No, my argument requires you to realize the difference between the NSA and those who want to commit fraud.

Thieves will be deterred by technical means. The NSA will not be. Securing yourself against thieves is still preferable to not securing yourself at all.

I certainly don't expect you to trust the NSA, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't matter for most of us. They're not interested in us.

If you want to fight the NSA, you have to do it politically. It's their only weak point.

You know, I hate the patriot act with every fiber of my being, but that argument doesn't quite hold water.

The NSA doesn't care about your money. They don't need to blackmail you. If they want you, they can come and get you. They don't affect the vast majority of Americans. I don't care for them spying on me, but in reality the vast majority of us (myself included) will never see anything become of it.

Thieves and fraudsters, on the other hand, have a definite desire to have your money. They will get it by any means necessary. You need protection against them.

You'll never have a foolproof defense against the NSA. You can make their job harder, but that's about it. They have the resources to get to you if they want to. Ukrainian script kiddies don't. So make technical countermeasures against the thieves, and political ones against the NSA.

That was my point, actually.

Oklahoma is a very oil-friendly state. We're not about to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs until our houses all fall down.

Hopefully those studies can keep others from falling in the same hole we are here. As for us, forget about us, we'll be pumping until there's nothing there but rock.

First off: spreading FUD? Watch that knee, it's jerking a bit there.

I can't find the story on slashdot (admittedly, I didn't try all too hard), but a quick google search found the name of the facility and the wikipedia article. It's the Rocky Flats Plant about 15 miles from Denver. There are pretty little graphs showing where plutonium was found.

It's old news - I don't remember what the slashdot story was about off the top of my head.

My point is that this sort of thing isn't acceptable for commercial entities, and it shouldn't be acceptable for the government. I'm all behind a lot of special exceptions the government gets - like military vehicles not having to be compliant with safety laws - but things like nuclear safety should apply to everyone. Best practices are there for a reason.

I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.

Had the fallout been a lot worse, Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been cordoned off.

I'm actually surprised they rebuilt, honestly. There are large parts of Okinawa where nothing gets built. I was under the understanding that it's a religious thing - they believe that the spirits of the dead from the battle there still occupy those sites, and building there would upset them. Okinawa tends to be cane fields, urban sprawl, and wilderness. A lot of people died at the two bomb sites, so you think they'd have abandoned them.

(Disclaimer: I lived in Japan, but do not claim to be an expert in their religion)

"Bomb the Blogosphere was a t-shirt worn by Martin Reed in the comic Questionable Content.

Not sure if xkcd ever talked about bombing the blogosphere.

There are fault lines in Oklahoma. There's a fairly large one that runs down from Nebraska into the eastern part of the state. It's usually pretty quiet, but every now and again you get a shift.

And the article said that they're updating fault maps - they don't have enough data.

So... are we sure these are caused by fracking? 'Cause even if you are, you'll never get Oklahomans (especially the government) to believe it.

After all, we're the state that gave you Sen. Inhofe, who still denies that climate change is happening at all (sorry about that, I didn't vote for him). We've got a lot of people employed in the Oil industry. Going against Oil here is political suicide.

Hopefully we can provide scientists enough data to prove what's going on (if it is indeed manmade) so they can use the data elsewhere. They'll make no traction here.

Just guessing here:

They want to remind the current politicians and the people that vote for them that nuclear testing isn't OK.

And probably that the US needs to take more concern about the environment, especially the military. Remember the story a few weeks back about how the background radiation in Denver is considerably higher than normal due to poor practices at an upwind nuclear weapon factory? That kind of crap is unacceptable.

(I'm not an anti-bomb guy or an anti-nuclear guy , but I do think the government needs to be a bit more careful with their impact on the environment, since that's where its citizens live. I'm not upset about trinity though - special circumstances and whatnot.)

It's small compared to other tests. It's only large compared to Hiroshima.

You'll note that Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still there. If we dropped, say, a 50 megaton bomb on them, they wouldn't be.

I'm not entirely sure that the amount of radioactive fallout is directly proportional to the size of the bomb, though.

He's talking about social conservatives, who want life to return to a non-existent "golden age" when men did what Jesus said if they didn't want to go to hell and women did what they were told if they didn't want to run into another door.

They tend to coincide with a lot of rich industrialists, who believe we should go back to a simpler time when they could shoot union leaders and not have to worry about silly things like safety or disability insurance, or paying actual money to the workers.

Personally, I'd say he probably means 150 years rather than 300. 300 years ago, the north was full of religious extremists and in the south you were either a slave-owning plantation worker or a nobody.

Back in the old days, you'd generally have to either replace the physical chip or at least move a jumper in order to write to firmware.

The current status quo is simply to lower costs for support; you don't have to send out a tech to update someone's firmware, you can just have them download a file and run it. Companies can save money on QA because you can fix mistakes later on. To make matters worse, the vast majority of consumers don't understand the problem.

I agree with you 100%, but this is money we're talking about. I could see a small market of locked-firmware devices targeted at entities that require that level of security, but it would be priced well outside consumer range.

I can see three categories here:

1) Victim is underage. Child porn laws apply, obviously.

2) Victim did not consent to be photographed. I don't know what the law says here, but I could see the justification for making this a criminal offense if it's not one already. A reasonable expectation of privacy would be a standard - being photographed by a spy cam in the bathroom isn't the same as being photographed sunbathing on a nude beach.

3) Victim did consent to be photographed, but did not consent to have the photographs published. This should be a civil matter. It's a dick move, sure, but it's not a matter for the police.

I'm not sure new laws need to be made, but existing laws may need clarification.

Did you get lost on your way to 4chan, little boy?

Pipe down, the adults are talking.

I've heard that, but the company I drove for doesn't do anything past New York (and even then, only rarely). I've heard plenty of truck drivers curse Boston, although NYC still holds the candle for most the most truck-hostile reputation (I've never been there either) - not for having bad drivers, but because the roads aren't made for 53' trailers.

That wouldn't explain the recovery after the dust bowl. Sure, there's some cattle ranching out there, but it's certainly not everywhere. And while the farmers do fertilize the fields, they don't fertilize areas left fallow. Those areas are recovering as well.