The real solution is already known: organ donation should be opt-out by default. Studies have already been conducted that organ donation is above 80% or so in countries that adopt an opt-out default, and only 20% or so in an opt-in system. Most people simply don't take the time to opt-in, but they similarly wouldn't take the time to opt-out.
I guess that now the data is structured and easily searchable rather than having to stitch together random analog phone conversations. But in a country of 300 million people, no one is interested in your text messages, emails, etc. unless you're using them to actively plan something.
You're wrong. Scandals about the misuse of this power have already broken out. Where have you been? Didn't you hear about the NSA employees abusing these surveillance powers to spy on potential love interests?
That's just the beginning. Once you normalize that behaviour, you can expect political and other oppressive abuses to soon follow.
You're liable for things that happen in your home, but you don't have to stay home all day and be vigilant about every little thing that happens. That's what insurance is for.
That quote refers to anonymity from the government. It's not clear that anonymity whem commenting on corprations or people have the same protections due to libel laws.
Copying and providing proxy access are process controls. You discipline people for that.
No, it's worse than that. Firstly, they are efficiency impediments because they require workarounds, and moreover, they obstruct the deployment of fine-grained permissions ala POLA because users still need to be able to do something to do their jobs. Secondly, training users has never worked and will never work, particularly when such discipline conflicts with the need to do their job.
There's a reason capability-based security tokens are gaining traction with online web services at the expense of traditional wall-garden authentication scenarios: they are more composable, more fine-grained, and most importantly, fine-grained security authorizations are largely invisible to users.
You're demanding something perfect and rejecting anything that doesn't measure up.
No, I'm demanding that administrators not be able to express policies that aren't actually enforceable.
For example, if Alice allows access to Bob and Charlie, she should have the ability to restrict resharing.
Why? This access control merely provides a false sense of security. Bob and Charlie could always just make a copy and send that, or proxy access for whomever they wish to share to. It doesn't actually restrict delegation, it merely provides the illusion of doing so.
Restricting delegation has caused all sorts of insecure mechanisms just re-enable the types of sharing that are needed just to get work done.
Let's be clear; the NSA has not broken the letter of the law, simply because there are judges, and a government backing those judges, that deems what the NSA is doing is appropriate and legal.
Who cares what they "think". It's up to a court, not the court of public opinion.
It's up to exactly the court of public opinion. If enough people think Snowden did the right thing, Obama will issue a pardon for whatever crimes Snowden may have broken.
The pill isn't just used for contraceptive reasons, but also for hormone regulation, particularly for women with exceptionally painful menstrual cramping. That Christians would rather exacerbate these people' suffering simply because the pill has other uses doesn't sound very Christian.
What world is this guy living in? Just the other week there were numerous articles documenting pervasive abuse of the surveillance abilities to monitor love interests. Last week a Federal district court judge ruled the surveillance was unconstitutional.
Solar power is expensive, really expensive. It's only because of government subsidies that anyone even considers using solar where grid power is available.
Not true, at least not to the extent you're implying. Prior to government subsidies, solar had a payback period of around 10-15 years. Solar panels need replacement every 20-25 years, barring disasters, so they have always had positive ROI. With equializing government subsidies, payback is less than 5 years. Furthermore, power generated from solar is during peak times when power is inherently more expensive.
Power companies need to invest in building more infrastructure than they actually need to generate in steady-state, just to handle rare peaks. Most of that additional investment sits idle on off-peak times. In the near future, power companies can instead avoid this additional expense because power can be generated closer to demand at peak times due to distributed power generation from renewables.
Furthermore, solar can be deployed in locales and in geometries that is otherwise wasted space (roofs, walls, windows, fabrics, etc.). The economics of solar have changed dramatically over the past decade, and that change is accelerating.
What piles on to the cost is the backup systems that need to be in place for when the sun does not shine.
Except most solar hookups use grid-ties, not backup systems, which is why it's not nearly as expensive as you seem to think.
Nuclear is an increasingly viable option, but a homogenous power generation infrastructure is a terrible idea. Our incredibly poor power transmission infrastructure is a product of a centralized power generation mentality, and switching to a smarter grid permitting bidirection power flow is essential for future growth, to increase robustness against failure, and to permit more flexible experimentation with future developments in energy. Take that from another electrical engineer.
I never denied that nuclear could displace nearly all fossil fuels for power generation, I simply deny that this is desirable. A mixed power infrastructure is essential, and the network topology changes needed to support distributed power generation make the whole network more robust against partial failures. Renewables are desirable for more than just safety reasons.
You're correct that nuclear has a better safety record than all other fuel sources save renewables, but it's disengenuous to claim that it doesn't have problems. The disaster potential is extremely, extremely high. Much higher than anything else could possibly even remotely approach.
New Thorium reactor designs are much safer, as are newer meltdown-safe designs, but they aren't widely deployed and proven either.
Waste disposal poses public safety concerns as well, even in Thorium designs (radiation intensity is much higher, even though its duration is much shorter).
I am sick of people trying to convince me that somehow paying 2X or 3X is somehow better when it clearly is not
How about you consider that perhaps you simply don't understand that current energy prices are artificially deflated due to subsidies and other negative externalities. Paying more is a price adjustment to a market stable price.
It's exactly the right way to look at it. Because that's what is happening, you are trying to throw money to artificially hurry up when solar becomes cost effective, which just doesn't work - you can only improve materials science so quickly before you are just wasting money.
Firstly, the government constantly subsidizes burgeoning industries in order to corner a market niche. Why pick on solar specifically?
Secondly, solar's cost effectiveness isn't limited by materials science at this point, it's limited by production capacity for refining the raw materials and producing panels. If solar enjoyed half the subsidies that fossil fuels have gotten over the years, they would be less expensive than fossil fuels are now. Thanks to recent subsidies, solar's cost has halved in the past 5 years and is now within spitting distance of fossil fuels.
Really? So, if I put a natural gas generator on my property the government will pay for 60% of the material and installation cost? As well as require the utility to buy electricity from me at a price above what it costs them to produce it themselves? I don't think so.
So because the subsidies are of a different type, they must not exist? Are you for real? Tell me, how much does military action in the middle east for access to cheap oil cost? What about the negative environmental externalities? 10,000 people a year die from respiratory complications due to air pollution. These and more are all implicit or explicit subsidies that fossil fuels enjoy, and you don't even think twice about them because you just grew up with this ridiculous status quo.
Solar must be the most subsidized electricity source out there today. I won't claim to be an expert but I've talked to people around here that are in the wind and solar business. The level of subsidies on wind and solar is mind blowing. These people will basically get the state and federal government to pay for all the equipment but they still can't build up wind and solar power because they would not be able to make enough money to pay the rent on the land. Think about that, they get the sun and wind for free, and the solar panels and windmills paid for by my tax dollars, and they still can't make any money.
The old centralized model power generation model doesn't work well for renewables, particularly in Canada. This has been known for quite some time.
'represents the government's counter-punch' to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network by connecting fragmented and fleeting communications. In ruling, the judge noted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. 'The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data,' he said."
Uh-huh, so they claim. Now where's the proof of its effectiveness? Because without that evidence, and also how many false negatives it throws up, we can't properly guage it's effectiveness and this judge is just blowing hot air out of his ass.
That's a mistake too. Centralized power generation allows for greater efficiencies, but also greater vulnerabilities as we just found out in Toronto with our huge ice storm outage.
Nuclear has many advantages, but it's not without its own problems. And "forcing alternative energy" is the wrong way to look at it. Renewables are just getting the same subsidies fossil fuels continue to enjoy.
Of course, and this in turn is offset by higher electricity prices. Surprise, and welcome to Ontario, Canada. Where electricity prices will jump 33% in the next 3 years thanks to "green energy." [financialpost.com] This will make it one of the most expensive places in North America to buy electricity. And what's funny? These "green energy retrofits and FiT programs" account for under 14% of generation.
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Higher energy costs spur investment in alternative energy sources and efficiency gains. It's something we need to do anyway. Fossil fuels are already too heavily subsidized as it stands, and that's one of the main reasons renewables aren't yet competitive. Speaking as an Ontarian.
Universities should band together to distribute all data from published material on P2P networks so it's redundantly stored at mulitple locations. This has the side-benefit of making a legitimate use of P2P obvious.
Or bad compared to a gang member, a warlord's soldier, or even security consultant?
Covering for each other is exactly what gang members and other organized criminals do. We really should have a higher standard of conduct for law enforcement. Just saying.
Data mining was just used to capture a large Food Stamp fraud ring in Florida. There really are public benefits to allowing snooping in depth. [...] Income tax cheaters really could be destroyed by data mining. You can bet we have a couple of million people who are tax cheats.
These types of fraud are not caught by data mining their phone and e-mail records, they're caught by analyzing the usage data they already have access to and look for unexpected patterns, just like we check for rigged elections. There are fe wpublic benefits to snopping in depth, and the number of false positives drown out any true positives they may return.
I'm no alarmist, but you got to know that Chernobyl caused 31 immediate deaths with three months of the event and will be a contributing factor in the deaths of many more people through cancer both in the emergency crews working the event and the general public in a number of countries. So your characterization of the event as minor is a bit much.
Air pollution causes over 10,000 deaths every year in America alone due to respiratory distress. Nuclear's disasters pale in comparison.
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The real solution is already known: organ donation should be opt-out by default. Studies have already been conducted that organ donation is above 80% or so in countries that adopt an opt-out default, and only 20% or so in an opt-in system. Most people simply don't take the time to opt-in, but they similarly wouldn't take the time to opt-out.
You're wrong. Scandals about the misuse of this power have already broken out. Where have you been? Didn't you hear about the NSA employees abusing these surveillance powers to spy on potential love interests?
That's just the beginning. Once you normalize that behaviour, you can expect political and other oppressive abuses to soon follow.
You're liable for things that happen in your home, but you don't have to stay home all day and be vigilant about every little thing that happens. That's what insurance is for.
That quote refers to anonymity from the government. It's not clear that anonymity whem commenting on corprations or people have the same protections due to libel laws.
No, it's worse than that. Firstly, they are efficiency impediments because they require workarounds, and moreover, they obstruct the deployment of fine-grained permissions ala POLA because users still need to be able to do something to do their jobs. Secondly, training users has never worked and will never work, particularly when such discipline conflicts with the need to do their job.
There's a reason capability-based security tokens are gaining traction with online web services at the expense of traditional wall-garden authentication scenarios: they are more composable, more fine-grained, and most importantly, fine-grained security authorizations are largely invisible to users.
No, I'm demanding that administrators not be able to express policies that aren't actually enforceable.
Why? This access control merely provides a false sense of security. Bob and Charlie could always just make a copy and send that, or proxy access for whomever they wish to share to. It doesn't actually restrict delegation, it merely provides the illusion of doing so.
Restricting delegation has caused all sorts of insecure mechanisms just re-enable the types of sharing that are needed just to get work done.
Polaris: Virus Safe Computing for Windows XP. This is what Windows Vista's new security model should have been.
Except the courts were lied to, and there is no oversight. There are thousands of documented cases of abuse. What the NSA is doing is far from legal.
It's up to exactly the court of public opinion. If enough people think Snowden did the right thing, Obama will issue a pardon for whatever crimes Snowden may have broken.
The pill isn't just used for contraceptive reasons, but also for hormone regulation, particularly for women with exceptionally painful menstrual cramping. That Christians would rather exacerbate these people' suffering simply because the pill has other uses doesn't sound very Christian.
What world is this guy living in? Just the other week there were numerous articles documenting pervasive abuse of the surveillance abilities to monitor love interests. Last week a Federal district court judge ruled the surveillance was unconstitutional.
Not true, at least not to the extent you're implying. Prior to government subsidies, solar had a payback period of around 10-15 years. Solar panels need replacement every 20-25 years, barring disasters, so they have always had positive ROI. With equializing government subsidies, payback is less than 5 years. Furthermore, power generated from solar is during peak times when power is inherently more expensive.
Power companies need to invest in building more infrastructure than they actually need to generate in steady-state, just to handle rare peaks. Most of that additional investment sits idle on off-peak times. In the near future, power companies can instead avoid this additional expense because power can be generated closer to demand at peak times due to distributed power generation from renewables.
Furthermore, solar can be deployed in locales and in geometries that is otherwise wasted space (roofs, walls, windows, fabrics, etc.). The economics of solar have changed dramatically over the past decade, and that change is accelerating.
Except most solar hookups use grid-ties, not backup systems, which is why it's not nearly as expensive as you seem to think.
Nuclear is an increasingly viable option, but a homogenous power generation infrastructure is a terrible idea. Our incredibly poor power transmission infrastructure is a product of a centralized power generation mentality, and switching to a smarter grid permitting bidirection power flow is essential for future growth, to increase robustness against failure, and to permit more flexible experimentation with future developments in energy. Take that from another electrical engineer.
I never denied that nuclear could displace nearly all fossil fuels for power generation, I simply deny that this is desirable. A mixed power infrastructure is essential, and the network topology changes needed to support distributed power generation make the whole network more robust against partial failures. Renewables are desirable for more than just safety reasons.
You're correct that nuclear has a better safety record than all other fuel sources save renewables, but it's disengenuous to claim that it doesn't have problems. The disaster potential is extremely, extremely high. Much higher than anything else could possibly even remotely approach.
New Thorium reactor designs are much safer, as are newer meltdown-safe designs, but they aren't widely deployed and proven either.
Waste disposal poses public safety concerns as well, even in Thorium designs (radiation intensity is much higher, even though its duration is much shorter).
How about you consider that perhaps you simply don't understand that current energy prices are artificially deflated due to subsidies and other negative externalities. Paying more is a price adjustment to a market stable price.
Firstly, the government constantly subsidizes burgeoning industries in order to corner a market niche. Why pick on solar specifically?
Secondly, solar's cost effectiveness isn't limited by materials science at this point, it's limited by production capacity for refining the raw materials and producing panels. If solar enjoyed half the subsidies that fossil fuels have gotten over the years, they would be less expensive than fossil fuels are now. Thanks to recent subsidies, solar's cost has halved in the past 5 years and is now within spitting distance of fossil fuels.
So because the subsidies are of a different type, they must not exist? Are you for real? Tell me, how much does military action in the middle east for access to cheap oil cost? What about the negative environmental externalities? 10,000 people a year die from respiratory complications due to air pollution. These and more are all implicit or explicit subsidies that fossil fuels enjoy, and you don't even think twice about them because you just grew up with this ridiculous status quo.
The old centralized model power generation model doesn't work well for renewables, particularly in Canada. This has been known for quite some time.
Uh-huh, so they claim. Now where's the proof of its effectiveness? Because without that evidence, and also how many false negatives it throws up, we can't properly guage it's effectiveness and this judge is just blowing hot air out of his ass.
That's a mistake too. Centralized power generation allows for greater efficiencies, but also greater vulnerabilities as we just found out in Toronto with our huge ice storm outage.
Nuclear has many advantages, but it's not without its own problems. And "forcing alternative energy" is the wrong way to look at it. Renewables are just getting the same subsidies fossil fuels continue to enjoy.
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Higher energy costs spur investment in alternative energy sources and efficiency gains. It's something we need to do anyway. Fossil fuels are already too heavily subsidized as it stands, and that's one of the main reasons renewables aren't yet competitive. Speaking as an Ontarian.
Universities should band together to distribute all data from published material on P2P networks so it's redundantly stored at mulitple locations. This has the side-benefit of making a legitimate use of P2P obvious.
Covering for each other is exactly what gang members and other organized criminals do. We really should have a higher standard of conduct for law enforcement. Just saying.
These types of fraud are not caught by data mining their phone and e-mail records, they're caught by analyzing the usage data they already have access to and look for unexpected patterns, just like we check for rigged elections. There are fe wpublic benefits to snopping in depth, and the number of false positives drown out any true positives they may return.
ID-based encryption is a terrible idea. There is no such thing as a public, unique, non-cryptographic name. See Zooko's triangle.
Air pollution causes over 10,000 deaths every year in America alone due to respiratory distress. Nuclear's disasters pale in comparison.