Comment Re:Another puff of hot air from our Obama-in-chief (Score 1) 144
I stand corrected...
Wow. I'm glad that you educated me. I had always thought that the Constitution granted the power to declare war to Congress alone.
I always thought, too, that there were civilian administrative procedures. I'm sure glad you let me know that that lady working in the drivers license division was drawing military hazard pay. And judges and courts
... and that mystical power of the President to command the executives of banks in foreign countries
So he's got the power to unilaterally rule a US Citizen in Yemen is an enemy of the US, and blow up said citizen with a drone (incidentally killing several others), but he can't freeze the US bank account of a Chinese military officer whose busily hacking Americans?
Until Congress changes it, yep. That's how it is, no matter how illogical it might seem.
When normal lawyers deal with the Commander-in-Chief clause, which has very few limits (the biggest is that it doesn't apply that often), they really get into trouble fast.
Nope. Look it up for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Obama has no authority to impose sanctions on anybody for these acts, unless (1) Congress passes a law that says he does or (2) a foreign country says he does, creating jurisdiction. Neither has happened.
Obama said "From now on, we have the power to freeze their assets, make it harder for them to do business with U.S. companies, and limit their ability to profit from their misdeeds" in the making (apparently) of an executive order. If the power existed, it existed prior to Mr. Obama's order because it was authorized by 1 or 2 above. Mr. Obama's declarations of power are worthy of the bottom of my birdcage.
This idiot of a reporter at The Stack dot com thinks that an executive order is "legislation". Someone should inform her that legislation almost always appears in the U.S. Code, not in some press release on the White House Blog. I can't wait for this administration to try to enforce these sanctions: they're going to get tossed out of court on their rear ends if they try.
1. It doesn't matter if the attack is online or not. If the hacker has your hashed password, then he can get your password from that. The brute force attack becomes feasible because he can run millions/billions of tries per second on your password. (If he does it on a repository of hashed passwords, then the rewards per try are even greater.)
2. The words are in your memory, not in the password. If my password is "agmlpoas", then I can remember it as "all good men like pickes on afternoon sandwiches". The password can be as random as you like.
3. When you have an organization like the NSA devoting tens of thousands of CPUs (or specially designed digital circuits implementing a hash/encryption function) to such an effort, your offline attack becomes feasible (unless you have a lot more characters in your password than most people want to type.)
A truly unbreakable encryption method will make it impossible for an attacker to tell whether he's had success in breaking the encryption. (That's why the one-time pad works: it decodes to a very large number of potentially valid messages.) If everyone's messages were littered with words from the Bin Laden book of anarchy, then the NSA would have a more difficult time knowing who the real bad guys were.
The whole point in using passwords and passphrases is that the point of entry (the screen or page where you enter it) can't be reproduced millions of times per second. If a human can only press "enter" once per second, it will take a long time for a hacker (NSA or otherwise) to brute force through. If the attacker can get his hands on the password stored in the system (encrypted or not) the game is already lost.
Besides: anyone can think up a poem or a mnemonic for a password using random letters and/or numbers, and you'll be using your own words and not those of someone else out of a dictionary (which makes it more likely for you to remember).
Unbreakable passwords are easy to generate: just use a randomly-generated password as long as the information you're encrypting (the so called "one time pad"). When I'm logging into my bank or other on-line service, I don't want to have to deal with that much data. That's why it lets me have three tries at entering the password every ten minutes.
Go sell this idea to the next guy, please...
... are for entertainment value only. It's like shoving 500 feral cats into a van and watching the action.
Who the hell cares if this scientist took some under-the-table money over a decade ago. Neither side has proven anything, and pointing out a pimple on the other side's stripper doesn't make anyone look creditable.
Dear Slashdot: poisoning your content in this way doesn't motivate me to visit your site.
Addressing your answer to these elements in order:
1- Lower efficiency cells can be used, it just takes more cells to produce the same output.
2- There is nothing stopping an under-developed country from making their own solar cells. They are basically glass with thin films of material deposited thereon.
3- Even if these films require the use of rare earth materials, glass and those materials cannot be patented. Build the plant in the under-developed country, import the materials and make as many cells as you like.
That's three strikes, and my point wins.
And as far as the importation of consumer products: a rice farmer with two cows doesn't care about efficient water-use appliances nor about the generation of electricity. He doesn't import the advanced technology because he doesn't want it or can't afford it, not because there's some patent-holder keeping it from him. (You left out the cost of transporting the cells to his location, which will be perhaps more significant than the manufacturing cost. Transporting panes of glass can be a tricky business...)
Why doesn't the IP/patents of the industrialized world matter to poorer nations? The answer in one word: jurisdiction. A U.S. patent won't stop anyone from practicing or importing an invention in any other country, so long as those activities are done entirely outside of the U.S. (Replace "U.S" with any other country or region and you have the same thing.) The article just touched on the possibility that technology might be stopped in the developing world IF it was not possible to build the potentially-infringing products to be installed elsewhere. But that really isn't much of an impediment: all products are assemblages of their component parts, and those component parts are rarely protected in their totality under patents. Want to build the technology in Nigeria (where there are no patents to it)? Then build the component parts in the industrialized world, ship them there, and let the Nigerian workers turn their wrenches. Unless there is a component part that is (1) essential to a patented product or method, (2) must be exclusively manufactured in the places where it is patented, and (3) has no non-infringing uses, then this theoretical IP won't stop the technology from being built and developed in the third world. It's a big red herring.
The problem isn't one of IP: it's one of a lack of capital and ROI. When large companies see profit in building energy infrastructure in those poorer nations, I assure you that they'll be right there.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
