agroot12's comments

agroot12 | 9 years ago | on: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible.

The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...).

In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic.

So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?

agroot12 | 9 years ago | on: On Political Correctness

Well, where is the PC police when you need it? Because that sentence triggered me: "That, by the way, is why liberal students (and liberals in general) are so bad at defending their own positions.".

Edit: My comment was meant humorously, although I consider the main content of the article to be very thoughtful. And the above sentence, seemingly a soundbite from a right-wing talk show, has a nugget of truth in it: Once you stop debating the basic pillars of your society, you risk losing the defensive forces to protect them, e.g. against populism.

agroot12 | 9 years ago | on: Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual

The first half lists lots of state actions against encryption, the second part advertises the shadow project, a blockchain based anonymous currency, communication and commerce platform: https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow

agroot12 | 9 years ago | on: FBI raids dental software researcher who discovered patient data on FTP server

A more accurate analogy for an FTP server is a machine that sends you letters on demand.

It's like Shafer wrote a letter to their office asking for their list of patients, and lo and behold, they've sent him back an envelope containing that list.

agroot12 | 10 years ago | on: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

The 161 bytes offset might be explained by corruption in an encoded version of the key. 161 bytes in binary data would be ~ 216 chars in base64. With an (unusual) line length of 72 the corruption would start exactly at the 4th line.

But: Mail clients should use 78 chars per text line, and GPG encodes base64 in lines of 64 chars length, so ignore my theory ;-).