relax88

Might wanna put some shoes on before you deep fry your turkey.

The US has 1/3 the population density as Europe. I'm sure that helps to explain it somewhat.

I really wish SpaceX would use industry-standard PoE with a normal Cat5E/Cat6 cable instead of a proprietary cable.

I don't understand why they insist on a proprietary cable, it caused us tons of problems in a commercial environment (Industrial, remote locations).

People like getting fucked up. It’s not that confusing.

I more or less quit alcohol when cannabis was legalized in Canada.

It’s a better recreational drug by pretty much every metric.

It only takes a few tens of milligrams of THC to get the desired effect vs 50+ grams of ethanol in an evening (that gets metabolized into carcinogenic acetaldehyde).

While we don’t fully know the safety profile of cannabis it’s obviously far safer than booze, especially when consumed with a dry herb vaporizer.

No hangover. I can wake up at 6am 7 days a week and work out.

A small amount allows me to instantly shed all work related stress at the end of a busy day/week and get in touch with my body, a process that without cannabis usually takes a few hours.

It makes sex better and boosts libido, unlike alcohol which can easily ruin a sexy evening if you have too much.

I can grow my own, providing a fun hobby.

It doesn’t cause any gastrointestinal issues, but in fact calms your gut. The opposite of alcohol.

It’s just better (for me) in every possible way. It enhances my life greatly.

Seems more likely the old mines in the area are causing the contamination with BMAA and that it is being consumed in shellfish. BMAA contamination is often associated with old flooded mine shafts, and there are several in the area where these people are getting sick, most of them upstream.

Not sure why you're assuming this has anything to do with climate change. What could be the link there?

Switching from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear can have massive benefits to population health.

It’s not all a negative trade off.

It’s much easier to spend an hour getting a vaccine than it is to live a healthy life.

If there was a safe and effective vaccine against lung cancer and obesity do you think your argument would be as strong?

Agreed. The only clearly justified use cases I’ve seen are illegal or unsanctioned activity.

The only things Bitcoin and Monero really excel at is avoiding sanctions, buying drugs on the dark web, ransomware, and as an alternative if your entire country goes to shit (e.g Venezuela).

I think for this reason crypto will always be around in some form, but I doubt it will ever be mainstream.

Central Bank Issued crypto currencies will almost certainly be a thing though.

I never really changed my mind about Bitcoin.

I always thought that Bitcoin is an interesting and novel technology, and risky speculative asset.

I’ve also always thought that most of the crypto ecosystem is fraudulent schemes designed to separate people from their dollars, and that this unforgiving nature and lack of institutional and state control will likely preclude mass adoption as an actual currency.

So no, not much has changed, though the second point has gotten much, much worse.

Uhh.... we already do this:

https://dnaspaces.cisco.com/

If someone were to gain some kind of advantage that could prevent a retaliatory nuclear strike, then I could see it. Otherwise I highly doubt it. World War 2 offensives were made possible by the advances in mechanized and aerial warfare.

Interestingly enough the US has been retrofitting their nuclear arsenal with better targeting systems, making it much more effective. The Russians don't like this, which is why you hear talk of hypersonic missiles, autonomous submersibles carrying nuclear warheads, etc.

Perhaps some kind of neutron-based weapon could be developed to counteract large numbers of incoming ICBMs in the upper atmosphere, or to destroy an enemy nuclear arsenal in place. There we concepts like this, and the US even built some for defense against ICBMs (The W66 warhead).

The problem is often political. I have been at many orgs where the management of the dev team over promises something to the executive, and then when ops finds out about it and realizes the project is going to be a giant dumpster fire whose failure they will likely be blamed for, it becomes really hard for people to foster a “we’re on the same team” mindset.

As with most organizational dysfunction, middle management fiefdoms are to blame.

It always helps when the executive can see through this bullshit and ask the right questions, but often by the time this happens millions of dollars have been wasted.

It bypasses all proxies and interception, and hides all of the traffic contained in the tunnel. This means no traffic logging of the tunneled traffic, no IPS/IDS in front of the SSH service, and no visibility into the SSH traffic itself. If the box with the SSH service isn’t in a DMZ it also compromises network segmentation.

The problem isn’t SSH over TOR being insecure. It is sidestepping all of the security controls in place at your org and not talking to the netsec folks first.

Honestly I would be amazed if any competent netsec folks would even allow TOR outbound by default. I certainly wouldn’t allow it by default in an enterprise environment.

“Because I think I might know better I will act in a disrespectful way, and make someone else’s job harder instead of working with them to solve the problem”

You’re not the one who’s phone is going to ring at 3am on Saturday when that Tor node gets compromised. You’re not the one who has to manage the security incident. You’re not the one who has to explain why your security controls and policy did not prevent this from happening. Nor are you the one who has to clean up the damage if something goes badly.

I also think you’re vastly overestimating the average developers awareness of security issues. Perhaps you are very well versed in this topic, but many developers are utterly clueless, even when it comes to basic application security practices.

What you’ve just described is most post secondary institutions, public utilities, government, etc.

“Policy made my job slightly harder so because I know better than the netsec team who clearly has or should have unlimited time and resources to help me I will do what I want anyways, and put the organization at risk.”

Also known as “how to make the netsec team hate you 101”

I agree with you about why shadow IT exists, but most IT departments are spread so thin that expecting them to be super responsive to anything but the most critical business projects is often totally unreasonable.

Then they have to waste even more time hunting down idiots setting up Tor nodes on their internal networks.

I can confirm as someone who works in netsec that this exactly how it would have gone at my previous employer.

There is a tone of “I know what’s best and will do what I want” in this thread.

If you think that the way to get the IT department to implement something for you is to sidestep around policy instead of working with them, you will just piss them off.

When someone just does whatever they feel like and violates policy, what do you think should happen?

Should someone send them a sternly worded email for them to ignore?

Or maybe they should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of what risk it poses to the organization?

Yeah I don’t think the convenience is what is holding it back. It’s pretty easy to pay for something with BTC. I think it’s more to do with how there is limited coin supply, no dispute or consumer protection, and then the issue of taxes.

If I have to pay for breakfast I’d rather use a credit card app on my phone that has a dispute process and gives me a % cash back.

In Canada those breakfasts would technically be taxable capital gains, which means calculating the adjusted cost basis based on mining input costs and then half of that taxable gain is added to your annual income.

There is just no real incentive to use crypto unless you’re buying something questionable on the internet.

Depends on the bank, account type, and the destination for the funds.

My bank requires in-person to send a wire transfer, meaning in person identification at a bank branch with photo ID and PIN.

You can only transfer money on the app within your own accounts or to payees that are in the system (e.g your utility company, insurance company, etc.) or by using interac e-transfers with a limit of ~$1500.

Even if you’re trying to pay your taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency the bill payment system has a limit that I have hit. You can bet that a review process is triggered when that happens as well.

Any deposit of >$10000 from a wire transfer usually triggers a phone call as well where someone will politely ask you if you were expecting the transfer.

This is correct, and why the average end consumer will never actually use Bitcoin for anything.

It may have some utility as an asset class but the crypto fan boys seem to ignore that it is largely incompatible with our current financial and legal system.

I’ll happily agree with anyone that Bitcoin is an interesting and novel invention but I fail to see how it does anything useful for me other than as a speculative investment.

Now that crypto markets are a parody of wildcat banks in the 1800s I won’t even touch it with a 10 foot pole.

A vast system of fraud detection and limits on what can be done to accounts, especially on a mobile app.

If you try and move large amounts of money via your mobile banking app you won’t get very far before you have to show up in person at a branch.

Considering most of the population doesn’t eat very healthy and rates of B12 deficiency are only ~6% I can’t imagine it would make much difference what your genetics are. Especially since many cases of deficiency will be the result of medical problems.

I brought up nuclear because I felt that your original comment above was overly optimistic about what is possible with renewables.

People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher.

If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact.

We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms.

If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention.

Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good.

15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials.

A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer.

Solar has more than 15x the materials throughput per energy generated:

https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-technology-review-0

Solar produces 4x more carbon than Nuclear:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/

The value of variable renewables declines with increased deployment:

https://neon.energy/Hirth-2013-Market-Value-Renewables-Solar...

Wind and solar combines receive 94x the US Federal subsidies and Fossiel fuels receives 2x (per TWh of generation):

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/

There is also the fact that most wind farms use about 400x more land per TWh generation, and solar is about 150x. You can compare solar plants to nuclear on Wikipedia.

Then you’ve got the countless real world examples of where nuclear plants get shut down and the per capita emissions of that area shoot up, despite a bunch of politicians talking about renewables and clean energy (Vermont, California, etc.)

Nuclear isn’t hype. Look at France vs Germany for a great real world example of why nuclear is the better technology.

You talk about 50 years under delivering, but there have hardly been any nuclear plants even built in the last 50 years in the West, mostly due to public opposition to a technology that kills less people than wind farms.

If it’s so expensive why are places like Bangladesh, India, and China making massive investments in new reactors?

Yes… the wireless card on the Librem 15 has given me some grief due to sticky roaming. I’ll have to look into this!

Intel ME is apparently disabled and not connected to the network interface in the Librem 13/15 if I remember correctly.

Yeah I had no issues with shipping my Librem 15 laptop, it was only a few weeks. The phone however I opted for the Evergreen release of the Librem 5 hoping to get something a little more polished. I’ve been waiting since summer 2019. It seems they’ve been having issues with manufacturing, possibly due to small order sizes plus semiconductor shortages plus COVID.

I think the reason system76 has less issues is that it isn’t custom silicon. I’m not sure about Pine but perhaps it’s the same case?

The Librem 15 is a decent laptop and is very serviceable / easy to repair but for the price it’s definitely not as good as the build quality of a Dell XPS for example.

I really like the idea of a quality open source phone (hardware and software) that isn’t sold by surveillance capitalists, which is why I support them but I still don’t know if I’ll use it as a daily driver.