You've got it upside dowm. I run systemd on emacs.

Peak pricing is based on peak demand. If someone buys a battery to try and get abitrage between peak and offpeak pricing they can.

However as soon as you try to scale it up and "everyone starts doing it" it doesn't work.

Each person that adds on lops a little slice of how much is needed at peak, and adds a little sloce to how much is needed off peak.

Think about that. As soon as enough people jump on the bandwagon the offpeak demand rises and the peak demand falls to equilibrium and the prices will equalize and there will be no more price arbitrage.

So, short term, yeah, it might makes sense - you might even break even or come out ahead depending on how things go. As backup power for your home, maybe it makes sense.

But long term though, I speculate the power company will simply deploy its own industrial scale batteries for a fraction of the price per kwh stored than will be available to me at home and use that to smooth things out at their end. And then peak pricing and off peak pricing will move to equillibrium.

Bad guys have to set the evil bit; the software checks whether or not it's set. Really people, we've thought this through.

Good solve! :) Strictly speaking, it would have been O18.9Neon as I was truncating rather than rounding atomic weights.

That was my thought too. And even that algorithm was relatively simple; requiring the user memorize just a couple simple rules and either know the periodic table; or have ready access to one (which is trivial) in the event he needs to "regenerate" a forgotten password.

I -used- to use techniques in the same general category as this for password generation... but after a few breaches and other forced password change situations it became irritating because I could no longer use the password the 'system' generated with some sites. I switched to using a password manager with random passwords on most sites.

I still use a 'system' for some sites I use regularly and/or have to enter the p/w manually instead of being able to use copy/paste.

I memorize a simple password for each and then some apply some ciphers and transformations to it. So losing one to a phish isn't a threat to the rest, and I can change it easily since it isn't based soley on the domain name.

But it's only suitable for a smallish number of sites; since I still have to remember a basic password.

And honestly, at this stage I feel the so-called security questions (that anyone who knows you can answer) with email or SMS recovery mechanisms are the weakest link. As these are both fairly easy to intercept; especially if you know the target.

Your criticism amounts to "If it doesn't completely solve the problem for everybody its no good." and that is false.

Yes some will switch to various simple password patterns t.password for twitter... f.password for facebook... or maybe fb.password... etc. That's still an improvement. Even simple patters require some effort to break.

Some fraction will use a harder patterns that aren't immediately obvious. That's an improvement. Lets say my password is "stupidgdog" for google. Maybe your automated phishing tools will try stupidfdog on facebook... but maybe not.

Some fraction will use a slightly harder pattern.

Lets say I use stupidgHdog as my google password. My new pattern is still simple. its "stupid" + "first name of domain" + "next letter in alphabet capitalized" + "dog"

With just one sample, are you really sure your automated phishing tools going to figure out that facebook is: stupidfGdog ? And twitter its stupidtUdog?

And that's still pretty lazy as passwords go.

Some smal fraction will take the hint and use much harder patterns. That will take several fished passwords for the user and probably some human eyes to figure out. This is an improvement.

Lets say my google password is: C69.7Germanium what's my facebook password?

Here... I give you twitter on this pattern too: N47.8Vanadium.
With 2 samples passwords you've got enough of a pattern to try and brute force it... letter + 3 digits + element... 26* 1000 * 118... 2.6 million passwords to try.

Very doable if its a targeted search on a particular user... but your probably not going to spend the time looking at each fished password and then write a script to do that specific search... for just one random user. Probably.

And some fraction of people will switch to using a password safe or something, and thats an improvement too.

Fair enough. Still...

"Password Alert is also available to Google for Work customers, including Google Apps and Drive for Work. Your administrator can install Password Alert for everyone in the domains they manage, and receive alerts when Password Alert detects a possible problem."

The intersection of administrators who might think its a good idea with end users that use the same password on other sites might be large enough to be at least a little bit fun.

Yeah, if it were integrated with something like password safe or password gorilla or keypass etc.

Or I suppose it could be tied into the A/V products which already have anti-phishing extensions -- McAfee for example, already has a password safe and antiphishing ... seems almost a no-brainer for them to integrate them in this way. The password safe component could dump a list of hashes and domain names and if you try entering a password that matches the hash throw up an alert. And then maybe flag the page for A/V's phishing lists so if a page is generating alerts like crazy visitors it can be blacklisted -- preventing other users from even reaching the domain/phishing page.

Put on the popcorn and wait for the fireworks show that arises when people who use the same password they use for google on other sites.

Still its an interesting idea, that might be usable in a general purpose extension that maintains hashes and URLs and then hashes every input box and compares it to the databse / urls -- and if it finds a hash match but the URL is wrong throw up an alert.

Way more useful than a google only one that only works in chrome and only when you are signed in.

No good reason for Grandma to use Chrome anyway, or anyone else for that matter.

All fair points. And also don't forget about the ridiculous bailout the Democrats gave Wall Street too. They should have been put in jail, not given a free ride.

It's really distressing. The choices are basically, do you want a lubricated glove (Democrats), or a chainsaw (Republicans). But you still need to bend over regardless.

Only reason I lean towards the Democrats, is that there is at least a theoretical chance that a good person may make it to the top, like Elizabeth Warren or that other guy that recently threw his hat in (I forget his name now...). With the Republicans, it's very clear they will do everything they can as quickly as they can, to make sure world burns and force their messiah to come down a toast gold-plated marshmallows on the world's charred remains.

I gave this reply to someone else. Here's a link so that you get the slashdot reply notification.

http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Actually, there have been several studies that demonstrate that republicans go out of their way to spread disinformation. For example, people who watch Fox News know *less* about current events that people who don't watch any news programs at all.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Googling for 'conservative stupid study' will give you article after article

The thing is, it's not about whether Democrats are good and Republicans are bad. Everyone seems to be under this assumption that Democrats=liberal and Republicans=conservative. In actuality, Democrats=center leaning conservatives, and Republicans=psycho theocrats that make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look rational.

The Democrats most closely correlate with the conservatives of the 60s-80s. They're hardly perfect, and they have their own moments of self-serving garbage. But Republicans? They actively *scare* me. They are hell bent on persecuting everything that isn't white, male, and rich, and heterosexual. And that persecution goes up exponentially as you take away more of those elements. They have not only consistently voted against *anything* that would help the average American, but they have repealed existing laws that help, especially when it comes to womens rights.

As one example: The Democrats implemented one of the single most important pieces of legislation that helps fix the horrific mess that is the US health care system. It has been clearly demonstrated now that not only do many Americans now have access to health care that they didn't have access to before, but it has decreased overall health care costs. The Republicans have been trying, and continue to try, to repeal the ACA for no logical reason whatsoever.

Republicans are railing against Obama for *not* being enough of a war-monger. They collectively deny basic science like evolution. The list just goes on and on. It's not that Democrats are good. It's that the Republicans are *insane*.

This is needlessly cynical. I don't dispute the TLAs love mass surveillance. But there is a legitimate concern where law enforcement can justify and obtain a legal warrant for someone's electronic records/communications but not have any way to actually legally act on the warrant.

Ie... if they have your encrypted laptop AND a warrant they ARE allowed to break into it, but they can't. This is a legitimate issue.

"Rubber hose decryption" is not legal, nor should it ever be.

In a sense, encrypted data is like the contents of one's mind more than its like other property; in that there is currently no legal way to ensure they can get at it.

Their desire for a backdoor is pretty reasonable, in a way, but the problem is what they are asking for is a key which is far too much. There is no good solution here.

a) Giving them the power to demand the key is fine, but what if they demand the key of someone who genuinely doesn't have it? Is he guilty and imprisoned for not having something? That's bullshit.

b) Giving them a back door so they can just come and go as they please is giving them far too much power and ripe for abuse.

c) Not giving them a back door and requiring they break has the issue that properly encryption can't currently be broken.

The sanest and only reasonable choice is 'c', but it is not really a solution to the legitimate problem... its just the only one that doesn't trample on the innocent.

No the car analogy isn't valid, because the police do have access to everyone's cars and homes. They get a warrant. They bring a crowbar. Done.

That's the issue with encryption, they can get a warrant giving them the legal right to get in. But there is no crowbar.

I'm not in favor of this, but we do need to understand it is a somewhat unique situation. Strongly encrypted data is not like other property.

I'd like to point out that the traffic problem in cities is not caused by all the cars that are full of people.

But then we'll all bitch about that married couple that work near each other and get to use the carpool lane, and would carpool even there were no HOV lanes... so they aren't removing any cars from the road.

Yes. Exactly. "Most". For the odd time you don't have it though it really sucks. The hotel with only wired in the room. Or the day your wifi router craps on you and you need to wire in to fix it. Or the office that has wired everywhere because ethernet just works, whereas wifi has all sorts of issues... signal strength, bandwidth contention, more prone to random disconnects, etc.

An RJ45 ethernet port adds like a nickle to the cost of a laptop. And if it has to be a couple mm thicker so be it. Fill the space with some more battery.

if a vendor wants to offer an ultraportable without one that's fine. But any vendor that removes ethernet from their entire laptop lineup from ultraportable to pro-desktop-replacment has its head firmly stuck in its ass.