As one of my friends, who is a *bigtime* file-sharer and file-trader, says, "never, ever underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck full of hard drives." That's how they've been moving music for the last five years, by boxes filled with 120 gig HD's and CD's.
addendum to previous reply: here's a discussion of part of why the Irish potato crop was uniquely vulnerable. They were all clones of one another, because of the propagation technique used, rather than using seeds (which would've resulted in gene crossing, if the parents were different. If they were clones, the child would be a sexually produced 'clone', an interesting thought.)
And to tie this right back into the original discussion, it's likely that all the potato plants in Ireland were derived from only two or three original plants, so they were pretty close to identical. In other places, with other cultivars (namely the New World, because until the 1700's almost all the potato cultivars in the Old World were pretty similar) the blight was much less severe. Unfortunately I can't find any good discussions of the homogeneity online: it was just stuff I read in a textbook on epidemiology.
>It may stop a universal outbreak by limiting it to some subset of the population, but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating.
But if you only constitute a small percentage of the total population, the transmission rate might be so low that an epidemic never happens. That's what we see with partial vaccination, which leaves communities in which only a small number of people are suseptible. There are mathematical models of this. The same thing applies to computers: if there were enough heterogeneity within the population, there would be epidemic thresholds keeping viruses from propagating widely. This doesn't make you feel better when you're the target of a small, sporadic outbreak, but it does address the Internet-stopping problems.
I've found a bunch of IT vulnerabilities, starting with a VAX in 1986 that had.motd's permissions 777. That's not critical, but it did mean that I could remove typos from the.motd if I wanted. Then because I didn't feel like getting heat for 'why were you poking around there, anyway?' I told a friend, who told another friend, who misused the knowledge by rewriting the.motd entirely and got in trouble for it. Several more critical experiences since then, same solution: let someone else know, someone you know will tell people that'll misuse it. While someone might look around for where the knowledge started, they'll only be upset at the people who actually took advantage of it.
It's generally a reasonable approximation that gases occupy about 1000 times the volume that liquids do. There's more dissolved oxygen in fresh water, per unit volume, than oxygen in the atmosphere, for this reason. (Which is one reason fish do so well.)
Heat and pressure are heavily interlinked (look up Boyle's Law some time if you're curious) so it's not probably necessary to use reduced pressure to extract the hydrogen from the palladium: heat will do fine. In some supersonic ramjet designs, they've used the waste friction heat of the airframe to heat the liquid hydrogen and vaporize it, simultaneously keeping the airframe from melting and converting the fuel to a more useful form. I guess that'd be called regenerative since that's a hip term these days. So: you could run your engine coolant through the fuel tank to keep the engine cool and produce the gaseous hydrogen the engine needs, which improves the overall efficiency.
And the tricky part is: sometimes bloggers (I'm not saying YOU do this) falsely, and maybe maliciously, misquote articles and then claim that the article's authors have gone and changed it, and it's much harder to know which side is right.
You didn't mention that, prior to the war, the Administration aggressively persecuted people who called their $20B estimate hogwash, even though those people were proposing 'realistic' costs far less than it actually HAS cost. If they were running a company the way they're running the US, their shareholders would be livid and they'd all be jobless.
As other people pointed out in other replies (but not explicitly): all genes drift, and all drifting is bad because it's altering the function of a gene that currently works. Sometimes the drift has new effects that outweigh the cost of losing an existing gene and that's when mutation is good. But in many cases, having two copies of a mutant gene will be fatal, but in select environments having NO copies of that gene will also increase mortality; having one copy is the best situation. Also, it turns out that in many cases the sequence that transcribes to a protein is repeated a variable number of times, which in some ways duplicates the functionality of having two genes: over- or under-expression of a gene on one chromosome has compensation by the other gene, so it can be more tricky than the original Mendelian dominant/recessive examples. There are even dominant, but destructive, genes out there that have stayed in the gene pool for many generations, like polydactyly, but are rarely seen, and that's especially the case if the gene is linked (closely placed on the DNA) to another, very important gene -- it's essentially carried along.
>Kind of frustrating to think that for the cost of the military action in Iraq, we could have built 8 Tokamac reactors. (I know, you could say the same about welfare...it doesn't make the money thrown at Iraq any less irritating)
You're looking at this the wrong way. The correct way is: "for the cost of the military action in Iraq, we could have created several dozen multimillionares among the top-level executives in Halliburton, Exxon, Chevron, and their dependent political action committees and paid-for congresspeople."
Frenchman: "I tell you, zeez Americans are *so* *stupid* we could get thaym to buy *wa-tair*." Englishman: "You're crazy. Who would buy something when it's given away for free?" Frenchman: "We tell them it is the *FRANCH* wa-tair, and we become zeelionares!" Englishman: "Well, right then, let's start a company! What shall we call it?" Frenchman: "Perrier?"
CP nitric is expensive, and stains your skin -- as you no doubt know. Doctors used to use trichloroacetic acid (I don't know what they use now) but before that, they used simple hydrochloric acid, aka muriatic acid, available at hardware stores for paint stripping. One interesting thing about HCl is that it differentially stains the tissue infected with HPV, for reasons I've never heard anyone discuss, but it's how they mark lesions when treating cervical cancer. (Yeah, basically, they fill the woman's cervical area with hydrochloric acid. Lovely, huh?) If I were doing this at home I don't think I'd neutralize it for several hours because that'll allow the HCl to penetrate. The problem is that HPV has significant vertical development in the skin, so just hitting and killing the top will make it go away for a while but not permanently. What it actually does is signal (through damage) the immune system that something's wrong there, and the macrophages that penetrate into the area to try and fight off infection end up killing the adjacent, infected cells, and eventually that serves to make the wart spontaneously go away. The average time for spotaneous remission is about 7 years, if I recall correctly from my virology classes. But, yeah, use HCl and it doesn't have to be anywhere near commercially pure. 20% would probably be just fine. There are actually good reasons for using dilute materials -- the reason that rubbing alcohol is 70% is not because it can't be made more pure, but because if it is more pure it'll actually clot proteins, like making an omlette, which will prevent it penetrating. Somewhat more dilute solutions can get much more deeply into a bacterial colony. I don't know that the smae thing holds with mineral acids on HPV infections, but it seems a better idea to start dilute and move towards concentrated until you find an effective concentration.
I think I disagree. The company I work for has, with no funding, taken competitors' chips apart and extracted information from security modules on the chip. (they could do something we couldn't, so we found how they did it: the downside of trade secrets.) I'm not saying the technical challenges are anything like easy, but it might not be as difficult as you think, to design your own chip that looks and acts just like the one it's replacing, but also has new functionality. Personally I'd probably choose the ethernet controller, since those are well-known designs and the information escape route is easy. The problem is: what do you *do* with your backdoor? Unless it's in the software, you really don't have much access to the important stuff. Keylogging, fine, but there's very little value per character. What you want to see is what the other person has on the screen, and that's not trivial to get off the computer without being very noticeable. Failing that, you want access to the storage media, and that's not so easy if you want actual, random access -- particularly if you want to do it without being noticed, while the system is, presumably, being used.
Or to sum up, I think it's less difficult than you think to make a custom chip, but I'm not sure it's very useful to do so.
If you find something, I'd sure love to know about it. I have several friends who are pretty interested, to the point of having bought land in Canada and other places "just in case."
Vioxx worked really well for a lot of people. It was about the only thing that worked well for my mom, for instance. And for some people it was harmful. That's what drugs do. Merck was not doing a very good thing when they hid evidence of that aspect of Vioxx, but if they hadn't it might not have been approved in the first place. Maybe that would've been better, if it hadn't been approved. That's a hard call, when many people really appreciated what it did for them. It's unfortunate that there's no way in modern, litigatious society, to offer the option of signing waivers before getting treatment. Desperate people would sign the waivers, and because they're desperate, they could later claim they'd signed under duress and void them. Drug companies are in somewhat of a lose-lose situation (and given some of their behavior I can't say I'm entirely sorry about that) but the other people who lose from this are the people who can't get any help for their health problems, even though possible help exists.
It's a problem if you don't know much about computers and want to actually access material on the NTFS side from your linux partition. The average consumer is starting to hear about linux, but the average consumer is not going to be able to get anything approaching normal usability from the linux NTFS tools that currently exist, unless things have changed drastically since the last time I helped some of my friends try and get dual-boot systems set up.
I was thinking shared data, yeah, and captive-ntfs hasn't worked very well for me, and I'm reasonably computer-literate. The 90% of the world who doesn't know anything about linux or alternate drivers/filesystems, will just look at this as one more big hurdle to be jumped to get linux working.
I've thought about that and talked about it with friends. Small islands might not be above water soonish, and at the least, might not have much arable landmass if the water rises.
Greenland has the advantage of *abundant* fresh water -- a serious problem on smaller islands, unless you have a really good power source for heavy-duty water distillation -- and gigantic amounts of arable land, and it has an existing government and diplomatic relations, more or less, so it's a *little* harder for the US to just walk in and take over, than some tiny island nobody's ever heard of. Maybe.
The main problem is that some climate models indicate the northern Atlantic might get *really* freaking cold over the next 100 years, in which case Greenland would be a bad choice.
Satellite internet's a pretty good idea. In an ideal world, at least part of the economy of any such place would be based on hosting a server farm outside of the US/EU, so a lot of bandwidth would be nice. That kind of implies wired, which gets into the problem of where you put the other end of the wire. It's an unrealistic dream.
I'd bet the hard drive requirements are to place it safely in the NTFS realm, because if people keep formatting their installation drives with FAT32 it makes it much easier for them to build dual-boot machines.
>I just don't understand why companies, individuals and interest groups keep going after the messenger.
I know this is probably too obvious, but because the messenger has billlyuns and billllyuns of dollars and the people that are actually doing something illegal are A: hard to catch and B: have (by design, or because they're the type of people who find it difficult to get a legitimate job) few available assets.
I wish I had modpoints to give to you. The central point of this line of reasoning is that it's unfalsifiable. No matter how much abuse there is, no matter how many attacks, the answer is always 'more police power' because it answers both situations: if attack, more police power needed, if no attack, police power needed to maintain the situation.
We who want freedom and the values upon which this country was founded, need to figure out how to address the semantics of the argument so that we can convincingly argue the point.
If there WERE any, I'd be there tomorrow. Unfortunately, most all the landmasses that are self-sustaining are already settled and a lot of those are going to disappear in the next 100 years. That's why the Raft, from Stephenson's Snow Crash, makes more sense -- or Greenland. For what it's worth, I know probably ten other people who would immediately move to such a place, and another 20 who would seriously consider it if it looked like it was working, and I don't know that many people, just really smart, really productive, and really scared people. If I multiply that out by the population of the US and UK, we might completely overwhelm the populations of some small islands, which, really, would do the same thing as getting us our own country. Hence the Greenland comment. 30,000 people would represent a controlling voting block, and it has a surprising amount of arable land, increasing all the time.
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As one of my friends, who is a *bigtime* file-sharer and file-trader, says, "never, ever underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck full of hard drives." That's how they've been moving music for the last five years, by boxes filled with 120 gig HD's and CD's.
addendum to previous reply: here's a discussion of part of why the Irish potato crop was uniquely vulnerable. They were all clones of one another, because of the propagation technique used, rather than using seeds (which would've resulted in gene crossing, if the parents were different. If they were clones, the child would be a sexually produced 'clone', an interesting thought.)
And to tie this right back into the original discussion, it's likely that all the potato plants in Ireland were derived from only two or three original plants, so they were pretty close to identical. In other places, with other cultivars (namely the New World, because until the 1700's almost all the potato cultivars in the Old World were pretty similar) the blight was much less severe. Unfortunately I can't find any good discussions of the homogeneity online: it was just stuff I read in a textbook on epidemiology.
But if you only constitute a small percentage of the total population, the transmission rate might be so low that an epidemic never happens. That's what we see with partial vaccination, which leaves communities in which only a small number of people are suseptible. There are mathematical models of this. The same thing applies to computers: if there were enough heterogeneity within the population, there would be epidemic thresholds keeping viruses from propagating widely. This doesn't make you feel better when you're the target of a small, sporadic outbreak, but it does address the Internet-stopping problems.
Maybe, some day, we'll have cable or DSL or even POTS on lines that aren't 50 years old, but it isn't going to be any time soon.
I've found a bunch of IT vulnerabilities, starting with a VAX in 1986 that had .motd's permissions 777. That's not critical, but it did mean that I could remove typos from the .motd if I wanted. Then because I didn't feel like getting heat for 'why were you poking around there, anyway?' I told a friend, who told another friend, who misused the knowledge by rewriting the .motd entirely and got in trouble for it. Several more critical experiences since then, same solution: let someone else know, someone you know will tell people that'll misuse it. While someone might look around for where the knowledge started, they'll only be upset at the people who actually took advantage of it.
Heat and pressure are heavily interlinked (look up Boyle's Law some time if you're curious) so it's not probably necessary to use reduced pressure to extract the hydrogen from the palladium: heat will do fine. In some supersonic ramjet designs, they've used the waste friction heat of the airframe to heat the liquid hydrogen and vaporize it, simultaneously keeping the airframe from melting and converting the fuel to a more useful form. I guess that'd be called regenerative since that's a hip term these days. So: you could run your engine coolant through the fuel tank to keep the engine cool and produce the gaseous hydrogen the engine needs, which improves the overall efficiency.
And the tricky part is: sometimes bloggers (I'm not saying YOU do this) falsely, and maybe maliciously, misquote articles and then claim that the article's authors have gone and changed it, and it's much harder to know which side is right.
You didn't mention that, prior to the war, the Administration aggressively persecuted people who called their $20B estimate hogwash, even though those people were proposing 'realistic' costs far less than it actually HAS cost. If they were running a company the way they're running the US, their shareholders would be livid and they'd all be jobless.
As other people pointed out in other replies (but not explicitly): all genes drift, and all drifting is bad because it's altering the function of a gene that currently works. Sometimes the drift has new effects that outweigh the cost of losing an existing gene and that's when mutation is good. But in many cases, having two copies of a mutant gene will be fatal, but in select environments having NO copies of that gene will also increase mortality; having one copy is the best situation. Also, it turns out that in many cases the sequence that transcribes to a protein is repeated a variable number of times, which in some ways duplicates the functionality of having two genes: over- or under-expression of a gene on one chromosome has compensation by the other gene, so it can be more tricky than the original Mendelian dominant/recessive examples. There are even dominant, but destructive, genes out there that have stayed in the gene pool for many generations, like polydactyly, but are rarely seen, and that's especially the case if the gene is linked (closely placed on the DNA) to another, very important gene -- it's essentially carried along.
>Kind of frustrating to think that for the cost of the military action in Iraq, we could have built 8 Tokamac reactors. (I know, you could say the same about welfare...it doesn't make the money thrown at Iraq any less irritating)
You're looking at this the wrong way. The correct way is: "for the cost of the military action in Iraq, we could have created several dozen multimillionares among the top-level executives in Halliburton, Exxon, Chevron, and their dependent political action committees and paid-for congresspeople."
>"It still uses radioactive particles."
If someone says that to you, reply: "so does the sun." It'll probably get the point across.
Frenchman: "I tell you, zeez Americans are *so* *stupid* we could get thaym to buy *wa-tair*."
Englishman: "You're crazy. Who would buy something when it's given away for free?"
Frenchman: "We tell them it is the *FRANCH* wa-tair, and we become zeelionares!"
Englishman: "Well, right then, let's start a company! What shall we call it?"
Frenchman: "Perrier?"
CP nitric is expensive, and stains your skin -- as you no doubt know. Doctors used to use trichloroacetic acid (I don't know what they use now) but before that, they used simple hydrochloric acid, aka muriatic acid, available at hardware stores for paint stripping. One interesting thing about HCl is that it differentially stains the tissue infected with HPV, for reasons I've never heard anyone discuss, but it's how they mark lesions when treating cervical cancer. (Yeah, basically, they fill the woman's cervical area with hydrochloric acid. Lovely, huh?) If I were doing this at home I don't think I'd neutralize it for several hours because that'll allow the HCl to penetrate. The problem is that HPV has significant vertical development in the skin, so just hitting and killing the top will make it go away for a while but not permanently. What it actually does is signal (through damage) the immune system that something's wrong there, and the macrophages that penetrate into the area to try and fight off infection end up killing the adjacent, infected cells, and eventually that serves to make the wart spontaneously go away. The average time for spotaneous remission is about 7 years, if I recall correctly from my virology classes. But, yeah, use HCl and it doesn't have to be anywhere near commercially pure. 20% would probably be just fine. There are actually good reasons for using dilute materials -- the reason that rubbing alcohol is 70% is not because it can't be made more pure, but because if it is more pure it'll actually clot proteins, like making an omlette, which will prevent it penetrating. Somewhat more dilute solutions can get much more deeply into a bacterial colony. I don't know that the smae thing holds with mineral acids on HPV infections, but it seems a better idea to start dilute and move towards concentrated until you find an effective concentration.
That is one poignant reply. Too bad there's not a +1 Painfully True mod coz it's more than just funny.
I think I disagree. The company I work for has, with no funding, taken competitors' chips apart and extracted information from security modules on the chip. (they could do something we couldn't, so we found how they did it: the downside of trade secrets.) I'm not saying the technical challenges are anything like easy, but it might not be as difficult as you think, to design your own chip that looks and acts just like the one it's replacing, but also has new functionality. Personally I'd probably choose the ethernet controller, since those are well-known designs and the information escape route is easy. The problem is: what do you *do* with your backdoor? Unless it's in the software, you really don't have much access to the important stuff. Keylogging, fine, but there's very little value per character. What you want to see is what the other person has on the screen, and that's not trivial to get off the computer without being very noticeable. Failing that, you want access to the storage media, and that's not so easy if you want actual, random access -- particularly if you want to do it without being noticed, while the system is, presumably, being used.
Or to sum up, I think it's less difficult than you think to make a custom chip, but I'm not sure it's very useful to do so.
If you find something, I'd sure love to know about it. I have several friends who are pretty interested, to the point of having bought land in Canada and other places "just in case."
Vioxx worked really well for a lot of people. It was about the only thing that worked well for my mom, for instance. And for some people it was harmful. That's what drugs do. Merck was not doing a very good thing when they hid evidence of that aspect of Vioxx, but if they hadn't it might not have been approved in the first place. Maybe that would've been better, if it hadn't been approved. That's a hard call, when many people really appreciated what it did for them. It's unfortunate that there's no way in modern, litigatious society, to offer the option of signing waivers before getting treatment. Desperate people would sign the waivers, and because they're desperate, they could later claim they'd signed under duress and void them. Drug companies are in somewhat of a lose-lose situation (and given some of their behavior I can't say I'm entirely sorry about that) but the other people who lose from this are the people who can't get any help for their health problems, even though possible help exists.
It's a problem if you don't know much about computers and want to actually access material on the NTFS side from your linux partition. The average consumer is starting to hear about linux, but the average consumer is not going to be able to get anything approaching normal usability from the linux NTFS tools that currently exist, unless things have changed drastically since the last time I helped some of my friends try and get dual-boot systems set up.
I was thinking shared data, yeah, and captive-ntfs hasn't worked very well for me, and I'm reasonably computer-literate. The 90% of the world who doesn't know anything about linux or alternate drivers/filesystems, will just look at this as one more big hurdle to be jumped to get linux working.
I've thought about that and talked about it with friends. Small islands might not be above water soonish, and at the least, might not have much arable landmass if the water rises.
Greenland has the advantage of *abundant* fresh water -- a serious problem on smaller islands, unless you have a really good power source for heavy-duty water distillation -- and gigantic amounts of arable land, and it has an existing government and diplomatic relations, more or less, so it's a *little* harder for the US to just walk in and take over, than some tiny island nobody's ever heard of. Maybe.
The main problem is that some climate models indicate the northern Atlantic might get *really* freaking cold over the next 100 years, in which case Greenland would be a bad choice.
Satellite internet's a pretty good idea. In an ideal world, at least part of the economy of any such place would be based on hosting a server farm outside of the US/EU, so a lot of bandwidth would be nice. That kind of implies wired, which gets into the problem of where you put the other end of the wire. It's an unrealistic dream.
I'd bet the hard drive requirements are to place it safely in the NTFS realm, because if people keep formatting their installation drives with FAT32 it makes it much easier for them to build dual-boot machines.
I know this is probably too obvious, but because the messenger has billlyuns and billllyuns of dollars and the people that are actually doing something illegal are A: hard to catch and B: have (by design, or because they're the type of people who find it difficult to get a legitimate job) few available assets.
I wish I had modpoints to give to you. The central point of this line of reasoning is that it's unfalsifiable. No matter how much abuse there is, no matter how many attacks, the answer is always 'more police power' because it answers both situations: if attack, more police power needed, if no attack, police power needed to maintain the situation.
We who want freedom and the values upon which this country was founded, need to figure out how to address the semantics of the argument so that we can convincingly argue the point.
suggestions welcome...
If there WERE any, I'd be there tomorrow. Unfortunately, most all the landmasses that are self-sustaining are already settled and a lot of those are going to disappear in the next 100 years. That's why the Raft, from Stephenson's Snow Crash, makes more sense -- or Greenland. For what it's worth, I know probably ten other people who would immediately move to such a place, and another 20 who would seriously consider it if it looked like it was working, and I don't know that many people, just really smart, really productive, and really scared people. If I multiply that out by the population of the US and UK, we might completely overwhelm the populations of some small islands, which, really, would do the same thing as getting us our own country. Hence the Greenland comment. 30,000 people would represent a controlling voting block, and it has a surprising amount of arable land, increasing all the time.