US technology companies were being forced in FISA courts to cooperate with FBI investigations, such as on "mandatory back doors" to allow access to encrypted data."
Is there an actual link to this happening, or is this just more apples-to oranges fearmongering?
Both.
The FBI wanted a backdoor, and Apple fought it. https://gizmodo.com/why-you-sh... Successfully, that time-- the FBI withdrew, and said they'd find a different way to crack the phone.
Interestingly Washington DC has free public transport for all residents under 21 and has for years. They don't have a school bus system.
I do not think that word means what you may think it means.
Then you think wrong. The phrase "free public transport for all residents under 21" means people under 21 do not pay for transportation. If you think it means something else, you're wrong.
The statements the libertarian ideologues have been repeating over and over, "it's not free, somebody pays for it!!" is really a statement with no content. When a restaurant gives out free samples to people passing by, that doesn't mean they don't pay for it. If the bar I go to says "free beer when the Browns win a game"-- yes, of course the bar pays for the beer. "Free" means you don't pay for it. Even "free comic book day" doesn't mean that comic books appear by a magic spell, somebody still prints them, and the printers and distributors and even the employees of the comic shop all get paid for "selling" the book for free.
Yes, the word "free" has multiple meanings. Anybody posting on/. ought to already know that. If you don't, try: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
I mean the point is to not use up resources until we don't have any, and to not throw shit into nature until we're living in our own shit.
No, the point of metropolitan bans is that a lot of cars in a densely populated small urban area makes unbreathable air.
Overall, fuel efficiency and pollution and carbon efficiency mean, as you say, that you don't want to use up resources, but the specific application discussed here is cities.
Numbers can be tricky. What affects the cost of car conversions from infernal combustion to all electric is not actually the cost of the conversion, it is actually the cost of the loss of investment in the current fossil fueled vehicle.
...So how much will a $100,000 vehicle be worth if it is banned from metropolitan areas, pretty much zero,
I don't get it. Sports cars are for driving out on the open road. The metropolitan bans are typically for the crowded downtown areas. You don't even want to take your sports car there, you want a little runabout for that.
I would have said that converting a classic Aston Martin from gas to electric would turn it from a collectable into a hodgepodge.
Not quite everyone goes to University to mate. Actually, there weren't any women in the physics department that I went to.
I think physics departments have somewhat changed since you graduated. Not completely, but the all-male department is becoming somewhat of a dinosaur. Currently, about 20% of physics degrees are earned by women:
Please, tell me where University still costs only $60,000...
I got a degree for $20k in the early y2k at the local state college.
Got it.
The first hit on google: "According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was... $9,970 for state residents at public colleges." https://www.collegedata.com/cs...
Yes, I was referring to the U.S. (and the western world in general). PRC does not have a market economy, so it's problematical to base "economically competitive" (which is what we were talking about) on what they do.
That also applies to the 53 gigawatts of solar capacity the PRC installed last year-- considerably more than the nuclear generation installed, even with the capacity factor. Interesting, but the decisions in PRC are calculated by a different metric than we do, so you can't really translate that to economics here. (The installation does work to push solar panel production and installation down the learning curve, though.)
Not "anywhere". Nuclear plants need cooling, so you want to have access to water.
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
Cooling towers don't remove the need for water. It's not a big deal overall, since 75% of the planet is water (and most cities tend to be near one body of water or another) but, no, you can't site them "anywhere". "Dry cooling" exists as a technology, but it's 3-4 times as expensive, and no plants use it in the U.S. (I think that there's one in South Africa).
I'm not even sure what your point about potassium is. Eating a banana does not increase your potassium 40 exposure. This is true whether you use the linear-no-threshold model or not.
As for Thorium cycle reactors, yes, I agree that it's wise to be somewhat skeptical of the technology until some of the details are a bit more developed. The old IAEA report gives some of the basics: https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/... , and there are review papers here and there that give a somewhat more updated view: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/... , for example.
I think it's an interesting enough approach to solving long-term problems that I would like to see some engineering development work done on a prototype to show it's feasible, but I wouldn't want to commit to it without seeing some engineering. There is not a "then a miracle occurs" step, but as with most engineering, the devil is likely to be in the details, and we need to know the details.
In the short term, though, my approach would be to start reprocessing spent reactor fuel. The proliferation concerns can be addressed, and it's simply silly to warehouse it in swimming pools; that's not reasonable by any possible metric.
Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations. In places that have sun: solar. In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down. It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
Cool. Then you should start your own solar powered utility. You will make trillions of dollars because everyone will switch to your utility.
I don't need to; it's already happening. Take a look at the ratio of new solar generation installation versus new nuclear generation installation.
Oh, wait, new nuclear generation has an installation rate of zero. So that ratio is infinite.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale. Check the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are biomass conversion technologies, but they're usually called "biofuels", not synfuels.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, with better tech).
If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both.
That's amusing, but debunked. Bananas do contain potassium, some of which is 40, but the body maintains homeostatic levels of potassium: you don't incorporate more potassium in your body if you eat bananas. Even the Wikipedia article points that out.
...
* Lie I personally find most annoying: you can't use civilian reactor bred plutonium to make nuclear weapons, it's in there too long, too much of the isotopes that are hot or fission too easily.
Uh, sort of. You're right, you don't do that today, because we don't use breeder reactors, nor do we reprocess "spent" nuclear fuel. If we are going to move to a long-term solution of the global energy requirements using nuclear power, however, we would have to do these, and proliferation is a concern if you have breeder reactors, and also for reprocessing.
A possible alternative, though, is thorium cycle reactors. Current thinking is that diverting thorium-cycle production to bomb use is not practical. (But then, as yet the thorium reactors are more theoretical than actual).
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements.
True, but what that's saying is primarily that not all sources meet all applications, so we may want to use different energy sources for different applications.
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Nuclear, on the other hand, may be the preferred source for gigawatt-scale baseload power in industrialized areas (which is not to say that you might not also use solar for daytime peaking power).
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy. It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface.
Not "anywhere". Nuclear plants need cooling, so you want to have access to water.
(That turns out to be not a problem with the Navy, which operates its ships only in environments surrounded by water.)
...
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas.
Transportation is not going to be nuclear, unless you're talking electric vehicles, in which case the electrical source can be solar, or pretty much anything that generates electricity. You mentioned ships, but marine freight accounts for only 15% of the transportation energy use, which itself is about 25% of world energy use-- less than 4% of world energy use. (link: https://www.maritime-executive... ). Might indeed be worth going after that 4%, but it's only going to be a small perturbation on global energy, not a big factor.
As for "industry"-- that depends which industry you're talking about.
No, it is Azure. Office 365 is just one of the services (presumably) deployed there.
Yes, "presumably". Specifically, the summary we are talking about starts "Starting around 9:15 a.m. ET, a number of Office 365 customers began reporting on Twitter that they were unable to sign into that service "
The outage affected systems from other organizations and people as well.
He did pontificate against human colonization and terraforming of Mars. (He didn't exactly say he was "against" it: what he said was that he thought it would never happen)....
200 years ago, some idiots were saying the same about Antarctica,...
NASA seems to have got Mars landings down nearly pat. Although the article didn't exactly say, it seemed like this descent was similar to other recent landers, will have to look for exact details...
Yes, it was identical to the Mars Phoenix in overall landing technique, which itself was (nearly) identical to the Mars Polar Lander of 1998 ("nearly" accounting for some corrections made to avoid the fate of Polar Lander, which crashed).
different from Pathfinder and MER, which used the airbag technique, and from Curiosity (and the upcoming 2020), which used SkyCrane.
Didn't THE scientific mind of our times, Bill Nye, just last week pontificate that Mars exploration is pointless?
No, he didn't.
He did pontificate against human colonization and terraforming of Mars. (He didn't exactly say he was "against" it: was he said was that he thought it would never happen). But he said he was in favor of human exploration of Mars.
...
I value Mars exploration. We both get a vote. I vote for more space exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
US technology companies were being forced in FISA courts to cooperate with FBI investigations, such as on "mandatory back doors" to allow access to encrypted data."
Is there an actual link to this happening, or is this just more apples-to oranges fearmongering?
Both.
The FBI wanted a backdoor, and Apple fought it.
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-sh...
Successfully, that time-- the FBI withdrew, and said they'd find a different way to crack the phone.
Interestingly Washington DC has free public transport for all residents under 21 and has for years. They don't have a school bus system.
I do not think that word means what you may think it means.
Then you think wrong. The phrase "free public transport for all residents under 21" means people under 21 do not pay for transportation.
If you think it means something else, you're wrong.
The statements the libertarian ideologues have been repeating over and over, "it's not free, somebody pays for it!!" is really a statement with no content. When a restaurant gives out free samples to people passing by, that doesn't mean they don't pay for it. If the bar I go to says "free beer when the Browns win a game"-- yes, of course the bar pays for the beer. "Free" means you don't pay for it. Even "free comic book day" doesn't mean that comic books appear by a magic spell, somebody still prints them, and the printers and distributors and even the employees of the comic shop all get paid for "selling" the book for free.
Yes, the word "free" has multiple meanings. Anybody posting on /. ought to already know that. If you don't, try: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
I mean the point is to not use up resources until we don't have any, and to not throw shit into nature until we're living in our own shit.
No, the point of metropolitan bans is that a lot of cars in a densely populated small urban area makes unbreathable air.
Overall, fuel efficiency and pollution and carbon efficiency mean, as you say, that you don't want to use up resources, but the specific application discussed here is cities.
Numbers can be tricky. What affects the cost of car conversions from infernal combustion to all electric is not actually the cost of the conversion, it is actually the cost of the loss of investment in the current fossil fueled vehicle.
...So how much will a $100,000 vehicle be worth if it is banned from metropolitan areas, pretty much zero,
I don't get it. Sports cars are for driving out on the open road. The metropolitan bans are typically for the crowded downtown areas. You don't even want to take your sports car there, you want a little runabout for that.
I would have said that converting a classic Aston Martin from gas to electric would turn it from a collectable into a hodgepodge.
But so far Apple has resisted the mandatory decrypting and back doors.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/05/02/apple-other-tech-companies-continue-to-resist-encryption-backdoor-proposals-by-fbi-us-doj
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/apple-fbi-privacy-encryption-fight-san-bernardino-shooting-syed-farook-iphone
https://www.imore.com/why-apple-was-right-resist-government-demands-back-door-ios
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-wants-apple-to-help-unlock-iphone-used-by-san-bernardino-shooter/2016/02/16/69b903ee-d4d9-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.htm
Not quite everyone goes to University to mate. Actually, there weren't any women in the physics department that I went to.
I think physics departments have somewhat changed since you graduated. Not completely, but the all-male department is becoming somewhat of a dinosaur. Currently, about 20% of physics degrees are earned by women:
https://www.aps.org/programs/women/resources/statistics.cfm
Overall in universities, though, women outnumber men.
Please, tell me where University still costs only $60,000...
I got a degree for $20k in the early y2k at the local state college.
Got it.
The first hit on google: "According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was... $9,970 for state residents at public colleges."
https://www.collegedata.com/cs...
when I look at a dollar bill, it says "this note is legal tender for all debts, public or private".
So I'd think that if you offer to pay your coffee-shop bill with dollar bills, that's legal tender for the debt you owe then for the service. "A creditor is obligated to accept legal tender toward repayment of a debt."
Yes, I was referring to the U.S. (and the western world in general). PRC does not have a market economy, so it's problematical to base "economically competitive" (which is what we were talking about) on what they do.
That also applies to the 53 gigawatts of solar capacity the PRC installed last year-- considerably more than the nuclear generation installed, even with the capacity factor. Interesting, but the decisions in PRC are calculated by a different metric than we do, so you can't really translate that to economics here. (The installation does work to push solar panel production and installation down the learning curve, though.)
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
Cooling towers don't remove the need for water. It's not a big deal overall, since 75% of the planet is water (and most cities tend to be near one body of water or another) but, no, you can't site them "anywhere". "Dry cooling" exists as a technology, but it's 3-4 times as expensive, and no plants use it in the U.S. (I think that there's one in South Africa).
I'm not even sure what your point about potassium is. Eating a banana does not increase your potassium 40 exposure. This is true whether you use the linear-no-threshold model or not.
As for Thorium cycle reactors, yes, I agree that it's wise to be somewhat skeptical of the technology until some of the details are a bit more developed. The old IAEA report gives some of the basics: https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/... , and there are review papers here and there that give a somewhat more updated view: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/... , for example.
I think it's an interesting enough approach to solving long-term problems that I would like to see some engineering development work done on a prototype to show it's feasible, but I wouldn't want to commit to it without seeing some engineering. There is not a "then a miracle occurs" step, but as with most engineering, the devil is likely to be in the details, and we need to know the details.
In the short term, though, my approach would be to start reprocessing spent reactor fuel. The proliferation concerns can be addressed, and it's simply silly to warehouse it in swimming pools; that's not reasonable by any possible metric.
Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations. In places that have sun: solar. In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down. It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
Cool. Then you should start your own solar powered utility. You will make trillions of dollars because everyone will switch to your utility.
I don't need to; it's already happening. Take a look at the ratio of new solar generation installation versus new nuclear generation installation.
Oh, wait, new nuclear generation has an installation rate of zero. So that ratio is infinite.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
Check the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are biomass conversion technologies, but they're usually called "biofuels", not synfuels.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, with better tech).
If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both.
That's amusing, but debunked. Bananas do contain potassium, some of which is 40, but the body maintains homeostatic levels of potassium: you don't incorporate more potassium in your body if you eat bananas. Even the Wikipedia article points that out.
...
* Lie I personally find most annoying: you can't use civilian reactor bred plutonium to make nuclear weapons, it's in there too long, too much of the isotopes that are hot or fission too easily.
Uh, sort of. You're right, you don't do that today, because we don't use breeder reactors, nor do we reprocess "spent" nuclear fuel. If we are going to move to a long-term solution of the global energy requirements using nuclear power, however, we would have to do these, and proliferation is a concern if you have breeder reactors, and also for reprocessing.
A possible alternative, though, is thorium cycle reactors. Current thinking is that diverting thorium-cycle production to bomb use is not practical. (But then, as yet the thorium reactors are more theoretical than actual).
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements.
True, but what that's saying is primarily that not all sources meet all applications, so we may want to use different energy sources for different applications.
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Nuclear, on the other hand, may be the preferred source for gigawatt-scale baseload power in industrialized areas (which is not to say that you might not also use solar for daytime peaking power).
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface.
Not "anywhere". Nuclear plants need cooling, so you want to have access to water.
(That turns out to be not a problem with the Navy, which operates its ships only in environments surrounded by water.)
...
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas.
Transportation is not going to be nuclear, unless you're talking electric vehicles, in which case the electrical source can be solar, or pretty much anything that generates electricity. You mentioned ships, but marine freight accounts for only 15% of the transportation energy use, which itself is about 25% of world energy use-- less than 4% of world energy use. (link: https://www.maritime-executive... ). Might indeed be worth going after that 4%, but it's only going to be a small perturbation on global energy, not a big factor.
As for "industry"-- that depends which industry you're talking about.
Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations.
In places that have sun: solar.
In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down.
It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
No, it is Azure. Office 365 is just one of the services (presumably) deployed there.
Yes, "presumably". Specifically, the summary we are talking about starts "Starting around 9:15 a.m. ET, a number of Office 365 customers began reporting on Twitter that they were unable to sign into that service "
The outage affected systems from other organizations and people as well.
Sure.
You plan on running your own 2 factor authentication token system? Good luck keeping it up 100% of the time for 100% of your users across the globe.
I'm not sure why I should need two factor authentication to run my word processor.
You do know that this is what we're talking about, right? Office 365. Which most people use as a word processor.
Yes: this is what happens when you don't own your software, you just "license" the use of it.
He did pontificate against human colonization and terraforming of Mars. (He didn't exactly say he was "against" it: what he said was that he thought it would never happen). ...
200 years ago, some idiots were saying the same about Antarctica, ...
I'm with you there :)
https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/sto...
Does this site have moderators any more? The new owners - hey, get them to do their job - this used to be a tech site, not a spammers' playground.
Set your browsing to +1 in the slider at the top and you'll miss most of the junk.
NASA seems to have got Mars landings down nearly pat. Although the article didn't exactly say, it seemed like this descent was similar to other recent landers, will have to look for exact details...
Yes, it was identical to the Mars Phoenix in overall landing technique, which itself was (nearly) identical to the Mars Polar Lander of 1998 ("nearly" accounting for some corrections made to avoid the fate of Polar Lander, which crashed).
different from Pathfinder and MER, which used the airbag technique, and from Curiosity (and the upcoming 2020), which used SkyCrane.
Explain to me right this instant why you should not be banned with your idiotic posts?
Because since he posted as AC, that means would mean banning anonymous cowards?
(not that this would necessarily be a bad thing, considering the low signal to noise ratio of AC posts...)
Didn't THE scientific mind of our times, Bill Nye, just last week pontificate that Mars exploration is pointless?
No, he didn't.
He did pontificate against human colonization and terraforming of Mars. (He didn't exactly say he was "against" it: was he said was that he thought it would never happen). But he said he was in favor of human exploration of Mars.
...
I value Mars exploration. We both get a vote. I vote for more space exploration.
Yep, I'm with you.