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Comment: Still fewer cancers than fossil fuels (Score 2, Informative) 157

by Ckwop (#46306065) Attached to: Safety Measures Fail To Stop Fukushima Plant Leaks

Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.

What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.

Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:

The EPA found slightly higher average coal concentrations than used by McBride et al. of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Gabbard (A. Gabbard, “Coal combustion: nuclear resource or danger?,” ORNL Review 26, http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview... 34/text/colmain.html.) finds that American releases from each typical 1 GWe coal plant in 1982 were 4.7 tonnes of uranium and 11.6 tonnes of thorium, for a total national release of 727 tonnes of uranium and 1788 tonnes of thorium. The total release of radioactivity from coal-fired fossil fuel was 97.3 TBq (9.73 x 1013 Bq) that year. This compares to the total release of 0.63 TBq (6.3 x 1011 Bq) from the notorious TMI accident, 155 times smaller.

So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.

If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.

This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!

Comment: A few problems... (Score 5, Insightful) 149

by Ckwop (#46279217) Attached to: Can Reactive Programming Handle Complexity?
A few problems:

- What about circular reactions?
- Is SQL really that right language for encoding business logic?
- Triggers are kind of an anti-pattern.
- What about atomicity? What if I need the whole reaction chain to work or none of it.

I'm afraid there more questions than answers with this proposed pattern.

Comment: Re:And they called me crazy (Score 3, Interesting) 221

by Ckwop (#45858677) Attached to: NSA Trying To Build Quantum Computer

256GB USB drives full of true randomly generated one-time pads

I know this is a piece of humour but since this is Slashdot why not?

What a lot of people don't understand is that is much harder than it first appears. For example, doing cat /dev/random to a file on disk will not give you bytes suitable for use in a OTP.

The issue is that the many TRNGs hash their entropy pool with a cryptographically secure hash. When you use such a hash there is no guarantee that the input space would be uniformly mapped to the output space.

To illustrate this, suppose we had an entropy pool 1024-bits deep. Suppose before producing the output the pool is hashed with SHA-1. This is an output that 160-bits wide. There is no proof whatsoever that if we cycled a counter from 0 to 2**1024 that the hash of these would distribute evenly of 2**160 possible has outputs. If this were the case, each output hash value would appear exactly 2**864 times. It is highly unlikely that this is the case.

What this means is the the output is distinguishable from a true random source, which completely breaks the security proof for the OTP. Granted, the attacker would likely to have to do an infeasible amount of work to use this distinguisher. However, the OTPs proof gives you security from computationally unbound adversaries. It's the whole point of using the OTP!

So in short, you can't use /dev/random, you can't use pretty much any commercial random number generator. You'd have to roll your own and show that your bias is small enough for no attack to be practical. Like I said, it's harder than it looks.

Comment: We need spies but big databases are no use. (Score 4, Interesting) 461

by Ckwop (#45115277) Attached to: Hillary Clinton: "We Need To Talk Sensibly About Spying"

The world is not a perfect place. The West does need spies and it does need an infrastructure to support them and gather intelligence.

However, we should remember who we actually need to be spying on. Nation states, failed states, and yes terrorist training camps and what not.

What we should not be engaging in is dragnet surveillance where everyone is entered in to some giant database. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the databases are not really likely to be that useful. Prism didn't stop the Boston Marathon bombers. You might have every text, every phone call, every e-mail but if you can't spot the connections it doesn't help you.

Second, the massive database is a security risk in its own right. The NSA might think the Snowden leak is bad but it's child's play compared to what would happen if somebody leaks that database! You can bet your bottom dollar a shit-storm a 100% times the size would ensue. It might even threaten the agency's continued existence.

Third, the database could be hacked by a foreign governments. This in itself is a giant risk that dwarfs the one outlined in the second paragraph. China getting access to wiretaps on US businesses? Does no-one in the security community see what a giant hole they're making in the West's security?

This leads nicely to my fourth and final point. I do get the impression from the Snowden leaks that the competency of these organisations is being called in to question. It's clear they don't know what Snowden took; they don't know what he knows and what he doesn't. This is why he's catching them at so many lies. They make one statement, he leaks another document that shows them they're full of shit.

This final point is perhaps the most damning. They've built a giant system they can't audit! If they don't know what he took when he's just a fairly junior contractor, we have to assume other nation states have thoroughly penetrated the system and already stolen Western secrets!

They're clearly not competent enough to run such a system and it should be shut down on grounds of national security.

Comment: Service Economies are the future (Score 5, Interesting) 754

by Ckwop (#45071733) Attached to: Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner

On the Internet, people often moan about how Western countries "don't make anything any more." The idea being that our service economy is built on a house of cards and the only true economic generator is the making and selling of stuff.

My view is that manufacturing is a bad choice of focus for our economies. The direction of travel is clear: it is very clearly a race to an ever descending race to the bottom which will end with completely automated factories. This race started with the industrial revolution and it will accelerate during our life times. The jobs are slowly but surely being eliminated and it might even have happened sooner if China hadn't been able to provide so much cheap labour. Those jobs are simply not safe in the long term.

But even the Chinese are not safe. Eventually, they'll all be replaced by machines and when they are, it won't matter where those machines are located. The machines will re-locate closer to the consumers to shorten supply lines.

The message is stark: any job that is repetitive risks being replaced by a robot.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is automated driving. It promises to completely transform our world. It will transform logistics in much the same way as containerisation did to shipping. It will transform everything but just think of the number of jobs that will be eliminated!

Then there are threats like 3D printers which threaten to completely remake the world as we know it.

The only sensible way to weather the next 100 years is through developing products and service that can not be automated. These are things like law, software development, media etc. etc.

Producing stuff is quickly becoming unprofitable. Service economies are our only hope.

Comment: Re:Faith and evolution ARE compatible (Score 1) 1293

by Ckwop (#44902723) Attached to: Why Are Some Hell-Bent On Teaching Intelligent Design?

Additionally, there are many passages in the Bible which indicate that anyone who heard the true voice or looked directly upon the face of God would perish because they could not withstand the awesome power. That's just the sort of indicator the faithful could logically use to support a metaphorical interpretation of scripture.

Yet there are other passages, such as Jesus appearing to hundreds of people, or God appearing to Abraham or Moses where this is not the case. To be honest with you, I always find this line of argument odd.

If God can't contact us because it was destroy our feeble minds, then how did his messiahs, prophets come to know about him? How did Paul receive his vision from the creator of the universe and not have his mind thoroughly destroyed. What about Noah or Moses? How did their minds take the strain?

It's another one of these absurd adhoc retreats from the fact there is basically no evidence of God talking to anyone, ever. If God really did exist and he cared about what we did, then we'd be able to discover what we wanted. Humans of all stripes, in all times, in all places would agree on what the message was. I'd be as discoverable as the value of PI, or the laws of Physics or Chemistry.

Yet, once again, this is not what we observe. What we observe is precisely what we'd expect if he didn't exist: complete and utter confusion.

Additionally, if the truth were apparent, then there would be no benefit to be had from the iterative and ongoing process of interpreting scripture or the fractious nature of the church, in any of its various schismatic forms.

I'm not sure how this confusion benefits anyone. It's like the old joke about standards from Tanenbaum; the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.

Likewise, the great thing about the "Words" of God is that there are so many different, mutually contradictory, "words" to choose from.

Why on earth would a God who cared about us allow this confusion to persist?

Comment: Re:Faith and evolution ARE compatible (Score 3, Interesting) 1293

by Ckwop (#44900449) Attached to: Why Are Some Hell-Bent On Teaching Intelligent Design?

The idea that the Creation stories in Genesis are meant to literally describe how God created is another matter entirely, and it is the blind insistence upon this presupposition that results in so much hot air being expelled on both sides of the issue.

In practically every thread you get someone who tries to reconcile evolution with theism. They say, well, "God created the system of evolution. Tada!" or "God guides evolution. Tada!"

The truth is that when evolution is properly understood it is a complete replacement for the theistic creator hypothesis. It actually goes even further than this and give us yet more evidence that God doesn't not exist.

The problem with evolution is that it's not the kind of system a God that cared and loved us would design.

Does survival of the fittest seem righteous to you? Why should the most well adapted survive? Surely a better system would be one where people with kindness, co-operation and charity thrive and the selfish, brutish and dishonest perish? Yet we do not live in this world.

Theism as a whole has the problem that it makes a really bold claim: "God exists and he loves us." and then it has to retreat almost immediately behind a series of adhoc justifications for why the observed universe doesn't match what we'd expect if that claim were true.

If God really existed the universe would be hugely different to the one we currently live in. If God really existed science would have found him by now.

That's because that's what Christ said. "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Mk 16:16

This is yet another problem with the theism. The complete and utter confusion about what God wants. You're sat in this thread quoting the Bible as if it were the word of God, yet there are literally thousands of independent strands of Christianity alone. I don't even mention that even there were 2 billion Christians, 71% of the words population think your view is a heresy. You would even be called a heretic by members of your own superstition.

Again, would this confusion about religion be expected if there was a God who loved us? Absolutely not.

It is a popular--and recent--misconception that faith and reasoning are incompatible. Many, if not most, of the great minds of the ages were believers in God or in other forms of religion. The idea that religious people are necessarily irrational fools is simply a lie; there are plenty of both religious and atheistic people who are irrational fools.

The people in previous times didn't have the weight of evidence we do today. Faith and reason are incompatible. Faith is based on truth by revelation; that is, that some people a long time ago had the "word" revealed to them and every one else is left in the dark. The only hope we have is to just trust them. Reason works by studying, debating and seeking out evidence. Anybody can critique that evidence, review it and discuss it.

These are diametrically opposed view of the universe and completely incompatible.

Comment: Re:Good (Score 4, Insightful) 491

by Ckwop (#44631783) Attached to: Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years

He's a traitor, he deserves it.

I don't think anyone can argue with the fact an offence was committed. But the punishment should fit the crime. It is on that basis I object to this sentence. The sentence is so long that I feel this punishment violates your constitution. It is cruel and unusual.

We're talking about locking this guy up longer many rapists or murderers. You're even talking about executing him. How is that a sensible level of punishment?

At the end of the day, nobody died from this leak. Nothing of any substance has changed in geo-politics either. The cable leaks had a tendency to show that US foreign policy behind closed doors was pretty much the same as it was on the public sphere. As a Brit, I thought they actually came out of it looking quite good. It was the other countries were made to look like asshats.

Manning is a bit of an idiot and should serve some time but taking his entire life in forfeit for his stupidity is totally disproportionate and in my view unconstitutional.

Comment: Democracy has failed (Score 4, Interesting) 569

by Ckwop (#44553319) Attached to: Obama's Privacy Reform Panel Will Report To<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... the NSA

I've slowly started to come to the view that representative democracy has basically failed. It's time to try a new system.

What that system should be up for discussion but the idea of voting for representatives who then decide the policy has been tried and failed. It's too easy for corruption to take root and it's too easy for those people to grab power for power's sake.

I refuse to accept that there is no better solution than the status-quo. There must be a way to capture the will of the people, protect minorities, and protect the people from government overreach. There must be a way to have our cake and eat it.

Comment: Who is being kept safe? (Score 5, Insightful) 144

by Ckwop (#44475815) Attached to: Other Agencies Clamor For Data NSA Compiles

Right across the free world we're told this these giant databases are there to keep us safe.

The question is more who is being kept safe who. Is the purpose of these databases to protect me or protect the politicians? Is to protect me or big business? Is it to protect my right to process or restrict it?

In my own country, William Hague said that it was unthinkable that GCHQ would be operating outside of the law. The problem is I don't believe you!

Practically every time the government has secrecy it abuses that power to its own ends. This is just the nature of power held in secret with a lack of transparency. The entire span of human history shows that kind of power is hugely destructive.

The cure is worse than the disease here. Honestly, I'd rather have more terrorist attacks that having my privacy systematically shredded for the greater good. All terrorists can ever do is kill people. It takes a government to kill a society.

Comment: Lesson not learnt (Score 2) 290

by Ckwop (#44325593) Attached to: How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud

The issue here is that he didn't have adequate disaster recovery procedures and policies.

The standard solution to this sort of problem is that you have a backup system that sits off site ready to take the load should something happen to primary. This backup system should be located in another data center, with a different ISP etc.

Moving to the cloud doesn't solve this, per se, if you move all your infrastructure to say Amazon you're still beholden to that company and its internal procedures. A system administration on their part could easily render you down for many hours.

The lesson hasn't been learnt.

Comment: Useful for weeding out non-programmers (Score 5, Insightful) 776

by Ckwop (#42544595) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are Timed Coding Tests Valuable?


A surprising number of people fail this test.




Comment: Error of omission (Score 4, Insightful) 278

by Ckwop (#42357843) Attached to: UK Government To Spy On Computers of the Jobless

There's an opinion on-line that the UK is turning in to some sort oppressive totalitarian state. It seems like this summary was written with this view in mind. It makes a number of errors of omission.

The article says it's opt-in! It only applies to that web-site too. That's obviously a huge omission to make from the summary. The summary seems to imply that the government would snoop on all traffic of a job-seeker and it was mandatory.

Finally, people who are claiming Job Seekers allowance are requesting support from the government while they look for a job. It's not totalitarian to suggest that we ensure that they are actually looking for a job!

As a taxpayer and a liberal democrat, it's something I support!

Some people carve careers, others chisel them.