>AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it

Provided the implementation is flawless of course. After all, a lot of maintenance is bug-fixing rather than updates.

On the flip side there may be something to be said for a certain amount of security through obscurity, provided it doesn't interfere with battle-hardened security, after all some of the security holes found by those many eyes will be kept secret/be sold on the black market by nefarious actors. A narrow-purpose algorithm is going to have far fewer eyes, good and bad, looking for security holes.

BUT for Gandalf's sake use your custom algorithm as a second layer of defense behind a well tested one, not instead of it! It's not like there's not plenty of good patent free security available. Some of it even has BSD licensed implementations.

> Anyone can be a dick, but being a competent _____________ entitles you to behaviour that from the outside looks dickish, but it really just a case of telling to truth to people who don't know what they don't know.

I think that's true of a great many specialties, even when you're trying hard not to look dickish (as I think we generally should)

>Human-made global warming: every sensible man should consider this a wild speculation at the moment

That was true 70 years ago, when such accusations were well-founded. We waited. Now we have the data to confirm that the extremely simple principles involved actually work as expected.

Total atmospheric CO2 levels have been steadily increasing at about 60-70% the rate of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that it the tub is filling up less quickly than you're adding water, its a near-certainty that you are responsible.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which scatters an infrared band not appreciably scattered by any other atmospheric gasses. It's really easy to do small-scale experiments to see this first hand - Bill Nye has even done some nice straightforward ones. And it's not *that* much more difficult to calculate the very approximate amount of additional energy that adds to the Earth (IIRC roughly 1MW of excess solar energy will be added to the Earth for every 1W of fossil-fuel based power produced, unless something unexpected happens to radically shorten the half-life of atmospheric CO2)

The only unknown is whether some as-yet unseen feedback system will kick in before the runaway greenhouse effect sets in that has tipped our bistable planet into its warm state so many times before. And so farm we've been discovering lots and lots of positive feedback systems kicking in to accelerate the transition, but not many to counteract it, certainly nothing nearly powerful enough to halt or reverse the trend.

At this point all the evidence points in one direction. It's not 100% certain, nothing in science ever is, but it's a lot more than wild speculation. Let us cycle the planet from cool to warm states and back again a few times and maybe we'll have enough data to work out all the details - nothing less will do. But meanwhile every one of those transitions is going to cause mass-extinctions on a scale we can't begin to comprehend. And right now, with the evidence we have available, this isn't an intellectual exercise. If our current models are even vaguely accurate then we're fast approaching the point of no return, maybe even past it. Basically, the only way we can definitively test the models is to push our planet past the tipping point. Once the large-scale positive feedback systems come into play, there's no going back. MAYBE dangerously aggressive geoengineering done promptly and concertedly by all the planet's major governments could claw us back if we catch things early enough. Maybe. But how likely do you think a well-organized global cooperation is going to be in the midst of global ecological changes that will actually be benefiting some of the major players? (What do you suppose Russia's frozen tundra would look like 8-12*C warmer?)

It's like racing your car across the desert and seeing what looks like a sudden drop in the distance. The close you get, the more it looks like you're going to end up driving right off a cliff. It's not 100% certain, but don't you think maybe we should slow down? Maybe even stop near the apparent edge and look over it to see if there's actually a way down? Because right now we're just stomping on the gas, accelerating towards that cliff at an ever-increasing pace - to the point where we're no longer entirely sure we could stop in time even if we slammed on the brakes immediately.

No, the mercury itself is the problem - it's a nasty toxin no matter where it's coming from.

CO2 on the other hand is harmless in normal concentrations, and in fact is absolutely vital to the healthy functioning of our ecology. The only problem with it is that we're producing it from sources where the carbon would normally remain sequestered for many, many more millions of years, and in the process disrupting the thermal equilibrium of the planet, threatening to push it past the tipping point to the other bistable extreme of a radically warmer world.

>Besides that, an inaccurate scientific prediction is wrong by definition, i.e. it cannot be used to prove anything.

Hardly. Science is interested in successively more accurate approximation, not perfection. For example Newtonian Gravity is known to be "wrong", but it was accurate enough to predict pretty much everything we could test for 200+ years, and is still taught in schools because the more accurate General Relativity is radically more complex and gives the same answers to several significant digits for most "normal" situations.

The genuine skeptics, yes. They however can mostly see the writing on the wall, and are interested in dialing in the details. For example one of the biggest real controversies in global climate change today is to what extent, if any, cosmic rays influence cloud formation and global temperature. But cosmic ray levels have been relatively constant for the past few decades, so the result is irrelevant to the warming we're currently observing.

The "skeptics" though are a problem. Those are the ones who doubt that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, despite the fact that global atmospheric CO2 levels have been steadily increasing at 60-70% the rate that we pump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that if the tub is filling up more slowly than you're pouring water into it, then if you stopped adding water, the water would almost certainly stop climbing.

Or they doubt that atmospheric CO2 causes warming - which is an experiment any third grader can test on a small scale: Shine a light at an object in a jar filled with normal air versus CO2 rich air - it will heat faster in CO2 rich air because infrared radiation can't escape as quickly.

Or they doubt that there won't be some currently unexpected force that comes in to set things "right" again - despite the fact that our planet is clearly bistable and has transitioned between the cool and warm states many, many times in it's history, and the vast majority the unexpected feedback loops we've discovered so far are self-accelerating.

Only the last one has any shred of potential legitimacy - and notice the double negative: they doubt a surprise fix won't appear - I'd say that's faith in the status quo, not skepticism of the science.

Or willfully blind.
Or have an agenda.

Honestly, I'd prefer dumb. Dumb people can still be educated.

I'm not so sure. Probably you couldn't do it with any sort of efficiency. Perhaps more importantly though, I haven't heard of many *effective* long-term CO2 sequestration strategies - we're going to need to store this stuff for at least a few centuries after all, to buy ourselves some time to come up with more permanent solutions. Trying to pump it into abandoned oil or gas wells hasn't been very successful - after a few years it just starts leaking out again over many square miles, and fracking makes it much worse. Storing it undersea is a non-starter - it creates giant dead zones in one our planet's most important ecosystems, and dissolves into the surrounding water, increasing ocean acidification and probably decreasing the ocean's normal uptake of atmospheric CO2 by a similar amount. The only one I've heard of that make any sense is creating biochar and burying it as a soil enrichment additive. But at that point, why not just make biofuel instead and pay the costs up front, instead of loading our cars with giant compressed-gas bombs and inviting various exploits of the CO2 recycling system?

Out of curiosity, let's run some numbers on efficiency of CO2 compression:

First off you run into the issue that a gallon of gas produces about 20 pounds of CO2 (or about 3.17lb CO2 per lb gasoline), so if you burn through a 15 gallon tank of gas you'll be increasing the mass you're carrying by 2.17* (15G*6.3lb/G) = 205lbs. Not a *lot*, but enough to have a measurable impact on efficiency.

Then there's the question of how much energy it takes to compress the CO2. To make it simple lets assume we first produce all the CO2 at atmospheric pressure, and then compress it. I think that should work out the same (or better) than the continuous-flow model. The relevant equation is W=nRT ln(V2/V1).
R=1.986Btu / lb-mol / *R (seems the most applicable availble on the wikipedia page, since for some damned reason I decided to do this in American units)
CO2 is 10.3 moles/pound, and there's 453.59237lb-mol per mol, so n = 305lb*10.3/454 = 7lb-moles of CO2
And it's ~0.12lb/ft^3 at NTP (normal temperature and pressure), so V1 = 305/0.12 = 2,542 ft^3
Finally the temperature at NTP = 70*F, or 530R
That leaves only the size of the storage tank, V2, to decide on. Lets say we make it the same size as the gas tank at 15gal=2ft^3

So the total (ideal case) energy to compress it will be
W=7lb-mol *(1.986Btu/lbmol/R) * 530R * ln( 2,542ft^3 / 2ft^3)
= 52,663 Btu
Huh, a lot less than I expected. And a gallon of gas typically contains ~114,100 Btu, though assuming compression is powered by engine with it's horrible ~25% efficiency, we're talking about burning 1.85 of those 15 gallons of gas just to compress the CO2. A 12% efficiency loss off the top - unfortunate, but surmountable. So I guess the only real problem is sequestration.

Not necessarily. As I recall from my motorhead friends, completely stripping out the emission control system will generally boost both power and mpg. And there's lots of cheap "fixes" to expensive problems that involve doing just that (or at least a specific subsystem).

I would bet that the majority of these "out of tune" cars are owned by impoverished people whose priority is to both eat this month AND maintain a functional vehicle so that they can get to work (so that they can eat this month) - which means either DIY repairs or shade tree mechanics that don't have the diagnostic equipment necessary to tune things properly from an emissions perspective, nor any particular incentive to want to. I mean if a $5 burger for lunch is a luxury expense, and the mechanic says "Well, I can fix your car properly for $2000, or get it running fine again for $50, but the emissions will be all out of spec", which are you going to choose?

Why would you automatically assume that it would usually be coupled with an expansion board costing 67% more than the device itself? I'm comparing it to the Compute Module, becasue that was the stripped-down Pi which was announced as JUST the CPU, 4GB flash, and 512MB ram, delivered on a notebook RAM form factor, designed for relatively easy usage of a Pi-compatible SOC for embedded projects.

Plus the article explicitly mentions that they designed this thing in response to deciding that the CM wasn't actually all that well suited for it's intended market (for example, I imagine, consider that if you want *any* sort of I/O you have to build a custom circuit board containing the necessary modules wired to a SODIMM-style socket) Honestly I'm somewhat puzzled about the expected use-case of the CM - it seems they expect people to trade in all the IO features of the Pi A/B for a little storage and a slightly smaller form factor at roughly the same price. Seems to me there's a pretty narrow range of "amateur" products where the thickness is *that* important. The price point though - Chip shaves off $16, 64% of the cost of the Pi-A, while keeping pretty much all the features of interest to an embedded project (and actually, I'd say the swap from ethernet to wifi counts as a substantial upgrade in almost all scenarios).

That it can *also* function as an alternative to the RPi-A with a different set of features by adding an HDMI shield is an added bonus. Though as you point out yourself, 4GB of storage isn't much for a PC configuration, and there's no expansion potential except by using one of the two precious USB ports. (Not to mention, with PC usage patterns that 4GB flash isn't going to last long)

As an aside, please be aware that case matters for units: 1GB(gigabyte) = 8Gb(gigabit). "gb" isn't an actual thing, and guessing which of the aforementioned was intended can be difficult, especially considering how many seedy marketers intentionally exploit the confusion, but also when when talking about the embedded device space where native hardware capacities are often measured in bits, I suppose for consistency with smaller-capacity hardware and/or to avoid confusion around non-standard byte sizes (for example extra "hidden" bits are required for each byte to provide error-detection or -correction)

My mistake - just looked it up again and apparently human CO2 emissios are 100x greater than the most generous estimates of volcanic emissions. I knew that number felt wrong.

Also, here's a nice image showing the carbon cycle in a bit more detail.
http://essayweb.net/geology/qu...

Notice that it shows carbon flow in both directions - so for example every year vegetation sucks 121.3Gt of carbon out of the atmosphere while releasing 60 Gt back directly, and a further 60GT back from the soil (decomposition, presumably) - for a net flow of 1.3Gt out of the atmosphere.

The ocean similarly cycles 92Gt out of the atmosphere while returning 90Gt back, for a net flow of 2Gt

(And there, at the very bottom, there's sediment - the long-term geological sequestration of carbon at 0.2Gt per year.)

Meanwhile human emissions release 5.5Gt of carbon per year - two thirds more than is removed by vegetation and oceans, to say nothing of the 0.2Gt rate at which it gets geologically sequestered again.

LabMD may still have had a security problem worthy of investigation. But Tiversa's behavior is the subject of this criminal investigation. If Tiversa only blew the whistle on LabMD after they declined to purchase Tiversa's services, they are arguably engaged in racketeering, and should be prosecuted.

Exactly. CO2 emissions are not themselves the problem. That they're coming from fossil fuels is the problem. If cars all burned ethanol or bio-diesel it would be a non-issue. Well, I suppose they'd still contribute tot he heat-island effect around cities, but that's a much smaller and not always unwelcome side effect. It's only because we're pumping geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, completely unbalancing the geological carbon cycle, that we have a problem.

The problem is not the comparative amount of CO2 that humans are producing, it's that the ecological carbon cycle is not well equipped to deal with changes in the the total amount of carbon present - that normally only varies on geological timescales, as carbon normally only flows into/out of geological stockpiles *very* slowly (and usually in a fairly balanced manner, so that there is only a tiny net change). Burning fossil fuel is the exception - we're releasing geological carbon into the atmosphere much faster than all other geological processes combined (I can't clearly remember the numbers, but I think we exceed global volcanic activity by 10-20x)

Basically, on a human timescale there are three major "pools" that carbon gets cycled between - the ocean, the atmosphere, and biomass. When we burn fossil fuels we introduce new carbon that hasn't been part of the cycle since before anything resembling humanity existed, and that carbon has to go somewhere. Now if we could get biomass levels to increase in line with fossil fuel emissions we'd be set - but planetary biomass levels seem to actually be falling, which leaves the ocean and atmosphere. CO2 levels in the oceans are climbing - aka ocean acidification, and it's beginning to have devastating effects. Meanwhile the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been climbing at roughly 60-70% of the rate we're emitting the stuff for as long as we've been measuring it - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to make the connection that we're probably dumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than the ecosystem can deal with it.