It seems like the local newspapers should be interested in this document stash: it seems like a good source of data for a bit of investigative journalism and could be turned into quite q few interesting articles. So they should team up with these two programmers to help parse through the data, just like journalists teamed together to analyze the Snowden documents.
It also seems like they need a way to make this data more searchable and organized which is again a problem that journalists faced many times (Snowden, Luxleaks, Swissleaks, Sony). So if there's not some open-source code for organising such data already there should be by now. Anyway contacting people involved with one of these older data stashes could help figure out how to organize this one and make the most of it.
Maybe for light vehicle electric can win if range, cost, refuel time, and the problem of a jump start if you run out of gas on the roads is solved. Now design a battery that can pull a 440,000 pounds or 200,000 kilograms triple trailer configuration across hundreds of miles of highway.
So you're saying battery-powered vehicules are not worth even considering until they are viable to pull the equivalent of, not one, not two, but almost four M1 Abrams tanks? A feat that even most full-size commercial trucks cannot pull off?
It would be nice to have more details. Does this device need lots of tuning for each user? It seems like it would a bit if only to adapt to size. Does it help if one is running too? Would it help marathonians get better times? What about sprinters?
The scenario with a bag of bagels isn't one of the ones causing an issue, so as an example it doesn't apply. That type of transaction is fine - that the buyer is gay or whatever is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the transaction, it has no reason to come up. It'd be quite a stretch to say that by selling them some bagels you are endorsing them in any way.
Indiana's senate bill 101 does not make it clear that it does not apply in this case (I'll grant you it does not make much clear at all though). Do you have a reliable source that explains why this case is not relevant?
But what if my chuch/religion says that gay marriage is okay? Shouldn't the government stay out of it?
The problem is the government is outsourcing of who can get special tax status and other benefits to religions. A religious wedding should have no legal consequence whatsoever. Only the government should decide who enters a partnership with whom. Whether you call that partnership "marriage" or something else like "civil union" to appease the religious types is of little importance.
Note that it would be fine to have the religious organisations handle your civil union paperwork to make things as transparent as possible, as long as you can file the exact same parperwork directly with the government, and as long as that paperwork is the only thing recognized by the government. But having the law recognize the religious notion of marriage and civil unions separately introduces unneeded complexity and opportunities for inconsistencies.
On the other side, it seems like you have the government forcing people not just to tolerate - but to actively celebrate - something that is deeply abhorrent to them.
How is being forbidden from refusing to sell a bag of bagels to anyone who's polite and pays being forced to actively celebrate same-sex marriage?
I do not believe that it is discrimination to refuse to take the money and provide services to someone who wants to you to make a cake for their same-sex wedding.
What about refusing to sell a bag of bagels to a customer on the basis he's gay? My understanding of the law is that it would legalize that. Can you still claim that would not be discrimination?
What of "freedom of speech"? This right says that you have the right to have and express any opinion you choose. Where you are "free" to say something, you are not free from the consequences of what you say. There ARE limits to this freedom too. The classic "yelling fire in a crowded theater" comes to mine, as does inciting riots. Now, lets discuss freedom of religion. I've never said there are "no limits" to what you can do in the name of religion in this country. There ARE limits.
And yet while you'd be the first to get up in arms if a shopkeeper refused to sell you bagels on the basis of your religion, you're the one claiming that forbidding you from doing so on the basis of a customer being gay would infringe on your freedom of religion! So forgive me for getting the impression that you're employing double standards there and not seeing what kind of restrictions you're willing to accept to your freedom of religion.
Oh, and I'd like to point out that the law we are discussing was passed and signed into law by the FEDERAL government way back during Clinton's terms in office, was also adopted by 20 individual states including Illinois where B. Obama was serving at the time (and offered no objections to at the time).
So? Is that supposed to magically make legalizing discrimination a good thing?
The only reason we are discussing this in Indiana is political theater....
No, the reason we're discussing this is that many people find it incredible that there are still some, including high ranking politicians in your country, who would claim in this day and age that discrimination is good. Sure you're the first one to say that discrimination based on religion is wrong and you even concede that discrimination based on race and sex is illegal, but to you discriminating on other criteria not being explicitly outlawed means it's morally ok? So discriminating against albinos is fine. Against blondes, absolutely no problem. Against single mothers? Sure. Against gays? A duty? Have you really learned nothing from history?
I have better things to do than argue about your definition of what cannot be religious freedom in your view, because in reality your framework of reason is really more of an authoritarian "Government knows best" solution that is not about preserving freedom, but about something else....
Oh sure. Claim all others really want is a dictatorship when it is you who wants to put a new law on the books, pose as the victim when it is you who wants to victimize others. That makes total sense.
Let me rephrase because I think you missed the point. Discriminations are generally wielded by a majority against a minority. Your argument that we should let the market decide makes no sense: the majority will not feel the impact of a minority of their customers going elsewhere and thus will not have any reason to change their behavior. So it's a hypocritical way of say minorities should continue to be discriminated against "until the problem goes away".
Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
We either do or we don't have religious freedom here and if that freedom doesn't extend into how people can conduct business and what activities they choose to be involved in and what they refuse to do, then we really DON'T have the freedom,
So it seems your view is that religious freedom must trump every other freedom or right. But that cannot work. Not everyone follows the same religion (if any). Ensuring that is the whole point of religious freedom. But each religion has its own idea of what its followers must do. Some say unmarried women who have sex must be stoned. According to your argument, making that illegal would be denying these people their religious freedom. Sure you may not agree with their religious mores, but you cannot question or deny theirs while refusing your right to discriminate based on yours to be questioned or made illegal.
the only way out is to hold that religious freedom must stop where other people's freedoms start. That means the right to go about their live peacefully, and not to be discriminated against.
Just like doctors should not be allowed to discriminate for any reason, people running stores open to the general public should not be allowed to discriminate. If selling to some categories of the population goes against their religion then they should run a private store, one that requires a membership card from their congregation or something, or they should find themselves another job where they can choose their clients.
We have government interfering with religion which is expressly forbidden in our constitution..
I think you were more specifically thinking of the Bill of Rights. It's a good document but it's not the absolute unambiguous answer you make it out to be. For instance, the first amendment, the one you care about because it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", immediately continues with "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Well, lots of religions consider blasphemy to be a religious crime and want it to be forbidden and punished. But that would go against the very same amendment's protection of freedom of speech. So which is it? It seems like according to you religious freedom should trump freedom of speech but I'm not sure your fellow citizens would agree with you on that, or that you'd really like to live in such a country.
Don't like it? Sorry. Get the constitution changed, but I warn you that you won't like the results.
Don't need to. I already leave in a country where discrimination is illegal. Works just fine. Thank you very much.
Then there are things which you CAN discriminate on.
If you don't like who a business [...] refuses service to, you are free to take your business elsewhere and share your views with your friends, neighbors or even the random person on the street if they will listen.
Let the market decide and if the majority of people think like you and take their business some other place, so be it. Just live your life and do your business and let others do the same. Seems like freedom to me.
Wonderful community you want to build. One where minorities can be ostracised, denied service by the majority, forced to either supply themselves from shaddy sources who will overchage them or to die or leave if they can. Members of that holier than thou majority can try to hide behind the veil of religious mores all they want. The truth is it is they who don't have one shred of morality.
As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.
3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.
That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on investment. So they will at most install a separate electric meter at the customer's premises, and then hook up their machine to a regular power outlet. So then this fiber you want to put in the power cable will have nowhere to plug into. And again, given that most houses/apartments don't have fiber yet it, requiring a fiber connection would limit them to just a fraction of the potential market, or would force them to lay their own fiber which again is incredibly expensive (but at least it would not be redundant if they manage to resell it to regular ISPs). But it's more likely they will simply reuse their customer's Internet connection (remember data caps are mostly a US thing). So really what this tells us is that they will limit themselves to workloads which don't require too much communication. The ideal case would be CPU/GPU intensive computations like Folding@Home, SETI, GIMPS, etc.
They say the SSD is PCIe 3.0 but is the slot it's plugged into PCIe 3.0 or still PCIe 2.0? Too little is known to be sure that this combination actually doubled the bandwidth per lane, though it's certainly plausible.
I think you meant to say there is no power shortage. However we only have 56 years of proven reserves of oil, add another 4 years counting oil sands. To me that qualifies as a looming shortage of one of our primary source of energy. And that's all assuming zero increase in energy use, and as a corollary that about 85% of the population keeps on using 5 to 10 times less energy per person than Americans. So saying there's no energy shortage is a bit optimistic.
That said I'll grant you that although we only have 58 years of proven natural gas reserves, at least discoveries seem to be keeping pace. We'll see how that goes once the oil runs out however. Also while we can switch to other energy sources like wind and solar, they require an important initial investment of energy which will be hard once we start feeling the crunch.
Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation.
That's disingenuous when it's caused by a byproduct of our main sources of energy. CO2 is not something you can filter out of your car exhaust or that we can easily take out of power plants.
So you think we need to get rid of 6 out of every 7 people. Will you be first in line?
No. He's saying that whether we want it or not the world population will go down to 1 billion, either in an orderly fashion of our own choosing; or through famine, disease and war over resources.
While I don't agree with his 1 billion mark, it's obvious the population cannot increase indefinitely. Fortunately it's expected that it will plateau at or before the 10 billion mark. But there's still the question of whether there's enough resources (energy, drinking water, ores, etc) to sustain a population of 10 billion, all living decent lives (unlike now), indefinitely.
Mod this up! I've been asking the same questions for years now and still haven't seen any answers. I've also come to the same conclusions as AC.
Studies are not hard to find: type 'weather impact of wind turbines' in Google and the first link will be Wikipedia which will point you to five studies on the subject!
To summarize the current set of studies don't find a significant impact but more detailed analyzes will tell us more. But we've been building sky-scrapers and other tall structures for a century now and have yet to see any impact of these. Also wind-turbines are about 150 meters high when our atmosphere is 20,000 meters thick. Finally taking down wind-turbines is much easier than scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. So overall I have a hard time feeling concerned.
Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.
You're forgetting all the the food that is thrown away by producers and then supermarkets because it would not sell, then all the food people buy and let go bad, and then all that they put in their plate and then throw away because they're full. So to get this 2000 calories intake farmers need to produce at least 4000. But probably you think that solving this issue is trivial.
However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently.
A no less considerable amount does not lend itself to standard agricultural practices either because of the terrain or the lack of water for irrigation. The 'efficient land use' also relies on a massive use of fossil fuel based fertilizers. But you probably think we have an inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels.
And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. [...] And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.
Sure. Convincing everyone to stop eating beef, let alone most forms of meat, is totally realistic. And having to go down this path is absolutely not the sign that there's more people than the earth can support given our current lifestyle.
And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% [...] we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it,
Great! 0.5% of the population can afford increased food costs! Even if we ignore disparities among their populations and extend your reasoning to all developed countries we end up with at most a billion people. Do you even care about the remaining 85%?
So maybe the earth can sustain 7 billion people but all your arguments are naive and totally off the mark.
I have been wondering about Stingrays too. Based on the Stingrays Wikipedia page they would not need access to the SIM card's private key. Instead they force the device to use the weaker A5/2 security protocol and then crack it which allows them to recover the SIM card's private key.
The "GSM Active Key Extraction" performed by the StingRay in step three merits additional explanation. A GSM phone encrypts all communications content using an encryption key stored on its SIM card with a copy stored at the service provider. While simulating the target device during the above explained man-in-the-middle attack, the service provider cell site will ask the StingRay (which it believes to be the target device) to initiate encryption using the key stored on the target device. Therefore, the StingRay needs a method to obtain the target device's stored encryption key else the man-in-the-middle attack will fail.
GSM primarily encrypts communications content using the A5/1 call encryption cypher. In 2008 it was reported that a GSM phone's encryption key can be obtained using $1,000 worth of computer hardware and 30 minutes of cryptanalysis performed on signals encrypted using A5/1. However, GSM also supports an export weakened variant of A5/1 called A5/2. This weaker encryption cypher can be cracked in real-time. While A5/1 and A5/2 use different cypher strengths, they each utilize the same underlying encryption key stored on the SIM card. Therefore, the StingRay performs "GSM Active Key Extraction" during step three of the man-in-the-middle attack as follows: (1) instruct target device to use the weaker A5/2 encryption cypher, (2) collect A5/2 encrypted signals from target device, and (3) perform cryptanalysis of the A5/2 signals to quickly recover the underlying stored encryption key. Once the encryption key is obtained, the StingRay uses it to comply with the encryption request made to it by the service provider during the man-in-the-middle attack.
This perfectly illustrates why allowing protocol variants with weaker security is a bad idea. It also makes Gemalto's security lapse look somewhat irrelevant: cracking the SIM's private key seems pretty trivial anyway.
with the vital secrets either stored a lot more carefully, or, ideally, generated on-SIM and never leaving the SIM during its operational life, short of a direct silicon-level attack.
My understanding is that's what they do already. The private key is generated and put directly into the SIM card and never leaves it. But a private key is useless if nobody knows the corresponding public key. It's the transfer of that public key to the entity that needs it, the carrier, that the NSA/GCHQ intercepted.
Maybe a fix would be for Gemalto to sell blank SIM cards and have the carriers themselves generate and burn the private key to it using a software WORN API: Write Once, Read Never. Of course then the NSA/GCHQ would have no trouble forcing the US carriers to hand over all their public keys but then they can already force them to intercept the communications. At least the rest of the world would only be subject spying by their own government.
The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".
Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi referring to a small person.
But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up;-) ).
So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.
The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".
Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi refering to a small person.
But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up;-) ).
So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.
This proves that all the whining about the NSA has little to do with actual worries (as if anyone in the government actually cares about their porn viewing habits), and more to do with overwrought anti-Americanism.
Quite the opposite. It proves that the anti-French sentiment is so strong in the US and UK that it drowns any rational discussion.
ISP: Internet Service Provider. They connect your machine to the internet. WTF do you think server hosting companies do, you nitwit?
Server hosting companies certainly do not connect my machine to the Internet: they provide Internet hosting services and not Internet Access. And if you're going to use the ISP acronym in another discussion you should know that it commonly exclusively refers to Internet access providers. But it sure is a great way to spread FUD and claim plausible deniability.
I don't think it makes any noticable difference but that was not the point I was trying to make. If they can show a measurable difference
And again you miss the point: no matter what equipment you use you will not be able to detect any difference in sound quality between their cable and a regular cable.
It's even obvious without any testing to anyone who knows anything about the Ethernet, TCP/IP or the OSI model: either a packet of data makes it across the cable or it does not. If it does, then it's going to be bit for bit identical no matter what cable you used, and thus the resulting sound will be identical too. If the packet did not get across, then it means you god a broken cable or some rodent has been chomping on it. But the result will either be a retransmission in time, in which case there will again be no impact on the sound quality, and if not, a pop, stall or stutter. But you will under no circumstances get a reduced "sound picture", lesser "differentiation between sonic elements" or lesser "sense of clarity".
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the local newspapers should be interested in this document stash: it seems like a good source of data for a bit of investigative journalism and could be turned into quite q few interesting articles. So they should team up with these two programmers to help parse through the data, just like journalists teamed together to analyze the Snowden documents.
It also seems like they need a way to make this data more searchable and organized which is again a problem that journalists faced many times (Snowden, Luxleaks, Swissleaks, Sony). So if there's not some open-source code for organising such data already there should be by now. Anyway contacting people involved with one of these older data stashes could help figure out how to organize this one and make the most of it.
Maybe for light vehicle electric can win if range, cost, refuel time, and the problem of a jump start if you run out of gas on the roads is solved. Now design a battery that can pull a 440,000 pounds or 200,000 kilograms triple trailer configuration across hundreds of miles of highway.
So you're saying battery-powered vehicules are not worth even considering until they are viable to pull the equivalent of, not one, not two, but almost four M1 Abrams tanks? A feat that even most full-size commercial trucks cannot pull off?
It would be nice to have more details. Does this device need lots of tuning for each user? It seems like it would a bit if only to adapt to size. Does it help if one is running too? Would it help marathonians get better times? What about sprinters?
The scenario with a bag of bagels isn't one of the ones causing an issue, so as an example it doesn't apply. That type of transaction is fine - that the buyer is gay or whatever is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the transaction, it has no reason to come up. It'd be quite a stretch to say that by selling them some bagels you are endorsing them in any way.
Indiana's senate bill 101 does not make it clear that it does not apply in this case (I'll grant you it does not make much clear at all though). Do you have a reliable source that explains why this case is not relevant?
But what if my chuch/religion says that gay marriage is okay? Shouldn't the government stay out of it?
The problem is the government is outsourcing of who can get special tax status and other benefits to religions. A religious wedding should have no legal consequence whatsoever. Only the government should decide who enters a partnership with whom. Whether you call that partnership "marriage" or something else like "civil union" to appease the religious types is of little importance.
Note that it would be fine to have the religious organisations handle your civil union paperwork to make things as transparent as possible, as long as you can file the exact same parperwork directly with the government, and as long as that paperwork is the only thing recognized by the government. But having the law recognize the religious notion of marriage and civil unions separately introduces unneeded complexity and opportunities for inconsistencies.
On the other side, it seems like you have the government forcing people not just to tolerate - but to actively celebrate - something that is deeply abhorrent to them.
How is being forbidden from refusing to sell a bag of bagels to anyone who's polite and pays being forced to actively celebrate same-sex marriage?
I do not believe that it is discrimination to refuse to take the money and provide services to someone who wants to you to make a cake for their same-sex wedding.
What about refusing to sell a bag of bagels to a customer on the basis he's gay? My understanding of the law is that it would legalize that. Can you still claim that would not be discrimination?
What of "freedom of speech"? This right says that you have the right to have and express any opinion you choose. Where you are "free" to say something, you are not free from the consequences of what you say. There ARE limits to this freedom too. The classic "yelling fire in a crowded theater" comes to mine, as does inciting riots. Now, lets discuss freedom of religion. I've never said there are "no limits" to what you can do in the name of religion in this country. There ARE limits.
And yet while you'd be the first to get up in arms if a shopkeeper refused to sell you bagels on the basis of your religion, you're the one claiming that forbidding you from doing so on the basis of a customer being gay would infringe on your freedom of religion! So forgive me for getting the impression that you're employing double standards there and not seeing what kind of restrictions you're willing to accept to your freedom of religion.
Oh, and I'd like to point out that the law we are discussing was passed and signed into law by the FEDERAL government way back during Clinton's terms in office, was also adopted by 20 individual states including Illinois where B. Obama was serving at the time (and offered no objections to at the time).
So? Is that supposed to magically make legalizing discrimination a good thing?
The only reason we are discussing this in Indiana is political theater....
No, the reason we're discussing this is that many people find it incredible that there are still some, including high ranking politicians in your country, who would claim in this day and age that discrimination is good. Sure you're the first one to say that discrimination based on religion is wrong and you even concede that discrimination based on race and sex is illegal, but to you discriminating on other criteria not being explicitly outlawed means it's morally ok? So discriminating against albinos is fine. Against blondes, absolutely no problem. Against single mothers? Sure. Against gays? A duty? Have you really learned nothing from history?
I have better things to do than argue about your definition of what cannot be religious freedom in your view, because in reality your framework of reason is really more of an authoritarian "Government knows best" solution that is not about preserving freedom, but about something else....
Oh sure. Claim all others really want is a dictatorship when it is you who wants to put a new law on the books, pose as the victim when it is you who wants to victimize others. That makes total sense.
Let me rephrase because I think you missed the point. Discriminations are generally wielded by a majority against a minority. Your argument that we should let the market decide makes no sense: the majority will not feel the impact of a minority of their customers going elsewhere and thus will not have any reason to change their behavior. So it's a hypocritical way of say minorities should continue to be discriminated against "until the problem goes away".
And here are some parts of the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US helped draft, that you don't seem to be aware of:
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
We either do or we don't have religious freedom here and if that freedom doesn't extend into how people can conduct business and what activities they choose to be involved in and what they refuse to do, then we really DON'T have the freedom,
So it seems your view is that religious freedom must trump every other freedom or right. But that cannot work. Not everyone follows the same religion (if any). Ensuring that is the whole point of religious freedom. But each religion has its own idea of what its followers must do. Some say unmarried women who have sex must be stoned. According to your argument, making that illegal would be denying these people their religious freedom. Sure you may not agree with their religious mores, but you cannot question or deny theirs while refusing your right to discriminate based on yours to be questioned or made illegal.
the only way out is to hold that religious freedom must stop where other people's freedoms start. That means the right to go about their live peacefully, and not to be discriminated against.
Just like doctors should not be allowed to discriminate for any reason, people running stores open to the general public should not be allowed to discriminate. If selling to some categories of the population goes against their religion then they should run a private store, one that requires a membership card from their congregation or something, or they should find themselves another job where they can choose their clients.
We have government interfering with religion which is expressly forbidden in our constitution..
I think you were more specifically thinking of the Bill of Rights. It's a good document but it's not the absolute unambiguous answer you make it out to be. For instance, the first amendment, the one you care about because it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", immediately continues with "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Well, lots of religions consider blasphemy to be a religious crime and want it to be forbidden and punished. But that would go against the very same amendment's protection of freedom of speech. So which is it? It seems like according to you religious freedom should trump freedom of speech but I'm not sure your fellow citizens would agree with you on that, or that you'd really like to live in such a country.
Don't like it? Sorry. Get the constitution changed, but I warn you that you won't like the results.
Don't need to. I already leave in a country where discrimination is illegal. Works just fine. Thank you very much.
Then there are things which you CAN discriminate on.
If you don't like who a business [...] refuses service to, you are free to take your business elsewhere and share your views with your friends, neighbors or even the random person on the street if they will listen.
Let the market decide and if the majority of people think like you and take their business some other place, so be it. Just live your life and do your business and let others do the same. Seems like freedom to me.
Wonderful community you want to build. One where minorities can be ostracised, denied service by the majority, forced to either supply themselves from shaddy sources who will overchage them or to die or leave if they can. Members of that holier than thou majority can try to hide behind the veil of religious mores all they want. The truth is it is they who don't have one shred of morality.
3. [...]no moving parts. SSD for boot,
As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.
3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.
That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on investment. So they will at most install a separate electric meter at the customer's premises, and then hook up their machine to a regular power outlet. So then this fiber you want to put in the power cable will have nowhere to plug into. And again, given that most houses/apartments don't have fiber yet it, requiring a fiber connection would limit them to just a fraction of the potential market, or would force them to lay their own fiber which again is incredibly expensive (but at least it would not be redundant if they manage to resell it to regular ISPs). But it's more likely they will simply reuse their customer's Internet connection (remember data caps are mostly a US thing). So really what this tells us is that they will limit themselves to workloads which don't require too much communication. The ideal case would be CPU/GPU intensive computations like Folding@Home, SETI, GIMPS, etc.
They say the SSD is PCIe 3.0 but is the slot it's plugged into PCIe 3.0 or still PCIe 2.0? Too little is known to be sure that this combination actually doubled the bandwidth per lane, though it's certainly plausible.
There is no energy shortage.
I think you meant to say there is no power shortage. However we only have 56 years of proven reserves of oil, add another 4 years counting oil sands. To me that qualifies as a looming shortage of one of our primary source of energy. And that's all assuming zero increase in energy use, and as a corollary that about 85% of the population keeps on using 5 to 10 times less energy per person than Americans. So saying there's no energy shortage is a bit optimistic.
That said I'll grant you that although we only have 58 years of proven natural gas reserves, at least discoveries seem to be keeping pace. We'll see how that goes once the oil runs out however. Also while we can switch to other energy sources like wind and solar, they require an important initial investment of energy which will be hard once we start feeling the crunch.
Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation.
That's disingenuous when it's caused by a byproduct of our main sources of energy. CO2 is not something you can filter out of your car exhaust or that we can easily take out of power plants.
So you think we need to get rid of 6 out of every 7 people. Will you be first in line?
No. He's saying that whether we want it or not the world population will go down to 1 billion, either in an orderly fashion of our own choosing; or through famine, disease and war over resources.
While I don't agree with his 1 billion mark, it's obvious the population cannot increase indefinitely. Fortunately it's expected that it will plateau at or before the 10 billion mark. But there's still the question of whether there's enough resources (energy, drinking water, ores, etc) to sustain a population of 10 billion, all living decent lives (unlike now), indefinitely.
Mod this up! I've been asking the same questions for years now and still haven't seen any answers. I've also come to the same conclusions as AC.
Studies are not hard to find: type 'weather impact of wind turbines' in Google and the first link will be Wikipedia which will point you to five studies on the subject!
To summarize the current set of studies don't find a significant impact but more detailed analyzes will tell us more. But we've been building sky-scrapers and other tall structures for a century now and have yet to see any impact of these. Also wind-turbines are about 150 meters high when our atmosphere is 20,000 meters thick. Finally taking down wind-turbines is much easier than scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. So overall I have a hard time feeling concerned.
Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.
You're forgetting all the the food that is thrown away by producers and then supermarkets because it would not sell, then all the food people buy and let go bad, and then all that they put in their plate and then throw away because they're full. So to get this 2000 calories intake farmers need to produce at least 4000. But probably you think that solving this issue is trivial.
However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently.
A no less considerable amount does not lend itself to standard agricultural practices either because of the terrain or the lack of water for irrigation. The 'efficient land use' also relies on a massive use of fossil fuel based fertilizers. But you probably think we have an inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels.
And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. [...] And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.
Sure. Convincing everyone to stop eating beef, let alone most forms of meat, is totally realistic. And having to go down this path is absolutely not the sign that there's more people than the earth can support given our current lifestyle.
And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% [...] we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it,
Great! 0.5% of the population can afford increased food costs! Even if we ignore disparities among their populations and extend your reasoning to all developed countries we end up with at most a billion people. Do you even care about the remaining 85%?
So maybe the earth can sustain 7 billion people but all your arguments are naive and totally off the mark.
I have been wondering about Stingrays too. Based on the Stingrays Wikipedia page they would not need access to the SIM card's private key. Instead they force the device to use the weaker A5/2 security protocol and then crack it which allows them to recover the SIM card's private key.
The "GSM Active Key Extraction" performed by the StingRay in step three merits additional explanation. A GSM phone encrypts all communications content using an encryption key stored on its SIM card with a copy stored at the service provider. While simulating the target device during the above explained man-in-the-middle attack, the service provider cell site will ask the StingRay (which it believes to be the target device) to initiate encryption using the key stored on the target device. Therefore, the StingRay needs a method to obtain the target device's stored encryption key else the man-in-the-middle attack will fail.
GSM primarily encrypts communications content using the A5/1 call encryption cypher. In 2008 it was reported that a GSM phone's encryption key can be obtained using $1,000 worth of computer hardware and 30 minutes of cryptanalysis performed on signals encrypted using A5/1. However, GSM also supports an export weakened variant of A5/1 called A5/2. This weaker encryption cypher can be cracked in real-time. While A5/1 and A5/2 use different cypher strengths, they each utilize the same underlying encryption key stored on the SIM card. Therefore, the StingRay performs "GSM Active Key Extraction" during step three of the man-in-the-middle attack as follows: (1) instruct target device to use the weaker A5/2 encryption cypher, (2) collect A5/2 encrypted signals from target device, and (3) perform cryptanalysis of the A5/2 signals to quickly recover the underlying stored encryption key. Once the encryption key is obtained, the StingRay uses it to comply with the encryption request made to it by the service provider during the man-in-the-middle attack.
This perfectly illustrates why allowing protocol variants with weaker security is a bad idea. It also makes Gemalto's security lapse look somewhat irrelevant: cracking the SIM's private key seems pretty trivial anyway.
with the vital secrets either stored a lot more carefully, or, ideally, generated on-SIM and never leaving the SIM during its operational life, short of a direct silicon-level attack.
My understanding is that's what they do already. The private key is generated and put directly into the SIM card and never leaves it. But a private key is useless if nobody knows the corresponding public key. It's the transfer of that public key to the entity that needs it, the carrier, that the NSA/GCHQ intercepted.
Maybe a fix would be for Gemalto to sell blank SIM cards and have the carriers themselves generate and burn the private key to it using a software WORN API: Write Once, Read Never. Of course then the NSA/GCHQ would have no trouble forcing the US carriers to hand over all their public keys but then they can already force them to intercept the communications. At least the rest of the world would only be subject spying by their own government.
Sorry, wrong story.
The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".
Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi referring to a small person.
But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).
So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.
Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi refering to a small person.
But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).
So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.
This proves that all the whining about the NSA has little to do with actual worries (as if anyone in the government actually cares about their porn viewing habits), and more to do with overwrought anti-Americanism.
Quite the opposite. It proves that the anti-French sentiment is so strong in the US and UK that it drowns any rational discussion.
ISP: Internet Service Provider. They connect your machine to the internet. WTF do you think server hosting companies do, you nitwit?
Server hosting companies certainly do not connect my machine to the Internet: they provide Internet hosting services and not Internet Access. And if you're going to use the ISP acronym in another discussion you should know that it commonly exclusively refers to Internet access providers. But it sure is a great way to spread FUD and claim plausible deniability.
I don't think it makes any noticable difference but that was not the point I was trying to make. If they can show a measurable difference
And again you miss the point: no matter what equipment you use you will not be able to detect any difference in sound quality between their cable and a regular cable.
It's even obvious without any testing to anyone who knows anything about the Ethernet, TCP/IP or the OSI model: either a packet of data makes it across the cable or it does not. If it does, then it's going to be bit for bit identical no matter what cable you used, and thus the resulting sound will be identical too. If the packet did not get across, then it means you god a broken cable or some rodent has been chomping on it. But the result will either be a retransmission in time, in which case there will again be no impact on the sound quality, and if not, a pop, stall or stutter. But you will under no circumstances get a reduced "sound picture", lesser "differentiation between sonic elements" or lesser "sense of clarity".