Comment bIoMeTrIcS aRe TeH FuChAr! (Score 4, Insightful) 146
Biometrics: Credentials that can be stolen off your body, can't be hashed, and can never be reset...and stealing them off your body can be legal too.
Biometrics: Credentials that can be stolen off your body, can't be hashed, and can never be reset...and stealing them off your body can be legal too.
Previous protests did result in a significant delay and eventual cancellation of Project Dragonfly, so the answer is yes, probably:
Unfortunately that's pretty much all of the companies...
It's worse than limited symptom-treating, they'll have no need to purchase data at all when they can just compel domestic companies to hand the data over China-style:
Actually, if Biden gets in again, there may not be a "next guy" either but for a different reason.
I'm really curious about what this might be. Sure, there would almost certainly be a "next girl" but there could be subsequent "next guys" after that...
US to China: Nobody gets away with turning all their megacorporations into arms of a giant state surveillance apparatus - except us!
It's good news that this "DRM developer" took 6 months to do what a DRM cracker did in less than 2 weeks. "DRM developer" is also one of the most openly villainous job titles I've ever run across.
Canada seems like a poster child for the failures of FPTP voting. For many decades they've had 2-3 leftist-to-centrist parties that attract voters who would all agree to put the tories well down the list of parties they'd like to have in charge (just above any far-right fringe parties that might appear, maybe also the most leftist party for some), and these parties get significant fractions of the vote, but the tories often win because they get more votes than any one of those 2-3 parties. In a ranked-choice system the tories wouldn't win just because the majority doesn't agree on their #1 choice for who they'd vastly prefer to have in power instead.
FPTP's tendency to force moderate outcomes is not an advantage even if it can seem appealing at times - it merely acts as a pressure vessel for extremism, holding it in with Kang vs. Kodos/Douche vs. Turd choices that disappoint a majority of voters across the spectrum until it explodes with the election of an anti-democratic candidate like Trump.
I agree that most people merely tolerate democracy rather than actually want it. FPTP does have a tendency to produce 2-party systems however:
You have to weigh the greening against crop losses due to less predictable/more extreme weather and reduced crop nutrition beyond 400ppm (the point where plants stop benefiting from increased CO2, which was passed many years ago). By 2030 the overall effect is expected to be signficant double-digit percentage drops in crop yields:
How about improved forms of democracy? Countries with primitive forms of democracy like first-past-the-post should upgrade to ranked-choice voting with proportional representation to break 2-party strangleholds and end strategic voting. The next step would be to move toward liquid democracy.
Statistical significance is an arbitrary threshold anyway, especially when the textbook 5% is used as if there's some fundamental law of the universe that gives 5% a special relationship to causality, when it was actually just a default number plugged in that should set off alarm bells if it hasn't been changed.
First we have to compare two types of flaring, just releasing the gas unburned where the methane goes directly into the atmosphere and acts as a powerful greenhouse gas (rarely done these days...intentionally, anyway), and flaring and burning it where the methane is ignited into an open flame that mostly converts it to CO2, a longer-lasting but much less powerful greenhouse gas. Previously the energy wasn't used at all, just wasted, but that was an energy waste issue rather than an emissions issue.
Burning the gas in a turbine converts it to CO2 more efficiently than an open flame, so the environmental improvement over the first scenario is obvious, compared to the second the improvement isn't as huge but still significant. I'd guess the 63% CO2-equivalent emissions is the difference between the total effective GHG output of running the gas through a turbine vs. burning it in an open flame, since some of the methane can still escape that way.
It doesn't take more energy than the fossil fuel produced to capture all of its CO2 output and more, so it's not a violation of thermodynamics any more than a catalytic converter on a car is.
This is much better for the environment than just flaring the gas but it's about the least useful thing that could be done with that energy. Training/running AIs would be somewhat better. Some even better uses I could think of:
- Putting the energy into grid storage (maybe even just local grid for the oil rig equipment)
- Running an atmospheric CCS plant, or even CCS on the exhaust of some of the nearby oil rig equipment
- Running a traditional data center (even better usefulness per watt/hour than AIs)
- Running some beneficial distributed computation work like WCG or F@H
I wonder why they're saying he was in "custody" if the only thing he needed to escape was another passport. Seems he didn't need to break out of jail first, and was likely in Executive Time Out with some limitations on where he was allowed to go, like Carlos Ghosn. And it seems like he may have been allowed to go to the airport.
I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs. -- H.L. Mencken