I think you meant to say there is no power shortage. However we only have 56 years of proven reserves of oil, add another 4 years counting oil sands. To me that qualifies as a looming shortage of one of our primary source of energy. And that's all assuming zero increase in energy use, and as a corollary that about 85% of the population keeps on using 5 to 10 times less energy per person than Americans. So saying there's no energy shortage is a bit optimistic.

That said I'll grant you that although we only have 58 years of proven natural gas reserves, at least discoveries seem to be keeping pace. We'll see how that goes once the oil runs out however. Also while we can switch to other energy sources like wind and solar, they require an important initial investment of energy which will be hard once we start feeling the crunch.

That's disingenuous when it's caused by a byproduct of our main sources of energy. CO2 is not something you can filter out of your car exhaust or that we can easily take out of power plants.

No. He's saying that whether we want it or not the world population will go down to 1 billion, either in an orderly fashion of our own choosing; or through famine, disease and war over resources.

While I don't agree with his 1 billion mark, it's obvious the population cannot increase indefinitely. Fortunately it's expected that it will plateau at or before the 10 billion mark. But there's still the question of whether there's enough resources (energy, drinking water, ores, etc) to sustain a population of 10 billion, all living decent lives (unlike now), indefinitely.

Studies are not hard to find: type 'weather impact of wind turbines' in Google and the first link will be Wikipedia which will point you to five studies on the subject!

To summarize the current set of studies don't find a significant impact but more detailed analyzes will tell us more. But we've been building sky-scrapers and other tall structures for a century now and have yet to see any impact of these. Also wind-turbines are about 150 meters high when our atmosphere is 20,000 meters thick. Finally taking down wind-turbines is much easier than scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. So overall I have a hard time feeling concerned.

You're forgetting all the the food that is thrown away by producers and then supermarkets because it would not sell, then all the food people buy and let go bad, and then all that they put in their plate and then throw away because they're full. So to get this 2000 calories intake farmers need to produce at least 4000. But probably you think that solving this issue is trivial.

A no less considerable amount does not lend itself to standard agricultural practices either because of the terrain or the lack of water for irrigation. The 'efficient land use' also relies on a massive use of fossil fuel based fertilizers. But you probably think we have an inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels.

Sure. Convincing everyone to stop eating beef, let alone most forms of meat, is totally realistic. And having to go down this path is absolutely not the sign that there's more people than the earth can support given our current lifestyle.

Great! 0.5% of the population can afford increased food costs! Even if we ignore disparities among their populations and extend your reasoning to all developed countries we end up with at most a billion people. Do you even care about the remaining 85%?

So maybe the earth can sustain 7 billion people but all your arguments are naive and totally off the mark.

I have been wondering about Stingrays too. Based on the Stingrays Wikipedia page they would not need access to the SIM card's private key. Instead they force the device to use the weaker A5/2 security protocol and then crack it which allows them to recover the SIM card's private key.

This perfectly illustrates why allowing protocol variants with weaker security is a bad idea. It also makes Gemalto's security lapse look somewhat irrelevant: cracking the SIM's private key seems pretty trivial anyway.

My understanding is that's what they do already. The private key is generated and put directly into the SIM card and never leaves it. But a private key is useless if nobody knows the corresponding public key. It's the transfer of that public key to the entity that needs it, the carrier, that the NSA/GCHQ intercepted.

Maybe a fix would be for Gemalto to sell blank SIM cards and have the carriers themselves generate and burn the private key to it using a software WORN API: Write Once, Read Never. Of course then the NSA/GCHQ would have no trouble forcing the US carriers to hand over all their public keys but then they can already force them to intercept the communications. At least the rest of the world would only be subject spying by their own government.

Sorry, wrong story.

The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".

Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi referring to a small person.

But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).

So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.

The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".

Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi refering to a small person.

But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).

So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.

Quite the opposite. It proves that the anti-French sentiment is so strong in the US and UK that it drowns any rational discussion.

Server hosting companies certainly do not connect my machine to the Internet: they provide Internet hosting services and not Internet Access. And if you're going to use the ISP acronym in another discussion you should know that it commonly exclusively refers to Internet access providers. But it sure is a great way to spread FUD and claim plausible deniability.

And again you miss the point: no matter what equipment you use you will not be able to detect any difference in sound quality between their cable and a regular cable.

It's even obvious without any testing to anyone who knows anything about the Ethernet, TCP/IP or the OSI model: either a packet of data makes it across the cable or it does not. If it does, then it's going to be bit for bit identical no matter what cable you used, and thus the resulting sound will be identical too. If the packet did not get across, then it means you god a broken cable or some rodent has been chomping on it. But the result will either be a retransmission in time, in which case there will again be no impact on the sound quality, and if not, a pop, stall or stutter. But you will under no circumstances get a reduced "sound picture", lesser "differentiation between sonic elements" or lesser "sense of clarity".

As I said I gave you a deep discount. But if you still think that electrical noise and crosstalk are in any way relevant to the quality of sound sent through IP packets, then you don't know what you're talking about. In fact it puts you clearly in their target audiophile category with the only thing saving you being the size of your wallet. They could likely con you by selling making the same claims about an ordinary cable and selling it at a a mere 50% premium.

Of course you have to type "$0". How can you expect to get away with omitting the name of the command you want to run?

Oh. I see the problem. Your connection to the Internet goes through a low quality Ethernet cable, or even, shudder, a WiFi connection. But fear not. I provide you with a premium high-fidelity Ethernet cable that will let you see the full clarity of my prose. With it the words will be sharper, their meaning will come into focus. Never again will you have to wonder at the meaning of what you read. And it can be yours now for the low low price of $1000.