It doesn't mean the «energy efficiency» rating is wrongfully stated, the statement is true, regarding electrical efficiency of the device, yet the cold produced by the device is not delivered to your house as you might think. It is split unevenly between your house and the Earth's atmosphere, where less than 1/2 is delivered to you, all the rest surprisingly enough is dumped into the atmosphere, no matter how many «pluses» they print on the energy efficiency label.

Forget about «A++++» — let's do some elementary physics

This beautiful picture is not true. Well, technically it is not entirely untrue, in absolutely dry air this picture is true, for example in Atacama desert or on Mars, but chances are the atmosphere of your house contains plenty of water, which is not mentioned on the picture. When your air conditioner cools air down it cools ALL components, of which the significant part is water vapour. The water vapour concentration is limited by the air temperature, lower the temperature lower is the maximum possible water content. That creates the dew point phenomenon. If you drop the air temperature below a certain level water condenses out, and your air conditioner heat exchanger operates most certainly below the dew point, this is why water comes out from the device. ...And goes straight outdoors carrying the cold produced on your expense to the earth atmosphere. So that the correct scheme should look like this:

Please, stop chanting «A+++++»

Even if we assume 100% efficiency of the device, it simply DISPOSES OF a significant part of its END PRODUCT. Now, let's us estimate how much significant is it.

Let's assume you want to cool a room down to comfortable 24 C, in a hot day (37 c, with 68% humidity, which is a typical July day in my home town).

Thus the air initially contains 0.03 kg of water per m^3.
If we now generously assume that the air pump operates at 11 C then we only need to cool 1/2 of the room volume in order to reach 24 C. It means that the heat exchanger produces 100% humid air at 11 C, which contains 0.01 kg of water per m^3.

Thus, the heat exchanger dumps 0.02 kg of cool water per m^3 of air.
Vaporization heat of water is 2257 kJ/kg, therefore your air conditioner dumps 0.02*2257 = 45.14 kJ/m^3
Let's see how big is this number.

Specific Heat capacity of humid air in our context is about 1.034 kJ/kg/K (with insignificant variation for such a rough calculation) and the density is about 1.2 kg/m^3. Thus the «consumer value» (pardon my language) of the air conditioning is roughly: 1.034*(37-24)*1.2 = 16.13 kJ/m^3

While the actually produced work consists of cooling half of the given amount of air from 37 to 11 C plus condensing water, which amounts to: (1.034*(37-11)*1.2 + 45.14)/2 = 38.7 kJ/m^3

Finally the ratio is: 16.13 / 38.7 = 0.42 — i.e. roughly 58% of the cold produced by your air conditioner goes straight outdoors.

Of course, it is a very rough estimation, but it gives you the order of magnitude of the phenomenon. Although I tried to give a conservative estimation, feel free to directly measure your air conditioner water output in order to get the precise number — I bet it will be even worse than «60%» stated in the title.

This loss does only seem inevitable!

The sad part is that this energy is completely recyclable for no cost — all you need to do is to vaporize this water on the heat exchanger of the condenser unit — BUT NOBODY CARES.

I decided to join flattr.com — a very neat donation platform. Isn't it reasonable to donate some money to the authors you like? Would it motivate you to donate if it leads to the elimination of ads? At least we can run this simple experiment. You are reading me (I know you do), and you are taking for granted the complete absence of ads on this clean and concise website. Please, consider making a flattr donation of any size if any article amused you. If it works sufficiently well to keep me from starvation, then ads will never appear on ithipster.com

Today I want to talk about ecology, in a very unorthodox manner, as I always do with any subject. There is one very necessary practice in the metallurgy all over the world: slag dumping. Of course, our cherished environmentalist buzz-makers know nothing about that, because steel and copper, just like coffee and croissants, grow on trees. And it is much better to keep them at their present state of ignorance, as long as we want a serious, intelligent, and productive discussion on the topic.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with the metallurgy in general and the slag in particular. However, there is some room for a significant improvement that benefits our «environment», unlike bullshit «carbon taxes» or «wind turbines». In order to understand the basics of the problem watch any of the «slag dump» videos on youtube, like this one www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKOENNXsSBQ This «molten lava» is slag, an inevitable byproduct of any metallurgical process. It has no use in the industry, it contains no precious components, and it has to be removed from furnaces, in order to keep them running.

The first thing that must strike you as you see the action is: «what a waste of energy!!!» Indeed, slag is hellishly hot, where «hot» means two important properties: abundant and high potential, which makes the energy easily CONVERTIBLE. But, hold on, this shit is solid under normal conditions. When you extract energy from molten slag it will solidify, incapacitating any conceivable heat exchanger.

Let's apply some IT reasoning here. While it is difficult to take energy away, how about taking an energy consumer in? Picture that, you have to heat something, so you mix it into hot slag. The output will very likely to be total garbage… Yes! GARBAGE! Put garbage in, melt it by the heat contained in the slag, and then shape it in building bricks, or fillers, or whatever you need to build artificial islands…

In the end you get a pretty normal solid waste processing plant running on free energy.

Once I stated the title I immediately realized that there are many distinct dimensions having their own «bottoms» and «ups». So I must specify. The «bottom» is a set of elementary data manipulation operations available to you as a programmer or a data security specialist (although it is often the same «you»). The «top» is a transitive closure of this set. The set of operations available for a user is rather close to the «top», and mapping them into the basic data handling operations constitutes the essence of the programmer's job. The «bottom-up» approach to data security is a job of defining all the necessary data access rules in terms of the basic data handling operations — you apply certain restrictions to various data elements and they affect the data system overall behavior, namely data accessibility in the high-level terms used by the end users. The most elaborated text-book example of this approach is SQL — it gives you very low-level security bricks to build a custom building without specifying explicitly this building emergent properties.
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Amendment 28

The U.S. govt has no right to interfere with any aspect of public education, neither institutionalized nor irregular. It is prohibited for the govt to fund a school, advertise education services, impose standards or requirements in any way related to public education, limit educational activities in any way shape or form (for example: by demanding licensing).

Amendment 29

A teacher has an absolute, unrestricted, unalienable right to choose his students as he sees fit. A teacher is free to enroll and dismiss students on a whim at any time without answering to anyone or explaining his motives. The right of a teacher to freely select his students can not be limited by any institution, this amendment overrides any contractual obligations in this regard.

=================
Simple as that. No more laws and «departments» and «committees» are needed. You can even send your department of education to a re-education camp in Siberia.

And by the way, these two clauses are sufficient to return MALE teachers to the schools.

Picture that: You are a farmer.
You have grown a ton of potato and brought it to a marketplace.
You recon everybody sells potatoes for $1 and you decided to set the price to 0.9 so that you can return home earlier.
Presently, a group of well dressed respectable men with baseball bats approached you:
— Nice potato you have here, good sir. Do you know that the minimum price for potatoes here is $1?

QUESTIONS:
1. do you believe these respectable men helped you sell your potato for a better price?
2. do you wish the minimum price to be set higher (e.g. $1.1)?

Undoubtedly we live in the age of false dichotomies… Somehow people are all talking (and fighting) about subjects with no substance.

Dear vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, your fight is ridiculous, and it is not because you are both partially right, it is because you are both completely wrong.

Have any one of you ever tried to DEFINE the subject of your debate? What do you think a vaccine is? And what to you think the category «vaccines» is? How can you make a utility/risk claim about ALL vaccines, piling together a smallpox vaccine that demonstrably saved the humanity and a flu vaccine that have never entered any testing whatsoever! Do these two share any INNATE properties at all? Can you formulate a property that all vaccines possess on their own, a property that can be observed in the vaccines themselves, all vaccines and nowhere else? This would be a characteristic property that gives you the least moral ground to speak about the «vaccines» as an object (entity). Until then, both of you vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, are engaged into a typical case of false entitification — there is no such entity «vaccines» that you pretend to be talking about. Therefore ANY CLAIM ABOUT ALL VACCINES IS GUARANTEED TO BE WRONG.

But there is still more hilarity in the «debate». Here is a logical scheme of the anti-vaxxer standing:

In a government-run hospital my child was given a shot, that was documented as vaccination. Shortly after the event the child became sick (as never before).

Let's assume we have a sufficient amount of the episodes like that (properly documented («there is no evidence» fanboys can go fuck themselves)).

How is this a reason to blame the sickness on vaccines? Let's control for all other factors… all those kids were perfectly healthy before the injection and so on and so on. If we determine beyond reasonable doubt that the sickness was caused by this particular injection, how is it a reason to blame vaccines? In order to blame vaccines on the ground described above, you must assume that the government-run hospital DID NOT lie to you about the injected substance!!!

So the anti-vaxxers' claim of the vaccines' malice is based upon the trust to the govt! The same govt that under a false pretense of vaccination and medical treatment injected kids with plutonium, gave people syphilis, created a polio outbreak (not even for scientific nor military purposes, just for fun). The govt that has broken the trust of the people over 9000 times, this govt the anti-vaxxers trust! — «govt said it was a vaccine, duh, vaccines are bad» — what a joke!

The deepest root of all the misunderstandings that constitute the InfoSec discourse nowadays is that the normal people («security experts» included) do not understand what is software, and its fundamental difference from the physical world we live in.

The entire realm of software is purely artificial.

Not only programs and functions, not only bugs and security holes, but also all the notions and intentions, all phenomena in the realm of software, even those perceived as «natural», are created by a man.

There are no natural laws that a program must follow and obey. While your computer does follow all the laws of physics, your programs do not at all. This very distinction makes a computer useful for us. The purpose and the only purpose of your computer's existence is to create a virtual TABULA RASA world, the world devoid of any laws, the world completely disconnected from the physical reality, the world that you are supposed to populate with laws of your own creation.

In other words, a computer can produce any output from any input — this is the definition and the characteristic property of a computer. This is what they always forget, and I stress ALWAYS.

REMEMBER THAT! If you want to improve your «safety», «cyber security», whatever. Every time you assume any expectation to a program of someone else's creation. Remember that! Every time you are disappointed: I gave this stupid machine a perfect input! Remember what a computer is: a machine that produces any output from any input — no restrictions at all. If you remember it well, first you will stop acting surprised when you wonder into a trap, second you will become more challenging prey, third you will stop believing InfoSec selling stories.

Before you indulge into an experiment investigating the effects of whatever quality of a subject, it is the best for you to make sure beforehand that the quality in question does belong to your subject.

We colloquially say: «a red pencil» as if it is not a question whether a pencil can be red. Indeed, it can. In this particular case our «intuition» coincide with physical reality. We can create an experiment that demonstrates a possibility of any colour be a quality of a pencil. We can clearly define «red» as a specific feature of the light spectrum, and we can unambiguously link those spectra to each pencil. We can see (experimentally) that some pencils share this quality, while some do not. Even if the dividing line between these sets is fuzzy, we now have a CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY of a «red pencil»: all red pencils share this property, and all non red do not have it. Facing a pencil, we can (experimentally) determine if it is red (and to what extent).

It is perfectly legitimate for anyone to call a pencil «red» or otherwise tag a pencil with a colour, because of the physics, not because the language allows it. Language is equally suitable for describing reality and nonsense as well. We still can call a pencil «aggressive» but it does not make physical sense. Aggressiveness can not be observed in pencils. There are many qualities applicable to pencils and there are many qualities inapplicable to pencils. Some qualities are plainly inapplicable to some objects — this fact is so basic that is often forgotten.

Now, I give you two grains of wheat, one is «GMO» and another isn't.
Can you conceive an experiment that tells me which is which?

Maybe it is time to make one step back and determine if «GMO» is a quality of an organism? Is there any CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY of a «GM organism», something that all «GM» subjects share, while none of the rest have? Please, define this property for me. ...or simply ask yourself (every time you are looking for the magical label on the food package) what is this characteristic property I am looking for?

Now, as you have yelled at me all your suggestions, think carefully which of them is actually a property of an organism. Not single one. All that you have come up with are qualities of a production process or a design process or even earlier. None of those can be observed in a grain of wheat.

Observing a car, can you tell, for example, a difference between a car that was sketched with HB pencil and a car sketched with 2B pencil during their stage of development? In case of a car you would not claim that all qualities of a design phase are inherited by the product. You may consider me foolish to even suggest this very possibility. It is too obvious for you that a car and a car production process are two wildly different objects. Ok, then. What makes you claim that «GM» property of an organism design process is also a quality of a resulted organism? Hopefully you are not going to claim that organisms and their production processes are the same object.

However, you may legitimately conjecture that this particular property somehow translates from the design process to the organism. This is why I gave you these two grains of wheat. Take them and prove your conjecture. Show me the CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY of «GMO».

I know you are wondering what all this nonsense has to do with passwords.
Well, this is all about the information entropy, which you do happily assign to your passwords without even a glimpse of doubt: IS IT REALLY A QUALITY OF A PASSWORD??? CAN I CREATE A CHARACTERISTIC RELATION THAT MAPS PASSWORDS ON REAL NUMBERS AND IS A FUNCTION???