Russian analyst urges nuclear attack on Yellowstone National Park and San Andreas fault line

A Russian geopolitical analyst says the best way to attack the United States is to detonate nuclear weapons to trigger a supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park or along the San Andreas fault line on California's coast.

The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems based in Moscow, Konstantin Sivkov said in an article for a Russian trade newspaper on Wednesday, VPK News, that Russia needed to increase its military weapons and strategies against the "West" which was "moving to the borders or Russia".

He has a conspiracy theory that NATO - a political and military alliance which counts the US, UK, Canada and many countries in western Europe as members - was amassing strength against Russia and the only way to combat that problem was to attack America's vulnerabilities to ensure a "complete destruction of the enemy".

"Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States - a country just disappears," he said.

"Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault - 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates ... a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States."

Full story

Considering that nuclear power is the safest form of power the world has ever known, I'd say it's worthy of recognition for offsetting carbon more than anything else. To borrow a phrase, "It's the energy density, stupid."

There's a reason why China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.

...but they get our shit to space.

Ditto here. I forget what I had to do to verify, but it was basically the same as if I had called in and wanted to do something with my account. In fact, that's exactly what it was! At the end of entering the card into my iPhone, it prompted me to call the card's service phone number, where I verified my identity, and then they activated Apple Pay. This was in December, well before the rash of articles on this topic, so wasn't just a knee-jerk reaction by my bank.

True, it wasn't as much security as the bank wanted when I wired a down payment for my house; after receiving that fax, they asked no fewer than TEN security questions. I didn't know they had that many pieces of knowledge about me!

The place I used to work used to offer it as a service for $5-10 per SIMM/DIMM. If you can find a local shop that has such a tester, maybe they'd do the same. Otherwise, it's probably not terribly likely to get a low-cost solution, since the volume of such testers is pretty small.

I hadn't heard of this either, but a quick google turned up a description of false parity RAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
TLazy;DR: To save cost where parity RAM was required by the hardware but not by the operator, modules existed that would calculate the parity bit upon reading the RAM, rather than storing the parity bit. I don't see any evidence that this type of module ever existed for ECC though.

To make sure memory is ECC, it's probably sufficient to count the memory chips on a DIMM. If there are 9 or 18 (or even 36, if it's a particularly large DIMM) identically-marked chips, that's ECC. If there are 4, 8, 16, or 32 chips, then it's probably not. If one of the chips is marked differently than the others, it might be a little more complicated; it might be possible that it's a different memory chip (e.g. if there are 4 x16 memory chips, you'd only need one x8 to get a x72 ECC DIMM, so that last chip would be different). But it's also possible that it's buffered/registered memory, and the different chip is the buffer/register.

And an aside on the topic of buying RAM for yourself:
In general, I'm not a fan of cheaping out on memory. I did computer repair for a while, and it shocked me how many problems were caused by bad RAM - from the obvious ("my computer crashes every time I boot it") to less obvious ("every few days, an application crashes") to the rather insidious ("it was running fine, and now I can't mount my hard drive any more"). It got to the point where, when a computer came in with nonspecific symptoms like that, I'd open up the computer and peek at the RAM chips first. If they had no recognizable manufacturer, they were certainly garbage. If they were recognizable but not top-tier, they probably needed some stress testing on our RAM tester. And if they were the good stuff (Samsung always had my vote there, though it's hard to find because they don't sell directly to consumers), then it was probably something else.

That's also where I learned that things like memtest86 or other software diagnostic tools were basically useless too. Only the absolute worst memory would fail a test, even a looped test run for days. Most bad RAM was marginal - after all, it probably passed some manufacturing tests. We had a rather expensive (~$4k-8k) box that would test memory, doing things like varying the supply voltage or self-heating the RAM. When RAM is installed in your PC, you're still limited by the hardware - i.e. the voltage regulator and the memory controller - which probably keep the memory as close to nominal conditions as possible. Obviously, those machines are rather hard to come by, so you have to make do with software tests instead - but a pass on those just means I can't prove it's bad; it doesn't mean the memory is good. Even if I pass all memory testing, I'll still swap/remove/replace DIMMs in an attempt to find which one is bad, because it's often not obvious.

That description basically sounds like the San Francisco Bay area to me...

If you're interested in riding, find someone else who does it, and they may have helpful tips on where to ride. As you get more experienced, you might find yourself more comfortable sharing the road with cars - but certainly initially, most people prefer to take quiet residential streets or sidewalks. (Personally, I think sidewalks are a terrible idea for bikes - nobody is looking for you, and there are lots of driveways and obstacles. But if that's the only way that people feel safe riding, so be it.)

I used to ride a hybrid in the snow with nearly-bald medium-width tires (28-32 or so, I moved narrower over several years). I usually avoided the 8-mile commute when it was actually snowing and cars were sliding around everywhere, though. Only fell twice on those skinny tires; both were when I tried to make ~90 turns at low speed. At higher speeds, the bike still wants to stay upright, even if there's no traction.

Layers are good, but nothing helps when the temperature is negative (F) and you start breathing hard when you go up a steep hill... I could feel my alveoli freezing with every breath. Never stopped me, though...

Yes. There's a group of people that rides from San Francisco to Google in Mountain View; roughly, it's 42.5 miles, though it's a bit different for each person, because most riders: 1. don't live at the coffee shop(s) where they meet up to start the ride, and 2. don't necessarily work at Google. Once they get to Google, smaller groups branch off in the directions of all the other area tech companies.

Just from hearsay, though; I've never ridden it myself (my commute is a bit tamer), though I've considered trying their route out for fun sometime.

In case the 42.5-mile ride is not to your liking, there are alternate scenic routes that go 48 or 62 miles, at a cost of more hills.

Your (and my, and any individual citizen's) personal interpretation of the Constitution is not the measure. It is the interpretation and implementation by our three branches of government. I realize that some reading this believe they have all been compromised, or that they think some particular thing is "obviously unconstitutional" (even though the judicial, legislative, and executive branches say otherwise), but the fact is we have the system of government we have. So how about you consider the alternative: one where you don't assume that everyone working at every/any level of government, e.g., NSA, doesn't have the worst motivations and is actually trying to do their best to honorably, legally, and Constitutionally, protect our nation and its people instead of the opposite. How about that?

If you would actually like to have a discussion, I am more than happy to engage. I have articulated these views (not on this specific topic, of course) long before I ever served in uniform, and they have nothing to do with a "paycheck" -- in fact, it's the inverse: the reason I chose to serve is because of my personal desire to do what I can to support things I believe in, and believe are important for our nation and my family and fellow citizens, not the other way around. Yes, our system of government is imperfect...grossly so -- but I choose to support it over any and all alternatives, warts and all. (And that is not to say that there are not things that cannot be improved.)

And again -- and I sincerely mean this -- if you are actually serious about engaging in a dialogue, I am happy to.

Yes, where to even begin...

Do you realize that over 70% of FOREIGN internet traffic enters, traverses, or otherwise touches the US?

Do you understand that an individualized warrant is required to target, collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the communications content of a US Person anywhere on the globe, and that the current law on the issue is stronger and more restrictive with regard to US Persons than it has ever been?

Do you understand that the FOREIGN communications we are going after are now intermixed with the communications of the rest of the world, including that of Americans?

Do you understand that when terrorists use Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Hotmail, Twitter, Skype, etc. etc. etc., or Windows, or Dell computers, or Android phones, or Cisco routers, and so on, that there is no technical distinction between your communications and theirs, yet -- surprise -- we still would like to access those communications, and have legal, policy, and technical frameworks to do so, even if you have not personally inspected them yourself?

If you are a US citizen, and not covered by any warrant, no one cares about your communications. And almost by definition, no foreign intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, DIA) remotely gives a shit about your communications, and would greatly prefer to avoid it altogether, unless you have some kind of connection with foreign intelligence targets -- in which case any collection or monitoring of your communications would require an individualized warrant from FISC or another court of competent jurisdiction. I realize you think this isn't the case, and that all of your communications are being mined and monitored (illegally, no less), and since proving a negative is impossible, I won't be able to help in that regard.

My motivation for commenting on these topics on slashdot may be informed by my position, but has nothing to do with it beyond that.

No. The trigger for this isn't that companies are holding data...it's that users have data, and the NSA wants to force the companies to keep/get access their users data even if the company doesn't want to, so that the NSA can access it also. This is a *very* different proposition. If Apple doesn't want to hold its user's data, why should the NSA force them to just so that the NSA can read it? That seems to be the NSA's problem, not Apple's.

And? NSA may "want" a lot of things. That doesn't mean they are going to get it. But if a US-based company is holding encrypted data to which they also have access, you had damned well better believe the government is going to seek access to that data if it is supported by law. If companies want to take the direction of removing themselves from the encryption picture altogether, that is their prerogative. And guess what? There are other technical ways to get that data, such as before it's encrypted in the first place.

Saying "encryption" does not make the data magical, but it also doesn't entitle the NSA to special treatment. If they can break it, fine. If they can't, there is no valid reason for me to make it easy for them.

No, there isn't. And I didn't say there is. I was stating a set of facts, as are you. See? We can talk like adults.

Do we really believe that the US is the only one who has the "right" to access any backdoor/golden-key/whatever? That's absolute nonsense. If the US forces Apple, Google, MS, etc to build key escrow into their devices so that the NSA can read the data on them, then that key will be used by every government on the earth. If you really believe that the NSA will manage to keep exclusive control of a master key for all encryption for a given major vendor, then I'm going to call you delusional.

No...you are completely misunderstanding my point. If you reread what I said, you will note that nowhere did I argue that anyone should build a backdoor for anything...but the fact is that some US-based companies DO have the ability to decrypt stored encrypted data, which they sometimes do for any variety of reasons, and, if when those services are storing the foreign communications of adversaries of the United States, which they are, then we should have a legal framework that allows access to said data. That is all.

Arguing for a master key -- which is what you THINK ADM Rogers is arguing for, but actually isn't -- is antithetical to the security interests of the United States, our people, our military, our intelligence community, and anyone else who requires secure communications in any form. But if you have already formed your conclusions, that is fine. What ADM Rogers is arguing for is a legal framework for data access of entities that operate within and under a US legal construct...and if there is encrypted data present that the data holder cannot access, that is just the way it goes. But as you know, there a number of ways to access the contents of what is ultimately encrypted data without breaking the encryption...ways that are as old as this decades-old discussion.

And we are going to seek those ways, and I will say something that is offensive to many slashdotters' sensibilities: if you support the principles that you claim to -- things like freedom, of speech, of choice, of anything else -- then you should support the abilities of one of the strongest powers in the world at actually, materially, and in reality (not in your little internet fantasy) of actually protecting and projecting those ideals. Actually judging the actions of the US Intelligence Community based on facts, to say nothing of having some perspective on history and reality beyond what self-styled internet tech-libertarians tell you, would be helpful also.

OMG, that must invalidate everything I have to say!

Sorry, been there, done that, been through all the logical fallacies you can lob my way.