Yeah well, you probably would have been cynical of SpaceX when their first three launches failed. Now they are on track to dominate the entire industry, even without reusability. Looking at Musk's history, when he says something is possible, you can be quite sure that success is in the set of possible outcomes.

>If by 40 and you can't make your way into management or have the talent to become a senior-level programmer leading projects, then you deserve to fail.

Why? Why shouldn't there be a solid career path for "good enough" individuals, as there is in most fields?

Look around your building. How many "normal" employees are there? How many managers and senior staff? 10 to 1 maybe? So, what happens to the other nine programmers after the best one gets the "higher" job? It's not like they can get a job elsewhere - every other business is in exactly the same situation. If half the working population is over 40, and fill 100% of "higher" jobs, that will only employ 20% of them. What are the other 80% supposed to do? Or more importantly, why should they enter a career path knowing there's an 80% chance they'll be thrown to the curb once their most exploitable years are behind them?

Of course, unless things have changed dramatically since the last time I paid attention, a 3 bedroom house in China is liable to be a much higher status thing than it is in the US, owned primarily by executives and the like. May as well try to judge the economic wellbeing of the workers at a major jewelery store by the average price of Ferrari's in the parking lot.

Read that line again in context. I was dismissing the creation of biochar from stored automotive exhaust as needlessly complicated. Not advocating biofuels.

Nonsense. It may not add *much* security, but that depends entirely on the resources of your attacker. Have you never hidden a house key somewhere outside in case you lock yourself out? Classic case of security through obscurity (though in fairness, that's probably one of the stronger links in your home security). Ditto secret passages across the ages. Your security *will* be broken, if it's important then you need to implement multiple independent layers and pray that the weaknesses in one will be found and fixed before attackers find a way through all the others. If one or more of those layers is something the attacker has never seen before, then when they encounter it they have to break it from scratch, rather than just purchasing the crack on whatever markets deal in such knowledge. If you've got an "obscurity layer" in, say, your insulin pump software, then there's probably very little market for the knowledge of how to break it, which greatly improves the chances that such knowledge will be lost, or noticed by the "good guys" before simultaneous holes in the other security layers are found.

I suppose it depends on the attacker. After all, the question probably isn't "has my security been broken?" but "who has broken my security?". Or can you offer a few examples of encryption *implementations* that have never been compromised? After all, even theoretically unbreakable encryption algorithms would be only as secure as the specific implementation you're using, and nobody is perfect.

Today we know that the NSA, and presumably other major spy agencies around the world, successfully managed to crack and/or compromise many of the key encryption standards in use, and have no particular reason to assume we know about more than the tip of the iceberg. And I'm willing to bet that knowledge leaks into the hands of other powerful interests as well. And from there... well, useful secrets tend to spread for the right price.

Thanks. My head is still stuffed full of cotton, but not constantly hurting everywhere has never felt so good. Nasty bug, though at least the worst of it only lasted a couple days.

This does sound intruiging, and I'm going to try to come back to it once I can think clearly, but I have a feeling I don't have sufficient background to appreciate a lot of it.

Hmm, sounds plausible. Knew there was a reason I stay away from security beyond avoiding buffer overrun potential, etc. (I mean, aside from it encouraging unhealthy paranoid tendencies)

But... it seems like your raw data would be protected from such side-channel attacks though if your home-grown encryption was the *first* line of defense instead - any vulnerabilities would then only expose the battle-tested encrypted stream, would they not? That might even improve the penetration resistance of your own algorithm as well, especially if the attacker doesn't know what battle-tested algorithm is in use. I mean it's pretty obvious that you've found a vulnerability if you're suddenly able to access a well-organized stream of data, less so if you're just getting a different stream of "white noise".

Yep, all you need is $50,000 to buy a new vehicle instead of scraping together $500 for something that will hopefully last until you can afford something better, or $50 for a kludgey fix to your current clunker. 25th percentile annual income is almost $18,000, so that shouldn't take long, right?

Though granted, a custom control module is probably not an option at the low end. My friend made custom-modded street-racers, I remember one that had four different modules that could be switched between depending on your current priorities - from (relatively) fuel-efficient cruise-mobile to "punch you into the chair so hard you have to climb out of the trunk".

That bothered me as well, I'm pretty sure vegetation is decreasing. but all the detailed diagrams I looked at had that discrepancy. I imagine some small percentage of biomass gets sequestered - biochar from wildfires and the like. And thriving ecosystems grow soil - a good permaculturist can grow several inches of fresh topsoil a year, so that even if the vegetation level is holding steady, the amount of soil could be increasing.

>equilibrium has and will be attained again for every level of carbon in the cycle

Not really, the Earth is a bistable system, there are only two broad equilibrium points (well, there are at least two more as well, but those are unable to support complex life) Of course a new equilibrium will be reached, in a strictly literal sense. But it may take many millenia for that new equilibrium to be reached, and it won't necessarily bear any resemblance to what exists now.

I suppose I should have said "the ecological carbon cycle is not well equipped to maintain stability in the face of changes in the the total amount of carbon present". Better?

It's more difficult yes. You probably want to keep the fuel injection - just replace the control system with one that doesn't care about emissions and it'll run at a very different sweet-spot. Especially after you rip out all the wasteful hardware that is now pointless.

And sure, but OBD2 scanners only tell you the *very* limited data both collected by the cars own sensors and made available over the interface. Often enough to get started, but not even remotely comparable to proper external diagnostics, especially for something like emissions testing.

Dude, have you *seen* me code? 96 hours with no sleep, just Cheetos and Jolt cola, and I can write a much improved Office from scratch. Okay, it can't actually save, or format text, and the spreadsheet formulas can only use addition in Reverse Polish notation, and never get quite the right result. But damn it, the cursor blinks in a Fibonacci sequence mod 5!

Right. At that point only pretty much every homegrown encryption algorithm on the planet had been trivially cracked. Not like today when pretty much every homegrown encryption algorithm on the planet has been trivially cracked

And if you absolutely, positively MUST roll your own encryption (because, reasons!), then cascade THAT behind something battle-tested.

>AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it

Provided the implementation is flawless of course. After all, a lot of maintenance is bug-fixing rather than updates.