Well, if you're a betting sort of person... anyone who has an arch-nemesis, or arch-nemeses, is probably not a good sort of person. (And obviously that applies to that person's arch-nemesis, too.)

The person I'm replying to never uses any units and is consistently mixing up mass, volume, and count, so I have no confidence in anything he is saying. His entire posts consist of childish name calling and passages pasted from the product's marketing claims. Anyway, the five to one ration seems to be referring to volume. The papers I had previously read referred to mixtures of 1:1 by weight. I'll find them at work tomorrow and provide the citations.

Overall, I'm not arguing that the uses for this aren't niche. I'm still hiking with my 200 proof. But to say that there are no uses at all shows a lack of imagination (even if novelty is the biggest use today). Screwing up the chemistry and mixing up mass, volume, and count is just annoying. His are fail-out-of-chem-101 level arguments.

If it's made by mixing 1:1 ethanol and maltodextrin by mass, which I've said repeatedly in my posts, then it's exactly twice as heavy as 200 proof ethanol. You're really having a hard time with all of this, aren't you?

I also gave some pretty decent examples of why you may prefer absorbed ethanol to liquid ethanol that don't involve weight or volume. But keep on blathering about the same thing over and over again, sport.

"Proof" is a measure of the volume of alcohol in a volume of water, as adjusted for the density of the mixture. Your measure of "filler to alcohol ratio", using whatever units you're pulling out of your ass to express that, has nothing to do with proof. Alcohol proof isn't even a relevant way to describe powdered alcohol.

There are many benefits to using a solid vs a liquid that have nothing to do with weight or volume. Solids are more easily handled than liquids, absorbed ethanol doesn't evaporate as quickly as liquid ethanol, absorbed ethanol is not as chemically reactive as liquid ethanol.

Nobody really cares if you're struggling to figure out why anyone would use this. You appear to struggle with a good deal more than that. Why don't you just finish with your little apoplectic fit so that the grown-ups can have an intelligent discussion here.

That's what I do, and in liquid form it's more conveniently available for use as emergency fuel or antiseptic. (I actually carry non-denatured 200 proof from my lab. It's cheap and burns well, but is illegal to drink.) On the other hand, high proof ethanol isn't particularly easy on plastic containers and seals (especially outside during rough handling or long-term storage), so there are some compelling reasons to carry it in an absorbed state.

I responded to you up above, but your ignorance on the subject tied to your complete confidence in yourself is too much for me. In every post you make some other ridiculous claim based on the numbers you initially pulled out of your ass.

Powdered alcohol is made by mixing pure ethanol with maltodextrin in a 1:1 ratio by weight. By weight alone, it's equivalent in alcohol content to a 63% ABV drink, and if ingested as a powder, your body will provide the water for solvation. The volume is large, because it's a fluffy powder, but the alcohol content by weight is significantly higher than a bottle of vodka.

A bottle of vodka is only ~30% alcohol by weight, so if you can obtain water from another source (pump or purifier) then it is lighter to carry the alcohol powdered (the maltodextrin is mixed with ethanol 1:1 by weight).

The waste in hiking with alcohol is that the water is tied up in vodka instead of being able to be added later. You'd be less likely to have an aneurism over this if you wouldn't just make up numbers and then operate as if they were true.

We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.

Our modern lives don't depend on utterly fucking up our environment, but ridiculous executive pay and concentration of wealth at the top benefit greatly from it. Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all. The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.

The random number generator, Dual_EC_DRBG is actually very very slow. If it wasn't pushed so hard, nobody would willingly use it.

In addition to fixing the S-boxes as you described, they also recommended reducing the key size, which made the algorithm weaker and shorter lived.

Dual_EC_DRBG was required for FIPS 140-2 certification, which is required for software that is used to protect sensitive-but-unclassfied information by the US government. So there is some conflict between the two goals above.

Which DANE and CT both solve. DANE, by simply putting an RR in DNS. CT, by watching every certificate ever made and contracting someone/some-system to look for certs issued to your domain. DANE can be rolled out domain by domain, but CT only fully works when every CA in the world is onboard.

I only brought Google into this because the GP mention that DANE was being promoted at the expense of sovereign keys. Their refusal to include their already written DANE code (and Mozilla's refusal to ever add any actually useful features) leaves the whole world trusting every CA due to politics.

This looks interesting. Thanks.

DANE isn't being promoted, either, because Google's all excited about Certificate Transparency and is pushing it hard. CT is nice, but it (like hardcoded certificate pinning in Chrome) is foremost a solution for Google's specific needs. They solve subtly different problems and shouldn't need to be exclusive.

HPKP is nice, but it takes place in-channel and is very subject to MitM on first contact.

Until we come up with a better fix for the whole CA system, browser support for DANE would be a huge step in the right direction. Especially, the type 2 (Trust anchor assertion) records would be helpful. So Google could say that only certificates issued by their own CA are legitimate. Or any site owner could publicly restrict trust to the CA that they actually get their certs from (or just specify a particular cert).

There will have to be a driverless car only lane, not simply HOV, or it will suffer from the same fate as HOV lanes and passing lanes today: 90% of traffic are willing and able to travel smoothly at a fast rate and a few cars are camped out in the left lane, driving well below the flow of traffic and refusing to yield.

Driverless cars will be great for people not wanting to spend their waking time operating a vehicle, but smooth traffic won't happen unless the traffic is segregated or all cars are driverless.

Yes, and the drone that delivers it will never make it back to base.

Building there was a zoning violation anyway. Think of it as random and overwhelming enforcement of municipal ordinances!

On a serious note, simply having the transmitting electronics powered by a coaxial beam from the receiver (that is itself initially powered by a low power pilot beam from the satellite) seems like it would be an effective interlock to prevent a wandering beam.

From what I've seen, though, it's difficult to make a very tightly focused beam that doesn't lose much of its power to the atmosphere. It's more efficient to use a diffuse downlink beam and a large collection array at the ground, so a wandering beam wouldn't really do much damage.