking for is "naivety".
"The Smartwater people keep your particular code unique for as long as you pay them rental of it."
That statement has a logical inconsistency. Either it's unique or it's not. I'd be pretty peeved if I was their customer, and found out the prosecution of someone stealing from me got screwed up because 5 years ago, a different customer was using the same code, stopped paying for it, and they re-assigned the code to me. If the code is sufficiently long, there is no reason for them to ever ever re-use a code. We're talking DNA encoding, right? Since DNA gives you four possible symbols to encode with (A, T, C, and G), the number of possible permutations for a sequence of N symbols is 4^N (four raised to the Nth power), right? A 48-symbol long DNA code would have approx 7.9E+28 possible unique codes.
I suppose it's possible that you wouldn't actually be able to use all the codes because of, for example, maybe very similar codes might become too easily corrupted into the other very similar codes through chemical or radioactive processes that would be likely to occur as the product is in use. But, it still seems to me that they can make the code as long as they need to, in order to have a large enough number of usable permutations that they don't need to re-use individual codes.
How long do you think it will be before people 'mask' murder as 'defending their property'. I believe in a justice system where criminals are tried based upon evidence presented to a jury of 12 members of the community, not people killing other people when their life (or *someones* life) is not in immediate jeopardy. Also, how do you, all-knowing one, know whether a man is stealing for survival or stealing 'for pleasure'?
Google hasn't exactly done the best job of trying to coordinate things. Google can Open Source the platform, but do like Sun did with Java - anyone can implement Java, but you can't *call* it "Java", unless you passed a conformance test that Sun had. Google should have tried something similar to Android - make it so people can't market their phone as running "Android", unless they conformed to a certain definition of what Android is.
It's too late for that now, of course, but for future releases of the OS, they could do something similar - e.g "Android 3.0". I know these different phone manufacturer's think they MUST modify the OS so they can have "Product Diferentiation", but that's going to bite them all in the ass when some apps will only work on some Android phones and not others. If that starts to become too much of a problem, it might frustrate users and lead to the platform being abandoned by a lot of customers.
Yeah, well, NYTime is free to do whatever they want. Slashdot is also free to do whatevery *they* want. Slashdot doesn't want to have links which are basically inaccessible to most of their readers.
Fundamentally, I'm not interested in paying for 100 subscriptions to 100 different news sites, and I think neither is almost anyone else. Since Slashdot links to so many news sources, I can't possibly pay for individual subscriptions to all of them. So, Slashdot does the most reasonable thing in the situation - instead of frustrating their readers with links to paywalls, they just reject the story until an accessible source can be found.
*Most* news stories will be carried by other sources, you just have to wait a bit. The rather esoteric example you gave, it's true, is the type of story which perhaps no one else will run. The rest of us mostly have decided *we don't have to read such stories*. Our lives will go on if we miss out on why Newtond dabbled in Alchemy, even though as Nerds, we'd probably be interested.
Longer term, I think the answer to the basic problem here, is that the newspublishing industry needs to collaborate on creating a central clearinghouse sort of system - a sort of micro-transaction system which spans hundreds or thousands of news sources. I would go there and add credit to my account, then when I go to a site with premium content, I could be offered a choice "Do you want to purchase access to this article from XYZ.com for 5 cents, from your account, or purchase access to the entire site for a day for 25 cents? Current credit: $8.55).
That way I don't have to screw around with subscriptions to a site that I might only read one or two articles from in a given month (or only one article, ever).
There's just too many content sources to setup seperate accounts, payment details, and recurring monthly subscription fees, if I'm only interested in the occasional article from any given site.
How long before someone creates an add-on that auto-purges cookies from such sites before every page load, I wonder?
"but there are good reasons to subsidize them: they're better, and will cost the public less in the long run once we're converted to using them predominantly."
I challenge your statement. Show that they're better and cost the public less in the long run than Nuclear? You can't just make such a statement with no argument, evidence, or proof.
First, how are they 'better'? True, they don't use radioactive fuel, but that is a manageable problem - we can reprocess and re-use the 'waste' in breeder-reactor plants, and the final 'waste' products will be material which only remains radioactive for about 300 years, which we can safely store, and which should not cost us too greatly to store for a few centuries (the huge costs associated with storing nuclear fuel, I believe, only is incurred if you are trying to store waste for 100,000 years, but we DO NOT NEED to store it that long if we burn it off first.
If for no other reason than dealing with our current nuclear waste 'problem', we really need to start building breeder-reactors (or some other technology [maybe thorium nuclear?] which can burn off the long-lived waste). Building enough reactors to burn off the waste would, conveniently, also provide us with nuclear power for 200-500 years, according to estimates I've seen.
We know from 50 years of operational experience that U.S. Nuclear plants have about a 90% capacity factor (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute ) - that is the industry as a whole, will on average, generate 90% of the theoretical maximum 'faceplate' energy during the sample period (individual nukes do get shutdown for maintenance and refueling periodically, which is why the capacity factor isn't 100% - during operation they will, I believe, typically run at or near 100 percent, and for long periods - 3 to 4 years at a time with no outages). We also know that most plants that actually get built do pay for themselves and make a profit in the long run (I think TMI is the only exception, but not positive about that), all while selling electricity at competitive prices with other sources (coal is about the only one which, if you don't consider the environmental costs, is cheaper than nuclear, I believe).
Nuclear Plants are expensive, but when you look at the total lifetime power produced, they *do* make financial sense. If we can get the price of building nuclear plants down, which should be possible, that becomes even more true.
In operation, everyone agrees they produce almost no carbon dioxide (I think you can account a small amount of CO2 to a nuke plant for things like vehicles and grounds maintenance equipment [tractors, mowers, wheedwackers, etc], and emergency diesel generators to power the control and safety systems at a plant when outside power is lost), but it's pretty small.
Of course, operation isn't the only carbon we have to account for when considering carbon footprint: I found this article at Nature.com, which discusses the topic a bit.
There is the CO2 that would be generated in manufacturing the materials for the plant, transporting materials to the plant for construction, doing the actual construction (cranes, diggers, etc), which might add up to quite a bit of carbon - I'd like to find a source for what that is - but I don't think the carbon for building nuclear is worse than the carbon needed to build an equivalent generation capacity of wind farms - it takes lots and lots of wind turbines, since they run at about 30-40% capacity factor, to be equivalent to a 1-2GW nuke), and of course there is carbon for decommissioning of the plant (again, need to find a source for that number). There may also be carbon emissions associated with the mining, processing, and transportation of nuclear fuel.
Now what I'm about to say applies equally to any power source who's actual operation does not produce
"The OP was referring to reactor designs which are entirely in the experimental phase, thorium reactors and travelling wave reactors."
Yes, that's true. But my point is still valid - you can't just say that since something is unproven, it's not worth trying. . .
An important thing to keep in mind is that very very low levels of radiation exposure, a lot of studies show, is not hazardous, and probably even has health benefits (lookup Radiation Hormesis some time). Now, as far as I've heard (and if I'm wrong, please provide a link to a better source than what I've read/heard so far), Vermont Yankee, and the New York plant that have leaked 'radioactivity' into the water have leaked fairly small amounts of water that had some tritium in it.
I'm not saying we should constantly leak lots of Tritium and not worry about it, but my point is, I believe the leaks are being found and stopped before much has been released, and those small short term leaks are not necessarily worth worrying about?
I don't believe that anyone has found the quantities of tritium leaked to be considered a real health risk, have they?
Tritium occurs naturally in small amounts in water anyhow - you drink a tiny amount of tritium every day. As long as the concentration of the tritium leaked by the plants isn't too much higher than natural tritium levels, it wouldn't have much affect on the ground water, would it?
Hey, I'd be all for Geothermal, if it actually does make economic and environmental sense. I can only conclude that since we know about the possibility of Geotherm, but have not really made use of it (outside of a small number of places, like a few plants in California, and perhaps elsewhere), that there must be some sort of problem which has prevented investment in the tech, but I admit I'm not really sure what the problems are.
I still don't see how a government loan is a subsidy? How is the government losing money on a loan that you pay back at interest, even if the interest is a lower rate than what you would have payed if you got the money from a bank? Paying less interest doesn't seem like a subsidy to me - to me a subsidy is something that actually costs taxpayers money - like the subsidies on Wind and Solar projects, where the government is actually spending money which will never be repayed?
"So even the basic economics are that nuke plants are subsidized by the public with loans, among the many other public subsidies (eg. security, R&D, insurance)."
What is a subsidy, really? I don't see how a loan is exactly a subsidy - you pay it back, with interest. That's not a subsidy.
I suppose you can make the argument that, to the extent that some proposed nuclear plants get abandoned after part of the money has been spent, but before the reactor is actually built, that such defaults become a subsidy to the industry. However, the main reason that nuclear plant projects default is because the *government* makes it almost impossible to get a nuclear plant built on-time and within budget (at least, that is what I've read from every source I can find, so far - please feel free to post links to any credible source which shows otherwise).
It's kind of like if you kept trying to walk down the street, and I kept tripping you, maybe breaking your knees, then telling everyone you can't walk.
It's one of the reasons the industry has to go to the government in the first place for loans, instead of getting loans from private capital - the risks of the government screwing up the project and causing investors to lose all their money is too large. It's not generally considered the case that the power utility companies don't know how to manage the projects and get them done, or that the reactor manufacturers keep screwing up and making the plants go way over budget - it's mostly the government (and sometimes, some of the contractors who do something bad and cause problems, like needing to rebuild something because the contractor didn't do it right and the inspectors discovered the problem; that particular issue could be dealt with by requiring bonded contractors which can be held financially liable for their mistakes - you screw it up, you pay for the mistake).
If you can get a *reasonable* regulatory environment where investors could have confidence that different lobbyists, PACs, and environmental action groups couldn't interfere with the project (in the form of constantly changing regulations) after it's started, and if you can get enough of them built with government loans to start the ball rolling, private capital *will* follow. It's just a matter of showing we can get the job done, which we *can*.
I guarantee that the industry wouldn't need subsidies if you can just get enough plants built, and can start to get the per-plant cost to begin to decline instead of constantly rising.
The thing is, even if it costs $10 Billion to build a plant, if that plant can make $18-$20 Billion over it's lifespan (and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do it), it's a great investment. The problem is getting people to stake that much money up-front, when the prevailing regulatory environment leads to so many changes in the cost of a project after it has been planned and financed.
"Yes of course, unproven reactor designs will certainly be cheaper!"
Well, they won't *certainly* be more expensive (they *might* be more expensive, they might be the same, or they might be cheaper) - we won't know till we try them, will we? However, a LOT of engineering (3 or 4 decades of it) has gone into some of these new designs with the *specific primary design goal* being to create plants that are SAFER, while also being cheaper because they are designed to be simpler, with fewer welds, pipes, valves, and other 'support equipment' that increases the costs of anything.
It's a true-ism in engineering that generally, if you can accomplish the same results with fewer components, the design will be cheaper. You generally don't need a lot of 'testing' or 'proving' to show that a design with fewer expensive components costs less. The proving just needs to show that it is as safe as it is believed to be, and works as well as it was designed to work.
Also, a lot of the newer designs are for smaller reactors that can be factory manufactured to a standardized, proven (well, eventually - they aren't proven yet, so we need to start the process of proving them) design. It's also generally a true-ism that something mass produced in factories will be cheaper than things which are custom designed and built-to-order on site (which many of the older power plants basically were).
The whole argument against nuclear power, that it is "too expensive", is somewhat dumb, because we know that we can build them cheaper than they have been or currently are being built. Much of the expense isn't inherent to nuclear power, and isn't required for safety (that has been, I believe, a driver of much of the cost increases of nuclear power, but a lot of the things I've been reading about which add to the costs, don't realistically add to safety - they just add to the cost without providing any real additional safety).
I don't really know how much we could reduce the costs, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if we could eventually cut the cost of new plants in 1/2 compared to current prices - at 12 Billion per plant (or maybe that's per-reactor, not sure), it seems like there is a lot of room to reduce costs without reducing safety - I, of course, wouldn't advocate reducing costs at the expense of safety, but I can't believe we can't get those costs down other ways.
This is a topic I've been trying to research a bit more lately, but Wind and Solar are not, perhaps, as 'green' and safe as everyone seems to assume. Just because the energy itself is provided 'free and clean' by the Sun, doesn't mean that the technologies used to harvest the power are safe and green. There is a website I found, called "Learning About Energy", but a senior nuclear engineer named Ted Rockwell who has been part of the nuclear industry since almost the beginning - so, he's maybe not the most 'neutral' person, but it also doesn't mean he's wrong (I mention it mostly for full disclosure).
He wrote a paper (It's something like 20 pages long), called the Nuclear Facts Report, to try to address some of the claims made by opponents of nuclear/proponents of other 'renewables'. The paper mostly brings together and summarizes information from a variety of other studies and papers from all sorts of different sources.
In the sections discussing wind and solar, he talks about some of the safety and environmental issues associated with wind turbines and solar panels.
Some of the points he raises include the fact that there are an increasing number of accidents and injuries related to the installation and maintenance of Wind Turbines (they are, after all, hulking giant machines operating a fairly high mechanical energy levels). Now, that's not to say there's any huge amount of deaths associated with them - I think we all realize that at a certain level, life is dangerous, and nothing can be made totally safe - but there are 'reasonable' levels of risk. But, my point is, if we go to a big wind turbine buildout, while there may not be huge numbers of deaths, I can guarantee that more people will be killed in accidents involving Wind Power.
As far as environmental costs associated with wind, if you install it on land, if there's forest in that area, you have to clear-cut the forest under the wind-farm, as everyone knows, but, and this is a topic I'm trying to research more, I wonder what kinds of pollution might be created when we manufacture wind turbines? Of course, when you manufacture *anything* you will probably create some pollution (the same goes for Nuclear Plants, of course). Nobody ever talks about the environmental costs of manufacturing and installing all those turbines?
In the section on Wind Power, Ted calls out the fact that there is apparently some very toxic byproduct which is produced in fairly large quantities when manufacturing what is currently the most commonly used solar photovoltaic panels, and there are also toxic metals which are embedded into the panels themselves, which when the panels reach their end-of-life, could become a disposal problem.
Another approach to creating electricity from solar energy is the solar-thermal power plant concept. Ted also addresses safety issues related to them - there has apparently already been problems with fires at one or two of the experimental solar-thermal plants that have been built, and additionally, they haven't proven to be cost effective. (Which, might sound like an ironic claim in a discussion on an article about nuclear power being stalled because it's too expensive - but nuclear power, if you can fund it and get the plants built, does actually have a record of generating LOTS of electricity (about 16% of national demand in the U.S.) at competitive prices over the lifespan of the plant [about 60 years] - it's just that they are so expensive to build in the first place, it's hard to get all the funding together to build them, but the actual electricity they produce does not end up being expensive - much cheaper than solar or wind over the course of 60 years, at least with current technologies).
I don't know that solar and wind end up being any worse for the environment than Nuclear - that's something I'm still trying to get enough data to answer; but, there is certainly reason to be concerned about the real environmental cost of wind and solar technologies. It'
Well, that's a sort-of VPN. My point is that you use encryption to a server that you connect via IP address instead of DNS, to secure your DNS lookups. With SSH+SOCKS, you should be able to encrypt most of your traffic (web, ftp, remote X-sessions, etc), so that's basically, kinda a VPN.
The GP is correct - the only real way to 'secure' a public internet connection like a WiFi hotspot is with a VPN that also secures your DNS traffic so that all name lookups are served from a 'trusted' DNS Server. (This doesn't apply so much to SSH/SFTP, where you have, presumably, already cached the fingerprint of the server's Public Key, so if you get back the wrong key, you know someone's trying to attack you, and the client will warn you).
It all depends on how paranoid you are - generally, SSL Certs are *supposed* to protect you from someone impersonating an https request. However, I remember reading somewhere (might've been a story Slashdot covered), about someone successfully getting an SSL Cert signed by a registrar somewhere in the world, that they shouldn't have had, which allowed them to impersonate some site. I don't remember the exact details, but it had something to do with wildcard certs, IIRC.
In practice, I suspect most people setting up a 'phishing hole' WiFi hotspot, probably don't even worry about trying to attack the SSL connections, because that requires too much foreknowledge of what sites your targets would be visiting - just grab whatever plaintext you can - ought to be something interesting in it, sooner or later. Well, there's also the issue that someone could setup a phishing site and direct you to it with their poisoned DNS, and they just don't use any SSL at all, so the browser never gives a certificate complaint, and if the user isn't paying attention and verifying that encryption is in use, they'd maybe not realize they were connecting to the wrong server.
"If they significantly differ, then A shouldn't be trusted, but B(SA) (SA) is probably good."
Unless Compiler B was 'infected', and passed the exploit along to B(SA), which passed it along to B(SA)(SA), no? Just because they are different doesn't mean that compiler binary A was at fault - it could just as easily be B.
However, I do agree that if they are the same, then that would probably mean neither of the grandparent compiler binaries was compromised. I'm going to have to review, when I get some time, that dissertation which David A. Wheeler provided the link for in one of the other replies, to see if there is a refinement to this technique which would allow you to guarantee that you have 'sanitized' the resulting binaries.
Don't use Binary Blobs, I agree, absolutely, if you care at all about your Sovereignty. Get the source tree for an already very well secured OS like, say, OpenBSD, or perhaps Linux (though OBSD is, I believe, generally developed with practices that encourage better security - less focus on feature, more on audits and exploit finding/fixing). Have your 'trusted' developers from your nation go over every line of code, to make sure no trojans/backdoors/intentional exploits were added, then build it all yourself.
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
I suppose you need your own people to do a dis-assembly of the compiler to verify that. Or, build your own assembler in machine language, then build your own compiler with your assembler. Once you've done that, if you have a trusted compiler, and verified source code, you don't really lose security by using Open Source. If anything, it'll *probably* be more secure, if it's popular enough to have a lot of devs analyzing it and fixing problems.
Canadian Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I'm not Canadian, but heard about it somewhere recently.
I was in a store recently, and my eye caught a cheap DECT phone, and I was thinking of buying it, but decided I should research DECT first. Turns out it has weak encryption which has already been broken. So, you should just throw that phone away anyhow. *grin* Well, at least, don't use it for any sensitive communications.
Unforunately, GSM was recently 'broken' too, so there doesn't seem to be too much left in the way of secure wireless comms - maybe some sort of VoIP with TLS or AES crypto or something (seems like I remember hearing about a VoIP encapsulation scheme based on OpenPGP - I'll have to look into that.
Still, the consumer electronics industry needs to really update their encryption standards.
Yeah, if you have an Android phone, Goog-411 becomes kind of redundant, as the phone has built-in voice search from Google - one touch on the icon, then speak what I want, and up it pops in the built-in browser. Can even use the maps feature to locate what you want at a convenient location without having to actually know where such-and-such street is (that is, Goog - 411 would give you a list of results, with addresses, but what if you don't already know where all those addresses are? Sure nice to see them on a map).
However, not everyone has a smart phone, and it really is a shame that the service will no longer be available for them - I used to use Goog-411 pretty frequently before getting my G1. I'm afraid just not enough people knew about Goog-411. Or perhaps they were happy with the number of users, but just decided it cost too much and as a company, didn't provide any revenue. "Free" things don't usually seem to last forever - you need *some* kind of revenue to support any service, no matter how cheap it is to provide it to the customers. Since they didn't make you listen to an ad, there was no apparent revenue stream (well, sometimes I do remember hearing something like this service brought to you by broadband.com, or something like that, so perhaps they got a little revenue from that).