For starters, please provide a reference and backing evidence for your assertion that 'hundreds of millions of homes ... will be flooded'. While we're waiting on that, let's assume for the moment that it does happen:

1) It's going to take a hundred years for the temperature to go up that much and melt that much ice.

2) The USA, -by itself-, builds half a million houses, in a bad year.

3) The USA, -by itself-, can easily replace 50 million houses in a century.

4) Why replace the houses when you can dike them off, like New Orleans and the Netherlands?

5) What is the effective lifespan of these houses that will need to be replaced? If a house only lasts for 50 years, it would have to be replaced anyway. Most housing in poor countries is lucky to last five years; in the US, 50 years would be exceptional for a modern home. Is your estimate of housing numbers derated for natural wear and tear?

And finally, moving a hundred million homes over the course of a century does not even remotely qualify as a 'catastrophe'. It may inconvenience some people, but so do hurricanes, and hurricanes are much more violent and much less predictable. See earlier messages in this thread for a proper definition of catastrophe.

Whether or not I care about future generations a hundred years from now is really irrelevant, because I already have sufficient motivation: -I- personally intend to be alive in a hundred years. I'm not going to risk my own future by risking society. I plan for the long term.

While I can't really fault the details of how you live your life, that's a pretty crappy attitude to take. I largely behave the same way you do (multiple computers 24/7, AC/70/70, no recycling), but one substantial way we differ is that I most definitely do plan to be around in 100 years. It's critically important to me that the world 100 years from now be sane, safe, and livable - and that means no environmental catastrophe. (It also means avoiding the short-sightedness of people like you, but that's a whole different problem with many more available options for failure.)

So why do I not change my behaviour to be more 'environmentially friendly'? It's not for lack of self control - I am perfectly capable of delaying gratification for the greater/later good. It's not because I'm ignorant - I've educated myself pretty substantially on the topic.

The reason I don't change my behaviour is because I don't see a path from "climate change" to "catastrophe". The earth has been substantially hotter in the past than it is now; it has also been substantially cooler. It has had higher CO2 levels, and lower. Quite frankly, even a (huge!) 5C rise in global temperature does not sound like a "catastrophe" to me; when I think catastrophe, I think of things like "30 mile diameter asteroid strike", "airborne ebola with 3 day contagion and two week onset of symptoms", and "old age". Having some icebergs melt, a handful of species go extinct, and some cities erecting dikes due to the sea level rising an inch a year does not even remotely qualify.

I have no doubt that in a hundred years, we'll pretty much be off stored carbon as an energy source, if for no other reason that there will be so little left it won't be worth digging it out of the ground. I also have no doubt that in a hundred years, geoengineering will have already been performed to some minor extent, and that if things really go stupid it'll be in our capability to perform major geoengineering. Worst case, we block out 5% of solar incident radiation with space based mirrors.

Yes, this stuff is rocket science; but so is a modern cell phone. We can handle it, and we will. I'll help make sure of it.

Just because I believe that the recent climate change (the last century or so) is largely man-made, doesn't mean I think need needs to be 'fixed'. It's possible to be aware of climate change and not care/not think it's important.

As another poster said, this is about virtual pair production, which we see all the time. But there's an interesting side effect of pair production which I figured I'd toss out there: it makes vacuum an imperfect insulator. If you apply enough voltage across a chunk of vacuum, current -will- start to flow. In other words, vacuum has a breakdown voltage as a result of virtual pair production.

This breakdown point is at roughly the voltage required to separate virtual particle pairs that come into existence. Suppose a pair of the two lightest species, an electron and a positron, pops into existence for a moment. Before they can mutually annihilate, a huge external electric field pulls them apart and pays the energy debt to create them. The resulting electron flow to the positive terminal and the positron flow to the negative terminal are an electrical current, reducing the potential difference of the field.

This same effect of separating virtual particles via a huge electric field is what the experiment is proposing to measure. Normal matter breaks down long before the required field strength is met, so the only way to create an electric field that strong is via photons, which in a laser pulse all constructively combine to give small regions of space huge electric and magnetic fields.

Just FYI.

Understood. This is one of those 'minor technical' reasons I was talking about.

Something that has always confused me about crypto implementations is why chained block modes and ciphers with an actual 'inverse' operation (like AES) are used. I understand the technical arguments and I know that in some cases, chained modes really are the optimal solution; but they aren't "so optimal" that they're far and away the best choice. Usually they're only optimal in some minor technical fashion.

However, most of the attacks I've seen against ciphers involve these modes. For some reason, the chained construction is simply harder to implement and design around. The few systems I've designed used counter mode, because it's just easier to think about and design against, and can use a cipher without an inverse. It does have more overhead, but if you're encrypting for provable security you'd think that some overhead would be expected.

However, as I understand it, counter mode wouldn't really have helped here unless some kind of replay prevention and MIC checks were also used, which I believe is infeasible due to the XML design space. The spec itself simply leaks the data due to data formatting stupidity and server responses; no amount of crypto will help if your server basically tells you the data bits.

I think you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision making. Let me help you lay it out in bare form:

One the one side, we have a 99+% probability of complete dysfunction and death.

On the other side, we have "some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse and/or may not work".

Sit down and really think for a minute about your "unknown side effect" scenarios. What are the odds of it working, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of catastrophic failure, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of failure that isn't catastrophic? Why did you pick the numbers that you picked? What evidence do you have for those numbers?

Quite frankly, if it doesn't work or if it fails catastrophically, she's dead anyway, so the losses are roughly equivalent. The odds of success however, are vastly different - because doing nothing is guaranteed to fail, while trying the treatment is not. Taking a larger view, there is also a general research value in having her try treatment, because that additional data may help save the lives of others.

-dentin

Yeah, this would be fine, or even "wc /dev/sd?". As long as the drive is read from periodically, it seems to help a lot.

I've been doing this for a long time, and have settled on the concept of a long term data archive for this purpose. It contains approximately half a terabyte of data that I consider to be 'important', and a few hundred megabytes of data that I consider 'very important'.

The first thing to be aware of is that a data archive is useless if it's not readily available 24/7. You don't back up data by putting it on tapes and throwing it in a box in the closet. Putting tapes in a closet is useful, but it should be considered a 'catastrophic recovery option to be used as a last resort'.

The main machine that houses the 'live' archive contains two large drives, each with a full copy of an operating system and the data archive. The currently booting disk is considered current; its archive is live. The second drive is an older copy of the archive, and is generally only a few days out of date. Rsync via atq automatically mirrors the archive and operating system to the second drive every few nights.

The backup machine has a similar setup, but it has older versions of the data archive. I update each archive on the backup machine every two months, staggered so there's always a copy of the archive about a month old, and always a copy about two months old. Having older versions of the archive available helps in the rare situations where you blow away something you shouldn't have. The backup machine should be off site if you can manage it.

For the 'very important' data, I keep copies on a handful of external machines and maintain them either via revision control or rsync. In the 'catastrophic backup' regime, I keep decommissioned disks containing old copies of the archive off site, usually in the hands of reliable friends and family.

It should be noted that I've found it important to run a nightly MD5 or SHA-256 checksum of every file in the archive, even if you don't do anything with it. (I actually compare against previous values, but that's not the important part.) This seems to greatly extend the lifetime of disks and reduce disk failure; I don't have a good explanation for this, but I suspect that reading from the bulk of the disk periodically allows the drive to identify and rewrite refresh questionable sectors before the data is unreadable. The disk need not go bad or have a catastrophic failure for data to become unreadable; mechanical aging and magnetic decoherence can simply put a sector above the ability of the FEC in the drive to recover, if left too long.

I don't use revision control on the bulk of the data in the archive. 95+% of the archive is considered long term read-only storage. Your usage may be different, and you may choose to use revision control on the entire archive. That doesn't really change the nature of the backup process though.