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The way I see it, one has to look at any online service (or any company for that matter) with two points in mind: a) does it intend to be around for the short term or long term, and b) are customers happy to pay for it. Most people seem to be assuming Facebook wants to be Facebook for a long time to come, and that advertisers are happy. I don't think either is necessarily the case.
Look at Google; they started with a web search service and stayed with that as the basis for the rest of their ventures. It turned out to be a stable revenue earner. They did it well and advertising works on Google.
Advertising may not be working so well on Facebook; we've been hearing grumbles about that lately. I don't recall any such grumbling about Google ads. So there's that elephant in the room. It's an unproven quantity - and it's their main revenue stream.
Also keep in mind that all improvements in privacy regulation hurt Facebook, and we will be seeing more as time goes on. There's this cookie tracking class action thing. All challenges for FB to convince advertisers their platform is special.
So I think they want to raise as much capital as possible and start trying other stuff, like Google does, but they're going to do it while Facebook begins to struggle to convince big advertisers they get value for money. Whether Zuck and crew can think up other revenue earners on that scale is questionable at this point.
That's just my take.. the cautious pessimist. I see big hurdles for them ahead, unless they have some other killer plan up their sleeve. Granted, they're in a superb position to do that, having such a user base. But it depends on the execution.
Facebook was a rare thing - an accidental success. Google/Yahoo/etc. was intentional. Important difference there. Facebook (as a company) needs to start exhibiting intentional good ideas. If their next plan also depends on viral uptake, like G+, it won't bode well for the company, imo. |
I gave you an upvote because I don't need /sarcasm tags. |
Comcast's actual level of cooperation with the RIAA] ( may be more accurately displayed in this article by CNET. Although, it's difficult to say, because the OP's posting is to a torrent site (obviously biased) and CNET is owned by CBS (which is also obviously going to be biased, but likely in the other direction). I'd expect Comcast to cooperate as much as possible since they own half of NBC universal, and that involves a lot of copyrighting I'm sure. |
Are we going to keep throwing that quote around here? To quote someone else here on r/tech "to say this case was about rectangles with rounded corners is the worst |
can somebody just shoot this guy in the head already?
No; as much as I disagree with this man's moral values and even motivations at times, I will fight for his right to express his will (and then argue against it). In America, or anywhere in the world, we will always find idiots and those individuals that seem to seek to impede the progress of mankind.
True progress comes when a collective moral code [of the population] supersedes Lamar's agenda. We must be louder and more persistent than the opposition as we are the majority... rather than fruitlessly taking a human life. Politics make us all angry and we must be careful to preserve our humanity in the process. |
Does anyone remember what happened when i phone first came out in big cities? Dropped calls! Lots of dropped calls! Why? Spectrum bandwidth and not having enough of it. As shitty and monopolistic as it is we either have a cell tower on every block, and micro cells on every floor for skyscrapers. Have a change in fcc policy and investigate something like wimax, or: use qos so we dont get A TON of dropped calls because people want to video chat. Wish I could post a too damn high meme here. |
It's not actually anything to do with circumventing roaming charges.
The GPS in the femtos exist for two reasons:
e-911 location
FCC frequency licensing
For 1: Without the GPS in the femto, the carrier wouldn't know where you were when you dialed 911, making 911 location services useless to yourself or anyone else on the femto
For 2: Cell carriers don't own all frequencies in all markets (and especially not in all countries) - so the femto has to know where it is to make sure it isn't breaking the law and/or causing interference on someone else's network. (Which would break THEIR 911, etc.)
<- a good map of how the frequencies are divided up by carrier |
Well my phone doesn't support either of those, the only reason I like to use AIM over facebook messenger is because facebook repeatedly doesn't send my messages without warning. I also like keeping my own chatlogs and not having to worry about reading messages without responding because the person can see I read the message. |
There is theft yes. Truth is there wasn't much cable internet to start with - just satellite and dial up. In Kenya for instance, fibre networks are very recent thing but picking up . |
I think what SniperGX1's point was, that in court, should the account holder be held accountable, they could chalenge by stating that they were not the only user of the IP address.
Furthermore, with more recent tools, WEP encrypted wireless connections can be broken in a matter of minutes, and WPA can be cracked in hours - depending on the specifics of it. It wouldn't be hard to demonstrate at the very least breaking into a WEP encrypted wireless network and show how absurd the practice of charging the account holder is purely on speculation of the IP address.
Further more, if the person wanted to protect themselves further they could go to the trouble of masking the content they download.
And then there are VPN services / darknets which make the identifying of a person purely by IP even more difficult. |
I think you're wrong here.
First off, let me just say that I believe the U.S. legal system should, overall, be more accessible to laypeople in terms of subject matter, procedure, and cost. I will note, however, that many people do effectively represent themselves pro se, especially at the lower court levels and with simple claims. Courts often try to facilitate pro se litigants for many matters, and even provide online resources so that "it is something that anyone can do without prior experience."
Having said that, law is complicated because people are complicated. Law is a function of people and their processes. So in the same way society is complicated, culture is complicated, business is complicated, science is complicated, and any other human creation... legal disputes can get very complicated as result.
To understand just why law is so complicated and often inaccessible to a layperson (why a person usually can't just go online and get general advice), you have to understand the background of law- how laws are created, the policy considerations, the legal theories involved, the facts at issue, the historical and cultural and political influences, the individuals involved... and on and on.
Once you get the gist of how and why law is, however, you have to understand how it's used. Sometimes law is used to settle a dispute; sometimes it's used to punish people; sometimes it's used to set out rules and boundaries for what people may freely do; and often it's used to keep things fair...
Take a gander at the [Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.]( These rules serve numerous functions, but mostly it's to keep things fair- so no one gets an unfair procedural advantage. Contrary to a system that's created by lawyers and perpetuated by lawyers, each one of these rules has been examined extensively over the years by courts, legislators, committees, independent analysts, think tanks, students, lawyers, laypeople, commentators, academics, and so on. They are in plain English and can be understood with enough study and time. But because they are such particularly crafted instruments, it will be difficult to know how to effectively use them without the proper background and understanding of their use. It requires studying case law, knowing how to interpret statutes, and knowing how to piece together various components of the laws at issue. And then applying it all together to a particular set of facts and issues. And that's just procedure.
So why we do we have a procedural law you may ask? Well, in a society as big as ours, there are many players- some are individuals others are big corporations. To keep the playing field level, we need rules that are fair to both. Just because an individual layperson doesn't have the time to devote to properly learn these rules doesn't mean we should eliminate them. Enter a lawyer.
Look, reality is simple on the surface but complicated underneath. Why is law so inaccessible to laypeople? To some extent you're right that the legal industry is self-perpetuating and that rules are self-serving at times- that's the nature of any industry. But the reality of the matter is that law is complicated not because lawyers want to keep their jobs, but because there are layers and layers of issues involved in creating an enduring system of justice that is fair to everyone. It's hard, relies on trial and error, and is a product of humans. And the more you try to set one rule in stone, the more objectors you get, the more caveats begin to emerge, and the more issues and considerations you could have never foreseen begin to pop up.
If you think the U.S. legal system should be simpler, that's great. But to expect simplicity is to ignore reality and to not grasp the nature of law.
There's a lot more to say, but I'll leave it at that for now.
edit, |
No, this is how power and class works in the justice system of America. Things that are criminalized and bring down prison time aren't just the most brutal crimes, but the offenses that poor people get prosecuted for, like writing bad checks or smoking pot. Because poor-people crimes are not civil offenses, the criminal justice system that the taxpayer funds, takes on the expense of prosecuting cases on behalf of victims.
The offenses that wealthy or professional people commit, like taking retainer fees and doing nothing for you, or investing your money in some shady financial product that was rigged to only generate fees for them, are "civil" offenses. So the system goes after bad-check writers and prosecutes them and throws them in prison, but if some investment banker steals your pension, it's up to you to find a lawyer, prosecute the case in civil court, and shell out whatever tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes.
The entertainment/copyright corporate interests are trying to create a new class of criminal offense, like bad check writing or pot smoking, because then the justice system prosecutes their copyrights for them, i.e. the taxpayer foots the cost of the labor, legal expenses and prosecution. It's a form of corporate class warfare, just as criminalizing bad check writing but treating securities fraud as "civil" offenses, is financial corporate class warfare. |
Yeah, I realise it's not what the article says - I confess to not reading the article prior to commenting (was on the phone... and on the loo, ahem). Victim once again to foolishly relying on post titles -_- |
Have you tried running it in compatibility mode for XP? If that doesn't work then DosBox Or you can grab a Windows XP ISO or disc, and install it on [VMware player]( which allows you to run XP as Virtual Mechine inside your existing modern Windows install. |
What happens when you sell the house and the inspector balks at your ghetto rigged non-code solar setup? Now it actually hurts the value of your home. You're going to give the buyer a credit to get it removed, and yes, that probably involves lots of roof work as all the holes you punched in the roof need to be fixed.
Also, need a new roof in 10 years? Now the roof guys need to take all that shit down and put it back up. Unless you plan on doing that as well. |
You don't think we're poisoning the planet? you seem a little trollish but ok I'm still up...
did you click the link to brushy forks, they're going to expand it to hold 2 billion more gallons of coal waste, what part of the planet isn't slowly succumbing to human pollution?
I lived at a house where the water was orange, mostly because of a nearby paper mill, if i washed my white work uniform it turned grey, we had to get our water from a nearby treatment plant, happily i'm in the municipality now.
But yeah you're right everything is fine, we'll all just keep on living like our resources are endless and the trash dumps are bottomless, and [corporations don't do horrible things]( to the environment cause people like you think that those of us who care are being dramatic... wat ever man, take your condescension to the gg bush meme... |
Interesting math, but the exact volume isn't relevant since a whole lot of compressing could be made. The NSA isn't going to save [Gangum Style]( 1.7 billion times on their servers when they can simply add a short code to each viewer's profile. Same with all browsing history and downloads.
As for sensitive non-redundant info such as communications, we already know they can [very cheaply]( store all phone calls. And presumably the same is true for emails since we consume more b/w talking than typing. |
I'll try to explain this like you're five too.
Yes it will work. The NSA is an extremely robust group of some of the best computer minds in the world. The "chip" they put in the computer is a permanent "backdoor" or open access to the computer. I'm guessing it gives each computer a Unique Identifier number.
When a computer is connected to the internet, what do you do? You surf the web. This uses port 80, so in your new firewall your going to set up, you'll have to open port 80 to surf the web.
Now, if you're going to build a backdoor project... what is your goal? Availability of access and the greatest number of people possible. So to get the most availability, they're not going to send that traffic over some weird port... they're going to code it to use whatever is used most... HTTP, or Port 80. Maybe even HTTPS, port 443. So unless you do something like deep packet inspection on your firewall, which isn't common on a home router or firewall, it's not looking good. You would have to have an explicit deny all on your firewall rules and only open up the IP addresses you want to use.. and even then who's to say those IP addresses aren't compromised? Traffic can be hijacked pretty easily. I mean shit, the chip is probably advanced enough to piggyback off of the traffic flowing through the firewall already, use the routers that traffic is going through to reach its intended destination.
Basically, your firewall doesn't even know the traffic is bad, it just sees it as normal traffic.
you'll also target Windows machines because they account for the majority of the market by a long shot. |
Signed boot image is trusted computing. TPM is a secured key store.
They aren't related to each other at all.
Trusted computing means that every piece of code that loads new code validates the new loaded code or refuses to run it. If you do this all the way from the first piece of code on the machine (in the ROM), then you have a chain of trust from the ROM to any piece of loaded code. And thus any piece of code loaded (in this fashion) can be trusted.
The TPM (Trusted Platform Manager) goes the exact opposite route. It assumes the system is compromised and thus cannot be trusted. So it provides a small separate computing system which cannot be tampered with and so can be trusted. You can store stuff (secrets) in the TPM and ask it to perform operations on what is in it, probably delete stuff out too, but you cannot ask for the secrets you placed in it.
The TPM is very similar in principle to the SIM card in your phone, or a smart card (a European credit card or a satellite TV key card), or the secure element/transactor in a phone with NFC.
Some people hate trusted computing because it is designed to take the choice of what code you can run on your computer out of your hands. If a piece of code isn't signed you can't run it, or if it does run, it's sandboxed. The very idea of trusted computing is that the owner/user cannot be trusted to decide what code to run.
But Windows 8 doesn't require Trusted Computing, indeed it cannot. Remember that Trusted Computing has to start from the first piece of code on a system, if the chain is ever broken by a piece of code which runs another without checking it, then the security is lost. So if your boot ROM (BIOS) on your PC doesn't do Trusted Computing or turns it off, then there is nothing Windows 8 can do to mend the situation. So if you're angry about Trusted Computing, then you should be considering your boot ROM (BIOS), not Windows 8.
And this is why you see people angry about UEFI. They think that UEFI is forcing Trusted Computing on them. And indeed on a Windows RT machine, it does. Microsoft controls the hardware spec for Windows RT machines and they specify that secure boot must be on and you don't get the signing key needed to authorize code to run from the boot ROM. And thus Windows RT is a trusted computing system through-and-through. You cannot run linux, and if Windows RT doesn't trust the code (i.e. it isn't bought through the MS store) you can't run it under Windows RT either.
But Microsoft doesn't control the hardware spec for Windows 8. So if you are worried about Trusted Computing, make sure you get a machine where UEFI's secure boot can be turned off and/or you can load your own signing (trusted) keys into the secure boot system.
Now, back to the TPM for a minute. You can have a TPM (or similar) in a system which is otherwise unsecured. For example, if you buy a Google Nexus 4, you get a device which has a completely unlockable bootloader (i.e. you can turn off Trusted Computing) but you still can use Google Wallet to make NFC purchases on it because Google Wallet stores its secrets in the secure element (TPM).
This article appears to be bogus, because it makes the same mistakes you see by ill-informed but generally angry people on reddit and other social sites. If anything, the German government would probably be pro-Trusted Computing, because then they don't have to trust their users (the people who they give government-owned computers to) to not mess up their machines. Trusted Computing is a sysadmin's dream! They would of course want to be able to load their own trusted keys on the systems first, but as long as they did this, Trusted Computing would be their friend. Even if they ran linux, they could keep you from putting your own hacked linux on and force you to run their authorized distro. |
This article is really uninformed.
First of all, regardless as to whether or not there is a TPM backdoor, TPM is an optional component. You can elect to enable or disable TPM functionality in your firmware (BIOS or UEFI). Speaking of firmware, you should probably update yours. Most of you are probably out-of-date.
Secondly, if TPM is enabled, you still need to have an appropriate TPM driver installed (Windows may or may not have a compatible driver available for your device.) Further still, you could elect to disable the device in the Device Manager, effectively rendering it useless. |
Well, the private key used to secure the SSD would be stored in the TPM and only in the TPM. You would need the actual chip itself, and you'd have to rip it apart (in a very careful way) to obtain the private key.
Encryption schemes like this work by using two keys. The first key is a symmetric key, used in a cipher like AES. Encryption and decryption is extremely fast. This key is stored on the hard drive--but it's not stored in the clear. Instead, it's encrypted with the second key. This second key is stored on the TPM. Depending on the implementation, the second key may be encrypted with another symmetric cipher, or some public key crypto scheme.
If you want to grant access to the hard drive under other circumstances, the first key is sometimes encrypted with a third or a fourth key--these might be stored in different places. You would still need at least one of these keys in order to obtain the primary key used to secure the data, but in this case, the TPM isn't involved. |
Cool article, indeed. I had every iPhone from 3G-5. I knew it was then't the best in a lot of areas (looking at you, apple maps and no background image for the longest time). But I didn't care, because it was an iPhone . I could get a better phone, but it wouldn't be as cool. And what if it's cheaper ? Can't have that! What am I, a farmer? After 5 months of having the 5, I finally caved. I got tired of seeing the same boring wall of static icons. I got tired of the same thing generation after generation. And I realized how silly it was to pay extra for less for the sake of social status. I jumped to Windows Phone 8 (be cool, guys) after falling in love with the look of the operating system. I tried it, liked it, bought it, used it, love it. I actually made $200 profit because I sold my iPhone 5 for $650 and bought the WP for $450. Sure, Windows Phone is currently lacking in apps (which I don't really care about anyway), and probably some other features. But now, I'm not dealing with these shortcomings because I want to look cool. I deal with them because I love my phone. And I'm willing to wait until it gets better.
Wow, I got a little carried away there. Wasn't expecting to write an essay. |
Censorship is just part of the liberal elitist culture we've been poisoned conditioned to embrace. Even reddit is a hypocrite in this regard, touting its intellectual freedom while censoring dissenting views. We still haven't learned the most important lesson of all; nobody trusts a coward who is afraid of [putting his views under public scrutiny.](
>Since when is censorship a liberal ideology? That's hilarious.
Because it's fucktard liberals who champion it. It's typically women and white knights who make up the liberal population. This of course translates into censoring the truth. The evidence is everywhere. Even on reddit; anything outside of a convenient over-simplified meme is either censored or deleted when it involves valid criticism of women. Again, not referring to the "i hate fat chicks" type drivel that we can easily find on here, but anything substantive that cuts to the core of these issues such as [criticism of feminism.]( The very fact that I can't even find one of you cowardly keyboard warriors to debate me live on this is proof enough! The only reason cowardly keyboard warriors don't live debate is because they know they can't censor the outcome. The achilles heel of any liberal/feminist ideology is always public scrutiny. These cowards operate like cockroaches--in the dark so their hypocrisy remains hidden.
The irony of course is that you're too fucking dumb to even grasp it. :) As I've proved on many occasions, I'm more than willing to [live debate any coward]( on the subject, especially you. But we both know that open and live debate involves the removal of censorship and that's the ultimate kryptonite for liberals/feminists who are accustomed to controlling and abusing the free flow of information.
Edit: the best you liberal feminist cowards can do is downvote. But thankfully (and unlike your intellectual dishonest views) the truth isn't subject to popular opinion. It will stand regardless of your butthurt kneejerk reaction to impotently reach for the tantrum arrows. :) |
Censorship is just part of the liberal elitist culture we've been poisoned conditioned to embrace. Even reddit is a hypocrite in this regard, touting its intellectual freedom while censoring dissenting views. We still haven't learned the most important lesson of all; nobody trusts a coward who is afraid of [putting his views under public scrutiny.](
>Since when is censorship a liberal ideology? That's hilarious.
Because it's fucktard liberals who champion it. It's typically women and white knights who make up the liberal population. This of course translates into censoring the truth. The evidence is everywhere. Even on reddit; anything outside of a convenient over-simplified meme is either censored or deleted when it involves valid criticism of women. Again, not referring to the "i hate fat chicks" type drivel that we can easily find on here, but anything substantive that cuts to the core of these issues such as [criticism of feminism.]( The very fact that I can't even find one of you cowardly keyboard warriors to debate me live on this is proof enough! The only reason cowardly keyboard warriors don't live debate is because they know they can't censor the outcome. The achilles heel of any liberal/feminist ideology is always public scrutiny. These cowards operate like cockroaches--in the dark so their hypocrisy remains hidden.
The irony of course is that you're too fucking dumb to even grasp it. :) As I've proved on many occasions, I'm more than willing to [live debate any coward]( on the subject, especially you. But we both know that open and live debate involves the removal of censorship and that's the ultimate kryptonite for liberals/feminists who are accustomed to controlling and abusing the free flow of information.
Edit: the best you liberal feminist cowards can do is downvote. But thankfully (and unlike your intellectual dishonest views) the truth isn't subject to popular opinion. It will stand regardless of your butthurt kneejerk reaction to impotently reach for the tantrum arrows. :) |
They aren't really related except that they both involve obfuscation of the code. Where's Richard Stallman when you need him. |
The name doesn't make much sense though.
While a descendant of the Romulan race would still technically be a descendant of the Vulcan race, they wouldn't call themselves a descendant of the Vulcans because they have little in common with them.
Naming themselves Rumulans only makes sense if they want to associate themselves with the Romulans/were calling themselves Romulans until they got really drunk, meaning they are more descendants of the Romulans than they are of the Vulcans.
Humans are technically descendants of monkeys because apes are descendants of monkey but you usually only talk about them as descendants of apes. Get it? |
This is my perfect area of expertise - Databases are just spreadsheets with special fields (for the ease of explaining). The data on them is almost always text, or binary (on/off, yes/no) slots. These are compressed when stored to remove extra-text and spaces. Our company makes medical records and in the database you could be this:
Firstname,lastname,birthdate,SSN,address-street,address-street-2,city,state,zip,telephone,admitted-date,discharge-date,level-of-care,insurance-number,insurance-provider-key, etc.
So basically in the database, John Doe could be
John,Doe,01011980,123456789,123 fake street,apartment 2,Town,MN,55555,1231231234,03042014,04032014,5,123A54F23,42
That is it. THe program takes all that and makes it fancy and readable.
Repeat that for every person, and you would barely have much. I put Commas there because an easy way to transfer database data is CSV files (Comma Separated Value) which the program takes each Comma as a new field in a row.
The trick here is you use keys and other numbers to store data more efficiently - so the entire data of a page isn't there. You might have "super insurance co" but we store that as company 573, and int he database your record has 573 instead of the long name, which saves characters which is important when you consider how many records you want to store, and how fast you want to pull it.
It gets really fun, but |
Read the fine print of the Google EULA regarding their OneDrive or whatever it is being called this week.
Anything you put on your drive, you have given up any copyright protection, intellectual property rights are gone, you have lost any right to privacy and Google can utilize any of the information stored there for basically whatever reason they feel like at the time, and this can change at any time without prior notice.
Oh yeah, and you have absolutely no legal recourse if they leak any sensitive information and you are harmed or financially destroyed because you OK'd the ironclad EULA that gave them this right and you still put the sensitive information on their site.
Not only that, once they have access to the data, they can do whatever they want with it. Study it, sell it, advertise with it - literally whatever the heck they feel like.
Like the above poster says, Google isn't in the Search Engine Business.
Google is in the Information Control, Distribution and Data Analysis business. |
Medical data is protected by law. You can't just go upload it on someone else's server.
In the US we have HIPAA which governs things like this and it would require google to sign an agreement that they will follow the correct data protection policies and disclosure requirements.
In the US google refuses to sign those types of agreements. To use anything google and the legality is largely untested, you have to contract with a company that is essentially a contracted reseller/manager/consultant of google services and that company signs the HIPAA agreements. I say it is untested, because will google disclose the necessary info to their reseller so that the reseller can truly comply with HIPAA? If google doesn't disclose, then the reseller cannot report a breach and no one would ever know HIPAA was violated.
I believe the UK has what is called safe habor. I doubt google was qualified under the law to be receiving medical data because they don't sign agreements to protect medical data. |
Gates gave up pretty much all of his money
Not yet he hasn't. He's the richest man in the world and lives on a $125 million estate. He has signed a pledge to give away the majority of his wealth. . .but so has Musk. The exact same [Giving Pledge]( in fact.
> to make the world a genuinely better place, specifically in the ways every single one of his bucks could make a maximum impact.
More accurately, he's spending his bucks in ways that he thinks will have maximum impact. Musk could well be doing the same. Musk has stated that his long-term goal is to help humanity become a true spacefaring civilization. It's easy to argue (and I personally believe) that this work is much more beneficial to humankind than the health issues that Gates is involved in. It's fantastic to save individuals, but Musk is working to save the species. We need a solution to the energy problem. Musk is working on Renewables and storage. We need to diversify humankind across more than a single planet, or face extinction. Musk is working on Rockets and missions to Mars. In short, it's not fair to say that Bill Gates is a humanitarian while Musk just builds toys. It's ok for Philanthropy to be fun!
> He is not anywhere near as philanthropic as Gates.
Measuring by dollars spent to date, you're correct. Measured by personal effort, goals, beliefs, etc, I don't think you can argue that.
> The guy's a snake oil salesman
This is where I get confused. Do you know what a "snake oil salesman" is? Musk's reputation is built on the fact that virtually everything he's had his hand in has seen success beyond anyone's imagination. PayPal, SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla. . .snake oil? Seriously? The Hyperloop is the only thing he's done that might qualify, and that was little more than a thought experiment of his that he was careful to say he didn't plan to build. He never promised anything, just drew up some plans that he thought should work. And from every analysis I've seen of the idea, there's no reason it shouldn't. |
Actually the hard part will be designing and building a Mars transport ship with a form of artificial gravity (tethered, counter-weighted rotation most likely).
Three months weightlessness results in nearly incapacitated astronauts, even at the bottom of a 1/3G gravity well.
Look at guys returning from 5 months on the ISS, they can't even hold their heads up out of a couch for a surprisingly long time.
We'll need our astronauts to be fully operational when they're bounding about on Mars. So: we'll need some G.
Artificial gravity won't be all that difficult, you just spool out a tethered weight, probably some of your supplies, or your Earth or Mars lander maybe, then start the craft to rotating. That said, we've never even tried it (unless you count Gemini 8, which you probably shouldn't). |
It is a complex question really, we have the technology to start the process but the issue comes down to how much money we put in and equipment we send. There are some plans that could change the atmospheric pressure to a point where we could walk outside comfortably (with the assistance of an oxygen supply like scuba air-system). The goal would be to use green-house gasses to assist in creating this atmospheric pressure change so that it gets to the necessary point of being 'run-away' in the sense that it will not un-do itself. (This is a complex issue, there are resting states in the nature of mars in terms of temperatures and pressures which set the bounds for the minimium change we need to get away from having the planet default/fall back to its resting state.)
Ultimately the answer is; Sort of. The time scales look a bit bleak when you think of peoples 'ideas' of science and terraforming. To get mars to an earth-ish environment will be on the scale of a thousand years with turn of the 21st century technology. This will probably be sped up once we have more data/research and understanding of how mars works (which we can only get from hands on research on mars).
That all being said, we are roughly at a point where we could modify the environment quite rapidly to a point where plants and simple organisms could survive on the surface of the planet within ~15-20 years of starting the initial terraforming process and correct modifications of plants and organism (Selection pressures/breeding and potentially simple genetic modifications). |
I work for AT&T. When I was at a clients office today closing a sale the client attempted to haggle the quoted price by threatening that she'd switch her company's service from AT&T to Comcast. When I informed her that Comcast was in fact rated worst company in the United States by consumer magazine she said I don't care I have had Comcast for 20 years and never had a problem with their service. While I wouldn't necessarily argue that she's lying but that her information is biased to her own experience without giving respect to the current telecommunications business climate. I don't believe it to be very wise of her to come to such a conclusion without doing her research. Point of the matter, it's potentially fair to assume that the majority of people who don't know what's actually happening with net neutrality hold the belief that as long as their service is uninterrupted that the company or service provider has their best interest. |
Not really, but mostly because the Standard Oil situation is completely mischaracterized by history and painted as being both evil and price gouging. What got people upset is that businesses that couldn't stand to Standard Oil fell and they felt cheapened. But Standard Oil is blameless to many of the things it attributed to.
When you actually look at history, it shows that most of the price wars that Standard Oil was credited with that drove out competition were actually instigated by its competitors and not Standard Oil, but even then, after Standard Oil reached its largest size, the price of oil still fell. It fell from over 30 cents per gallon in 1869, to 10 cents in 1874, to 8 cents in 1885, and to 5.9 cents in 1897.
"Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911 that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent, due to the expansion in capacity by competitors. Numerous regional competitors (such as Pure Oil in the East, Texaco and Gulf Oil in the Gulf Coast, Cities Service and Sun in the Midcontinent, Union in California, and Shell overseas) had organized themselves into competitive vertically integrated oil companies, the industry structure pioneered years earlier by Standard itself."
Comcast by comparison faces no real threat of competition ever mostly due to insulation thanks to right of way laws for the lines and the initial FCC and local government policies that were designed for cable TV that helped grow them into behemoths in the first place |
I am so jealous. If you see this, would you please be kind enough to test a non-local server?
You can do this by clicking "new server" after your initial speedtest. Then you can go pick a server manually. Try something in New York City.
I only ask because the 1ms ping is ridiculous. As in, if the server is more than ~180 miles from you, a 1ms ping is impossible because light doesn't travel that fast. That's not even accounting for any delays due to the computers/network switches themselves. This makes me wonder if the server you're using is located a few blocks from you. Also, testing a non-local server will give you a more accurate representation of what your true internet speed will be during normal use. |
For most in the US they know of it, but they either think they live their lives clean enough 'they have nothing to hide' or they know there has always been people being J Edgar Hoover and if they have the determination and a little bit more resources than you they will eventually find dirt on you. The scale is larger, but the situation is the same.
America has a lot of people and most of them aren't breaking enough laws on a large enough scale and/or aren't creating enemies of a high enough caliber to worry about it.
Add on top of that the difficulty in using it in court and having to deal with discussing how the information was obtained and most average people aren't going to be affected. |
This is awesome news for enterprise applications that need consistent high write speeds, the average home user will likely not see a significant speed increase because sequential writes are rarely used in modern applications with the exception of content creation or large encoding jobs. It's the seek times and random 4k writes/reads that have the most real world performance impact. Additionally the SATA interface is almost completely saturated with current drive tech so waiting for SATA 4 will likely give much greater performance increases. |
Yeah, well, a lot of "evidence" against piracy is shit science made by people who support enhanced copyright to rationalize their position.
>In counter, scoobidoo112 provided "evidence" which was shit science made by people who support piracy to rationalize their position, which regressively falls back under my original argument.
Kay, whatever, still no actual source to back up that claim.
> |
It's a protocol; instead of routing your packets directly to the destination, they're sent through a bunch of randomly selected computers, part of the Tor network. At each step, the computers aren't telling one another who sent the packet before them, so there's no real way to trace who the packet originated from.
This creates massive latency and slows down the connection speed significantly, so there's no real reason to use it for normal people. As a result, most traffic from the western world is driven by distribution of child porn, gore/snuff films, or other questionable content.
There's also a small minority of netsec obsessed people ostensibly using it solely for their privacy, but they're probably more likely to be managing a botnet, buying malware or the like. It's also how people buy drugs or hire supposed hitmen online.
From nations like Iran, China or Russia many people use it to skirt government censorship, so it's not all illegitimate. Though, like I said, there's not really any reason to use it in the western world. A simple onshore proxy or VPN will provide ample security and privacy without tanking your connection speeds. |
I didn't just prove your point, you just failed to grasp mine.
Watching porn doesn't make you a pervert. A recent study said that basically 100% of men do it. Women, slightly less.
He could very well have been checking his bank account. That is still some thing you shouldn't do in a public space.
My point was that there is a very defined public private space, and we have cultural norms and laws that govern that kind of behavior. You don't watch porn on the street, just like you don't fuck on the street. You have the option to do that at home. Just because you fucked inside a giant sock doesn't mean that you wont be arrested for indecency. My point was to make a distinction between cyber and meat space. The face sock is much less necessary because we have established privacy rights in private spaces. You can go there and watch your porn, check your bank, and bang your girlfriend as much as you'd like. The thing about public space is people are allowed to be as snoopy as they want to. This means it is folly to do private things in what is very obviously a public setting, and the expectation of privacy in a public place means that your are clearly out of touch with society. People look at you weird because you are imposing on their expectations. When they are in public they expect everyone else to be too, and when they are in private they expect freedom from intrusion
The problem is people expect that they can project the public/private distinction on to cyber-space. This is just wrong. In the cyber world you do need something like the face sock, or the shit tent because of the nature of the beast. Public/private distinction is much more blurry in cyberspace and I would argue may not even exist. You don't have privacy on the internet and your only way to achieve even approximation of privacy is by relying on anonymity. Tor allows you to establish this boundary on nearly your own terms, which is a very powerful thing to be able to do. Barring sites that block known Tor exit nodes you can push anonymous space to the edges of the internet. This is disconcerting to some people because it allows your to establish your own private(read anonymous) boundaries, and doesn't approximate that public private dichotomy that exists in meat-space. In data-space a lot of times it is one or the other, and there is no middle ground. You can be the guy with the shit tent or you can shit in front of the real pervs. (Yes, voyeuristic intrusion on someone's privacy and watching them shit does make you a perv.)
eidt: |
People should realize that the "it shouldn't bother you if you have nothing to hide" mentality is fundamentally flawed because desiring privacy is natural for innocent folks.
No, what is fundamentally flawed is privacy-obsessed loons who really believe that the rest of the populace want privacy online. The Facebook / Twitter generation has brought out and played on mankinds biggest flaw - egotism.
Most people can't wait to tell the world they are at the coffee shop and their house is empty. Most people are quite happy posting semi-naked pictures of themselves to Facebook and basking in that sweet sweet attention and 5 seconds of fame. Most people seem to take some perverse enjoyment that 2000+ online stalkers are following their every word / move.
Making bold sweeping statements that "desiring privacy is natural" is patently false in an online context, when 1 billion+ FB and TW users are proving the opposite 24/7/365. Comparing a closed bathroom stall to a Facebook page is not equivalent - especially when bathroom mirror selfies are so prevalent across the web.
If you want privacy, then go ahead use TOR or whatever - no one is criticizing your choices. But you must accept that the stigma surrounding TOR is always going to be there, because 99.9999% of it is used to access darknet dodgy porn and "how to make a bomb" sites. |
But you're thinking that people who say they're at the coffee shop are okay with everyone knowing where they are and what they're doing all the time.
There's a reason they checked in at the coffee shop. They wanted people to know they were there at that time.
There's a reason they didn't check in at Chipotle. They didn't want people to know they were there at that time.
People who post pictures of them on vacation wearing a bikini did so because they were comfortable with their facebook friends seeing it. Or maybe they put it on instagram and their account isn't protected. Just like they're okay wearing a bikini to the beach where other people can see them, they don't mind if random internet people happen to find the picture.
But that doesn't mean they want everyone to see it.
Desiring privacy is natural. Especially on the internet. I use facebook. I occasionally post what I'm doing and where I am. That's because throwing "I'm at a Robyn concert tonight" into the internet is an easy way for friends to see it and say "have fun!" or "I saw her last week in Ohio! You're in for a good time." It's absolutely not the same as having a 24/7 live stream of what you're doing.
People will check in to a lot of places often. But even the most active twitter user won't post where they are and what they're doing every second of the day. It doesn't matter if I checked in to every single store I went to today. I didn't check in when I took a dump in the morning. I didn't "check in" to pornhub when I got bored this afternoon. |
TOR was developed by the U.S. Navy. The reason that they opened it up to everyone was that if the only people seen leaving TOR exit nodes were government secret agents, then the use of TOR would be a dead giveaway. Now that TOR is open and you have tons of people using it, TOR doesn't look so suspicious anymore. If an agent is trying to infiltrate some online cracker group, you can't immediately tell that they're an agent because half of their legitimate members are probably using TOR too! |
You still have the biggest problem of secret key encryption: giving the other party the secret key. Except now you tack on the problem of repeatedly giving the other party the secret key when the pad runs out. Sure, you could pass a program around that comes up with the pad so you don't have to keep passing out pads, but now if someone gets caught and the program discovered, you need a new program instead of it not being that big a deal (they could only decrypt a few past messages, not necessarily future ones and not likely many future ones). |
There are not many downsides to using a TV as a monitor, depending on what you plan on doing that is!
If you're looking to do gaming and such on a TV, latency is going to be a big issue, while it seems odd to think about latency in a TV, it can adversely affect the quality of games. Most TV's have a latency of about 50-60MS, if not higher. So of you plan on doing any sort of computer gaming on your TV it's something to consider.
Latency is not an issue with consoles because they are designed with that in mind, so while a game played via a console may play great, you'll sometimes experience lag playing the same game via a computer on your TV (Dark souls 2 being a good example) |
The problem with holding people in corporate positions legally liable is that who do you blame? Responsibility is typically diffused throughout the corporate chain of command making it hard to really hold any specific person as liable for actions (this is often done by intent). So if something illegal is done, who do you blame, the person who directly committed the action despite him likely being just another lowly wage slave, the person who ordered the action be done despite the fact that he was largely forced to do it by superiors (such as instructed to cut costs 'by any means'), the person who instructed that person that radical 'by any means' action was required, go all the way up the chain to the corporate president who probably had no specific knowledge of anything that was going on (despite him likely leading that company's philosophy of negligence and illegality, only keeping him out of the know simply to absolve himself of involvement), or do you even take it further than that and hold the stock holders legally responsible, despite most of them having no control or care of the company's actions besides the desire for it to 'make more money'? |
But it signifies that internet is being slowly polarized. Its not about the technical prowess of the top 30 companies, but the fact that they have acquired enough clout to change rules to help them significantly. I guess the only way out is when everyone has fiber and can generate more content and run servers from their own homes. i guess the |
Yes except if you are basing your opinions off of econ 101 then you are going to be wrong. A basic model may work like that, but you are ignoring other forms of taxes.
For example this tax break encourages companies to spend on assets to lower their tax burden. Bonus Depreciation allows for one years depreciation to be removed, so on an asset of $10 million depreciated straight line over 20 years, they would save $500,000 in tax in the first year. There is still sales tax though. So a company has just paid $10 million to acquire goods will pay approximately 7% sales tax so they paid $700,000 in sales tax, unrelated to the previous deductable. The government has gained $200,000 in this situation.
Then remember that this tax is only for the first year of the asset. The asset will continue to produce future cash flows for many years, but that $500,000 can only be deducted once. The future cash flows will also be taxed and need to be factored in. Therefore the government will gain because of the future productivity of these assets.
Finally if the equipment or whatever it is is not used to generate cash flows or produce value/ a positive economic value then it cannot be depreciated or used for this tax benefit. Some people in this thread mention buying fibre optic cable and never using it, but that isn't considered an asset and cannot be depreciated therefore no tax deduction. |
It's not that simple, either. Nobody was demanding touchscreen mobile devices a decade ago. Somehow Apple decided to expand and develop one anyway. No demand and yet expansion."
You're looking at demand wrong. There wasn't necessarily a demand for a "touch screen", the was a demand for innovation in general, or something new.
[Expectations, or a taste for innovation, are factors that also drive demand](
You can say that innovation comes from demand.
Therefore, the model is: First demand → then innovation → finally supply.
On another note, [Much of the Iphone's history is impacted by demand](
"In April 2003 at the "All Things Digital" executive conference, Jobs expressed his belief that tablet PCs and traditional PDAs were not good choices as high-demand markets for Apple to enter, despite many requests made to him that Apple create another PDA. He did believe that cell phones were going to become important devices for portable information access , and that what cell phones needed to have was excellent synchronization software."
Basically, Jobs new that cell phones, not PDA's or tablet computers were going to be the next big thing, the thing people wanted, the thing people would eventually demand the most.
[He was right](
Think about it: why does Microsoft come out with a new Xbox every few years?
Because Microsoft knows that there will be a demand for it.
Demand means profits...don't think for a second that Microsoft is developing the next generation Xbox technology out of the goodness of their hearts. They are developing it for profits.
Or
15 years ago, there wasn't a high demand for fuel efficient cars. However, gas prices went up...which caused the demand for fuel efficient cars to go up. Then, car companies began producing more fuel efficient cars.
Or
Fuck, you're not hungry now, so why should you go food shopping? Because you know that you will demand food in the future, so you get a good supply of food.
Demand causes everything, you feel me? |
But the bigger reason is the amount of money they don't put back into their infrastructure. Last year, their reported profits were $49 billion dollars. Then they complain that they need more money and push net neutrality as the reason they can't afford to expand their infrastructure, because they aren't charging people enough for services.
AT&T has been around for over 100 years. Google hasn't even been around for 20. Google may be small scale, but again, that isn't their business. It is AT&T's. And we're not looking at 'the drop of a hat', that's the problem; AT&T (and other ISPs) have had decades to work on increasing bandwidth, including the last mile. They have all but flat-out refused and are only doing the bare minimum. Their 2012 plan had them pledging 14 billion towards infrastructure upgrades, but 8 billion of that was for wireless infrastructure. That leaves 6 billion for a 2-year plan.
The estimates for Google to roll out fiber nationally is $140 billion dollars. That's for a company with no existing infrastructure. If we assume that having an existing infrastructure accounts for 30% of costs (in reality, it's probably much higher), that leaves us with just over 93 billion dollars needed to upgrade all of the nation's backbone. But AT&T doesn't cover the entire country, so let's split that among AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.
We'll give AT&T 37 billion, Verizon 30 billion, and Comcast 26 billion. At AT&T's current rate, that means we will not see "national" fiber for at least another decade. AT&T could financially complete their upgrade in one year's profits alone.
This doesn't even take into account the locations with already existing 'dark' fiber optics, of which they have several existing networks that they aren't turning on because it's just not as profitable. It also wouldn't look good for their cause to take over the internet either.
Yes, I understand that there is a large amount of planning to be done. But again, we've been throwing money at ISPs for nearly 2 decades and you're telling me that virtually no progress is acceptable? If it took me more than 2 months to design an upgrade to my network, I would be fighting for my job, and I'm just one person. They could also be rolling out city by city, the same as Google and Verizon have done. The problem is, FiOS has slowed its expansion citing poor finances. They haven't done any expansion since 2010 as far as I know, and they don't even offer gigabit speeds and charge much more than Google (500Mbit for $300 vs. 1Gbit for $70).
Austin will be an interesting city to look at, since Google Fiber is there as well. It's already helped to keep AT&T from price gouging, which is excellent news, and part of the reason behind Google Fiber. The latter is slated for 34 cities across the country, which is more than AT&T has committed to (27).
I apologize for the long post, but if that doesn't outline it well enough, I don't know how to better put it. |
Data is not limited, bandwith is.
Let's take a best case scenario. You're connected to a cell over LTE-A using 60mhz of spectrum. If you were doing this in a lab with perfect conditions that cell could provide 450mbit/s.
Now back to reality. In most countries 60mhz would require aggregating 3 different bands. Where I live that would be 800, 1800, 2600 (and the auction for 800 and 2600 is in progress). Just by adding 2600 here we're limiting this to a very small area so let's scratch that. 40mhz of aggregated 800/1800 nets us 300mbit/s per cell in perfect radio conditions. 1800 is not available far from the cell tower, in my experience about 2km (I can't factor max output power though, varies from country to country even in EU).
These assumptions are unreal because our counterpart to FCC won't sell anyone more than 10 out of 800mhz and won'te let two carriers to aggregate more than 15 of continuous spectrum to perserve market balance. But that's just Poland and doesn't mean every market has such restrictions so we'll assume we have a carrier with 20mhz of low band spectrum and 20mhz mid one.
Let's go even further into reality. We're never going to have optimal radio conditions and LTE is very prone to interference (moreso than WCDMA) so you can't use the coverage as densely and there will be gaps. Simple rule of thumb is to divide maximum bandwith by 2. We're down to 150mbit/s.
All of that will have to be shared by subcribers connected to that cell. There are traditionally 3 cells per tower per band. If there's 30 people downloading something at the same time via same cell you're down to 5mbit/s. I doubt people will be satisfied with such speed and we're talking about tech that's only now beginning to be deployed.
One of the carriers in Poland started offering unlimited LTE few months ago. It's network was bogged down in 3 months and they had to enforce fair usage policy effectively capping them at certain amount of data. That's what happens with unlimited data, people begin to think they can replace their landline/cable based solutions. |
The patent trolls are a scapegoat here. Removing them won't fix the real problem.
The real problem is that for basically anything you can build in the technology field, you WILL infringe many, many patents. 5.8 MILLION patents were filed in 2014 alone, and the grant rate is around 90%. Checking and "designing around" all of these is simply impossible and to do so would utterly stall tech development.
The quality/validity of granted patents is less relevant than the amount of money you have to attack/defend them, relative to your opposition. Hence most are settled out of court. This means the rich guys (Apple, Bose, Trolls) crush innovation and their competition using their bought power (lawyers) within the legal system, rather than beating them with the best product in the marketplace. And THAT is why the patent system is broken. |
lakh is hindi. Most Indians know hindi. It's is also commonly used in Indian English ( ). The article is located on a website devoted to Indian news. This website's audience consists almost entirely of english speaking Indians who know what a lakh is. |
It is certainly an anomalous artefact, but a sarcophagus? Not so sure.
Yes, I agree in the context of Egyptian history, that item is commonly interpreted as a sarcophagus, if only out of the reluctance of Egyptologists to admit that they really don't know.
The Cheops pyramid itself is a misnomer based on the shabby fraud perpetrated by Vyse who forged a cartouche (badly!) just as his money was about to run out.
But in fact there is little to suggest this basalt box ever contained a body and it has almost nothing in common with any other Egyptian sarcophagi. It also has no lid and it's too short.
The very first person (Calaph Al Ma'mun in the 9th cent.) to set foot in the King's Chamber (so-called for no particular reason whatsoever) found it empty.
But the coffer itself is a fascinating relic! Modern engineering analysis has shown that it was hollowed out using fixed-point drills of over 2 tons pressure and what has been called 'space-age precision.'
There is growing suspicion that the pyramids were there looong before the Egyptians. |
So...totally read that fuck you espeon and was sad cuz I love espeon psychic pokemon are awesome. Then I read the next part and was confused. Then I read "who cares if I'm out of cyan" and spent the next 15 seconds trying to figure out what item that was because I didn't remember it. Then in registered I'm pretty dumb. Then I clicked the link. |
I have been reading digital books on various devices for close to 10 years now. I've found that I can read faster on some than on others, and within a given device (currently my Palm TX) there are different programs and different setting with each program that affect reading speed. with any device there is a bit of an adjustment period while you get used to the format, but .... once I get used to it, I can read much faster on digital devices. |
It's not a per-phone issue, it's a problem with the design of the phone in general.
The rundown: all phones have a signal drop when you cover the antenna. Even the iPhone 4's antenna, though it is harder to cover as it runs all the way around the phone. Completely as expected, and nothing to complain about. However: the iPhone 4 has its own specific issue, wherein bridging the gap between two antennas causes an additional drop, which is fairly severe.
Why it shows for some and not for others: basically, bars are a terrible way of estimating signal. Here is a diagram showing how bars are mapped in iOS 4.0 and 4.1, created by some fellow and used in an anandtech article:
A typical drop for holding the iPhone 4 while bridging the gap is ~20dB. Looking at the upper portion: if you were at -51, you're now at -71 — still five bars. But if you were at -91, you're now at -111 — five bars to one bar, or possibly loss of signal entirely. The drop was the same, but the bars are too "grainy" to display that properly. The end result of all this is that the phone informs you of the signal degradation only sometimes, even though it always happens. This is why some people can't duplicate the issue: they have probably been sitting at the higher end of the range for their 5th bar.
Why the antenna design is terrible: place a piece of non-conductive tape over the antenna, and the bridging issue is completely gone. Yes, placing tape over the antenna causes a very slight lowering of the "baseline" signal, but on the plus side you're not dropping ~20dB every time you put your fingers in the wrong spot.
Why Apple's explanation is bad: they say that all phones lose signal when you cover the antenna, which is correct. The iPhone 4 is no exception. But that's not what is causing most of the problems. What is causing problems is the severe drop caused by antenna bridging, due to a very simple design flaw that they should have caught, a design flaw which no other phone has . Once they started comparing to other phones, they were being deceptive by suggesting that this flaw was normal. |
Just want to point out that big companies losing their ability to insert arbitration clauses means:
They lose more money in lawsuits.
Their breakeven points are higher.
They have to charge more in order to keep above these breakeven points to continue their existence as a business.
Consumers get charged more and you complain either way.
The expense for AT&T when your friend gets in his potentially successful lawsuit over a 30 dollar tax gets equally distributed to all the other customers of AT&T as increased costs. |
Except that it isn't. IMHO it's exactly spot-on-the-money.
My $600 Android Droid2 compares very well against the iPhone, no surprises. But a far cheaper Android phone (LG Optimus) compares very well against my Droid2! This puts the iPhone in a direct, head-to-head competition against Android phones available at much-cheaper carriers at 1/2, 1/3, even 1/4 the price! Sure, the iPhone may be somewhat more refined than a budget-priced Android. But if you could do "pretty much" everything the iPhone can do at 50%, 33%, or 25% the price, which would YOU choose?
It's 1985 all over again, and "good enough for cheaper" will slaughter "best ever for big bux", just like it did in 1985 when Dos/Win slaughtered Apple/Macintosh.
And honestly, it's not like an Android user is giving up much! On a recent trip, I had my wife's LG Optimus Android phone (at less than half the cost of my Droid2) doing:
1) Listening to my fave hometown radio station a la TuneInRadio app.
2) Giving us driving directions a la Navigator app.
3) Providing internet service to my laptop a la EzTether while I did some "War programming" in the car.
4) While texting to my sister. (whose house we were travelling to)
5) Charging via the USB connection to my laptop. |
You don't have a real complaint then. Stop reading news about new phones and suddenly your complaint about sensational new phones goes away.
Fragmentation is no worse on Android than iOS. Theres only a few chipsets in use so many phone preform at pretty much the same rate. This year was almost nothing but snapdragon. |
I know android is pretty good and almost feature matches the iphone in some ways while beating it in others. I'm just sick of the rampant fanboy-ism and dumbass business people with sensationalist headlines. I'm an iPhone user, but often consider switching, but just haven't been convinced by the experience that I would. Honeycomb looks very nice from what I've seen so far. The fact of the matter is both are quality platforms and there is plenty of room for competition, webOS and WinPhone7 also look competent, just not mature. Analyze with an even hand and stop blowing things out of proportion. |
Oh look... the internets are coming with LOIC again. Be afraid, some geeks are going to sit at home and do something that in no way inconveniences the politicians that pass these laws, and may in fact help promote their agenda.
Instead, how about writing to your representative. No, not an email. Not a facebook petition. Write a physical letter. On paper. And send it via post. (I know it's hard- involves actually doing something like leaving your home for five minutes to post a letter).
After you've done that, write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Hell, write an article and see if they'll publish it.
Discuss it amongst your colleagues at work and have them do the same thing.
LOIC just makes you look like a terrorist. Writing a letter makes you look like a concerned citizen. Who votes. And votes are what the politicians care about. |
On paper. And send it via post. (I know it's hard- involves actually doing something like leaving your home for five minutes to post a letter).
>After you've done that, write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Hell, write an article and see if they'll publish it.
Meh. Both useless. Patently so. More and more people use the internet for their exclusive news source. Any activity there is NOT USELESS. It is powerful.
>Discuss it amongst your colleagues at work and have them do the same thing.
Powerful. YES!
>LOIC just makes you look like a terrorist.
Yes. They WILL call you a terrorist. Fact.
>Writing a letter makes you look like a concerned citizen. Who votes/ And votes are what the politicians care about.
No. No. They don't give one fuck for you. Not one. Stockholm syndrome. These people are not just and not ethical. They lie to your face every time they speak. This is not hyperbole. |
This is probably going to get buried, but DesertRain covered this in good detail over at /r/netsec. |
Unfortunately, it's not just the GOP. Bear in mind that quite a few of the DNC Presidential candidates used "censorship" (specifically cyber censorship) as cornerstone issues in their campaigns. |
I have a problem with this:
>These players have a genuine grievance, in that the internet poses an overwhelming threat to their old business model. The copyright-versus-technology debate is worth having, and soon.
Every commentary on issues surrounding copyright gets this wrong. The rightsholders' business model actually still works. In fact, they're making money hand-over-tit. If they're so bloody poor because of internet piracy, where did they get the money to buy all these laws to enhance their already fantastic profits? These bills didn't materialize out of a desire by politicians to ensure artists are treated fairly.
Second problem: what about never-expiring copyright? We're all paying tax dollars and dedicating criminal justice enforcement to protect Disney's profits on Mickey Mouse, an 80-year-old character. |
democracy: we vote some partys who vote some guy to speak for them at EU.
You can tell everone on the world how the internet is in china and everyone whould say thats fucking horrible, i dont want that here
but yet some of these guys at EU who should share our interests vote for something noone wants, I voted some party because they want to sink the taxes, but I would vote against everyparty who wants to censor anything
The greeks got it right |
Freedom of information is a powerful thing that should not be curtailed lightly in a free society, but I am curious about the numbers cited in your title. Surely the 6.7 billion people making up the 99.99% are not all equally situated, nor would the restriction of internet freedom affect them all equally. Altering internet access would change relative power dynamics among lots of different groups of people, and presumably it would not always turn out as expected. Viewing this in the light of the 99.99% versus the .1% is a poor lens through which to understand such a complicated situation. Moreover, such a false dichotomy can sometimes stifle what could otherwise be a rich debate on the merits of any particular law or policy. |
It is tough to say, depending on what you want/expect from your computing experience. Windows is still the front runner in terms of enterprise software, and gaming, though Linux has made great strides in both of these areas in recent years. For sheer productivity, many argue that OSX has the perfect balance of intuitiveness and polished software options.
Linux however, excels in two key ways over these other two, especially if you are a power user or a web/email only user. For the latter case, Linux performs as well as, or better than OSX and Windows, while costing significantly less. In addition, it provides the novice user with a more secure computing environment, causing their often risky browsing and email behavior to expose their system less.
For the former group - the power users who demand absolute control over their hardware - Linux simply offers capabilities that Windows and OSX never will. If you go into any engineering or science lab in the world, and check to see what kind of equipment their custom data-collection tools are hooked up to, it is almost always Linux. I don't have to buy Visual Studio and a Dev kit to hack together Linux drivers for a random RS-232 peripheral. This is just a small example though - once you start using tools like Eclipse, and Gstreamer, you will wonder why anybody pays for Visual Studio or Final-Cut. You will discover the entire world of computing that exists beyond the GUI, and will eventually come to scoff at anyone who needs to render an extra window to make quick changes to a piece of code. If you don't like the way your system manages Kernel space Ethernet buffers you can compile a custom kernel with your own patches. Even if you never do this kind of stuff, and require certain Windows tools, Linux is as good, if not better in terms of virtualization than Windows and OSX. WINE can run basic windows applications (and some games), while VirtualBox and VMWare allow you to run entire instances of other OSs inside your native OS. |
It's really only a problem if he were the type of person to abuse it."
You just told us: He has access. He looks. He abuses it.
People talk to their Doctors and their attorneys via videoconference. Is it really OK for this creep to sneak into people's confidential Doctors' visits and lurk and watch? Why? Because he works in IT?
>"[D]on't act like it's [Skype's] fault you don't know how to use secure channels for secure information properly."
Allow me to be clear: It is Skype's fault that I don't know how to use secure channels for secure information properly.
I know how to use Skype. Skype will not admit that their product is insecure. Therefore it is Skype's fault that I have come to rely on their product instead of seeking alternatives..
Skype advertises and profits from creating a leaky communication medium. Skype puts its service out there for everyone from business people to little old grannies to use. Skype is "the professional" in this relationship and they need to act that way and own up to responsibility. Skype won't even come clean and admit publicly that their product is insecure. Skype is therefore misleading the public into using their insecure product.
The argument that the public should know better than the professionals do is flawed:
If I go to a mechanic and he does a half-assed job on my brakes, the mechanic shouldn't be allowed to just say "It's not my fault you don't know how to fix your own brakes." No, he is in the business of fixing brakes. I am not in the business of fixing brakes, and I should not be required to be in that business just to own a car.
>
>"Skype doesn't advertise secure connections."
Skype knows their product is 'broken', and according to the article they are concealing it from the public by dodging questions about it. They know that little old grannies, Doctors, and others use their service. They can't just hide behind the idea that "everyone should simply know how to secure a videoconferencing session". They can't just claim that security is common knowledge and anyone who doesn't know enough is just a "bad consumer". Their product is used by little kids, by construction workers, by all walks of life. |
Not necessarily. It's possible for proprietary software to have it's source code made available while still being proprietary.
Then again if we are taking the OSI definition of open source, there are plenty of licenses that don't qualify as open source, but still provide sufficient insurance that there is no eavesdropping capability in the software. So, torpidnotion isn't technically correct either. |
The first thing MSFT did was move all of the super nodes to their infrastructure, which in turn made Skype essentially non-distributed and provided a single point from which to eavesdrop.
because before when you logged into skype and connected to their login/master server, when it authenticated you and directed you to a supernode to connect to the mesh from.. there was no way for skype to eavesdrop?
there has always been a single point of failure, which is the master login server. who is to say that the super node and the nodes you connected to before the supernode centralization were not really peers but malicious nodes that were designed by skype to wiretap? you wouldn't know the difference, but they would be able to wiretap you just as easily without having to build & maintain a datacenter?
furthermore, they have made no changes to the network besides controlling every supernode, so they havent changed anything besides which computers are supernodes.
>Skype is a distributed network; if everyone goes offline, Skype doesn't work. The architecture relies on Nodes (your computers) and super nodes (big computers).
Super nodes were not "big computers in places owned by skype" they were other user's computers, super nodes in this respect are very unstable because if that user turns off skype, you lose quite a bit of peering. Granted with a large enough network it does not cause many problems, but it is simply just not an optimal way of running a network.
Think of it like DNS servers, if half the root servers died instantly, there would be some peering issues. But because they are centrally run and maintained, they never go down. Skype was doing the same exact thing, except essentially the root DNS servers were its client's computers. Now tell me whats wrong with that picture.
>Up until the MSFT acquisition, the super nodes were distributed in a somewhat random fashion. Since there was no single core routing point, monitoring calls over Skype was impossible.
Monitoring calls over skype via supernodes is still impossible because that data does not get sent to them. Every VOIP & webcam chat from computer->computer is a direct connection between the two nodes, only text would be possible if you are both using computers. of course they can MITM attack or do countless other things to try and wiretap, but the changing of supernodes does not affect that.
want proof of that claim? well, ask the progamer/streamer Destiny. Who, because of how skype handles computer->computer calls/video, was dDoS'd for a week by a 13 year old since when you call someone, that person's IP is leaked no matter what. [Here is his solution to that problem](
Now, if you wanna get really meta with it all, just look at skype news stories. Almost exactly 1 year ago reddit was up in arms about skype NOT routing everything through its servers.
[Redditors literally complained about the exact opposite thing last year](
The instant messages that are sent would be the only thing you can truely wiretap via supernodes, but even those I wouldn't be too sure of since it gets sent, in pieces, to other peers and its entirely possible that not all the data goes through the supernodes. Hell, i'm sure that there are messages that had none of the data go through supernodes. Supernodes are primarily used for peering nodes together, and not so much for transferring data. which is why supernodes do not use much more bandwidth than other nodes (but do use much more CPU/RAM).
>So are they eavesdropping? I'm not sure, but the point is they've technically facilitated eavesdropping in a way that the original Estonian engineers never would've done.
they have done nothing of the sort, The moving of the servers does not facilitate eavesdropping anymore than having a stable network does. If skype wanted to eavesdrop you, they would do it when you login, not when you are trying to connect to other nodes/communicating.
Now, If you are calling cell phones/landlines, then it goes through a skype server, but this data still is not transferred through a supernode, and that system would not be affected by a centralization of supernodes any more than having a stable mesh would.
>I tend to think that with all the 3 letter organization spying revelations we've had recently indicates a larger spying culture that's uniquitous in nature.
If you think the spying culture ever stopped being as big as it is/was in the cold war, you are naive. Its just now people are more likely to hear about it because of the internet. |
thousands would have audited the code
Haha... simply wrong. I've worked on dozens of open source projects. This is how it really works in 99.99% of cases :
#1) Joe implements feature x. Nobody knows what Joe's true motivations are. We're just happy about the new feature.
#2A) If feature x is desirable, works as documented, fits the coding guidelines, interfaces with the rest of the software well, etc. the chances that anyone (even the core developers) will ever look at the code again are small. The chances that anyone will bother to understand the code beyond the interface are infinitesimal. The chances that someone knowledgeable enough in security and obfuscated coding will carefully audit it are pretty much damn near NOTHING.
#2B) If feature x fails to work in some way, a bug report will be filed. The bug report will very likely just sit around until Joe gets around to patching it. Even if someone else does try to patch the bug out before Joe, they will do the absolute minimal amount of work possible to get things working. If the code ever gets forked down the line, everyone will just accept it as gospel for the rest of eternity.
NOBODY volunteers to sit around auditing the source (esp. for security). That is janitorial work. It isn't fun, and you have to PAY qualified people a lot of money to do it. Furthermore, the number of people you could rely on to reliably detect nefarious obfuscated code literally numbers in the dozens world-wide (esp. once you get to the level of sophistication that an organization like the NSA could have cooked up).
If I were running the NSA (or any other foreign intelligence agency), I would do two things:
A) I would secretly bribe/extort backdoors in closed-source software. This is simple, and you would have to be a fool to believe that closed-source software isn't full of backdoors for intelligence agencies.
B) I would have a team of programming elites actively submitting patches and features to large open source projects. This would take place over many years and they would be respected members of their development communities. For example, I could have one team covertly introduce an illusive side-effect (in the comp-sci sense) into the compiler toolchain. I could then have the team working on the hypothetical open-source skype clone utilize this undocumented behavior to create a section of underhanded code that would look 100% legit to anyone reading it (even someone specifically searching for underhanded code). In reality, the code would couple with the side-effect to subtly leak information about the encryption keys in the packet jitter, etc, etc. This is just one example, but I hope it conveys the idea... If you sat around all day just thinking about this you could come up with dozens of devious ways to skin this cat... and all of this is doubly true if you are able to exert any level of control at the hardware design/manufacture level.
This may all sound conspiracy-theory crazy, but by my estimation, sneaking a single subtle timing bug into a cryptography library for a major open-source OS would be worth several billion dollars. It is foolish to believe that nobody has ever tried (or succeeded). |
This is important : If you get your own modem, pay attention to your bill and make 100% sure that Comcast (or whoever) doesn't continue charging you for the rental.
I paid $7 monthly for a modem that I had physically turned into Comcast for six years before noticing that they had still been charging me for the damn thing in some tiny subsection with taxes.
Called, was assured that the problem would be solved. Sure enough, next bill comes along and the damn thing is still on there. Call again, am assured that it will be solved this time and that they need to escalate it for a refund, some person from Comcast calls me to break the news that they can only refund 6 months of this charge even though I have documents proving that I had returned their modem, installed my own modem, and activated it with their home activation kit.
Yes, I know, I'm an idiot for not paying attention to the fine print and I'm responsible for figuring out if Comcast has fucked up my bill royally, but it still angers me how little they cared about resolving the issue amicably. Honestly, pretty sure they don't give a shit because they know they're the only option in my region. |
Well, I'm working on qc now. I think qc is a big deal. I don't think THIS work is a big deal. Its an incremental improvement on D-wave's work with mapping problems to spin ising models.
And the comment about dilution refrigeration is not at all moot. The operational costs of a quantum computer put it outside the budget of any consumer that doesn't have a research grant. Sub-Kelvin cooling is very expensive and not an active field of research, unlike transistors over the past 40 years.
Further, qc will not work better than traditional computing for consumer usage. Only very difficult problems are easier with a qc, like factoring large numbers and simulating quantum systems. |
Ok so heres my problem with comcast, I got them about 4 months ago when I moved into our new condo, We wanted WOW but they said they dont do condos (Dammit-_-) So! We go to comcast not really wanting to but not having a choice, So, I work at home off my PC and days where I use it alot, They shut it off for awhile, It isnt in the contract, It doesnt say we can only use a certin limit (I know some companies have that) And I know its them, My PC has connection but I just cant go anywhere, Like im being DDOSd. And some how, When I call them and tell them Im losing money All the sudden my Internet is back! ITS A MIRACLE. I need a new provider, AT@T sounds nice I guess :/
Spelling isnt great, sorry, Not worried about it |
I got a call from them at 9:30 AM on Saturday. Guess who was hungover as shit? This guy. What do they want to tell me? Here's a brief summary...
Comcast : "Sir, your plan is no longer being offered. I can offer you a new package for ~$50 a month more than you're paying now. And it includes a phone line, Stars and Encore! It will bring your total to $149/month".
Me : "I don't want any of those things. I want the plan I have now".
Comcast : "Well, that plan will also cost $149 starting next month so you may as well get the Triple Play offer I have here now"
Me : "If I don't get the phone line can you do $148? This is 2013, a land line is worth exactly $0 to me. Stars and Encore are worth about the same"
Comcast : "I'm sorry sir, this is the best offer we have. If you want HD channels and HBO, it's pretty much your cheapest option."
After over an hour of arguing/protesting/haggling I managed to get a free DVR, an extra 10 mbs of internet speed and 40 other channels (Nat Geo was the only thing they gave me that I will use) and they wouldn't budge on the price...I hate them. What sucks is that their customer service is fantastic. They're so friendly, nice and helpful that I feel bad about getting pissed at them for their infuriating corporate policies. |
Generally women targeted gadgets are driven purely with purchase statistics and data, and yes they sell a shit load to their target customer base as well. Which in turn reinforces their product strategy and brings more devices. |
I hate to have to break this to you, but it looks like your reading comprehension needs work or you are simply misinformed.
The Surface Pro guy was referring to has [shipped 400k units]( at last count.
There is no such product as "The Surface". There is the Surface RT and there is the Surface Pro. Combined they've shipped 1.5 million units. |
I just finished federal jury duty in San Francisco where a patent holder was suing Sony for patent infringement on several claims of his 4 patents. He was asking for $84 million. We the jury not only found for Sony, but we invalidated his claims [of the patents] based on prior art.
One thing that the jury kept wondering was how could the patent office issue patents on this? But that was not for us to decide. We were asked to review ONLY what was presented in court and decide for or against infringement and also to decide if the patent claim were invalid. We were allowed to consider the prior art that Sony presented in court.
Relevant article:
This article was published before our trial was complete. I cannot find an online source that states our decision. We refused to speak with the reporter outside of the courtroom after we gave our decisions. |
You could patent the isolation or insertion, if they were innovative in their field. More than likely though they use the same isolation and insertion techniques everyone else in that field does which makes it unable to be patented. Even if it was, it's almost completely unable to be enforced and offers no protection of the innovation.
I have issues with a gene itself being patented. However, I can't think of any other way they can protect their investment. If you can't protect the gene, what's to stop your competitor from sequencing your seed and just sticking in the roundup ready gene? I see it more akin to software licensing than anything else, especially as applies to businesses. This isn't a question of personal use, the farmer is operating a business, and knowingly attempted to increase his profit by using fraudulent goods in the production of his product. |
So if I front all the costs to figure something out, and five other companies just copy my methods and basically push me out of competition because they can have a lower bottom line, what are my options?
Don't get my wrong, I know it's an open ended question with no easy solution. I'm a scientist so I definitely like open flow and use of information, but when it comes to the actual application of our research findings, what other option is there? Research is risky from a business perspective, so there needs to be some incentive to reduce the chances of an idea being a dud on the marketing end of things. A lot of good ideas that do well on the research end of things never see the light of day because bringing the product to market already doesn't seem like a worthwhile plan when weighed against the potential risks. |
The transport layer's job is to provide a standard interface to the application layer while handling segmentation, controlling error and in the case of TCP, ensuring delivery.
HTML is at the application layer, which is where you want all the application/protocol specific logic, which is what DRM is. |
This is because America's telecoms laws are fucked up, and has allowed ISPs and Cable companies to create local monopolies, and a general country-wide oligopoly.
In the US, the person who owns the physical wiring/connection has the right to be the only person to sell internet or cable through that connection. In order to get a different company's service they have to put significant investment into their own infrastructure. You wouldn't run electricity companies like this, would you? In fact, early British lawmakers made the same mistake with the legal framework for the early British electricity grid. This significantly slowed the rate at which electricity made its way into British life, and was one of the major reasons that Britain fell behind Germany & the US in the early 20th century.
(most) Modern European telecoms laws today work in much the same way that electricity infrastructure is governed; the owner of the lines has the right to charge some form of 'line rental' at a rate that is agreed to be fair with a regulator, but it's illegal to refuse to allow any company who wants to sell electricity (or internet or cable) through your infrastructure to do so. I really wish the US would take a hint from both history and the legal frameworks of other developed nations, or else it's at risk of continuing to significantly hamper its own economic growth into the 21st century; cheap access to good internet is basically a prerequisite for a cutting-edge developed economy these days. |
doesn't really demonstrate anything.
one market isn't enough to pressure companies into action - it's a viable strategy for CC/TW to take a bath on subscriber rates/numbers in KC just to present the perception that Google Fiber doesn't threaten their revenue on a national scale, and thus they will not be forced into modifying their behavior.
plus, old people still subscribe to AOL; by reason, probably 90% of people over 35 (i.e. those paying most of the bills) probably perceive "Google Fiber" as the new and confounding whiz-bang techie thing that they can't understand, and will stick with their existing ISP until inertia/widespread adoption lets them know that it's ok to switch.
google knows this. comcast knows this. it's just a game to see how far google is really going to have to go before broadband providers give them what they want - an assured, robust, cost-free pipeline to google's sales targets: internet users. |
This point exactly. I have no idea how people look at the cable industry and blame the government. It's really simple: Company A owns the last mile lines (the ones that connect to your house) and Company A provides service via those lines. You are a captured customer, why on earth would it make sense in a free market for them to share their lines to a competitor? So now the situation is if Company B wants access to you they have to build their own lines to your house.
Which is what Verizon is doing and why Fios is so geographically limited. If it were a government monopoly one would think they would have stopped Verizon from building lines.
Though it doesn't solve the problem because if Google wants to provide the good people of, say, Lewisville, TX with their fiber service and offer 1GBPS service for cheap, they would have to build their own last mile fiber because Verizon sure as hell aren't going to share their lines. Verizon doesn't want to feel price pressure at that tier (one the incumbent Cable company can't ever hope to match).
Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unrestrained capitalism, and while they utilize government influence as one of many tools to maintain their status, they do not require government assistance to exist.
At this point the only way to have proper competition is to mandate line-sharing or treat them like roads and maintain and build them with tax dollars. This is entirely possible save for the fact that cable and internet lines are not regulated under the same telecom regulations that mandate line sharing for phone lines, etc. It is because of government regulation you could pick a phone provider of your choice, and it is because of a distinct lack of government regulation that you can either get cable internet service from a single company or go without. |
You're acting like I give a shit whether Google gives a shit about me. They are trying to force ISP's to give us better service at lower prices and you complain about their intentions!? That's how the free-market works. Businesses adapt and change (something humans generally don't like to do) in an effort to appease their customers' ever shifting demands. This allows for the creation of efficient, better, faster goods and services. So they want to make a dollar? Who cares? We're both happy. They are richer, and I have exchanged my money for something I value more than that money. Win-win. |
In my experience, a number of people have said things like "The Tesla S is too expensive at ~$70K, I'd rather buy the Volvo XC90 for $45K, because I get more car and it's cheaper."
>
Well, let's take a look at the lifetime costs of a car. To make the math easier, let's say you paid cash (or cash equivalent) for a $70k Tesla and a $45k Volvo, to not have to deal with any financing costs (interest is a harsh mistress). Let's assume also equal insurance costs (invalid assumption) and equal taxes, if any (also an invalid assumption). No depreciation costs either.
Volvo
The $45k Volvo runs on gas, and probably gets about 20 mpg combined. Right now the average US national gas price is $3.28 (according to AAA). I think insurance companies suggest that people drive on average 12,000 miles per year. Taking this into consideration, the cost to drive the car is:
Gas Costs
(12,000 miles / year) / (20 miles / gallon) = 600 gallons / year
600 gallons / year * $3.28 / gallon = $1,968.00 / year
This is only the gas cost. Other costs would be maintenance.
Maintenance
Maintenance is hard to calculate; this is highly variable. 5 year costs for cheaper cars run in the $3,000 range.
Total 5 year costs
Gas and maintenance
$3,000 + ($1,968 / year* 5) = $12,480
Total
$57,840
Tesla
Electricity Costs
The model S has a 60 kWh battery. The average price per kWh in the States is $0.11 / kWh. Therefore to fill a battery it would cost:
$0.11 / kWh * 60 kWh = $6.6
The EPA says the car has a range of 265 miles / charge. Using our 12,000 miles / year number from before, this is :
12,000 miles / (265 miles / charge) = 45.3 charges per year.
At $6.6 per charge, we pay a comparatively small $300 per year to feed the beast.
Maintenance
5 year maintenance costs aren't known at this point, but Tesla Roadsters required a $600 / year maintenance checkup. Not sure about the Model S. Just this alone brings us to $3000 / 5 years, excluding any tire changes, etc. that might occur. Because of the lack of info here, I'm going to add 20% (an incorrect assumption) to the average cost of maintenance, so $3,600.
Total
$70k + (5 * $300) + 3,600 = $75100 |
The full quote:
>In a letter to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, DHS wrote that they have "been actively investigating the emerging threat and criminal exploitation of virtual currency systems that further transnational criminal operations."
...
>"The anonymity of cyberspace affords a unique opportunity for criminal organizations to launder huge sums of money undetected," they wrote. "With the advent of virtual currencies and the ease with which financial transactions can be exploited by criminal organizations, DHS has recognized the need for an aggressive posture toward this evolving trend."
There is a scary quote about targeting the financial platforms themselves, but in context it also makes much more sense:
>This effort includes targeting the underground black markets on the Internet that are operated by transnational criminal networks. The multi-prong strategy employed by DHS also targets the virtual currency platforms and the network of virtual currency exchange makers. The strategic plan to combat this criminal activity relies heavily on building upon new and existing interagency partnerships as well as educating financial institutions, specifically their Anti-Money Laundering Departments , on this criminal methodology
So they want to educate financial institutions about the potential to launder money through these financial tools and then look into ways to mitigate the risk. After they look into, read up on, and draft a proposal.
This title is misleading. |
A streaming black box, beyond technical limitations of streaming the huge number of data being recorded on 90,000 airline flights a day, provides little more than instant gratification that people can speculate from preliminary black box findings.
For one, in an emergency, a pilot's responsibilities and priorities are: aviate, navigate, communicate. The idea being that you need to first fly the plane - or recover it to flight if an incident has happened (e.g. engines suddenly shut down - you get the airplane into a stable glide first, find a landing field, and go over engine restart procedures). The second being that once you can at least direct the plane somewhere, you need to direct it to the nearest suitable landing spot - be it water, a field, or whatever. And the very last thing you worry about is communicating - because if you can't fly the freakin plane and/or navigate it somewhere, what good is communicating that you are going to crash - the searchers are going to find out one way or another since at that point a crash is going to happen.
Also, transponders already have international codes for emergencies (squawk 7700), hijacking (squawk 7500), or radio failure (7600) which are actually very easily set to let any secondary radars picking up your transponder code to know that you are in an emergency or in distress. In fact, note that radio failure is a code that can be used - because if radios fail (and it does happen), you have backup ways of letting people know that shit is going on.
The whole streaming black box thing is ultimately going to be little gain for the cost - situations like Air France 447 aren't common and in this flight's case, it's possible the searchers botched their initial choice of a search area (the latest says that they expanded the search area from a 20 mile radius to a 50 mile radius - and if radar did show the plane try turning around, then it's even more likely they fucked up where they were looking). |
while I agree that it's not 100% secure, we can't start second guessing every effort to harden individual areas of IT infrastructure. Rome wasn't built in a day. the reason blanket surveillance is because the vast majority of global internet traffic is in the clear. The first step is to get as much encrypted traffic flowing, then work on hardening systems for security individually. not dismissing the incremental steps for not being, complete, easy to use final solutions. |
I think it's fine if you really want it. What I don't like about a lot of Social Media is that they make it waay to easy to overshare without thinking about it.
The thing is that unless you're really tech savy, it can be difficult to make those settings private enough to keep people out that you don't want there. It's not just facebook, google plus does the same thing. And what makes this a bad thing isn't just that FB or Google might sell aggragate data to other companies, it's that anyone who wants to know you without you knowing about it knows to go to social media. There have already been cases of people fired for a bad post on FB, as well as reports (a few years ago) of people being asked for the FB passwords as part of a job interview . The |
Because smartphones have to be made to run on infrastructure compatible with phones from the 90s.
Telecom companies are starting to implement VoLTE (which makes use of newer, faster 4G/LTE towers to deliver higher quality voice calls) but it seems like the four big carriers can't agree on a new, higher quality standard. Until the common standard of phone calls (known as POTS, or "plain old telephone system") is completely ditched, chances are you will be stuck with shitty call quality unless you use apps like Hangouts or FaceTime Audio to make voice calls. |
Absolutely not! It's the inverse. The influence of money isn't confined to one nation or one government. It's universal. From dictators to socialist regimes to democratically elected bodies. Money rules them all.
As long as people are chasing after money, it will always buy power.
But the real problem isn't even money itself. It's that the way we acquire money is through hoarding it. It's not based on achievement, or contribution, or merit. And because of this, old money is able to defend its position and gain more money, influence, and power. |
The problem is, the government should NOT have a monopoly on use of violence, at least not in the United States. The founding fathers wanted NO standing military and they would call on militia to be an army in times of need. The government was supposed to work for the people, and if it did not, it was supposed to be at the mercy of those militia. The idea was that a large standing army would only be used to suppress the people and the masses would not be represented, only repressed. A small standing army was created, mainly to address native uprisings, but the army was kept relatively small - 13000 at the start of the American Civil War. Compared to population, the military is now 10x larger, has reserves (800k reserves) and the military has a monopoly on many advanced weapons. |
Phenomenons is also correct in English
English is a weakly inflected, word order based language which lost most non-standard inflections as various different Germanic tribes who had different inflections dropped them and kept the few common ones (plurals for many words ending in s/es, possession, and past tense being the notable exception)
The standardized inflection is also real English, defined and understood, over the more middle and old English inflection based words in most cases (Lit vs lighted), however one may be more common, especially in the older currently alive generation. The German root words are most likely to be resistant to this standardization (mice, dice), while Latin and Greek and their derivative languages are widely accepted with standard English inflections of the words |
So Physics teacher here who loves relativity, hoping to give a reasonable explanation - Special Relativity does lots of crazy stuff to things going very fast, and there are a couple of ways of looking at accelerating up to the speed of light.
When something (our engine) goes faster, Special Relativity says that its mass increases, but not in a linear fashion (so not "double the speed, double the mass"). The mass increase only really becomes noticeable above 1/10th the speed of light (14% of the speed of light causes a 1% increase in mass), and above that the effect gets stronger and stronger - this graph shows how the mass suddenly shoots up as you get nearer 1 (1 x c being the speed of light).
So going from 1% to 2% of the speed of light takes the same amount of energy, because our engine has the same mass (F=ma), and the same thing up until about 14%, when it takes a bit more energy, but barely any noticeable change really. At about 85% the speed of light, the mass has finally doubled, meaning it will take 2x the force and energy to keep accelerating this engine. By 96% the speed of light, the mass has doubled again, 99% doubled again, then 99.8%, 99.95%, 99.99%, 99.997% - this pattern goes on getting closer to 100% (i.e. light speed), but each jump closer taking more energy, and never quite getting you to light speed, and meaning that at light speed your engine has an infinite mass, and the last "push" would take up an infinite amount of energy! |
I think the take-home lesson here is more about learning to control your penis, not the fact that you have one. It's amazingly shitty how everyone (men and women alike) didn't mind violating the privacy of these women again, and again, and again by viewing obviously stolen, private photos. Just because a person didn't steal the photos doesn't make it any less shitty to then look at them once they've been shared as KNOWINGLY STOLEN PRIVATE CONTENT.
However, as the vast majority of supporters/viewers/contributors of "the fappening" were male (I'm not going to waste time attempting to find a statistic on this. You, me, everyone can admit this is true without needing scientific data on it), men are going to have to accept those "born with a penis" are correspondingly going to take some heat for the situation. |
They'll chew up a but, but if they start rounding it, its usually a matter of not having it tight enough. |
I recently went to a show in a hockey arena that prohibited tablets during the show. The security guard pulled my girlfriend's samsung tablet from her purse and told her she would have to leave because "ipads" weren't allowed into the venue. She replied with "that isn't an ipad". He looked at it and said "this here is not an ipad?" to which she said again said "nope it isn't an ipad". After consulting another security officer they confirmed that it was not in fact an ipad and let us through without any more trouble.
I would like to clarify that we weren't trying to film the show or anything we just didn't realize she had the tablet in her purse and had already walked a considerable way to get to the show. I really didn't want to go all the way back home because they didn't want to let tablets in and then have to run back to catch the show. |
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