Slashdot Mirror

Someone with some common sense:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...

Re: pro-tip .... you should follow your own advice.

http://reason.com/archives/200...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

OT: I finally found your moped jesus:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

now that that mystery is solved, all the rest look comparatively simple.

November 3, 2008 - Telegraph article reporting on an interview on MTV. You won't find anything similar from the 2012 campaign, but it does show a turn-around in his position. The time frame is similar as CA Prop 8 was on the ballot for that year, though Obama did voice his opposition to CA Prop 8.

But it is a reasonable question. However, he's already answered it:

"McAfee, 68, was named by police in Belize as a person of interest in the Nov. 11, 2012, shooting of Gregory Faull, but he fled the small Central American country before he could be questioned.

McAfee denies involvement in the death of Faull, an Orlando contractor and restaurant owner. But he told Reuters in a telephone interview he would not fight a subpoena for deposition in the lawsuit.

'Of course not, because the deposition will be here in America. I've told the police in Belize that I will sit for questioning in any neutral country in the world ... I just will not go to Belize," McAfee said.' ...
The estate is seeking a jury trial and damages in excess of $75,000 on behalf of Faull's 26-year-old daughter."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

A question I would have is, would he agree to a jury trial if he's charged either by Belize or the US.

Case in point: Prison guards find mobile phone in hollowed out Weetabix

Re submarine command around the world?
'Vacuum causes $400M damage to nuclear submarine" from USA
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/...
"Fire breaks out on Russian nuclear submarine" from Russia
http://www.reuters.com/article...
"Navy warship accidentally fires torpedo at nuclear dockyard" from UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
They seem to be having they own dock related issues?

Really, couldn't we just instate a best practice that slashdot editors should refrain from posting stories that are pulled out straight out of the telegraph? There seems to be such a strong correlation between that and the story being hogwash...

Russian finances are a mess, Rouble almost worthless, and the Kremlin almost broke, especially after the Crimea adventure. Currency and stock market have sunk like a stone.. Putin going to the lolly shop with a few pennies. China could do something, but they wouldn't as that would hurt their growth, so that's not going to happen. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Your post sounds to me like one of those "I'm ideologically opposed to the proposal, so I'll think of some problem that it has and invest zero thought into possibilities of how the problem could be solved, because I'm just waiting for you shut up about this issue that I wish we wouldn't even be talking about."

Ha! Precisely the opposite.

But I'm one of those completely state school (free/public for those in the US) educated bods who made it to Oxbridge.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/edu...

My school advised me (prior to applying to Oxbridge) to drop further maths so I could concentrate on my other exams (which I refused to do). Of course, when I got my offer (Physics) I needed to pass further maths. I probably wouldn't even have got an interview if I'd dropped further maths and I'd have had no idea (nor the school). Quite frankly, I don't think I'd have survived the course without having done further maths in the sixth form.

Facebook buying 11000 drones to connect Africa. What is so special about this project?

If the US gets missile defense systems into the Ukraine they could theoretically win a nuclear war with a first strike. This is what has Putin's panties in a bunch. This is also why Russia was so upset with the US considering putting their missile defense systems in Poland.

It would still be a crazy gambit, as Russia still has nuclear subs, and who the heck would want to take the risk? Is Putin just paranoid, or would the US really try to win a nuclear war? There are some crazy motherfuckers in positions of power in the US.

...designed by an advisor who was later arrested for CP?

...in a country whose government has collected a million pictures of naked Americans cyber-webcamming on Yahoo?

...that has one surveillance camera for every 11 people in the country?

...whose brilliant standards of morality lead to the persecution and destruction of everyone from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing?

Fuck you, James Brokenshire. How's that for unsavory?

At least Firefox can be altered to become what you want it to be because Firefox respect's a users software freedom. Far more important than vagaries like "fast" and "not bloated" is how a program treats its users. Proprietary browsers leave users no opportunity for improving the program. Thus security issues in proprietary programs go unfixed and are exploited for years. This, in turn, allows others to invade people's computers and leaves users helpless. This is exactly what happened with Apple's iTunes for over 3 years. I would not be surprised to learn that software proprietors including Microsoft, Google, and Apple are doing similar things with proprietary web browser programs as well.

So while I like trustworthy programs like other computer users, I know that I can't ascertain the trustworthiness of proprietary programs like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome. The extent to which any of them are built from software that respects my software freedom is irrelevant because proprietary programs and their updates are essentially black boxes. I can't possibly inspect or fix all of the software I use, but I can put myself in a position where I stand to benefit from the improvements a lot of programmers make by exclusively running software that respects my freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify—free software—freedoms I value in their own right.

That doesn't make the poor appreciably any better off

I think the poor would disagree with you there. That $283 is more than they make in a year. Typical western ignorance.

Yes, your ignorance is showing, but this is slashdot and talking out your rear is welcomed. So how much of a change would $283 be? Have you spent time in Ghana, or Haiti, or Uruguay, or Laos? I have - and whilst $283 would definitely help out - it would not significantly change anyone's lifestyle. It's going to take more than that - meaning it's better to focus on growing economies, not just handing out dollars (like ignorant Western people want to do).

There is reason many native Africans call for a halt to charity - and to refocus our efforts on assisting building economies. The whole "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" argument. But then, if you weren't doing that, how can you refocus your class envy?

Contrary to your propaganda I think there is actually significant doubt as to whether he has violated international laws.

Well, soldiers operating without proper identification is a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and its subsequent modifications(the "Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977."). For example, from Article 37:

1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:

[...]

(c) the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status;

Also the use of the Night Wolves violates article 43:

3. Whenever a Party to a conflict incorporates a paramilitary or armed law enforcement agency into its armed forces it shall so notify the other Parties to the conflict.

Never underestimate a bunch of fanatics. And even the *threat* of them having nukes could easily be enough to start WWIII.

The "fanatics" in this case being in Moscow, which as repeatedly threatened its neighbors with attack, including Ukraine. And now it is back to seizing territory as has previously occurred to many of the neighbors of Russia (nee Soviet Union) in the last century: Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania. Now they try again with Ukraine.

Russia threatens nuclear attack on Ukraine - 12 Feb 2008
Russia threatens to aim missiles at Czech Republic, Poland if US installs defence shield - 20-02-2007

Actively sabotaging child education because you cannot let go of your goat-herding traditions of fear in the desert is WRONG.

If Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School is trying to sabotage its pupils education, they're certainly doing a shitty job of it.

From that link:

Pupils at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School in Stamford Hill, north London, were on average five terms ahead of 14-year-olds in the rest of the country in maths, English and science.

(Emphasis mine)

Seems they must be doing something right, even if I can't agree with the actions described in TFA, assuming that they are true.

The Telegraph has a nice one right now about the madrassas discriminating by gender in hiring teachers. The BBC, however, has had a history of being soft on Islam.

Research funding must consider mid to long term planning, so one has to project somewhat in the future, say 2020. There are many such forecasts, but perhaps this one is interesting to quote in view of the origin (US DOE) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10242882/Solar-power-to-trump-shale-helped-by-US-military.html/

"The US Energy Department expects the cost of solar power to fall by 75pc between 2010 and 2020. By then average costs will have dropped to the $1 per watt for big solar farms, $1.25 for offices and $1.50 for homes, achieving the Holy Grail of grid parity with new coal and gas plants without further need for subsidies. "

Apple may have known about the issue for a while and not talked about it until it could release whatever proprietary blob alleges to be a fix. Apple's users might have known Apple's software was buggy too, but not been able to do anything about fixing Apple's code, since that's the nature of proprietary software. Apple has sat on exploitable security issues before; in that case, governments used that iTunes security hole to invade people's computers (as RMS points out). So in that case, apparently multiple people knew iTunes was a security problem.

Just because your six year old hasn't been taught the value of software freedom doesn't make software freedom worthless. I'm guessing there are a lot of things a six year old has not yet come to value which they will later learn they should have valued all along. Perhaps teaching your six year old to value substantive issues like ethical understanding of how people treat one another would be a good start. And while I certainly wish anyone with a fix would have shared that fix, they're under no obligation to share in the free software world and I doubt they'll be convinced to by your namecalling. But the situation is still better that anyone could have fixed this (and possibly some did) rather than having no option but hoping the proprietor takes an interest.

And was Autonomous Republic of Crimea annected by anyone? They want to vote on their status like Kosovo did (democracy at work). The British used the same excuse to explain their power over Falklands and Gibraltar.
Do you know that during the draw of Euro 2016 soccer qualifiers Gibraltar was moved because of political reasons into a new qualifying group after its team was drawn against Spain?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/10656522/Gibraltar-moves-group-in-Euro-2016-qualifiers-draw-over-political-tensions.html

The non-aggression treaty was just as much serving Stalin as it was Hitler- if not more so. Stalin needed the time for the war to start and to build up his forces (not that the Russians really did well anyway, but they had even less when the pact was signed).

True. Stalin was expecting it would take Germany the better part of a year or longer to push through Western Europe, not a matter of weeks.

Even the name Nazi is an acronym for an abbreviation for the party - it's a socialist workers party.

Classifying parties via etymology instead of the positions they hold is an automatic fail.

In the meanwhile, tens of millions of people will be killed by the pollution. But then, after that, I'll be fine.

Economies run on blood, sweat and tears.

This is just satiating the blood requirement (also, mining deaths, etc).

In the meanwhile, tens of millions of people will be killed by the pollution. But then, after that, I'll be fine.

It love your extreme specificity. "Up", "plentiful", "an amazing rate", "almost certain".

Drake himself never said the equation was intended to be used with any extreme specificity.

It's a thought experiment about the parameters, factors, and gross probabilities. Nobody was ever going to punch numbers into Drake's equation and come up with a probability of 87.625% and have that mean anything. The entire equation is intended to be a big huge thumb-and-squint for generating estimates and talking about it.

So, given its purpose and inherent vagueness, it's not intended to be a rigorously scientific calculation, but a back of the napkin calculation for talking about really broad probabilities.

But when your estimate on # of stars with planets goes from "a few" to "many" (or "most"), the whole equation correspondingly goes up.

Even with very small values for all of the terms ... across the sheer number of stars in the galaxy, and the sheer number of galaxies in the universe ... it becomes almost a statistical certainty that some form of life probably exists (or existed) on other than the rock we call home.

Just 25 years ago, there was a belief only a tiny fraction of stars would have planets. Now, we know that a much much higher fraction does ... and if the current estimate is that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, a small increase in the percentage with planets skews the number of planets which could have life by rather quite a lot.

Perhaps you simply don't understand what Drake's equation actually is?

Here is a link to the Daily Telegraph article.

To some extent this happens in businesses already. More than once have I gone through the checkout at a grocery or big-box store only to have the cashier have to step aside so someone not deeply religious could process my alcohol or pork.

...maybe not my pork, but you get the idea, and it's happened to other's pork.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

In short, they don't serve my kind!

Tattooed on the inner thigh. Forget a password? Just find the nearest restroom. With these new non-permanent tats its better than ever, and much less of a space issue. For extra security (in case anyone has X-ray specs) you can do a rot-13. Of course you do have to be careful if you go swimming, such as wear an old style suit or a maybe a "burkini" if a woman.

To this very day it is so radioactive you can't get within 50 to 100 miles of it?

Unless you're a presenter on Top Gear that is..

Yup, don't like fracking - it carries too high a risk of polluting my landscape, and quite likely turning a beautiful view into a rubbish-tip. In the UK, the government has even gone on record to say the extracted oil & gas won't reduce anybody's energy bills. It will, however, make a shit-load of money for some people who already have too much, and who seem willing to rig the deck to make sure they get their way.

Don't like nuclear fission power either - it produces *filthy* dirty waste, that we have no idea what to do with. AFAIK, not a single nuclear power station has yet been decommissioned and cleaned up anywhere in the world - quite a few are mothballed, while an alleged "decommissioning" process achieves almost nothing and stretches endlessly into the future at vast expense to the tax-payer (cos poor little private sector can't take the pain, so public sector has to take that task on, or private sector will take its ball home).

Both these technologies are amateurish, half-assed, ill-thought-out, poor examples of our abilities at this climactic moment of the 21st century, and I'm embarrassed to be a member of the same species that wants to do this crap. Come on ... we're capable of better than that.

For some reason, many of my peers in this /. community seem to take umbrage whenever there is any criticism of any industrial process if there is some kind of "technology" aspect to that process. There appears to be a belief that so long as a process makes money and is technological, it must be undertaken, irrespective of the impact on this one uniquely precious planet that we have here. I will continue to try to understand this point of view, but I fear its exponents are blinded by the flashing lights.

Sigh.

To paraphrase, when the government does it, it's not illegal. It would be absurd to expect any other outcome.

Actually in the UK it is a surprise when this happens. From ridiculous court decisions like allowing prisoners to vote, the many judgments that prevented Abu Quartada from neing deported for decades, to many cases when foreign criminals have used human rights law to prevent being deported the courts seem to go against both the government and common sense whenever possible.

To paraphrase, when the government does it, it's not illegal. It would be absurd to expect any other outcome.

Actually in the UK it is a surprise when this happens. From ridiculous court decisions like allowing prisoners to vote, the many judgments that prevented Abu Quartada from neing deported for decades, to many cases when foreign criminals have used human rights law to prevent being deported the courts seem to go against both the government and common sense whenever possible.

To paraphrase, when the government does it, it's not illegal. It would be absurd to expect any other outcome.

Actually in the UK it is a surprise when this happens. From ridiculous court decisions like allowing prisoners to vote, the many judgments that prevented Abu Quartada from neing deported for decades, to many cases when foreign criminals have used human rights law to prevent being deported the courts seem to go against both the government and common sense whenever possible.

Whilst I wouldn't be 100% sure based on a press report, it does appear to be laser fused:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...

I suspect the stupidity of such people has little if anything to do with chemicals. But that's an article you won't see on slashdot.

a) False by Dyson's own admission he scaled down the dust separation system next to his workbench. The only reason it took him 100 goes at it is because he didn't understand the dyanimcs involved, shame since cyclonic separation has been used for at least 100 years.

b) False by firstly by the fact his US patent is flat out not accepted in several countries, and that the patent was rejected by the IPO as not being original. But hey I don't need to convince you of this, you just need to look at the patents yourself. Take note of this side by side image. On the left Dyson's patent, on the right, a Toshiba patent from 30 years earlier. The description of his first patent application to the IPO described something identical to the Toshiba fan, the second submission on the other hand was completely different. Talk about desperate to patent an existing design.

But hey he has other inventions too, like the AirBlade .... no Mitsubishi had one of those 15 years earlier. Just because it wasn't on the market in the USA doesn't mean Dyson invented it. I can't wait for him to claim he invented the robotic vacuum too.

This and this guy. Mod up if you remember being pissed at how smug they were about it, the British bastards...

Do you see this news story?

17 Beheaded in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan for Attending Wedding Party with Dancing

They would gladly do it to you, just like they did it to those 17, and to Daniel Pearl. Their goal is to impose that sort of rule on the entire world even if it takes 1,000 years. As of today there are people willing to put their body between you and them, putting their life and limb and risk, to prevent them from endangering you. Frankly, I'm not sure that the sacrifice of any of them is worth you. But they still do it. So it would be great if you would either grow up, or stop providing evidence you may be a moral idiot and a fool. (I realize that asking you to show some gratitude for the defense of your life is wasted breath. Some people only learn the hard way.)

The UK doesn't seem to give a toss about its obligations as an EU member, but giving complete police access to medical records without court order appears to violate EU privacy guidelines. Never mind all reasonable expectations of privacy. Here's a telegraph article which suggests that the NHS policy violates EU guidelines and could lead to a ban. That the UK would likely ignore.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...

Honestly, there are places where national health care systems really do work. But man does the USA/UK alliance do their best to confirm every libertarian paranoid fear about rogue government abusing private data in publicly held records. What a mess.

For all your non-DRM, out of copyright (mostly, some creative commons material as well) ebook needs: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Also check out the proof reading project where material for Project Gutenberg is produced, http://www.pgdp.net/

Unfortunately this is no longer a growing domain. The length of copyright extends before anything can become "out of copyright".

Well, when there are 17.4 million users of a drug in the US alone eventually one of them will be a crazed cannibal.
In 2012 there was that New York cop charged with plotting to murder and eat women. There are only about 795,000 police in the US so perhaps being a cop is a stronger indicator of a potential cannibal than cannabis use.

Re attempt at warning British whistle blowers what would happen if you cross the US.
This also happened in Australia with a book chapter on the Iraq and a hard-drive destroyed.
http://www.igis.gov.au/annual_...
"After the sensitive elements were deleted (but only those elements), each concerned person was given the choice of having the copy of their hard-drive (on a
government supplied disk) destroyed in front of them. In some instances this offer was accepted. The purpose of such visible destruction was, I am told, to provide assurance to the person that the government was not retaining any of the information the person had on their computers.
As you will note, the process was managed by the Attorney-General’s Department. That department is not within my jurisdiction."
The option is to be as chilling and direct - in the UK, Australia, the USA now hinting at
"Guardian journalists could face criminal charges over Edward Snowden leaks"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Your slowly seeing the same panicked mind set at the digital level of a 1980's Polish gov with issues they can no longer bribe, jail, control, spin, twist or sock puppet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

How does that work?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...

The government has already turned the corner, due to the previous recommendation against peanuts apparently "backfiring".

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/p...

Peanuts are safe in pregnancy

Go ahead and eat peanuts or food containing peanuts (such as peanut butter) during pregnancy, unless you are allergic to them or a health professional advises you not to.

You may have heard that peanuts should be avoided during pregnancy. This is because the government previously advised women that they may want to avoid eating peanuts if there was a history of allergy (such as asthma, eczema, hay fever, food allergy or other types of allergy) in their child's immediate family.

This advice has now been changed because the latest research has shown that there is no clear evidence showing that eating peanuts during pregnancy affects the chances of your baby developing a peanut allergy.

Nobody ever mentioned there was an age "too young" to expose them to it,

No idea how old your son is, but there was a decade or so where "No peanuts" to babies, and even to pregnant / breastfeeding mothers was a real thing.

It was going on full volume when our kids were born 10 years ago, and we get notices every year about there being kids with major severe peanut allergies in their classes.

And I thought you were so nice and polite.

Not everyone in Canada is polite, and the Canadian government has its own security concerns of many types.

I take it then that you are part of the continent that prefers for a large body count of your fellow citizens to accumulate before taking action against an enemy that declares hostile intent, and might oppose it even then? Is this more your flavor of "hero"?

According to you Mann and many countless others deliberately changed data and somehow got the right results that were later supported by other research.

I'm saying exactly what the experts who looked at his research are saying:

The 'hockey stick' that became emblematic of the threat posed by climate change exaggerated the rise in temperature because it was created using 'inappropriate' methods, according to the head of the Royal Statistical Society. ... However the review, led by Lord Oxburgh into the research carried out by the centre, found no evidence of ''deliberate scientific malpractice".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

Mann was not qualified or capable of performing the statistical analyses he did. The analysis he did was objectively wrong. And the resulting graph he got was quantitatively wrong. The only thing that was right about it was the qualitative behavior in the part of the graph used to justify political action against AGW; that is not a vindication of his work or methods.

The issue here (as with much of climate science) is one of lack of competence and publication bias, not deliberate scientific fraud. You ridicule people for supposedly alleging deliberate fraud by climate researchers, but that's a straw man. I am sure there is fairly little deliberate fraud in global warming research; I'm also sure that poor use of statistical methods and publication bias make most of the published results on global warming worthless.

I'm sure because that's the same in most scientific fields. Usually, these problems work themselves out over the next few decades. For climate science, however, politicians and activists want to rush into action based on results that are only a few years old, and that's a serious problem.

"Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank".

Banks Launder Billions of Illegal Cartel Money

Royal Bank of Scotland fined £5.6m for failing to properly report over a third of transactions

EU fines Royal Bank of Scotland £324m over Libor rigging

Chip and Pin has already been comprimised in the wild:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Nothing in the article states that the fraudulent charges were run as Chip+[Sig/PIN] transactions, though. They were processed in a way that bypass the chip:

1. 1) Card not present transactions (mail/phone/internet)
2. 2) Cloned magstripe-only card on a non-chip terminal (I had a chipped Visa fraudulently used in the US with this method)
3. 3) Same as #2 but with a PIN at a merchant terminal for cash back or at an ATM for cash withdrawal or advance

I've yet to hear of a case where a fraudulent chip transaction came from a cloned card.

Forcing everything in the card present transaction chain -- cards, POS devices and ATMs, card processor networks, banks -- to require the chip, eliminating the use of the magstripe, should (at least in theory) eliminate methods 2 and 3. But there's still the issue of card not present transactions. Until you find a viable solution for that, the scammers will always have an avenue for fraud.

Chip and Pin has already been comprimised in the wild:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...