Comment This is a custom vaccine - likely very $$$ (Score 2) 72
Comment variability of a stable system is persistent (Score 4, Interesting) 110
The people of Europe are learning what the farmers on Southern Ontario learned 30 years ago. Even if the average doesn't change the weather has significantly changed. Average temperature is a terrible measure for climate change. It might be easy to explain but it lags the real change by 30 years.
Comment US created the modern rules based order (Score 5, Informative) 139
The rest of the world accepted American leadership because in 1945 the USA was the world leader in trade, in promoting free trade, protecting trade, in trade and relations expertise. The USA was also paying to rebuild Europe and parts of Asia.
The world continued to accept these slightly skewed trade rules because negotiating new rules is hard and the USA, was in large part a reliable, trust worthy and intelligent leader in world trade that had spent 80 years building good will and making everyone rich.
Trump has blown up all that good will, he has destroyed the trustworthiness of the USA and no one thinks of American policy as intelligent. The USA still has by far the most vibrant economy in the world, they are the leaders or are second in almost every market that matters, farming, mining, AI, software... However, the rest of the world will slowly reconfigure trade away from the US. It will take a while. Countries will suck up to Trump during this transition but they will move away. It took 80 years (or 150 depending on who you are) for the current global system to be created. It will take a while to realign it but it will happen.
We will all be poorer when the existing system is replaced. No one else can fill the role the old, reliable, intelligent USA used to hold.
Comment Insurance is a bet (Score 1) 81
Comment Wealth vs Consumption (Score 1) 23
tax the wealth of the extremely wealthy, and make it easier to form unions. The number of roadblocks to unionizing have increased over the decades, which is one of many reasons there's been such an obvious, ongoing, inexorable transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class.
I understand wealth is easier to measure than consumption but other than that why are so many, possibly a majority of people so focused on the wealthy having to much wealth? Wealth is the means of production. Why do you care who owns it? Shouldn't your main concern be that the wealth we have is well used? And that we are creating more wealth to make future generations more productive? What you should care about is how much consumption people have. A house is wealth, it provides housing. Personally I think it is more important to have housing for young people, housing that allows people to move and have geographic mobility and enough housing for everyone than have housing as the primary investment vehicle for the middle class. I think it is more important that people have inexpensive food, that they can conveniently buy regardless of who owns the grocery store. If you track consumption you will notice it isn't the top 0.01% of people that are competing with you for it. The rich don't eat more than you, they are not your main competition for housing in places you want to live. They don't consume enough healthcare or vacations or cars to in anyway have an effect on what is left for you. The very rich probably have the same cell phone as you.
In fact if you do think about consumption you might be able to figure out why our youth are so f#$ked and who is screwing them so badly. Unfortunately most people can't bring themselves to think like this because they want to be the screwers.
Comment seriously - who certified or tested this (Score 2) 46
And one entity, the US government, had a non-standard random number generator, that they couldn't explain in the original version of Open SSL (yes the US government paid for it). It did pass all the randomness tests I tried but it wasn't the algorithm they claimed. With random number generators you "merge" in entropy from a physical source into your entropy pool because your physical source could have a "bias" or uneven distribution to its bits.
Comment Between 30 and 35,000 jobs lost (Score 2, Insightful) 23
Comment It's consumption not wealth (Score 1) 143
There is not some fixed sum of wealth in the world. When boomers spend money on healthcare, it doesn’t burn up like smoke. It goes to pay employees....
When boomers spend money on healthcare that consumption does go up in smoke. It is a one time consumption and it is a consumption that is redirected away from younger people. The entire point of our economy is to provide consumption - housing, healthcare, food, entertainment... The Elon Musks of the world aren't consuming all the housing, they don't eat more than you and I, they have the same cell phone as you and I. In fact if, Musk can't possibly spend a penny more than he currently does on himself, his mistresses and his various children. Every penny you tax from him is a penny not spent on new capital for future generations. Your anger at the super rich is misplaced. Our youth are f#$ked over by the over 55 consuming must of what our economy makes.
Comment Using the wrong encryption is the biggest risk (Score 1) 32
A few examples
*UK smart metering implicit certificates are based on the North American certificates except they swapped the order of the key reconstruction data and use a longer elliptic curve. The trouble is, by swapping the fields the new certs are vulnerable to a hash collision attack and since the old certs were not vulnerable, only a 128 bit hash was used. So the UK certs have a security level of 2^64. (all hashes are only secure to hash collisions for half their bit size from a meet in the middle attack - despite what British GHCQ might say)
*X509 certs use ASN1 encoding. ASN1 parsers are notorious for parsing badly formed ASN1, unfortunately they don't all parse badly formed ASN1 the same way. An attacker could have an X509 cert signed by a certificate authority that thinks it is signing one thing but is signing something that another parser thinks is something else.
*IoT standards that have 128 bit encryption for privacy but only 32 bit for authentication. Most IoT messages don't need privacy and based on message lengths you can guess what the message is anyway. Unfortunately, if I can guess what a valid message is, I can then flip the bits in the message to create a malicious message and have a 1 in 2^32 chance of not being caught. If I'm attacking 1000 things and I don't care which one I compromise 1 in 2^32 isn't that big of a number.
Comment conviction rate for murders has fallen (Score 1) 224
Comment University's fault - hear me out (Score 4, Insightful) 132
When I was in university in the early 90s there were students graduating who couldn't speak English and it's questionable if they could read the assignments and exam questions well enough to answer them. Their secret was to only take classes from professors who never changed their exams or assignments. We confronted one such prof that his assignments were too hard and everyone else was cheating, he removed some of the requirements from the assignment and guess what, everyone but our group submitted assignments that magically had the removed features. There were threats of consequence but in the end absolutely nothing happened. (University of Waterloo Computer science)
It has always been true that you can cheat, memorize old exams, or just memorize patterns to pass university or you can actually learn the material. And it is also true that unless you have a good prof, who truly spends the time to see if his class understands, the former method will lead to better marks.
Comment Drivers license as ID (Score 1) 46
Unless your response was sarcasm?
Comment Iran asking for more (Score 1) 82
But the bigger problem is Iran isn't negotiating with Trump. They are negotiating with the USA. The USA went back on the last deal the Iran made over nuclear fuel enrichment. The USA attacked and assassinated the Iranian leadership while the Iranians thought the USA was negotiating with them. No matter what the Iranians agree to there is nothing stopping the USA from attacking or changing the deal. The USA signed a treaty to protect Ukraine from any aggression when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, the USA has torn up or threatened to rescind trade agreements with their closest friends. There is no arbitrator or court that the USA needs to answer to. Which means there is no deal that Trump can sign that is worth the paper it is written on.