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Comment: Re:Solves nothing (Score 2) 396

by jurgen (#47247433) Attached to: "Super Bananas" May Save Millions of Lives In Africa

Uhm, no.

I live in a very similar place (Bahia in Brazil, which has a mostly African derived culture), and we have the same bananas here. I assure you that they are not the primary calorie source, although they may be a prominent part of the diet. In any case to get those GM bananas into the hands of the people who currently eat the non-GM bananas you're going to have to organize a huge logistical operation of producing millions of GM banana offshoots (remember that bananas have no seeds, they are all clones) and distributing them to millions of subsistence farmers. Possibly doable, but definitely more difficult than distributing papaya seeds (one papaya has hundreds of seeds and they store and sprout very easily!) And they can grow some papayas alongside their bananas... like I said they like the same soil conditions and they actually grow well together.

Also in the case of Uganda by far the easiest solution is make sure there is unprocessed red palm oil available on the local markets and that the people know that it's better for them than the processed oil... it is a superior source beta carotene as well as Vitamin E and some other essential nutrients, and Uganda is a major palm oil producer. Probably today almost all the palm oil produced commercially in Uganda gets processed and exported, which is the real irony in all of this... they probably destroy enough beta carotene in the processing of commercial palm oil to cure Vitamin A deficiency in the whole world!

(To explain the above... the oil plam produces two oils, red oil from the mesocarp and white oil from the kernel. The red oil, unprocessed, is very rich in beta carotene ((which gives the red color)) but has a strong flavor that makes it unsuitable for industrial food use. So they process it to remove the color, smell, and flavor, then the ship it around the world to use in junk food and other delights of civilization.)

Comment: Solves nothing (Score 5, Interesting) 396

by jurgen (#47246161) Attached to: "Super Bananas" May Save Millions of Lives In Africa




Comment: To paraphrase Lincoln... (Score 1) 309

by jurgen (#47204483) Attached to: Was Turing Test Legitimately Beaten, Or Just Cleverly Tricked?

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you haven't /really/ passed the Turing test until you can fool all of the people all of the time.

No really... Eliza fooled some of the people back in 1966. There is nothing really new to see here, move right along.

Comment: Better a robot than a human robot? (Score 4, Insightful) 294

by jurgen (#43080103) Attached to: Do Kiosks and IVRs Threaten Human Interaction?

The problem with human interaction in much of the service industry today is that most of the corporate employees we have to interact with are so dis-empowered, they really are just robots... they act according to very limited scripts with neither real knowledge about the systems of which they are part nor any real decision making power. So they are just robots with the additional defect that they execute their programs imperfectly because they human and even have hurt feelings when you swear at them because of their incapacity to actually help you. This is frustrating for the customer and dehumanizing for the employee. So better real robots than fake (human) robots, right? Just so long as they understand "let me talk to a human"...

(And then there's the small problem of all the low-end jobs we're eliminating, etc, etc, but hey, progress is progress.)

Comment: Re:Port knocking anyone? (Score 1) 349

by jurgen (#42926711) Attached to: SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports

Like I already said, it isn't very strong security, but it's as much real security as any password ever is. I already said it can be listened in on at the link layer... and a password (shared or not) can always be listened in on somewhere, if you encrypt all your network links I can still listen in on your keyboard, etc.

All security is relative and its usefulness must be evaluated against the types of threats that your trying to protect yourself from. If you're trying to protect yourself from un-targeted attacks (and that's not just unsophisticated script kiddies, but includes large-scale phishing by serious attackers) then the port-knocking concept can provide real security, because you can use it to implement a strong password (strong in the sense of being resistant to brute force attack) for network layer connections. It doesn't even matter if these passwords are shared or if your colleagues put them on sticky notes under their desk... the attackers in this particular threat-model don't have access to your link-layer or your desks.

Comment: Port knocking anyone? (Score 2) 349

by jurgen (#42924481) Attached to: SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports

Like others have said, moving sshd to a high port was never meant to be additional security, just annoyance-reduction to reduce the sheer load in terms of bandwidth and log space. I did that for a while, but then (well over a decade ago) I saw an article about port knocking which is where you (i.e. the sshd) don't answer until the system receives a secret sequence of connection attempts at various ports... i.e. a secret "knock". The secret knock is a kind of password, and can be sent by executing a specialized client, or if you are somewhere where you don't have one available, by manually making telnet attempts, i.e. "telnet 16111; telnet 28123; telnet 22222".

The knock is basically a password for OSI network layer connections. This not only reduces the annoyance level of unsophisticated phishing attacks, but basically eliminates them altogether with a layer of real security. That security is not very strong... in a targeted attack, anyone who can monitor your link layer anywhere along a connection you make can see your secret knock... but it's an easy add-on and better than just playing tag with script-kiddies by moving ssh protocol to a high port.

Comment: Re:Petroleum bias (Score 2, Informative) 468

by jurgen (#42708459) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

Your understanding of the scientific method is a bit naive. Lots of incorrect results pass peer review even in the most prestigious journals and sometimes are discovered as being incorrect only years later (or never)... because there is always some "fuzziness" in real-world experiments or data analysis. Were the experiments designed correctly? Was the data read correctly? Were there any errors in the analysis (mathematical or otherwise)? Is the logic leading to the conclusions correct? Peers who read the papers may or may not spot the errors... sometimes because the errors are subtle, and sometimes because even the smartest peers don't fully understand the research in the first place. (And with regard to the this Norwegian government research... well it hasn't even been peer-reviewed yet.)

There are a lot of steps in research and in each of the stops bias can creep in even if the researchers are honest and well-intentioned.

For more about this see, i.e.:

...and lots more. In some areas of research (specifically bio-medical) there have been estimates (based on meta-analysis) that as much as half of all published results are wrong, and mostly along the lines of the researchers inherent biases.

Comment: Re:Petroleum bias (Score 2) 468

by jurgen (#42708337) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

I *didn't* accuse them of fabricating anything. I just pointed out ("informationally" if you like) that they have an inherent bias. If they were perfect scientists that bias wouldn't affect their results, but nobody is perfect. Because of this bias, even if it be subconscious, they are more likely to draw certain conclusions from the same set of data than other scientists with less or different biases.

Comment: Re:Petroleum bias (Score 1, Interesting) 468

by jurgen (#42708297) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared


Comment: Petroleum bias (Score 0, Troll) 468

by jurgen (#42707533) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

Norway is one of the richest countries in the world... it has the second highest GDP per capita. Norwegians enjoy an incredibly high standard of living across the board... there is very little wealth-disparity and almost no poverty. Education is free and health-care is universal. It's a good life! And it's all largely thanks to oil, of which Norway has lots. Over 55% of Norway's GDP comes directly from petroleum. Imagine if you and all your fellow citizens had half of your assets invested in oil companies and depended on those investments for half of all your income and half of all your future retirement... in Norway that's the reality.

I wouldn't accuse the scientists of Norway's research council of fabricating data or anything, but they can't help but have a strong bias.

Comment: The Artic meltdown shows that things are worse... (Score 2) 757

by jurgen (#41412027) Attached to: Rapid Arctic Melt Called 'Planetary Emergency'

Why is this Artic meltdown so important?

Three words: "postitive feedback loops."

All the "scary math" up until now has ignored this one very fundamental thing that could make things much, much worse than even the worst case estimates in the IPCC reports until now. The possibility of positive feedback loops accellerating climate change was explicitly excluded from the IPCC reports because they are poorly understood and introduce potentially wildly chaotic responses. They actually say litterally: we're ignoring this because we don't understand it.

The rapid Arctic meltdown has proven that at least some positive feedback loops are already operating, that for this part of the global system the curve is exponential, not linear.

Now the very real and very great danger is the Arctic meltdown will or already has triggered other, even more significant positive feedback loops. Such as releasing the vast stores of Methane in sub-sea hydrates and the permafrost. If that turns out to be the case, then fasten your seatbelts... we're on the fasttrack to global meltdown already.

Take a look at this site: http://www.ameg.me/

Comment: Re:Short term record (Score 4, Informative) 398

by jurgen (#41132641) Attached to: Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Extent

Actually the true statement IS that "this has never happened before". Ok, maybe it did happen in the interglacial periods before the last ice age, but not in the last 1450 years for which we have ice cores and other proxy data... and by that point there is no reason to not assume it to be true for the rest of our current interglacial unless you have some good argument to the contrary. You don't NEED the rather super-precise satellite observations we have for the last 33 years to make this kind of statement.

If this weren't so tragic it would be really funny seeing you deniers all flailing madly about for a way out of this one.

Comment: What's really scary about this... (Score 5, Insightful) 398

by jurgen (#41132465) Attached to: Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Extent

What is really scary about this is that only a few years ago scientists were saying that the Arctic "could be ice free in summer before the end of the century" and the deniers were calling them alarmists THEN. Then in the last couple of years some of the most alarmist of these alarmists have been saying that the Arctic could be ice free in summer in the next couple of decades.

Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.

The Arctic sea ice is showing us how much more rapidly things can change than even the "worst alarmists" dare to predict when positive feedback loops kick in and tipping points are passed. What will be the ripple effects of this? Where is the next tipping point?
