Posts by BenWilson
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However, all that said, even in the most compact storage form we can currently get, a yottabyte of data takes as much volume as the Pyramid of Cheops. It's staggeringly large and strikes me as unlikely too.
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To clarify what I'm saying there, estimates of how much energy is needed would require us to know how frequently the data is accessed, and how fast the access would need to be. So it really depends how it is used, and the NSA may be using it completely differently to Google. You could quite feasibly do clever processing that indexes the data as it is stored so that 99.9% of it sits in a powered down state almost all the time, and is only pulled out when some algorithm's triggers decide to look deeper. Considering that they are storing stuff for the purposes of code cracking most of the time, this strikes me as being a likely usage - the data is of no use, it's just stored for completeness for cracking at a later date. It can't be searched, because it's encrypted.
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OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The NSA is still bound by basic laws of physics around heat production and cooling capability, no matter what they do, so reasonable deductions can be made by looking at how much cooling capacity they’re providing.
Do we know this figure? Also, I'm not sure you can deduce storage capacity from energy usage. Energy is needed for processing, not storage. A disk sitting idle, full of data, is using no energy. The limit is dictated by cost and space, rather than energy availability.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Alex Coleman,
So that’s that then I guess.
Yes, they accidentally intended to take action against someone whose residency they didn't check, and they did! Case dismissed!
The most amazing part in Key's announcement is that he used the word deliberately...deliberately...and even deliberated it to the point of pronouncing every syllable.
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Capture: Spring Breaks, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Beerz in da hood? Gots study break, can haz?
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Capture: Spring Breaks, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I recognize the chairs. Pt Erin Pool? Many happy memories of sunburning myself lying on the pebbles in front of those chairs (although they were different chairs back then). The stones would get super hot so we'd wet them a little then lie on them until we'd sucked the heat out, then move along a bit. A time lapse shot would have shown a group of children apparently sliding along the ground on our stomachs, diving in, then getting out further along and repeating.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Matthew Poole,
What they do do is threaten to use them, so things just don’t come up for a vote, which also skews the numbers.
It comes to the same thing, really. That's "using your veto to block something".
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to martinb,
That is very good.
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It’s crappy that the superpowers use their vetoes frequently in the UN, but the UN would possibly not exist if they didn’t have those powers. It is limited to the superpowers because when veto power is available to all states, as it was in the League of Nations, then it becomes completely impossible to resolve any disputes at all.
As to getting rid of the veto power, I expect any such move will always be vetoed.
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OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use…, in reply to B Jones,
Even that wouldn’t work.
Yup, hiding data is pretty easy. The security guy at a firm I was in once challenged me to get a picture file past his extensive filters. It took me about 10 minutes to code it up. It was in a spreadsheet file. He was shocked and said that the scanner looked for files in spreadsheets. But he didn't expect to have to scan the data cells in the spreadsheet itself, analysing them for the patterns associated with picture files. The sheet itself contained the code, presented as a big fat button on the front sheet, which decoded the data into a file in a location of your choice. To anyone looking at it, it was a spreadsheet of financial time series data.
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