Look in s housewares store in Europe it's full of pressure cookers! It's Socialists who use them! Red blooded Americans don't dare use them because it's the road to Communism!

Um, whoosh???

Technically speaking, the tremendous number of earthquakes in Oklahoma aren't the immediate result of fracking; they are the result of wastewater injection. Now, the wastewater does come from fracking...so...there you go.

This was seen back in the 60's in the Coalinga area of California.

DreadPirate, you are really not calculating correctly. I know it sounds cheap, but it isn't. If you can get there for $30 in gas, that's 40 miles per gallon -- not bad. Still, that's 7.5 cents/mile.

Say you bought a used car for $10,000, and can drive it for 100,000 miles. That's 10 cents a mile. More than gas.

Oil changes every 5,000 miles at $40? That's another penny a mile.

Tires at $300 every 30,000 miles? Another penny a mile.

Let's not talk about what your time is worth (you might really enjoy the drive), or insurance (not too dependent on miles driven) -- but still, that's about 20 cents a mile, or $80.

Most people don't really like to think how expensive driving is, but it isn't cheap. We have been taught that it's all about the gas, but it just isn't.

IBM's involvement was well after Linux became popular and is not the reason. I'm sure they would have used BSD if it had won by that point.

Uh no, all Unixes at that time allowed over-allocating.

It's kind of interesting.

One of the big reasons that they thought it would be limited to 90 days is that the solar panels get covered in dust, and as that happens the amount of energy collected diminishes. They figured in about 90 days, based on previous missions to Mars, they'd be out of juice.

And...for the first 50 days or so, it was going that way. And then, a whirlwind came by, and scrubbed the rover clean. This has happened many many times since. An unexpected good fortune.

Although I see problems with this I kind of doubt counterfeiting is going to be one. To successfully do this the driver/Uber would have to have access to a huge warehouse of counterfeit goods so they could exchange the real item (chosen by the customer, not the Uber driver) for a matching fake one. I just don't see that as a practical scheme for stealing goods.

if you and Wacom would embrace Bluetooth

So either the tablet is plugged into the wall or it is thick enough to contain a battery, or it has some thick part near the edge containing the battery? And I have to recharge it or replace the battery? Sorry I don't think so.

Actually you can change the monitor layout without restarting X now.

And the Gnome control for moving the monitors around somewhat works, though it is unclear if they are special casing Nvidia or that NVidia is implementing the necessary parts of xrnr. The Nvidia control works somewhat better.

We'll see.

It's absolutely wrong that I am proposing a 'stealable' ID. No, it's not that at all. Like NFC (ApplePay and others) you don't send out your ID, your bracelet will engage in a two-way conversation that uses generates unique identifiers every time that prove that it's you without giving the system communicating with you the ability to impersonate you. It's not hard at all; we should have been doing this years ago. This is described in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography twenty-fucking-years ago. Chapter 21(Identification Schemes) describes "zero-knowledge proof of identity". Curiously, researchers Feige, Fiat, and Shamir submitted a patent application in 1986 for this, but the Patent Office responded "the disclosure or publication of the subject matter ... would be detrimental to the national security..." The authors were ordered to notify all Americans to whom the research had been disclosed that unauthorized disclosure could lead to two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine, or both. Somewhat hilarious, as the work was all done at Weizmann Institute in Israel.

That said, I do think that groups like the NSA and FBI have been quite successful in keeping people (like Jeff4747) remarkably uneducated. Banks, credit card companies, and groups like Google that make gigabucks tracking people have held back from doing things right as well -- and they're paying for it today.

To say again. It is easy to build a system that would securely verify that you have authority to do something, without giving the ability for somebody else to impersonate you. It's somewhat more challenging than printing number in plastic on a credit card, but only a tiny bit more challenging.

This will happen. Once it does people will wonder why it took so long.

The problem with phones is that you can lose them or break them or have them stolen. I agree that it's a good place to start, though.

I believe that the RFID tag that Coren22 suggests don't have, and can't have, the processing power required to do this right. You don't want to say "Yes, I'm 132132123123", that would be *way* too easy to fake. You want to have a back-and-forth communication that shows that you are who you are, without giving away your ID.

I think the bracelet would become a status symbol -- the status being "yeah, I care about security." I'm actually not kidding.

At some point, and my guess is pretty darn soon, reasonable people are going to have a very secure cryptobracelet that they never take off, or if you take it off it will never work again.

The bracelet would work like the NFC chip in current phones, it would create unique identifiers for each transaction, so you can be verified that you are who you are without ever broadcasting your identity.

Then, all email and every other communication can easily be encrypted, securely, and without adding complication. You won't have to worry about remembering a hundred passwords, or about what happens when the store you bought things from is hacked, or that a library of 100 millions passwords will find yours.

I grant that some will protest that this is not natural (I don't want to wear something on my wrist!) but people do a hundred other unnatural things every day (brush their teeth, use deodorant, wear glasses, live longer than fifty years...) The benefits will be enormous, the changes minimal, and this will be led, I believe, by thought leaders.

If the difference in list price of the expensive to the super-expensive Tesla is only $10,000; I would expect that at least 30% of that price would be extra profit for Tesla. Kind of like the gold Apple Watch. So their cost is probably less than $250/kWh.

The problem with license plate readers is that there are only so many cameras out there. How can they know where everybody was all the time?

The answer is the Vehicles Miles Traveled tax. Many states and the federal gov't have proposed over and over that all cars have GPS trackers in them that tax them on how many miles they drive. They say "the problem is cars are more efficient, so we don't make as much money." (Can't you just raise the rate then? wtf?) or that this is "more fair", everybody is charged the same amount for how far they drive; as opposed to how much gas they use and how much carbon they emit.

But, come on, the real reason is almost certainly to track where everybody went, all the time. If there is anything the Snowden revelations have demonstrated, it's that if there is any possible way to capture data on people, the government is going to do it. Anything you can imagine, and many things that you could never have imagined, are being done. If you want to believe that a GPS tracker that hooks up to a gas pump only sends one bit of information, well, I suppose you deserve what you get.