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Comment What's your suggestion for intelligence work? (Score 1) 504

I presume you wouldn't say it was "wrong" of the United States to crack the German and Japanese codes in WWII...

...so when US adversaries (and lets just caveat this by saying people YOU, personally, agree are legitimate US adversaries) don't use their own "codes", but instead share the same systems, networks, services, devices, cloud providers, operating systems, encryption schemes, and so on, that Americans and much of the rest of the world uses, would you suggest that they should be off limits?

This isn't so much a law enforcement question as a question of how to do SIGINT in the modern digital world, but given the above, and given that intelligence requires secrecy in order to be effective, how would you suggest the United States go after legitimate targets? Or should we not be able to, because that power "might" be able to be abused -- as can any/all government powers, by definition?

This simplistic view that the only purpose of the government in a free and democratic society must be to somehow subjugate, spy on, and violate the rights of its citizens is insane, while actual totalitarian and non-free states, to say nothing of myriad terrorist and other groups, press their advantage. And why wouldn't they? The US and its ever-imperfect system of law is not the great villain in the world.

Take a step back and get some perspective. And this is not a rhetorical question: if someone can tell me their solution for how we should be able to target technologies that are fundamentally shared with innocent Americans and foreigners everywhere while still keeping such sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques secret, I'm all ears. And if you believe the second a technology is shared it should become magically off-limits because power might be abused, you are insane -- or, more to the point, you believe you have some moral high ground which, ironically, would actually result in severe disadvantages for the system of free society you would claim to support.

Comment Anderman is a troll (Score 1) 393

Seriously, this guy has written about Tesla for a number of years. Yet, he has always been negative on them, and WRONG.

The global EV market will grow from 65,000 units in 2012 to 450,000 in 2020; and yet, pure evs nearly doubled in 2013 to 111K and on-track to double last years sales in 2014. Heck, at the end of 2015, Tesla ALONE will be producing 50K cars / year.
and here, he gripes about Tesla as being a large unknown, and not likely to hit its numbers.

Basically, Anderman is NOT about batteries, but just an industry troll, with lousy ability to make accurate predictions.

Comment Re:High reliability? (Score 1) 93

Incidentally, QNX has an interesting design in this respect, in that it maps the the source buffer (a page at a time, IIRC) into the address space of the receiving process, and does the copy directly. Or it might map the destination buffer into the address space of the sending process; not sure about that. This allows messages to be arbitrary-length.

Comment Re:Expensive and complicated? (Score 1) 97

"... photo development was cheap and common enough to fully automate at a kiosk in the mall."

And why, pray tell, would someone who cared about photographic quality process film and make prints at a kiosk in the mall? Crappy processing and crappy prints, and with automated printing and color correction you have no idea as to what the hell went wrong (or right) with your images.

Shoot pro-grade E100, or Velvia, and you paid $10-12 per roll of film plus $10/roll commercial processing, or at least $20/roll combined. Shoot a dozen rolls at an event, and you just blew through $250 in 1980's dollars.

So yeah, I'd call it "pricey".

Comment Re:High reliability? (Score 2) 93

Monoliths, e.g. Linux, don't have IPC latency [...]

In the case of non-memory-mapped I/O (e.g. anything that goes through a file descriptor), the major cost isn't context switching, it's copying data. Microkernels have to transfer all this data between address spaces. Macrokernels, on the other hand, have to transfer it between user space and kernel space. It's basically the same operation with basically the same cost, but it falls under a different heading.

Comment not sure that we want it controlled (Score 1) 119

The truth is, that whenever the world has mass die offs due to nature, we do not get wars.
Right now, we have massive numbers of small wars popping up. This has gotten old. In addition, it could lead to a real war with nukes.

But, if the world takes a massive loss of life due to say Ebola going airborne, it would lower the likelihood of a nuke war.

Comment Re: Talking Point (Score 1) 427

The one who is lying is you.

Germany roughly 7tons per capita, USA roughly 18tons, that is close to a factor of 3, not 2.

Per the European Edgar DB, Figure 2.4, American per capita in 2012, was 16.4. In Germany, it was just under 10. That is a factor of 1.5, and no where NEAR 3x.

Chinas rate is still on the lower edge of European countries like Denmark or Germany.

in 2012, China's per capita was at ~7.2, while Europe's was at ~7.3. That was two years ago.
Since that time, Chinas CO2 emissions have risen more than 20%. China now accounts for more than 1/3 of the global emissions, with less than 1/6 of the world population.
And all of that is based on numbers that Chinese gov. has given up. OCO2 is about to shock the world and liars like yourself.

Secondly, over the last 20 years, Europe's rate has not changed much That is complete nonsense. Europes footprint dropped by 30%.

In POF, america is the only major nation to have made major cuts That is nonsense, too. Since 1997 you dropped perhaps in 5% ... if at all.

And while China continues to grow their emissions by 3-5% a year, and Europe is actually growing as well, only Americas continues to fall. wow three lies in one sentence, you are good at that.

Per edgar, EU27 was at 4.12 in 1992. In 2012, you were at 3.74. That is a 10% drop.
Now, in the same time span, we increased heavily due to W (from 5->5.91), and then due to our cheap nat gas, we dropped BELOW 5, though, edgar shows America at 5.19 in 2012. However, other groups show that 2013 was a major drop for America, pretty much a fixed level for Europe (esp. due to Germany's killing of their nukes and their massive build-out of coal plants), and a REAL MASSIVE increase for China's emissions.

Comment Re: Been there, done that. (Score 1) 100

Several things wrong with that BS.
1) China has NEVER been transparent with their budget.
2) much of what is considered military in America and the west, goes under civilian budget, but military control, in china.
3) China is not a TRUE capitalism. As such, all those that work on the military side, are paid a fraction of what they are paid elsewhere. As such, building an AK-47 in China is a REAL fraction of what it would costs to build in America.

Far more important, is the speed with which China is growing their military, combined with the large number of military secrets that China has stolen from the west (esp. America).

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