jvanleuvan

From my understanding of the climate change issue is that we don't know enough about the problem to devise a reasonable plan to stop any negative outcome:

I read a little article written by a climate scientist (his name escapes me now);  He basically laid out what we know on a scale of certainty.  and it went like this:

1) Is the climate changing: Absolutely
2) Is SOME of that change man-made: Probably
3) How much is man made: Vague
4) What are the realistic dangers to humans: Not Sure
5) What realistic plan can we undertake to actually completely/mostly solve this issue: Completely Unknown.

So for all of this concern over climate change we don't really have anymore than "token" proposals that exist only to give the appearance of doing something but have little to no chance of actually solving the issue.

A theoretical example that I heard was this:

"Lets solve global warming!!!" (and avoid the rising sea levels, harsher weather, droughts, and hurricanes, etc)
We can spend about 7-10 TRILLION dollars and replace every land based vehicle in the US with a hybrid (assuming we could source enough lithium salts to manufacture this amount of vehicles); Would that simply solve the issue? No more climate change? No rising Sea levels? No droughts?  NO! it would have almost no long term effect on the negative dangers listed above.  BUT 7 trillion $ goes a very looooooong way toward building seawalls to protect low-lying cities, and levies to defend against hurricanes, and desalinization plants to deal with fresh water shortages, and aqueducts to feed water to farm land, etc....  And as an added bonus, deferring this spending allows us to only spend as needed in case the predicted dangers don't materialize, as opposed to spending now on what is little more than a gamble on a gamble (a gamble that the predicted dangers actually appear as predicted and that our plan to stem these dangers actually works....)

From my understanding, the Paris accord is simply another "token" gesture, simply expensive virtue signaling that will have almost no real effect on the climate long term.

avon b7 said:
You've lost me. You are knocking Samsung for providing an option that is weak even though the system itself warns you that there are better options on the same phone but have no issue with a phone that allows you to use weak four digit codes or none at all and possibly gives you no warning.

You label the former a security risk but the latter is OK?

If you argue the latter is fine because the user can freely decide to turn passcode on/off or choose a very weak one, it conflicts with your criticism of Samsung's facial recognition because the user has the same options as with passcodes and to top things off even gets a warning when the feature is turned on.

The only decent resolution of this conflict would be for the phone to reject weak/repeated passcodes and not allow you to turn them off. 

Why do assume that the user might assume a feature to be relatively secure if the feature warns the user when it is turned on?

As for the mantle photo scenario, I think it would fail as a thief is unlikely to have your photo and if it were a case of privacy, as opposed to theft, the user would have probably heeded the warning on facial recognition and chosen another option.

These two items aren't equivalent; a weak passcode vs bad facial recognition.

Even a 4 digit passcode requires near governmental level resources to hack.  (given 10000 possibilities, of which the average to find a match is about 5000, which could be reduced by half again if we use advanced methods and focus on more common numerical patterns, you are still looking at more than 2000 hours of work to unlock the phone, or about 1 man year)

The facial recognition on the S8 can be bypassed by a 12 year old with your facebook profile picture in 10 minutes.

Think of this in terms of real locks;  I know my $25 front door lock isn't as hardened as say a bank vault lock,  but I do expect it to not be so easily bypassed as to be trivial; like having the screws on the outside or something....