If the mountain is a 2km away the reflection from the mirror is going to be very broad indeed. The sun is a half-degree across, and half-degree times 2km means that the edges of the mirror beam will be about 20 meters wide, nice soft edges and not the harsh ellipse shown. The ends of the ellipse will have edges more like 100 meters wide.

Common misconception - certificate authorities do not have private keys. Your private key never leaves your own computers. That's why the NSA would have to force companies to cough them up (or steal them).

Also, for normal SSL having the private key lets you passively eavesdrop and decrypt. For souped up SSL with forward secrecy it doesn't, it only lets you MITM the connections, which results in the server and client having a different view of things - that's detectable, whereas a leaked SSL key isn't.

Forward secret SSL is new, and not that easy to do. At the end of 2011 Google employees did the necessary upgrades to OpenSSL, but most other sites haven't deployed it (yet). Enabling forward secret SSL is the best and easiest step forward to beat the NSA/GCHQ right now, because if they HAVE obtained your private key, it forces them to start actively intercepting connections which is expensive and detectable.

You are apparently blissfully unaware that such studies *are* done already before siting a nuclear power plant. Permission to construct and operate one of these plants requires extensive studies on what kinds of disasters -- natural or manmade -- the plant could be subject to, how those events would affect the plant, and what steps are taken to mitigate those effects.

Alas a lot of suburbanites, like the GP, get ridiculously defensive about their lifestyles. They know it's inefficient and causes excessive tax burdens, and the last thing they want to admit is that they might, actually, be happier living in a home on a street that has a convenience store on the corner and a bus stop three minutes walk away.

Not everyone is happy to live in a hive. It is nice to have a bus in 3 minutes; however from criminal statistics point of view availability of a bus directly translates into house robberies. Even if that is not your concern, the same bus will be making noise around your house. The convenience store on the corner is nice, but now you are locked into its prices (otherwise you lose the convenience of proximity.) You will have more neighbors, and you can talk to ten of them at once without raising your voice. They do the same; you will be aware, without even trying, of all their family problems; and when their son has a party the whole block can't sleep.

There is value in living farther away from all that human hive. The air is clearer; the birds are plentiful; the land is available to do whatever you want - a garden, a tree (or ten,) chickens, cattle - whatever you can imagine. Your activities are not seen by every passerby; your property has a gate; there is no HOA; there are no taxes to the city; there are no laws about having a tree, and there is no death penalty for cutting one down. If you have dogs, they have plenty of room to be dogs. If you have cars, they are parked on your property and you don't need to lock them. If you have projects to work on, there is space for them. You don't have any of that when you are constrained to 0.0025 of an acre that your backyard occupies. Perhaps city people can convince themselves that they want to live in such conditions - but as soon as someone makes it big they buy a mansion in suburbs, lock the gates, and live happily ever after without rubbing elbows with a crowd of neighbors.

That's what I did with MOO2--played it for a day or two, and went back to (and still play) MOO . . .(never even stuck MOO3 into the drive).

hawk

During my exile in Pennsylvania, I had to deal with their summer road construction method: shut down all of the lanes that you hope to work on over the summer at the very beginning, then work on them sparingly.

Anyway, they had signs with what was supposed to look like a child's handwriting saying, "Please slow down. My Daddy works here."

I wanted to load the van with signs to put next to these in the empty construction zones saying, "Please work. My Daddy drives here."

hawk, who didn't at the time think of the Mommy variant [the state had both], I supposed I'd need a "Please hold a sign. My daddy drives here."

California used to have Illegal Alien Crossing signs; I don't know if they still do.

hawk

When people notice these, or the mannequin behind the wheels, the decoy cars have been known to get decorated with donuts . . .

hawk

if the KDE4-followed-by-GNOME3 debacle had never happened, I'd still be using Linux. Instead, I went to Mac OS, which is where all of the other Linux users I used to know went as well—a group that had steadily been growing for a decade prior to the last 2-3 years.

Now it's too late to close the stable door; the horse is gone.

From here. Very few of those jokes have been translated.

Not typical in cities, true, because shooting in cities triggers a major police response. However tagging of signs is commonplace. Probably 10% of road signs are tagged at any given time, on average, and 30% to 50% of suitable, inaccessible vertical surfaces. I see them every day.

Signs that are shot up are on rural roads. I saw them personally, close by. The nearest sign with a .22LR hole is about 100 yards from my home. The hole was still there yesterday. A year ago a police officer was calling up everyone in the area because a bullet struck a wall of a house a mile away from my house and he was investigating. It is very easy for gang members to drive up the road and shoot randomly from a moving car. There is nobody to see them doing it; certainly not after midnight. Shooting is legal in unincorporated areas, so the police won't even respond. Some neighbors shoot their own firearms on their land, so it's not possible to tell who is doing what.

Most likely I'll return to Canada after my work here is done. The USA is just too violent, and there is no cure that would pass the muster of democracy and political correctness. The country is going downhill. I'd love to stop that, but there isn't much I can do.

So question: what if they were in possession of data clearly laying out 9/11 but they hadn't searched it yet? Do you really think they aren't looking at ALL that data with keywords from the get go?

Automated systems are going to be crawling and indexing this data, hence they *are* looking at it.

So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?

I'd pay them because it would be fair. However, in this particular case AT&T is no longer providing my Internet connection because they scrapped DSL equipment and focused on U-Verse or whatever it is that works only in cities. Now I have a pretty good dish that reaches the nearest tower of Clear.net. I can get up to 5 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up this way, for half the price. I have the land line, but I rarely need it, and I can give it up. (My AT&T microcell at home works over Internet.)

Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative

The apartment building was full of fluorescent lights, and more were in the street. I had noise at S9+ and couldn't get any signal at all. Perhaps a repeater at 2m would be an option, but there is no challenge in that. Push the button and talk; there isn't much else you can do.

I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results...

I have a Buddistick, and it is pretty good for such a compact antenna. But as every other high impedance antenna, it is narrowband, and it still won't work if there are hundreds of fluorescent lights all over you (in corridors, and at neighbors.) Now I have a proper, full height HF9V, half a mile away from the nearest neighbor, and the difference is astonishing.

take it to the beach for even better results.

It would look funny if you go to a beach at midnight to work some DX at 40m or 80m :-) Besides, that Buddi* won't be very good at those bands (it doesn't support them, IIRC.) Working a 24h or 48h contest from a beach ... well, Field Day, perhaps, but not much else :-) You are talking about an incidental QSO now and then, to test the equipment. That you can always do. But if you are aiming for a bit more, like an award perhaps, you need to try harder. My FT-950 costs too much to operate it at the beach, where dust, salt and heat are plentiful.

If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own

That is not the answer. You are telling me why I shouldn't be needing what I need. That's an entirely different discussion. Today you can have a 3D printer kit for a $999. A friend is already assembling that kit. It's not dirt cheap, but hobbies don't have to be cheap, especially if you don't drink and don't smoke (those "hobbies" are far more expensive.) You live only once; spend your money while you can - the last suit has no pockets. Besides, techies like myself are well paid, and I can afford gizmos like that.

Some of my friends rebuild cars - some are in love with old cars, other are building racing cars; yet another friend is a motorbike aficionado. You can't tell them to keep their projects in the club. There are other issues with machines, though. They require careful alignment before you can use them. That alignment takes time, and if you are the owner you know what was done and what was not done, so you don't have to recalibrate everything each time you walk up to the mill. There is value in owning your tools.

If you've lived somewhere with cluster mailboxes, you know they aren't always under the view of a camera, but are provided with locks in all circumstances.

Who hasn't started with renting an apartment? I did. The mailboxes were outside, away from the street. Anyone could break those locks - they are only strong enough to keep honest people honest. Fortunately, such break-ins haven't happened while I was there, but in general it happens from time to time. Human stupidity is infinite.

At a business center we have clusters; more than once the mail carrier drove away closing the door but failing to lock it, so that all the mail compartments were left exposed.