Aside from the "zOMG!!!! He belonged to some 'socialist' club in college!" bullshit, most of the rest of the file seemed to be variations on 'some foreign guy wants to be a permanent resident; we have absolutely nothing interesting on him'.

I suppose you might as well write it down if you go to the trouble of checking; but even J Edgar Hoover's paranoid little minions apparently couldn't find too much to hyperventilate about.

I don't know the details of proposed and actual treatment mechanisms for non-pathogen problems (though here is an outline of the regulations surrounding levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc permitted in the US. Regulation of organic pollutants and hydrocarbon levels were considered; but dropped and don't currently apply); but my understanding is that 'composting' on a wastewater treatment scale is not much like what people do in their back gardens, and is generally done in relatively vast hardware far from the neighbors. If anything, doing it properly probably scales up better than it scales down(amateur composters frequently fail to achieve optimal temperatures, moisture, etc. That's merely inefficient if you are dealing with grass clippings; but potentially fatal if dealing with intestinal pathogens; professionals can afford expertise, instruments, and process control, if they care).

Unfortunately, once you get past metals and pathogens(metals are at least measured, pathogens are acknowledged as a threat), you get a whole lot of 'more research needed'(the usual answer on endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical persistence); or 'ooh, it's just a teensy bit, and we aren't required to model bioaccumulation from populations exposed to higher levels of contaminants in food producing biosolids higher in contaminants, which produce more contaminated food, and so forth..'(this is why dioxins, dibenzofurans, and similar known-nasty carbon/chlorine creations aren't covered by final regulations).

In the long run, we've obviously survived exposure to this planet, trace metals and all; and more than a few unpleasant chemicals, so I'd hope that the problems can be worked out; but the financial pressure from people who just don't want to deal with the cost of incineration or landfilling has led to some rather questionable decisions. You tell someone that if they spread the stuff over a large enough area, they get to call it 'soil treatment'; but if they bury it all in one place they need to abide by standards for non-permeable landfill construction to keep the contaminants from leaching out, you create a deeply perverse incentive.

Better separation of industrial sources is an obvious first step(it's always more expensive to un-mix things after the fact than it is to keep them separate); but I get a lot of 'more research needed' when it comes to household disposal and drug excretion.

On the bright side, we don't use pig toilets anymore! So there is that.

The one nasty trick, even with residential effluent; but especially if commercial/industrial gets mixed in thanks to antiquated, defective, or illicit sewer piping; is that sewage is only mostly dangerous because of the bacteria.

Drugs of various sorts show up in residential sewage all the time, and have widely varying resistance to breakdown by low cost measures(if you throw enough resources at a chemist just about anything can be separated out, right down to isotopes; but if you can't biodegrade it, destroy it with UV exposure of modest intensity and duration, settle it out with flocculants, or similar cheap bulk methods, the cost will be high enough to be dubiously relevant to water treatment even in the first world); heavy metals show up from time to time and don't do much degrading at all, nasty persistent organic compounds are always a possibility. People just dump all kinds of ghastly stuff down the drain.

There is a certain...history... associated with people trying to dispose of the byproducts of sewage treatment, where most of these goodies end up, by means cheaper than landfilling. The current strategy involves re-branding them as 'biosolids', composting them long enough that the bacterial pathogens are (mostly) weeded out, and then trying to find suckers willing to use them as fertilizer.

It's too bad, really. If it were just shit, moderately competent composting practices would turn it quite readily into a safe, useful, soil additive. Dealing with the modest; but very much nonzero, levels of heavy metals and persistent organic compounds has proven to be really hairy.

Desalination is still expensive and thirst can be very, very, motivational. That, and thanks to their totally fucked water rights distribution, California will probably still be exporting alfalfa and bottled water as they are installing deathstills to reclaim the body's water of the dead.

You might notice if someone is tacky enough to run a hash cracker on the target machine's GPU; but GPUs are ever so good at very, very, fast memory access without straining themselves much or bothering the CPU at all. The 'ooh, antivirus isn't scanning your VRAM!!!' issue is practically irrelevant compared to the fact that you've got a more or less flexibly programmable secondary processor that can, in most systems, do whatever the hell it wants to pretty much all the RAM.

The only saving grace is that it's probably pretty easy to accidentally crash the system if you poke around too aggressively; but that's a weak defense.

I can see the case for avoiding overt offense just for giggles(Hey, let's call the downs babies 'mongoloids' just like the good old days!); but this WHO suggestion seems both excessively broad(eg. diseases named for people almost always honor discoverers or significant researchers, which is hardly stigmatizing; diseases named after locations, unless novel as all hell, tend to better known than their place of origin/discovery pretty quickly) and deeply futile(the veterinarians and epidemiologists of the world are suddenly going to stop making reference to animal vectors? Like hell.)

Plus, even brutally banal acronyms tend to find pejorative meanings that suit peoples' impressions of a disease pretty quickly. 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome' does its best to mean nothing; but people were still calling it 'severe asian respiratory syndrome' within days of its announcement. Plus, our supply of 'Novel Something Syndrome' form names is going to dry up real quick once the first one stops being novel and a second one shows up.

Some sort of systematic naming convention, ideally shorter than the causal organism's entire genetic code, would be nice; but informal naming is always kind of a mess and seems unlikely to change.

Most security-related hardware is also (and probably largely for this purpose) kept low-voltage/data cabling only, so you can usually do it without getting a full electrician involved.

Especially if you want outdoor mounts, there are still any number of mistakes that can lead to moisture problems, compromise insulation, damage fire barriers, and so on, so you don't want to scrape the bottom of the barrel too hard; but there aren't too many formal requirements compared to mains voltage work or structural modifications.

I know that smearing 'security' all over things is popular; but isn't this almost comically similar to non-security job descriptions?

Suitably high level technical skill pays very well, 'Director of' and 'Chief Something Officer' pay well to very well, 'consultants' are either quite expensive or powerless peons who have been reclassified to avoid labor laws that apply to real employees; and installation technicians aren't quite below the poverty line.

It depends on what is being simulated; but if the user is expected to do something useful under dire conditions(trigger ejection seat or the like), it may not be possible to usefully 'simulate' without beating on them a bit. A simulator that produces people who can calmly press the correct button when presented with the appropriate visual and audio stimuli; but panics, or flinches and jars the controls, when exposed to the shocks of a real mechanical system really failing might well get some users killed.

It's probably unhelpful to actually damage them; but the sensations of (sometimes violent) movement are a big part of operating some types of hardware and somebody who isn't experienced with them is arguably maltrained, or at least trained only to a very limited level.

It's more of a sleight of hand trick: the actual issue on the table was price; the 'FWD.us' flacks did a quick swap to capability (so that they could assert that those lazy workers could have gotten the job if they just up-skilled some more or something); and then abandoned the issue before anyone could point out that 'make yourself able to get the job' is not a matter of 'become more capable'; but 'become cheaper and more powerless.'

At least when these guys are talking about actually unskilled individuals what they say is somewhere close to true-ish, albeit not very helpful(yes, it is true that people with no skills and tepid intelligence are fucked. Any plans on how the bottom couple of quintiles are going to just train their way into being somebody you'd let touch an application, much less pay to do so?); but this one is a pure cost move. The workers were able to get the job, that's why they had it. They did have the skills, that's how they trained their replacements. They just weren't cheap enough.

Obviously, if you run a company whose two main costs are techies and electricity, you want to be able to hire techies for whatever qualifies as subsistence wages in Uttar Pradesh; but don't pretend that that's about 'skills', and don't fucking pretend you are doing us a favor by preaching some wise words about job creation at the same time.

The floating gates are isolated; but not perfectly, and on a modern high density device(especially an MLC one) it doesn't take much leakage to result in the wrong result.

Decay within a week is pretty aggressive for anything you'd have the nerve to sell; but all flash memory can be expected to lose its contents over time.

Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

Probably because the authors of the study were researchers at the University of Toronto and had access to air sampling equipment set up in the area? Sometimes you have to do the research where you can, rather than where you might want to.

(Also, we only share the same atmosphere on average. For, say, an urban area with lots of vehicle traffic, the amount of soot people are inhaling is going to depend very substantially on the vehicles in local use, with much weaker effects from more distant sources.)

Aside from the overtly disconcerting possibilities of nanotechnology-augmented spiders; does it strike anyone else as a matter for some potential concern that at least some organisms are quite permeable indeed to novel carbon structures?

A 'sap' is a small blunt weapon, usually a leather sack of lead shot, used to incapacitate a target. A 'SAP system' is a gargantuan and expensive piece of ERP software used to incapacitate a corporation.