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Uber drivers play all sorts of games with canceling fares which are too short or not "ideal" for them.

Uber drivers need to accept an offer, before it gets confirmed to the passenger. So yes, a passenger may never get picked up for all kinds of reasons, but at least, he is not mislead into believing someone will pick him up.

And Uber's real-time map is a lie, which is obvious in several places that I have tried it.

That article is interesting, but very thin on details.

My google latitude tracking information (that I give family members access to) can also be out of date. My gps may be off, or my battery may be low, thus my phone may think that I am still at the same location I was at 30 minutes ago, but that doesn't prove that I am purposefully misleading my family members.

The article then goes on to try to back up its claim by talking about a patent Uber had issued on the practice, but if you read the paragraph further, you find out that the actual patent mentioned had actually nothing to do with the main point the article was trying to make.

In any case, that is something that you can easily verify for yourself. There are $20 off promo codes floating around the internet for first-time Uber customers, so you might as well use one of those promo codes, book a $5 to $19 ride, and see if the virtual dot does follow the car coming to pick you up. For me, it did it the couple of times that I did it. For you, it may not. But if it doesn't, I'd sure like to know about it.

At least the taxi companies are regulated so there are complaint channels and potential consequences. With Uber you're relying on a sleazy company to police themselves.

You're making it sound like we're in Somalia or something.

The legal system hasn't gone anywhere. And the credit card charge back system hasn't gone anywhere either.

I've been stranded waiting for a taxi. The taxi that was sent never made it. This happens about 50% of the time for a pickup where hailing is common, and never in locations where hailing isn't common. Taxis are allowed to take a hail while going to a dispatched call. If the dispatched call is too short of a distance, they'll try to get out of it. An airport fare is much better than a shorter in town fare. That you think it shouldn't happen isn't proof that it doesn't. Uber doesn't steal from taxis. People hail taxis. People dispatch Uber. Dispatched cars in NYC don't need medallions. They are private cars.

Uber drivers play all sorts of games with canceling fares which are too short or not "ideal" for them. And Uber's real-time map is a lie, which is obvious in several places that I have tried it. At least the taxi companies are regulated so there are complaint channels and potential consequences. With Uber you're relying on a sleazy company to police themselves.

I posted this back when Wuala shut down. Seems relevant again just a few months later.

I've been using Sync.com for the past year. They've been sort of in beta but releasing features. 5GB free.

SpiderOak is decent but they recently dropped their free plan, so not sure what's going on there.

MEGA was great but Kim.com said last week in Wired that the company is run by criminals

Tresorit is good but expensive. Maybe that's why they've been around so long.
Bitcasa pulled a Wuala last year and closed down their consumer cloud storage after a lawsuit. That's pretty much it.
There's OwnCloud which is do it yourself. And BitTorrent Sync which is kind of do it yourself but they've been adjusting pricing so it's bait and switch as well.

"Shawyer says net thrust occurs because the microwaves have a group velocity which is greater in one direction than the other and Einstein's relativity comes into play." http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

The raw logs:

Independent GamerGate release of full logs: http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6...

Original partial release that prompted GG to doc dump: https://storify.com/strictmach...

Basically Quinn made her post, and then GG released full logs in the hope that the vast amount of information would overload anyone looking at it. Unfortunately they didn't reckon with grep and the fact that they used easily searchable keywords, so you can verify everything quite easily.

Analysis:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

If you scroll down a bit in either article there is a screenshot of where a 4chan anon invented #notyourshield to "deflect genuine criticism." They have form of course, they also invented #EndFathersDay.

No, this is not because of advertising. The bbc tries to make copying the content hard, and uses digital restrictions management. They even supported EME: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

BBC is going to cut off people using VPNs from outside of the UK soon... http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar... Boy you are going to need a thicker sheet of foil now.

Projection? You're denying the elephant in the room. Rather than dig up all the feminist teeth gnashing over this when it was news two years ago, let's just get it from the filly's mouth:

I don't think this is a gendered topic.

Two questions later...

I think that my perspective is somewhat coloured by both my gender and my age... So I think they picked up a little bit of the brogrammer culture... that just doesn't work for people who aren't men

Oh dear, gender essentialism... tsk tsk. There's nothing preventing women from learning and appreciating this "brogrammer culture". Women have done it forever, until feminist called them "cool girls" and started shaming them.

He mixed up 2 different cases. One is the one you described, and the other is the 'cat' person using a "remote control virus" to taunt the police and got them to arrest the wrong person (whose PC is infected and used to send email remotely). He got caught and confessed eventually I think.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
http://www.japancrush.com/2012...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

I've been using Sync.com for the past year. They've been sort of in beta but releasing features. 5GB free.

SpiderOak is decent but they recently dropped their free plan, so not sure what's going on there.

MEGA was great but Kim.com said last week in Wired that the company is run by criminals

Tresorit is good but expensive. Maybe that's why they've been around so long.
Bitcasa pulled a Wuala last year and closed down their consumer cloud storage after a lawsuit. That's pretty much it. There's OwnCloud which is do it yourself. And BitTorrent Sync which is kind of do it yourself but they've been adjusting pricing so it's bait and switch as well.

Bullshit yourself. Uber is only working within the regulation in places that they have decided it wasn't worth fighting anymore (often because they won enough concessions).

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

It's nice to see you have moved on from your Apple shilling days to Uber shilling.

First link after googling 'watson medical detection':

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

"Wellpoint's Samuel Nessbaum has claimed that, in tests, Watson's successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for human doctors."

Second link, where it works every day:

https://www.mskcc.org/about/in...

The first line of the article:

While there are many parts of Windows 10 that we would happily pay for, one that we're sad we have to is classic built-in game, Solitaire.

From the linked article, "Free Windows 10 features we would have happily paid for":

Pre-installed nostalgia

Solitaire is back, and so are its friends Spider and Freecell. Ever since the early days of Windows, Solitaire and chums have been keeping procrastinating freelancers and students, as well as children with no real video games, entertained in their droves. It was intended "to soothe people intimidated by the operating system". Microsoft tried making a version of Windows (Windows 8) without the card game pre-installed and just look how well that went down.

I guess even Wired writers don't read their articles.

This will produce what is being argued to be the most amusing error dialog in human history, which reads in big letters "Something Happened", and then under that in smaller letters the clarification: "Something Happened".

Or the equally amusing "Error: the operation completed successfully". It happened to me a number of times when I used Windows, typically on XP.

Don't try to upgrade from Windows Update. Just don't. It'll fail. Something is borked with the download process. It'll probably be fixed in a week (or even today, maybe), but for now, to be on the safe side,

...don't bother, unless your time is worthless to you.

just go to this link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com] and download the ISO. Then burn it to a DVD or install it onto a USB drive of sufficient capacity, and away you go. Not sure if it would work if you mounted it to a virtual drive, but worth a try.

If you do that, the first thing it does is ask for an activation key. Your windows activation key from your original Windows media is likely to not be accepted. My 8.0 key wasn't.

Although, there is one really interesting thing you can do. Instead of creating an install ISO, take the option to just upgrade straight. Do this from a non-admin account (you know, the way you are supposed to run things for system safety). This will produce what is being argued to be the most amusing error dialog in human history, which reads in big letters "Something Happened", and then under that in smaller letters the clarification: "Something Happened". Years from now, you can tell your grandchildren you personally got this dialog.

But if you aren't aching to participate in the meme, save yourself some aggravation and wait until MS gets their act together.

Scientists Confirm 'Impossible' EM Drive Propulsion

Science News, Space / July 27, 2015 / by Giulio Prisco/

Later today, July 27, German scientists will present new experimental results on the controversial, "impossible" EM Drive, at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics' Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando. The presentation is titled "Direct Thrust Measurements of an EmDrive and Evaluation of Possible Side-Effects."

Presenter Martin Tajmar is a professor and chair for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology, interested in space propulsion systems and breakthrough propulsion physics.

A Revolutionary Development for Space Travel

The EM Drive (Electro Magnetic Drive) uses electromagnetic microwave cavities to directly convert electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant. First proposed by Satellite Propulsion Research, a research company based in the UK founded by aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, the EM Drive concept was predictably scorned by much of the mainstream research community for allegedly violating the laws of physics, including the conservation of momentum.

However, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – investigated the EM Drive and presented encouraging test results in 2014 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference.

White proposes that the EM Drive’s thrust is due to virtual particles in the quantum vacuum that behave like propellant ions in magneto-hydrodynamical propulsion systems, extracting "fuel" from the very fabric of space-time and eliminating the need to carry propellant. While a number of scientists criticize White's theoretical model, others feel that he is at least pointing to the right direction. The NASASpaceFlight website and forums have emerged as unofficial news source and discussion space for all things related to the EM Drive and related breakthrough space propulsion proposals such as the Cannae Drive.

Shawyer has often been dismissed by the research establishment for not having peer-reviewed scientific publications, but White and Tajmar have impeccable credentials that put them beyond cheap dismissal and scorn. Physics is an experimental science, and the fact that the EM Drive works is confirmed in the lab. "This is the first time that someone with a well-equipped lab and a strong background in tracking experimental error has been involved, rather than engineers who may be unconsciously influenced by a desire to see it work," notes Wired referring to Tajmar's work.

Hacked has obtained a copy of Tajmar's Propulsion and Energy Forum paper, co-authored by G. Fiedler.

"Our measurements reveal thrusts as expected from previous claims after carefully studying thermal and electromagnetic interferences," note the researchers. "If true, this could certainly revolutionize space travel."

“The nature of the thrusts observed is still unclear.”

"Additional tests need to be carried out to study the magnetic interaction of the power feeding lines used for the liquid metal contacts," conclude the researchers. "Nevertheless, we do observe thrusts close to the magnitude of the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena. Next steps include better magnetic shielding, further vacuum tests and improved EMDrive models with higher Q factors and electronics that allow tuning for optimal operation."

Contrary to sensationalist reports published by the sensationalist press, the EM Drive is not a "warp drive" for faster than

Doing so is illegal under WTO rules:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

> Thank you, pirates. You got your freebies, but you destroyed everything in the process and killed the music industry as a whole.

Gee, let's conveniently ignore the facts:

* http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... or http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
* https://torrentfreak.com/bitto...
* http://business.time.com/2013/...

All the numbers relating piracy to lost sales are complete imaginary and bullshit. There has never been a financial statement listing the dollar amount of piracy.

GPs will be fine. People really like having a human Doctor. Particularly an American-accented human Doctor. Unless the Hospital can bill the insurance company extra for using the human GP they will continue to use the human GP. And the insurers aren't likely to pay extra so the hospital can replace a GP earning low six figures with a computer. Moreover computers would make really shitty GPs, as they are unable to figure out whether you have high blood pressure because you're about to die, or because you're nervous that a robot has just grabbed your fucking arm.

While I agree with much of what you said, I don't think it will be a robot grabbing your arms much as a PA or NP who sees you and the computer does more of the analysis and the PA or NP does the final analysis and diagnosis; and the NP licenses will allow independent practice in all states and not just some as it is in the US today. It's not so much that the computer replaces the human as changes the role and training of the human, and thus the costs. In addition, a broader move to NP's and connected, computer assisted practice, could make primary care more available as well.

OTOH, many specialists entire job is reading a chart. The chart's format does not change much. Interpreting data is something computers are great at. Watson was already measurably better at reading certain specialized charts then actual Doctors back in '13. Those guys are gone. They make more then a GP does, while frequently bringing in less revenue, and the patient's aren't going to ding your Medicare quality ratings because a behind-the-scenes Doctor they'd never met got replaced by a computer.

This is just like any other skilled work that can be automated. The textile machines of the early 19th century were demonstrably worse then many weavers, but they were a) cheaper, and b) better then the average. So as of 1840 or so weaver was no longer a career option. Computers are already better then the average specialist in some fields, and they will be cheaper soon enough thanks to Moore's Law.

I'm not so sure here. I've worked with specialists and while they do a lot of chartology the decision making process is more than just what the chart says; especially when it comes to final treatment and decisions on a person's health. I agree a computer can take a lot of the analysis work off of the specialist but for the real skill the have is knowing what questions to a ask and how to followup to solve a problem, not a rote review of a defined operation procedure that can be codified. As one put it, it's as important to know when not to operate as when to operate. Will how they interact with computers change? Certainly, but I think the GP is more likely to see a greater impact than the specialist; at least in the short term.

GPs will be fine. People really like having a human Doctor. Particularly an American-accented human Doctor. Unless the Hospital can bill the insurance company extra for using the human GP they will continue to use the human GP. And the insurers aren't likely to pay extra so the hospital can replace a GP earning low six figures with a computer. Moreover computers would make really shitty GPs, as they are unable to figure out whether you have high blood pressure because you're about to die, or because you're nervous that a robot has just grabbed your fucking arm.

OTOH, many specialists entire job is reading a chart. The chart's format does not change much. Interpreting data is something computers are great at. Watson was already measurably better at reading certain specialized charts then actual Doctors back in '13. Those guys are gone. They make more then a GP does, while frequently bringing in less revenue, and the patient's aren't going to ding your Medicare quality ratings because a behind-the-scenes Doctor they'd never met got replaced by a computer.

This is just like any other skilled work that can be automated. The textile machines of the early 19th century were demonstrably worse then many weavers, but they were a) cheaper, and b) better then the average. So as of 1840 or so weaver was no longer a career option. Computers are already better then the average specialist in some fields, and they will be cheaper soon enough thanks to Moore's Law.

Testosterone has a great deal to do with risk taking behaviors, and why men and women approach risk differently.

People mostly don't make decisions logically - they make the decision, then justify it if they have to. I love chocolate. If asked, I can give reasons to justify that, but I loved chocolate way before I ever gave a thought as to why.

I love dogs. Ask me why, and I can come up with reasons - but again, those are post hoc justifications for the fact that I just happen to love dogs. The same can apply to those who don't like dogs. Refuting their reasons logically, even if they agree with you 100%, won't suddenly make them like dogs.

Just like driving a car or riding a bicycle, most of our decisions are mostly made on autopilot before we are conscious of them. You sit down beside someone in the hospital who really stinks, and you immediately don't like them. Why? You don't know anything about them except that they stink, which has nothing to do with who they are. They may have a leaking colostomy bag for all you know.

The same can be seen on crowded buses. People don't like to be around people who smell different. No logical reason. Purely chemical.

Gives you an idea of what the time-scales are:

A Forecast of When We'll Run Out of Each Metal - Visual Capitalist

China warns that its rare earth minerals are running out (Wired UK)

Society seems to have a lot of denialists, denial that we can ever run out any mineral with arguments like oh but the sea is 0.0003ppm of that mineral which means there is x tonnes of it left or the crust is 0.05% of a particular mineral so there is no problem. Of course these numbers are not particularly relevant, what is relevant is how 'clumped' these minerals are and mow much it costs to extract them, if the cost is too high then we will effectively have run out for all practical purposes.

He offered $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove homeopathy works. Nobody won though some quack named George Vithoulkas, whose International Academy for Classical Homeopathy is based on an island in Greece, claims Randi backed out of a previous challenge issued early in the 21st Century; don't know about that and the new challenge was instated in 2011 and not a peep from George Vithoulkas as far as I'm aware.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Windows - the most insecure OS in the world. There are probably more viruses, malware and ransonware than actual apps.

I doubt it.

Download.com alone hosts over 51,000 Windows apps. Search Results for all Windows, Sourceforge, 16,000, 2,200 certified Fresh.

Amazon.com 22,000 for retail sale. PC Software

You could make a very strong case for Android being the most insecure, incompetently planned and managed OS in the wild.

Google's position is complicated, because it has produced a platform that it has no power to update. There's no Windows Update for Android phones, and Google has no ability to push out updates to the operating system; it has to depend on a range of OEMs and network operators to adopt its source code changes and distribute them to users. Both Apple and Microsoft, in contrast, have a direct channel to update their mobile operating systems.

Google won't fix bug affecting 60 percent of Android users

Great idea. Working through my backlog of WIRED magazines and was only reading about the bizarre case of the Craiglist Killers last night.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazin...

Re: "Does the UK system cause fundamental human nature to change such that you can trust those in power to act responsibly with no scrutiny?"
"You lose, journalism. Carrying GCHQ docs is terrorism" 19 Feb 14
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
"... because the journalist will have his own take or focus on what serves the public interest, for which he is not answerable to the public through Parliament."
The UK has other ideas on press freedoms and any scrutiny :) The US had a much more clear approach with The Pentagon Papers.

Mod up for Obama reference.

That will not help if the device is cloned or out of sight for a while.
Or have free services in the area "How the NSA, GCHQ and crooks can hack mobile apps" (30 Jan 14) http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

With a Tabby

Get yours today!... Er, tomorrow... Would you believe...

Okay, okay, already. Apologies in advance for the snark. This really is a cool project.. And one worth watching. I do think the name is poorly positioned, however. Hey! What about Carduino? No? Anything but Tabby. I got it.. I got it... The Stallman! Hmmm. On second thought not for a car. I'll keep thinking.

Didn't get the links properly in:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Artificial Intelligence: B-

Really, B- for AI? I'd give it a C-minus at best, and that's mostly due to the unexpected increases in computer technology and speed, and also due to data aggregation and connections on the internet (which were largely not predicted). If you grade AI and curve it based on 1950s predictions about the state of electronics, computers, etc., I'd say you're looking at a solid D-minus.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm thrilled with the kinds of things computers can do and the limited "intelligent" functionality we have developed, particularly just in the past few years. But are we really anywhere near the predictions of "Sputnik era" (as you put it)?

My baseline has always been the original Turing test description by Turing himself (from 1950, close to Sputnik era), where he describes a skilled "interrogator" comparing responses between an intelligent human and an AI, trying to sort out which one is human. In Turing's example, the "interrogator" has to resort to a complex discussion of the appropriateness of potential word substitutions in Shakespearean sonnets, including layers of subtlety of meaning -- because the AI is apparently so fluent in the English language that it could converse on that that level with no errors.

Turing predicted that, by the year 2000, we'd have AI that could fool 30% of intelligent interrogators on such a test with machines that would have 100 MB of storage capacity.

Instead, 14 years after Turing's prediction, we have people claiming to have "passed" his test by having a chatbot pretend to be an annoying, nonresponsive teenager who doesn't even really speak the language of the interrogator. Debating the scansion and subtle meanings of Shakespeare's poetry, indeed...

But don't take this one prediction as an example. Take a look at an actual study on AI predictions and their accuracy. Heck, that article starts with discussion of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where they proposed that a team of 10 guys working for only 2 months over the summer could basically solve the basic problems of AI like comprehending natural language, forming abstract concepts, and becoming self-learning.

That's definitely "Sputnik era," and that's what the top researchers thought at that point. It didn't happen in two months or even two decades, and only in the past decade have we really started getting close to actual natural language voice recognition, let alone understanding or comprehension.

Yes, through terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning," AI researchers have convinced us that something LIKE human "intelligence" is involved in their algorithms, but mostly we just have computers that can do computations faster and draw on larger databases to make better guesses. We're just even beginning to do basic things like have computers be able to recognize language constructs to detect what the antecedent of a pronoun is -- and even that is in its infancy and only tends to work in circumscribed cases. With that sort of benchmark now, it's safe to say we've made precious little progress in having AI actually "understand" or "create" abstract concepts, when it often can't even figure out how to parse a paragraph in a way that connects sentences together. (I'm focusing on language understanding issues because Turing did, but there are other similar limitations for AI applications in other areas.)

Again, I do NOT wish to downplay the significant advances we have made. And I applaud AI researchers for the awesome things we are starting to see glimpses of in recent technology.

But to claim we are anywhere even on the spectrum of what people thought in the 1950s? No way.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazin...

Like this? http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Don't forget about passive radar systems.
Current stealth technology is mostly ineffective against it.

Thank you. The hilarious thing is that this time, the zealots aren't even reading the report before "debunking" it. TFA (and, to be fair, lots of other sources) confused the recent NASA experiments on the Cannae Drive for experiments on the EmDrive. These are similar devices, but are invented by different people and their inventors claim different explanations for how they work. The actual inventor of the EmDrive (whose device was also tested, and produced more than twice as much thrust as the ~40 from the Cannae Drive as mentioned in TFA) is arguably vindicated by the result; having built something "different" but of basically the same design, it *also* produced thrust!

Oh, and that "null" device? That was the lack of a supposedly-required feature on the Cannae Drive, without which it supposedly is inoperative. The *actual* EmDrive has never required any such modification (radial slots on the chamber). Shawyer (inventor of the EmDrive) is probably also wrong about how it works and or even whether it does... but not for the reasons that all the idiots - most of whom *don't* even have lab coats - are claiming.

A good article refuting the claims of things like TFA (found by somebody else but worth reading): http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar.... A more powerful test device is already in development and will be tried out at multiple labs on multiple apparatus. *THEN* we will see whether to change the textbooks...

It's sad how pathetic the pretenders on Slashdot are sometimes. So full of themselves and sure that they are smarter than the next guy.

I know it's appeal to authority, but NASA doesn't employ idiots. And if you had bothered to do even a simply Google search you would have found this which sheds some more light on the situation.

Just to save you the effort, the abstract sucks (most likely written by a public relations flunky), they were very careful in setting up the experiment, it WAS done in a vacuum, there is something there. Note that they didn't explain it, they just report their observations.

But you go ahead and stick with your second year physics student attitude.

Re How the West could do it:
You need trust that the exit nodes are fast, well funded and NGO like. You need national level mastery of all packet traffic in and out of every tame provider.
Think of the cost of setting and funding per month a really good set of TOR servers/nodes.
You would really want the commanding height of the fastest say top 5 exit relays, then a larger pool of a good few 10's of other relays.
This would herd and make clear most traffic in a larger nation.
To cover this project set up as many NGO, friendly "person" like fronts as you can to do the heavy lifting. You have to win the packet race with all other server products in the domestic and international interconnect locations every hour. No hard, just ensure your nations telco network has a lot of end points that peers all telco plans to say an east and west coast or big main city. Get the young intelligence community staff to hold "crypto parties" where other real NGO's can put a friendly face to the new big servers. This builds confidence that its a nice real person working with some of more big tor exits. Add in some work colleges of the young intelligence community staff to set up Tor nodes and a country will soon have real faces to a lot of the back end hardware.
As for price? Think back to the GCHQ's 2006 programmes around the SIGMod (sigint modernisation) initiative and a nation can get Tempora http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar... (24 June 2013)
Once you have every packet moving in and out of a nation, just sort deep over time.
After that you have the telco net down the the users and can get unique hardware/software layer information per user, no matter the ip or provider like with p2p and classic MAC addresses.
The honeypot aspect was talked about in 1997.

Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.

Ok, I'll stipulate that he claims he wrote them.

All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.

I honestly and sincerely don't even see it as related. He may not even anticipated that someone would challenge. He was seeking to establish beyond credible doubt that the NSA was doing XYZ. That is "the story" he was looking to tell. That someone would try to argue that a big part of the story would be "hey, can you prove you tried to tell someone inside, first" possibly didn't even enter into his mind.

In the big picture, it doesn't even matter. What matters is what the NSA was doing, not how vigorously Snowden tried to change it from within first.

Regardless of how important this particular detail is to you, its at best a tangential detail to the main story.

Its just a small minded distraction to try and divert attention from the main story. Like obsessing over Julian Assange's significant personal flaws instead of focusing on the actual wiki leaks leaks.

Maybe because they don't exist?

That doesn't fly within this thread of the sub-argument.

You'd stipulated they DID exist and contained the NSA's response that they were legal. You can't now argue that maybe they didn't exist, at least not within this sub-thread.

Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?

They could redact them. Even if they were just "walls of black ink", they would establish that they existed.

I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.

You are contorting like an acrobat. You are arguing that "if they exist, the NSA is rightfully keeping them secret, therefore we should assume Snowden is lying about their existence, and that they don't exist". That's not even coherent.

Seems to me then, its perfectly reasonable to accept Snowden's claim they exist.

Which "general consensus" is that?

Lets see:
the 5 member Privacy and Civil liberties Oversight Board created by Congress ruled them illegal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled them illegal.

United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled them illegal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.com/2013/12/b...

And even the NSA itself, has ADMITTED substantial wrongdoing.

http://thehill.com/policy/tech...

"The one on Slashdot?"

Yeah, sure, the one on slashdot too. ::eyeroll::

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Google: nsa skydrive skype

F'in Brits! :-)

I recall Dean Kamen saying how he agreed to help Coca Cola with their new soda machine that could dispense hundreds of different flavors if they helped him distribute his water purification systems in parts of the world where Coke was one of very few distributors. Win-win. Sometimes people can use companies not just to make money.

After all, the brain is an incredibly complex and specific structure, forged in the relentless pressure of millions of years of evolution to be organized just so.

Ugh, Creationists. No, that's wrong. Evolution is simply the application of environmental bias to chaos -- the same fundamental process by which complexity naturally arises from entropy. Look, we jabbed some wires in a rodent head and hooked up an infrared sensor. Then they became able to sense infrared and use the infrared input to navigate. That adaptation didn't take millions of years. What an idiot. Evolution is a form of emergence, but it is not the only form of emergence, this process operates at all levels of reality and all scales of time. Your puny brains and insignificant lives give you a small window within which to compare the universe to your experience and thus you fail to realize that the neuroplasticity of brains adapting to new inputs is really not so different a process than droplets of condensation forming rain, or molecules forming amino acids when energized and cooled, or stars forming, or matter being produced all via similar emergent processes.

The structure of self replicating life is that chemistry which propagates more complex information about itself into the future faster. If you could witness those millions of years in time-lapse then you'd see how adapting to IR inputs isn't really much different at all, just at a different scale. Yet you classify one adaptation as "evolution" and the other "emergence" for purely arbitrary reasons: The genetically reproducible capability of the adaptation -- As if we can't jab more wires in the next generation's heads from here on out according to protocol. Your language simply lacks the words for most basic universal truths. I suppose you also draw a thick arbitrary line between children and their parents -- one that nature doesn't draw else "species" wouldn't exist. The tendencies of your pattern recognition and classification systems can hamper you if you let your mind run rampant. I believe you call this "confirmation bias".

Humans understand very well what their neurons are doing now at the chemical level. It's now known how neurotransmitters are being transported by motor proteins in vesicles across neurons along micro-tubules in a very mechanical fashion that uses a bias applied to entropy to emerge the action within cells. The governing principals of cognition are being discovered by neurologists and abstracted by cybernetics to gain a fundamental understanding of cognition that philosophers have always craved. When cyberneticians model replicas of a retina's layers, the artificial neural networks end up having the same motion sensing behavior; The same is true for many other parts of the brain. Indeed the hippocampus has been successfully replaced in mice with an artificial implant and proven they can still remember and learn with the implant.

If the brain were so specifically crafted then cutting out half of it would reduce people to vegetables and forever destroy half of their motor function, but that's a moronic thing to assume would happen. Neuroplasticity of the brain disproves the assumption that it is so strongly dependent upon its structural components. Cyberneticians know that everything flows, so they acknowledge that primitive instinctual responses and cognitive biases due to various physical structural formations feed their effects into the greater neurological function; However this is not the core governing mechanic of cognition -- It can't be else the little girl with half her brain wouldn't remain sentient, let alone able to walk.

Much of modern philosophy loves to cast a mystic shroud of "lack of understanding" upon that which is already thor

Actually they're readily available, even in civilian circles:

http://www.inertproducts.com/i...

The above site is HUGELY overpriced, of course; the mine manufacturers could put out inert mines very cheaply if they wished. Most armed forces already have them, used for mine warfare training all the time.

But there may be other and better solutions. Not necessarily the goats in another comment, but maybe things like honeybees:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Well I would think that looking at where the connector was and seeing that it was taking up a lot of space that could have been used for other things like bigger speakers. I mean it doesn't take a genius to see the comparison. Also yes whatever you get from Apple: memory, HDs, cables, etc will be cheaper than you can get elsewhere and in the beginning only Apple was going to have the cables. You can get them at places like monoprice now for much cheaper.

"The electrical grid has ZERO energy storage"

Why do you think I said we should be investing in storage technologies?

"your side's fabricated dire predictions"

I didn't fabricate anything.

You say nuclear waste can be recycled, but right now, that is a fantasy, this is the reality:

Around the world, nuclear power plants are churning out high-level radioactive waste at a rate of knots. It's estimated that about 250,000 tonnes of the material is currently in interim storage, submerged in huge tanks of water in facilities that keep it safe -- temporarily.

But there's very little agreement on what to do with the stuff long-term, as it will remain a danger for around 100,000 years

from:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Two Technion students reverse-engineered Waze's method for detecting a traffic jam, then created a network of fake clients that reported traffic patterns that caused Waze to mark as jammed what was in reality a perfectly empty road.

Sources: Jerusalem Post, Wired.

This is like the 4th or 5th exchange that has gone bust, right? Actually more like 18, but MtGox counts as the first major exchange to fail. The rest of those amount to you or I throwing up an "exchange" as our CompSci101 project and then vanishing when they lost their shirts. The loss of MtGox definitely counts as a blow to Bitcoin, but as others will no doubt point out, it had already started "failing" months ago (when you have a good 20% price spread vs the next highest exchange and you don't see arbitrage occurring on a massive scale, you know you have a problem). Any fools with either USD or BTC left in Gox since the beginning of the year (and even before that) pretty much stopped paying attention and deserve what they got.

One of the key problems with MTGox (and perhaps others) is it was not really an exchange like a stock or commodities exchange. An exchange facilitates trades amongst many individual holders of the item being traded, and often has market makers who ensure liquidity, and never hold the actual items themselves. They make money on the spread and other charges, and are insulated from price swings. Bitcoin exchanges that accept deposits are essentially taking a short position in Bitcoin. As a result, they are leaving themselves open to having to cover that position. Unless they have a stack of cash equal to the value of the holdings they will eventually come up short as depositors redeem Bitcoin for cash. A rapid price increase could easily leave them unable to cover the liability they face. Since exchanges limit withdrawals they clearly are trying to manage their cash position to prevent running out of cash. The problem is unless they can keep selling Bitcoin eventually their cash goes to zero and they are insolvent. Had MtGOX simply bought and sold Bitcoin and made money off the spread they would not be in this position. However, they probably had many more people wanting to deposit Bitcoins than they could sell. I'm guessing many Bitcoin holders did not realize the counter party risk they we taking on, much like my CDO holders didn't. Now they are learning a lesson on risk and the financial system.

The arbitrage opportunities point to how poorly the Bitcoin markets work. In a liquid, functioning market the arbitrage opportunities would quickly issappear. That they don't tells me it is a lot easier to buy Bitcoin than sell them.

And the effect on the BTC market since then bears that out - The price initially plummeted, but has already stabilized at 2/3rds its previous stable value. If anything, this counted (and still does, IMO) as a great opportunity to get in during a market correction and load up on deeply discounted BTC.

As with any highly speculative investment it could as easily continue to decrease as return to its previous level. The notion that a price drop is a good buy opportunity is incorrect.