Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

No, you'd have the key. If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.

The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key. You'd need to copy this between devices, but it's relatively small (under 1KB). It's small enough to fit in a version 40 QR code quite easily, so you could set up mobile devices by displaying the QR code on your laptop screen and point the mobile device's camera at it, if you don't have any sensible way of transferring files between devices. The client then has to download the file and the associated key, decrypt the key with the locally-stored key, and then decrypt the file, but that's not something that's exposed to the user.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

The anonymous poster pointed out a simpler mechanism, which is used in practice on file stores that want to be encrypted on the server. This technique also has a number of advantages. Using a symmetric cypher is generally faster than an asymmetric one and using a different key for each file is just good practice anyway as it limits the damage that certain kinds of trojan can do. If you're sharing with everyone, then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file. If you're sharing with just a few people, then sending them a (fixed-size) key for each file is not too much overhead.

The thing that's really put me off the surgery is the improvement in contact lens technology over the last 10 years. My sight is sufficiently bad in one eye that I'd have to have an implanted contact lens, although the other could be fixed by burning the cornea. The contact lenses that I have now; however, are so thin that I don't notice that I'm wearing them most of the time and can be worn overnight. I put them in at the start of a month and then change them a month later. There's a slightly increased risk of eye infection, but they come with six monthly checkups to prevent this. I was wearing the previous generation of lenses (which were noticeably thicker) for about 10 years without serious issue, but with slight irritation around the eyelids caused by the thickness of the lens (and my eyes sometimes getting very dry, because it took a long time for the lens to dry out, so I'd forget to blink sometimes). With the newer ones, it's basically as if I had fully working eyes and if my prescription changes then I can put in different lenses next month.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

I've been in the industry for over a decade, and have used the calculus and statistics required for my CS degree precisely never.

Well, I've been in the industry for over 30 years and I've found one good use for statistics during that time - it's great to sniff out BS. Like the crap spread by the VP of Quality who touts a 2% decline in customer calls YOY when the variance in this yearly data is around 5% and you didn't put out a major product release this year. Not that you're politically well-connected enough to call him on it, of course, but it's good to know that it's crap nonetheless, because next year, when you do get the next major version out, and the customer calls go up, you'll be ready to defend politically.

There are techniques that allow searching within encrypted files, but they rely on the client creating the index. You can then search the index for an encrypted search term and, if you know the keys, interpret the answer. Getting this right is quite tricky (there are several research papers about it), so he's right, but it's not impossible.

The main reason that I suspect DropBox discourages encryption is that they rely a lot on deduplication to reduce their costs. If everyone encrypted their files, then even two identical files would have different representations server-side if owned by different users, so their costs would go up a lot.

I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.

Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.

In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.

I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.

I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).