You didn't get far in reading my post above - "That thief with a stolen laptop can't use a key to get full access remotely" was mentioned, but maybe I should add another. The tiny amount of extra effort required by disabling root logins covers a lot of possibilities. I've gained access to a former workplace as much as three years after leaving by running the wrong old script - whoops! That human intervention of cancelling accounts depends on things like those HR people talking to IT people (Eloi vs Moorlocks in some places). Having a procedure that does not have an unreliable person as a vital part of the chain is a better idea than the latter - or in more diplomatic terms keeping it simple with one less thing to go wrong.

Next step, laugh at the 'hackers' wasting all that effort trying to guess the root password

Logs get full of such attempts even when root is not able to login. Once it gets tedious you can install sshgaurd or similar to block them and not be bothered by so many of such fruitless attempts clogging up the logs.

Now that's nice - blaming me for your deliberate misleading shift of the goalposts.
Politeness is wasted on "ends justifies the means" extremists like you that just see it as weakness.

Umami just rolls off the tongue.



They are right, "yo mama's" jokes all the way down.

I can distinctly and easily identify sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. But umami? Myth.

Only two tastes for me - chilli and bland.

That's the way it goes, stuff from papers takes years to make it into set textbooks. See also the "personality test" shit that HR people are using. Debunked decades ago. About all it tells you is who is good at gaming those tests.

I taste dead ... ok let's not go there. That way lies madness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

disabling root logins has no security benefit at al

Of course it does. That former employee that knows the root password or has the keys can't get to it. The current employee that fat fingers a command to the wrong host can't do much damage. That thief with a stolen laptop can't use a key to get full access remotely. There is a very very long list and it's just inexperience, laziness or lack of sleep that's stopping you from thinking of entries in it.

Insulation will help in both directions, but it's largely not an option for existing buildings.

Why not? They have roof space and what's wrong with wall cladding on walls that get a lot of sun? Plastic foam, some sort of thin backing, glue and paint is how it's done.

That's 65% of the legacy buildings you would need to effectively reconstruct

No.
Minor modifications are not reconstruction.

It's a prime example of "low hanging fruit" where buildings that were not designed for the climate can be altered a bit to remove obvious flaws.

The subway isn't an issue, except to say that, operating on electricity

Mass transit versus gridlock. Getting a lot more people on trains going to where they want to go gets a lot of vehicles off the street, and those ones still left on the street can move at a decent speed and use less fuel to get where they are going. A full train uses hardly any energy per person to move them, so if you can give people a good reason to ride on a train that cuts down on energy usage a lot - thus "reducing carbon" but it's best to just use energy consumption to consider things.

it's just "carbon shifting" to move the greenhouse gas generation elsewhere

Even if it was that (which it isn't) that can be a very good idea. It was the entire idea behind suggesting electric cars in California and other places where air pollution from vehicles is a serious issue. Do that energy shifting to a place where the exhaust goes through a scrubber, then out of a high stack a long way from the city and that can be a major health benefit versus people choking on smog - so even if there is no reduction in carbon dioxide output you still have an improvement. Add actual reduction and you have even more of a win. Get a lot of those people on an electric train/tram/bus and the roads are no longer so congested with idling engines creating smog.


Common sense says that living in cities is going to limit the amount of resources required per person. Most cities massively defy common sense and become huge energy sinks due to poor planning or a complete lack in some situations. Sometimes it's as easy as painting a roof to go from needing AC to not. Sometimes it's as easy as a duct to change that hot roofspace air with cold basement air. Putting a thin tinting film on a thousand windows can financially pay for itself over a summer and last for decades.

This is the easy stuff.
Going from not thinking of the summer heat at all to doing something about it is the low hanging fruit. A coastal city with a hot summer has buildings designed for a midwest winter.

Nice little joke, but some of the people that tend to "debate" nuclear energy on this site are almost pathologically quick to take offence and I've had to put disclaimers on even the most neutral of statements to avoid long and boring flamefests.

I see no difference between the design of USA toilets and Australian toilets

The interior shape of the bowl is completely different.

If your toilet doesn't work when it's flushed you should fix your toilet rather than blaming the government

WTF is that coming from?
Oh the EU stuff above - sometimes a good idea can be pushed a bit too hard into areas where it isn't but I'll bet the above poster will find that there are exceptions to the "mandate" if they look hard enough.

There are plenty of places with water restrictions on their toilets which don't seem to be having a shitty problem.

It's just a situation where the defining leader of the market was something that needed a shitload of water to get rid of a load of shit. After that there's the normal resistance to change and a half-arsed solution. Australia is only really flushed with success because widespread adoption of flush toilets happened later so a more capable design could be developed and be introduced without having to compete with "what they should look like".

Which then just moves it to a different government department.
Taxes can be spent on stuff other than giving a couple of guys millions for consulting on waterboarding, Star Trek set designers for the NSA and paying for dead wood executives on the FEMA payroll you know.

Depends on the workplace. In a typical office it's bad news, in a government office of most types very bad news, in mining, who gives a fuck?

It doesn't matter how good a negotiator you are if the company you apply for has a criteria that people who ask for more than a certain figure are not going to get it. Some places even delight in going for the worst negotiator since it's the "lowest bid". After being laid off, having a needy girlfriend and prepared to take anything in my field I ended up in that situation - bad choice in the long term not the sort of people you want to stay with (eg. only way to get time off, let alone a salary rise, is to quit and work elsewhere).

The big clues are right there in the summary. It's probably doable without a vast amount of effort since a lot of it will come down to insulation, ducting and awnings or similar window shading. There is already a subway in place so improvements there come down to better equipment instead of expensive tunnelling or land aquistion.
What makes 40% or so possible is buildings constructed with no thought for energy consumption in some cases need only minor modifications to for a major reduction in use. We've seen that in other place with "no-brainers" such as painting a roof white making a major difference to AC use.
It's not hard to use less if a lot is being thrown away.